Not long after a Nassau detective staged a fake raid at a mob-run gambling den in the back of a shoe repair shop on behalf of the Bonnano crime family, the owner spotted the cop in an unlikely place — a seedy Long Island bar run by a Bonanno associate, the shoemaker testified.
Salvatore “Sal the Shoemaker” Rubino took the stand in Brooklyn Federal Court Thursday, describing how now-fired Nassau County detective Hector Rosario raided his back-room gambling club, which he ran out of his Merrick shoe store, back in 2013.
Rosario is on trial for obstruction and lying to an FBI agent. The feds say he was on the take for the Bonanno crime family, paying visits to gambling dens run by competing families in the hopes they’d be scared into shutting down.
But Rosario had no luck putting anyone out of business — COVID actually shut down Sal the Shoemaker’s gambling den years later, not Rosario’s clumsy attempt to make him think he was under investigation, according to testimony.
Rubino, 60, who got his nickname from his profession, had a second job – running underground card rooms and Joker Poker machines for Joseph “Joe Box” Rutigliano, a Genovese crime family associate, he testified.
Rosario, meanwhile, was close friends with Sal Russo, a Bonanno associate who was running competing gambling spots, and owned the Blue Tequila bar in West Hempstead. According to court papers, the Blue Tequila regularly brought in women and paid them to entertain male customers and encourage them to drink.
When Russo wanted to chase away the Genovese competition at his gambling spots, he called on his detective friend, who agreed to show up at their doors and identify himself as a cop to intimidate them, according to the feds.
Rubino ran his gambling room at night, in a back room that wasn’t visible from the front of his shoe store. And when Rosario came calling in 2013, he brought two men with him, all wearing “police” jackets and what looked like police shields dangling from their necks, Rubino testified.
Rubino said he was headed to the front of the store to smoke a cigarette when he saw them outside. “[Rosario] pointed at me to open the door and showed the badge,” he said. “As soon as I opened the door, he started pushing toward the back, barging in, all three of them.”
Rosario kept asking, “Who’s in charge?” and when the shoemaker asked who he was looking for, the cop said, “Where’s Joe Box?”
Joe Box wasn’t there, so Rosario asked one of his cohorts to smash a Joker Poker machine screen with the back of a flashlight.
Before they left, Rosario called out a warning: “He just [said], ‘Stay away from Joe Box!’ And they ran out,” Rubino said.
Rubino, who’d been busted in a real gambling parlor raid in the past, quickly realized “something was not right,” he said. The so-called cops didn’t take anyone’s IDs, didn’t seize any machines and didn’t make any arrests.
About a week later, Rubino was at the Blue Tequila and he spotted Rosario, “just hanging out,” he testified.
Rosario also tried to leak intel to the Nassau County D.A.’s office’s organized crime unit to shut down rival ambling parlors, according to the feds.
He arranged a meeting with Det. John Clinton in April 2014, Clinton testified Wednesday.
Rosario said he had a confidential informant who knew about gambling rooms run by the Gambino and Genovese families, but he wouldn’t share the informant’s name, or even put him on the phone, Clinton testified. And he didn’t want to be brought into Clinton’s larger investigation into mafia gambling operations.
Clinton called that “a little unusual.”
Clinton also gave jurors a glimpse into how gamblers got access to the secret rooms.
At the Gran Caffe in Lynbrook, which was run by the Bonanno and Genovese families, would-be gamblers had to know the code to get to the back room: “You go by the counters, ask for an espresso or cappuccino, say you knew someone named Kelly.”