Aging Mob Hit Man Gets Life for 4 NYC Murders

NEW YORK (AP/1010 WINS)  -- An aging hit man known as a cold-blooded enforcer for late mob boss John Gotti -- and notorious for disposing of bodies with acid -- was sentenced Thursday to life in prison for four murders after being berated by the families of his victims.


Juliet Papa reports

Charles Carneglia, 63, leaned sat back in his chair and arched his eyebrows as the sister of a slain court officer asked the judge to show no mercy.

"You have no soul,'' Emily Gelb told Carneglia. "I ask that they lock you in a cage fitting for the animal that you are.''

Before U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein imposed the maximum term, Carneglia complained that he hadn't received a fair trial, saying, ``Liar upon liar testified against me.''

At a trial earlier this year in federal court in Brooklyn, mob turncoats testified that Carneglia was a feared Gambino organized crime family soldier who was eager to please his superiors. In one instance -- an ambush in the World Trade Center parking lot -- he pumped four bullets into a man who ignored an invitation by Gotti to a social club in 1990.

Besides the parking lot ambush, Carneglia was convicted in the killing of a 57-year-old security guard who was shot in the back during the armored car holdup at John F. Kennedy International Airport in 1990. The two other murder convictions involved a rival mobster stabbed in 1977 during a fight outside a diner and a Gambino associate killed in 1983 during an argument with Carneglia over money.

A jury failed to reach a verdict on a fifth murder charge in the death of court officer Albert Gelb. Prosecutors had claimed Gelb was assassinated in retaliation for making an off-duty arrest of Carneglia after he spotted him in a restaurant wearing a gun.

The case produced one of the gorier allegations to emerge recently in mob lore: that the body of John Favara -- a neighbor killed for accidentally running over the elder Gotti's 12-year-old son -- was dissolved in a vat of acid. Carneglia wasn't charged in the killing, but jurors were allowed to hear testimony that he was involved in disposing of bodies.

Defense attorneys insisted their client was a mob misfit who drank too much to ever be a reliable assassin. He even broke the rules by growing a bushy beard -- his "personal way of defying the mob,'' said attorney Curtis Farber.

Inset photo: Emily Gelb with photo of brother, murdered court officer Albert Gelb, from Juliet Papa