Federal Prison

A 28-year-old Allentown man described as a founding member of the Latin Kings gang was sentenced to 28 years in federal prison Wednesday for his part in running a violent drug ring. Luis Colon, founder of the Latin Kings' "Bethlehem Sun Tribe," pleaded guilty July 9 to racketeering conspiracy and related offenses. Federal prosecutors said the gang also kidnapped, assaulted, and killed its own members for violating tribe rules. Colon was among two dozen gang members charged in 2010. Among the crimes attributed to Colon was a plot to kill New Jersey Latin Kings members.

The clock struck midnight yesterday for a New Jersey business executive who used $12 million he embezzled from his employer over eight years to amass one of the world's finest collections of antique European timepieces. Francis X. Vitale Jr., 53, who was a senior vice president of the Engelhard Corp. in Iselin in Middlesex County, pleaded guilty in federal court in Camden to diverting the money and buying precious old clocks. Prosecutors said Vitale owned more than 140 rare clocks, some dating to the 17th century, some worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons is looking for more than a few good men - and women - to staff its new federal jail at 7th and Arch streets. The 11-story, $90 million Philadelphia Metropolitan Detention Center, scheduled to be completed in December, will need at least 301 workers, said Florentino Morlote, executive assistant at the center. To fill some of those positions, the bureau is holding a job fair Tuesday from noon to 6 p.m. at the Clarion Suites, 1010 Race St. "We're hoping to fill about 55 percent of the positions, 165 jobs, with people who live in and near the community where the detention center is," said Morlote.

A Bucks County doctor has been sentenced to 34 months in federal prison for operating a $5 million diet drug "pill mill" in Northeast Philadelphia. Christopher Vassalluzzo, 47, of New Hope, pleaded guilty in April to conspiracy to distribute controlled substances, mail fraud, conspiracy to commit mail fraud, structuring, aggravated structuring, conspiracy to commit tax evasion, and tax evasion. The U.S. Attorney's Office said Vassalluzzo ran a "pill mill" from his office in the Holme Circle section, netting more than $5 million by illegally distributing prescriptions for controlled substance diet drugs.

Reputed mobster Joseph "Skinny Joey" Merlino was arrested early yesterday after driving the wrong way down a one-way street in South Philadelphia. He was charged with driving while intoxicated and with a suspended license, police said, and was released on his own recognizance pending a preliminary hearing Sept. 13. The arrest of Merlino, 33 - on parole for a 1987 armored-car robbery - could eventually result in his being returned to federal prison, police said. Merlino, considered a mob associate during the bloody reign of Nicodemo "Little Nicky" Scarfo in the late 1980s, later became involved in what federal authorities called a mob war for control of the Philadelphia-South Jersey crime family.

A former president of the Warlocks Motorcycle Club's South Jersey chapter with ties to La Cosa Nostra was brought from federal prison yesterday to plead guilty in Camden to drug and insurance fraud charges filed 10 years ago. The former club leader, Salvatore "Sammy" Branco, 49, spoke quietly as he admitted in Camden County Superior Court that he had possessed methamphetamine and filed a bogus insurance claim in 1986. The crimes occurred in Winslow Township and Runnemede Borough in Camden County, Branco said.

Santa Claus is not the only "Nick" coming to town. After a seven-year absence, imprisoned mob boss Nicodemo "Little Nicky" Scarfo is heading back to Philadelphia. Scarfo, 67, could be in town as early as today, according to Assistant District Attorney Arlene Fisk. Fisk told Common Pleas Court Judge Eugene H. Clarke Jr. yesterday that she expects the former mob boss to be in the city prison system shortly. Federal marshals were expected to begin transporting Scarfo yesterday, she said.

A South Jersey financial adviser once known for his extravagant lifestyle was sentenced yesterday to five years in federal prison for swindling millions of dollars from more than 100 of his clients. Michael Tropiano, 36, of Haddonfield pleaded guilty last October to bilking investors of more than $2 million, by convincing 118 of his clients to invest in commodity futures while he diverted the funds into his personal accounts. Federal prosecutors charged Tropiano, who operated Ardmore Financial Services, with violating the mail-fraud statute.

The Philadelphia Planning Commission, responding to concerns about a proposal to build a federal prison on the edge of Chinatown, yesterday drew up a list of alternative sites that would not be in anybody's back yard. But the federal official overseeing the selection of a site for the prison said the time to speak up was last June, when the federal Bureau of Prisons backed off its initial plan to put the facility at Seventh and Arch Streets. "At some point it has to stop. . . . We just can't continue to receive sites," said Debra Hood, a Bureau of Prisons site-selection specialist overseeing the Philadelphia project.

Federal immigration authorities picked up former rape suspect Omar Lezama De La Rosa yesterday and transferred him to the federal holding facility in York, Pa., the man's lawyer said. Daniel-Paul Alva, Lezama De La Rosa's lawyer, said the man's family was trying to raise $20,000 to bail him out while he awaits deportation proceedings to Mexico. Yesterday's transfer from a city prison to a federal one was the latest in a series of twists in the complicated case that began July 18, when a 24-year-old woman was raped in the SEPTA station in Chinatown.

A Philadelphia man who had avoided conviction in city courts despite multiple arrests for robbery and other crimes, was sentenced to 37 years in a federal lockup Tuesday for two gunpoint robberies in the far Northeast in December 2007 and October 2009. U.S. District Judge Anita Brody also ordered John Gassew to pay $7,194 in restitution to two victims. Gassew, 25, was found guilty in February of two robberies and using a firearm while committing the crimes. He was cleared of one robbery and one gun charge.

A Gloucester County firm's former financial officer was sentenced today to 57 months in federal prison for embezzling $1.3 million from the company. Rusty Spickenreuther, 46, of Franklinville, previously pleaded guilty to one count each of wire fraud,money laundering, and of tax fraud. Imposing the sentence in Camden, U.S. District Judge Joseph H. Rodriguez,also ordered Spickenreuther to pay $1.3 million in restitution to Swedesboro-based Environmental Industrial Services Corp.

A Holmesburg woman was charged late Wednesday by the U.S. Attorney here with telephoning a threat in September to detonate a bomb near a federal official identified only as "Person #1" and the official's family members. According to an FBI arrest affidavit, Ruby Marconi, 57, of Shelmire Avenue near Cottage Street, left several threatening messages on U.S. Senator Robert P. Casey Jr.'s U.S. Capitol office telephone on Sept. 16 . A Casey staffer reported the messages to U.S. Capitol Police.

IN THE REGION Gomes to gambling's Hall of Fame The late owner of Resorts Casino Hotel in Atlantic City is headed to the Gaming Hall of Fame. Dennis Gomes was a veteran casino executive and mob-busting investigator in Las Vegas. He died in February of complications from kidney dialysis. The head of the American Gaming Association, Frank Fahrenkopf Jr., said the casino industry "lost one of its boldest and most creative owners. " The movie Casino was based on a mob-run theft operation that Gomes uncovered while working with the Nevada Gaming Commission.

A truck driver who slammed his rig into a sedan on the Schuylkill Expressway in January 2009, killing a Fort Washington man, was sentenced Monday to 18 months in federal prison. Valerijs Nikolaevish Belovs, 58, of Somerton, pleaded guilty in October to federal charges he had falsified his driver's logs. The Jan. 23, 2009, crash killed businessman David Schreffler and seriously injured a passenger in his car when Belov's rig, loaded with more than 75,000 pounds of broccoli, slammed into stopped traffic and pinned Schreffler's car under the truck.

TORONTO - Former media mogul Conrad Black arrived in Canada on Friday and was spotted kissing his wife, playing with their dogs, and roaming the grounds of his sprawling Toronto estate on Friday just hours after being released from U.S. prison. Black left a federal prison outside Miami early Friday after serving about three years for defrauding investors. Black, whose empire once included the Chicago Sun-Times, the Daily Telegraph of London, the Jerusalem Post and small papers across the United States and Canada, had returned to prison in September to finish serving his sentence.

A CAREER CRIMINAL who had been part of a gang that targeted successful Asian business owners for home-invasion robberies was sentenced Monday to more than 33 years in federal prison. Tahn Le, 44, of the city's Elmwood section, and several co-defendants burst into the home of a nail-salon owner in Bartonsville, Monroe County, in January 2010, after he arrived home from work with his two children. Prosecutors said Le and his coconspirators held their victims at gunpoint, threatened them, assaulted the salon owner and restrained him while they rummaged through the man's home, stealing expensive jewelry.

AT HIS sentencing Tuesday, a federal prosecutor said that Robert Stinson Jr. had a three-decade long career as a "cunning and deadly" con man. U.S. District Judge Michael M. Baylson sentenced the five-time fraudster to more than 33 years in federal prison. Authorities said that Stinson, 57, bilked at least 263 investors out of more than $14 million in a Ponzi scheme that was shut down by the Securities & Exchange Commission in 2010. Stinson's scheme collapsed in June 2010, when law-enforcement officials raided the local offices of his company, Life's Good Inc., which Stinson started in 2006.

Donald J. Goldberg, 81 of Rittenhouse Square, a trial lawyer in Philadelphia for 58 years, died of complications from cancer Saturday, April 7, at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1991, Mr. Goldberg had been special counsel in the litigation department of Ballard Spahr and was a member of the firm's white-collar investigations group. He previously had a solo practice in Center City for 30 years. "Partners and associates in the firm treasured any opportunity to learn from Don," Ballard Spahr chairman Mark Stewart said.

OLD CITY is where developer Michael Yaron built his small empire in the last decade. The former Israeli soldier came to the United States with nothing, earned a doctorate from the University of Oxford in England, and later rubbed shoulders with some of Philadelphia's most powerful people. But as he walked alone the other afternoon past his buildings on North 3rd Street and on Arch, the narrow streets seemed to be closing in on him. Yaron and three others recently were found guilty of federal wire- and mail-fraud charges in a $2 million kickback scheme to get lucrative asbestos-removal contracts at a New York hospital.