Caught with a duffel bag of marijuana in April 2017, Ronald Serio was understandably blindsided by his arrest.
At the time, the Amherst drug trafficker was allegedly paying Joseph Bongiovanni, then a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, $4,000 a month for information about informants and investigations to protect his drug operation, according to federal prosecutors.
But Bongiovanni didn’t know about the Serio search warrants and surveillance by the Erie County Sheriff’s Office, prosecutors say, and testimony in the former DEA agent’s bribery trial revealed that the reluctance of sheriff’s detectives to use a DEA database helped keep their Serio investigation from becoming known to Bongiovanni.
Sheriff’s Office detectives arrested Serio less than two weeks after first learning about his trafficking efforts, and they did not access the DEA’s tracking database to submit or look at information about Serio before the arrest, said Chief D.J. Granville of the Erie County Sheriff’s Narcotics and Intelligence Unit.
If the Sheriff’s Office had done so, Bongiovanni would have learned about it, because he used the tracking database to monitor if other DEA agents or agencies were looking into traffickers he is accused of protecting, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Tripi told jurors earlier in the trial.
Granville’s testimony is among the latest developments in the government’s case against Bongiovanni, a retired DEA agent facing charges he accepted at least $250,000 in bribes from drug dealers whom he thought were associated with Italian organized crime and shielded them from arrest, as well as provided them with information about investigations and cooperating sources. The bribery, conspiracy and obstruction of justice counts could put the 59-year-old Bongiovanni in prison for life. Many of the charges are related to how he allegedly protected the Serio drug-trafficking organization, and other counts involve Peter Gerace Jr., the owner of Pharaoh’s Gentlemen’s Club near the airport, who himself is expected to face trial later this year on charges that include bribery, drug trafficking and sex trafficking.
Prosecutors allege Bongiovanni protected Serio several ways over the better part of a decade, from letting him know whether he was on law enforcement’s radar to leaking information about investigations and informants. Bongiovanni also opened a fictitious case and pretended to investigate Serio, Tripi said. Doing this kept other law enforcement agencies from targeting Serio, and it also positioned Bongiovanni to be alerted if another agency became interested in him through the DEA’s deconfliction database, Tripi said.
Bongiovanni’s lawyer says the government is misrepresenting how the databases were used in this case. But Tripi called Bongiovanni’s reliance on the database just one example of how he used his knowledge of the DEA’s operations to protect Serio and others in the drug organization.
Granville testified he prefers not to use the database.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas Cooper asked Granville if law enforcement agencies sometimes use the deconfliction database as a way “to essentially mark a target as their territory.”
“That’s what it is,” Granville replied.
“Can that sometimes prevent you from furthering your own investigation?” Cooper asked.
“Yes,” Granville said.
But this time, “there was no notice provided to Bongiovanni, because the investigation came together so quickly, he wasn’t aware of it,” Tripi said. “Just a couple of days, they got a couple of search warrants, they arrest Ron Serio.”
Granville said “we’re able to act very quickly,” and he credited his team for “outstanding surveillance” work.
By July 2018, facing serious charges, Serio was telling authorities how he had paid money to Bongiovanni, through co-conspirator Michael Masecchia, prosecutors say.
A tripwire
The DEA’s Analysis and Response Tracking System, or DARTS, is an internal deconfliction tool that assists investigators in identifying overlaps between cases through unique identifiers such as phone numbers, email accounts, websites, financial accounts and license plates, according to the agency.
“So by putting subpoenaed information into the database, for example, it will notify a DEA agent in, say, New Jersey or New York City if Bongiovanni here in Buffalo has a file with the same name and phone number,” Tripi told jurors. “Used for its proper purpose, it allows agents around the country to coordinate and collaborate and be efficient so that two people aren’t overlapping and not working together on the same targets. They can coordinate. That’s how it’s supposed to work.”
Bongiovanni entered information into the database about traffickers whom Tripi said were being protected by the then-DEA agent.
“Used for the nefarious purpose that the defendant used it for, it created a tripwire,” Tripi said. “By putting that information in, it would notify Bongiovanni if anyone else was on those same phone numbers and those same targets.”
Even if he were to close a case, once Bongiovanni entered those names and phone numbers into the DARTS deconfliction system, the information stays in the database, Tripi said.
“So, if someone two, three, four or five years down the road starts looking at them by name or those same phone numbers, he gets an email,” Tripi said. “He created the ultimate tripwire by opening the file.”
Granville testified about his reluctance to use the database.
“Oftentimes, we found, specifically federal agencies, every federal agency would pump a name into the deconfliction database simply (because) maybe that person’s name was mentioned, and they put it in the database,” Granville said. “Then three months from then, we’ll knock them in a search warrant or some local agency will have a good case on them.”
The federal agency “would kind of ride our coattails on that caper, and not really have much invested,” he said.
Still, the Sheriff’s Office typically alerts other law enforcement agencies about its work on cases, he said.
“We have guys assigned to various agencies as task force officers, and we generally try to keep everybody in the loop,” Granville testified.
Targeting Serio
But the swiftness of the Sheriff’s Office investigation of Serio – less than two weeks – meant there was little time for other agencies to learn about it.
A tip had come in that a group was looking to rob Serio of his marijuana and money in a home invasion. That was the first sheriff’s investigators had even heard of Serio, Granville said.
“We decided to target Ron Serio,” Granville said, in part to protect him.
The tip was that a couple of Serio’s properties would be targeted by the burglars, Granville said.
Investigators kept surveillance on his 9,000-square-foot French Provincial mansion on 2.4 acres of land on Lebrun Road in Amherst, complete with a carriage house, tennis court and swimming pool.
Serio’s arrest followed.
They found an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and a marijuana grow room, some bags and bricks of marijuana, and small amounts of oxycodone, amphetamines and other drugs. In Serio’s Range Rover, they found three cellphones and $22,000.
Investigators saw him come and go between the mansion and a house on the 300 block of Huntington Avenue in North Buffalo. He was arrested with a large amount of marijuana in the duffel bag and some cocaine in the rear driveway near the garage of the Huntington property, Granville said.
Investigators at Serio’s property on Grimsby Road in the Town of Tonawanda found marijuana, cocaine and fentanyl pills.
Serio pleaded guilty in 2020 to felony drug and weapons charges, and he’s scheduled to be sentenced in April.
Defense points to other database
By the time sheriff’s detectives and FBI agents arrested Serio on April 18, 2017, he had been on the DEA’s radar for years, with Bongiovanni as the agent in charge of the Serio case. But the DEA investigation stalled.
Bongiovanni’s defense lawyers offer their own take on how another database casts a different impression on the DEA’s handling of the Serio investigation that discounts Bongiovanni’s role in squashing it.
“You heard a lot about deconfliction,” defense attorney Parker MacKay told jurors in his opening statement. “Deconfliction is a system of databases you’re going to learn about that basically act to prevent what’s called blue-on-blue police encounters. At their worst, it’s two police agencies showing up armed to a raid at the same location.”
But it’s also, more simply, a way to alert different law enforcement agencies somebody has been a target or somehow connected to an investigation, MacKay said.
“One of these systems that you’re going to hear about is SafetyNet,” he said. “It’s a system that injects names in, and if somebody runs a query, you get something back saying here’s the agent, the law enforcement officer, running this file so you can reach out to them and figure out what’s going on. Maybe there’s an investigation. Maybe there was something that was closed many years ago. Maybe it’s a name that came up but we’re not really doing anything with it.”
MacKay said the evidence will show Bongiovanni wasn’t even the point contact in the SafetyNet database.
So in 2017, when Serio was arrested, the FBI checked if any investigator in the SafetyNet system was connected to Serio, MacKay said.
“They see a prior investigation about Ron Serio,” he said. “But who’s flagged? It’s an IRS agent.”
Years before, the Serio investigation was essentially cut loose from the DEA and pushed over to the IRS to see if they could make a money-laundering case, MacKay said.
“It’s no longer in the control of the DEA,” he said. “The DEA no longer has tight control over it to be able to monitor it and reel it in.”
