Curtis Ryan, a supervisory criminal investigator for Homeland Security Investigations, leaves the federal courthouse in Buffalo after testifying in the Joseph Bongiovanni bribery and corruption trial.
A federal agent’s question, asked again and again, changed the course of an investigation in a way nobody saw coming – with a Drug Enforcement Administration special agent ending up in handcuffs.
This question jolted the investigation: What does it mean to be connected?
Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent Curtis Ryan put that question to Ron Serio, an Amherst drug trafficker who had been caught by FBI agents and sheriff’s investigators in April 2017 with a large amount of marijuana in a duffel bag and some cocaine.
During a meeting more than a year after his arrest between Serio and federal agents and prosecutors, Ryan’s initial focus was to glean details about Serio’s distribution network, motorcycle club members at Pharaoh’s Gentlemen’s Club and Serio’s relationship with Peter Gerace Jr. and his brother Anthony Gerace.
It was only when Ryan asked about the Geraces that Serio’s demeanor changed.
“He was particularly uncomfortable when I asked him about Peter and Anthony Gerace,” Ryan testified last week in U.S. District Court, recalling Serio said the two “carried a lot of weight in the community.”
Ryan picked up on Serio’s discomfort, so he zeroed in on what it means to be connected.
“He was trying to evade answering that question,” Ryan recalled. “I continued to ask him the same question. And I was going to ask it until he answered it.”
Complete coverage: The case of ex-DEA agent Joseph Bongiovanni
Then came the answer that changed everything. Serio uttered a name: Joseph Bongiovanni.
The onetime DEA agent had provided him information about informants and investigations as a way to shield Serio’s drug operation, Serio said.
Not a single member of law enforcement was investigating Bongiovanni before the Serio interview on July 20, 2018.
“It never entered my mind,” Ryan said.
The following summer, Ryan would be among federal agents searching Bongiovanni’s house in the Town of Tonawanda. And by the summer of 2020, Bongiovanni would become the first in Western New York ever charged with accepting bribes as a DEA agent to protect those he believed to be members of Italian organized crime.
Ryan’s testimony is the latest in the government’s case against Bongiovanni, who faces charges he accepted at least $250,000 in bribes to shield drug traffickers from arrest, as well as provide them with information about investigations and cooperating sources. Many of the 15 charges are related to the Serio drug-trafficking organization. Other counts involve alleged bribes from Peter Gerace, the owner of a strip club in Cheektowaga, who himself is expected to face trial later this year on charges that include bribery, drug trafficking and sex trafficking.
“Repeated, repeated questions,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Tripi previously told jurors at Bongiovanni’s trial, which enters its fifth full week Monday. “Under that questioning and that specific focus, Ron Serio first uttered words that indicated that this defendant had been providing information about informants and investigations. That took the focus in a whole different direction.”
Bongiovanni’s defense attorneys, who are expected to begin cross-examining Ryan on Monday, have denied Bongiovanni accepted any bribes.
Ronald Serio, a marijuana and cocaine trafficker who said he paid bribes to onetime DEA agent Joseph Bongiovanni, leaves federal court on March 12, 2024, after testifying.
‘Do you hate Italians?’
Serio’s revelation became a secret among those who interviewed him.
The half dozen agents and prosecutors informed their bosses. But the details of the investigation would be concealed from other DEA agents and the broader law enforcement community, Ryan said.
The secrecy was also intended to protect Bongiovanni’s reputation, in case Serio’s claim turned out to be unfounded.
Two reports were prepared: one that would go to the DEA file omitting any information about what Serio said about Bongiovanni, and the other for Ryan’s agency, Homeland Security Investigations, that included everything Serio said.
Ryan became the case agent in what turned into a Bongiovanni investigation.
Anthony Casullo, a DEA special agent who participated in the Serio interview, had his own history with Bongiovanni.
About two years earlier, Casullo caused a subpoena to be issued for Gerace’s phone records, and Bongiovanni was not happy about it, Tripi said.
So Casullo had approached Bongiovanni and said words to the effect of, ‘Hey, you seem upset. What’s going on? I’d like to get past this,’” Tripi said.
“And Bongiovanni got angry,” Tripi said. “And he said to Casullo, ‘Do you hate Italians?’”
Casullo, who’s Italian, said no.
Then Bongiovanni blustered, telling Casullo the agency should be investigating Black and Hispanic people, using racial epithets, Tripi said.
Bongiovanni’s alleged comments came two years before the Serio interview.
Casullo, who stopped investigating Gerace after that exchange, reported the race-related comments after the Serio interview, sparking an investigation by the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General.
Although the narcotics chief at the U.S. Attorney’s Office was “walled off” from the Bongiovanni case, he had told his prosecutors that Bongiovanni was no longer allowed to sign affidavits.
“That means he cannot get a search warrant, he cannot charge someone,” Tripi said. “He couldn’t do work with our office. And Bongiovanni learned it. And what he did was he poked and prodded, and tried to find out what he could.”
Bongiovanni called an assistant U.S. attorney and asked why he couldn’t sign affidavits, wondering if it was because of “this inspector general thing,” Tripi said.
“Bongiovanni had a total blind spot as to the bribery investigation that was brewing,” Tripi said.
By the fall of 2018, Bongiovanni prepared for his Feb. 1, 2019, retirement, Tripi said.
On Nov. 1, 2018, he wrote a DEA memo minimizing his contacts with Peter Gerace, including one time in which he said he met Gerace “by chance” at a beach cottage party, according to Tripi.
“That’s how Bongiovanni, in an official report, wrote about his relationship with Gerace,” Tripi said, “because he knew about the race comments, and he knew his relationship with Gerace was under scrutiny.”
On Dec. 10, 2018, after receiving a message from Gerace, he wrote another report describing the communication and informing his bosses he would report all contacts with Gerace to a DEA supervisor as he has done in the past.
But years worth of communications between the two were never reported, Tripi said.
The Gerace texts
The Homeland Security investigation continued as Bongiovanni left the DEA.
On March 29, 2019, about a month after his retirement, Bongiovanni was interviewed by an agent of the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General, who avoided mentioning anything about the Serio prong of the investigation, Tripi said.
Bongiovanni answered questions about his relationship with Gerace.
“He denied that he ever initiated contact with Gerace,” Tripi said. “He denied ever witnessing Gerace consume narcotics. He denied that Gerace ever contacted him while a dancer was overdosing at Pharaoh’s.”
A crucial development followed about a month after Bongiovanni’s interview: Peter Gerace traveled internationally.
When travelers return to the United States, they are subject to border inspections. Homeland Security agents have authority to search travelers’ phones.
Ryan got the heads up Gerace would return to the United States on April 27, 2019, so he arranged to have Gerace’s iPhone confiscated at the Newark, N.J., airport. Gerace’s phone was sent to Ryan by FedEx in an evidence bag, and the DEA extracted the phone’s data.
During his testimony, Ryan read several of the extracted text messages between Gerace and Bongiovanni.
“We need to get together soon,” Gerace texted on Jan. 6, 2015.
“I know bro maybe lunch soon. miss ya bro,” Bongiovanni replied.
In July 2016, Gerace texted, “What’s the date we are doing Aruba?”
“Bro, not this year,” Bongiovanni replied.
In December 2018, Gerace texted after hearing a rumor the DEA was investigating Bongiovanni.
“Hey brother I knew we haven’t talked in a while but you’ll always be one of my best friends and you know I always have your back,” Gerace texted.
Defense attorney Parker MacKay called the texts the kind exchanged between “old neighborhood friends who have gone their own ways but still have a past in common.”
“We’re not going to deny they grew up together, and over the years had contact,” MacKay said. “They had a relationship going back years – the kind of contact that amounts to text message conversations over the years, back and forth, maybe a drink while out and about, even a dinner together on even fewer occasions.”
MacKay called it “the kind of contact (from) someone you can’t quite shake despite your best intentions to put some distance between you and him.”
Gerace’s phone included a photo of Gerace, Bongiovanni and others at a beach cottage party. A former Pharaoh’s dancer at that gathering testified earlier in the trial that Bongiovanni did cocaine with her and Gerace at that party.
The texts and photo led Ryan and other agents to search Bongiovanni’s house on June 6, 2019.
Bongiovanni was placed in handcuffs.
When Ryan took off the handcuffs, he sat with Bongiovanni at the dining room table. Bongiovanni did not know Ryan had gone through Gerace’s iPhone.
Bongiovanni denied a close relationship with Gerace, which Ryan called “inconsistent with the messages.”
Bongiovanni appeared stirred up during the search. His demeanor changed when Ryan asked him about a phone number. The number belonged to someone who knew Lou Selva, a friend of Bongiovanni’s since childhood. Selva has testified he negotiated the Serio bribes with Bongiovanni.
When Bongiovanni mentioned Selva, he put his elbows on his knees and dropped his head. He looked defeated, Ryan said.
“It seemed like someone he didn’t want to talk about,” Ryan said.
