The ex-wife of Peter Gerace Jr. testified Tuesday that she twice gave onetime Drug Enforcement Administration agent Joseph Bongiovanni envelopes “thick” with cash at Pharaoh’s Gentlemen’s Club in Cheektowaga.
Katrina Nigro said she did not know how much cash was in the envelopes she was instructed to give to Bongiovanni. She also said she saw Gerace give Bongiovanni a 50th birthday card containing $5,000 in cash.
Nigro, 41, called the birthday present “over the top.”
“I never got a gift like that,” she said.
“The evidence will show that those were rewards for a job well done,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Tripi told jurors earlier in Bongiovanni’s bribery and corruption trial.
Nigro’s testimony, on the 18th day of testimony in the trial, is considered key because she is the only government witness, so far, who has acknowledged giving Bongiovanni money directly.
Earlier in the trial, Louis Selva and Ronald Serio testified about negotiating and funding a scheme they said paid Bongiovanni $4,000 a month to protect the Serio drug-trafficking organization, but neither of them directly put money in Bongiovanni’s hands. The man who allegedly did that, the now-imprisoned Michael Masecchia, is not expected to testify.
Nigro’s testimony is the latest development in the government’s case against Bongiovanni, a retired DEA agent facing charges he accepted at least $250,000 in bribes from the Serio drug-trafficking organization to protect drug dealers whom he allegedly thought were associated with Italian organized crime and to shield them from arrest, as well as provide them with information about investigations and cooperating sources.
If convicted, 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 Gerace, the owner of Pharaoh’s near the airport, who himself is expected to face trial later this year on charges that include bribery, drug trafficking and sex trafficking.
Bongiovanni’s lawyers have sought to discredit Nigro’s testimony.
“You’re not gonna hear anything about Joe Bongiovanni being caught on a wire, a tape, a camera accepting bribes,” defense attorney Parker MacKay told jurors earlier in the trial. “There’s not going to be an exchange of marked funds like you see on TV, or even that he admitted to taking any bribes.”
The accounts about “these supposed bribes” come from an ex-wife “so wrapped up in her hatred of Peter that she embraces fully the publicity she gets from this case,” MacKay said. “And the stories she tells are so fanciful, they don’t just strain credibility, they tear it apart.”
Tripi has said Nigro “was intimately placed in that club.”
“She knows who got brought upstairs to have sex with dancers,” Tripi said. “She knows how many overdoses there were. She knows Gerace’s cocaine distribution and who was involved.
“And one thing that she’ll also know is that this defendant would come for his envelopes of cash every so often, he would come to a side door and enter where there were no cameras, and she would provide the envelopes of cash to the defendant,” Tripi told jurors earlier in the trial. “And then she’ll tell you about another time when she and Peter Gerace were at the defendant’s birthday party at a restaurant on Hertel Avenue, and Gerace’s gift to the defendant was a card stuffed with cash.”
On the stand Tuesday, she talked about how drugs flowed in the strip club during her time there between 2014 and 2018.
The drug use was “almost everywhere” inside the club, Nigro said.
Nigro said she sometimes would have to wipe the noses of dancers who were on stage, because traces of cocaine would show up under the black lights without them realizing it.
Katrina Nigro with her then-husband, Peter G. Gerace Jr., the owner of Pharaoh’s Gentlemen’s Club, a strip club in Cheektowaga.
At first, she operated an adult store inside Pharaoh’s. Nigro eventually became an office manager at Pharaoh’s and married Gerace.
She previously told The Buffalo News she had a ringside seat to Buffalo Mafia activities during her four years as Gerace’s wife. They divorced in 2018.
The News has previously reported Nigro has served as a witness for federal law enforcement authorities investigating suspected organized crime activities involving her ex-husband and others, but Tripi on Tuesday did not focus on Italian organized crime as he questioned her.
Tripi asked her about the Outlaws Motorcycle Club members at Pharaoh’s.
The club’s members were at Pharaoh’s every Wednesday, she said.
“It was like their church day,” she said.
John Ermin, who prosecutors have described as a national leader of the Outlaws, was still just a cleaner when she was working at the strip club, she said. He did not become a manager there until after she no longer worked at Pharaoh’s.
Nigro testified that Gerace supplied dancers and others with cocaine and Lortabs.
She also described what she called a “Peter favor,” which could include Gerace setting up a friend with a dancer and being allowed to use the private upstairs area at Pharaoh’s not otherwise accessible to patrons.
She said Gerace was involved in prostitution at the club, setting up friends and patrons with dancers, either to go upstairs to the private area or to engage in sexual activity in the first-floor VIP room after the customers tipped the bouncers to overlook what was going on.
Pharaoh’s was searched by federal agents in December 2019 several weeks after Bongiovanni’s arrest.
‘Call Peter first’
Nigro also testified about what she called an unwritten rule at Pharaoh’s: Whenever a dancer or customer overdosed on drugs, employees were instructed to first call Gerace – not 911.
Employees were not to call police or for an ambulance “because it’s a strike against the liquor license,” Nigro said.
She recalled two heroin overdoses in 2015.
“I had to use Narcan,” she said.
Douglas Augustyniak, 52, worked at Pharaoh’s for about 10 years until 2018, first working security and eventually as a part-time manager, usually working nights.
He said he rarely encountered Gerace at the club. He said he threw customers out of the club if he caught them with drugs, and did the same with dancers.
He also testified he never saw Gerace use drugs, but added it was his understanding Gerace allowed drug use among his friends at the club.
Augustyniak said he sometimes spotted Gerace heading upstairs to the private area.
“He would go drink with his buddies, partying with girls,” Augustyniak said.
In 2015, Augustyniak called Gerace when a dancer was apparently overdosing on drugs, unable to speak but just moaning.
“He told me to get her out of the club,” Augustyniak testified Monday.
Augustyniak said the club’s policy was nobody should call 911 without permission.
Gerace did not tell him to call 911, but Augustyniak did so anyway, he testified.
Federal prosecutors seek to use his account of that incident to bolster one of the charges against Bongiovanni: conspiracy to defraud the United States.
One of the overt acts listed in the indictment against Bongiovanni is his alleged response to a telephone call from Gerace after a stripper overdosed on drugs at Pharaoh’s.
Prosecutors say Bongiovanni advised Gerace to “get her out” of the gentlemen’s club.
A DEA agent who is expected to testify this week said Bongiovanni recounted to him that he gave Gerace that advice, prosecutors say.
“As women started overdosing, he had a conversation with Bongiovanni who gave him advice,” Tripi told jurors earlier in the trial. “Get her out of there. Get her out of there.”
