Ex-DEA agent accused of corruption and a 'little dark secret' gets his day in court

After waiting more than four years, Joseph Bongiovanni’s day in court is upon him.

The retired DEA agent could very well spend the next two months on trial in a federal courtroom in Buffalo on 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.

Jury selection starts Monday.

Given that 88 court documents have been sealed, there’s plenty of evidence not yet publicly known about his case. But pretrial hearings and the public court filings offer a glimpse of what prosecutors intend to delve into as they seek to convict the first DEA special agent in Western New York charged with bribery and corruption.

Prosecutors describe one witness as a co-conspirator who is expected to testify that he participated in a conversation about marijuana shipments.

“He’s going to talk about the words he heard come out of other people’s mouths and his participation in that conversation: who the people were, what they said,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas Cooper at a recent court proceeding.

Other testimony is expected to cover:

• Bongiovanni’s associations with drug dealers and alleged drug use.
• His finances, described by prosecutors as strained.
• What he told fellow DEA agents about his dealings with co-defendant Peter Gerace Jr., the owner of Pharaoh’s Gentlemen’s Club in Cheektowaga, who will be tried later.
• His alleged fondness for Italian organized crime members.

During the trial, prosecutors and defense attorneys will argue over which statements and evidence can be used against Bongiovanni.

The judge who will preside at the trial has already made clear what it will not become: a deep dive into the inner workings and hierarchy of organized crime in Western New York.

“This is not going to become a trial about whether Mr. Gerace’s grandfather was the head of the Italian organized crime,” U.S. District Judge Lawrence Vilardo said.

The charges

Bongiovanni, 59, faces 15 charges, many related to his dealings with Gerace. Other counts involve Michael Masecchia, a former schoolteacher who in May 2022 was sentenced to seven years in prison after he said he received help from Bongiovanni in trafficking marijuana into Buffalo and its suburbs.

The two counts of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. center on Bongiovanni’s numerous actions allegedly to protect drug traffickers, including providing them information about investigations. Prosecutors allege he arranged to handle a confidential source to ensure that source provided no cooperation against the drug traffickers who were paying him bribes. The other count charges Bongiovanni with accepting cash bribes from Gerace in exchange for protection from arrest and prosecution, and also of falsely portraying Gerace as a DEA confidential source in order to dissuade an FBI agent from investigating Gerace.

The two bribery counts allege Bongiovanni was paid at least $250,000 to mislead others in law enforcement and provide sensitive information about investigations and help those he believed connected to Italian organized crime continue their drug trafficking between 2008 and 2017. As for his actions related to Gerace, he is charged with being paid to, among other acts, not enforce drug laws at Pharaoh’s.

Seven counts of obstruction of justice deal with his entries on DEA reports allegedly to impede an investigation and mislead the agency about the true nature of his relationship with Gerace; deleting the contents on his DEA cellphone; and removing a working file on a DEA case to his home.

The first of two counts of making false statements to a federal agency accuses him of falsely denying to the Department of Justice that he witnessed Gerace use drugs or that Gerace called him about someone actively overdosing at Pharaoh’s. The second count specifies nine statements that a federal grand jury charged were false, including denials he was in a close relationship with Gerace and that he never went on trips with a co-conspirator.

The two counts of conspiracy to distribute controlled substance covers his alleged involvement with Masecchia and Gerace. The first count alleges Bongiovanni conspired with Masecchia and others to distribute marijuana and cocaine. The second count alleges he conspired with Gerace and others to possess with intent to distribute and to distribute cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, Adderall and marijuana.

“His case has taken many twists and turns over the years, often because it was tied to Peter Gerace’s case, which has taken on a life of its own,” said attorney Parker MacKay, who with attorney Robert Singer is representing Bongiovanni. “He looks forward to clearing his own name in his own trial in the coming weeks.”

Bongiovanni’s associations

Bongiovanni’s lawyers have expressed doubt over the admissibility of evidence suggesting he was aware of drug use at a party in Toronto.

They say the government intends to point to the party as an example of Bongiovanni being comfortable around drug use and associating with people who take drugs.

A person at the party who was also involved in drugs will testify, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Tripi said at a recent hearing.

Also, a government witness who has known Bongiovanni for decades will testify to Bongiovanni’s alleged drug use as a DEA agent as well as when both were in their 20s, Tripi said. That witness used cocaine with Bongiovanni early and later in Bongiovanni’s life, and the witness and a “circle of friends later conspired and bribed him,” Tripi said.

“We intend to present evidence that when he was younger – post-high school, college age into the 20s – that Mr. Bongiovanni had a period of life where he would procure cocaine from individuals, he would party with cocaine with friends, some of whom are going to be testifying in this case,” Tripi said.

The conspiracy charge deals not only with shielding drug traffickers from investigation but concealing his behavior, Tripi said.

“So he’s got that little dark secret that’s also going to cause him to not comply with his oath and duty,” Tripi said.

If Bongiovanni was at a party in Toronto with people who may have been sneaking off to a bathroom to use drugs, it’s not an act of deceit or part of some conspiracy if he didn’t arrest anybody, Singer said.

Vilardo asked the defense lawyers, “Why isn’t hanging out with these folks, allegedly using drugs with these folks, and ignoring the use of drugs by other folks, why isn’t that all part of the story here?”

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“If all the co-conspirators got together every Friday night, used cocaine together and hung out, that might go to telling the story about the formation of a conspiracy,” Singer replied.

That’s not what the Toronto party was, he said.

“It was a birthday party for Mr. Bongiovanni’s sister-in-law,” Singer said, adding that the witness who will testify about the party had never before met Bongiovanni.

Strained finances

Vilardo indicated he would allow prosecutors to show jurors a redacted letter from Bongiovanni to his ex-wife about expenses.

Prosecutors say the letter shows the financial strain he was under after the couple broke up in 2001.

“He’s complaining consistently about the financial pressures regarding alimony, maintenance, paying for attorneys,” Tripi said. “This is built into and continues into the time frame when he’s accepting bribes.”

Cooper called the letter “a brick in the wall of motive.”

Vilardo indicated that he wants everything in the letter redacted except the parts where Bongiovanni said he paid $6,450 for his daughter’s braces, paid the monthly tuition for her Catholic school education and never missed a child support payment.

The letter doesn’t show he’s in debt, Singer said.

A forensic accountant for the FBI will testify about her analysis of Bongiovanni’s accounts, which Cooper said reveals that “without unexplained cash in the accounts, he would have been in the red.”

‘Do you hate Italians?’

At least one DEA agent who worked with Bongiovanni is expected to testify.

When Bongiovanni learned about who his fellow agent was investigating, the agent said Bongiovanni asked him, “Do you hate Italians?”

Bongiovanni then allegedly told the agent he should instead be investigating Black people and Hispanics, using derogatory epithets for them, according to prosecutors.

Bongiovanni denies making the statement, Mackay said, adding there is no corroboration.

“Certainly, advising other agents to investigate somebody based on racial animus is a violation of duty,” said Jordan Dickson, a Department of Justice attorney.

It was not clear during pretrial hearings if that same agent or a different one also had an encounter with Bongiovanni about advice Bongiovanni allegedly gave Gerace about overdoses at Pharaoh’s. According to prosecutors, Bongiovanni told an agent that Gerace had called him when a dancer overdosed at Pharaoh’s and “I told him to get her out of there.”

“That conversation is a nexus between the flustered admission that he makes to a fellow agent when he finds out that that agent is investigating Gerace,” Tripi said.

Singer discounted the notion that Gerace had overdose victims removed from Pharaoh’s without calling 911 solely based on a statement that Bongiovanni denies making.

“It piles inference on top of inference, and there’s too many other things out there,” Singer said.

An agent is also expected to testify that Bongiovanni inappropriately kept a DEA file in his home’s basement after his retirement.

‘What’s in your client’s head’

The trial is expected to clarify the roles, if any, of others linked to the Bongiovanni investigation. The Buffalo News reported in 2021 that Ronald Serio is one of the drug traffickers whom prosecutors sought to connect to the former federal drug agent.

Serio, 47, was charged with drug trafficking in October 2019 after law enforcement officers detained him in 2017 at a Buffalo residence where they found 20 one-pound vacuum-sealed bags of marijuana. A search of his then-home on Lebrun Road in Amherst uncovered three similar bags. He pleaded guilty in 2020 to felony drug and weapons charges. His original November 2020 sentencing date has been postponed eight times, and he’s now scheduled to be sentenced in April.

When agents were preparing to search Serio’s Amherst property, Anthony Gerace of Clarence showed up, briefly visited and was pulled over by Erie County deputies as he drove off with oxycodone pills in his car, according to a Homeland Security agent’s affidavit. Prosecutors called Anthony Gerace an unindicted co-conspirator in Bongiovanni’s case. He is Peter Gerace’s brother and nephew of Joseph A. Todaro, who federal officials have claimed leads the Buffalo Mafia. Todaro has denied that.

Prosecutors say Bongiovanni was protecting people whom he understood to be part of Italian organized crime.

Vilardo said Bongiovanni’s “thoughts about Italian organized crime ... and so forth can come in” at the trial.

But he said, “the focus of this is not what the government thinks, it’s not what the rumors are – it’s what’s in your client’s head.”