When DEA Special Agent Shane Nastoff heard his fellow agent Joseph Bongiovanni express anger that one of their targets was mad at him, Nastoff was taken aback.
Nastoff, who now works as a supervisor for the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibilities and is stationed in Florida, told jurors that Bongiovanni seemed irritated that Anthony Anastasia, who pleaded guilty in a 2015 cocaine trafficking case, was telling people that Bongiovanni had “screwed him over.”
“I was angry and puzzled as to why that statement was made,” he said from the witness stand.
Former DEA agent Joseph Bongiovanni is accused of accepting at least $250,000 in bribes to shield drug traffickers from arrest.
Nastoff testified at Bongiovanni’s bribery and corruption retrial that he perceived it to mean that Anastasia was mad at the legal process and that Bongiovanni “didn’t help him out.”
Bongiovanni, 60, faces 11 charges, including a bribery count alleging that he accepted at least $250,000 from a drug-trafficking organization that he thought was associated with Italian organized crime and shielded its members from arrest and provided them with information about investigations and cooperating sources.
In his questioning of Nastoff, Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas Cooper took Nastoff through documents related to investigations and pointed to inconsistencies between Bongiovanni’s paperwork and investigative techniques and those that are standard to the agency.
Cooper also asked questions about the lack of detail in some of the reports Bongiovanni submitted, particularly those written about top targets in the Ronald Serio drug trafficking organization.
State police handed case to DEA when Bongiovanni suggested it had 'organized crime' ties
He pointed to three forms, all submitted by Bongiovanni on Dec. 24, 2012, as case files on brothers Thomas and Ronald Serio and David Oddo, another alleged member of the organization.
For all three, Bongiovanni wrote in the remarks section of the document ”Initial G-DEP submission for priority target.”
Nastoff testified that this section usually includes more details, including about the person’s role in the organization and any other information that might be helpful to other investigators who pull the file.
“I would describe why they’re being put in the file,” Nastoff said of his typical practice for filling out that section of the form.
A signature also appeared on all three of those documents identifying Nastoff as a second officer on the file. The form identifying Oddo had “For:” written before the signature, a common practice when signing for another officer with their permission.
Another federal agency steered clear of drug-smuggling probe as Bongiovanni held sway over informant
Nastoff said he was unaware of the existence of the documents at the time they were filed and never gave Bongiovanni permission to sign for him.
Cooper also asked Nastoff about subpoenas Bongiovanni ordered on the phone numbers of Michael Masecchia and Louis Selva, both involved with the Serio drug organization. Masecchia and Selva, a former Erie County sheriff’s jail deputy who resigned when federal agents raided his home, were both friends of Bongiovanni’s. Bongiovanni entered no details about the two into other DEA files, something that would have been a common practice at the DEA.
After entering their information into a DEA “deconfliction” system, Bongiovanni would receive a notification anytime another law enforcement officer looked them up, Nastoff said.
And it would be considered improper for Bongiovanni to subpoena those records, given his personal relationship with Selva and Masecchia, Nastoff added.
“That would be in my experience a conflict of interest,” he said.
Earlier in the day the prosecution and defense also finished their questioning of Francis DiCarlo, a DEA supervisor who collected the documents requested for the trial and testified on how information is collected and distributed throughout the organization.
DiCarlo testified on the information Bongiovanni would have been able to access and whether or not there were records confirming he had accessed certain documents.
