Carmine 'The Snake' Persico was head of the New York-based Colombo crime family and was 33 years into a 139-year prison sentence.
The former boss of one of America's most powerful Mafia families has died while serving a 139-year-old jail sentence.His lawyer Benson Weintraub said Persico died at the Duke University Medical Centre in North Carolina, near a federal prison in Butner where he was imprisoned. He was 85 years old.
He was convicted of racketeering and murder and sentenced to more than a century behind bars in 1986. Persico was among eight defendants convicted in what became known as the"Commission Trial" which was overseen by the then US attorney Rudolph Giuliani - who went on to become mayor of New York and is now Donald Trump's lawyer.
Prosecutors said during the trial that he was involved in the assassinations of two other mobsters - Albert Anastasia, the Murder Inc. leader who was killed in a barber's chair in Manhattan in 1957, and Joseph Gallo, who was shot at Umberto's Clam House in Little Italy in 1972.Persico represented himself during the trial and questioned prosecution witness Fred DeChristopher, his cousin by marriage, who admitted turning him in for a $50,000 reward.
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