Given his Irish heritage, Gambino associate Edmund (Eddie) Boyle always knew he could never become a powerful “made guy.”
But that hasn’t stopped him from earning a reputation in mob circles as a clever, resourceful money maker who won’t buckle under pressure.
Boyle’s rap sheet – along with other alleged crimes – makes him a contender to become another Jimmy (The Gent) Burke, the legendary gangster played by Robert DeNiro in Goodfellas, the classic Mafia film about the $6 million Lufthansa Airlines robbery that Burke, a Luchese family associate, masterminded in 1979.
“He’s intelligent, cool under pressure and most important, a stand up guy,” said one law enforcement source, pointing to Boyle’s status as a “trusted and capable” member of a Brooklyn-based mob crew headed by Gambino soldier Thomas (Huck) Carbonaro.
From 1986 through 1999, Boyle skated through a life of crime with just five relatively minor convictions, serving a total of two years in prison. A year ago, however, things turned sour.
Boyle, now 39, was indicted last September as a “principal organizer” of the Night Drop Crew, a gang of mob associates – including a Carbonaro nephew – who netted nearly $2 million robbing and burglarizing banks from New York to Las Vegas. From 1993 to last year, according to a 33-count racketeering indictment, Boyle took part in one robbery, five burglaries and four failed bank jobs.
According to the indictment, Boyle led his crew to a $900,000 payday in a 1994 armed robbery of a Bay Ridge, Brooklyn bank. He and a cohort entered the vault through an adjoining boiler room and overpowered two guards, escaping with the help of others who served as lookouts and getaway drivers, according to court papers.
The feds claim he has committed a much worse crime. At a detention hearing, assistant U.S. attorney Joseph Lipton alleged that on April 28, 1998, Boyle was the gunman who shot suspected informer Frank Hydell to death outside a Staten Island nightclub. The prosecutor insisted Boyle was a danger to society who should be jailed while awaiting trial.
Brooklyn Federal Judge Sterling Johnson disagreed, ruling that strict home detention and a $2.5 million bond secured by properties belonging to his mother, sister, and two friends would suffice.
Last month, however, his bail was revoked when Lipton told Johnson that lawyer Richard Rehbock, an attorney for Boyle codefendant Thomas Dono, had boasted to John A. (Junior) Gotti in a tape recorded jailhouse discussion that Boyle had been helping his own cause through some questionable activities.
In a taped segment played for Johnson, Rehbock was heard telling Gotti: “(Boyle) calls up the state of Florida and gets motor vehicle records” while posing as "an investigator for an insurance company," adding, "I told him. 'You beat this case, I’ll hire you to work on (Junior’s) case." (Soon after the proceeding, Dono (left) fired Rehbock and retained a new attorney.)
As if going to prison because of words from Dono’s lawyer wasn’t bad enough, last week Boyle lost the services of his lawyer, Martin Geduldig, in a bizarre, seemingly vindictive, ruling by Johnson.
As often happens in cases that drag out – trial is scheduled to begin in February – Boyle claimed he ran out of money. He filled out the appropriate forms, and asked that the court pay Geduldig’s remaining fees – normally a pro forma request – even when the attorney is not a member of the court’s “CJA panel,” one set up to represent indigent defendants under the federal judiciary’s Criminal Justice Act.
Without explanation, however, Johnson refused, appointing a new attorney from the CJA panel, even though Geduldig is also on the panel and often takes assigned cases and was willing to accept the going $90 an hour rate.
Before he was bounced, however, Geduldig was called on to respond to another blast from the government, this one directed at Boyle’s mother, sister and the friends who had posted their homes as security for a $2.5 million bond.
Citing Boyle’s bail revocation, Lipton asked Johnson to forfeit their properties to the government.
Geduldig countered that except for the “bluster and bragging” by Rehbock about matters he knew nothing about, the feds had submitted no evidence that Boyle had done anything wrong. He urged the forfeiture issue be put off until Monday to give the suretors – Boyle’s family and friends – time to obtain an attorney, a request that was granted.
Yesterday, their attorney, Mark Fernich, said that even though the law allowed forfeiture, he felt “virtually certain that the judge can exercise his discretion and prevent the disproportionate hardship to the innocent suretors, especially since the purpose of the bond was to assure Boyle’s appearance and he has never failed to be there.”
Boyle’s new lawyer, Paul Gamble, told Gang Land he had not yet met with Boyle, and declined to discuss recent hardball tactics by prosecutor Lipton and Judge Johnson in the case.
The feds’ tactics seem designed to convince Eddie Boyle that rather than live out his days like Jimmy Burke – he died in prison – he might want to follow the lead of Burke’s former right-hand-man-in-crime, Henry Hill, (played by Ray Liotta in Goodfellas.) After turning on the mob and testifying against Burke and other Luchese associates, Hill, through personal appearances, books and most recently his own website, has set himself up as a cottage industry.
Courtesy of gangland.com
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HE’S already in federal prison. But the charges just keep piling up for Brooklyn Irish gangster Edmund Boyle.
Last week, Boyle, along with two other men aligned with the Gambino organized crime family, were hit with charges related to a 1998 killing outside a Staten Island strip club. If that sounds like a scene straight out of The Sopranos or Goodfellas, well, that makes sense. Boyle, after all, has regularly been compared to Jimmy “the Gent” Burke, the Irish gangster who served as the basis for Robert DeNiro’s character in the classic Martin Scorsese movie.
“Given his Irish heritage, Gambino associate Edmund (Eddie) Boyle always knew he could never become a powerful made guy,” mob-chronicler Jerry Capeci has written on his authoritative website gangland-news.com.
“But that hasn’t stopped him from earning a reputation in mob circles as a clever, resourceful money maker who won’t buckle under pressure.”
In fact, if you take a closer look at Boyle and his alleged crimes, they probably would not make for good movie material. In some ways, they are too outlandish to believe.
The 43 year-old Boyle has gotten himself mixed up with the infamous NYPD detectives who performed mob killings, an ex-boyfriend of Madonna’s and a victim who was killed because (allegedly) he was mad that he actually had to work at a construction job which was supposed to be a “no show” gig.
The latest charges against Boyle stem from an incident which happened outside Scarlet’s strip club on Staten Island in April of 1998.
Boyle, along with fellow reputed Gambino associates Thomas Dono and Lenny DeCarlo, have been accused of conspiring to kill Frank Hydell outside the strip joint, according to authorities and press reports.
Prosecutors have said that the gangsters feared Hydell was going to talk to cops about a separate killing , the 1997 Super Bowl Sunday murder of Frank Parasole at a Brooklyn social club.
It was Parasole, according to testimony and published reports, who supposedly forced one of Boyle’s pals to do construction labor on what had initially been understood to be a no-show job.
Boyle’s pal felt disrespected. So they (allegedly) whacked the guy.
The recent charges against Boyle interrupted what was, according to mob watchers, a lucrative career.
“He’s intelligent, cool under pressure and most important, a stand up guy,” one law enforcement source told ganglandnews.com, referring to Boyle, who was described as a “trusted and capable” member of a Brooklyn-based Gambino crew.
The Gambino family, of course, was made famous by former boss John Gotti.
How did Eddie Boyle get mixed up with the infamous “mafia cops”?
Well, Frank Hydell, that guy killed in the parking lot of a Staten Island strip club? It turns out he had a brother named James who, uh, simply vanished in October of 1986.
Law enforcement officials believe James Hydell was abducted by Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, the NYPD detectives who – it was later revealed – were also performing missions for the mob.
Now, how did Boyle get mixed up with Madonna’s boy toy?
Well, you may remember the name Chris Paciello, from the days when the tabloids were interested in Madonna they way they, today, are interested in Britney and Amy Winehouse. For a brief spell, Paciello became king of Miami night life. His clubs attracted supermodels and superstars like Madonna, to whom Paciello was romantically linked. Before all that, however, Paciello was a bank robber who worked for (at least according to prosecutors) Edmund Boyle. Originally known as the “Night Drop Crew,” the Irish American thief apparently played such a prominent role in the robbery crew that prosecutors simply began calling it the “Boyle crew.”
All in all, during the 1990s, Boyle was accused of stealing nearly $900,000 from National Westminster Bank on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, and taking part in almost ten other bank and home robberies.
Paciello himself is a long way from Madonna and the night club scene. He was sentenced to seven years in prison for taking part in a 1992 robbery which led to the deaths of the home residents.
As for Boyle, well, maybe he too could rat out some of his pals and write a book or screenplay.
Trouble is, no one would probably believe it.
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