A menacing Bonanno crime family soldier nicknamed “The Maniac” was convicted of extorting a loan sharking victim who he forced into stripping naked in his Queens auto parts shop.
John Ragano, 62, learned his fate after a week-long trial in Brooklyn Federal Court, where a jury convicted him of extortion, but acquitted him of witness harassment and tampering.
Ragano, who goes by the nickname “Bazoo,” was accused of repeatedly pressuring Vincent Martino, a mob-connected construction business owner, into paying back a $150,000 street loan — even after he’d already been convicted and was awaiting sentencing in a case involving that same loan.
Some of the extortion occurred inside the federal courthouse, a crime that U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District Breon Peace called “an affront to the criminal justice system and a glaring example of this Bonanno mobster’s flagrant disrespect for the law.”
“With today’s verdict, the jury has delivered a clear message that the rule of law will prevail over extortionate threats,” Peace said.
During trial, Assistant U.S. Attorney Devon Lash said that Ragano was determined to get his loan back, as well as the $1,800 weekly interest payments he claimed he was owed.
“The defendant wanted his money, and he was going to get it one way or the other,” Lash said. “He knew how those demands would be understood — pay or face the violent consequences.”
Martino, who went to the FBI in January 2023 and started wearing a wire, resumed sporadic payments to Ragano through an an intermediary for several months. On July 5, 2023, their loan arrangement came to a head in a cinematic scene at A & G Auto Dismantlers in Ridgewood, according to Martino’s testimony and an audio recording played at the trial.
Martino, 47, walked into the lobby that day, as Manfred Mann’s classic cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light” played in the background. He stepped into a dark and grimy “warehouse” area filled with tires and metal materials and met with Ragano face-to-face.
But Martino flipped the script, accusing Ragano of ratting him out to the feds in a marijuana distribution scheme.
“I gotta end this thing. Bro, you f–king snitched me,” Martino said. “You gave me up on the weed case.”
Enraged, Ragano started yelling at him. “When I get out, you put a f—ing wire on me, I’m gonna come out and I’m gonna show you what kind of guy i am … Take off your f–ing shit right now. Take off your f—ing pants!”
Ragano continued, “You owe me my f—ing money, let’s see how you gonna do when I get out!”
Martino pulled down his pants and underwear and rolled up his shirt, but when he saw two more men approaching him with what he thought were tire irons, he ran off, hustled to his car and drove away.
Ragano’s lawyer, Joel Stein, cast the encounter in a different light, and accused Martino of provoking Ragano while wearing a wire.
“It’s not about collecting the loan. It’s about p–sing off Mr. Ragano, and he did a damn good job,” Stein said in his closing argument Thursday. “He’s the arsonist who lit a fire and called 911 and said, ‘There’s a fire in here.’”
Stein called Martino a “thief, liar and cheat” who used his cooperation as a way to skate on his own crimes.
Martino was swimming in business debt, and testified he went to the mafia to take out several high-interest street loans, including a $150,000 loan from Ragano.
He’d been making regular weekly payments on the $100,000 interest until September 2021, when he, Ragano, and the entire leadership of the Colombo crime family got arrested in connection with a union shakedown indictment.
Ragano had pleaded guilty to several charges in that case — including previously extorting Martino in regards to the loan. He started a 57-month sentence in that case on July 10, 2023, just five days after the recorded encounter with Martino.
The mobster faces 20 years in prison at sentencing, which is expected in the next few weeks.
