Cold Cases

Det. Giuseppe “Joe” Petrosino was a NYPD cop who was murdered by the mafia. The case was finally closed when Italian police arrested Domenico Palazzoto during a major organized crime bust that netted 95 mafioso's this weekend in Sicily.

Detective Petrosino was murdered in 1909.

In a wiretapped telephone conversation, Domenico Palazzoto boasted that a relative,  Paolo Palazzoto, was the trigger man in the assassination of  Det. Petrosino 105 years ago.

Det. Joe Petrosino

Police recordings caught one of the men arrested bragging that his relative was responsible for killing a top cop boasting, “My father’s uncle, whose name was Paolo Palazzotto, was responsible for the first policeman killed in Palermo. He murdered the first police officer to be killed in Palermo. He killed Joe Petrosino.” 

Domenico Palazzoto, a descendant of a mob boss of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, Vito Cascio Ferro, is facing charges with his fellow mafiosos including extortion and association in a criminal network. 

Italian police said Palazzoto, 29, sealed his fate during that wiretapped conversation. “As evidence of his own more than 100-year mafia pedigree, guaranteed by his descent from Paolo Palazzotto, confirmed the murder as the work of his own relative,” the statement said, according to Bloomberg.

And the mutt is proud of it, boasting of a coward's action a hundred years later.

Story here.