CRIME PAYS LOUSY By KATI CORNELL SMITH
Heading up a crime family is not nearly as lucrative a job as it's cracked up to be, a mob turncoat said yesterday.
Joseph "Little Joe" Defede - testifying at the racketeering trial of Peter Gotti - said he earned only $1,014,000 as boss of the Luchese crime family from 1994 to 1998.
The approximately $250,000 a year doesn't come close to what a corporate CEO - even an honest one - earns.
Gotti's lawyer, Gerald Shargal, questioned Defede's arithmetic, asking how he could keep track of his earnings in view of the fact that "the Mafia doesn't send out W-2s."
"It's very simple, counselor," Defede responded. "Add the numbers up.
"I kept it all up here," he said, tapping his forehead.
Defede was called by prosecutors in Brooklyn federal court to give the jury an overview of how mobsters get their pay - and to back up government claims that Gotti is boss of the Gambino family, a job he allegedly inherited from his late brother, John.
Since Defede was imprisoned from 1998 until last February, when he entered the Witness Protection Program, he could testify only about the period he headed the Lucheses.
John Gotti, jailed at the time, was the official head of the Gambino family, and his son John A. "Junior" Gotti was acting boss. But it was Peter, he said, who represented the Gambinos at eight inter-family "commission" meetings at the former Lexington Hotel in Manhattan, now the Radisson Lexington.
"Junior," he stressed, did not attend the commission meetings. The Gotti delegation consisted of Peter, then a capo, and another captain, Nick Corozzo, Defede said.
Speaking of money matters, Defede said the total take of the approximately 100-member Luchese family over the four years he headed it was about $6 million.
After Defede's $1 million cut, a lower-ranking mobster would average only about $50,000 a year, if Defede's figures are accurate. Defede broke down his quarter-million-dollar-a-year take as follows: a salary of about $60,000 a year, plus $50,000 bonuses every three months.
The money, he said, was brought to him in paper bags delivered in the bathrooms of various diners.
"What is the purpose of organized crime?" prosecutor Katya Jestin asked.
"To make money," Defede responded, insisting that in his years at the top of the family, he never authorized or committed a murder.
He complained that he was demoted while in prison because he was falsely accused of stealing money from the family. The bad news was broken to him by a fellow capo in a jailhouse visit, he said.
"He said I was taken down, I was demoted," Defede said.
"He told me the money don't jive."