Two men were indicted — including a purported gangster linked to three NYC Mafia families — after the feds seized 28 pounds of cocaine and 500 pounds of marijuana from a private jet at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, court papers revealed.
The plane was headed to Liverpool John Lennon Airport, but the aircraft never left the ground on Nov. 16 due to unexpected turbulence — in the form of US Customs and Border Protection Agents.
Port Authority cops arrested Leonardo Petrosillo, 45, of West Milford, NJ, and Edwin Spears, 49, of Newark, NJ, a reputed Bloods member with ties to La Cosa Nostra, and two other passengers following the contraband seizure, Manhattan Federal Court documents state.
The only passengers on the plane were Spears, Petrosillo, and three unidentified passengers — Spears’ girlfriend, an adult exotic dancer from Maryland and her friend, the court docs show.
Authorities allege the dancer and her friend were on the flight as part of a ruse to account for all the luggage.
Petrosillo was carrying three fraudulent New Jersey driver’s licenses and two bogus Social Security cards, according to court papers.
He also “appears to have ties to foreign nations” — the address he provided for himself to the hotel near Teterboro was an address in Bangkok, Thailand, court docs state.
The feds allege surveillance footage showed Spears and Petrosillo “worked together” to move the drug-filled luggage from their vehicles into a hotel near the airport and then from the hotel to the plane.
Spears “has a long and serious criminal history” dating back to 1992, and was collared in 2010 in New Jersey on charges of money laundering, bribery, and racketeering stemming from a scheme to smuggle drugs and contraband cellphones into a New Jersey state prison, court papers said.
Spears, who was already serving a 10-year prison sentence on assault charges, “worked from inside the prison with members of the Lucchese organized crime family of La Cosa Nostra to bring heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and prepaid cellphones into the prison,” the documents state.
According to an affidavit filed in connection with that case, law enforcement agents intercepted numerous recorded calls between Spears and Joseph Perna, a soldier in the Lucchese family, concerning the scheme, and Spears claimed he was a leader of the Bloods street gang. Ultimately, in 2016, Spears pleaded guilty to a heroin distribution charge and was sentenced to 50 months.
“Spears continues to communicate with members and associates of organized crime,” the documents in the new smuggling case say. “Spears’ phone records show recent communications with at least one known soldier of the Bonanno organized crime family and one soldier of the Gambino organized crime family.”
“Spears always had links back to the traditional La Cosa Nostra guys because a lot of time when their [the Bloods] different suppliers would dry up, La Cosa Nostra was always available for them,” Rick Norcross, retired commander of the Gang Intelligence Unit in Camden, NJ, told the Post.
The NJ-to-Liverpool cargo “doesn’t sound like a first-trip package,” Norcross said.
Spears and Petrosillo this week pleaded not guilty to drug conspiracy charges in Brooklyn Federal Court. They are jailed in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
The feds did not seize the private plane, according to John Marzulli, a spokesman for the US Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn. He would not say who owned the aircraft.