A man charged with running a $4 million-a-year international sports-betting ring out of a Long Island bar once came close to pulling off the biggest robbery in U.S. history – a $1.2 billion securities heist, authorities said.
In 1987, Carmine Morreale, 44, of Seaford, a businessman who now operates a Chicken Holiday restaurant in North Massapequa, was nabbed by the FBI and NYPD on a Manhattan street with a gun in his hand – about to rob an armored car, sources said.
The heist would have been the largest securities robbery in U.S. history and perhaps the largest criminal enterprise ever.
But the FBI had surveillance in place at a bar that Morreale then operated in Queens and got wind of the plan, said retired FBI Agent Walter Carroll, who had the case and was there for the arrest of Morreale and two others.
Just before 7 a.m. May 28, 1987, Morreale and alleged accomplice Richard Cognata donned ski masks and pulled out pistols as they approached guards of a Loomis armored car.
The guards were pushing a cart loaded with four sacks that were filled with piles of valuable securities – many of which were payable to the bearer.
“They were wearing ski masks, they had their guns out. It could have been the largest securities robbery in the whole country,” Carroll said.
An army of undercover cops and feds swarmed in and busted Morreale and his cohort on federal weapons and robbery-conspiracy charges before they could get their hands on the loot.
“They gave it up,” and no shots were fired, Carroll said.
One of the guards, Reinaldo Aponte-Gonzales, 30, of Queens, was also charged as an accomplice but told a jury Morreale was a mobster who forced him into the scheme, said Carroll, and a jury acquitted him.
Aponte-Gonzales had been a customer in Morreale’s Queens bar, Carroll said. Authorities never found evidence that Morreale was involved with the mob, Carroll said.
Carroll said Morreale “never gave up anybody. He took his plea” and was given eight years behind bars. Cognata was also sent to jail, Carroll said.
Morreale later prospered on Long Island as the operator of a chicken eatery, a bar and – according to last Monday’s charges – a sports-betting ring.
“I don’t know too many people who carry $60,000 in cash in their cars and another $110,000 in cash in his mother’s house,” said Nassau prosecutor Joseph Dompkowski. “That’s a lot of chickens.”