Gilgo Beach Suspect’s Home Held a 279 Weapon Arsenal and a Walk-In Vault
This is an entirely different aspect of how “The Law of Cause & Effect” works, than was illustrated by the case of Gynecologist Robert Hadden’s sentence of twenty years in prison for sexually abusing his patients. In the former, he was eventually given up by his patients. In this case, the serial rapist/murderer Rex Heuermann was apprehended only after years of tenacious detective work, conducted by officers who would just not give up! Gilgo Beach Suspect’s Home Held a 279 Weapon Arsenal and a Walk-In Vault
The “Law” doesn’t care how it is expressed. It just keeps working until the proper destination is reached!
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/25/nyregion/gilgo-beach-suspect-279-weapon-seized.html?smid=em-share
“I’ve read a number of books that focus on sharing a similar message, including “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne, “The Answer” by John Assaraf & Murray Smith, “The Celestine Prophecy” by James Redfield, “Think and Grow Rich,” by Napoleon Hill, and I must say that I find Rob’s to be my favorite.” – Sheryl Woodhouse, founder of Livelihood Matters LLC
Gilgo Beach Suspect’s Home Held a 279-Weapon Arsenal and a Walk-In Vault
Investigators have been excavating the backyard of the suspect’s home after finding “disturbances” that might be buried objects, the district attorney said.
Corey Kilgannon and
Rex Heuermann, the Long Island architect charged in the Gilgo Beach serial murder case, kept 279 weapons in his rundown home, most of them in a basement vault big enough to walk into, the authorities said on Tuesday.
At a news conference outside Mr. Heuermann’s ranch house, where the authorities have been collecting evidence since the arrest, the Suffolk County district attorney, Raymond A. Tierney, said that his team was wrapping up its search after more than a week of searching and seizing items. Mr. Heuermann had lived with his family in the dilapidated one-story house with the unkempt yard on First Avenue in Massapequa Park, N.Y., for years, commuting to his architectural consultancy in Manhattan.
The suspect’s now-estranged wife and two grown children have vacated the premises, and crime scene officials have spent the week digging up the backyard and removing items ranging from large pieces of furniture to small bags of household possessions. As they’ve worked, the house has become something of a tourist attraction for true crime fans and a daily encampment for news crews covering the case.
Mr. Heuermann, 59, was arrested on July 13 and charged in connection with the killings of young women whose bodies were dumped in the thick overgrowth along a stretch of Ocean Parkway along Gilgo Beach on the South Shore of the island. Mr. Heuermann has been charged with killing Amber Lynn Costello, 27; Melissa Barthelemy, 24; and Megan Waterman, 22. He is the prime suspect in the murder of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25.
He is being held without bail and has pleaded not guilty.
Their bodies were found in 2010 about a 20-minute drive from the Massapequa Park house, near one another and similarly bound and wrapped in burlap. But in all, 11 bodies have been found along the miles-long stretch of beach on the South Shore, and law-enforcement agencies throughout the region have been examining unsolved cases on the possibility that Mr. Heuermann might become a suspect.
In Massapequa Park, investigators have been turning the remnants of Mr. Heuermann’s existence inside out. Mr. Tierney said at the news conference outside the house Tuesday that the authorities executed a search warrant that allowed them to use ground-piercing technology to locate “a number of disturbances” under the backyard, indicating buried objects. They excavated the objects, which will now be tested, said Mr. Tierney, who was flanked by about a dozen police officers in the midday sun.
“It’s going to be a while for the analysts to do their job,” he said, adding that much of the search was an effort to find genetic evidence linking Mr. Heuermann to crimes.
Mr. Tierney said investigators had pulled “a massive amount of material” from the cluttered house, including the arsenal in the vault, which included various long guns. The collection exceeded the 92 legal permits Mr. Heuermann held, the authorities said.
Authorities have not specified how the women were killed. Asked whether anyone might have died in the house, Mr. Tierney said, “We haven’t ruled in or ruled out anything.”
Commissioner Rodney K. Harrison of the Suffolk County Police Department told reporters the search of the house was “fruitful.” And by the end of the news conference, police command posts and evidence collection trucks that had been posted outside the house almost since the arrest were gone, but an official SUV blocked the street.
When First Avenue is reopened, anyone who loiters and blocks traffic in front of the Heuermann house will be fined $150, the police said. A work crew installed a camera on a nearby telephone pole to monitor.
The 12-year investigation into the Gilgo Beach killings was marked by dysfunction and disarray, but was reinvigorated in February 2022 when authorities announced the creation of a task force of local, state and federal investigators that focused on cellphone records.
The four women whom authorities have specifically linked to Mr. Heuermann had been contacted by different burner phones, and investigators, using mapping technology, learned the calls came from two key locations that they eventually connected to the defendant: near his Massapequa Park home and near his office at Fifth Avenue and 36th Street in Manhattan.
A break came in March 2022 when investigators discovered that Mr. Heuermann had owned a Chevrolet Avalanche truck at the time of the killings. It was the same type of truck a witness had seen parked in a victim’s driveway shortly before she disappeared.
Last month, investigators matched DNA from a hair on Ms. Waterman’s body with the DNA swabbed from discarded crusts recovered from a pizza box that Mr. Heuermann had thrown out.
On Tuesday, Mr. Tierney said much of the investigation so far had focused on the so-called Gilgo Four. He said his team was “working toward” filing cases in the fourth case, all of which could take time.
“A 13-year-old cold case doesn’t get solved in a matter of weeks or days,” he said.
Kirkus Reviews, the gold-standard for independent & accurate reviews, has this to say about
What Goes Around Comes Around:
A stable, positive, non preachy, objective voice makes the book stand apart from others in the genre. A successful guide that uses anecdotes to reveal powerful truths about life.
~ Kirkus Reviews
“I’ve read a number of books that focus on sharing a similar message, including “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne, “The Answer” by John Assaraf & Murray Smith, “The Celestine Prophecy” by James Redfield, “Think and Grow Rich,” by Napoleon Hill, and I must say that I find Rob’s to be my favorite.” – Sheryl Woodhouse, founder of Livelihood Matters LLC
Gilgo Beach Suspect’s Home Held a 279 Weapon Arsenal and a Walk-In Vault
Gilgo Beach Suspect’s Home Held a 279 Weapon Arsenal and a Walk-In Vault
Here’s a case of “Group malfeasance, blamed on poor judgement, from the consumption of too much wine!” A nine month investigation of the American chapter of “The Court of Master Sommeliers” has revealed a widespread expectation/demand of sexual favors in return for mentoring female applicants, undergoing the rigorous exam process, required for membership and recognition as an official Sommellier.
This follows the complaint of 21 women that their supposed mentors, had pressured them for sex, apparently a well-established condition with a long history. So far 22 men have been investigated.
The point being, that when a lowly activity becomes “institutionalized” in a grouping of people, ie: company, sport, union, association, religion, etc, it can go on undetected for a long time. It may even acquire an almost “accepted as part of the game” kind of cover, with those participating considering it, “just one of their perks”, and no big deal! That is, until someone blows the lid off.
That’s when everything changes for those who took part. It is not after all, that they didn’t know there was something amiss about the game they were playing. They just thought they had a really good cover! Instead, that cover just went poof, as all covers eventually do. Just another example that, “What Goes Around Comes Around!” Its just difficult to predict when.
Colombo Family Crime Boss and 12 Others Are Arrested, Prosecutors Say
An indictment unsealed on Tuesday accuses the organization of orchestrating a two-decade scheme to extort a labor union.
For two decades, the leadership of the Colombo crime family extorted a Queens labor union, federal prosecutors said — an effort that continued unabated even as members of the mob clan cycled through prison, the family’s notorious longtime boss died, and as federal law enforcement closed in.
Over time, what began as a Colombo captain’s shakedown of a union leader, complete with expletive-laced threats of violence, expanded into a cottage industry, prosecutors said, as the Colombo organization assumed control of contracting and union business, with side operations in phony construction certificates, marijuana trafficking and loan-sharking.
On Tuesday, 11 reputed members and associates of the Colombo crime family, including the mob clan’s entire leadership, were charged in a labor racketeering case brought by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn.
All but two of the men were arrested Tuesday morning across New York and New Jersey, prosecutors said. Another was surrendered to the authorities on Tuesday; another defendant, identified as the family consigliere, remained at large, prosecutors said.
The indictment accuses the Colombo family of orchestrating a two-decade scheme to extort an unnamed labor union that represented construction workers, using threats of violence to secure payments and arrange contracts that would benefit the crime family.
The charges are an ambitious effort by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to take down one of the city’s five Mafia families. In addition to the union extortion scheme, which is the heart of the racketeering charge, the indictment charges several misdeeds often associated with the mob, including drug trafficking, money laundering, loan-sharking and falsifying federal labor safety paperwork.
Detention hearings for the defendants in Brooklyn federal court continued into the evening Tuesday, as they entered not-guilty pleas to the charges; prosecutors had asked the court to keep 10 of the defendants in custody.
“Everything we allege in this investigation proves history does indeed repeat itself,” Michael J. Driscoll, F.B.I. assistant director-in-charge, said in a statement. “The underbelly of the crime families in New York City is alive and well.”
Around 2001, prosecutors said, Vincent Ricciardo — a reported captain in the family, also known as “Vinny Unions” — began to demand a portion of a senior labor union official’s salary. When Mr. Ricciardo was convicted and imprisoned on federal racketeering charges in the mid-2000s, prosecutors said, his cousin continued to collect those payments.
Starting in late 2019, prosecutors said, the senior leadership of the Colombo family became directly involved in the shakedown, which extended to broader efforts to siphon money from the union: for example, manipulating the selection of union health fund vendors to contract with entities connected to the family, and diverting more than $10,000 each month from the fund to the family.
Andrew Russo, 87, who prosecutors describe as the family boss, is accused of taking part in those efforts, as well as a money-laundering scheme to send the proceeds of the union extortion through intermediaries to Colombo associates. He was among nine defendants charged with racketeering.
Mr. Russo appeared in court virtually from the hospital Tuesday; he is set to be detained upon his release, pending a future bail hearing.
The family’s infamous longtime boss, Carmine J. Persico, died in federal custody in North Carolina in March 2019.
Federal law enforcement learned of the extortion scheme about a year ago, prosecutors wrote in a court filing Tuesday; investigators gathered thousands of hours of wiretapped calls and conversations recorded by a confidential witness, wrote the prosecutors, who also described law-enforcement surveillance of meetings among the accused conspirators.
The authorities said they repeatedly captured Mr. Ricciardo and his associates threatening to kill the union official. “I’ll put him in the ground right in front of his wife and kids,” Mr. Ricciardo was recorded saying in June.
On another occasion cited by prosecutors in the memo seeking his detention, Mr. Ricciardo directed the union official to hire a consultant selected by the Colombo family, saying: “It’s my union and that’s it.” Prosecutors said his activities were overseen by a Colombo soldier and the consigliere who remains at large.
Much of the activity outlined in the indictment took place while the defendants were either in prison or on supervised release for prior federal mob-related convictions. Theodore Persico Jr., described as a family captain and soldier, was released from federal prison in 2020 and, despite a directive not to associate with members of organized crime, “directed much of the labor racketeering scheme,” prosecutors said.
Mr. Persico, 58, is set to inherit the role of boss after Mr. Russo, prosecutors wrote.
Several of the defendants were named in what prosecutors described as a fraudulent safety training scheme, in which they falsified state and federal paperwork that is required for construction workers to show they have completed safety training courses.
One of the defendants, John Ragano — whom prosecutors say is a soldier in the Bonanno crime family — is accused of setting up phony occupational safety training schools in New York, which prosecutors said were “mills” that provided fraudulent safety training certificates to hundreds of people.
In October 2020, prosecutors said, an undercover law enforcement officer visited one of the schools in Ozone Park, Queens, and received, from Mr. Ricciardo’s cousin, a blank test form and an answer sheet; weeks later, the agent returned to pick up his federal safety card and paid $500.
The purported schools were also used for meetings with members of La Cosa Nostra — the group of crime families commonly known as the Mafia — and to store illegal drugs and fireworks, according to the indictment.
Mr. Ragano wasn’t charged on the racketeering count, although prosecutors also sought his detention pending trial. In addition to the racketeering count, several defendants, including Mr. Ricciardo and his cousin, were charged with extortion, conspiracy, fraud and conspiracy to make false statements.
William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.
Correction:
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of people identified in an indictment as members of the Colombo crime family. It is 11, not more than a dozen.