A member of the Bonanno crime family known as “The Maniac” reportedly compelled one of his loan-sharking victims to strip naked to check for a wire, commanding, “Take off your f–king pants right now!” as per prosecutors.
John Ragano, aged 62, allegedly made his associate Vincent Martino remove his clothes while threatening to “slap the s–t out of him” if he was found to be wired for the feds during a meeting on July 5, 2023, just five days before Ragano was set to go to prison for a federal racketeering case in Brooklyn.
“OK, well, then take off your f–king s–t right now, my man. Take off your f–king pants right now, lemme see, I want to see,” a furious Ragano reportedly instructed Martino at his office when Martino denied being wired up.
Martino, who apparently had a wire on his clothes, followed Ragano’s instructions — and somehow still managed to secretly record the whole meeting anyway, even as he stood naked while two other men stood behind him with a crowbar and another with a tire iron, federal prosecutors have said.
“John Ragano forced a man who owed money to strip naked in a garage in Queens and threatened to slap the s–t out of him,” federal prosecutor Andrew Reich said at the beginning of Ragano’s trial in Brooklyn Federal Court.
Another mob associate, Broadway-show-tunes singer-turned-criminal Andrew Koslosky, 66, testified that he collected loan payments from Martino for Ragano — who he painted as a hair-trigger-tempered “big fella.”
“He made it clear that people didn’t want to cross him,” Koslosky said.
During Koslosky’s testimony, jurors were shown a photo of how he recorded payments in an envelope named “Italian” — while another photo showed stacks of cash amounting to $6,200 that was paid by Martino in April 2021.
“When he put his fist down on the desk, the whole room shook,” Koslosky said of Ragano, who is charged with extortion, harassing a witness, and witness tampering.
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