20°
Leonardo Petrosillo, 45, of West Milford, and Edwin Spears, 49, of Newark brought three companions -- Spears’s girlfriend, an exotic dancer from Maryland and a friend of hers -- as a front for a dozen drug-stuffed bags of luggage, they said.
The plane was to fly it all to John Lennon Airport in London, according to a complaint filed by the FBI in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn.
It never got off the ground.
Federal authorities and Port Authority police made sure of that, the complaint says.
The crime busters moved in on Petrosillo and Spears that Nov. 16 day after recording them on video stashing the drugs at a hotel near the airport off Route 46 and then transporting them to Teterboro, the FBI complaint says.
In addition to the drugs, agents said they found Petrosillo carrying three phony New Jersey driver’s licenses and two bogus Social Security cards.
“Money” Spears made headlines in 2007 when authorities said he teamed up reputed Lucchese organized crime family Joseph Perna of Wyckoff and a correctional officer to smuggle heroin, cocaine, pot and burner cellphones into East Jersey State Prison in Newark, where he was serving time for assault.
The “5-star general” of the Nine Trey Bloods street gang later got a 50-month sentence in 2016 for that one.
That same year, Perna, his son and his father -- reputed Lucchese capo Ralph Perna -- were sentenced to state prison for their roles in an international criminal gambling enterprise that authorities said handled billions of dollars in wagers and relied on extortion and violence to collect debts.
Petrosillo made news of his own after two men were reportedly abducted at gunpoint in the Rockland County town of Ramapo – also, coincidentally, in 2016.
He and a 40-year-old Wayne man were stopped by New Jersey State Police and arrested on the Garden State Parkway.
A single alleged victim came forward saying he’d been bound at gunpoint and had his car keys taken from him before being pushed from the car earlier in the ordeal.
Spears and Petrosillo were initially booked into the Bergen County Jail and remained held there until U.S. Marshals from the Eastern District of New York picked them up on Nov. 24, records show.
Both were ordered held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
Click here to follow Daily Voice Vineland and receive free news updates.
