On March 18th, according to the Department of Labor’s Office of Labor-Management Standards, Vincent D’Acunto, former Secretary-Treasurer of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 2D (located in Brooklyn, N.Y.), pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (SDNY).
D’Acunto’s guilty plea came one week after Frank Cognetta, former Secretary-Treasurer of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1D (located in Brooklyn, N.Y.), also pled guilty to racketeering conspiracy in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (SDNY).
The cases go back more than a year, when federal prosecutors charged five members and associates of the Genovese crime family with racketeering dating back to the early 2000s. [See indictment below.]
Cognetta, according to the New York Daily News, was charged in 2018 with “soliciting and accepting bribes and directing union benefit plans in specific investment in return for kickbacks.”
According to the indictment, Cognetta “engaged in multiple schemes to defraud his union…by, among other things, soliciting and accepting bribes and steering union benefit plans into investments in exchange for kickbacks,” reported the National Legal and Policy Center’s Carl Horowitz last year. “Specifically, during 2014-17 he allegedly steered nearly $500,000 from a union health plan to the financial adviser whom he had appointed as an insurance broker.”
D’Acunto, on the other hand, conspired with Steven Arena and Vincent Esposito, plus four reputed Genovese made men and extorted annual cash payments since the early 2000s from a then-unnamed UFCW Local 2D officer by threatening that individual with violence and a loss of employment if the cash was not forthcoming.
That unnamed UFCW officer was reportedly Vincent Fyfe, the President of UFCW Local 2D.
Read more…
- UFCW Secretary-Treasurers in Brooklyn Plead Guilty to Racketeering
- Genovese Mobsters Charged with Running Brooklyn UFCW Rackets
- Genovese family bust turns into a family affair with the emergence of a cooperating witness
UFCW-Related Indictment on Scribd
