Politics
Former Nassau County Detective Who Moonlighted for Mafia Is Convicted
Hector Rosario had hoped to earn big from his work for the Bonanno crime family. He wound up with about $8,000 and an indictment.
The assignment carried a lot of risk and not much reward.
The Long Island detective would try to shut down illegal gambling operations run out of backrooms in a shoe repair store, a cafe and a chess club. The work netted him around $8,000. But his employer wasn’t the police: It was the Bonanno crime family, which paid him to target the franchises of rival families.
On Tuesday, the risk was realized. A federal jury in Brooklyn found the former Nassau County detective, Hector Rosario, 51, guilty of lying to the authorities about his knowledge of the illegal gambling scheme. The jurors acquitted him on a charge of obstructing justice.
In 2022, prosecutors for the Eastern District of New York indicted Mr. Rosario and eight members and associates of the Bonanno and Genovese crime families after a yearslong probe into racketeering and illegal gambling on Long Island. Mr. Rosario, who was fired by the Nassau County Police Department shortly after the indictment, was the only defendant who did not accept a plea deal and whose case went to trial.
Mr. Rosario, prosecutors said, was a loyal enforcer of the Bonanno family’s business directives, chief among them a push to quash the competition: illegal gambling operations run by rival families. Key witness testimony helped support the prosecutors’ argument that Mr. Rosario had lied about having no knowledge of the illegal gambling activities or of certain people and venues involved in the scheme.
The trial embodied the diminished power of organized crime families in the region. Beginning in the 1980s and ’90s, prosecutors in the Eastern District decimated the five major families — Bonanno, Genovese, Gambino, Lucchese and Colombo — with cases against their leaders. Now, where the families once made their money by dominating large unions and industries in the Northeast, they dabble in smaller criminal ventures.
The district’s prosecutors described this illegal gambling scheme as lucrative, with profits from one establishment often exceeding $10,000 per week, but Mr. Rosario’s cut was meager. And the setting of the illegal activities — card tables and a handful of computerized gambling machines squirreled away in the back of small businesses — was a far cry from the Mafia of yesteryear.
