Last December, the man once picked to lead the Colombo crime family strolled into an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn, where he was greeted by a buffet, Christmas wreaths and kisses from the mob members he’d been ordered to stay away from.
The man, Theodore (Teddy) Persico Jr., was attending a Christmas party thrown by the family. But as he ate a plate of food at the bar surrounded by several men in black, he knew he wasn’t supposed to be there.
As it turned out, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation were aware of his outing. And on Wednesday, Mr. Persico was sentenced to nine months in prison for meeting with mob members, which a judge in Federal District Court in Brooklyn found to be a violation of the terms of his supervised release.
The courtroom setting was familiar for Mr. Persico, a longtime soldier and captain in the Colombo crime family who has spent much of his adult life in prison for crimes that include murder conspiracy, racketeering and extortion. Prosecutors have described Mr. Persico as someone who “dedicated his life to crime.” His uncle, Carmine (Snake) Persico, led the family for decades.
Mr. Persico had been released from a West Virginia federal prison in May 2025, where he had served most of a five-year sentence for his role in a scheme to extort a Queens labor union. Judge Hector Gonzalez also ordered him to avoid “organized crime groups, gangs or any other criminal enterprise.” Nor was he allowed to frequent any establishment where such people might gather.
In court on Wednesday, Joseph Corozzo Jr., Mr. Persico’s lawyer, said that Mr. Persico had gone to the restaurant for a short amount of time, wearing the shirt of his employer, Vintage Collision on Staten Island, and had not tried to hide the meeting from federal probation officers.
“There’s a quick exchange of pleasantries, a seven-minute meeting, and then it’s over,” Mr. Corozzo said.
Mr. Persico was handpicked to lead the family in May 2020 after serving eight years in prison for conspiring to murder a Colombo boss during a bloody internecine war in the family. While he was on release from prison in 1993 to attend his grandmother’s wake, Mr. Persico, according to prosecutors, ordered members of his crew to kill Joseph Scopo.
A year after his release in 2020, Mr. Persico was again arrested, along with 10 others members and associates of the Colombo crime family,on charges of extorting a Queens labor union, as well as money laundering, drug trafficking and more federal offenses.
The case represented an ambitious effort by federal prosecutors to cut down the entire leadership of one of the city’s five Mafia families. Mr. Persico, prosecutors said, “directed much of the labor racketeering scheme.”
In July 2025, Mr. Persico began a three-year term of supervised release.
Yet he soon returned to meeting with mob members. In addition to the Christmas party he attended at Ponte Vecchio in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, Mr. Persico met with a Colombo member outside a Manhattan hospital and greeted a member of the Gambino crime family outside a body shop in Staten Island.
The restaurant did not respond to a request for comment.
Such meetings, Mr. Corozzo said in court, were informal and an aspect of Italian American culture. But Devon Lash, a federal prosecutor, said it was “common sense” that the meetings were about mob business.
“These meetings were, in fact, related to organized crime,” Ms. Lash said.
In issuing the sentence on Wednesday, Judge Gonzalez noted it was the third time Mr. Persico had violated federal supervised release, and that he might have been “naïve” to think Mr. Persico could avoid associating with mob members.
But he offered a measure of encouragement to Mr. Persico, who apologized to the judge for appearing in his courtroom.
“I hope you can break this cycle,” Judge Gonzalez said.
Santul Nerkar is a Times reporter covering federal courts in Brooklyn.
The post Former Colombo Boss Is Going Back to Prison for Meeting With Mob Members appeared first on New York Times.
