The grandson of an infamous mob boss was sentenced to prison on Monday after pleading guilty to defrauding the federal government out of more than $1 million in Covid relief funds, some of which he invested in cryptocurrency.
Carmine G. Agnello Jr., the grandson of John J. Gotti, the former leader of the Gambino crime family, appeared in Federal District Court in Central Islip, N.Y., where he was sentenced to 15 months in prison.
Starting in April 2020, Mr. Agnello applied for at least three loans for his Queens-based company, Crown Auto Parts & Recycling L.L.C., through a program meant to support small businesses hurt by the pandemic.
He applied for the loans under false pretenses, claiming he did not have a criminal record when he in fact did have one, prosecutors said. He then used more than $400,000 of the borrowed money to invest in a crypto business.
Mr. Agnello pleaded guilty in September 2024 to a single count of wire fraud. Federal prosecutors with the Eastern District of New York had sought a sentence of around three years, as well as $1.3 million in restitution.
As a child, Mr. Agnello starred on the reality television show “Growing Up Gotti” alongside his mother, Victoria Gotti, and two brothers, Frank and John. The show, which ran on A&E for three seasons and was canceled in 2005, depicted a Long Island household in the milieu of “The Sopranos.”
At the time, Mr. Agnello’s father, Carmine (the Bull) Agnello, was in prison and had been divorced from Ms. Gotti, a former columnist for The New York Post, leaving her to raise three rowdy sons. The intense media focus on the Gottis gave the grandson “a distorted sense of reality,” wrote John Gotti Jr., Mr. Agnello’s uncle and the leader of the crime family in the 1990s, in a letter to Judge Nusrat J. Choudhury before the sentencing.
“Being part of the Gotti family meant growing up with too much attention, expectations and society’s judgment that most kids never have to deal with,” Mr. Gotti wrote. He added that his nephew faced pressure “to live up to the Gotti name.”
Mr. Agnello found his way into the family business, in a sense. In 2018, he pleaded guilty to running an unregistered scrap business; that case echoed his father’s racketeering conviction after he firebombed a rival scrap company in Queens that was run by undercover police officers.
Mr. Agnello’s grandfather, Mr. Gotti, exercised power with unrelenting brutality and delighted in the spotlight. He seized control of the family by organizing the 1985 assassination of his predecessor, Paul Castellano, before running enterprises that investigators estimated earned about $500 million a year from ventures that included extorting unions, illegal gambling, loan-sharking and stock fraud.
After numerous acquittals in state and federal trials, aided by juries that had been tampered with, Mr. Gotti earned the nickname “Teflon Don” from New York City’s tabloids. He was ultimately convicted in 1992 on 13 criminal counts and died of cancer in 2002 at age 61 in a federal prison hospital.
The “Teflon” moniker did not appear to fit Mr. Gotti’s grandson. Earlier this year, Steven Metcalf, a lawyer for Mr. Agnello, asked Judge Choudhury for a sentence with no prison time so that Mr. Agnello could donate a kidney to his mother, who has renal disease. Without the transplant, Ms. Gotti could die during her son’s prison term, Mr. Metcalf said.
But in April, Mr. Agnello hired a new lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, who apologized to the judge for Mr. Metcalf’s “voluminous argument” in support of Mr. Agnello, which stretched hundreds of pages.
In his letter to the judge, John Gotti Jr. wrote that Mr. Agnello could have learned from seeing his family members incarcerated. Instead, it made him numb, Mr. Gotti said.
“Sadly, in our family going to prison became almost a rite of passage,” Mr. Gotti wrote.
Santul Nerkar is a Times reporter covering federal courts in Brooklyn.
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