As a reward for testifying in eight federal mob trials, admitted Colombo crime family consigliere Carmine Sessa was sentenced yesterday to time served for four murders – meaning he’ll go free next month.
Sessa, 49, has served about seven years in prison. Federal Judge Jack Weinstein handed down the light sentence after prosecutor George Stamboulidis told the judge Sessa’s “cooperation was extraordinary.”
In 1993, Sessa pled guilty to killing three men and one woman while he ran with a notorious Brooklyn faction of the Colombo crime family. He turned informant to avoid a life sentence in prison.
Sessa has since turned over a new leaf, he told Weinstein in a hand-written statement he read before sentencing.
“I hate everything about the life I led,” he said. “And I hope that it ends soon, because it keeps destroying families and kids who are infatuated with it and can’t wait to be ‘goodfellas.’
“I wish I could tell them what it really is.”
Sessa fingered other mobsters in a series of crimes, and blew the whistle on mobster Gregory Scarpa Jr.’s corrupt relationship with an FBI supervisor.
After four years of testifying, he was released on bail in the summer of 1997.
But he was back in the clink the next year for gun possession, beating his wife and stealing guns from his son, Thomas.
Things didn’t go much better for him in his other “family.”
“The movie ‘Goodfellas’ explains it well,” Sessa said yesterday in court. “Everybody gets killed by a bunch of animals or so-called ‘friends’ … This thing I thought I respected as a young man has no respect.”
Sessa also apologized to the families of his victims.