The feds last week secretly busted the alleged acting head of the Bonanno organized-crime family — Salvatore “Sal the Ironworker” Montagna — and are on the verge of deporting him to Canada for an immigration violation, The Post has learned.
The 38-year-old Montagna’s lawyer said the purported mobster is being booted from the United States for a 2003 contempt conviction only because federal authorities are frustrated at being unable to indict him for any crimes after investigating him for years.
“It is sour grapes on the part of the FBI,” said Montagna’s lawyer, George Stavropoulos, who denies his client is a Mafia family member. “They brought in [immigration authorities] into the case a year ago in the event they could not indict him on anything.”
“This was the ace up their sleeve. They always knew they could get him on the immigration thing,” Stavropoulos said.
“It is quite shameful that after a three-year investigation by the feds, the best they can do is get him deported.”
“Basically, the government has uprooted him from his family,” said the lawyer of Montagna, an Elmont, LI, resident with a wife and three young daughters, who has lived in the United States since he was 15. “He’s going to lose his business.”
Montagna, who was born in Sicily and later immigrated to Canada, was identified by authorities three years ago as the acting head of the Bonanno family. His purported ascension raised eyebrows because he was just 35 at the time, but it was chalked up to the fact that a series of prosecutions had decimated the upper ranks of the Cosa Nostra clan.
Montagna was busted April 6 at his company, Matrix Steel, in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and has since been held in an immigration detention center in lower Manhattan, his lawyer said.
Stavropoulos said immigration authorities have detained him on the grounds that he pleaded guilty in 2003 to criminal contempt charges for refusing to answer questions in front of a Manhattan grand jury.
Immigration officials told Stavropoulos yesterday they will send Montagna to Canada in the next five business days.