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He was the good humor man, all right.
A Staten Island ice-cream vendor allegedly sold huge quantities of potent and dangerous prescription oxycodone out of his Lickety Split truck — and parked right in front of the house he shares with his NYPD officer dad.
It was an open secret in the neighborhood that Louis Scala Jr. sold Good Humor ice cream and $20-a-pop “oxy’s” out of his green-and-white truck, city Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget Brennan said.
He was part of a mobbed-up prescription painkiller ring that netted about $1 million over the course of a year, officials said.
“I’d hear the music, and the truck would come in selling ice cream,” said one retired cop from the Pleasant Plains neighborhood, asking not to be named. “It did get a little frustrating when it would be out there at 9 o’clock at night. I’d think, why the hell is he selling ice cream at night?”
Louis Jr. would sell ice cream on his route, then park his truck outside his house in Pleasant Plains, Brennan said.
He’d sell cones to kids, then open the truck for business for the adult customers who were waiting for him in their cars.
The adults would step into the truck to get their fix, and new “oxy” customers got a discount to lure them in, Brennan said.
Scala’s dad, Louis Sr., 50, who works out of Manhattan’s 10th Precinct, is heartbroken over the arrest of his 29-year-old namesake son and that of his other son, Anthony, 21 — allegedly recruited by his older brother as a drug runner in the scheme, according to a source with knowledge of the case.
Louis Jr. and accused fellow mastermind Joseph Zaffuto, 39 — a convicted Luchese racketeer — allegedly used two dozen runners to fill prescriptions for the painkiller and did a booming business, pumping nearly 43,000 pills into the borough’s already-saturated black market.
Louis Jr. and Zaffuto would buy blank prescription-pad pages for $100 apiece from Nancy Wilkins, 40, of Brooklyn, who worked for a Manhattan orthopedic surgeon and was the “linchpin” of the scheme, said Staten Island DA Dan Donovan.
Louis Jr. and Zaffuto then allegedly hired at least 28 other people to fill the forged oxycodone prescriptions at pharmacies around the city — including Louis Jr.’s fiancée and two uncles, officials said.