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She waited more than three decades for justice, and yesterday, Catherine Godkin finally got to see the mobster who murdered her husband held accountable.
Sitting in a Brooklyn federal courtroom every day of a five-week trial over the 1981 murder of husband, Richard Godkin, and his business partner, John D’Agnese, Catherine Godkin, 70, was stunned to finally see a jury convict Gambino capo Bartolomeo “Bobby Glasses” Vernace.
“Thirty-two years and six days. I’m just so overwhelmed that the justice system did not fail. Unbelievable,” Godkin told The Post, her eyes filled with tears outside court.
In the decades following her husband’s murder, Catherine Godkin had seen earlier state prosecutions mounted and then collapse amid allegations of mob witness tampering and intimidation.
Key witnesses lied or changed their stories out of sheer terror, lead federal prosecutor Evan Norris told the jury at this trial. “Thirty-two years later, they are still scared. That’s fear. That’s the Mafia. That’s the Gambino crime family. That’s how they keep things going. That’s how they make this thing work,” Norris had said.
The rubout in The Shamrock Bar in Woodhaven began when a drink was spilled on a wiseguy’s girlfriend. Three mobsters returned for payback, with Vernace shooting Richard Godkin in the chest and another Gambino shooting co-owner D’Agnese in the face.
Vernace, who sat on the Gambinos’ ruling panel, faces life in prison.
Catherine Godkin, a grandmother of eight, was a mom of four kids under the age of 10 when she had to break the news to them of their father’s murder.
They said a prayer together, but the kids were too young to comprehend that the Mafia had killed their dad over a spilled drink.
“This has to be the third best day of my life after the birth of my two children,” said daughter Susan Godkin, who was only 5 years old at the time.