Move over, Granny — we’ve got another corpse coming!
Colombo crime-family scion Theodore “Skinny Teddy” Persico Jr., ordered a rival’s murder while attending his own grandmother’s wake in a Brooklyn funeral home — where he’d been taken in shackles by correction officers because he was doing a prison stint at the time, a mob rat revealed yesterday.
“You’ve got to kill Joey,” Persico whispered to three Colombo cohorts at the wake held at Scarpaci Funeral Home in Dyker Heights in August 1993, one of the mobsters, Anthony “Big Anthony” Russo, testified.
A handcuffed Persico — who was referring to renegade Colombo gangster Joseph “Joey” Scopo — ordered the hit as he sat in a room with both his grandmother’s body and three state jail guards who’d transported him from an upstate prison, Russo told jurors in Brooklyn federal court.
Russo described the morbid scene at the trial of Colombo mobster Francis “B.F.” Guerra, who is charged with murdering Scopo and another wiseguy.
“He said, ‘You got to get Joey,’ ” Russo recalled. “He said, ‘I want my guys to take care of this — killing Joey Scopo.’ ”
“He was whispering to us,” Russo said of the order. “He said, ‘Get it done.’ ”
And they did.
Two months later, in front of his Queens house, Scopo, 47, was gunned down by a hit team.
Russo testified that during the shooting by two other mobsters, he was sitting in a getaway car while Guerra was sitting nearby in a second car that would be used to crash into cops if they arrived.
Persico pleaded guilty last week to charges of extortion and conspiracy to commit murder for the Scopo hit.