He’s a reputed member of a notorious Irish gang and peddled rhino horns on the black market — but Brooklyn lockup is just too much for him.
Wimpy redheaded Limerick County crook Michael Slattery, 23, sobbed in Brooklyn Federal Court on Tuesday as he described his traumatic exposure to hardcore Brooklyn prison life while pleading guilty to dealing in horns from the critically endangered Black Rhino.
Slattery told Judge John Gleeson that a fellow inmate threatened to “spin my head off” after he accidentally bumped into him at the Metropolitan Detention Center.
The trembling thug added that two other inmates — one of them a murderer — debated over who would be his cellmate.
The murderer “wanted me to sleep with him,” he noted.
“There’s no way I’m staying with the fella who said he’s a murderer,” Slattery noted to the vaguely concerned judge.
Slattery, an alleged member of a shadowy nomadic Irish criminal group known as the Rathkeale Rovers, was arrested in 2010 after he sold four illegal rhino horns for $50,000 to a buyer in Queens.
The items are coveted by practitioners of Asian medicine who believe that Black Rhino horn serves as an aphrodisiac and helps fight cancer.
Slattery wept and stammered his way through his appearance as Gleeson explained his legal options.
“You look like a nervous wreck,” the jurist observed.
In an unsuccessful attempt to calm him down, Gleeson told him that he was still a young man and that his maximum sentence of five years in prison would leave him with plenty of time to live his life.
“What are you crying about?” Gleeson inquired.
Slattery used a day laborer to purchase a set of horns in Texas to shield him from detection and then traveled to New York in 2010 to sell off his goods, according to prosecutors.
European officials claim the Rovers are linked to raids on museums where rhino horns have been stolen before being sold.