In this haunted house, prosecutors didn’t need the walls to talk.
A mob turncoat testified in grisly detail yesterday how a member of his crew brutally hacked and drowned a man at a spooky Staten Island mansion, then had his body sawed up and burned the pieces in a furnace.
Stefan Cicale, a one-time Bonanno family associate, described how Joseph “Joe Black” Young, 27, lured Robert McKelvey to the Kreischer Mansion in Charleston in 2005 with the intention of killing him.
“He was hiding in the hallway. When [McKelvey] walked in the door he jumped out of the hallway and stabbed him with a knife,” Cicale testified on the opening day of Young’s trial in Brooklyn federal court. “He broke free and they crashed into the door.”
Young then followed as McKelvey ran outside.
“Joe grabbed him by the bushes in the front and drowned him in the pool right there,” Cicale said.
Cicale, Young and two other crew members, Michael Maggio and Jose Garcia, allegedly dragged McKelvey’s body to a shed in the back yard and left it there while they went to eat and buy supplies to dispose of the body.
After returning with garbage bags, drop cloths and power saws, they hauled McKelvey’s body back into the mansion’s kitchen and dumped it on a mattress to absorb any blood.
“We started to cut the body. We took turns. Two of us would hold the body and one of us would cut the body,” he said.
He said they started with parts of the body that could be used to identify McKelvey – like one of his arms that had a tattoo.
“They cut it from the elbow down. Then the left hand, feet, knees, stomach and then the head,” he said. “The parts were double-bagged and brought downstairs and burned in the furnace.”
He said Young used a three-foot long metal pipe to push the parts around as they burned.
“It was like a fireplace poker, to move around the parts in the furnace. It was taking a long time so we had to move the parts around to make sure they were burning,” he said. “[There was a] terrible smell.”
Gino Galestro – a Bonanno soldier – pleaded guilty to ordering the hit because McKelvey owed him money and had a big mouth. Cicale, Maggio and Garcia are cooperating with the government.
In his opening statement, Young’s lawyer admitted his client was a bad man – but insisted he had nothing to do with McKelvey’s murder.
“He committed crimes and some of them were indeed violent crimes,” said Robert Soloway. “[He] is not a murderer.”
Young was working as a caretaker of the creepy Kreischer mansion – which has long been rumored to be haunted by the ghosts of the family who built it in the 1880s.
In a bizarre twist, prosecutors showed a trailer made by a budding Long Island filmmaker for a film about the crew called “Neighborhood Boyz.”
In it, the goon squad is filmed in and around the house discussing a mob hit and how to dispose of the body.