A fearsome former mob boss who federal prosecutors said ordered the 1997 hit on an NYPD officer who dared marry his ex-wife was found not guilty by a Brooklyn jury Tuesday.
It took just 4 ¹/₂ hours of deliberations for the jurors to find former Colombo consigliere Joel “Joe Waverly” Cacace not guilty of ordering the grisly hit on Police Officer Ralph Dols in Brooklyn.
Now 72, the stone-faced mafioso looked mildly pleased by the verdict and turned to give hearty hugs and kisses to his defense team while sullen government prosecutors looked on silently.
A Colombo hit squad gunned down the 28-year-old Dols on Aug. 25, 1997 outside the Gravesend home he shared with his wife — Cacace’s ex — Kimberly Kennaugh, and their infant daughter.
Kennaugh and Dols had wed in Las vegas in 1995, a year after she divorced the wiseguy Cacace.
Prosecutors said that Cacace big couldn’t stomach the fact that his ex had married a cop and wanted him dead.
But jurors rejected testimony from two of Dols’ killers, Dino Calabro and Joe Competiello, who said Colombo captain Thomas “Tommy Shots” Gioeli told them Cacace wanted the cop dead.
“When you don’t have any evidence, a jury can tell,” crowed Cacace’s jubilant attorney Susan Kellman.
The mobster’s sister, Kathy Vandino, clutched a locket containing their mother’s ashes as she wiped tears from her cheek. “I prayed so hard for this verdict,” she said. “I’m overwhelmingly happy.”
Cacace still faces seven more years in prison for a prior murder conviction but celebrated like a free man as dozens of friends and family erupted into cheers, tears, and mild applause after the verdict was read.
He blew kisses and waved to his supporters who packed the gallery each day of his three-week trial.
But stunned relatives of the murdered cop cried and held hands as they slowly walked out of the courthouse. “It’s very upsetting,” said Dols’ mother, Maria Dols, who was being comforted by about five relatives.
The acquittal came on the strength of Kellman’s evisceration of the government’s star witnesses — who she painted as soulless killers whose testimony had no value.
Repeatedly referring to them as “maniacs,” “animals,” and “subhuman,” Kellman argued that the killers were simply trying to soften their own looming sentences by taking down a mob whale for the government.
She also dismissed the notion that Cacace was consumed by jealousy over Kennaugh’s new beau and said that he couldn’t have cared less about her new life with Dols.
A career criminal with an especially thick mafia resume, Cacace once disarmed a man who shot him during an attempted robbery of his Sheepshead Bay flower shop and then shot him dead.
Asked if her famously old-school client said anything after the verdict, Kellman paused.
“He’s not a talker,” she said.