A low-level Lucchese lunkhead was sentenced to 5 1/2 years prison today for the elaborately-staged Macing and mugging of a jilted bachelor who was selling an engagement ring on Craigslist.
Ring Worm Gerard DeGerolamo had repeatedly emailed and met with the lovelorn bachelor for weeks, each time insisting he was really, really on the verge of coughing up $30,000 to buy the ring.
Finally, in Dec., 2009, DeGerolamo, 66, lured the victim, salesman David Cushman, 31, to a vestibule on Christopher Street, on the pretext of meeting there with DeGerolamo’s “daughter.”
Once in the vestibule, DeGerolamo whipped out a can of Mace, blasted Cushman in the face, and grabbed the ring box.
Nearly blinded, with his face burning, Cushman still managed to turn the tables.
Cushman testified at trial last month that he chased the thug back out the door, tackling him, taking back the ring and delivering a sound beating that sent DeGerolamo to the hospital for facial stitches.
“He got the worst of it,” defense lawyer Martin Morris told Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Thomas Farber, in asking for less time than the eight-year sentence requested by prosecutors.
“I never hurt anybody,” DeGerolamo told the judge, when given his own chance to speak. “I never hurt anybody in my life.
“I still to this day can’t believe that I’ve been convicted,” he added. “That’s all I gotta say.”
The judge called DeGerolamo’s continued protestations of innocence “Preposterous.”
“The evidence in this case is frankly overwhelming,” the judge said.
DeGerolamo’s rap sheet shows he has a flair for elaborate, wacky and ultimately failed criminal plots.
In 1989, DeGerolamo, his son, and another accomplice stole $3.7 million by taking off in an armored car he’d been hired to drive. The following year, he absconded off the grounds of a minimum-security federal prison.
In 1992, he and two associates were caught in the midst of yet another armored car heist — in which the smallest of the trio was hidden in a packing crate to gain entrance into a cash-filled vault. He served a decade behind bars for that crime.
He remains charged with a second Craigslist attempted robbery — this one of a 33-year-old woman selling two diamond rings that her husband, who she was divorcing, had given her.
That case is back before the same judge next month.