Officials: Body is Colombo underbossFBI excavating suspected mob burial site in E. Farmingdale.
7:59 PM EDT, October 7, 2008
A forensic dentist has confirmed that the body whose remains were found by FBI agents excavating an apparent mob burial site is that of former Colombo family underboss William Cutolo, according to Robert Nardoza, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Benton Campbell.
A team of doctors and dentists has been working at the Suffolk medical examiner's office in Hauppauge since Monday to identify the body through dental records and DNA tests.
Cutolo disappeared in 1999 and was believed to have been a victim in a war for control of the Colombo family in the 1990s, which resulted in more than a dozen murders.
More than a dozen people were believed to have been murdered during that battle. The war was between factions headed by Alphonse Persico, the son of imprisoned boss Carmine Persico, and Cutolo.
The younger Persico was convicted at a federal trial last year of having Cutolo, 49, murdered in 1999.
Federal prosecutors said at Persico's trial that after Cutolo was murdered, his body was dropped into the Atlantic.
After finding Cutolo's remains, one body that an informant had told them was among three buried in an East Farmingdale mob burial ground, FBI agents returned to the site yesterday with renewed confidence that they might locate the other two, according to sources.
The body found Monday was not precisely where the informant had told them Cutolo's body had been buried, but was within a few yards of the spot, the sources said.
The body, fully clothed and wrapped in a stiff cloth, was desiccated and it was difficult to make out features, the sources said.
Yesterday, 13 agents and two backhoes worked to clear a previous search area on Executive Drive and agents worked slowly toward Route 110 along the Long Island Rail Road tracks.
Meanwhile, a police squad car stood guard at the site on Boening Place, where Monday's discovery was made.
That discovery came at about 10 p.m., after several days of digging at three sites along the railroad tracks near several office buildings.
An informant told FBI agents three bodies were buried there between 1994 and 1999, sources said.
Agents have been digging at the site for five days after receiving a tip from informant Joseph Competiello, who said the bodies of three Colombo family affiliates were buried there.
Competiello told authorities the bodies of Cutolo, Richard Greaves and Carmine Gargano Jr., 21, a Pace University student who disappeared in 1994, are buried there.
Competiello was indicted in June in connection with the death of Greaves.
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