Record
Court opinion
2006-09-27
CourtListener (Free Law Project), text of the opinion
United States v. Giovanelli, 464 F.3d 346 (2d Cir. 2006)
The Second Circuit affirms the obstruction-of-justice convictions of Federico Giovanelli, whom the trial evidence showed passing secret grand jury information in 1999 to targets of an investigation of the "Decavalcante Family."
- Date
- 2006-09-27
- Kind
- court-opinion
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Docket
- No. 04-5763-CR
- Rights
- Opinion of a United States court. Works of the federal judiciary are in the public domain in the United States. The text was read on CourtListener.
Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, per curiam, decided September 27, 2006. Giovanelli was tried in 2004 in the Southern District of New York before Judge Rakoff on eighteen counts. “On May 14, 2004, after an 18-day trial, the jury acquitted Giovanelli of fifteen counts, but returned a verdict of guilty for the conspiracy count and the two obstruction of justice counts” under 18 U.S.C. § 1503. He was sentenced to 121 months; on a Crosby remand the sentence was reduced to 90 months. The court affirmed.
The court states that the trial evidence, “read in the light most favorable to the government,” supports these facts: that Giovanelli “was a long-time ‘Caporegime’ or captain of the Genovese Organized Crime Family of La Cosa Nostra”; that in 1999 a New York grand jury “was conducting a thorough investigation into another family of La Cosa Nostra, the Decavalcante Family”; and that Giovanelli gave “targets of the investigation, including Vincent Palermo, then the Acting Boss of the Decavalcante Family,” sensitive information, including “two separate written lists of the people to be indicted.”
The words “Caporegime” and “Acting Boss” are the court’s, describing the evidence as the jury could have viewed it. This archive does not place either man on a chart. Both may be living, and nothing is added here beyond the opinion.