Chicago mob soldier Robert (Bobby Pinocchio) Panozzo pleaded guilty to a single count of federal extortion this week out of U.S. District Court in Rockford, Illinois. Panozzo, a member of the Outfit’s Grand Avenue crew, is already serving an 18-year sentence in state prison for racketeering and faces up to a 14-year term, most likely to run concurrent with his state case, when he’s sentenced in federal court later this year by the Honorable Philip Reinhard. Before his arrest in 2014 in a headline-grabbing sting where he was nabbed walking out of a drug house carrying a safe, Panozzo’s was the right-hand man to Grand Avenue crew capo and Outfit street boss Albert (Albie the Falcon) Vena, both the most feared and most wanted man in Chicago right now. Panozzo’s state case centered around a home-invasion and armed robbery ring targeting drug dealers. The feds pinched him for beating up a debtor over $100,000 in interest owed on a $40,000 juice loan. Panozzo, 60, loaned a McHenry County businessman $40k in 2005. Before he left to serve two years behind bars for another robbery bust, Bobby Pinocchio and associate Joe Abbott paid the businessman a visit at his office in October 2006 and attacked him, throwing his head against a wall multiple times. Upon his release from prison in 2008, Panozzo paid Abbott $1,000 in cash to torch the victim’s car and an additional $5,000 to blow up the garage attached to his house. Abbott has pleaded guilty to extortion in the case as well.
