New York mobster Anthony (Tony Boy) Zinzi did almost a decade in state prison on a conviction for his role in a double murder in the late 1960s. The 73-year old Zinzi, currently alleged to be a top lieutenant of Genovese crime family power Patsy Parrello, participated in the Bronx’s Glass Boat Bar slayings on December 22, 1968 – the hit on fellow wiseguy and suspected police informant Liberto (Libby) Moresco and his friend and drinking buddy Joe Gurney. One federal record cites informants calling the Glass Boat Bar hits as how Zinzi “made his bones,” a job-well-done he was rewarded for with induction into the Genovese Family following his prison stint. Spending nine years in Green Haven State Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York after pleading guilty to manslaughter and assault charges, Zinzi was released in 1977. He was referenced in an article in Sports Illustrated Magazine that same year as being part of convicted armed-robber-turned-pro boxer Bobby (The Hebrew Hammer) Halpern’s entourage. By the 1980s, per court filings, he was working directly underneath Parrello, who in the years that followed would have his son and namesake killed for throwing a punch at a made man in the Gambino crime family in front of a crowded Bronx social club and saw his crew infiltrated by the an undercover state police trooper. Zinzi and Parrello, 72, were indicted together back in the summer in a federal racketeering case. Parrello allegedly oversees the Genovese syndicate’s affairs in the Bronx. Zinzi is charged with running an after-hours gambling club in Yonkers and acting as an enforcer on behalf of Parrello, handling such duties as assaulting a man harassing patrons in the parking lot of Parrello’s Arthur Avenue restaurant headquarters, Pasquale’s Rigoletto, and ordering the car of a rival backdoor casino operator torched, according to the August 2016 indictment. In December 1968, a then-24 year old Zinzi and two associates, John (Johnny Boy) Petrucelli and Ernie (Coco) Coralluzzo, were tasked with getting rid of Moresco, per police reports and court documents, and got help from John Ferolito, the owner of the Glass Boat Bar, a watering hole in the Bronx Moresco was known to frequent. When Moresco arrived and began drinking with Gurney on the night of December 22, Ferolito called the Genovese hit crew to alert them and sent his one cocktail waitress down the street on a coffee run. Arriving at the Glass Boat Bar in Zinzi’s blue-colored Oldsmobile, Zinzi, Petrucelli and Coralluzzo went inside and shot both Moresco and Gurney. It was a grim scene. Gurney died on the spot. Moresco, wounded and wielding a pistol, stalked his assailants into the parking lot and Zinzi ran him over with his car. Moresco died at the hospital less than an hour later. Ferolito and Zinzi both copped pleas. Coralluzzo was acquitted at trial and went on to a lucrative career as a mob narcotics trafficker – doing much of his business in the 1970s with local African-American crime lords like Leroy (Nicky) Barnes, Frank (Black Caesar) Matthews and Frank Lucas and his “Country Boys Gang” – while Petrucelli was convicted of Gurney’s murder, but not Moresco’s. Petrucelli allegedly bragged of shooting Gurney to friends and was slain gangland style himself in the fall of 1989, just two years removed from being sprung from prison on the Gurney homicide.
