Over the years, as they've prosecuted mob associate Edmund (Eddie) Boyle in federal courts on both sides of the East River, the feds have changed the name of the crew he ran with several times. His reputed associates haven't changed. Merely the name of the gang the feds say he's been part of as he's allegedly robbed and burglarized banks all around the town.
Welcome to the federal government's 2009 version of the 1964 song by Shirley Ellis that's been immortalized in recent years on You Tube, "The Name Game."
The way the feds see it, Boyle played for more teams than Hall of Fame Major League Baseball base-stealing kingpin Rickey Henderson.
When he was first nailed back in 2003, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said he was a founding member of the Night Drop Crew. Along the way, the feds called the gang The Springfield Boys and the Bank Crew. A few years later, after all his codefendants had pleaded guilty and he went to trial alone, they called the gang the Eddie Boyle Crew.
Now, as he's about to go to trial next month for the 1998 murder of a federal informer, federal prosecutors in Manhattan say that at the same time that he belonged to all those crews, he was really a member of a Gambino family crew headed by soldier Thomas (Huck) Carbonaro.
In court papers, Manhattan prosecutors Jonathan New and John Zach have asked Judge Colleen McMahon to prevent Boyle's lawyers, Diarmuid White and Martin Geduldig, from bringing up the different names at trial because it might confuse or mislead the jury about what's really happening.
What they don't want to happen, they say, is for Geduldig to argue what he did at Boyle's trial in Brooklyn - that the feds change the names of mob crews to fit the evidence they plan to introduce in an effort to unfairly make jurors think Boyle is a "dangerous and evil man."
Not everything that happened in Brooklyn, where Boyle was convicted of bank burglary and sentenced to 10 years, is bad, say the prosecutors. They plan to use evidence of the same bank burglaries and robberies that the feds used to convict him in Brooklyn at his Manhattan trial.
Another piece of the Brooklyn case they want to use is evidence that when a Brooklyn landlord made unwanted sexual advances toward Huck Carbonaro's niece, Boyle retaliated, not with violence. "Instead," say the prosecutors, Boyle "spray-painted the entire exterior of his house, including the sidewalk and bushes, with pink paint."
As he was in Brooklyn, Boyle, 43, is the last man standing in the case.
Sources tell Gang Land that codefendants Thomas Dono, and Leterio DeCarlo, have agreed to plea bargains calling for double digit prison terms that will be finalized this week.