It's been a long time since anyone named Persico has won anything in the never-ending court battles the family has been waging for more than half a century all around the town.
But last week, Michael Persico, the businessman-son of jailed-for-life Colombo crime boss Carmine (Junior) Persico won a pretty big victory - for himself, as well as for any defendant with an otherwise clean record and no allegations of violence pending against them.
On Wednesday, following ten weeks behind bars after having been judged too dangerous to be released, Persico returned to his Brooklyn home. He immediately began preparing for his upcoming trial on racketeering and extortion charges under the relative luxury of house arrest.
A day earlier, Brooklyn Federal Judge Carol Amon heeded the arguments of lawyers Sarita Kedia and Henry Mazurek and made the official ruling that sent Persico home after his friends and relatives had posted $5 million in property as collateral, and he agreed to pay for the cost of the electronic monitoring that would be in place 24/7.
The 53-year old widower returned to the Dyker Heights home he shares with his two teenage daughters.
Amon's ruling was not unexpected. It came a few days after three federal appeals court judges in Manhattan ruled that the judge who had kept Persico behind bars was clearly wrong on the law - and probably wrong on the facts too - and sent the matter back to Brooklyn to be dealt with properly.
The really puzzling thing is what Judge Sandra Townes was thinking when she ruled that Persico was "presumed" to be dangerous, and that even under the very prosecution-friendly Bail Reform Act that he did not have to be accused of at least one violent crime in order for her to detain him as a danger to the community.
She was wrong on both counts, wrote Second Circuit Court of Appeals Judges Jon Newman, John Walker and Gerard Lynch, stating that Townes "erred in presuming Persico to be dangerous" and that her "erroneous" finding "at the very outset" of her analysis wrongly colored her ultimate decision.
"The Bail Reform Act allows a court to presume dangerousness only if it finds probable cause to believe that the defendant has committed various specific crimes," none of which Persico was even alleged to have committed, the judges wrote, ordering Townes to reconsider his bail application.
Even the government had conceded in its arguments before the panel that the judge had erred on the law, wrote the panel, agreeing with the remedy proposed by Persico's attorneys Sarita Kedia and Henry Mazurek.
In its unusually critical five-page opinion, the appeals panel indicated quite forcefully that while it did not address the merits of whether the safety of the public could be assured if Persico were released, his argument on that score was quite persuasive, and it was likely to reverse Townes if she reconsidered her ruling and still found that no bail conditions could secure the safety of the community.
"Significantly," wrote the panel, "the government offered no evidence that he ordered others to use violence. Although the government claims to have recorded 800 conversations related to this case, none of those conversations capture Persico ordering violence.
"Indeed, Persico argues that the recordings show that whenever others asked him whether to use violence, he discouraged them. He also cites recordings reflecting that he told his co-defendants to stop threatening debtors with violence, and that the only threats he ever considered were threats of legal action."
In one conversation relied on by the feds and Townes, but not mentioned in the appeals court ruling, Persico's gun-toting, hot-headed cousin Theodore (Skinny Teddy) Perisco Jr. was overheard saying that when it comes to adversaries, he prefers to "get a gun and shoot them, or stab them, or beat them up" and was going to seek his cousin Michael's permission to act on his desires. But, as the high court noted, that never happened.
In March, Townes upheld an initial ruling by U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein to detain Persico - whose only prior bouts with the law involved getting behind the wheel of a car while impaired. The magistrate's ruling went against the findings of the U.S. Probation Department which stated that the safety of the community would be assured by a posting of significant bail.
Townes was saved from having to reverse herself. She indicated last week that she would be away a few days, and referred the bail hearing to Judge Amon. His lawyers had requested a speedy resolution because of a medical emergency involving Persico's stepson, Joseph, who underwent thyroid cancer surgery a few hours before Michael Persico's bail hearing.
If Persico were released, the lawyers wrote, Joseph intended to live at home with his stepdad and Michael's two teenage daughters following the surgery at NYU Medical Center.
For the record, the last time a Persico family member achieved a courtroom victory was back in 1994, when Michael's brother Alphonse walked out of prison after he was acquitted of murder and racketeering charges. Five years later, Alphonse was back in prison, where he's been ever since. Dad Carmine, 76, is living out his days at a federal prison hospital in North Carolina.