Copyright 1989 Newsday, Inc.  
Newsday (New York) March 18, 1989, Saturday, CITY EDITION
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 16

LENGTH: 354 words

HEADLINE: Ex-Union Boss Sentenced in Extortion

BYLINE: By Pete Bowles

BODY:
A once-powerful Queens union boss was sentenced to 5 years in prison and 5 years' probation and fined $ 100,000 yesterday for using "fear, violence and force" to extort payoffs from construction companies in return for labor peace.

Basil Robert Cervone Sr., 76, business agent of Local 13 of the Mason Tenders Union, also was ordered to pay a forfeiture of $ 143,532, the amount of money that prosecutors said he realized from the scheme.

Cervone, of North Woodmere, L.I., was convicted Nov. 18 of racketeering, extortion and conspiracy.

"I am sorry for what I have done," he told U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Platt before sentence was imposed. vb.15Anthony Siano, a prosecutor for the Organized Crime Strike Force in Brooklyn, asked for a stiff prison sentence. "Mr. Cervone has forfeited his right to liberty through a lifetime of pervasive criminality," Siano said. Cervone had faced up to 20 years' imprisonment on a racketeering charge, the most serious count.

At the trial, Cervone's son, Basil Robert Cervone Jr., testified that for almost three years he had picked up about $ 1,600 a week from Queens contractors for "ghost" employees and turned the money over to his father. The son, a member of the federal Witness Protection Program, said he knew of seven other laborers who also picked up "ghost checks" for his father.

Ten others were convicted in the scheme. Nine defendants are awaiting sentencing. The 10th, Cervone's other son, Joseph, 51, the union's former president, was sentenced to 6 months in jail for labor bribery and conspiracy.

The indictment charged that the defendants, union officials and contractors, had conspired to rig bids on a number of building projects in Queens, including an unsuccessful attempt to fix the price on a 1985 renovation project for luxury boxes at Shea Stadium.

The elder Cervone, a reputed associate of the Genovese and Gambino organized-crime families, began his career as a pushcart peddler. He took over control of the union in 1966 after his chief rival, his half-brother, George, was executed as he slept in his Long Beach, L.I., bungalow.