Mobster said spirit of his grandparents told him to turn rat

It was a ghost he couldn’t refuse.

Luchese mobster John Pennisi says he got an earth-shaking message from the great beyond via his deceased grandparents that convinced him to become a government turncoat.

The paranormal message came to him in his Long Island home just as he was praying before a photo of his late grandparents and seeking their advice about whether he should turn informant, he said in a recent podcast. Just at that moment, Pennisi says he heard a sudden loud rattling of dishes and glasses. "Everything was shaking in the house," Pennisi told podcaster Gary Jenkins.

That was the sign, Pennisi said, that convinced him to turn himself into the FBI in October 2018.

In the three trials where he has testified since becoming a government witness, Pennisi has never mentioned his poltergeist-style encounter. In his sworn testimony, Pennisi has said he flipped after Luchese family leaders wrongly tagged him as a "rat."

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In the podcast, Pennisi also offered dramatic new details on attempts on his life that he believes had been ordered by his former Luchese allies. Shortly before receiving the supernatural message from the Other Side, he was chased by "five or six Bloods" at a Manhattan job site. Pennisi said the hoodlums were laying in wait to kill him for the Lucheses.

"I couldn’t believe the level of disrespect they had stooped to," Pennisi said. He said the Luchese clan "had started using other ethnic groups. They began using the Bloods."
On another occasion, he said, he had chased off another group of Bloods with "a pistol in a knapsack."

Those encounters, he said, underscored his uneasiness due to mixed messages he was getting from the family’s acting boss, Michael (Big Mike) DeSantis.

Pennisi, who had recently moved, said, "I started seeing people laying around at the train stations in the new town that I lived in."

He said that when a cousin suggested he go to the FBI, he rejected that notion. But his son suggested they "write down the pros and cons" of the options he faced.

"As a last resort," said Pennisi, they wrote down the FBI. "That was the other option. It was the first time that I even thought of the government or the FBI. We had to put that down as a last resort."

Pennisi said his son, who "lost 17 years without his father" during the years Pennisi was in prison for killing a neighborhood rival, "was a nervous wreck." Pennisi said his son "knew I was either going to go to jail for the rest of my life, get killed or I’m going to be in some type of a war with these guys and I’m on the losing end. I’m one person. And he told me, ‘I think that you should go tomorrow,’ and it was a Thursday. And I said, ‘All right.’ So he left."

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Pennisi said he felt "sick to my stomach" from Friday to Sunday and "couldn’t do it." But on Monday morning he woke up and prayed to his grandparents who "had passed away" for guidance.

"I didn’t live by a train station," Pennisi said. "You had to walk [there].) There was no planes flying around. It wasn’t an earthquake. Gary, I swear to you, I had wine glasses and different glasses and dishes in the house. Everything was shaking in the house," he said in a high-pitched voice, imitating the sound of glasses clicking, "bing bing bing bing bing bing."

"I even called my mother up, and I says, ‘I want you to listen to something.’ This went on for hours. She says, ‘What is that?’ I says, ‘It’s the glasses. I prayed to Grandma and Grandpa. It’s the glasses and the dishes and the house is shaking.’ Gary, I can’t even explain it. And THAT was my sign to go."

Two attorneys who represent defendants against whom Pennisi testified said they should have been able to ask him about his strange encounters with the great beyond in front of a jury.

"It is simply inexcusable that the defense was never told about . . . the paranormal events that he claimed triggered his cooperation," said Anthony DiPietro, the attorney for convicted underboss Steven "Stevie Wonder" Crea.

"Had these materials, and many other things now revealed by Pennisi, been properly disclosed by the government, no grand jury or trial jury would ever credit his tales," said DiPietro.

"His capitalizing on his cooperation calls into question his prior testimony and his motives to fabricate now."

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Lawyer Gerald McMahon, who saw Pennisi testify against his client, Eugene "Boobsie" Castelle, had his own take on the new explanation by the government informant. On the witness stand, Pennisi testified that John "Big John" Castellucci made up the claim Pennisi was a "rat" to protect Boobsie from being ostracized or worse for violating mob protocol and sleeping with Pennisi’s girlfriend.

"With the recent spate of videos of UFO sightings that the Air Force and government are saying are the real thing," said McMahon, "there’s a bit of poetry and symmetry in his account. I swear to God," said the lawyer, "that in one of those videos I thought I saw Pennisi with a helmet on. This confirms that it was in fact Pennisi traveling from a distant galaxy far, far away."

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