Son of slain Bronx mobster Sylvester ‘Sally Daz’ Zottola to be sentenced for ordering dad’s murder, faces mandatory life in prison
The murderous son of slain mobster Sylvester “Sally Daz” Zottola won’t have to guess his fate when he’s sentenced in Brooklyn Friday for ordering his father’s death — he faces a mandatory life sentence.
A federal jury found Anthony Zottola, 45, guilty in October of orchestrating a plot to kill his 71-year-old dad and try to murder his older brother — by sending a bumbling band of Bloods gang members to his relatives’ doorsteps for nearly a year before they finally succeeded in offing the patriarch in 2018.
Zottola and the man who pulled the trigger, Himen Ross, were both convicted of murder-for-hire — a charge that will leave Judge Hector Gonzalez no wiggle room when both are sentenced Friday. The federal prison system has no parole.
Sally Daz died in a barrage of bullets as he waited for coffee in a Bronx McDonald’s drive-through on Oct. 4, 2018.
But the plot to kill him started long before then, and his son teamed up with a Brooklyn Bloods leader, Bushawn Shelton, to get it done.
Sally Daz, who spent decades running illegal “Joker Poker” gambling machines across the Bronx for the mafia, put his earnings into building a multi-million-dollar real estate empire — and Zottola wanted control of that empire, prosecutors established at his seven-week trial.
And that meant his father and older brother, Salvatore Zottola, had to die.
So he connected with Shelton in August 2017, feeding the Bloods leader details on his father’s movements, along with home security system info and house keys to help plan the murder.
But Shelton’s subordinates kept failing to get the job done, their plans stymied by incompetent underlings and a string of pratfalls. One of those cronies, a hapless hit man named Ron Cabey, turned against the plotters, testifying about three botched attempts to kill Sally Daz, and another three attempts on Salvatore Zottola’s life.
Another would-be killer, Jonathan “Giovanni” Jackson, bailed out on an attempt on Sally Daz’s life in early 2018 after noticing potential witnesses nearby — and was killed in a gang shooting before he got another chance.
Ross, who was Cabey’s getaway driver at one point, took over the role of trigger-man, repeatedly shooting and nearly killing Salvatore Zottola in a July 11, 2018 ambush outside his Bronx home. He also fired the bullets that ultimately ended Sally Daz’s life.
All the while, Anthony Zottola and Shelton traded coded texts for more than a year — texts the feds extracted from Shelton’s phones after arresting him.
“One of the most tragic aspects of this tragic case is the way that Anthony Zottola weaponized his unsuspecting family members,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kayla Bensing wrote in an April 7 letter to the judge.
“He heard about upcoming sibling vacations, and then planned attacks around them. He listened as his father and brother recounted the attacks that had occurred on them, and then passed key details on to Shelton to better fine-tune the next attempt.”
She added, “He turned his family into unwitting players in their own heartbreak.”
Zottola’s sister, Deborah, told the Daily News Monday she prefers to think about the happy memories she made with her father and brothers.
“I want to remember the good times, and not focus so much on this ... not focus on the negative and remember what we had as a family,” she said.
So far, three of the nine defendants convicted in the plot have been sentenced. Herman “Taliban” Blanco and Jason Cummings, both Bloods members, received 22- and 17-year sentences respectively, while Crips member Brandon Peterson got 16 years. A fourth, Arthur Codner, is set to be sentenced Wednesday. All four pleaded guilty.
Shelton, who pleaded guilty in exchange for 35 to 40 years behind bars, has yet to be sentenced.
