A former baseball coach at a Brooklyn high school played ball with the mob — helping to operate an illegal sports-betting operation for the Genovese crime family, authorities charged yesterday.
Gerald Bruzzese, who resigned last year as a volunteer coach at Xaverian Catholic HS in Bay Ridge, was among 16 suspects taken into custody after a two-year probe by the NYPD and Brooklyn District Attorney.
DA Charles Hynes refused to immediately release the indictment or information about specific allegations.
But The Post, which broke the story of the probe last February, reported that investigators believe that Bruzzese would walk off the field while wearing his uniform and collect bets from his customers — some of whom turned out to be undercover cops.
The were no allegations that any of his players were brought into the scheme.
Bruzzese and the other 15 suspects were cuffed at 6 a.m. yesterday.
They’re accused of helping to run five separate betting operations for the Genovese and Gambino families that netted a total of $20 million annually.
Prosecutors said Bruzzese’s chief project was nysportswager.com, an illegal Web site.
The site, they said, raked in $17 million in two years.
He’s also accused of being part of a loan-sharking ring that charged a whopping 156 percent interest rate.
Bruzzese’s lawyer insisted that authorities threw her client, a father of four, a curveball.
He’s just a “low-level subagent facing probation,” said the lawyer, Marianne Bertuna.
At Bruzzese’s arraignment on charges of conspiracy, promoting gambling and possessing gambling records, Justice John Walsh set bail at $30,000 after Bertuna cited his “deep roots in the community.”
Prosecutors had sought $100,000.
Dennis Canale, 67, the head baseball coach at Xaverian who hired Bruzzese, was probed in the multimillion-dollar scams but was not indicted.