A jailed son of Bonanno crime boss Vincent “Vinny Gorgeous” Basciano says he has no plans to follow his dad into the “family” business.
“I love my father with all my heart, and my heart bleeds for him [for] what he is going though, but I do not have plans to chose the life he lived or walk down the same path he did,” Stephen Basciano, 30, recently insisted in a two-page handwritten letter from his cell at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center to Manhattan federal Judge Richard Sullivan.
Stephen Basciano is scheduled to be sentenced by Sullivan on Friday for running a mini-marijuana enterprise with his two brothers.
He is facing 46 to 57 months in prison under a plea deal with the feds, but his lawyer, Joshua Dratel, has asked Sullivan for a sentence “well below” that amount.
“The choice I made by selling marijuana made my mother so upset that she hasn’t spoken to me since my arrest [in September 2013],” Stephen bemoaned to the judge in his missive.
He added that his bust did little to boost his girlfriend’s mother’s opinion of him, either, adding that his gal pal cries “herself to sleep at night.”
He makes it a point of referring to Sullivan as a “very popular judge” who “must have heard it all.”
But Basciano also notes his father’s arrest eight years ago “turned my world upside down,” adding “he was my best friend.”
Stephen says he had to shut down a body shop he co-owned shortly after his dad headed to the Big House because it was not doing well.
Vincent Basciano, 54 — who owned the “Hello Gorgeous’’ hair salon in The Bronx — is serving two life sentences for mob murders.
Over the next few years, Stephen said, he worked various blue-collar jobs before making “one of the worst decisions” of his life by agreeing to sell pot.
He says he once thought marijuana “wasn’t a serious drug” but has “learned the hard way … it’s still illegal.”
Stephen, along with brothers Vincent Jr., 32, and Joseph, 28, pleaded guilty earlier this year to running the ring, which the feds say involved hundreds of pounds of pot being brought from California to New York for distribution between August 2009 and April 2013.
After the brothers’ arrest, only Stephen remained in custody.
Prosecutors argued he should be denied bail because he has a long history of violence that includes being taped by a government witness bragging about having a gun with a silencer for years and having no problem “shooting people in the leg.”
Last month, Joseph Basciano became the first of the three brothers to be sentenced. Facing two years in jail, Sullivan cut him a break by giving him only six months in prison.
He also gave him fatherly advice, saying, “Go out there and get a real job. Pay taxes and do all the things ordinary people do.”