12 May 1 - 7, 2025 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents and I let them know in a nice way that I could be their friend or their enemy.” In the summer of ’95, Engel was under the impression that Ruggiano’s brother-in- law, Louis Maione, had gotten the truckload of cigarettes from a contact on a Native American reservation. Other stolen goods were available if Engel was interested. Engel didn’t question Maione’s story. “I’m good with stolen goods,” Engel says. “I can sell ice to an Eskimo.” He didn’t know that Maione had gotten pinched with 2 kilos of cocaine in Tampa Bay and agreed to wear a wire for the feds. The FBI wanted Anthony “Tony Pep” Tren- tacosta, who was also doing business in Florida, but then learned that Corozzo was operating in the area and persuaded Maione to wear a wire. The stolen cigarettes were from the FBI. A federal grand jury indicted Corozzo, Ruggiano, Engel and five others on 20 counts in December 1996. “Central to the government’s case were wire-tapped phone calls that detailed Gambino dealings with stolen merchandise and Corozzo’s instruc- tions to kidnap and kill an FBI snitch,” the Tampa Bay Times reported in August 1997. Corrozzo wanted to kill Maione, who wouldn’t be the only one to flip. Reaching Out to the FBI E ngel heard his daughter’s voice for the first time in early 1997 on a prison phone at Rikers Island in the Bronx. He was facing up to 20 years for a state drug charge in New York and the federal racke- teering charges in Florida. He didn’t get rounded up with the others. He had left Florida a few months before the indictment and returned to New York, where he disap- peared into the crack houses. He was picked up for selling crack to an undercover officer. Federal agents discovered him in the state judicial system. The last time he saw his daughter in ’94, Engel spent the day with her and her mother on the beach for the Fourth of July. They watched fireworks and saw a possible future that Engel would ignore when Rug- giano called for Corozzo. Trapped in a jail cell, Engel couldn’t hide from his decision to get high rather than spend time with his daughter. She was only 4, crying on the phone and wondering why he couldn’t see her. “All the weight of the guilt and shame shattered my heart,” Engel recalls. “I slammed the phone down and ran back. I didn’t want anyone to see me crying. I cried out to God, ‘Kill me or change me. Please help me.’ God answered the cry, but it wasn’t a miraculous change.” Engel had been in and out of prison since 1973, but this time, no attorney from the ma- fia was waiting for him. “I was hoping that they would have one,” he says. “I might have changed my mind. … I felt like they didn’t care about me. I realized it was up to me and that Jesus loved me. That’s how my life started changing.” Engel called his mother from Rikers and learned that an FBI agent had been hassling her for information about the cigarette case. You still got his card? Goodbye, Engel. Hello, Borelli. A lone in a hotel room in San Antonio, Engel struggled with his decision to enter WITSEC. He thought he’d be able to build a life with his daughter but couldn’t bring her with him into the pro- gram since he wasn’t married to her mother and had abandoned her. Robert Engel was reborn as Robert Borelli. It wouldn’t be his last rebirth. U.S. marshals paid for Borelli’s motel room in advance for a month, giving him a $40 per diem but expecting him to find a job. He received a new Social Security num- ber but had no work history before 1999, so people were leery about hiring him. The grocery chain HEB didn’t seem to mind and hired him as a night stocker, Borelli says. He only lasted a couple of weeks. Borelli’s mother died from lung cancer in early April 1999 while he was transitioning to witness protection after his 24-month prison sentence for the racketeering case. He found out three days after her funeral. His last memory of his mother is looking at her through a plexiglass window in ’97 at the Indian River County Jail in Florida, where he was held as a federal witness. “She never agreed with what I was doing. ‘These guys did so much for you. Why would you do that?’” he recalls her saying. “I explained it to her, and she said, ‘You just need to do what’s best for you.’” Back home in the neighborhood, his fam- ily distanced themselves from him. “In the neighborhood, I’m considered a rat and a stool pigeon,” he says. He says his daughter’s mother worried for their daughter’s safety and cut off all contact with him. Borelli didn’t have to testify against his old crew. Corozzo, Ruggiano and the others took plea deals in August ’97 for one count of racketeering. They received fewer than seven years in prison. Rebuilding his life didn’t take long. He met someone at a pizza parlor in San Anto- nio. He’d been sitting alone, and a local Real- tor’s family invited him to their table. He followed them to church, where the Realtor, Danny Thompson, served as the pastor. He soon found himself attending Thompson’s church and visiting two nursing homes weekly to share his testimony of overcoming addiction. At the real estate office, Thompson em- ployed Borelli as a buyer’s agent, which re- quired him to read a script to sell someone a home. The marshals helped him with an apartment and a real estate license. “Soon, I hear him on the phone, ‘What makes you think you can buy a house?’” recalls Thomp- son, doing his best Michael Corleone im- pression. Like the mafia, witness protection had rules. One was, “Never discuss the pro- gram.” Borelli violated this rule in the early 2000s when he revealed the truth to Thompson. “Nobody was upset, and never afraid,” says Thompson, who wondered why Borelli couldn’t return to New York. “He is a sweet guy. He is humble and kind of beaten down because he couldn’t talk to his daughter. It was fairly obvious something was going on. I didn’t bring it up. I figured he would.” Borelli then broke WITSEC’s “danger zone” rule, which for him meant no contact with the old neighborhood. He married someone from there in the early 2000s. A friend back home introduced them. They spoke on the phone for several months. She flew to San Antonio and never left the area. Then, Borelli’s sister called to share a dis- cussion with another sister who Borelli says “might have been dating one of the brothers of the guy that I had to testify against.” She wondered what he was doing because ev- erybody from the old neighborhood knew where he lived. It also didn’t help that his face was out there as a real estate agent. Borelli called to inform the marshals in 2001. “The government threw me out of the Witness Protection Program,” he says. Taking Flight B orelli fled with his wife to Utah, where they stayed with a friend for a few months. Shortly before he fled, Borelli decided to testify against Anthony “Tony Pep” Trenta- costa for the government despite being thrown out of the WITSEC program. Trenta- costa had taken over as capo after Fat Andy’s death from heart failure in March 1999. His reign only lasted a year. He faced federal rack- eteering charges for running a crew that committed bank fraud and extortion and strangled a 22-year-old stripper at a motel in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida. Borelli’s testimony placed Trentacosta at a 1995 meeting in Florida with Corozzo, who was acting as Fat Andy’s stand-in, to re- cruit someone from Fat Andy’s crew. Fat Andy was in prison on a racketeering charge but still called the shots. They met at a res- taurant, where the decision was made not to allow the recruitment. “It was tough,” says Borelli of testifying against Trentacosta. “I was saved and be- lieved I was doing the right thing, according to God.” Hiding out in Utah was also tough. He prayed and consulted with his friend. Borelli felt called to the ministry and ap- plied to Christ For The Nations. In 2002, he and his wife moved to the Morning Star dormitory in Dallas. He found a valet job downtown, and she worked as a recep- tionist. “I truly believe I was running from my- self and believe God was trying to get my at- tention for the longest time,” Borelli says. After graduating in 2004, Borelli received a scholarship to attend Criswell College, a private Christian school in Dallas, but he only lasted a year. “The government kept pulling me out of classes,” Borelli says. “I couldn’t do all the classes, so I had to drop out of some of the classes. And then my English teacher couldn’t deal with me. If I raised my hand, she was like, ‘Oh no.’ She hated my language. She hated the way I talked. Yeah, so she gave me a hard time.” Going Public B orelli believed he was doing the right thing, sitting across from Pat Robert- son, the 84-year-old face of The 700 Club, to share his story and promote The Witness: A Tale of the Life and Death of a Mafia Madman, a 2014 self-published novel based on his life. (Borelli had ap- peared on The 700 Club in 2011.) “There are a lot of criminal organiza- tions,” Robertson told the audience. “We call them the mob. The one that was most familiar was the Italian-Sicilian mob, later called the mafia. There are others besides that. Most of our exposure to these mob in- fluences comes from movies like Goodfellas or TV shows like The Sopranos, but Robert Engel actually lived the life of a so-called wise guy, and he survived to tell about it.” “I was not a wise guy,” Borelli clarified. “I was an associate. A wise guy would be some- body who was straightened out. A made man, someone who is an official member of organized crime.” Borelli seemed nervous as he broke the first rule of the mafia, though he kept secret what needed to remain secret. “One of the things I was always told was ‘Never ask questions. If we tell you to do something, you just do it. You don’t need to know why you’re doing it.’” Mike Brooks Anthony Ruggiano Jr. Mike Brooks Robert Borelli Witness from p10
