The Boston lawyer for North End mobster Enrico Ponzo claims the government has evidence that the cache of guns and rounds of ammunition seized from Ponzo’s Idaho home really belong to Ponzo’s former girlfriend.
And now defense attorney David Duncan wants a U.S. District Court judge to force the government to make that evidence public.
“If the government is in possession of statements that Ms. Pace made when interviewed in which she claimed sole ownership of and access to the firearms,” Duncan’s motion states, “such evidence would be powerfully exculpatory on the question of the defendant’s dangerousness.”
Ponzo, now behind bars at MCI-Cedar Junction, is facing racketeering and attempted murder charges. The U.S. Attorney’s office has said Ponzo was involved in the New England La Cosa Nostra in the late 1980s. He is charged with the 1989 attempted murder of Patriarca Crime Family Mafia boss Francis “Cadillac Frank” Salemme.
Ponzo fled Massachusetts in 1994. The U.S. Marshals caught up with him in February, in Idaho, masquerading as stay-at-home dad Jeffrey “Jay” Shaw.
Federal FBI agents hauled 34 guns, and “hundreds of thousands of rounds” of ammo from the home he once shared with Pace and their two kids. Duncan claims Ponzo posed no danger and simply “lived a peaceful life in Idaho, focused on his responsibilities as a loving and engaged father
