Another member of five MTA workers recently busted in an alleged overtime scam has family ties to the mob, The Post has learned.
Joseph Balestra Jr. — who was charged by the feds last week with billing for 3,000 hours of overtime in 2018 — is the son of a convicted weapons dealer to four New York City crime families, his lawyer confirmed.
Joseph Balestra Sr. served prison time in the 1990s for his role supplying sawed-off shotguns, brass knuckles, submachine guns and pistols to mobsters involved in narcotics trafficking, counterfeiting, truck hijacking and armed robbery, according to news accounts and court records. He died in 2006.
The Post reported last week that Joseph Balestra Jr.’s co-defendant, Frank Pizzonia, 53, is also the son of a mobster, Dominick “Skinny Dom” Pizzonia.
Spokespeople for the MTA Inspector General and federal prosecutors declined to comment when asked whether there is a Mafia connection to the overtime scam.
But a lawyer for Balestra said “100 percent, no,” when asked if he or the alleged overtime scheme was connected to the mob.
“He met his father less than 10 times in his life,” said Balestra’s lawyer, John LoTurco.
“His stepfather worked for the Long Island Railroad; that’s how he got connected to the Long Island Railroad,” the lawyer said. “He hopes that you don’t attribute the sins of a father that he never really knew on him.
“This father never went to his wedding. Doesn’t know his children. He never really considered him his real father,” LoTurco said, adding that his client “vehemently denies the charges.”
Joseph Sr. served at least two prison stints in the 1990s, court records show, including a two-year term that ended in 2000.
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn alleged that on one occasion in 1994, Joseph Sr., then 56 and a retired truck driver, negotiated a $14,000, 17-gun deal with two New York gangsters at a hotel in Columbus, Ohio, where he lived at the time.
One of the buyers was Lucchese associate Gioacchino “Jack Five-Hands” Cinquemani, a lieutenant in the “gang operating out of Queens,* the feds said at the time. Balestra was Cinquemani’s “principal out-of-state firearms supplier,” the feds alleged in a complaint.
The elder Pizzonia is a reputed Gambino crime family captain who was convicted in 2007 for plotting the murders of Bonnie-and-Clyde couple Thomas and Rosemarie Uva for robbing his social club, Cafe Liberty in Ozone Park.
“Fuhgeddaboudit!” the older man told a Post reporter when asked about his son’s travails last week.
The younger Balestra, Pizzonia and three other Long Island Rail Road workers were charged with scheming with each other to pocket massive amounts of overtime.
Joseph Jr. earned $348,000 from the LIRR in 2018, including $241,000 in overtime — the equivalent of eight hours of extra pay per weekday, prosecutors said.
Investigators used cell phone data to uncover his alleged true whereabouts while he was collecting OT — 40 miles away from work in and around his home in Suffolk County.
