Orena v. United States

MEMORANDUM and ORDER

WEINSTEIN, Senior District Judge.

In the closing decades of the last century heavily armed mobs of Mafiosi, protected by bullet proof vests and scanners monitoring police radio channels, roamed the streets of New York in their automobiles (bugged by the Federal Bureau of Investigations) shooting down their rivals in crime. One of the more fascinating episodes was the civil war in the Columbo organized crime family.

In the sequelae of that struggle, the two movants, Victor J. Orena and Pasquale Amato, were convicted in the early 1990’s of various crimes, including murder.…