Mobster Bragged of Dangling Mom-in-Law Off the Roof

There are thousands of pages to wade through, but so far the catch of the day in the 127-defendant Mobapalooza takedown by the feds is a caught-on-tape conversation in which a mobster describes how he took care of a major menace: his mother-in-law.

Peter Pace Jr., a Genovese crime family associate with a 30-year-long rap sheet, was captured on tape in a January 21, 2008 rap describing how he handled things:

"I tried to throw her off the roof on Viewmont Avenue back in 1988. She was a fucking junkie, right? So now...she's fucking telling everybody that I'm gonna come rob everybody, set me up with the neighborhood, right? So I brought her up to the fucking roof, about six stories, it was fucking, I hung her off the fucking side of the roof."

Pace's mother-in-law rant is cited by Brooklyn federal prosecutors as part of their bid to have Pace held in detention pending trial as an example of his tendency towards violence. Another taped snippet has Pace vowing, "I would have fucking been there last week cracking this guy in the fucking head. I swear to God."

Pace, 49, apparently knows how to do things like this. He was convicted of multiple assaults and intent to cause serious injury with a weapon in 1991 in Westchester County and sentenced to a year in prison. He's now charged with helping a trio of Genovese family allies -- including a retired NYPD officer -- to extort a pair of unnamed construction contractors and is looking at up to 20 years in the can if convicted.

(I would've held this back for next week's big next-to-last column on Why the Mob Still Matters, but given the clusterfuck of media in attendance at today's Eric Holder presser, and ever-escalating pressure of bloggers nibbling away at the good stuff, I decided Voice readers need to know now.)