When a masked person threatened millionaire real estate magnate Sylvester Zottola at gunpoint in November 2017, he survived.
When three men broke into his residence almost a month later, stabbed him multiple times and slashed his throat, Zottola clung to life but made it.
The attacks didn’t end. In October 2018, Zottola was fatally shot at a McDonald’s drive-through in the Bronx while waiting for his cup of coffee.
Zottola, who was 71, owned multifamily rental properties valued at tens of millions of dollars at the time of his death.
The man behind the violent string of attacks overseen by a Bloods gang member was close to home: His son Anthony Zottola Sr., 44, who helped him manage his business.
On Wednesday — more than five years after the first assault against his father — a federal jury convicted Anthony Zottola Sr. of plotting the series of attacks that ultimately led to his father’s death, all in hope of profiting from the properties the eldest Zottola left behind.
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Following the six-week trial, the jury also convicted Himen Ross, his accomplice, of Sylvester Zottola’s murder-for-hire.
Both men face mandatory life sentences.
“Over the course of more than a year, the elderly victim, Sylvester Zottola, was stalked, beaten, and stabbed, never knowing who orchestrated the attacks,” Breon Peace, the U. S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said Wednesday. “It was his own son, who was so determined to control the family’s lucrative real estate business that he hired a gang of hit men to murder his father.”
Anthony Zottola Sr. also hired hit men to unsuccessfully kill his brother Salvatore Zottola, prosecutors say. Salvatore Zottola suffered gunshot wounds to his head, chest and hand when a gunman opened fire in front of his house on July 2018, court records state.
Ross, 36 — hired by Bloods gang member Bushawn Shelton — learned about the eldest Zottola’s whereabouts on Oct. 4, 2018, using a tracking device placed in his car. When Ross found him at the drive-through that day, he fatally shot Sylvester Zottola while he waited for his to-go coffee inside his car. Shelton, 38, pleaded guilty in August 2022 to murder-for-hire conspiracy and murder-for-hire. He is awaiting sentencing.
Moments after Sylvester Zottola was killed, Ross and Shelton texted each other. Then Shelton texted Anthony Zottola Sr. to let him know the job he’d hired him to do had been completed.
“Can we party today or tomorrow?” Shelton texted Anthony Zottola Sr.
“I have the cases of water in a day or so,” he texted back, referring to the $200,000 payout for the murder-for-hire.
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