Mustang Club Backer Tells Jury of Shooting That Blinded Him

SANTA ANA â€”  Mustang Club investor C. William Carroll, blinded in a shooting two years ago, used hand motions Monday to describe to jurors in a rare Orange County racketeering trial how both his assailants held him down before firing three bullets into his head.

This morning, Superior Court Judge John L. Flynn Jr. is expected to take jurors to the loading dock of the courthouse in Santa Ana so that Carroll can demonstrate what happened in the same rented Honda in which the shooting occurred.

Carroll, 57, dabbing his watering eyes with a handkerchief, identified Joseph Angelo Grosso, now on trial, as the man who drove him and Los Angeles racketeer Michael Anthony Rizzitello into an empty Costa Mesa parking garage on May 1, 1987. Carroll claims that Grosso then held down his leg while Rizzitello, seated directly behind him in the back seat, grabbed him around the neck and shot him. Rizzitello’s trial is scheduled to follow Grosso’s.

Prosecutors claim that Rizzitello, 62, wanted to take control of the Mustang, a topless bar on Harbor Boulevard in Santa Ana, which has since closed. But Carroll, prosecutors contend, was viewed as uncooperative and had to be eliminated. Grosso, 46, prosecutors say, used his connections to Carroll to help set up the assault.

The Grosso/Rizzitello trials have drawn much interest from law enforcement officials in the region because of Rizzitello’s longtime connections to the leading organized crime family in Los Angeles. Rizzitello has a long history of racketeering and fraud convictions, but he has long been under investigation as a possible top enforcer for the mob family.

Although Monday was the first day of testimony in the prosecution’s case against Grosso, it was Grosso’s attorney, William Yacobozzi Jr., who in opening statements dominated most of the day with bold accusations that at the time of the shooting, Carroll, himself, was involved in everything from drugs to loan sharking to murder.

Carroll is attempting to get back at Grosso, the lawyer contends, because Grosso was an FBI informant and was feeding some of Carroll’s crime admissions to investigators. Part of Yacobozzi’s attack strategy is to convince jurors that Carroll is a suspect in “two to five murders,� including the New Year’s Day, 1987, shooting death of Jimmy Casino, manager of the Mustang bar. Casino, prosecutors claim, had borrowed more than $300,000 from Carroll to open the Mustang in the early 1980s, and the Mustang corporation still owed Carroll $140,000.

“Did you have anything to do with the murder of Jimmy Casino,� Yacobozzi asked Carroll during cross-examination.

Jurors turned their eyes to Carroll for his reaction. Carroll, clutching at his handkerchief, appeared unruffled by the question, and answered slowly: “Absolutely, unequivocally, no.�

Carroll waited 1 1/2 years after the shooting before telling authorities who had wounded him. But Carroll explained Monday that he wanted to wait until after resolution of a fraud case pending against him. He ended up pleading no contest to a misdemeanor in that case and received no time in jail.

“I thought that if I spent even one day in the County Jail, I probably would not come out alive,� he said, explaining that he feared Rizzitello would have him killed in the jail.