The hitman who sang

Mob informer Luigi Ronsisvalle was like the Forrest Gump of organized crime — in the middle of everything

DURING his two decades as Brooklyn’s top mobbusting homicide prosecutor, Michael Vecchione dealt with all manner of wiseguys, but none was less impressive than Luigi the Zip.

Short, overweight, and speaking in broken English, Sicilian import Luigi Ronsisvalle — dubbed “the human bowling ball” by Vecchione for being as wide as he was tall — embodied his Zip moniker, a slur American gangsters used for their overseas brethren, whom they regarded as backwater yokels. No one, it seemed, took Luigi seriously.

“He was just a schlub,” says Vecchione of the focus of his new book, “Homicide Is My Business” (Camino Books), out now. “He was just a guy who knew how to do what they wanted him to do, which was kill people.”

Vecchione, who penned two previous books involving his career as a crime fighter after he left the Brooklyn DA’s office in 2013, got to know Ronsisvalle in a series of meetings at his cramped office in Downtown Brooklyn in the early 1980s, where they chatted while the turncoat munched on veal parmesan sandwiches and sipped Budweiser from a can. His demeanor might have been underwhelming. But Luigi the

Zip — a heroin trafficker and hitman with 13 confirmed kills who flipped in 1979 — played a role in virtually every big Mafia event of his day, a kind of underworld Forrest Gump.

Ronsisvalle had intel on the French Connection heroin trade, made famous by the hit film starring Gene Hackman, and the Pizza Connection smugglers, which pumped some $1.6 billion worth of heroin into the US between 1975 and 1984, the drugs tucked into dough for pizzerias. He knew key details about the murder of mob boss Carmine Galante, and the schemes of an Italian banker suspected of stealing a fortune from the Vatican.

The mobster regaled the prosecutor with details of his various hits and his own personal code: pay your debts, treat workers with respect, leave the working man alone, and go after only those who deserve it. “A man of honor kills to help people,” he explained to Vecchione.

“He was encouraged to come to Brooklyn from Sicily by Carmine Galante and Joe Bonanno. They needed a hitman and bodyguards,” says Vecchione. “They started to import people like him to come to the United States to be their watchmen and to take care of business if a war broke out. But he was not what they were looking for as far as someone who moved up to become a made man. He was just a zip.”

Ronsisvalle was disillusioned by what he perceived as the mob’s lack of morals. He was outraged by the antics of notorious mobster Michele “The Shark” Sindona, a corrupt Sicilian-born banker, murderer and Gambino associate suspected of defrauding the Vatican Bank of an estimated $100 million to cover his loses when his Franklin National Bank on Long Island went under in 1974. Sindona, desperate to duck jail, asked Ronsisvalle to kill a US federal prosecutor, John Kenny of the Southern District in Manhattan, and a lawyer in Milan — for $100,000. He refused.

Nothing in the American mob business resembled the code of honor back home, he felt. This drove his decision to flip. He was eventually convicted of a 1976 slaying and was sentenced to just five years in jail before being whisked off into federal witness protection. In 1985, he became the star witness at the President’s Commission on Organized Crime under Ronald Reagan. “I grew up in Sicily, since age 10, 11, 12, like a kid, American kid falls in love with baseball, I fell in love with Mafia,” he told rapt panelists.

Vecchione said he was told that Ronsisvalle had commited suicide while in witness protection, but he was unable to confirm this, and never got any details.

“I believe it,” he said. “But I guess it’s possible he’s still alive.”