mobster pleaded guilty yesterday to a bizarre scheme to defraud a former Long Island congressman out of $18,500 in exchange for bogus information about Vietnam POWs.
Charles Guiga, 38, admitted that within the last year he’d sent letters supposedly written by a Russian mobster and giving the locations of 75 prisoners of war supposedly being held in the former Soviet republic of Belarus.
But the letters to one-term GOP Rep. John LeBoutillier were in actuality the scribblings of imprisoned Colombo crime-family captain Frank “Frankie Blue Eyes” Sparaco.
Sparaco, 54, who is serving a 24-year federal sentence, once did time with Russian mobster Vyacheslav Ivankov and claimed to have a line into Eastern European gangs. “Frank Sparaco sent me handwritten letters from prison and asked me to correct his spelling, type the letters and send them . . . to ‘John the Congressman,’ ” Guiga told Brooklyn federal Judge Carol Amon in pleading guilty to mail fraud.
LeBoutillier, 56, who held office from 1980 to 1982, served on a special congressional committee on Vietnam War MIA/POWs. He believes that some are still being held, and he remains committed to freeing them.
And he says he still feels that Sparaco’s letters could lead somewhere.
“I’ve gotten some good information from these guys,” he said
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