[NYPost] Wow. That got weird, quick!It was La Crossing Nostra.
The 86-year-old man who was decapitated by a truck that plowed into him at a Brooklyn crosswalk is a former acting captain for the Genovese crime family, The Post can exclusively reveal.
Anthony Conigliaro — a one-time mafioso known as "Tony Cakes," "Tony the Dessert Man," among other dessert-themed sobriquets — died June 12 in an accidental hit by a city Department of Transportation truck, his lawyers and law-enforcement sources said.
Grisly footage showed Conigliaro’s head several yards from his body.
"He spent his life looking over his shoulder but he forgot to look both ways before crossing the street," one police source said.
Before Conigliaro’s gruesome death, he apparently lived a quiet life by himself in a small Bay Ridge apartment building on Dahlgren Place.
A neighbor told The Post that Conigliaro, a dad of two, always looked out for others.
"We miss him. Everybody misses him," he said.
But the neighbor didn’t know about Conigliaro’s past — which not only included a connection to the mafia, but also a nearly two-decade-old racketeering case.
Brooklyn federal prosecutors in 2005 accused Conigliaro — who toiled for years in the wholesale cake business, selling sweets across the New York City area and running an Italian ice and gelato stand in Little Italy, according to court documents — of being a soldier in the Genovese crime family.
Conigliaro worked as a loan shark for the Genovese, the feds said in a four-count indictment.
He eventually copped a guilty plea to a racketeering conspiracy charge, for which he received a 13-month sentence, court records state.
Conigliaro also was arrested in 1999 for criminal usury and in 2006 in a grand larceny case, which has since been sealed, sources said.
The Post’s attempts to contact Conigliaro’s family were unsuccessful.
Mathew Mari, a longtime mob lawyer who counted Conigliaro as a friend and client, said the man he knew as "Tony Cheesecake" successfully delved into the dessert business after his time behind bars.
"Later on in life he became known as Tony the Dessert Man," Mari said.
"He was a kind gentle soft spoken very quiet guy. Always trying to help people."
A small memorial for the apparent former goodfella — four bouquets of flowers and two candles — was set up Friday at 92nd Street and Dahlgren Place, where he was fatally struck.
Grisly footage from the crash showed Conigliaro’s head severed several yards from his crumbled body — and a DOT driver, who was behind the wheel of a city truck when the elderly man walked against a traffic light to cross the street, looking teary-eyed and devastated.
"Now we know why that DOT guy was crying... he’s probably asking for witness protection," one source said.