Alleged Detroit mob associate Gino Accetola was slapped with a seven-year state prison term this week after pleading no contest to theft charges related to a credit card scam back in June. The 51-year old Accetola stole almost $150,000 from a local credit-card processing company he employed for his Metro Detroit tanning salon chain, Miami Tan. He did federal prison time for fraud in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Accetola owns five Miami Tan outlets across the Metro Detroit area. The case stems from a request for $200,000 dollars in additional funds from the credit-card processing firm (Interlink Repayment Systems) that he said was to sell a new tanning product. The product had in fact been recalled by its manufacturers and Accetola only repaid $52,000, using the remaining money to go on spending sprees and vacations with his girlfriend.
In an unrelated civil case from 2016, Accetola was found responsible for swindling 11 investors out of $4,000,000 in a construction-company linked Ponzi scheme. He’s been ordered to repay $12,000,000 to his victims, monies that have not yet been handed over according to the victims’ attorney. A chunk of the money pilfered, roughly $1,700,000, was gambled away at the MGM Grand Casino in downtown Detroit.
Throughout his Ponzi scheme, Accetola bragged of his mob ties, going as far as to blame the reason he was withholding profits from investors on orders from his bosses in the mafia. The 11 investors gave him money for bogus general contracting jobs. Back in 2013, he pled guilty in state court to another fraud offense and received a suspended 10-month jail sentence. Per sources, Accetola is connected to the Tocco wing of Detroit’s Tocco-Zerilli crime family.
The post Motor City Justice: Detroit Mafia Figure Smacked With Seven Spot For Credit Card Fraud appeared first on The Gangster Report.