Carmine Agnello, the grandson of notorious mob boss John Gotti, has been sentenced to 15 months in prison for his role in a Covid-19 relief funds scam, in which he fraudulently obtained $1.1 million from the US government's Small Business Administration and invested a significant portion of the proceeds in cryptocurrency. According to the Department of Justice, Agnello submitted false information to secure multiple disaster relief loans, claiming the funds were for his autoparts and recycling business in Queens. Instead, he diverted approximately $420,000 to a cryptocurrency business. The US Attorney's Eastern District of New York office stated that Agnello's actions were a shameful exploitation of government and taxpayer funds during the pandemic.
Agnello is not the only individual to have been caught defrauding the government's Covid relief fund, with statistics from the US Government Accountability Office suggesting that up to 15% of the total funds were lost to scams, amounting to roughly $135 billion. Agnello's grandfather, John Gotti, was a powerful figure in organized crime, earning an estimated $500 million annually from various illicit ventures before being convicted and sentenced to federal prison, where he died of cancer in 1992.