For Former Marine Who Called ‘Death’ His Job, an Unsurprising Outcome

Ex-Marine Who Called ‘Death’ His Job Gets Life in Staten Island Killing - NYTimes.com

For Former Marine Who Called ‘Death’ His Job, an Unsurprising Outcome

By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

The trial wove together the lurid details of a savage mob murder, the victim’s clumsy dismemberment in a supposedly haunted Victorian mansion and an improbable organized crime associate whose MySpace page listed his occupation as “death.”

The ultimate outcome then, on Friday, was perhaps unsurprising: A federal judge sentenced the trial’s sole defendant, a former Marine named Joseph Young, to life in prison for the murder, a messy affair that began with a botched stabbing and ended with the victim drowned in a decorative pond outside the secluded Staten Island manse.

Mr. Young, 30, who by his own admission committed other crimes as part of a Bonanno family crew, was something of a rarity in the world of organized crime, a black man enmeshed in an enterprise that is seldom recognized for its commitment to diversity.

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