Rizzitello Guilty of Murder Attempt : Justice: Reputed Milano crime family under boss will be sentenced on March 16.

Michael Anthony Rizzitello, identified as an under boss in the Milano crime family in Los Angeles, was found guilty of attempted murder today in an extortion-related shooting of the top financial operator of a topless bar.

It was the first conviction for Rizzitello, 62, since his 1980 racketeering conviction with four other Milano family members in Los Angeles. Rizzitello served four years in prison.

Rizzitello faces an automatic sentence of 27 years to life in prison. Superior Court Judge John L. Flynn Jr. set sentencing for March 16.

Rizzitello had been tried in three separate cases since that conviction, and each time was acquitted. Two of them were racketeer-related fraud cases, and the third was conspiracy to murder a government witness.

Rizzitello was awaiting a federal trial on the last of those cases when William Carroll, financier of the Mustang Club on Harbor Boulevard in Santa Ana, was shot three times in the head in an empty parking garage near the Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, just after midnight on May 1, 1987.

Carroll, blinded by the shooting, refused to name his assailants for 18 months. But just 15 minutes after a bank fraud case pending against Carroll was resolved as a misdemeanor conviction with no jail time, he talked to investigators. He named Rizzitello as the triggerman and one of the mobster’s associates, Joseph Angeleno Grosso, 46, as the driver who held him down.

Prosecutors contended that Rizzitello wanted to muscle in on profits at the topless bar, and considered Carroll someone who would not cooperate. Carroll had to be eliminated, prosecutors argued, so Rizzitello could use force to deal with Gene Lesher, the manager and the next in line to control the Mustang’s money.

Carroll was the key witness at both the Grosso and Rizzitello trials. But Lesher was also a critical witness, telling jurors at both trials that he gave in to threatening demands by Rizzitello that he get $5,000 a week in “skim” money from the club.

Grosso was convicted last December after nearly five days of jury deliberations. But Rizzitello’s jurors returned a verdict after just one hour of their second day of deliberations.

“We believed Mr. Carroll’s testimony,” said Beverly J. Meyer of Orange, the jury foreman. “We just did not think he had any reason to lie about who shot him.”

Rizzitello did not testify, but his defense attorney, Anthony P. Brooklier, blamed the shooting on Big George Yudzevich, a club bouncer who prosecutors say accepted the weekly skim money for Rizzitello and who has since been murdered.