FBI digging again at E. Farmingdale mob burial site

FBI agents armed with a backhoe and a front loader cut a wide trench alongside a 150-yard-long stretch of railroad tracks in an industrial section of East Farmingdale Monday, as they resumed a search for the bodies of two victims of mob hits supposedly buried in a makeshift organized-crime cemetery.

No bodies turned up during yesterday's digging from 8 a.m. until dusk, according to FBI spokesman James Margolin.

"We expect to find victims" of the mob, said Dennis Bolles, head of organized crime squads for the FBI in New York.

Bolles said that the digging of the four-foot-wide by six-foot-deep trench was going more quickly than expected.

The excavation was the FBI's first day of work at the site since the fall, when agents acted on a tip from an informant that three bodies had been buried in the area by killers from the Colombo family.

The agents then found the remains ofWilliam Cutolo, the former underboss of the Colombo family. Cutolo's body had a bullet hole in the head.

An informant told the FBI the Colombos used the area in the 1990s to dispose of bodies, and the informant pointed out the approximate site of the burials, according to sources.

Cutolo was buried in the area in 1999, after he was murdered by rivals for the leadership of the Colombo family, according to federal officials. The two other bodies buried in the area, according to the informant, were that of Ralph Greaves, who was killed in 1995 after he was suspected of becoming an informant, and Carmine Gargano, a college student who was killed in a revenge plot against a relative.

Margolin said that the excavation would continue Tuesday.