Joey Standup? Not For Family

Your average mobster will tell you that Joseph Cassese is a standup guy. His daughter, however, isn't so sure.

Josephine and Tina Torlone aren't so sure about brother Samuel, either, but more about that later.

Most wiseguys know how Cassese, a Luchese associate, tried to take the blame when a hit man was about to be arrested on gun and drug rap in front of Cassese's house.

But when his daughter Lucinda recently called him for help after being arrested for possession of a stolen car, he left her to fend for herself.

Back in 1981, Cassese begged cops to arrest him instead of Luchese family assassin Anthony Senter.

Of course, Lucinda wasn't quite as fearsome as Senter, who was ultimately convicted of 10 murders and is suspected of taking part in many more. Many of his victims were dismembered and deposited in the Fountain Ave. dump in Brooklyn.

Back then Cassese felt responsible for Senter's troubles with the law. Cassese had made a late-night phone call to Senter asking for help in dispersing a group of rowdy teenagers who were urinating in his front yard.

Senter raced over so fast that two cops stopped him for speeding and found a gun on the front seat of car and cocaine in a small pouch. At that point, Cassese claimed the gun and coke were his and begged cops to arrest him.

"It's my gun, it's my pouch! Arrest me! I'll even pay you to arrest me," Cassese screamed.

Because he was making such a fuss, the cops, Paul Wuerth and Michael Signorelli, arrested him, too. A judge threw out the charges against Cassese but Senter ended up serving an annoying year in prison.

Last year, Lucinda, 29, got jammed up as auto crime division cops and detectives ended an undercover probe of a chop shop operation that disassembled nearly $1 million in late model cars.

"We were terminating the wire and we tried to swoop down and scoop up as many stolen cars as we could," said Sgt. Edward Langford. "We heard she was driving a tag job, a stolen 1985 Oldsmobile Cutlass, so we stopped her near her home in Canarsie and placed her under arrest."

More interested in nailing her father, cops allowed her to make a phone call to see whether she could explain why she was driving a car that had been stolen seven months earlier and re-registered.

"She called her father, but he apparantly said, 'No way.' So we booked her on criminal possession of stolen property," said Langford. "Joey wasn't a standup guy."

Josephine and Tina Torlone, whose brother Samuel was a target of the chop shop investigation, were rounded up the same day as Lucinda Cassese.

Josephine, 25, was spotted driving a stolen 1987 Oldsmobile station wagon and followed home. Minutes later, she came out of her house and moved a stolen 1990 BMW from her driveway and was arrested for possessing two stolen cars, Langford said.

No sooner had police brought Josephine to the 69th Precinct when Tina, 20, drove up in a stolen 1988 Buick Century to find out what happened to her sister.

Like Cassese, Torlone didn't do right by his sisters.

Last week, the Brooklyn district attorney's office filed state racketeering charges against Torlone and three others, and related grand larceny charges against five other men.

The charges against the women were dropped early on because prosecutors did not want to disclose details about the probe before the indictment was filed.

Cassese, who beat the rap on the 1981 gun case because he was really innocent, skated this time because of a lack of evidence, said Detective Michael Grazoise.