The 86-year-old man who was decapitated by a truck that plowed into him at a Brooklyn crosswalk is a former acting captain for the Genovese crime family, The Post can exclusively reveal.
Anthony Conigliaro — a one-time mafioso known as “Tony Cakes,” “Tony the Dessert Man,” among other dessert-themed sobriquets — died June 12 in an accidental hit by a city Department of Transportation truck, his lawyers and law-enforcement sources said.
“He spent his life looking over his shoulder but he forgot to look both ways before crossing the street,” one police source said.
Before Conigliaro’s gruesome death, he apparently lived a quiet life by himself in a small Bay Ridge apartment building on Dahlgren Place.
A neighbor told The Post that Conigliaro, a dad of two, always looked out for others.
“We miss him. Everybody misses him,” he said.
But the neighbor didn’t know about Conigliaro’s past — which not only included a connection to the mafia, but also a nearly two-decade-old racketeering case.
