Today the Justice Department announced that the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York revoked the naturalized U.S. citizenship of Michael Pizzuti, a native of Italy, after finding that he had illegally procured his citizenship. The court determined that Pizzuti had committed crimes involving moral turpitude and unlawful acts and had given false testimony about those crimes during his naturalization proceedings, all of which prevented him from establishing the good moral character necessary to naturalize. The court additionally found that Pizzuti obtained his naturalization through fraudulent concealment and willful misrepresentations of material fact relating to his crimes.
From July 1998 through August 2000, Pizzuti dealt in counterfeit money, trafficked contraband cigarettes, and conspired to steal a truck and commit mail fraud. He was arrested and indicted for those crimes on December 5, 2001, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment. Then, between May 2001 and September 30, 2001, Pizzuti violently extorted his financial advisor after discovering that the advisor was running a Ponzi scheme with Pizzuti’s money. Pizzuti broke into his house, held him at gunpoint, ordered him to maintain the Ponzi scheme until he had enough money to pay back Pizzuti’s investment, and then destroyed computer records to hide his crimes. For that violent extortion and obstruction of justice, Pizzuti was convicted in 2005 (after he naturalized) and sentenced to 17½ years in prison.
“Violent criminals like this have no place in our society, and when they lie about those crimes to obtain U.S. citizenship, this Administration will stop at nothing to correct that travesty,” said Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division.
But on May 2, 2002 — less than five months after his first indictment and arrest — Pizzuti appeared at his naturalization interview and falsely testified, under oath, that he had never been arrested and had never committed a crime for which he had not been arrested. Based on that false testimony, Pizzuti naturalized unlawfully on July 24, 2002.
Pizzuti’s naturalization revocation case was investigated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations and the ICE Office of the Principle Legal Advisor. The cases were civilly prosecuted jointly by the Civil Division’s Office of Immigration Litigation, Affirmative Litigation Unit and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Pizzuti’s underlying criminal cases were prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
