Mobster: I must leave prison for kidney

A Gambino crime family captain who is serving a 15-year sentence for murder conspiracy wants to get out early because he is suffering from urinary tract cancer and wants to wait at his Queens home for a kidney transplant.

Dominick "Skinny Dom" Pizzonia, 69, currently serving time in the same North Carolina prison housing Bernard Madoff -- Butner Federal Correctional Complex -- wants to have his sentence changed to home confinement so he can enroll in an organ-transplant program and be monitored in preparation for surgery, he said in papers filed in Brooklyn federal court this month.

He may get his answer Wednesday in a hearing before Judge Jack Weinstein in which Pizzonia will participate by a telephone conference call. Federal prosecutors have asked Weinstein to dismiss the motion.

Pizzonia was convicted in 2006 for plotting the 1992 murders of Rosemarie and Thomas Uva, a couple who angered La Cosa Nostra bosses by robbing mob social clubs across New York City. Pizzonia said in his court filing that he was diagnosed with cancer in late 2010 and had an operation in prison to remove a tumor in his ureter, surgery that also took out his left kidney and a cancerous lymph node. Pizzonia fears that if his remaining kidney gets damaged he will need a transplant to survive.

Since the federal Bureau of Prisons is unable to provide him with an organ transplant, Pizzonia said in papers filed with Weinstein that he should be allowed to serve the rest of his sentence at home until he can get a transplant.

Pizzonia was cleared in his 2007 federal trial of killing Frank "Geekie" Boccia in 1988, despite testimony that Boccia was gunned down at Pizzonia's Queens social club. One witness said Pizzonia loaded the gun used in the shooting.

Relatives of Boccia, none of whom wanted to be identified, are angered that Pizzonia is trying to get out of prison.

"He is a prisoner sentenced to be in jail and in jail he should remain," said one close relative in an email. "To say he shouldn't die in jail due to his cancer and should be released is absurd."