COUNTYWIDE : Rizzitello’s Jury Selection to Start

Jury selection is scheduled to begin today in the second trial connected to the 1987 shooting of Mustang topless bar financier William Carroll.

Michael Anthony Rizzitello, 62, who has a long history of racketeering and fraud convictions, is accused by prosecutors of shooting Carroll three times in the back of the head, leaving him permanently blind. Prosecutors claim Rizzitello wanted to take over control of the Mustang and decided he would have to eliminate Carroll first.

Convicted of attempted murder last month in the Carroll shooting was Joseph Angelo Grosso, 48. Prosecutors claimed Grosso assisted Rizzitello by holding Carroll down when the shots were fired. Grosso testified that Rizzitello was the shooter, but denied any involvement himself.

Carroll, 56, was found in a Costa Mesa parking garage on May 1, 1987. Two of the three bullets remain lodged in his head. For a year and a half Carroll refused to say who shot him, but eventually named Rizzitello and Grosso.

Rizzitello’s trial has been assigned to Superior Court Judge John L. Flynn Jr., the same judge who presided over the Grosso trial.

Separate trials were ordered for the two defendants when Rizzitello’s lawyer, Anthony P. Brooklier, was tied up in a federal court case and Grosso would not agree to a postponement.

Rizzitello was one of five men convicted in 1980 in Los Angeles’ biggest racketeering case in which federal authorities claimed that it was the first time they had been able to bring down the entire hierarchy of an organized crime family. Rizzitello, considered by federal authorities a captain in the Milano crime family, was sentenced to four years in that case.

Rizzitello is being held in Orange County Jail without bail after authorities claimed at an earlier bail hearing that he would be a threat to eliminate either Grosso or Carroll before the first trial.

If convicted in the Carroll shooting, Rizzitello would face an automatic sentence of 26 years to life in prison, the same sentence Grosso received.