On Friday, Ronald Galati Sr., (pictured below) formerly of the 2500 block of South Garnet Street, stood before Common Pleas Court Judge Daniel Anders and learned his fate for having pleaded no contest three months earlier to charges of attempted murder and insurance fraud. The 66-year-old will serve 14 years and eight months to 29 years and four months for the matters that date back to November 2013 and May ’14, respectively.
In the first case, which resulted in a March ’15 conviction through a Camden-situated federal court, the ex-Girard Estate resident hired three men to kill his daughter’s then-boyfriend, Andrew Tuono, in Atlantic City. They shot him three times, but he survived. The other action against Galati Sr. involved his son, Ronald Jr., with the two, who had been operating American Collision & Auto Center at 1930 S. 20th St., crafting false stories of crashes to enhance insurance claims that swelled to millions of dollars.
Galati Sr. initially went to jail in Dec. ’13 in a murder-for-hire plot to rid him of a rival shop owner and the latter’s son two months earlier because he learned that the other proprietor, Joseph Rao Sr., had testified before a grand jury conducting an investigation against him. For his involvement in the fraud case, Galati Jr., 39, will serve nine to 23 months of house arrest, with 10 years of concurrent probation. His father will need to part with $1.8 million in restitution for the 18 bilked insurance companies, and the younger Galati will have to pay another entity $250,000.
