BUFFALO, N.Y. — The ex-wife of Pharaoh's strip club owner Peter Gerace testified on Wednesday at his ongoing drug and sex trafficking trial.
Katrina Nigro said drug use and prostitution were pervasive inside the club during the seven years she worked there, selling lingerie and keeping the books.
She also dropped a few names while on the stand.
Gerace is accused of operating Pharaoh's as a drug-involved-premises and is alleged by the government to have plied dancers with narcotics and then using their addictions to coerce them into sex acts with friends and high paying customers.
In correspondences to 2 On Your Side Gerace has described Nigro as a bitter ex spouse who will say anything to make him look bad.
In late 2019, just days after the raid at Pharaoh's which ultimately led to her ex-husband's indictment, Nigro contacted the FBI and started talking.
In the separate trail of co-defendant Joseph Bongiovanni Nigro testified that Gerace had threatened to "cut off her toes and fingers."
By that time she and Gerace's acrimonious marriage had ended, according to Nigro, who said the union was born of a "sham" ceremony performed without witnesses by the late New York State Supreme Justice John Michalski who she she says was a close friend of Gerace and frequent visitor to the club.
She testified Michalski, who stepped in front of a train shortly after Gerace was arrested and who then killed himself just after his home was raided by the FBI, was among those who would partake in private parties in a room on the second floor of the club with dancers who would engage in sex in exchange for drugs.
"Throughout your time working there, did you form an opinion that sex acts went on upstairs and in the V.I.P areas of the club?" Nigro was asked by Assistant US Attorney Joseph Tripi.
"It 100 percent went on," she replied.
Nigro, whose testimony will resume next week, also told of an occasion where Gerace paid an attorney he had hired to represent her in a DWI case with cocaine and the sexual services of a drug addicted dancer.
"It all worked together hand-in-hand," she said of the nexus between drugs and sex involving the dancers. "Most had to be impaired just to do their jobs."
Nigro also claimed to have witnessed eight dancers overdose inside the club, and said she saved two of them by administering Narcan.
Nigro also testified that several local politicians were involved in sex and drug activities upstairs at Pharaoh's but wasn't asked to name them, and that she could remember at least three Buffalo Sabres who did so as well. Here again, however, she was not asked to provide their names while on the stand.
One name she did mention, however, was actor Lillo Brancato, who starred as Robert De Niro's son in the movie "A Bronx Tale," and later had a role on the HBO TV series "The Sopranos" before his acting career was derailed by his involvement in drugs and a botched burglary in which a person was killed.
Nigro said Brancato was a visitor to one of the upstairs sex and drug parties sometime around 2014 after he had been released from prison.