MICHAEL MININNI
Won’t be charged. (James Messerschmidt)
Carmelo Calabro was an ex-boxer and brawny firefighter — but the elderly Brooklyn man managed to keep his hot temper and short fuse under control until his Bravest son died on 9/11.
It was then that Calabro — who was shot dead Tuesday lunging at his despised neighbor while carrying a gun — really started to lose it.
“It changed him a lot. You could see he was a different person,” said neighbor Anthony Roccotagliata, 49. “If you lose your son — and from what I understand he was pretty good guy — you take it hard.”
Another neighbor, John Tag, 56, said Calabro became an ornery crank after the devastating loss.
“9/11 had to have destroyed him. You lose a kid that’s a piece of gold, that’s got to affect you.”
The correction officer who killed Calabro won’t be charged in the man’s death because he acted in self-defense, sources said yesterday.
Michael Mininni was in the middle of a haircut at the local barbershop in Bath Beach when an enraged Calabro burst in, waving an illegal semi-automatic handgun, and yelled, “This is the day you are going to die!”
The two men tussled. At one point Calabro hit Mininni — a Rikers correction officer for more than two years — in the head with his .25-caliber gun.
He bit Mininni in the struggle, before the guard ended up firing his gun several times.
The bullets struck Calabro in the face, neck and torso.
The violent end came after years of bitter quarreling between Calabro and the Mininni family, a feud so epic it led to a whopping 14 harassment complaints filed against each other over the years.
Their feud even got physical.
Calabro pleaded guilty in 2003 to punching Mininni’s father in the face and taking a swing at Mininni’s mother with a snow shovel.
He got conditional release on the fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon charge.
In that instance, the ex-pugilist was mad that his neighbors got snow into his yard while shoveling.
No one in the neighborhood could recall exactly what started the feud, but one thing is clear — it escalated dramatically after the death of Salvatore Calabro on 9/11, according to court records.
All of the complaints against Calabro — including the one that led to his arrest for assault — were lodged after his son’s death.
By all accounts, Salvatore Calabro was an outstanding firefighter, husband and father to two boys, who were 5 and 2 when he died. Known as Sal to his friends, the younger Calabro was on his way to meet a friend at the gym on Sept. 11, 2001, in Staten Island.
Despite being off the clock, he heard about the terror attacks and immediately headed to his firehouse in Red Hook.
A history buff who was known for being extremely patriotic — wearing an American flag patch on his turnout coat — he caught up with six fellow members of Ladder 101.
None of those men were ever seen again and their bodies were never recovered, despite the efforts of his brother Richard Calabro, an NYPD detective who personally searched at Ground Zero.
Those lost men have been dubbed the “seven in heaven” by other members of Ladder 101.
Meanwhile, his father spent the years after his son’s death in hell, sparring with the family next door so badly that he chose to erect — painstakingly and by hand — a 6-foot-high brick wall to divide their property.
He made the wall even though a chain-link fence already separated their land.
The anger that helped him in the boxing ring as a young man was directed at the Mininni family.
In eight complaints to the police, the Mininnis accused their neighbor of everything from smearing cat feces on their car to harassing them.
They also accused him of throwing feces at Stephen Mininni’s car.
Audrey Mininni told cops that she saw a note on Calabro’s back door saying he would kill any person named Mininni that entered his back yard. Calabro also filed six complaints with the police, although he only mentioned Stephen Mininni once by name. He accused him of throwing garbage on his property in 2008. In the other complaints, he accused unknown people of littering his property with dog feces and cigarette butts and vandalizing his car.
Because Calabro’s son Richard Calabro works in the 62nd Precinct in Brooklyn, where the incident occurred, the 61st Precinct is conducting the investigation.
Sources said they are unlikely to convene a grand jury, however, because there is every indication Mininni acted in self-defense.
Additional reporting by Larry Celona and William J. Gorta
