At NYC mob patricide trial, suspect’s wife testifies husband was ‘shooken up’ by dad Sally Daz’s murder at McDonald’s drive thru

Bronx mobster Sally Daz’s son appeared stunned and grieved when he got news that his father had been shot dead in a McDonald’s drive-thru, his wife said Wednesday — a killing the feds say the vengeful son had set up.

Anthony Zottola, 44, was celebrating his own son’s 11th birthday on Oct. 4, 2018, when he got the call that something happened to his father, recalled his wife, Heidi Zottola, on the witness stand in her husband’s Brooklyn Federal Court murder-for-hire trial.

She described her husband as “shooken up.”

After Zottola learned his father, Sylvester “Sally Daz” Zottola, 71, was dead at the Bronx McDonald’s drive-thru, he reacted with grief, his wife said.

“I just hugged him, and I said I was so sorry,” said Heidi Zottola. “And then we both started crying.”

Heidi Zottola tried to depict her husband as a dedicated father to their three young children, and as a dutiful son who called his dad every morning, “so that the kids would talk to their Pop Pop every morning before school.”

Federal prosecutors have a different picture in mind — they accuse Anthony Zottola of paying a Bloods gang leader to wage a yearlong murder-for-hire plot so he could take over his father’s multimillion-dollar real estate business.

They accuse the younger Zottola of ordering his father’s death and the near-murder of his older brother, Salvatore Zottola, in a July shooting.

Sally Daz was the object of several murder attempts in the year before he was finally killed, and Heidi Zottola said her husband reacted with “shock” and “panic” after each one.

She also sought to take the sting out of a text message Zottola sent the day of the murder to Bloods leader Bushawn Shelton, who prosecutors say organized the killing for $200,000.

“It’s my lil man bday. I am taking him to his favorite place McDonalds (then) a movie. Lol. Like I eat that stuff. Thank you for being a great friend my man,” the text message reads.

Prosecutors suggested that the text message was a sick joke, but Zottola’s wife said Wednesday that the text referred to the couple’s 11-year-old son and his regular birthday routine — McDonald’s, which he loves, and a movie.

During cross-examination, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kayla Bensing suggested that Heidi Zottola knew to say her son loved McDonald’s because she has been sitting in the courtroom, watching the trial.

Bensing also got her to admit that her husband had talked about his displeasure with the way Sally Daz was running the real estate business, and established that he spoke to her daily on the same phone that he used to text Shelton.

Closing arguments in the trial will begin Thursday.