The door-to-door salesman on trial in the murders of three Middle Eastern shopkeepers in Brooklyn testified in his own defense on Tuesday — and insisted he’d been framed for the heinous crimes.
“I was set up,” Salvatore Perrone, 67, told jurors during his baffling testimony in Brooklyn Supreme Court.
The erratic Perrone, who has been prone to courtroom outbursts, claimed he’d been framed by a man named Michael Bila, who he said was an Iranian national who he’d done business with in the past and had given him the black duffel bag that contained the murder weapons — a sawed-off rifle and knife.
“At least that’s what he told me his name is,” Perrone said. “I know for sure that’s not his real name. That’s a fictitious name.”
Investigators found the bag, which prosecutors have dubbed Perrone’s “kill kit,” inside his girlfriend’s apartment.
Perrone admitted that he’d purchased the gun, but suggested that Bila had stolen it in 2010, when he left it alone in his apartment.
“On Sunday, Nov. 18, Michael Bila came over to East 14th Street and gave me the duffel bag, and as we all know there was a rifle in the duffel bag,” he said, claiming he’d never opened it.
Perrone conceded that he’d been caught on camera near the murder scene of Isaac Kadare, toting a black duffel bag. But that bag was filled with clothes he was trying to sell, he insisted.
“I did own that duffel bag,” he said. “Of course I owned that duffel bag … I own maybe four or five duffel bags.”
Perrone testfied that on July 6, the day he allegedly killed his first victim, Bay Ridge store owner Mohammah Gebeli, he was at a dinner party, and nowhere near the murder scene.
“I dealt with him when I had leftovers in my inventory,” he said. “We’d talk and joke. We had a cordial relationship. I did see his son through the years grow up, and on occasion I even met his wife.”