Former Local Coach Jailed 50 Years for Sexually Assaulting Girls
A former local girls’ basketball coach was sentenced last week to 50 years prison for sexually assaulting seven girls in his Cortlandt home.
A year ago, Richard Dinizo, 60, who coached 12 and 13-year-old girls in the Westchester Basketball Association for about 20 years, was sentenced to 25 years in state prison after pleading guilty to three counts of predatory sexual assault against a child—offenses that occurred in his Fowler Avenue home between March 1, 2008 and July 31, 2010.
“This case underscores the urgent need for law enforcement to continue its efforts to protect children from those who prey on them,” said Preet Bharara, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. “Today’s 50-year sentence is a measure of how reprehensible is the conduct of those who will sexually exploit children. We will use every tool available to law enforcement to investigate, prosecute and punish those who sexually abuse children.”
According to Bharara, in March 2013 a witness provided a camera memory card to law enforcement that Dinizo discarded in about August 2012. The memory card contained a series of videos made in 2009 and 2010 depicting Dinizo and a girl under the age of 11 engaging in a sexually explicit activity. Bharara said Dinizo used trickery and deceit in order to manipulate the victim into engaging in the sexual activity.
When he was sentenced last year, the Westchester District Attorney’s Office said two of Dinizo’s victims were seven years old and one victim was 10 at the time the crimes occurred. With each of the victims, Dinizo tricked the young girls, who were not players on any of his teams, into playing a tasting game that involved the girls performing acts of oral sex. Each victim wore a mask covering their eyes that kept them unaware of the defendant’s deviant sexual conduct.
During the investigation by federal law enforcement, seven victims, all under the age of 11, were identified. In many instances, Dinizo recorded the sexual abuse using multiple cameras simultaneously. The different cameras captured the abuse from different vantage points.
Dinizo, who in addition to coaching in the Westchester Basketball Association coached girls’ basketball at the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry for a year in 2000 and Transfiguration School in Tarrytown, transported his homemade videos to recipients outside New York. His video files have been recovered in numerous law enforcement investigations throughout the country and internationally.
Rick has more than 40 years’ experience covering local news in Westchester and Putnam counties, running the gamut from politics and crime to sports and human interest. He has been an editor at Examiner Media since 2012. Read more from Rick’s editor-author bio here. Read Rick’s work here: https://www.theexaminernews.com/author/pezzullo_rick-writer/
