Proud Boys member ‘Spaz’ who lit up cigar for a ‘victory smoke’ after breaking into Capitol with a riot shield is jailed for 10 years

A Proud Boys member who lit up a cigar for a ‘victory smoke’ after breaking into the Capitol with a riot shield has been jailed for 10 years. 

Dominic Pezzola’s sentence on Friday is the third to have been handed to members of the far-right group this week. 

Their case is one of the most serious brought in the unprecedented attack. Pezzola, of Rochester who owned a business called ‘D Pezzola Flooring’, was the only one of the five Proud Boys not to be convicted of seditious conspiracy. 

The group’s leader, Enrique Tarrio, as well as Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs and Zachary Rehl, were found guilty of seditious conspiracy over the attack. 

Pezzola, known as ‘Spaz’, was convicted of a raft of charges, including assaulting or resisting a police officer, robbery of a police shield, destruction of government property and obstructing an official proceeding for his part in the January 6, 2021, riot.

He was seen on video using a police shield to break a window which triggered a wave of the MAGA mob to storm the building. He was one of the first rioters to enter the Capitol. 

‘The reality is you were the one who did it,’ US District Judge Timothy Kelly said during Friday’s hearing. 

‘You were the one who smashed that window in and let people begin to stream into the Capitol building and threaten the lives of our lawmakers. It is not something I would have ever dreamed I’d see in our country.

‘You were really, in some ways, the tip of the spear.’ 

Just minutes after Judge Kelly told Pezzola he hoped he’d turned a new corner and left the room, Pezzola shouted ‘Trump won’, while raising his fist in the air.  

Videos show Pezzola, a Marine Corps veteran, using a riot shield to break windows and enter the capitol. 

‘Victory smoke in the Capitol, boys. This is f**king awesome. I knew we could take this motherf**ker over [if we] just tried hard enough,’ Pezzola said, according to a criminal complaint.  

The witness also said that Pezzola ‘bragged about breaking the windows to the Capitol and entering the building.’

A witness told the FBI that Pezzola talked about killing Vice President Mike Pence ‘if given the chance.’ 

Pezzola was also pictured wearing the Proud Boys logo at a MAGA rally on December 12 in Washington, D.C. which resulted in four stabbings. 

The rioters that stormed the U.S. Capitol were just 100 feet from the officer where Pence and his family were hiding. 

It took 14 minutes to evacuate Pence from the Senate Chamber after the MAGA mob first broke into the building, video footage showed. 

Secret Service agents eventually managed to convince the VP to leave and rushed him and his family into an office before they were taken to a second secure location.

Less than 60 seconds after Pence was taken to his hideaway, a violent crowd followed a Capitol officer up a flight of stairs – just 33 yards from the office but away from the chamber where many lawmakers still remained. 

Prosecutors say the groups were intent on keeping Democrat Joe Biden out of the White House at all costs. 

Just yesterday, his fellow Proud Boys group member sobbed as he was sentenced to 17 years in prison for his role in the attack. 

Biggs, of Ormond Beach, Florida, was a self-described Proud Boys organizer, but said he is ‘not a violent person and I proved that’ and was ‘seduced by the crowd.’ 

Waring an orange prison jumpsuit, he pleaded with the judge, saying he wanted to take his daughter to school and be there for his sick mother.

Another key figure in the attack, Zachary Rehl, was sentenced to 15 years.