On October 10th, 1998, a gangster from northern New Jersey named Joey Massella received a phone call from a mafia bookkeeper called Steve. Steve was in debt to Massella and he told him on the phone that he had $10,000 ready for him. Massella was a man whose life had gone badly off the rails.
He was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt himself and a string of failed gambling businesses lay behind him. He went to the agreed meeting place, but no one was there. He then received another call from the indebted man asking him to meet at a different location. Massella drove to Brooklyn, New York and stopped in the parking lot of the Dyker Beach Golf Course where Steve had said he would meet him.
As Massella sat in his car, a familiar face approached. It was another gangster, Anthony Greco. Greco pulled out a gun and shot Massella dead in the driver’s seat. These men are not just like the characters in The Sopranos. They are the real Sopranos. And this is the intimate story of their rise and their fall.
In the early 1930s, New Jersey was a state divided among numerous organized crime clans. Some local, others from outside. New York crime bosses, Giuseppe Masseria and Gaetano Reina, each maintained their own independent factions within the state. While Abner “Longy” Zwillman, a member of the Jewish mafia and an associate of the New York gangster Meyer Lansky, controlled a share of operations in the New York City area.
The Philadelphia crime family led by Salvatore Sabella also had operations in the southern part of the region. As for the true power brokers of New Jersey itself, the underworld was split into two main factions. The Newark faction controlled by Gaspare Di Amico and the Elizabeth faction controlled by Stefano Badami.
On September 22nd, 1886, Gaspare Di Amico was born into a Sicilian family in Villabate. He and his brother immigrated early to the United States followed later by the rest of their family. After arriving in New Jersey, Di Amico settled in New York where he began his own small smuggling operation in the 1920s which he would later grow into a much larger organization in the 1930s.
Stefano Badami was born in December 1888 in the Corleone district of Palermo, Sicily. He spent much of his life there marrying a woman named Giuseppa Giulietta in Roccamena on October 26th, 1924. However, on March 15th, 1927, Badami arrived in New York accompanied by his friend Salvatore Panino. The two men traveled from France on visas issued in Tunisia which was then a French territory.
Badami moved in with his brother-in-law, a man named Tommaso Gagliano and continued his criminal career. During prohibition, when the state was divided among numerous criminal factions, Badami controlled Elizabeth while Di Amico controlled Newark and the two men ran their own smuggling operations. However, because so many different hands held power in New Jersey, organized crime there was anything but organized.
But all of that changed with the outbreak of the Castellammarese War in New York. The war was fought between New York crime bosses Giuseppe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. And it took its name from Maranzano’s hometown of Castellammare del Golfo. Badami, who opposed New York’s influence over his territory, supported Maranzano rather than Masseria.
On April 15th, 1931, Masseria was killed by his own men who had secretly made a deal with Maranzano bringing the war to an end. Maranzano declared himself capo di tutti i capi and divided New York into five crime families. His victory also meant something else. Badami was now the officially recognized boss of Elizabeth.
The victory, however, was short-lived. On September 10th, 1931, four Jewish gangsters entered Maranzano’s office in the New York Central Building disguised as government agents in order to disarm his bodyguards. They cornered him in his office, opened fire on him and stabbed him with knives. The killers had been sent by Charles “Lucky” Luciano, one of the men who had earlier turned against Masseria in favor of Maranzano.
With Maranzano dead, his rivals also began to move against his allies including Stefano Badami. Over the following months, his underboss, Sam Monaco and several other associates were murdered and Badami decided to step back until the situation calmed down. Temporarily at least. Di Amico then became the new boss of the Elizabeth and Newark mafia.
In 1935, Vincenzo Troia began plotting to take control of the North Jersey mafia by force. Troia, who had worked with Luciano during the Castellammarese War, was a close associate of Maranzano. At the age of 26 in 1902, Troia had killed a man named Joe Catania who owed him a large debt. After arriving in the United States and using his gang connections to make a name for himself, Troia joined the Castellammarese War and ended up on the winning side.
However, when Maranzano was assassinated and his faction lost control of North Jersey, Troia decided to devise a revenge plan to seize control of the region. On the night of August 22nd, 1935, Troia was shot possibly by Di Amico’s men. But the battle of North Jersey did not end. In 1937, Joseph Profaci, the Sicilian boss of the Profaci family, attempted to assassinate Di Amico.
It was speculated that Joe, a successful businessman with strong mafia ties, acted because of his initial loyalty to Maranzano. As a result, Di Amico decided to flee the United States and return to Sicily. With him out of the picture, the commission divided the territory among several families including Badami’s and he then re-emerged as the new official boss of the North Jersey mafia.
Badami, however, was a controversial figure and over time, the New York faction of the family turned against him. In 1955, while sitting at Vito’s clan bar in New York, the brother of his former underboss, Frank Monaco, entered the restaurant and stabbed Badami, age 66, to death. After his funeral, a new boss was to be appointed. A man named Filippo Amari.
Amari had been Badami’s underboss and became the official boss after his death. He focused primarily on extortion, union rackets and drug trafficking in the New York area. His reign, however, was also short-lived as a mutiny formed against him. The Newark and Elizabeth factions were once again at odds and in 1957, less than two years after taking power, Amari fled to Sicily leaving another power vacuum in the family.
This void was later filled by Nick Delmore, the family’s underboss. Delmore was an old school bootlegger and gangster from Nicosia, Sicily. Unlike his predecessors, Delmore caused no unrest due to his reputation for respectability. Both sides of the conflict settled down as things grew more serious in the region.
At this point, the Elizabeth New York family was a fully established mafia organization operating in the shadow of the New York families. The family had between 30 and 35 officially inducted members making it one of the smallest in the country at the time. However, due to their geographic position with family history, the five administrative families of New York did not view the New Jersey mafia with much respect.
When men struggled to be inducted in New York, they often settled for their North Jersey partners instead, a clear sign of their place in the hierarchy. Still, the family maintained representation on the commission. In 1957, when the Genovese crime boss Vito Genovese organized the famous Apalachin meeting, Delmore attended with two gangsters, New York captain Frank Majuri and the family’s underboss, Louis Larasso.
Majuri was born in April 1909 and had spent much of his youth as a gangster in the New Jersey area. When Amari became boss of the family, he appointed Majorie’s capo, representing a major promotion. By the mid-1950s, Majorie had been promoted to capo regime, a high-ranking position many could only dream of.
However, when Delmore took control of the family, one of his first administrative decisions was to demote Majorie back to capo, and the gangster had no choice but to accept. The role of underboss was then assigned to the young Larossa, while Delmore continued to oversee operations in North New Jersey.
It’s 1964 and the North Jersey crime boss, Nick Delmore, lay on his deathbed in a local hospital. Before passing, he decided to name his successor, his nephew, Simon DeCavalcante. [singing] Simon DeCavalcante was born on April 30th, 1913 to Frank DeCavalcante and Marie Antoinette, both Italian immigrants.
He was born in Brooklyn, but shortly after his birth, the DeCavalcante family moved to Trenton, New Jersey, where Simon grew up. Born into the local mafia by blood, DeCavalcante entered the world of gangs at an early age and climbed the ranks over the next five decades until he reached the position of boss. Although the situation in New Jersey was slowly stabilizing, the family remained a disorganized group of rival gangsters who, in the eyes of the northern men, were nothing more than a band of country bumpkins.
However, DeCavalcante, a sharp and sophisticated man, would transform the criminal organization he inherited into a respected regional force. He implemented new policies such as dress codes for mafiosi, restrictions on facial hair, and eliminated elements he deemed unnecessary, like the use of a gun and knife in the initiation ceremony.
Although the gun, knife, and burning of the holy card were all historically symbolic elements of the ritual used by most Cosa Nostra organizations for decades, DeCavalcante saw them as unnecessary and could not have cared less how the New Yorkers viewed him. As a family boss, he owned a storefront in Kenilworth, New Jersey, a plumbing supply shop called Kenilworth Plumbing and Heating Company.
As a result, DeCavalcante earned the nickname Sam the Plumber, but Sam was not a plumber. He used the store as a source of legitimate taxable income. Behind the scenes, however, DeCavalcante ran a well-organized empire, holding stakes in numerous rackets along the East Coast, including a lucrative pawn operation, multiple gambling rackets, and pornography businesses.
He was a smooth-talking, diplomatic man who appreciated luxury and grandeur. Though called the plumber, DeCavalcante preferred more elegant titles, such as Princeton Sam or The Count. He was a violent and ruthless man, but intelligent and calculating. As a result, DeCavalcante never spent a night behind bars.
He doubled the number of inducted men in the family from 30 to 60 and had men on the street engaged in all sorts of activities. One of the most notable of these men was Gaetano Vastola. Vastola, born on May 20th, 1928, wielded significant influence over the music industry. He began his true career as a gangster in 1946 when, at the age of 18, he was arrested for burglary in New York.
He received a suspended sentence due to his youth and was placed on probation. By the mid-1950s, Vastola had entered the music industry and exercised mafia control over it, becoming a promoter for famous musicians such as Ray Charles. Based in Brooklyn, Vastola owned Roulette Records, a 1960s record label founded in 1957 by Morris Levy.
Levy, who had started his career as a nightclub manager in New York, met numerous musicians throughout his expanding business, and his career only grew from there. With the mafia’s assistance, Roulette Records expanded to cover multiple music genres, and Vastola was credited as a songwriter on numerous doo-wop singles from groups like The Cleftones.
Vastola also found a lucrative enterprise in music bootlegging, earning him over half a million dollars. This led to a 1-year prison sentence in 1960 for trademark violations. In 1965, Vastola was arrested again for theft and spent an extended period behind bars. Meanwhile, Majorie saw his career gain new momentum when DeCavalcante promoted him.
To avoid tensions within the organization, he kept Larossa as the family underboss, but made Majorie the new consigliere, a decision that was well received. In 1965, Carlo Gambino requested a favor from Larossa. He wanted the DeCavalcante family to eliminate his associate, Joey Fiola. Fiola was a member of Gambino’s organization and played a key role in the Westchester, New York waste industry.
Essentially, he was the trash baron in the region and planned to expand into North Jersey, the DeCavalcante family’s territory. Both Gambino and the DeCavalcantes disapproved of his actions and deemed him an unreliable businessman. Fiola was interfering with an important business deal, so the order was given to kill him.
On the night of his death, Larossa lured Fiola into New Jersey’s garage, strangled him, and buried him, confirming the murder with James Fiola, Gambino’s capo overseeing the waste business. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the DeCavalcante family and their associates, the FBI had intercepted all correspondence between the gangsters and was beginning to build a case against the family.
On October 23rd, 1964, Thomas G. Dunn, the mayor of Elizabeth, New Jersey, visited Sam DeCavalcante’s office to handle a matter. He wanted two men who posed a threat to his campaign silenced. Sam DeCavalcante responded by offering his full support to the mayor on the condition that he could secure city contracts in return.
However, while DeCavalcante sat in his office running his criminal organization, he was under constant surveillance. In fact, between 1961 and 1965, DeCavalcante was the primary suspect of the Goodfellas tapes, a monitoring operation targeting the small but growing New Jersey crime family. Authorities had planted listening devices in four locations across New Jersey and Pennsylvania, including DeCavalcante’s plumbing store, capturing every conversation between the boss and his team.
Other figures targeted by the operation included Philadelphia crime boss Angelino Bruno and New York Genovese family captain Gerardo Catena. The operation was initiated following the testimony of Joe Valachi, a member of the Genovese crime family, who had turned informant in 1963 and openly testified about the existence of the Cosa Nostra, becoming the first Italian gangster in history to do so.
Valachi’s street life began when he joined a street youth gang known as the Minute Men. These guys were known for their small smash-and-grab robberies, which involved breaking store windows and grabbing whatever they could before the police arrived. In 1921, at the age of 17, Valachi was arrested for grand larceny.
And 2 years later, after a botched robbery, he was sent to the notorious Sing Sing Institution in New York, though he was released after serving only half his sentence. He returned home to Harlem to find that his role as a getaway driver had already been taken by someone else. He then formed his own crew, and by 1930, he had built a solid reputation in the underworld.
That same year, Valachi became a fully initiated member of the mafia, serving as a soldier under Gaetano Reina. And in 1932, he also married into the Terranova family. When Maranzano became boss of bosses, Valachi became his bodyguard. And after his boss was assassinated, he became one of the key lieutenants of Lucchese and Luciano, operating under Tony Strollo.
In 1959, Valachi was convicted of narcotics trafficking and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He grew paranoid about his boss, Vito Genovese, claiming that Genovese had put a contract out on his life. He mistook another inmate for Joseph DePalermo, the man he believed had been sent to kill him, and attacked him with a metal bar.
Shortly afterward, Valachi, fearing a second conviction, turned informant, and a wave of anti-mafia campaigns began across the United States. [singing] The wiretaps captured DeCavalcante discussing eight different murders with his associates. The first one he talked about was the killing of Willie Moretti in 1951.
Moretti was the underboss of the Genovese family, then still known as the Luciano family. He was a cousin of family boss Frank Costello, and when Costello stepped down after narrowly surviving an assassination attempt, Moretti became Vito Genovese’s underboss. However, in the early 1950s, the once powerful and well-connected Moretti was suffering from advanced syphilis, which made him irrational.
Genovese wanted to put an end to his suffering. On October 4th, 1951, Moretti and four other gangsters sat down for lunch in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. They joked together in Italian before one of the men pulled out a gun and shot Moretti in the face. Del Cavalcante spoke about the murder of a Youngstown mafia member, Charles Calavero, who was killed by a hand grenade.
It was part of a territorial gang war, but the explosion also killed his 11-year-old son. Del Cavalcante, a man who often avoided the use of brutality, openly opposed both of these deaths, considering them contrary to the principles of Cosa Nostra. According to his account, Calavero’s death led to a new ban within the mafia on the use of grenades for killings.
He was later asked to approve a contract on a black construction worker who had struck mobster’s son with a shovel during a fight. Fearing a conflict with the Nation of Islam, however, Del Cavalcante refused. [singing] In early 1965, Del Cavalcante met with Joseph Zicarelli, an associate of New York’s Bonanno family, known for his corrupt activities, to discuss the impending deportation of the gangster Emanuel Riggi.
Zicarelli referred him to Cornelius Gallagher, a US Congressman from New Jersey’s 13th District, saying Gallagher could have the case dismissed, which was welcome news. Federal authorities recorded the boss speaking with police officers, politicians, gangsters, and others, and they compiled a long list of incriminating information.
One of the wiretaps at the Kenilworth shop captured Del Cavalcante expressing a sense of disillusionment with Cosa Nostra after Carlo Gambino failed to vote in his favor on the commission. Gambino had bypassed the Cavalcante family for a seat in the commission and instead appointed Joseph Colombo.
Colombo was the boss of the Colombo crime family and a man very close to Gambino. Del Cavalcante was heard discussing with Majorie how much the decision had irritated him. Colombo sits next to Carlo like a baby all the time. He’ll do whatever Carlo wants him to do. Sometimes, Frank, the more you see, the more disillusioned you become.
In 1966, Festola and his fellow mob associate, Daniel Annunziata, were sent by Del Cavalcante to a rigged dice game in a motel in Pennsylvania to rob the operation. The two men entered the room and began acting like ordinary players before pretending to be shocked and angry when they discovered that the dice were fixed.
They pulled out guns and demanded a settlement of $20,000. The organizers of the game decided to negotiate the terms of the settlement with the boss. Over the next 6 weeks, three meetings took place between the gamblers, the robbers, and Del Cavalcante, who had planned the entire operation. In the end, a settlement of $12,000 was agreed upon, of which the boss received $3,800.
On December 13th, 1967, Del Cavalcante was arrested and tried for falsifying driver’s licenses. Then, in March of the following year, Festola, Annunziata, and Del Cavalcante were indicted for conspiracy to violate federal extortion laws as part of a 17-month federal investigation. Using wiretaps, federal agents raided the Kenilworth shop and found four illegal firearms.
On July 18th, the boss was arrested again for possession of a stolen .38 caliber revolver. He was tried for the Pennsylvania extortion conspiracy, but his attorney, Sidney Franzblau, began to question the legality of the wiretaps. On January 17th, 1969, Franzblau filed a discovery motion and received a massive 2,300-page transcript of the Goodfellas tapes.
On June 10th, the defense requested the release of the recordings, and it was discovered that the wiretaps had been installed without judicial authorization. As a result, the thousands of pages of recordings could not be used as evidence. However, Franzblau, a former US prosecutor, had not requested that the files be disclosed only to the defense.
Consequently, the report became public and exposed many aspects of the mafia’s inner workings in the United States. The end of Del Cavalcante’s reign was approaching. On December 16th, 1969, more than 55 people, including the boss, were indicted by a grand jury. The charges involved a $20 million interstate gambling operation run out of New York.
At the time, it was one of the largest gambling networks in the country. On January 2nd, 1970, Del Cavalcante was charged with illegal gambling. Another trial began in April 1970, but was temporarily suspended after the boss fell ill with bronchitis. Del Cavalcante was brought back to court for the Trevose extortion case, and one of the victims of the scheme testified against the boss, laying out all the details of the operation.
The government was now convinced of Del Cavalcante’s role in the plot. Meanwhile, the defense had neither witnesses nor evidence to contradict it. Del Cavalcante claimed he was a victim of a setup and that he was nothing more than a mediator in an underworld dispute, but no one believed him. On September 24th, 1970, the head of the Del Cavalcante crime family was found guilty on three conspiracy counts, his first ever conviction.
He was sentenced to 15 years in prison, and he was furious. Festola and Annunziata were each found guilty of one count as well. In January 1971, Del Cavalcante was summoned to a secret hearing in New York, where he agreed to plead guilty to a conspiracy charge. The proceeding was not made public immediately in order to protect the rights of the other defendants.
On March 10th of that year, Del Cavalcante’s case was overturned. Judge Arlin Adams of the Philadelphia Court of Appeals vacated the ruling after a three-judge panel determined that the Trevose case did not actually contain sufficient evidence. Festola and Annunziata were released, but Del Cavalcante remained in custody.
His gambling case was still pending, and the US Attorney for New Jersey, Herbert Stern, did not want the gangster released. In March 1971, Del Cavalcante was sentenced to 5 years in prison and fined $10,000 for his role in the gambling network. On August 17th, he was indicted again for the stolen .
38 caliber revolver that federal agents had seized 3 years earlier. The boss of the Del Cavalcante crime family was now behind bars. During his incarceration, Del Cavalcante chose to work as a prison orderly, and his performance was praised by the prison’s chief physician. He maintained good behavior in prison, and on December 20th, 1973, he was granted parole.
It is now early 1974. Del Cavalcante was speeding along Interstate 287 in Saddle Brook when he was pulled over by a state trooper. He was driving at 77 mph in a 55 mph zone and was cited. However, he was ill at the time and suffering from bronchitis, and his case was postponed twice. The third time he requested a continuance, the judge denied it after a state trooper reported seeing Del Cavalcante out on the street looking perfectly healthy. He never appeared in court.
In early 1976, Del Cavalcante, now 63 years old, decided to move to South Florida, a region where his family had many operations. He considered building a legitimate casino there, but when the state rejected the legalization of gambling, the idea was abandoned. In 1980, the family boss decided to step back, officially retiring in 1982.
His position was then passed to Giovanni Riggi, who would lead the organization into the new decade. [music and singing] In 1980, the boss of the family, Simon Del Cavalcante, appointed Giovanni Riggi as the new head of the family as the aging man stepped down into retirement. Riggi’s appointment to that position made sense.
Riggi had been raised in the home of a Del Cavalcante soldier. He eventually lived the life of an ordinary citizen, although his father pushed him to join the gang. After finishing high school as valedictorian of the class Riggi joined the US Army. At the end of World War II, he returned home and joined his father in the Mafia.
Riggi was a likable and articulate man who commanded both respect and fear through the way he conducted himself. Like the boss before him, he tried to be more diplomatic to avoid killings. Of course, he was not opposed to them when he felt that they were necessary, but he was above all a peaceful paternal figure.
Unlike most other Mafia bosses, Riggi was the kind of man willing to take responsibility for his crew and to go to prison for them. On Sunday mornings, the entire crime family would gather at Riggi’s cafe, the Cafe Italia, across from the Ribera Social Club. The Ribera served to raise funds for poor families in Sicily, which made Riggi one of DelCavalcante’s favorites.
On October 2nd, 1964, Riggi, who had already been inducted, was promoted to the rank of captain within the family. And by the mid-1970s, he had taken control of nearly all construction within the family’s territory. He held the local unions in an iron grip, both bribing and extorting them. He was an agent for the International Association of Laborers and Hod Carriers and was involved in many criminal rackets such as loan sharking and gambling.
When DelCavalcante was sentenced to 5 years in prison, Riggi was appointed acting boss. In 1978, Riggi approved a hit on John Serrato, the uncle of Vinnie Palermo. Palermo, DelCavalcante’s nephew by marriage, would become important later. Serrato was a low-level member of the organization who spent most of his days working street operations.
He had been involved in a long-running dispute with his sister, and on the night of his murder, Palermo and his brother Patsy approached their uncle as he sat in his car, and the two opened fire, killing him on the spot. [singing] In the early 1980s, police found the body of Vincenzo Sorcia beneath the Goethals Bridge in Elizabeth.
Sorcia was a local contractor who had fallen out with another gangster at the Ribera, and he had to go. After becoming boss, Riggi introduced several administrative changes within the family. First, he reinstated the old traditions that Mafioso had once practiced during the initiation ceremony, including the burning of the holy card.
Riggi also began to push Majuri and Larasso out of their roles. Riggi and Majuri had been long-term rivals, and once in power, Riggi demoted Majuri from the position of consigliere. His role was given to Stefano Vitabella. Vitabella had joined the organization in the 1970s as a soldier under Riggi and rose through the ranks over the following decade, eventually becoming the family’s consigliere in Majuri’s place.
Majuri continued to run his own crew until 1983, the year he died. After that, his son Charles took over leadership of the crew. As for Larasso, a similar situation unfolded. His power within the organization had been slowly declining since the wave of indictments against the DelCavalcantes in the 1960s, and when Riggi took control, it was the final blow for the underboss.
His position was handed over to Girolamo Palermo. Palermo was a long-time gangster who had proven himself decades earlier and would go on to become a senior figure within the family organization. On September 13th, 1960, Alfonso Calichio stood behind the counter of his bar in Elizabeth, New Jersey, called Vinnie’s Tavern.
Palermo entered with a few other men and began violently assaulting Calichio. The bar owner fought back as Palermo pulled out a gun and shot him. The murder had been ordered by the boss at the time, Nick Delmore, who had become enraged by the situation. Just days earlier, Calichio had openly disrespected the boss, which ultimately led to his death and to Palermo’s rise within the family.
However, Palermo kept the murder quiet and under the radar as Calichio was Riggi’s brother-in-law. By the late 1970s, Riggi had made Palermo a full member of the family, and by the early 1980s, he promoted him to underboss. The man was hot-headed, and the entire affair had been beyond Riggi’s control.
Yet, this would cause problems later. Riggi was running a vast union racket alongside Gioacchino Amari and Giuseppe Schifilliti, hiring king captains within the organization. Together, these men were generating millions of dollars. Meanwhile, Riggi was a man who knew how to keep his mouth shut. He consistently avoided saying anything compromising, and as a result, federal wiretaps never captured him incriminating himself.
He refused to speak with men over the phone, and according to some sources, was willing to travel long distances to use a payphone for brief, simple conversations. In public, he never presented himself as a boss and never did anything that could land him in prison. On one particular occasion, Riggi had called a local contractor and asked him to meet in the dining room area of the Linden Sheraton Hotel.
The contractor alerted the New Jersey Organized Crime Task Force, OCTF, about the meeting. They placed a listening device on a table in the restaurant, and when Riggi arrived, the receptionist set up the device at the table. The OCTF was stationed outside the hotel listening in. Riggi sat with the contractor and told him that New Jersey was a very union-friendly state.
During the conversation, a group of union presidents in the restaurant noticed and came over to greet Riggi. They told the contractor how impressive Riggi was, and after the lunch meeting, the man began working with him. Meanwhile, the mob boss knew very well that at some point he would have to go to prison, and he began preparing for that reality.
He often sat alone in empty rooms for hours each day, and he also started exercising. One day in the mid-1980s, Riggi asked another gangster to drive him to East Orange, where he knew a butcher. He had saved the man’s life in the past, but had never asked for anything in return. He made a simple request of the butcher. If he ever ended up in prison, to take care of his family.
In 1986, Riggi was promoted to become president of Union Council 30, as well as a consultant for Local 394. He used this both as a legitimate job and as a foothold in the local unions, which had become the family’s most profitable racket. However, in 1988, things began to change when John Gotti, the boss of the Gambino family, started asserting his influence in northern New Jersey.
On December 16th, 1985, Gambino crime boss Paul Castellano sat in his 1985 Lincoln alongside the family underboss, Thomas Bilotti. The two men were on their way to meet Frank DeCicco at the Sparks Steak House in Midtown Manhattan. The car stopped near the restaurant entrance around 5:00 p.m.
However, unbeknownst to Castellano, six armed men wearing long Russian-style coats were positioned on either side of the street. The gang boss stepped out of his vehicle with Bilotti when the armed men emerged from the shadows and opened fire, striking the men dozens of times. The hail of bullets left both men dead in the street while the coat-clad killers disappeared into the darkness.
Across the street sat a car with tinted windows carrying John Gotti and his right-hand man, Sammy Gravano. In 1987, Vastola was arrested for physically assaulting a record label executive who had refused his attempt to extort the man’s business. While in prison, Vastola crossed paths with John Gotti, who, over time, became convinced that Vastola might cooperate with the authorities.
Gotti tried to persuade Riggi to have Vastola killed, but Riggi refused. The new Gambino boss quickly realized he needed to assert more control if he wanted things to go his way. On January 4th, 1988, the body of Vincent Rotondo, a high-ranking DelCavalcante family mobster, was found slumped in his Lincoln, riddled with bullets, in front of his Brooklyn home.
Rotondo had been a major earner for the family and heavily involved in the union racket in Brooklyn. However, it became clear he wanted to seize control of the organization, and Riggi needed him out of the way. Meanwhile, John Gotti had grown irritated by the Genovese-linked rivals family’s strong connections in northern New Jersey, and he decided to assert his dominance.
At Rotondo’s funeral in Linden, New Jersey, the DelCavalcantes appeared alongside the Gambinos. Gotti and Riggi appeared friendly, but Gotti took Riggi aside for a private meeting. According to Anthony Rotondo, when they emerged, Riggi was pale as a ghost. John Gotti had told him that from now on, the DelCavalcante family would answer to him.
Later that year, Gotti requested a major favor of Riggi. He wanted the boss to eliminate Fred Weiss, a private sanitation contractor in New York. Weiss had recently purchased a large vacant property in Staten Island with two mob associates and had begun dumping massive amounts of toxic medical waste. Staten Island authorities discovered the plan and immediately opened an investigation, making both Gotti and Riggi nervous.
The men feared Weiss would turn informant under the weight of the prosecution, so he had to be removed. Gotti approached Riggi and asked if he could handle it. Riggi, seeing an opportunity to curry favor with their powerful New York neighbors, approached Anthony Rotondo and told him that since a boss from another family had requested help from their leader, the job had to be done at all costs.
On September 11th, 1989, Vinnie Palermo and Anthony Capo, accompanied by a group of 12 mobsters, traveled to New York in four SUVs. They positioned themselves near Weiss’s girlfriend’s apartment, waiting for him to leave. Then Weiss stepped outside toward his car. Palermo and Capo approached and beat him to death on the spot.
The DeCavalcantes had performed a major service for a powerful New York boss, which seemed promising for their status. Yet, despite this, the northern New Jersey family was still viewed as a glorified satellite crew, frustrating the mobsters immensely. They aspired to be recognized as a true Mafia family, but were not seen as such by their peers.
On top of these challenges, the government launched a series of major prosecutions in the early 1990s, forcing Riggi’s administration to operate with extreme caution for a time. Despite this, the family entered the 1990s under his leadership, and their legal troubles, combined with internal insecurities, would soon lead to a significant wave of murders.
