On the afternoon of January 6th, 1992, a white Lincoln pulled away from Mill Basin, Brooklyn with John Demato in the back seat. He thought he was going to lunch. Instead, he was riding into an internal execution. Anthony Kappo turned, fired into him at close range, and when Damato groaned, “Oh no!” Kappo fired again.
In a few seconds, the acting boss of New Jerseys Davalcante family was finished. His body would be wrapped in plastic, moved through Brooklyn, driven upstate, and vanish so completely that his family never got a grave to visit. That is how it ended. Not in a courthouse, not in a war on the street, in a car with men he trusted. This wasn’t just another wise guy getting clipped.
John Boy Damato was 50 years old, New Yorkorn, married to Theresa, and sitting on one of the most dangerous chairs in organized crime. He had climbed through gambling, lone sharking, labor rackets, and personal alliances until imprisoned boss Giovani Riggy put him in charge of the family. He had ties to John Goty’s orbit, a reputation for ambition, and the kind of appetite that made other mobsters nervous.
In a world built on secrecy, he stood out. And that is always a dangerous thing. This is the story of how an acting boss inside the real life Sopranos’s universe rose fast, pushed too hard, and got marked for death after a rumor exploded into a crisis of power. Because here’s the truth. The rumor about John Demato’s private life mattered. But it wasn’t the whole story.
Later court testimony makes that clear. The gossip was the spark. The fuel was money, ego, theft, old resentments, and the suspicion that Damato was becoming his own power center. And here’s what the history books usually flatten. John Demato wasn’t killed only because the mob was cruel, though it was.
He was killed because in that culture, private shame and public authority couldn’t exist in the same body. Once men around him believed he was vulnerable, compromised, and reaching too far, they didn’t see a boss anymore. They saw a problem. And in that world, problems don’t get managed. They get disappeared. You have to understand where he came from.
Damato was born in New York City on May 12th, 1941. His record starts showing up early. gambling charges in 1963, a burglary conviction in 1971, a forgery conviction in 1984. That matters because it tells you what kind of mob figure he was, not a celebrity gangster, not a flashy headline machine at first. He was a grinder, the kind of man who keeps showing up in investigations because he knows how to make himself useful.
He built his standing in the Elizabeth faction of the Decavalcante family around bookmakers, loan collectors, union influence, and the daily business of squeezing cash out of people who couldn’t go to the police. The family he entered already had a long and ugly history. Back in the Sam de Cavalcante era, federal investigators said the Jersey organization was pulling in $20 million a year from gambling.
In 1970, the old boss faced fines totaling $30,000 after a Pennsylvania dice game extortion case where a $20,000 demand got negotiated down to $12,000. And Davalcante himself was said to have taken $3,800 as the so-called mediator. His bail was set at $50,000. One codefendant’s bail was $25,000. That’s the world Damato inherited.
a Jersey family that New York often mocked as farmers, but one that knew how to turn labor, peace, gambling markers, and fear into very real cash. By the 1980s, Damato had risen to Kappo under Giovani John the Eagle Riggy. Riggy’s regime fed on labor and construction, racketeering, lone sharking, illegal gambling, and extortion.
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Damato moved in that ecosystem with men like Charles Majuri, Guyotano Vasola, Jake Kamari, and later Vincent Palmo. He wasn’t just collecting envelopes. He was learning the mechanics of power in North Jersey, who controlled the union doors, who could shut down a job site, who was protected, who could be leaned on. Mob power isn’t magic.
It’s administration backed by violence. Damato understood that better every year. Here’s one scheme that shows you how that system really worked. First, the opportunity. New Jersey construction was full of contractors desperate to save money with non-UN labor. Second, the inside connection. The Davalcante family had influence over labor, locals, and key gatekeepers.
Third, the execution. A contractor either paid for labor peace or got hit with slowdowns, threats, pickets, and sabotage. Fourth, the money. Later testimony described a $70,000 payment delivered to Joseeppe Shifaliti for letting one company work non-union. Fifth, the problem. Every payoff created another witness, another courier, another secret that could be traded when indictments came.
That is how mob rackets always rot from the inside. The same logic drove the street rackets. Gambling and lone sharking look simple from a distance. They aren’t. The opportunity was constant. People always wanted action. Quick money or a way out of a bad month. The inside connection was the neighborhood network. Bartenders, book makers, collectors, social clubs, and a reputation everyone understood without saying it out loud.
The execution was methodical. Bets got laid off. Loans went out at punishing rates. Late payments meant visits, not invoices. The money came in weekly in cash with almost no paperwork and a lot of fear. The problem was ego. A debtor talks. A collector gets greedy. A captain starts skimming. Suddenly, the same silent business becomes a homicide file.
Damato’s rise accelerated when Riggy went down. After labor racketeering cases hit the administration in the late 1980s, Riggy wound up in prison. Vasola handled day-to-day control for a time. Then he got his own sentence. That opened the chair. From prison, Riggy elevated Damato to acting boss in 1990. That should have been the peak.
Instead, it became the beginning of the end. Because Damato didn’t just hold the job. He acted like he intended to keep it. He was close enough to John Goty’s circle that later reporting placed him at the Ravenite Social Club on Malbury Street every Tuesday and at Junior Goty’s wedding at the Helmsley Palace on April 21st, 1990.
In mob terms, that sent a message. Johnny Boy wasn’t just a caretaker. He was shopping for stature that created another dangerous plotline. Federal reporting in July of 1992 said Damato and Riggy were among those accused of conspiring with John Goti to help arrange the murder of Gaitano Vasola because they feared Vasola could become an informant.
Watch how that scheme was supposed to work. The opportunity was fear. Vasola faced serious prison time. The inside connection was Goty’s Reach and a Genevves linked intermediary named Baroleameo Nicolo who knew Vasola. The execution would have been a favor killing done through a friend to make it easier. The money wasn’t the point.
The prize was control of the family. The problem was classic Kosanostra politics. Nicolo’s Genevvesi superiors refused to approve it. The hit stalled. Basola lived. But the fact that Damato was in that orbit told everyone exactly what kind of game he was playing. So by late 1991, Damato had accumulated enemies in layers.
Men thought he was usurping power. Later testimony said he was stealing from the family. Others believed he was too close to Goty and could turn Jersey into an extension of Gambino influence. Then came the rumor that finished the job. His girlfriend Kelly, angry after an argument, told Anthony Ratando that Damato was bisexual and had gone to Manhattan sex clubs where he swapped partners and engaged in sex with men.
Ratando passed it along to Jacamari and Coniglier Stfano Vitabille. At that point, the story became dynamite. Not because mobsters were moralists. They weren’t. Because they were obsessed with image, dominance, and ridicule. A boss who could be mocked was a boss who could be challenged. But that’s not the crazy part. According to later court records, the administration did not treat the allegation as a private embarrassment.
They folded it into a formal case against him. Usation, theft, sex with men. Those three things together mattered. One charge said he was overreaching. One said he was disloyal. One said he was unacceptable as a symbol of authority. In that culture, that combination was fatal. At a meeting in November of 1991, Vitbal authorized Damato’s murder and even discussed how and where the body should be disposed of. Think about that.
Before the trigger was pulled, the disposal plan was already part of the meeting. That’s how calm these decisions could be. Murder first, geography second, emotion never. There was another problem. Mafia rules said you don’t kill a boss without approval from the commission. But Damato’s enemies believed the reason for the hit was too humiliating to share with the other families.
Anthony Kappo later told a Manhattan federal jury that they knew they would have to sneak him. Kappo’s testimony was blunt. Nobody’s going to respect us if we have a gay homosexual boss sitting down discussing Lacosa Nostra business. Brutal words and revealing ones. The murder wasn’t just about what Damato may have done in private.
It was about the fear that other gangsters would laugh at Jersey. That might sound small to civilians. In a mafia family, humiliation can be as lethal as betrayal. Then came the final sequence. Damato had recently returned from Florida where reporting said he had been laying low. On January 6th, 1992, Kappo and Victor Dichiara picked him up near Kelly’s home in Mil Basin.
Damato got in the back. He said, “Let’s go eat.” That’s the last documented line we have from him. As the car moved, Kappo turned and shot him twice. Damato made a sound. Kappo shot him twice more. No chase, no argument, no dramatic speech, just mechanics. Afterward, the body was taken to the home of Rudy Ferrron in Mil Basin, where Ferron and Vincent Palmo were waiting.
They searched Damato’s pockets and found $8,000 in cash and the card of an FBI agent. That last detail tells you how much pressure he was under. Either he was already in contact or he had reasons to keep that card close. In either case, it was one more bad sign discovered too late to matter. From there, the cleanup followed the script written weeks earlier.
Damato’s body was wrapped in plastic tarp. Ferrroni and Palmo loaded him into a black Cadillac and drove upstate to a farm in Newberg, New York, owned by Philip Lamela. Then he was gone. No funeral, no public discovery, no body recovered. For investigators, that makes everything harder. For mobsters, that’s the point.
A missing body keeps fear alive. It also protects everyone in the chain. No corpse means no burial scene, no forensics, no neat ending, just a boss who vanished and a family that moved on faster than any normal society could. And they did move on. Once Riggy was informed in prison, he appointed Jacob Mari as the new acting boss. Damato’s own brother, Frank, came out of prison not long after.
And according to later testimony, the administration even considered killing him too before he could retaliate. That hit never happened. But the fact that it was discussed tells you how the machine thinks after a purge. It isn’t enough to solve the first problem. You have to game out the second, third, and fourth order consequences.
Who mourns him? Who inherits his grievance? Who starts drinking too much and talking? Who suddenly needs to die next? What happened after that is the part most mobsters never plan for. Men started flipping. Anthony Kappo cooperated. Anthony Ratando cooperated. Vincent Palmo cooperated. In Manhattan federal court in the early 2000s, the family secrets spilled out in ugly detail.
Jurors heard about the hit, the sex club allegation, the violation of mafia rules, and the other crimes surrounding the administration. The same organization that had built itself through silence became a source of testimony. By 2006, major figures tied to the case, including Stfano Vitabille, Philip Abramo, and Joseeppe Chifaliti, drew life sentences before later appallet litigation reshaped parts of the case. But the damage was done.
