Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village is a quiet block, but Frank Deco never worked on Sullivan Street. He worked in Brooklyn out of a social club in Benenhurst. And on the day he died, he was in Dker Heights at a meeting that John Gotti was supposed to attend but canceled at the last minute. What did said to Sammy Gravano before any of that happened was this.
If John Gotti didn’t work out as boss within one year, the two of them would kill him and take over the family themselves. The calculation was cold, pragmatic, and entirely rational given what the Chico knew about Gotti’s ego, his gambling habits, and his inability to stay out of the spotlight. The problem was that Frank Deo never made it to that one-year deadline.
Four months after John Gotti became boss of the Gambino crime family, a car bomb exploded under Diko’s Buick Collector in Brooklyn, killing him instantly and ending the secret trial period he and Gravano had designed before it could produce the result they had planned for. The bomb was revenge for a murder that Gotti had ordered and Dico had helped arrange.
And the man who sent it understood that killing a boss without permission from the commission meant someone would eventually have to pay. Frank Deco paid first, which meant the insurance policy he had negotiated with Sammy Graano expired worthless, and the one-year test of John Gotti’s fitness to lead became irrelevant the moment the Sec’s body was scattered across a Brooklyn sidewalk.
Drop where you are watching from in the comments below. It is genuinely one of the best parts of doing this. If you are new here and want more history like this delivered straight to you, subscribe now. back to Brooklyn and the man whose calculation about John Gotti turned out to be correct but who never lived long enough to act on it. November 5th, 1935.
Frank Dico was born in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, the son of Vincent Booy Dico, an alcoholic soldier in the Gambino crime family who had come from Benavvento in southern Italy and never quite learned to stay sober or stay out of trouble. The nickname Boozy was not affectionate. Vincent Tico drank and the family knew it.
And the fact that he still held his position as a soldier despite the drinking said something about the tolerance the organization extended to men who did what they were told when it mattered. Frank grew up in that world, surrounded by men whose legitimacy came from the family they served rather than the work they claimed to do.
And by the time he was old enough to understand what his father actually did for a living, he was already being introduced to the people who would shape the rest of his life. His uncle George De Chico was a capo in the Gambino family. His brother George would eventually become a soldier. His nephew Robert would follow the same path. The Dico family was a Gambino family within the Gambino family, and Frank’s trajectory was established before he had any real choice in the matter.
He grew up in Bath Beach, but lived as an adult on Staten Island. He was a tall, muscular man with a thick neck that showed exposed arteries when he was angry. He dyed his silver hair black, leaving silver streaks styled in a pompador cough. He had a slightly mashed nose, the kind of feature that suggested either boxing or violence or both, and he carried himself with the physical confidence of someone who understood that in his world appearance and reputation were inseparable.
But for all his physical presence, Frank Dico was a disorganized man. He stuffed dozens of business cards into his suit jacket and kept a messy car. A nondescript 1985 Buick Electra that looked like something a middle manager would drive. Not a man who would eventually become underboss of one of the most powerful crime families in New York.
The mess mattered because it would later cost him his life. When a Luces soldier asked him for a lawyer’s business card on a Sunday afternoon in April of 1986, Dico had to get into the car to search the glove compartment, and that decision put him in the passenger seat when the bomb underneath the vehicle detonated.
Sammy Graano, who knew him as well as anyone in the Gambino family, described Frank Diko as calculating and observant. Paul Castiano, who was the Chico’s boss and mentor for years, once told Gravano, “Frankie, Frank’s a gambler. He’s a street dog, Sammy.” Both assessments were accurate. Diko was a successful gambler who played craps and roulette and frequented illegal gambling establishments across Brooklyn and Manhattan.
He owned his own social club in Benenhurst. He was calculating in the way that people who survive in organized crime have to be calculating. always weighing risk against reward, always thinking two moves ahead, always aware that the men around him were doing the same thing. He was also a street dog in the sense that Castayano meant it, which was that the Tiko understood the ground level realities of the organization in ways that bosses who ruled from mansions sometimes forgot.
Frank Diko joined the Gambino family as a soldier sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s. By 1973, he was robbing diamond dealers and hijacking trucks throughout New York State alongside Anthony Gaspipe Castle, who would later become under boss of the Lucasi crime family and who would 15 years after their partnership helped plan the car bomb that killed the seco in Brooklyn.
The two men worked together, made money together, and then went their separate ways as their respective families pulled them in different directions. The fact that Caso would eventually participate in the Chico’s murder was not personal. It was institutional. By the time the bomb went off, the Chico and Caso were serving different bosses with different grievances.
And the bond they had formed in 1973 meant nothing compared to the orders that came down from Vincent Gagante in 1986. Diko became a protege of Paul Castiano, which mattered because both men were from Bath Beach and because Castiano valued competence and operational discipline over the kind of theatrical toughness that some mobsters mistook for leadership.
Dato was close to Gambino Capo James, Jimmy Brown Fila, whom he described as his rabbi, the man who guided him through the family’s internal politics and vouched for him when it mattered. Through Castayano, Diko became heavily involved in labor racketeering with the international brotherhood of Teamsters Union Local 282. He held a no-show union organizer position, which meant he collected a paycheck for work he did not do while actually managing the Gambino family’s control over the local.
The members of local 282 delivered concrete and building materials to construction sites across New York City and Long Island. And Deco’s position gave the family leverage over who worked, at what price, and under what conditions. It was not violent work in the way that people outside the organization imagined mob work to be violent, but it was extraordinarily profitable, and it embedded Diko in one of the most lucrative rackets the Gambino family controlled.
His crew was one of the most powerful in the family. It included Joseph Joe the German Watts who served as John Gotti’s chauffeur and bodyguard and Joseph Oldman Peruda who would later become one of Sammy Gravano’s most reliable killers. The Chico also handled murders when the family required it. In 1978, he organized the killing of Nicholas Sibeta, Sammy Graano’s brother-in-law, who had insulted the daughter of George Dico, and created a problem that Paul Castiano decided could only be solved with Sheeta’s death.
The Chico was given the contract and told not to inform Gravano. But he decided that keeping Gravano in the dark was a worse idea than telling him the truth, and so he broke the rules and told Gravano what was about to happen. Gravano was furious but eventually accepted that his brother-in-law had earned his death through his own behavior.
The fact that the Chico made that call, breaking Castiano’s explicit order in order to preserve his relationship with Gravano showed the kind of pragmatic loyalty that would later lead him to betray Castiano entirely when the calculation changed. By the early 1980s, Frank Diko was one of the most powerful capos in the Gambino crime family. He had money.
He had a crew. He had the confidence of the boss. And he had a position in an organization that generated hundreds of millions of dollars a year through construction, gambling, lone sharking, labor racketeering, and a dozen other enterprises that most people never saw because they were designed to look legitimate.
He was 50 years old, secure in his position, and seemingly insulated from the kind of internal struggles that had torn apart other families. But by 1985, the world Paul Castiano had built was collapsing, and Frank Deo was going to have to choose which side of the coming war he belonged on. The problem was not Frank Dico’s loyalty to Paul Castano.
The problem was that by the middle of 1985, almost no one else in the Gambino family was loyal to Paul Castellano either. And the man who was about to force the issue was John Gotti. Castellano had been born in 1915 in Brooklyn, the son of Sicilian immigrants. And he had grown up in a world where the local mafia families controlled the neighborhood’s economic and social life in ways that were understood but rarely discussed.
He was Carlo Gambino’s first cousin. And in 1932, Gambino had married Castaniano’s sister, Katherine, which made them brothers-in-law as well as relatives. When Carlo Gambino died in 1976, Castiano took over as boss of the family that bore Gambino’s name, and he ruled it for the next nine years with an approach that prioritized white collar crime over the street level violence and drug dealing that had defined earlier generations of mobsters.
Castiano’s leadership style was methodical and profit focused. He avoided the kind of flashy public presence that had made earlier bosses famous and vulnerable. He invested in construction, trucking, and other businesses that appeared legitimate on the surface, but were controlled by the family through extortion, bidrigging, and union manipulation.
He ruled from a mansion on Staten Island, a house so large and ostentatious that it became known as the White House, and he rarely left it except for meetings with other bosses or court appearances related to the multiple indictments that were beginning to pile up by the middle of the 1980s. His distance from the street crews, his focus on whitecollar operations, and his perceived stinginess when it came to sharing the profits from those operations created resentment among the soldiers and capos who did the actual
work of enforcing the family’s control. By 1985, Paul Castayaniano was seen by many in his own family as greedy, out of touch, and more concerned with protecting his own wealth than with maintaining the loyalty of the men who kept him in power. The institutional crisis that made the conspiracy against Castillano possible began with a rule that Castillaniano had imposed and that John Gotti had violated.
Castano had forbidden drug dealing. He believed correctly that federal drug prosecutions carried long sentences, that drug cases attracted aggressive law enforcement attention, and that the money involved in narcotics created internal conflicts that destabilized families. The rule was clear, and the penalty for breaking it was understood.
But John Gotti, who operated out of the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park, Queens, and who had grown up in a world where the fastest way to make money was often the most illegal, did not follow the rule. He and his brother Jean were involved in heroin distribution, and so was Angelo Riierro, one of Gotti’s closest associates.
In August of 1983, Rugiierro and Gene Gotti were arrested for dealing heroin based primarily on recordings from a bug the FBI had planted in Rugierro’s house. Castiano demanded transcripts of the tapes. Rugiro refused. Casiano threatened to demote Goti. By 1984, Castayano himself was under indictment. He had been arrested and charged in a Reicho case related to the crimes of Roy Deo and his crew.
a group of killers who had committed as many as 200 murders and whose operations had become so reckless that they threatened to bring down everyone connected to them. In 1985, Castiano received a second indictment, this time for his role on the commission, the mafia’s governing body. He was facing life imprisonment on either case.
His plan, according to people who knew him, was to appoint his nephew, Thomas Tommy Gambino, as acting boss. and Thomas Tommy Balotti, his chauffeur and bodyguard, as under boss if he went to prison. The problem was that almost no one in the family respected Bellotti as a leader. He was seen as Castayano’s driver, a man who had been promoted because of personal loyalty rather than operational competence.
And the idea that he would become under boss enraged the CPOS, who believed they had earned that position through years of service. The final break came in December of 1985 when Aniel O’Neal Decroce died of cancer. Delroce had been the Gambino family’s under boss for decades. A man beloved by the street crews and deeply respected by John Gotti who had grown up under Delacroche’s mentorship.
Delicroce had kept the peace between Castillano and the more traditional members of the family and his death on December 2nd, 1985 removed the last buffer between the two factions. What made the situation irreparable was that Paul Castayano did not attend Delochce’s wake. He cited his legal troubles and his desire to lay low, but to Goti and many others in the family, the absence was an unforgivable sign of disrespect.
Two weeks later, Castelliano was dead, and the man who had ordered his murder was preparing to take over the family that Deloce had helped keep intact for so long. Frank Deo understood all of this. He was close to Castayano. He profited from Castayano’s rackets, and he had every reason to remain loyal to the boss who had made him powerful.
But he was also pragmatic enough to recognize that Castiano was losing the family’s support, that the indictments were not going away. and that if Castiano went to prison and left the organization in the hands of Tommy Gambino and Tommy Bolog, the resulting instability would be worse than whatever came from removing Castillano before that could happen.
Deico did not start the conspiracy against Paul Castaniano, but when it came to him, he made the calculation that joining it was safer than opposing it. Robert Deonardo was acting as John Gotti’s intermediary, which meant the conspiracy was already in motion by the time Sammy Graano found out about it. And when Gravano arrived at the meeting in Queens, expecting to see Gotti, he found only Angelo Rugiro waiting for him with a question that required a yes or no answer.
Ruggiro told Gravano that he and Goti were planning to murder Paul Castillano. He asked for Gravano’s support. Gravano was initially non-committal. He told Rogerro he needed time to think, but what he actually needed was to talk to Frank Dico because Dico was the one person in the family whose judgment Gravano trusted when it came to questions of leadership and survival.
The two men met privately and talked for several hours about what supporting the conspiracy would mean, what opposing it would mean, and whether there was any version of the future that did not involve choosing a side. Their concern was specific. If Paul Castiano was convicted and went to prison, he was going to name his nephew Tommy Gambino as acting boss and Tommy Botti as underboss.
Neither man appealed to Graano or Diko as leadership material. Gambino was competent but lacked the presence and the respect that holding the family together would require. Bellatti was loyal to Castilliano but was widely seen as unqualified for any position of real authority. The prospect of the family being run by those two men while Castayano sat in prison giving orders through intermediaries struck both Graano and the Chico as a recipe for internal collapse.
The alternative was to support Gotti’s plan, remove Castiano before he went to prison, and take their chances with a new boss whose weaknesses they already understood. Gravano’s first choice to become boss after Castiano’s murder was Frank Deo, not John Gotti. De Chico was the one Gravano trusted, the one whose judgment he respected, and the one who seemed capable of holding the family together without the kind of ego-driven recklessness that had destroyed other bosses.
But De Chico understood something about John Gotti that made that plan impossible. and what he told Gravano in that private conversation became the foundation for the secret pact that would govern their relationship with Gotti for as long as it lasted. Dico said, “John’s [ __ ] ego is too big. I could be his under boss, but he couldn’t be mine.
Look, he’s got balls. He’s got brains. He’s got charisma. If we can control him to stop the gambling and all of his flamboyant [ __ ] he could be a good boss. Sammy, I’ll tell you what. We’ll give him a shot. Let him be the boss. If it don’t work within a year, me and you, we’ll kill him. I’ll become the boss, and you’ll be my underboss, and we’ll run the family, right? The offer was cold, transactional, and entirely serious.
The Chico was not speculating about what might happen if Gotti failed. He was making a binding agreement with Graano that if Gotti’s ego, his gambling, or his love of publicity destroyed the family’s operational security within one year, the two of them would remove him and take over themselves. It was an insurance policy, a failafe, and a demonstration of the kind of conditional loyalty that actually governed relationships at the top of organized crime families, where trust was always provisional and where the consequences of bad leadership were
severe enough that even the men who put a boss in power reserved the right to kill him if he failed. Gravano agreed. The two men committed to supporting John Gotti’s conspiracy against Paul Castaniano and they did so with the understanding that their support came with an expiration date. The conspiracy expanded.
John Gotti, Angelo Ruggerro, Frank Diko, Sammy Gravano, Joseph Joe Piny, Armoni, and others formed the group that would later be referred to as the fist. Dico’s role was specific and essential. He was close to Paul Castiano. He had credibility with the boss. He could arrange a meeting that Castiano would attend without suspicion and he could provide the information about timing and location that the shooters would need to carry out the hit.
Do was not going to pull the trigger himself. He was going to deliver the target. And on December 16th, 1985, that is exactly what he did. The conspiracy had its support. The target had his meeting and the clock on John Gotti’s one-year trial period would start the moment Paul Castelliano stopped breathing. December 16th, 1985, Paul Castellano and Thomas Botti were driving through Midtown Manhattan in a Lincoln Sedan with tinted windows headed to a meeting at Spark Steakhouse on East 46th Street near Third Avenue.
A meeting that Frank Dico had arranged and that neither of them would survive. The location was deliberate. Sparks was a well-known restaurant in the heart of Manhattan. The kind of place where businessmen and mobsters alike could meet without attracting undue attention. And the fact that the meeting was happening during rush hour on a busy street meant that the shooters would have cover in the crowds of holiday shoppers and commuters moving through the area.
The Chico had tipped Gotti off about the meeting. Gotta and Gravano were sitting in a parked car nearby, watching as Castiano’s Lincoln pulled up to the curb in front of the restaurant at approximately 5:16 in the afternoon. Three or four hitmen were waiting outside the entrance, dressed in white trench coats and Russian fur hats that concealed their faces and made them blend into the winter crowd.
The disguises were functional, not theatrical. The men needed to be unrecognizable in the moments after the shooting when witnesses would be trying to describe what they had seen, and the long coats and fur hats gave them the anonymity they needed to walk away from the scene without being chased or identified.
Gotti gave the order over a walkie-talkie when Castiano’s car pulled up at a red light. Castiano and Bellotti exited the Lincoln and began walking toward the restaurant entrance. The gunman moved quickly. Castiano was shot six times. He collapsed beside a lampost on the sidewalk. Botti was shot four times.
He collapsed in the street about 2 yards from the sidewalk and died where he fell. Both men were killed almost instantly. The shooting lasted seconds. By the time bystanders realized what was happening, the shooters were already moving away from the scene, disappearing into the crowd with the kind of speed and coordination that comes from careful planning.
John Gotti and Sammy Gravano drove past the scene slowly to confirm that both men were dead. They saw the bodies. They saw the police arriving. They left the area and went back to Queens, where the rest of the conspirators were waiting for confirmation that the hit had been completed. The murder of Paul Castiano was one of the most public and spectacular mob assassinations in American history.
Carried out in the middle of Manhattan during rush hour with dozens of witnesses present. and it sent a message that was impossible to ignore. John Gotti had removed the boss of the Gambino family without seeking approval from the commission, the governing body that was supposed to authorize such actions. And in doing so, he had violated the most fundamental rule of Kosanostra, that a boss could only be killed with the permission of the other families.
Paul Castaniano had been an ally of Vincent Gagante, the boss of the Genevesei crime family, and Gagante controlled the commission at a time when most of the other New York bosses were either dead or in prison as a result of the commission trial that had been concluded earlier that year. The message that came back from the Genevese family after Castiano’s murder was clear and unambiguous.
The situation with Paul had to be put to rest. Somebody would have to answer for what had been done. If and when the commission ever got together again, there would be consequences. The Gambino family had a new boss, and every other family in New York knew exactly how he had taken power, which meant that sooner or later, someone was going to have to answer for what John Gotti and Frank Diko had just done.
It was an open secret that John Gotti had been the one behind the hit. And by the time the Gambino family formally acknowledged it, the only question left was how long his reign would last and whether the one-year trial period Frank Deco and Sammy Gravano had privately imposed would be enough time for Gotti to prove he could control himself.
The official recognition came on January 15th, 1986 when a meeting of 20 Gambino capos was held to formalize the new leadership structure. The meeting was not a democratic process. It was a ratification of something that had already been decided. But the ritual mattered because it established the legitimacy of the new regime in the eyes of the family and the other New York organizations.
When Frank Diko stood up and nominated John Gotti for the position of boss, there was no opposition. Gotti was a claim by consensus and the family that Paul Castiano had ruled for nine years passed into the hands of a man whose approach to leadership would prove to be the opposite of everything Castillano had valued.
Gotti selected Frank Do as his underboss in return for Dsiko’s loyalty and his role in planning the Castayano hit. It was the position the Chico had earned by betraying the boss who had made him powerful. And it was the position that would make him a target. Four months later, when Vincent Jagante decided that the bill for Paul Castiano’s murder was going to come due, at the same meeting, Toto Aello, one of the family’s older capos, announced his desire to step down from active leadership.
Sammy Gravano was elevated to Capo and given control of Aurela’s crew, which meant that all three men who had made the secret pact about Gotti’s one-year trial period were now in positions of authority. Gotti was boss. The Chiko was under boss. Gravano was a capo with a powerful crew and the trust of both men above him.
The arrangement appeared stable. The Chico took control of all the white collar rackets that had once belonged to the Castiano faction of the family. The construction operations, the labor union positions, the concrete business, all of it flowed through Chico now and the profits were substantial. Gotti moved his headquarters to the Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy, a storefront on Malberry Street that would become famous as the place where the FBI finally gathered the evidence that put Gotti away for life. But in January of
1986, the Ravenite was simply the new center of power for a family that had just undergone a violent change in leadership. And the men who gathered there believed that they had successfully navigated a transition that could have torn the organization apart. The institutional problem, however, had not gone away.
The other families had not approved the hit on Castayano. The Genovves family’s recognition of the new leadership came with a caveat that everyone understood. A rule had been broken. The situation with Paul had to be put to rest. Somebody would have to answer for it if and when the commission ever got together again. Vincent Chagante, the Genevese boss who controlled what was left of the commission after the convictions of the other New York bosses, was particularly enraged.
Castiano had been his ally in business and the two men had made significant money together through joint ventures that crossed family lines. More importantly, Jagante understood that if Gotti could kill a boss without commission approval and get away with it, then the commission’s authority meant nothing, and the structure that had kept the five families from tearing each other apart for decades would collapse.
The one-year clock was now running on John Gotti’s trial period. Frank Deo and Sammy Gravano were watching to see if Gotti could control his gambling, his flamboyance, and his ego. The early signs were not promising. Gotti embraced media attention in a way that made older mobsters uncomfortable. He dressed in expensive suits, held court publicly, and seemed to enjoy the fact that reporters and photographers followed him wherever he went.
It was exactly the kind of behavior that Diko had warned about when he made the secret pact with Graano. And it was exactly the kind of behavior that would eventually give the FBI everything it needed to destroy him. But in January of 1986, the one-year trial period had just begun, and Frank Deo was still alive to enforce it if Gotti failed.
Four months later, that would no longer be true. Frank Deo became under boss on January 15th, 1986. He would hold the position for less than four months, which meant the one-year trial period he and Sammy Gravano had designed would never be completed because Vincent Jagante had already decided that the bill for Paul Castiano’s murder was going to come due a lot sooner than that.
John Gotti believed he had seized control of the Gambino family. Vincent Jagante believed Gotti had signed his own death warrant and by early 1986 the Genevese boss had already begun assembling the team that would carry out the execution. Jagante had been born on March the 29th, 1928 and by 1981 he was the boss of the Genevese crime family, the largest and most powerful of the five New York families.
He was famous or would later become famous for feigning insanity wandering the streets of Greenwich Village in a bathrobe and slippers while actually running an organization that generated an estimated $100 million a year. The Bathrobe act was a performance designed to prevent prosecution and it worked for nearly 30 years.
But in 1986, Chigante was not pretending to be confused about what needed to happen to John Gotti and Frank Dico. He was entirely lucid and he was planning a murder. The problem from Jagante’s perspective was not that Paul Castiano was dead. Bosses died. The problem was that Gotti had killed Castiano without seeking the commission’s approval.
And if that violation went unpunished, then the commission’s authority would evaporate and the five families would descend into the kind of open warfare that had nearly destroyed organized crime in New York during earlier decades. Giganti controlled the commission at a time when most of the other bosses were imprisoned and he understood that maintaining the commission’s power meant enforcing its rules even when that enforcement required killing the boss of another family.
He reached out to the Lucesy family, specifically to Anthony Tony Du Carallo, who was the Lucesi boss, and to Victor Vic Amuzo and Anthony Gaspip Casto, who were rising stars in the Lucesi organization and who would soon take over the family when Caralo went to prison. Gigante and Carlo made the decision together. They were going to kill John Gotti, Frank Dico, and every other conspirator involved in the Castellano assassination.
The hit would be carried out by a Muso and Casso, and the method would be a car bomb, which was unusual because bombs had long been forbidden in the American mafia. The reason for the prohibition was simple. Bombs were indiscriminate. They killed bystanders. They attracted enormous law enforcement attention.
They violated the unwritten rule that mob violence should be targeted and contained, not explosive in public. But Jagante wanted to use a bomb for precisely those reasons. If the Gambinos were killed by a bomb, they would assume that Sicilian mafiosi were responsible. Because Sicilian organized crime groups were notorious for using explosives.
The bomb would deflect suspicion away from the Genovves and Lucasi families, and it would send a message to everyone in New York that the commission’s revenge was not just lethal, but terrifying. Anthony Casso and Frank Dico had a history. In 1973, the two men had worked together robbing diamond dealers and hijacking trucks throughout New York State.
They had been partners, or at least colleagues, in the kind of low-level but profitable crime that young mobsters used to prove themselves before being promoted to more significant positions. 15 years later, Castle was being asked to help kill the man he had once worked alongside. And he agreed without hesitation because by 1986, they were serving different bosses with different interests.
And whatever bond they had formed in 1973 no longer mattered. Castle selected the man who would actually plant and detonate the bomb. His name was Herbert Blue Eyes Pot and he was a Genevese family associate, a former US Army munitions expert and a drug dealer who had the technical knowledge to build an improvised explosive device that would work reliably under field conditions.
Pot was chosen for two reasons. First, he had no connection to the Gambino family, which meant he could stake out to Chico and Gordi without being recognized by anyone who might warn them. Second, he knew how to build bombs. The device he constructed used C4 plastic explosive and a mechanism taken from a remote control toy car, which allowed him to detonate the bomb from a distance using a handheld transmitter.
The bomb was placed in a brown bag which would later be left under Frank Deco’s Buick Electra in Brooklyn. And the plan was simple. Wait for Gotti and Deco to attend a meeting together. Plant the bomb under Deico’s car. Wait for both men to approach the vehicle and detonate the device remotely.
Both men would be killed. The revenge for Paul Castano’s murder would be delivered. The commission’s authority would be restored. By early April of 1986, everything was ready. Patty had the bomb. Caso had identified the location where Gotti and Diko were scheduled to meet. All they needed was for the two men to show up at the same place at the same time and the plan could be executed on Sunday, April 13th, 1986.
That is exactly what was supposed to happen and it almost did except for one detail that saved John Gotti’s life and ended Frankos. By early April 1986, Herbert Pate had the device ready. Anthony Castle had identified the location and all they needed was for John Gotti and Frank Dico to show up at the same place at the same time, which they did on Sunday, April 13th at a social club in Brooklyn, where Frank Diko would make a joke about a bomb under his car moments before one actually exploded. April 13th, 1986,
Frank Diko drove his 1985 Buick Electra to the Veterans and Friends social club in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn for a meeting with James Fiella and other Gambino members, not knowing that a brown bag containing a remotec controlled bomb had already been placed beneath the car and that the man holding the detonator was watching from 100 yards away.
The Veterans and Friends Social Club was located on 86th Street in a quiet residential and commercial area of Brooklyn. It was run by James Jimmy Brown Fila. The Gambino Capo, who had been Frank Deiko’s mentor and the man Deiko had once described as his rabbi. The club was a front like most mob social clubs, a place where members could meet without attracting attention from law enforcement or civilians who might ask too many questions about why a group of middle-aged men spent so much time sitting in a storefront drinking
coffee and playing cards. John Goti and Frank Deo were both scheduled to attend the meeting that afternoon. Herbert Pate had arrived earlier carrying two grocery bags, walking casually toward the area where the Chico’s Buick was parked. He approached the car, dropped one of the grocery bags near the vehicle and squatted down as if to pick up the spilled contents.
While in that position, he reached under the car and attached the C4 bomb to the underside of the vehicle. The whole process took seconds. Pate stood up, gathered his grocery bags, and walked away without anyone noticing what he had done. He moved to a position about a 100 yards away where he had a clear line of sight to the car and he waited.
Victor Amuzo and Anthony Casto were also nearby sitting in a parked car with a police scanner monitoring law enforcement frequencies in case the operation needed to be aborted. The three men, Pate, Amuzo, and Casso were executing a plan that had been authorized by Vincent Jagante and Anthony Caralo. And they were doing so with the understanding that if the hit succeeded, the Genevese and Luke families would have sent a message to every other organization in New York that unsanctioned boss killings would be met with lethal retaliation.
Inside the Veterans and Friends social club, the meeting proceeded. Frank Dico was there. James Fia was there. Sammy Gravano was also present attending in place of John Gotti because earlier that day Gotti had called the club and said he could not make it. He told the seco to meet him later at the Ravenite social club in Manhattan.
That last minute cancellation saved John Gotti’s life. At some point during the meeting, Frank Frankie Harts Bolino arrived at the club. Bolino was a Lucesy family soldier who had a legal problem and wanted the business card of a lawyer who could represent him. The Chico told him the card was in the glove compartment of his car.
The two men left the club together and walked toward the Buick, which was parked across the street. As they approached the vehicle, the seco noticed the brown bag that was visible underneath the car. He stopped, looked at the bag, and said to Bolino, “There’s probably a bomb under my car. It was a joke.” The Chico had no reason to believe there was actually a bomb under his car.
And the comment was the kind of dark humor that men in his profession used to acknowledge the everpresent possibility of violence without taking it too seriously in any given moment. Seconds later, he got into the passenger seat of the Buick to search the glove compartment for the lawyer’s business card. Bolino stood outside the car near the driver’s side door.
Herbert Pat was watching from his position 100 yards away. He saw Bolino approached the car. He saw someone get into the vehicle. He believed he was looking at John Gotti because Frank Bolino reportedly bore a startling resemblance to Gotti and Pate had been told that both Gotti and Dicko would be at the meeting.
Pat assumed the man standing next to the car was Gotti. He pushed the button on the remote detonator. The C4 explosive detonated at 1:45 in the afternoon. The car burst into a massive fireball. The explosion was so powerful that it shattered windows across the street, ruptured a nearby gas mane and sent body fragments scattering across the sidewalk.
Frank Dico was killed instantly. The blast dismembered him. One leg was blown off. One arm was severed. His lower body was completely destroyed. Frank Bolino was thrown backwards by the force of the explosion. His shoes were blown off. He lost several toes but survived with serious injuries that would affect him for the rest of his life.
Patrol officer Carmine Romeo, who was 35 years old and happened to be passing by in a police car, saw the explosion and ran to the scene. He pulled both men away from the burning wreckage of the Buick, extinguished their burning clothes with his hands, and called for emergency medical assistance. Romeo suffered smoke inhalation from the rescue attempt.
A woman who had been nearby suffered an asthma attack triggered by the smoke and the shock of what she had just witnessed. She was treated at a hospital and released. Witnesses who saw the explosion described the scene as looking like Beirut. Vinnie Varial, an area resident, later told reporters, “I saw the back of the car and all of a sudden a flash of light.
There was a cloud of black smoke like a mushroom. The whole car came completely out from the inside. Parts were all over the place. Only a shell was left. Sammy Gravano was inside the club or had just stepped outside when the bomb went off. He heard the explosion and ran toward the scene. What he saw when he arrived would stay with him for the rest of his life.
And years later, after he had become a government witness and testified against John Gotti, he described the aftermath of the bombing in graphic detail that conveyed both the horror of what had happened and his own attempt to help a man who was already beyond saving. Gravano said, “Franky Harts goes flying backwards.
The blast blew his shoes off and his toes. I go flying across the street and there’s Frankie Harts with the blood shooting out of his feet. I saw Frankie Deco laying on the ground beside the car. With the fire, it could blow up again. I tried to pull him away. I grabbed the leg, but he ain’t coming with it.
The leg is off. One of his arms is off. I got my hand under him, and my hand went right through his body to his stomach. There’s no ass. His ass, his balls, everything is blown completely off. I was wearing a white shirt. I looked at my shirt, amazed. There wasn’t a drop of blood on it.
The force of the blast, the concussion, blew most of the fluids out of Frankie’s body. He had no blood left in him. Nothing, not an ounce. The bomb that was meant to kill John Gotti had instead killed the man who had helped put Gotti in power. and Sammy Gravano standing on a Brooklyn street with his hands covered in what was left of Frank Diko now understood that the war Vincent Jagante had promised was not a threat for the future but a reality that had already begun.
The explosion outside the Veterans and Friends social club accomplished everything Vincent Jagante had intended except the part that mattered most which was killing John Gotti. But it did send a message that every member of the Gambino family understood. The commission had not forgotten about Paul Castaniano and someone had just paid the first installment on a debt that was not yet settled. Frank Dico died instantly.
Frank Bolino survived but would carry the physical consequences of the explosion for the rest of his life. Sammy Graano, who had witnessed the carnage and attempted to pull the Chico’s body away from the burning car, was physically unharmed, but understood that he had just come close to being killed himself.
Because if John Gotti had attended the meeting as originally planned, Graano would likely have left the club with both men, and the bomb might have detonated while all three of them were near the vehicle. The FBI and the New York Police Department immediately suspected that the bombing was revenge for the Castiano assassination. The use of a carb bomb was unusual in American mafia history, and investigators understood that the method had been chosen for a specific reason, either to make the Gambinos believe that Sicilian mafiosi were responsible or
simply to terrify the surviving members of the conspiracy. Years later, DEA supervising agent Edward Magnuson would testify that a confidential informant had told him that John Gotti was very angry relative to the murder of Frank Tatiko and that when Gotti was out on bail or when his trial was over, there was going to be a war and Jon would take his revenge.
But in April of 1986, Gotti’s immediate response was not to start a war. His immediate response was to consolidate the family’s unity in the face of an external threat. Gotti instructed all Gambino made men and associates to attend Frank Deo’s wake. The wake was held over two days at a funeral home near the bombing site and the turnout was massive.
It was a show of strength, a demonstration that the Gambino family was still intact despite the loss of its underboss and a message to the other families that Gotti was not going to be intimidated by the bombing. But the wake was also notable for what did not happen. The Roman Catholic Dascese of Brooklyn denied Frank Deco a funeral mass before the burial.
The church issued a statement saying that the mass should be delayed for the sake of the Deco family and to honor the somnity of the occasion. It was a rare public rebuke from an institution that usually avoided commenting on the criminal activities of its members. And it showed how notorious the Tiko’s crimes were and how unwilling the church was to be seen as blessing or legitimizing a man whose life had been defined by violence and organized crime.
John Gotti appointed Joseph Armon as underboss to replace the Chico. Armon was a capo who had been part of the conspiracy against Castellaniano and his promotion ensured that the leadership structure remained in the hands of men who had supported Gotti’s rise to power. But the larger consequence of Diko’s death had nothing to do with the organizational chart.
The larger consequence was that the secret pack between Frank Deo and Sammy Gravano was now void. The Chico had been under boss for less than four months from January 15th to April 13th, 1986. The one-year trial period for John Gotti, the agreement that if Gotti did not work out within one year, Diko and Gravano would kill him and run the family themselves, had ended at 4 months.
The insurance policy was worthless because the man who had designed it was dead. Sammy Gravano was now alone with his knowledge that Frank Deo had been right about John Gotti. Gotti’s ego, his gambling, his love of publicity. All the flaws that the Chico had identified when he made the secret pact were already becoming visible in the way Gotti operated as boss.
But Gravano no longer had a partner who could act on that knowledge if the situation required it. He no longer had the agreement that gave him the institutional backing to remove Gotti if Gotti failed. He was a capo in a family run by a boss whose weaknesses had already been diagnosed. And he would have to decide for himself over the next several years whether to remain loyal to that boss or eventually act on the concerns that the had articulated before the bomb under the Buick exploded.
John Gotti’s rage about Frank Dico’s death was documented by law enforcement through confidential informants. But despite his threats of war and revenge, no successful retaliation was ever carried out against Vincent Jagante, Anthony Castle, or Victor Amuso. Gigante was too powerful and too well protected.
His organizational structure which used a front boss to absorb law enforcement attention while Gigante operated invisibly in the background made him nearly impossible to target. Kaso and Amuso were rising stars in the Lucesi family and any move against them would have required the kind of interf family coordination that Gotti as a new boss without commission approval did not have the institutional standing to organize.
The bomb had worked as intended. It had terrified the Gambino leadership. It had demonstrated that the commission’s authority, even in its weakened state, was still capable of lethal enforcement. And it had ended the one-year trial period that Frank Deco and Sammy Gravano had designed before John Gotti ever had the chance to fail it.
The one-year trial period that Frank Deo and Sammy Gravano had privately imposed on John Gotti ended after four months, which meant no one would ever know whether Gotti would have failed the Chico’s test. But 5 years later, Sammy Gravano would answer the question anyway when he sat in a federal courtroom and testified against the boss that Frank Do had never trusted in the first place.
Everything Frank Tiko had worried about when he made the secret pact with Sammy Graano came true. It just took longer than one year to destroy John Gotti. But by December of 1990, the Dapper Don’s love of publicity, his inability to control his ego, and his assumption that loyalty was a one-way obligation had finally given the FBI everything it needed to put him away for life.
Gotti’s reign as boss of the Gambino family lasted from January of 1986 until his arrest in December of 1990. During those years, he became the most famous mobster in America, known as the Dapper Dawn because of his expensive suits and his groomed public image and as the Teflon Dawn because he had beaten multiple prosecutions through jury tampering, witness intimidation, and legal maneuvering that made him seem untouchable.
He embraced media attention in a way that no mob boss before him had done. He held court publicly at the Ravenite Social Club on Malberry Street in Little Italy. He was photographed leaving court appearances, attending neighborhood events, and walking through the streets of New York as if he were a celebrity rather than the head of a criminal organization.
It was exactly the kind of flamboyant behavior that Frank Diko had warned about when he told Gravano that if they could control Gotti and stop his gambling and all of his flamboyant [ __ ] he could be a good boss. They could not control him. And the flamboyant [ __ ] became the primary tool the FBI used to build a case that would finally convict him.
The FBI placed John Gotti under intense surveillance. They followed him. They photographed him. They identified everyone who met with him and most importantly they planted listening devices in an apartment above the Ravenite Social Club at 247 Malberry Street where Gotti held sensitive meetings that he believed were secure.
The tapes that came from those bugs captured Gotti discussing his position as boss, acknowledging his role in ordering murders, and attempting to frame Sammy Graano, his own underboss, as the primary force behind killings that Gotti himself had authorized. One conversation recorded on December 12th, 1990 became particularly damaging.
Gardi was talking with Frank Locashio, his consiliary, and during that conversation, Gardi explicitly acknowledged ordering the murders of Robert Dernardo and Liboro Milito. Milito had been one of Sammy Graano’s closest partners, a man Gravano had worked with for years, and Gotti’s decision to have him killed, followed by his attempt to blame Graano for the murder, created the rift that would eventually lead Gravano to turn informant.
The problem for Gravano was not just that Gotti had ordered Molito’s death. The problem was that on the wiretaps, Gotti was describing Gravano as too greedy, as someone who was pushing the family into risky operations for his own benefit and as the main force behind several murders that Gotti had actually authorized himself. Gotti was setting Gravano up to take the fall for crimes they had both committed.
And Gravano hearing those tapes after his arrest understood that his loyalty to Gotti had been on one directional. Gotti expected Gravano to remain loyal even as Gotti prepared to sacrifice him to protect himself. It was a violation of the fundamental understanding between a boss and his underboss.
And it was the kind of betrayal that Frank Chico might have predicted if he had lived long enough to see how Gotti operated under pressure. John Gotti, Sammy Graano, and Frank Locashio were arrested in December of 1990 on charges that included murder, racketeering, lone sharking, illegal gambling, tax evasion, and obstruction of justice.
Gravanao was facing life in prison if convicted. His lawyer, Bruce Cutler, who had successfully defended Gotti in previous trials, was barred from the case due to a conflict of interest, which left Gravano without the attorney who had kept him out of prison in the past. Gotti attempted to reconcile with Gravano to reassure him that everything would be fine and that they would beat the charges together, but Gravano had heard the wire taps.
He knew that Gotti was trying to frame him. He knew that his chances of winning his case were minimal, and he knew that the only way to avoid spending the rest of his life in prison was to do something that no underboss of a major New York crime family had ever done before. On November 13th, 1991, Sammy Gravano formally agreed to turn states evidence and testify against John Gotti.
Gravano’s decision made him the highest ranking member of a New York crime family to turn informant up to that point in history. He agreed to plead guilty to a single count of racketeering, to confess his involvement in 19 murders, and to testify in detail about John Gotti’s role in running the Gambino family and ordering killings.
In exchange, the government would drop most of the charges against him and recommend a reduced sentence that would allow him to avoid life in prison. It was a calculated decision, the same kind of pragmatic survival calculation that Frank Dico had made when he decided to support the conspiracy against Paul Castiano.
And it was a decision that Dico himself might have made in 1986 if he had lived long enough to see John Gotti’s one-year trial period fail. except Gravano was testifying for the government, not executing Gotti in a basement, which meant the secret pack that was supposed to preserve the Gambino family instead became the testimony that destroyed it.
The trial began in January of 1992 with an anonymous jury that was for the first time in a Brooklyn federal case fully sequestered during the proceedings because Jean Gotti’s reputation for jury tampering was well established and the government was not going to let him walk away a fourth time. And when Sammy Gravano walked into the courtroom on March 2nd to testify, John Gotti understood that the one man who could destroy him was about to do exactly that.
The trial was held in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York before Judge Fiends Leo Glasser. Jury selection had begun in January, and the decision to use an anonymous, fully sequestered jury was unprecedented in Brooklyn federal court. The jurors were not identified by name. They were escorted to and from the courthouse by federal marshals.
They were kept away from all media coverage of the trial. The entire process was designed to prevent John Gotti from using the intimidation and bribery tactics that had allowed him to beat three previous prosecutions. The prosecution’s opening statements began on February 12th, 1992. The prosecutors, Andrew Maloney and John Gleason, built their case around two pillars.
The first was the wiretap conversations from the apartment above the Ravenite, which captured Gotti in his own words, acknowledging his role as boss and discussing murders he had ordered. The second was Sammy Gravano, who would provide the insider testimony that no amount of wire taps could replace because Gravano had been in the room for meetings, murders, and conspiracies that the FBI had never recorded.
On March 2nd, Sammy Graano took the stand. He testified for days. He described in detail the conspiracy to assassinate Paul Castano. He explained how the plan was formed, who was involved, how Frank Diko arranged the meeting at Spark Steakhouse, and how John Gotti and Gravano sat in a parked car and watched as the shooters killed Castillano and Bilotti.
He confirmed Gotti’s place in the structure of the Gambino family. He described the internal workings of the organization in ways that only an underboss could describe them, and he confessed to 19 murders implicating Got D in four of them. The defense attorneys, Anthony Cardali, representing Frank Locashio and others representing Gotti, attempted to discredit Graano during cross-examination.
They pointed out his lengthy criminal history. They accused him of lying to save himself. They suggested that he was the real power behind the murders and that he was now blaming Goti to reduce his own sentence. But they were unable to shake Gravano’s testimony. He remained calm, detailed, and consistent throughout hours of questioning.
He acknowledged his own crimes. He did not attempt to minimize his role in the organization or the violence he had committed. He simply told the court what had happened, who had ordered what, and how the Gambino family had operated under John Gotti’s leadership. The government rested its case on March 24th. The defense called few witnesses.
John Gotti’s behavior during the trial became increasingly hostile. He interrupted proceedings. He made outbursts from the defense table. He called Sammy Graano a junkie in open court. Judge Glasser threatened to remove him from the courtroom if he could not control himself. Among other outbursts, Gotti compared the dismissal of a juror to the fixing of the 1919 World Series, a comment that reflected both his frustration and his understanding that the jury tampering tactics that had saved him before were not going to work this time.
On April 2nd, 1992, after only 14 hours of deliberation, the jury returned its verdict. John Gotti was found guilty in all charges. Frank Locashio was also convicted in all but one count. The speed of the deliberation showed that the jury had little doubt about the evidence or the testimony they had heard.
On June 23rd, 1992, Judge Glasser sentenced John Gotti to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole and a fine of $250,000. The judge described the sentence as appropriate given the scope and severity of Gotti’s crimes. Gotti was transferred to the United States Penitentiary in Marian, Illinois, one of the most secure federal prisons in the country, and later to the federal medical center in Springfield, Missouri, where he would spend the rest of his life.
Sammy Graano, in accordance with his plea agreement, received a sentence of 5 years in prison. Because he had already served four years in custody while awaiting trial, the sentence amounted to less than one additional year. He was released in 1994 and entered the federal witness protection program. John Gotti received life in prison without the possibility of parole on June 23rd, 1992, which meant that the boss, Frank Diko and Sammy Gravano had decided to give one year to prove himself had instead taken six years to destroy the
Gambino family. the commission and what was left of the code that said a made man never testified against his boss, which Sammy Gravano had just done, and which Frank Dico might have applauded or condemned, depending on whether he believed the secret pact he made in 1985, was an agreement to preserve the family, or simply an agreement between two calculating men who understood that loyalty in their world had always been conditional.
The secret pack that Frank Deo and Sammy Gravano made in late 1985 was not a romantic gesture or a moment of brotherhood. It was a business arrangement between two men who understood that leadership in organized crime was conditional, that loyalty extended only as far as competence allowed, and that even the boss they were about to install could be removed if he failed to meet the standards they had set for him.
The one-year trial period was insurance, and like all insurance, it was designed to protect the people who bought it from risks they could see coming but could not prevent. Frank Diko saw the risks in John Gotti clearly. He articulated them precisely when he told Gravano that God’s ego was too big, that his gambling and his flamboyant behavior could destroy the family if left unchecked, and that giving him one year to prove he could control himself was the safest way to manage a transition that was going to happen, whether they liked it or not.
The problem was that the insurance policy expired 4 months after it was written. And it expired because the meno and Goti had betrayed to seize power decided that someone would have to pay for Paul Castellano’s murder long before John Goti’s one-year trial period could produce a verdict.
Frank Dico’s death on April 13th, 1986 was not random mob violence. It was institutional revenge authorized by Vincent Jagante and carried out by Anthony Casso and Victor Amuso under orders from the commission. The decision to use a car bomb was deliberate. Bombs were forbidden in the American mafia because they were indiscriminate and because they attracted the kind of law enforcement attention that made all mob activity more dangerous.
But Jagante used a bomb anyway, specifically because he wanted to terrify the Gambinos and because he wanted them to believe that Sicilian mafiosi were responsible, which would deflect blame away from the Genevies and Lucesi families and prevent an immediate retaliation that could escalate into a war. The bomb worked.
It killed the SECO. It terrified the Gambinos. and it sent the message that unsanctioned boss killings would be punished with the kind of brutality that left no room for misunderstanding. The irony is that the bomb missed its primary target. John Gotti was supposed to be at the Veterans and Friends social club that day.
He was supposed to leave the meeting with Frank Deco. He was supposed to walk to the car with Diko and when the bomb detonated, both men were supposed to die. But Gotti canled at the last minute and Herbert Pate watching from a 100 yards away mistook Frank Bolino for Gotti and detonated the bomb when he saw Bolino approached the car.
The operational failure however did not diminish the strategic success. The message was sent. The Gambinos understood that the commission had not forgotten about Paul Castiano. And Frank Diko, who had helped put John Gotti in power with the understanding that Gotti could be removed if he failed, was now dead, which meant the one-year trial period was over before it began.
Sammy Gravano stood on a Brooklyn street on April the 13th, 1986, trying to pull Frank Diko away from a burning car and his hands went through Diko’s body to his stomach and the leg he grabbed came off in his hands and the white shirt he was wearing had no blood on it because the blast had blown all the fluids out of Diko’s body.
Gravano was alone now with the knowledge that the Chico had been right about John Gotti. Over the next four years, that knowledge would be confirmed repeatedly as Gotti’s ego, his publicity seeking, and his inability to maintain discipline brought the FBI closer and closer to building a case that no jury tampering could defeat. By November of 1991, when Gravano agreed to turn informant, he was making the same calculation that Diko might have made if he had lived to see the one-year trial period fail.
The difference was that Gravana was testifying for the government instead of executing Gauti in a basement, which meant the end result was the same. The removal of a boss who had failed to meet the standards set for him. But the method was the one thing Deco would never have chosen because it violated the code that said a made man never cooperated with law enforcement no matter what. Frank Deiko died at age 50.
Four months into the one-year trial period, he designed to evaluate John Gotti’s fitness to lead. John Gotti died on June 10th, 2002 at the Federal Medical Center in Springfield, Missouri at age 61 from throat cancer after serving 10 years of a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Vincent Jagante died at the same facility on December 19th, 2005, 3 years after Gotta, also at age 77.
Sammy Graano served 5 years in prison, was released, entered the witness protection program, left the program in 1995, and was arrested again in 2000 on drug trafficking charges along with his wife and children. He served 20 years for those charges and was released in 2017. Anthony Casso, who helped plan the bomb that killed the seco, turned informant in the 1990s, was later dropped from the witness protection program for lying to investigators and died in prison on December 15th, 2020 from COVID 19.
The Veterans and Friends Social Club in Brooklyn still stands. The Ravenite Social Club on Malberry Street in Manhattan, where John Gotti was finally caught on tape acknowledging his crimes, is now a shoe store. The secret pact between Frank Deco and Sammy Gravano remained secret for years, known only to the two men who made it, and it became public only after Gravano turned informant and began describing the internal dynamics of the conspiracy against Paul Castayano.
What it revealed was that mob leadership, at least at the level where Dico and Gravano operated, was far more calculating and conditional than the public mythology of honor and loyalty suggested. The one-year trial period was not a test of John Gotti’s moral character. It was a test of his operational competence and the fact that Diko and Gravano reserved the right to kill him if he failed showed that they understood something fundamental about organized crime that many outsiders miss. Loyalty in that world was
provisional. It extended as far as mutual benefit allowed. And when Abos’s failures threatened the survival of the people beneath him, those people did not hesitate to remove him, whether through assassination or in Gravano’s case, through testimony that sent him to prison for life. Frank Dico made a calculated gamble that giving John Gotti one year as boss was safer than fighting him for power.
But the bomb that killed the Chico four months later showed that the most dangerous threat was not Goti’s ego or his flamboyance. The most dangerous threat was the institutional forces that both men had ignored when they killed Paul Castayano without commission approval. The one-year trial period never mattered because the bill came due at 4 months.
The insurance policy expired worthless because the man who designed it was scattered across a Brooklyn sidewalk before it could be tested. And the question of whether John Gotti would have failed Frank Deco’s evaluation became irrelevant the moment the bomb exploded because the Chico was no longer alive to enforce the consequences and Sammy Graano standing alone with the knowledge that theo had been right would eventually make his own decision about how to deal with a boss who had failed every standard they had set for him. Frank Dico told Sammy
Gravano that if John Gotti didn’t work out within a year, they would kill him and run the family right. But the Chico never made it to that deadline, which means the last thing he learned before the bomb exploded was that he had been correct about Gotti’s recklessness, but wrong about which enemy would strike First.
