April 2nd, 1992 a federal courtroom in Brooklyn. The jury has been deliberating for 14 hours, and when they file back in, everyone in the room already knows what is coming. The defendant sits at the defense table in a well-tailored suit, silver-haired, composed, the same man who has walked out of courtrooms three times before with acquittals that the tabloids turned into mythology.
The same man the New York press had been calling the Teflon Don for the better part of a decade. The man whose criminal charges had never stuck, whose witnesses forgot what they had seen, whose jurors came back with the wrong verdict for the prosecution, the right verdict for the organization.
This time the verdict is different, guilty on all 13 counts, murder, conspiracy to commit murder, racketeering, obstruction of justice, tax evasion, illegal gambling, extortion, loan sharking. Five specific named and proven. Life in prison without the possibility of parole. $250,000 in fines. James Fox, the head of the FBI’s New York office, stood at a podium afterward and delivered the line that will be quoted in every account of the case for the next 30 years.
The Teflon is gone, Fox said. The Don is covered with Velcro and all the charges stuck. It was a clean verdict. It was a complete verdict. It covered the five murders the government had been able to prove, the five killings that made it into the indictment, the five names that appear in the formal legal record as the documented homicidal career of John Joseph Gotti Jr.
Five is not the number. The indictment was what prosecutors could establish beyond a reasonable doubt in a courtroom in Brooklyn in the winter of 1992. The historical record, built from informant testimony, FBI files, cooperation agreements, guilty pleas entered years after the verdict, and the documented silence of investigations that were never opened, and bodies that were never found, tells a different story about the scope of what Gotti was.
Before anyone called him the Dapper Don, before the tabloids called him Teflon, before the suits and the cameras and the acquittals, there were the bodies, and most of them never got a courtroom. This is the complete history of John Gotti’s deadliest secret. The murders he was never charged for. Before we go any further, drop where you are watching from in the comments below.
It is genuinely one of the best parts of doing this. And if you are new here and want more history like this delivered straight to you, hit subscribe now. Back to the man the law could not catch for a while. James Fox’s remark about Velcro was satisfying in the moment, but it required a specific kind of amnesia about the preceding decade to land cleanly.
The Teflon Don mythology had always been, on closer examination, something other than what it appeared. The first of the three acquittals that built the myth came in March 1987, when Gotti and his co-defendants were cleared of federal racketeering charges. The second came in March 1986, when a refrigerator mechanic named Romuald Piecyk stood on the witness stand and announced he could not remember who had attacked him in a parking dispute 2 years earlier.
The New York Post ran the headline I Forgotti across its front page. It was later established that in the months before Piecyk’s appearance in court, Gambino associates had severed his brake lines, made threatening phone calls, and followed him through the streets of Queens. The third acquittal came in February 1990, when Gotti was cleared of assault charges related to an attack on labor union official John O’Connor.
The jury foreman in an earlier proceeding had been paid $60,000 in cash and given a Teamsters job worth $75,000 a year. Salvatore Gravano arranged the payment personally. The charges did not fail to stick because Gotti was innocent. They failed to stick because he was buying the verdicts and terrifying the witnesses.
That distinction matters. It matters because it changes what you think you are looking at when you examine the official record of John Gotti’s criminal career. The man who appeared untouchable was not untouchable. He was calculating and ruthless and for a long period extremely fortunate.
And the machinery of fear and money that he assembled around himself did what he designed it to do until it stopped working, until the one man inside the organization who knew everything decided he had heard enough of his boss’s voice on a recording blaming him for murders they had committed together. John Joseph Gotti Jr. was born on October 27th, 1940, the fifth of 13 children in a South Bronx tenement to a day laborer who could not consistently feed the family he kept producing.
His father, John Joseph Gotti Sr., worked irregularly. He gambled. He moved the family from address to address across five boroughs without ever establishing anything that resembled stability. Gotti would say of his father years later, with the specific contempt of a man who had decided his resentment was a resource rather than a wound.
He never provided for the family. He never did nothing. He never earned nothing, and we never had nothing. By the time Gotti was 12, the family had settled in the East New York section of Brooklyn, a neighborhood already threaded through with the organizational infrastructure of the Gambino crime family. It was not a neighborhood where the mob was an abstraction or rumor.
It was present, specific, and visible. The men who ran things were known. The hierarchy was understood, and for a boy who had grown up watching his father fail at the most basic obligations of a provider, the men who commanded that hierarchy represented something his own home had never produced. The appearance of absolute authority, of consequence that followed from the decisions you made rather than the luck you were handed.
He began running errands for Carmine Fatico by 12. Fatico was a capo in what was then known as the Anastasia family, the organization that would become the Gambino crime family after Albert Anastasia’s murder in 1957. Through Fatico’s operation, Gotti met the man who would define the entire shape of his criminal ambitions. Aniello Dellacroce, the family’s underboss, a man whose combination of street credibility and organizational cunning Gotti studied the way other young men studied the people they intended to become.
At 14, attempting to steal a cement mixer from a construction site, Gotti let it fall on his feet. The injury crushed his toes and left him with a permanent limp. He enrolled at Franklin K. Lane High School and dropped out at 16. He was described by people who knew him during those years as a bully with a talent for reading rooms, for understanding who in any given situation had the leverage and who did not.
By the time he was 18, the NYPD had him listed as a low-level associate in the Fatico crew. By 21, he had been arrested five times for petty crimes and had served almost no jail time. In March 1962, he married 17-year-old Victoria DiGiorgio, who was of half Italian and half Russian descent. He tried, briefly and unconvincingly, to work legitimately, taking a job as a presser in a coat factory, and then as an assistant truck driver. Neither lasted.
What lasted was the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, the storefront in Ozone Park that Fatico had established as the crew’s headquarters, named after Bergen Street where the crew originally operated, the misspelling preserved because no one thought it mattered. At the Bergin, Gotti found what his father’s home had never offered, structure, hierarchy, loyalty enforced by consequence, money that arrived in amounts that a day laborer’s wage could not approach.
He met Angelo Ruggiero, who would become his closest associate for decades. He carried out truck hijackings at JFK Airport with Ruggiero and his brother Gene. He was given the nicknames Black John and Crazy Horse. He befriended the future Bonanno boss Joseph Massino. He became, steadily and with evident appetite, exactly what the world around him was designed to produce.
In 1968, FBI agents arrested him for cargo thefts connected to the airport hijackings. He was convicted and sentenced to 3 years at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania. Released in 1972, he returned immediately to the Bergin under Fatico, managed the crew’s illegal gambling operation, and proved himself as an enforcer.
When Fatico was indicted on loan sharking charges that same year, he named Gotti acting capo, though the membership books were still closed and Gotti was not yet formally a made man. In his new role, he traveled regularly to Dellacroce’s headquarters at the Ravenite Social Club in Manhattan to brief the underboss.
Dellacroce, who had already taken a liking to Gotti, drew him closer. By the time Carlo Gambino assigned him to his first murder, John Gotti was 32 years old, had never held a legitimate job for more than a few months, and was already exactly what the people around him had always told him he was capable of becoming.
The first murder John Gotti was assigned to carry out was not a clean operation. In 1973, a man named James McBratney kidnapped Emanuel Gambino, the 29-year-old nephew of Carlo Gambino. The ransom was paid. McBratney killed Emanuel anyway and dumped his body. Carlo Gambino wanted McBratney found and killed. Gotti was assigned to a hit team alongside Angelo Ruggiero and a fellow enforcer named Ralph Galione.
The three men dressed as police detectives and attempted to abduct McBratney from a bar on Staten Island on May 22nd, 1973. When their attempt to lure him out failed and the situation collapsed into a brawl, Galione shot McBratney dead in front of witnesses while his accomplices held him.
Gotti was identified by eyewitnesses and by a police informant and arrested in June 1974. Carlo Gambino hired attorney Roy Cohn, a man whose legal career had already encompassed enough moral flexibility to prepare him for the task at hand. With Cohn’s negotiation, the murder charge was reduced to attempted manslaughter. Gotti pleaded guilty and served approximately 2 years of a 4-year sentence, released in July 1977.
The murder of James McBratney was never prosecuted as what it was, a planned organizational killing carried out on the orders of the boss of the Gambino crime family. It was reduced to a lesser charge, served at a fraction of the sentence, and closed. It was the first demonstration of a pattern that would repeat itself across the next two decades.
The charge that followed from Gotti’s violence was not the charge that matched the violence. Shortly after his release, according to sworn testimony delivered by Bonanno boss Joseph Massino in federal court in 2003 and again in 2011, Gotti killed for the second time in circumstances that no prosecutor ever addressed.
The victim was a man named Vito Borelli. Borelli was dating Connie, the daughter of Paul Castellano, who was at that point a powerful capo within the Gambino family. Borelli had made, in what must have seemed to him an ordinary moment, a remark about Castellano’s physical appearance, comparing it to that of Frank Perdue, the businessman who appeared in television commercials promoting his chicken company.
Castellano had a prominent beak-like nose. Perdue was known for a similar profile. Borelli, apparently amused, said something to this effect in conversation. The remark found its way back to Castellano. Castellano ordered the murder. Borelli was lured by Bonanno associate Anthony Rabito to a location in Midtown Manhattan at or near a warehouse property at 308 East 53rd Street.
According to Massino’s testimony, John Gotti, then an acting captain, was the triggerman with Gambino associate Joseph Watts alongside him. Members of both the Gambino and Bonanno families served as lookouts, including Massino himself. Borelli’s body was placed in the trunk of a car and transported to a location in or near South Ozone Park, Queens.
It was then, according to the available account, turned over to Gambino soldier Roy DeMeo, who disposed of it at the Fountain Avenue dump in Brooklyn, a site DeMeo used regularly for such purposes. What the record does establish is that the killing happened, that Gotti pulled the trigger on the direct order of his organizational superior, and that no prosecutor ever put the name Vito Borelli in an indictment next to the name John Gotti.
The pattern was already becoming clear, though at this stage there was no one positioned to see it whole. A murder carried out, the paperwork reduced or never opened, the body disposed of, the record closed before it properly began. On June 11th, 1970, DeSimone, together with Jimmy Burke and Henry Hill, beat a man named William Billy Batts Bentvena to death at a nightclub in Jamaica, Queens.
Bentvena had been released from prison that day after serving 6 years for narcotics trafficking. At a welcome-home party held in his honor at a club Hill operated, Bentvena made a joking remark to DeSimone about shining shoes, a reference to a job DeSimone had held years earlier. DeSimone heard it as an insult. Two weeks later, he and Burke and Hill caught Bentvena at the same club, beat him with a pistol, a shovel, and a tire iron and buried him in a dog kennel in New Jersey.
William Bentvena was a made member of the Gambino crime family. Killing him without sanction from the organization was, by the code that governed these things, an offense that demanded a response. But the Gambino family did not yet know who had done it. Four years passed, then in December 1974, DeSimone made a mistake that was more immediately personal.
He had been dating the sister of a man named Ronald Foxy Gerote, a Bergin crew associate who was one of John Gotti’s closest and most trusted people. When the relationship ended badly and Gerote heard that DeSimone had assaulted his sister, Gerote threatened to kill DeSimone. DeSimone took this information at face value and acted on it immediately.
He went to Gerote’s apartment door and when Gerote opened it, DeSimone shot him three times in the face. Gerote was 27 years old. He died on December 18th, 1974. John Gotti was described by multiple sources as having felt the loss of Gerote with the specific intensity of a man who had considered him, in every meaningful sense, family.
The Gotti household, by several accounts, had treated Gerote as one of their own. His murder gave Gotti something personal. When Paul Vario eventually revealed to the Gambino family that DeSimone had killed Bentvena, the two grievances merged. By late December 1978, DeSimone was told he was finally going to be made, formally inducted as a member of the Lucchese family, the ceremony that would represent the culmination of his career.
He was driven to a location where the induction was supposed to take place. He was not inducted. What happened next depends entirely on which account you accept. Henry Hill, speaking to FBI agents after becoming an informant in 1980 and later in published accounts, maintained that John Gotti personally killed DeSimone, that Gotti himself pulled the trigger in a location described variously as the basement of Don Vito’s restaurant on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, or a similar site in that area, and that DeSimone was shot multiple times in the
head. Sal Polisi, another mob associate with a direct knowledge of the events, corroborated Hill’s account that Gotti was present and the triggerman. A separate account names Thomas Agro as the killer with Gotti present. A third account attributes the murder to Jimmy Burke as part of the Lufthansa heist cleanup.
A former Gambino associate interviewed by the publication Gang of Geek disputed that Gotti was involved directly. The record does not establish with certainty who pulled the trigger. What the record does establish is that the Gambino family ordered the killing, that Gotti had personal and organizational motive, that DeSimone disappeared around January 14th, 1979, and that his body was never found.
He was declared legally dead in 1990. No one was ever charged with his murder. On March 18th, 1980, in the Howard Beach section of Queens, a 12-year-old boy named Frank Gotti darted into the street on a motorized mini-bike from behind a dumpster. The mini-bike belonged to a friend who had not yet finished explaining how it worked.
Frank went into the street before the tutorial was complete. John Favara, 51 years old, was driving home from work. He was Gotti’s backyard neighbor. He had known the Gotti children for years. His adopted son had been a close friend of the Gotti children. There was, by the accounts of the investigation that followed, no meaningful time in which Favara could have swerved or stopped.
Frank Gotti struck the undercarriage of Favara’s car and was dragged. His death was ruled accidental. No criminal charges were filed against Favara. At some point in the weeks after Frank’s death, Victoria Gotti encountered John Favara on the street and attacked him with a metal baseball bat, sending him to the hospital.
Favara chose not to press charges. He subsequently received death threats. People who knew what the Gotti family was understood what the threats implied. Favara reportedly discussed moving but did not move. On July the 28th, 1980, witnesses saw John Favara struck over the head and forced into a van outside his home.
Gotti and his family were on vacation in Florida at the time. Favara was never seen again. When detectives approached Gotti, he said, “I’m not sorry the guy is missing. I would not be sorry if he turned up dead.” Favara was declared dead in absentia in 1983. Five years after his neighbor disappeared into a van in Howard Beach, John Gotti stood on a street in Midtown Manhattan in the December cold and watched his boss get shot.
The conditions that produced the Castellano murder had been building for years. Paul Castellano, who had inherited leadership of the Gambino family from his brother-in-law Carlo Gambino in 1976, was a man the street-level soldiers in the organization had never fully respected. He was more businessman than street boss, more interested in construction contracts and meat distribution than in the daily work of running crews.
He lived in a 17-room mansion on Staten Island designed to resemble the White House, complete with Carrara marble and an English garden. He rarely left it. He had an affair with his Colombian housekeeper while his wife remained in the house. When Castellano required meetings with his capos, they came to him.
Gotti, who had been raised on the specific street-level ethic of Dellacroce’s faction, regarded all of this with contempt. He also had a practical fear. His brother Gene and crew members, including Angelo Ruggiero, had been indicted for heroin trafficking in August 1983. And Castellano, who had banned narcotics dealing under penalty of death, was aware of it.
Castellano had demanded transcripts of recorded conversations from Ruggiero’s house. Ruggiero refused. Castellano threatened to dismantle Gotti’s crew. The threat was real and Gotti understood what it meant. Aniello Dellacroce, the underboss who had protected Gotti’s crew for years and whose personal loyalty to Gotti was the structural foundation of their relationship, died of cancer on December 2nd, 1985.
Castellano did not attend the wake. In the culture in which these men operated, the failure to appear was not a neutral act. It was an insult and it was read as one. Two weeks later, Castellano was dead. December 16th, 1985, approximately 5:30 in the evening, the holiday shopping season in Midtown Manhattan, the streets full of people who had no idea what was about to happen on the block outside Sparks Steak House on East 46th Street.
Four shooters in beige trench coats and Russian-style fur hats waited near the restaurant entrance. Their names were Salvatore Scala, Edward Lino, and John Carneglia, with additional backup shooters, including Ruggiero and Dominick Pizzonia, positioned further down the street. Gotti and Gravano sat in a car across the street with walkie-talkies, watching for Castellano’s arrival.
Thomas Bilotti, 70-year-old Castellano’s driver and newly appointed underboss, pulled the car to the curb. Castellano stepped out. The shooters moved. Castellano was shot multiple times. Bilotti was shot simultaneously as he exited the driver’s door. John Carneglia delivered what witnesses described as the killing shot to Castellano’s head.
Before leaving, Gotti had the car driven slowly past the bodies to confirm the kills. Two weeks later, Gotti was elected boss of the Gambino crime family. He assumed command of an organization with 23 active crews, approximately 300 inducted members, more than 2,000 associates, and an estimated annual income of $500 million.
His own annual take, documented by FBI sources and Gravano’s own estimate, ran between $5 million and $20 million derived from construction industry shakedowns, gambling operations, extortion, and the percentage he took from every crew under his authority. What followed the Castellano murder was not smooth.
Vincent Gigante of the Genovese family was outraged that Gotti had killed a boss without commission approval, a breach of protocol that could not be ignored. On April 13th, 1986, a car bomb exploded outside a social club in Bensonhurst intended for Gotti. Gotti had planned to be there, but canceled. His underboss, Frank DeCicco, who arrived as scheduled, was killed instead.
The bomb had been planted by Lucchese and Genovese family members seeking to avenge Castellano and punish his successors. Gotti survived because he changed his plans. DeCicco did not. And then something happened that had not happened to a New York mob boss in a generation. Gotti became famous, not infamous in the way that a criminal who is known to law enforcement is infamous, famous in the way that a celebrity is famous.
The tabloids coined the name Dapper Don and used it with a kind of admiration that the coverage of organized crime had not previously produced. He wore Brioni suits, hand-painted silk ties, and a halo of perfectly groomed silver hair. He had daily haircuts. He smiled and waved at cameras outside the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy, as though the cameras were there to document his success rather than gather evidence for prosecution.
In 1986, an Andy Warhol portrait of Gotti appeared on the cover of Time magazine. He dined at the finest restaurants, traveled by chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz, and held court with athletes and entertainers who found his energy irresistible. He declared his income as $100,000 a year from a job as a plumbing supply salesman.
His actual income was at minimum 50 times that figure. Bruce Mouw, the FBI agent who supervised the Gambino squad and who would eventually be the architect of Gotti’s final prosecution, described him afterward as the first media don, the boss who never tried to hide the fact that he was a super boss. The observation cuts both ways.
The visibility that made Gotti a celebrity was also a catastrophic operational error. He was the first media don. He was also the last. Every organization produces the instrument of its own destruction. For the Gambino family, it was a room above a club on Mulberry Street, a widow’s apartment, and a boss who could not stop talking.
While Gotti was standing outside the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street, smiling for cameras and conducting the weekly capo meetings he had instituted in January of 1988, despite Gravano’s documented objections, Bruce Mouw’s Gambino squad was photographing every face that walked through the door.
Beginning in February of that year, agents set up a video camera with a telephoto lens aimed at the club’s entrance. The footage identified the most senior members of the Gambino hierarchy, the captains and soldiers who would otherwise have remained invisible to the investigation. Gotti had, in effect, assembled his entire organization in one place on a predictable schedule for the FBI’s convenience.
The FBI bugged the club itself, but the recordings were largely useless. The ambient noise of the espresso machine and the radio, the paranoia that kept the men inside from speaking freely, produced hours of material that yielded almost nothing. The surveillance operation seemed to be approaching its limits. Then an informant passed a tip.
Gotti sometimes left the Ravenite through a back door and walked to a rear hallway in the building where he spoke with captains. The same informant reported that Gotti also went upstairs to an apartment on the second floor of the building at 247 Mulberry Street. The apartment belonged to a woman named Nettie Sorelli, 74 years old, the widow of Gambino soldier Michael Sorelli.
The late underboss, Aniello Dellacroce, had also used the apartment for private meetings. Gotti used it because he believed it was safe. Over Thanksgiving weekend of 1989, while Sorelli was visiting family in California, an FBI surveillance team entered the apartment and planted listening devices throughout it.
The recordings began immediately and did not stop. Over the following weeks and months, the bugs captured approximately 600 hours of conversations. Gotti talked about the Castellano killing. He talked about the murders of Robert DiBernardo, Liborio Milito, and Louis DiBono. He acknowledged ordering DiBernardo’s death with a candor that suggested he had never seriously imagined the room might be compromised.
On December 12th, 1989, speaking with his consigliere, Frank LoCascio, he said of DiBernardo, “I was in jail when I whacked him. I knew why it was being done. I’d done it anyway.” On DiBono, whose offense was ignoring a summons to a meeting, “He is going to die because he refused to come in when I called.
He did not do anything else wrong.” In January of 1990, an overheard remark suggested Gotti had been tipped off that the Ravenite was bugged and the conversations in the apartment became more guarded. But the tapes already captured what they needed to capture. Police Detective William Pistone was later charged with having leaked information to Gotti for years, a corruption that had extended the time Gotti had operating without full surveillance coverage.
The tapes accomplished something else, something that the FBI had not planned, but that proved to be the decisive development in the entire case. On multiple recordings, Gotti described the murders of DiBernardo, Milito, and DiBono in terms that shifted the primary responsibility to Gravano. He characterized Gravano as too greedy.
He implied that Gravano had asked permission to kill his own business partners as a way of eliminating competition. In one recorded conversation, he effectively framed Gravano as the driving force behind three murders they had committed together. Gravano was listening to those recordings while awaiting trial.
He processed what he heard. He drew conclusions. On December 11th, 1990, FBI agents and NYPD detectives raided the Ravenite Social Club. Gotti, Gravano, and Frank Locascio were at the rear of the club when agents came through the door. Gotti, by several accounts, remained calm. He declined to leave until he had finished his espresso.
He and his co-defendants were taken outside, arrested, charged, and denied bail on the basis of the recorded evidence. The room he had used for years because he thought it was safe was the room that ended everything. Wilfred Johnson had known John Gotti since 1957, when Gotti was a 17-year-old dropout and Johnson was a street enforcer in Canarsie, Brooklyn, already well established in a life that had no obvious exit.
In 1966, while serving time for armed robbery, Johnson had become an FBI informant. He provided information on Gotti and the Gambino family from 1966 through 1985. He was careful, by the accounts of his FBI handlers, about discussing Gotti directly. He harbored something for Gotti that fell between love and resentment, and both emotions seemed genuine.
He told one handler, “Sometimes I love him, and sometimes I hate him.” He told another handler that Gotti wore expensive suits now, but was still a lot of [ __ ] still a mutt, and that the smooth exterior should not fool anyone. Among the information Johnson provided was what he knew about the murder of Florida mobster Anthony Plate, known as Tony Plate, who disappeared in Miami in approximately 1979.
According to Johnson’s informant reports, Gotti and Ruggerio killed Plate. The record beyond Johnson’s account is thin. There is no body, no surviving official investigation record in accessible public documents, no charge that was ever filed. What exists is Johnson’s report and the absence of Tony Plate from any other verifiable account of what happened to him.
In 1985, Assistant United States Attorney Diane Giacalone took the extraordinary step of publicly revealing Johnson’s informant status in open court in an attempt to pressure him into testifying against Gotti. Johnson refused to enter witness protection. He refused to cooperate. He went to the press and denied ever having been an informant.
He kept living in Brooklyn, in the neighborhood he had spent his entire life in, where everyone who needed to know already knew what Giacalone had confirmed in court. Three years passed. On August 29th, 1988, Wilfred Johnson walked to his car outside his Brooklyn home and was shot to death. The killers were Bonanno family hitman Thomas Pitera and Vincent Ciatino, carrying out the job as a favor to Gotti.
He was 52 years old. He was shot multiple times. He had refused the one avenue that might have protected him because, by every account of how he operated, he could not bring himself to fully separate from the man he had spent decades both serving and resenting. John Gotti was never charged in connection with Johnson’s death.
11 days short of a year later, on September 11th, 1989, a man named Fred Weiss left his girlfriend’s apartment in the New Springville neighborhood of Staten Island at approximately 8:30 in the morning and walked to his car. Gotti became convinced that Weiss was going to cooperate with the federal government.
The specific trigger was that Weiss had changed lawyers, a move Gotti’s organization interpreted as the kind of repositioning a man does before he begins talking to prosecutors. Gotti ordered the killing. He arranged for the DeCavalcante crime family of New Jersey, which had come under the Gambino family’s effective control, to carry out the hit.
Vincent “Vinny Ocean” Palermo and James “Jimmy Gallo” drove to New Springville that morning. Anthony Cappo drove the getaway car. Palermo and Gallo approached Weiss as he reached his vehicle and shot him seven times. He died at the scene. The documented irony of Fred Weiss’s death is that it was entirely unnecessary by the organization’s own logic.
Federal prosecutors confirmed afterward that Weiss was not, in fact, cooperating with the government at the time of his murder. He had changed lawyers. He was fighting his case. He was not talking. He died because John Gotti was afraid he might, not because he was. DeCavalcante boss Giovanni “John the Eagle” Riggi, who arranged the killing as a favor to Gotti, pleaded guilty to ordering the murder in 2003.
Gambino associate Joseph Watts pleaded guilty in 2011 to setting up the hit. Gotti himself was never charged. Fred Weiss had changed lawyers. That was enough. The five murders and John Gotti’s indictment were not secrets when federal prosecutors walked into the Brooklyn courtroom in January of 1992. They were the killings the evidence had made prosecutable, the deaths that the surveillance and the testimony could support beyond a reasonable doubt.
They were, in the language of the law, the murder counts that could be proven. Robert DiBernardo had been one of the men who helped put Gotti in power. He was a Gambino soldier, the family’s pornography czar, a figure with substantial reach in both the criminal world and, through his distribution businesses, the legitimate economy.
He had been one of the four conspirators, alongside Gotti, Gravano, and DeCicco, who were collectively known as the fist, the coalition that planned and executed the Castellano murder. He sat in Florida the night Castellano was shot by mutual agreement to establish an alibi. Less than a year after Castellano’s murder, Gotti ordered another.
On June 5th, 1986, Robert DiBernardo left his office, got into his car, and called home to confirm dinner. Minutes later, he was shot twice in the back of the head. Gravano arranged it and watched it happen. Years later, on a wiretap, Gotti said it plainly. He ordered the killing from jail based on a rumor and allowed it anyway.
Then came Liborio “Louie Milito”. His offense was simple. He questioned authority. On March 8th, 1988, he canceled dinner with his daughter. It was the last time she heard from him. His body was never found. Louie DeBono’s offense was even smaller. He didn’t show up when he was called. He ignored the boss. In this world, that was enough.
On October 4th, 1990, Thomas DeBono was shot in a World Trade Center garage. He died because he ignored a call. That was enough. The FBI had the warning on tape, but misheard the name. They never stopped it. That same wiretap captured Gotti’s logic. “You don’t have to do anything wrong. You just have to not show up.
” And in the room he thought was private, he gave prosecutors what they had been missing for years. Salvatore Gravano had been involved in 19 murders, not claimed, confirmed under oath on March 2nd, 1992. He wasn’t just a participant. He was the system. Planner, shooter, organizer, the man who made sure orders became outcomes.
He helped plan Castellano’s murder, sat with Gotti as it happened, watched the bodies as they drove past. After that, they ran everything together. Gotti gave the orders, Gravano made them real, until the tapes. In a room above the Ravenite, Gravano heard Gotti turning on him, calling him greedy, shifting blame, rewriting who ordered the killings.
For the first time, the system turned inward, and that’s when it started to break. In November 1991, Gravano agreed to talk, the highest-ranking mob figure ever to break the code of silence. On March 2nd, 1992, he took the stand and laid out the Castellano murder, confirming Gotti gave the order. Cross-examined for days, he didn’t break, and the jury believed him.
On April 2nd, after 14 hours, Gotti was found guilty on all 13 counts. By June 23rd, he was sentenced to life. Gravano got 5 years, but those 13 counts were only what could be proven. Beside them sits a larger record, killings that never made it to court. Some happened in silence. Some left no body, no case, no charge.
One of them was Anthony Plate, who vanished in Miami in 1979. Informants said Gotti was involved. That’s all the record has, and all it ever will. In July 1996, 4 years into his sentence, Gotti was beaten by another inmate in a federal prison. Soon after, he allegedly offered between $40,000 and $400,000 to have the man killed.
The order was passed, but the target was transferred before it could happen. Gotti was never charged. Even from prison, he was still reaching and almost succeeded, but the full scope of what he was responsible for will never be known. Bodies disappeared. Cases were never opened. Witnesses never spoke. Some killings remained disputed.
Others exist only in informant reports. No bodies, no charges, no answers. This wasn’t a failure of investigation. It was the system working exactly as intended, built to make evidence disappear along with the people tied to it. The record shows a pattern, a killing, no charge, silence kept. Some cases collapsed, others disappeared.
A few men were punished, but never the one who gave the orders. The full count of what John Gotti was responsible for will never be known. Bodies vanished, cases were never opened, witnesses never spoke. He died on June 10th, 2002 at 61. The family survived, but quieter, having learned that visibility had cost them everything.
