Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village is a quiet block in Manhattan. The kind of street where a man could live his entire life within a few hundred yards and never need to explain to anyone why he never left. In the 1970s and ’80s, this was Aniello Dellacroce’s world, a tenement building across from a social club, the same neighborhood where he had been born 60 years earlier, the same streets where he had learned that loyalty was the only currency that mattered, and that the men who commanded respect were the men who
never asked for it. He was the underboss of the Gambino crime family, the second highest position in what was by most accounts the largest and most powerful criminal organization in the United States, and he held that position for 20 years while watching the man who should have been beneath him sit in the chair that everyone believed Dellacroce had earned.
He was passed over in 1976 when Carlo Gambino died and named his brother-in-law Paul Castellano as boss instead of his underboss, and Dellacroce accepted the decision and pledged his loyalty anyway. And for 9 years after that, he was the only thing standing between the men who believed Castellano had stolen what was rightfully theirs and the violence that loyalty to Dellacroce kept them from committing.
When he was dying of lung cancer in December of 1985, Castellano refused to visit him in the hospital and did not attend his wake. And 14 days after Dellacroce died, John Gotti had Castellano murdered outside Sparks Steak House in Midtown Manhattan, and the war that Dellacroce had prevented for 9 years through nothing more than loyalty and the force of his reputation arrived exactly on schedule.
The story of what Aniello Dellacroce held together and what fell apart when he was gone is the story of organized crime in New York at the moment when the old rules stopped working, and the men who had built their lives on those rules discovered that loyalty only protects you as long as the person you are loyal to remains alive.
Drop where you are watching from in the comments below. It is genuinely one of the best parts of doing this, knowing where this history is reaching. If you want more stories like this, subscribe now. This one begins not with violence, but with a neighborhood, a family, and a young man learning what the world would ask of him.
March 15th, 1914, a tenement building in Little Italy, Manhattan, a neighborhood where the language spoken in the hallways was Italian, and the language spoken in the streets was a negotiation between the world the immigrants had left and the world their children would inherit. Francesco and Antoinette Della Croce were first-generation immigrants, and the details of exactly which region of Italy they came from vary across sources, some saying Veneto and others saying the area around Naples.
But, what does not vary is that they came with nothing and raised their children in a place where organized crime was not an abstraction or an external force, but the actual structure that determined who worked, who prospered, and who survived. They had a son they named Aniello and a second son named Carmine and a daughter named Lucy, and they lived in a building across the street from a stretch of Mulberry Street where decades later their oldest son would run his operations from a social club that became one of the most infamous
addresses in American organized crime history. The neighborhood in the 1920s and early 30s was not a place that produced many legitimate opportunities for the children of immigrant families. Aniello found work as a butcher’s assistant in his teenage years, learning a trade that required precision and an indifference to blood.
But, work was scarce and the pay was uncertain, and the world that operated parallel to the legal economy was visible everywhere he looked. The Mangano crime family controlled significant portions of the neighborhood’s economic and social life. Not as invaders or outsiders, but as men who had grown up on the same streets and spoke in the same language and understood that the Italian immigrant community in Manhattan had its own systems of authority that preceded and often superseded the legal structures that governed everyone else.
For a young man with limited prospects and a family that needed support, the choice between a butcher’s assistant wage and the opportunities available to men who worked for the organization that actually controlled the neighborhood was not particularly complicated. He was arrested once as a young man for petty theft, the kind of minor criminal charge that marked a transition rather than a crisis, evidence that he had crossed the line from legitimate work into the world where different rules applied.
The arrest produced no serious consequences, no lengthy sentence, no permanent derailment, just a notation in a police file that would grow considerably thicker over the following decades. By the late 1930s, Aniello Della Croce had joined the Mangano crime family, the organization that would eventually become the Gambino family, and the education that would define the rest of his life had begun.
He was a young man in his 20s, 5 ft 10 in tall, broad-shouldered, physically imposing in a way that would become more significant as his reputation developed. The nickname that would follow him for the rest of his life was already in use by then, an Americanization of Aniello into Neil, the kind of adaptation that first-generation children made to navigate a world that demanded assimilation while the neighborhood they lived in demanded the opposite.
He had found the path that young men from his background and his neighborhood and his circumstances found when legitimate work failed to provide what survival required, and the man who would teach him what that path actually meant was already waiting. Albert Anastasia was called the Executioner, and the nickname was not metaphorical.
He was the underboss of the Mangano crime family underboss Vincent Mangano, and his reputation for violence was so thoroughly documented that law enforcement officials who spent their careers studying organized crime would later describe him as one of the most dangerous men they had ever encountered. He was, by the accounts of those who knew him and those who investigated him, a man who understood murder as a tool of organizational discipline and employed it with a frequency and a calculated precision that made him indispensable to
the family’s operations. When Aniello DellaCroce entered the Mangano family in the late 1930s, Anastasia took him under his wing, and the education that followed was an education how violence, loyalty, and operational discipline combined to create authority in a world where the legal system offered no protection and no recourse.
What DellaCroce learned from Anastasia over the next 15 years was not a set of abstract principles, but a practical methodology. How to identify threats before they materialized. How to respond to challenges with sufficient force that the response itself became a deterrent. How to maintain operational security in an environment where law enforcement agencies were improving their surveillance capabilities and rival organizations were constantly probing for weaknesses.
How to command respect without courting attention. The relationship between mentor and protege was close enough that when Vincent Mangano disappeared in 1951, presumed murdered, and Anastasia assumed control of the family, one of his first acts as boss was to promote Dellacroce to capo regime, giving him command of his own crew.
Dellacroce bought the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street in Little Italy, a modest storefront that would serve as his headquarters for the rest of his life. The location was deliberate, a building in the neighborhood where he had been raised, across the street from the tenement where his family had lived when he was a child.
The Ravenite became a gathering place for Gambino family members, a location where business was conducted and disputes were resolved, and the daily operations of organized crime in Lower Manhattan were coordinated. It was also a place that Dellacroce would later sweep regularly for listening devices, understanding that the same federal agencies that had once relied on informants and physical surveillance were developing technical capabilities that made every conversation a potential piece of evidence.
The operational methods that Dellacroce developed during these years were methods designed for a man who understood that visibility was a vulnerability. He sometimes walked the streets of Manhattan dressed as a priest, calling himself Father O’Neil, a disguise that confused both law enforcement and rival mobsters and made identification more difficult in an era before pervasive photographic documentation.
He allegedly committed at least one murder while dressed as a priest, an act that earned him the nickname in a world where such acts were understood as demonstrations of both capability and willingness. He also allegedly used body doubles for some public events, a precaution that reflected his preference for operating invisibly, even as his authority within the organization grew.
What made Dellacroce distinctive, what set him apart from other men in his position, was not his capacity for violence, which was common enough in that world, but something in his physical presence that unsettled even experienced law enforcement officials who had spent their careers dealing with organized crime figures.
Ralph Salerno was an NYPD detective who had met dozens of mobsters over the course of his career. Men who had committed murders and built criminal empires and commanded organizations that generated millions of dollars annually. And he said later that there were only two men that he had ever met who genuinely frightened him when he looked them in the eye.
One was Carmine Galante of the Bonanno family. The other was Aniello Dellacroce. Salerno described it with precision. They had bad eyes. I mean, they had the eyes of killers. You looked at Dellacroce’s eyes and you could see how frightening they were. The frigid glare of a killer. Joseph Coffey, a former top New York City mob investigator, described the same phenomenon in slightly different terms.
Dellacroce was one of the scariest individuals I’ve ever met in my life, Coffey said. Dellacroce’s eyes were like he didn’t have any eyes. It was like looking right through him. The description was not colorful exaggeration. It was the testimony of men who had looked directly at Dellacroce and understood that what they were seeing was something genuinely dangerous.
A capacity for violence that was visible in his face and that required no demonstration to be believed. The other nickname that followed him, though never used within his earshot, was the [ __ ] a reference to his square-shaped face that some family members thought gave him an appearance more consistent with Eastern European ancestry than Italian.
The nickname circulated behind his back because no one who understood what Dellacroce was would risk using it in his presence. The tall guy was another moniker, ironic given that at 5 ft 10 in, he was not particularly tall. But in a world where nicknames served as identifiers and where a man’s reputation was built as much on what people said about him when he was not present as on what he did when he was.
The names accumulated and the legend grew. On October 25th, 1957, gunmen walked into a Manhattan hotel barber shop and murdered Albert Anastasia and the protege who had learned everything from the executioner was about to learn what loyalty meant when the man who taught you is gone. On October 25th, 1957, gunmen murdered Albert Anastasia in the barber shop of the Park Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan and the investigation that followed pointed toward an alliance between Carlo Gambino, Tommy Lucchese, and Vito Genovese.
The assassination was not a random act of violence or the result of a spontaneous dispute, but a carefully planned removal of a boss who had enemies within his own organization and rivals who saw his death as an opportunity to consolidate power. Anastasia had been boss of what was still called the Mangano family and his murder opened the position for a man who had been planning his ascension for some time.
Carlo Gambino, who had been a powerful caporegime under Anastasia, took over as boss and the family was renamed in his honor. The alliance with Lucchese, boss of his own family, and Genovese, a powerful figure in yet another organization, suggested a level of coordination that extended beyond a single family’s internal disputes and into the broader politics of organized crime in New York.
Aniello Dellacroce had been a strong Anastasia supporter, loyal to the man who had mentored him and promoted him and given him command of his own crew. The murder placed him in a position that required a choice. He could seek revenge for the mentor who had shaped his career, a course of action that would have aligned with personal loyalty, but would have put him at odds with the new boss and the powerful alliance that had supported Gambino’s rise.
Or, he could accept the new order, pledge loyalty to the man who had conspired to kill his mentor, and subordinate personal allegiance to the organizational principle that the family came before individual relationships. De la Croce chose loyalty to the family. The decision was consistent with traditional Cosa Nostra protocols, where the survival and stability of the organization took precedence over personal grievances, and where a soldier or capo who refused to accept a new boss risked not only his own position, but the cohesion of the entire structure.
Gambino consolidated his control, and De la Croce, despite his personal allegiance to the murdered Anastasia, became one of Gambino’s most trusted subordinates. The relationship that developed between them over the next 8 years was a relationship built on mutual respect and operational effectiveness. And when Gambino decided in 1965 that it was time to move aside his aging underboss, Joseph Biondo, the man he chose to replace Biondo was De la Croce.
The promotion to underboss in 1965 was recognition of De la Croce’s capabilities, his loyalty, and his command of the traditional criminal activities that formed the foundation of the family’s operations. It was also, by the conventions that govern succession in that world, an implicit designation of the man who would eventually succeed Gambino as boss.
The underboss position was not merely a title or an administrative role. It was the second highest position in the organizational hierarchy. The man who would assume command if the boss died or was incapacitated, the figure whose authority was understood by every soldier and capo in the family to be exceeded only by the boss himself.
For the next 11 years, from 1965 to 1976, De La Croche served as Carlo Gambino’s underboss. And everyone who knew how the organization worked understood what that meant when the boss eventually died. For 11 years, from 1965 to 1976, De La Croche served as Carlo Gambino’s underboss.
And everyone who knew how the organization worked understood what that meant when the boss eventually died. The position carried authority over the family’s traditional operations, direct command over multiple crews, and the expectation that he would one day assume the title that his mentor Albert Anastasia had held, and that Carlo Gambino held now.
But the position also came with responsibilities that extended beyond criminal operations into the management of a personal life that had to be maintained alongside the demands of leading one of the largest criminal organizations in the country. The man who carried the title of underboss and the reputation of a killer also carried the obligations of a family.
And De La Croche maintained both with the same discipline he brought to everything else he did. He was married to Lucille Riccardi and they had children together, including a son named Armand and a daughter. The family initially lived in Little Italy in an apartment across the street from the Ravenite Social Club. A proximity that made the separation between his professional operations and his personal life a matter of yards rather than miles.
Later, the family moved to Grasmere on Staten Island, a residential neighborhood that offered more space and more distance from the immediate operations of the organization. Though De La Croche himself continued to spend most of his time at the Ravenite, where the work that defined him was conducted. His personal life was more complicated than a single marriage and a single household, as was common enough among men in his position in that era, but what mattered for the purposes of the family’s operations was not the complexity of his domestic
arrangements, but the network of relationships that connected him to other members of the organization. His brother Carmine was involved with the Gambino family. His sister Mary had three sons, John Ruggiero Sr., Angelo Ruggiero, and Salvatore Ruggiero, all of whom became Gambino associates, and DeLacroce was the great uncle to their children.
These family connections were not incidental details. They were structural relationships that would matter significantly in the 1980s, when questions of loyalty and protection and organizational discipline collided with the personal bonds that connected DeLacroce to men whose actions threatened the family’s stability. The reputation he carried within the organization during these years was a reputation for being a traditional Cosa Nostra figure, a man who believed in the established protocols and the old rules, and the principle that loyalty to the
family superseded personal ambition. He preferred to keep a low profile, avoiding the kind of public visibility that attracted law enforcement attention and media coverage. The social club, the neighborhood, the quiet execution of the responsibilities that came with his position, these were the patterns that defined his approach to leadership.
He was not a man who courted attention or sought recognition outside the organization. He was a man who understood that power in that world was most effective when it was least visible. The legal troubles that interrupted his service as underboss during this period were troubles that came with the territory. In 1971, he was sentenced to 1 year in state prison on contempt of court charges for refusing to answer grand jury questions about organized crime.
The conviction was a product of his adherence to the code of silence that governed interactions with law enforcement. A refusal to cooperate that was expected of anyone who held his position and that carried consequences he accepted without protest. He served the time and returned to his position. On May 2nd, 1972 federal authorities charged him with tax evasion.
The case centered on stocks worth $112,500 that he had failed to report as income. A common enough charge against organized crime figures in an era when direct prosecution for criminal activities was often difficult to achieve but financial irregularities could be documented through bank records and tax filings.
In March of 1973, he was convicted and sentenced to 5 years in federal prison and fined $15,000. The sentence was significant enough that it removed him from active operations for a period of years but it was not severe enough to end his career or diminish his standing within the organization. He served his time and when he was released, his position as underboss was waiting for him and the expectation that he would one day succeed Gambino remained intact.
In October of 1976, while De La Croce was still serving his sentence for tax evasion Carlo Gambino died at his home on Long Island and the decision Gambino had made about succession was about to test everything De La Croce believed about loyalty. October 15th 1976 Carlo Gambino died of a heart attack at his home on Long Island and the decision he had made about who would succeed him went against every expectation his family had built over 20 years of watching his underboss work.
The presumption among family members, among the capos who ran the crews and the soldiers who took their orders, was that DeCicco Croce, as underboss, as the man who had served Gambino loyally since 1957, and who had held the second highest position in the family since 1965, would assume the title of boss when Gambino died.
The progression was not merely logical. It was the established protocol, the way succession had worked in organizations that valued stability and continuity, and the principle that loyalty and service over decades earned the right to leadership. Gambino did not follow the protocol. Instead, he appointed his brother-in-law and cousin, Paul Castellano, as his successor.
The decision was controversial the moment it was announced, not because Castellano lacked qualifications, but because his qualifications were of a different kind than the qualifications that had traditionally defined leadership in the Gambino [clears throat] family. Castellano was a businessman, a man whose focus was on a white-collar operations, construction rackets, labor union manipulation, and the kinds of criminal enterprises that generated enormous profits without the violence and visibility that characterized traditional street-level
organized crime. He was methodical, cautious, more comfortable in a boardroom than in a social club, more inclined to manage the family like a corporation than like a criminal brotherhood. Gambino apparently believed that this approach, this emphasis on business over blood, would benefit the family in an era when law enforcement agencies were becoming more sophisticated, and when the most profitable criminal enterprises required connections to legitimate industries and political structures.
The problem was that DeCicco was in prison for tax evasion when Gambino died, unable to contest the succession or argue his case or mobilize the support of the Capos and soldiers who believed he had earned the position. Castellano’s appointment was confirmed at a meeting on November the 24th, 1976, and Dell Acroce, released from prison and confronted with a decision that had already been made, was present at that meeting.
The arrangement that emerged from that meeting was an arrangement that effectively split the Gambino family into two factions. Castellano would remain as boss and would control the white-collar operations, the construction rackets, the labor unions, the bid-rigging schemes, and the kinds of criminal enterprises that required political connections and business acumen.
Dell Acroce would remain as underboss and would control the traditional Cosa Nostra activities, extortion, robbery, loan-sharking, hijacking, and the street-level operations that had always formed the foundation of the family’s power. It was a division of authority that recognized Dell Acroce’s experience and his command over significant portions of the organization while allowing Castellano to pursue the business strategies that Gambino had believed would secure the family’s future.
The split also created the conditions for future conflict. Two centers of power, two philosophies of leadership, two factions within the same family, each loyal to a different man and committed to a different vision of what the organization should be. The arrangement held only because Dell Acroce accepted it.
He could have refused. He could have mobilized the Capos and soldiers who believed he had been passed over unjustly and forced a confrontation that would have torn the family apart. He He instead to pledge his loyalty to Castellano, despite being denied the position that everyone had assumed would be his.
And he insisted that his supporters also support Castellano for the good of the family. The decision temporarily quieted the dissension, but it did not eliminate the underlying tension. And everyone involved understood that the peace depended on Dellacroce’s willingness to maintain it. The arrangement held because Dellacroce accepted it.
And for 9 years, from 1976 to 1985, he kept the family from tearing itself apart over a succession he had every right to contest and chose not to. The restraint required to maintain that peace was restraint that extended beyond his own ambitions into his relationships with the men who looked to him for leadership. And the man who most embodied the tension between loyalty to Dellacroce and resentment toward Castellano was already rising through the ranks.
John Gotti came up through hijacking, extortion, and a reputation for violence that was less controlled than calculated. And the man who taught him how to channel that violence into organizational advancement was the same man who had learned from Albert Anastasia 30 years before. Gotti’s background was consistent with the backgrounds of many men who entered organized crime in New York during the 1960s and ’70s.
Working-class origins, limited legitimate opportunities, early criminal activities that brought him into contact with established family members who recognized his capabilities and his willingness to do what the organization required. By the mid-1970s, Gotti had established himself as a rising figure within the Gambino family, operating out of the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park, Queens.
But his most significant relationship was not with the crews he ran or the operations he controlled, but with the man who mentored him and protected him and taught him what it meant to be a Gambino. In July of 1977, John Gotti and Angelo Ruggiero were inducted into the Gambino family as made men in a ceremony officiated by Paul Castellano, consigliere Joseph N.
Gallo, and underboss Aniello Dellacroce. The ceremony itself was significant, the formal recognition that both men had proven themselves worthy of full membership in the organization. But what mattered more than the ceremony was the relationship that already existed between Dellacroce and Gotti, and the family connection that linked Dellacroce to Ruggiero.
Angelo Ruggiero was Dellacroce’s nephew, the son of Dellacroce’s sister Mary, and law enforcement officials who monitored the family’s activities speculated that Dellacroce’s personal affection for both Gotti and Ruggiero played a crucial role in their elevation within the organization. The speculation was almost certainly accurate.
Dellacroce was a man who valued loyalty and family connections, and his support for Gotti was support that extended beyond professional valuation into personal mentorship. What Gotti learned from Dellacroce was what Dellacroce had learned from Anastasia, how to command respect through a combination of competence and the willingness to use violence when violence was necessary, how to build loyalty among subordinates, how to operate within the organizational hierarchy while maintaining the independence necessary to run your own
crew effectively. Gotti operated the traditional Mafia wing of the Gambino family from the Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy, the same location that served as Dellacroce’s headquarters, a proximity that reinforced the mentor relationship and made clear to everyone in the family that Gotti was Della Croce’s protege in the same way Della Croce had been Anastasia’s.
The loyalty that Gotti developed was loyalty to Della Croce, not to Castellano. This was a distinction that mattered. Castellano was the boss, the man who held the title and the authority that came with it. But Gotti’s respect and his willingness to follow orders ran through Della Croce and as long as Della Croce supported Castellano, Gotti would remain in line.
The relationship created a buffer, a layer of insulation that prevented the resentment that many of Della Croce’s faction felt toward Castellano from translating into action. Gotti was charismatic, deadly, street savvy, a man who understood violence and was comfortable employing it and he represented everything that Castellano was not.
Where Castellano was reclusive, favoring his mansion on Staten Island over face time with capos, Gotti was visible, present, engaged with the soldiers and associates who formed the backbone of the organization. Where Castellano focused on white collar rackets and business strategies, Gotti focused on traditional criminal activities, hijacking, loan sharking, gambling and extortion.
The contrast was stark and the faction that Gotti led and that Della Croce commanded increasingly saw Castellano as out of touch, more interested in profits than in the traditions and the brotherhood that had always defined what it meant to be a Gambino. Gotti’s idolization of Della Croce was documented by multiple sources, law enforcement officials who monitored the family’s activities, informants who reported on internal dynamics and testimony from associates who later cooperated with prosecutors.
The relationship was not merely professional, it was personal, a bond between mentor and protege that gave Dell Acroce leverage over Gotti that no one else in the organization possessed. As long as Dell Acroce lived and supported Castellano, Gotti would not move against the boss. Not because Gotti respected Castellano, but because Gotti would not betray the man who had made his career possible.
By the end of the 1970s, the Gambino family had a boss who ran it like a corporation, an underboss who ran it like a traditional crime family, and a young capo who would follow the underboss anywhere and the boss nowhere. The structure held, but it held because one man chose to make it hold. And the question of what would happen when that man was no longer there to keep the peace was a question that would be answered in December of 1985.
Paul Castellano had made it clear from the day he became boss that no one in his family would deal in drugs, and Aniello Dellacroce had agreed with the policy and warned his crew that if he found out any of them were dealing, he would kill them himself. The ban was not new. Carlo Gambino had imposed the same prohibition during his tenure as boss, reasoning that the federal sentences for drug trafficking was severe enough to create incentives for arrested members to cooperate with law enforcement, and that the increased scrutiny that drug
operations attracted was not worth the profits they generated. Castellano maintained the ban for the same reasons, and Dellacroce, despite his disagreements with Castellano on other matters, supported the policy and communicated its importance to the men under his command. The problem was that by the early 1980s, John Gotti was already heavily involved in drug trafficking, and so was Angelo Ruggiero.
The involvement was not casual or incidental. It was systematic and profitable, generating significant income for their crew, and it represented a direct violation of the most important rule the family had established. The violation created a crisis that would have resulted in executions under normal circumstances, but the circumstances were not normal because the men who were violating the rule were protected by the one man in the organization whose authority Castellano could not easily override.
The federal government’s entry into the situation came through an informant. Wilfred “Willie Boy” Johnson was a childhood friend of John Gotti who had become an FBI informant. And the information he provided gave investigators the foundation they needed to pursue a wiretap investigation. The FBI installed listening devices in Angelo Ruggiero’s home targeting a telephone that was listed in his daughter Princess Ruggiero’s name.
Ruggiero had told informants that this particular phone was safe, that it would not be monitored, that he could speak freely on it without worrying about law enforcement listening. He was wrong. The FBI was listening. And what they captured on tape over the following months was evidence of loan sharking, illegal gambling, and discussions of heroin trafficking that implicated Ruggiero, Gene Gotti, and by extension, John Gotti himself.
In August of 1983, federal agents arrested Angelo Ruggiero, Gene Gotti, and John Carneglia on heroin trafficking charges. The arrests were damaging enough on their own, but what made the situation a crisis for the family was what else the tapes contained. Ruggiero had not confined his conversations to criminal operations. He had also spent considerable time on those recorded phone calls insulting Paul Castellano, criticizing his leadership, questioning his toughness, and making clear his disdain for the boss who prioritized business over
tradition. The tapes revealed that Ruggiero had been lying to both Castellano and Della Croce, telling them repeatedly that he was not involved in drug trafficking, that he was merely cleaning up loose ends from his brother Salvatore’s narcotics operation, that he was not violating the family’s most sacred rule.
When word of the tapes and their contents reached Castellano, his response was fury. He demanded that the tapes be turned over to him so he could hear for himself what Ruggero had been saying. Under normal circumstances, that demand would have been non- negotiable. The boss had the right to review evidence of disloyalty and to impose whatever punishment he deemed appropriate.
And the punishment for the combination of drug trafficking and insulting the boss would almost certainly have been death. But these were not normal circumstances because Angelo Ruggero was Aniello Dellacroce’s nephew and John Gotti was Dellacroce’s most trusted protege. And Dellacroce was not willing to let Castellano execute them. Dellacroce went out of his way to protect Gotti and Ruggero from Castellano.
When prosecutors revealed that the tapes existed and that they contained evidence of Ruggero’s disloyalty, Dellacroce refused to turn the tapes over to Castellano knowing that if Castellano heard them, he would order Ruggero killed and would likely move against Gotti as well. Dellacroce used every piece of leverage he possessed, his position as underboss, his authority over the traditional faction of the family, his family connection to Ruggero, to create a shield that Castellano could not penetrate.
The protection worked because Dellacroce’s authority was sufficient to prevent Castellano from acting unilaterally, but it also created a situation where the family’s leadership was openly divided, where the underboss was protecting men who had violated the bosses’ most important rule, and where the only thing preventing executions was the personal relationship between a mentor and his proteges.
As long as Della Croce lived and held his position, Castellano could not touch the men who had violated the most important rule the family had. But the tapes existed, the arrests had been made, and the protection that depended on one man’s authority was not going to last forever. The federal government had evidence, Castellano had rage, Della Croce had loyalty, and the clock was running on how long the balance could hold.
On February 25th, 1985, federal prosecutors filed what would become known as the Mafia Commission trial indictment, charging the leaders of all five New York crime families with running a criminal enterprise, and Aniello Della Croce’s name was on the list alongside men who had commanded the city’s underworld for decades.
The indictment was historic in scope, targeting not individual crimes or isolated conspiracies, but the organizational structure itself. The commission that coordinated activities among the families and resolved disputes, and functioned as a governing body for organized crime in New York. The charges included racketeering, extortion, labor racketeering, and conspiracy.
And the government’s theory was that the commission itself was a criminal enterprise under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Della Croce was charged alongside bosses and underbosses from the other families, men who had spent their careers avoiding exactly this kind of comprehensive prosecution. On March the 28th, 1985, a second indictment came down.
This one more narrowly focused, but no less serious. Federal prosecutors charged Della Croce, his son Armand, and eight others with racketeering based on the activities of two crews operating in New York and Long Island over the previous 18 years. The The indictment detailed a pattern of criminal conduct that spanned nearly two decades, a systematic operation that had generated millions of dollars, and that federal investigators had been documenting for years.
On July 1st, 1985, DeLacroce and the other defendants entered pleas of not guilty to the charges, and the legal process that would determine whether he would spend the rest of his life in federal prison began moving forward. The significance of these prosecutions was not lost on anyone involved. The Mafia Commission trial represented the federal government’s most ambitious attempt to dismantle the organizational structure of the New York families, and if the government succeeded, the convictions would remove an entire
generation of leadership and fundamentally alter the balance of power in organized crime. For DeLacroce personally, the combination of the Commission trial and the racketeering indictment meant that he was facing charges that could result in effective life sentences if convicted, and at his age, with his health declining, any significant prison term was a death sentence delivered in a different form.
The problem was that by the time these indictments were filed, DeLacroce was already very sick. He had been diagnosed with lung cancer, and his health was deteriorating throughout 1985. The disease was advanced, the prognosis was terminal, and everyone who knew him understood that he would not live long enough to stand trial, much less serve a sentence if convicted.
The legal process would continue. The pre-trial motions would be filed. The government would prepare its case, but the defendant they had indicted was dying, and the timeline of the disease was running faster than the timeline of the courts. Despite the illness, despite the knowledge that he had months rather than years, despite the federal charges and the certainty that he would not see the inside of a courtroom as a defendant, Dellacroce continued to serve as underboss.
He continued to manage the operations under his control. He continued to hold the family together. He continued to protect John Gotti and Angelo Ruggiero from Paul Castellano, knowing that Castellano’s desire to eliminate them had not diminished, and that the only barrier preventing their execution was Dellacroce’s refusal to allow it.
The final months of his life were months spent under enormous pressure, legal jeopardy that would never be resolved in court, a terminal illness that was advancing, and the responsibility of maintaining the fragile peace within a family that was held together by his authority and his willingness to use it. By autumn of 1985, everyone who knew Aniello Dellacroce understood that he was dying, and the question was not whether he would live to see the trials, but whether the family would survive what came after he
was gone. December 2nd, 1985, Aniello Dellacroce died of lung cancer at Mary Immaculate Hospital in Queens, 71 years old, underboss of the Gambino crime family for 20 years, and the boss he had served loyally despite being passed over for the position did not come to see him die. Paul Castellano, informed that his underboss was in the hospital dying, made a decision that will be remembered as the final insult in a relationship that had been strained for 9 years.
He did not visit Dellacroce in the hospital. He did not attend the wake. He did not attend the funeral. The stated reason was caution, a desire to avoid public visibility at a time when he was facing federal indictments, and when law enforcement agencies would be watching and documenting everyone who appeared at the services for a major organized crime figure.
The explanation was rational from a legal standpoint, a calculation of risk and exposure that any defense attorney would have endorsed. The explanation did not matter to the men who had served under Delacroce for 20 years and who believed that Castellano owed the dying underboss more than legal caution.
To John Gotti and the faction that had remained loyal to Delacroce despite Castellano’s leadership, the refusal to visit, the absence from the wake and the funeral was not prudence, it was disrespect. It was a betrayal of the traditions that governed relationships in that world where a boss was expected to pay his respects to a dying underboss, where presence at a funeral was not optional but obligatory, where the failure to appear was a statement of contempt that could not be ignored or excused.
Delacroce had served Castellano loyally for 9 years despite being passed over for the position that everyone believed he had earned. He had accepted the split in the family’s authority. He had supported Castellano’s leadership even when his own faction opposed it. He had protected Castellano from the resentment that men like Gotti felt toward a boss they considered unworthy and when Delacroce was dying, Castellano would not come to the hospital.
When Delacroce was dead, Castellano would not attend the services. The insult was complete. The immediate consequences were consequences that Castellano either did not anticipate or believed he could control. After Delacroce’s death, John Gotti and his supporters no longer felt constrained.
The man who had kept them in line, who had insisted that they respect Castellano’s authority, who had used his personal relationship with Gotti to prevent the violence that loyalty alone would not have prevented, was gone. The restraint that Delacroce had imposed was lifted and the resentment that had been building for 9 years was free to find its expression.
Castellano made the situation worse. He revised his succession plan appointing Thomas Bilotti as his new underboss, a decision that signaled his intention to consolidate power around men loyal to him rather than accommodating the faction that had been loyal to Dell Croche. He also made plans to break up John Gotti’s crew, a move that would have dismantled the power base that Gotti had built and that would have effectively ended Gotti’s influence within the family.
The combination of factors converged into a single conclusion for the men who had followed Dell Croche. The death had removed the restraining force. The insult had made it personal. The drug trafficking crisis remained unresolved with Castellano still demanding the tapes and still planning executions. The organizational restructuring threatened their positions and their livelihoods.
The decision was made. Paul Castellano had to be removed. 14 days after Aniello Dell Croche died in that hospital in Queens, the man who refused to visit him was going to die on a Manhattan street and the mentor who had kept his protege in check for 9 years was not there to stop it anymore. December 16th, 1985, approximately 5:16 in the evening East 46th Street near 3rd Avenue in Midtown Manhattan outside Sparks Steak House in the middle of the holiday shopping season with Christmas lights in the windows and tourists walking past, Paul Castellano
stepped out of a car and was shot to death. The scene was ordinary until it was not. A Manhattan street on a December evening, restaurants opening for dinner people finishing their shopping the kind of urban normalcy that persisted until the moment the violence arrived and transformed the block into a crime scene that would be photographed and analyzed and remembered as one of the most audacious mob hits in New York history.
Castellano and Thomas Bilotti arrived at Sparks Steak House for a dinner meeting with other Gambino family members, a routine piece of business on what should have been an unremarkable evening. They were expected. The restaurant had been chosen. The time had been set. What Castellano did not know was that three to four men were waiting for him outside, positioned near the entrance, dressed in trench coats and Russian fur hats, armed and ready to execute a plan that had been coordinated with precision.
John Gotti and Sammy Gravano were sitting in a car across the street, watching, waiting for confirmation that the target had arrived. When Castellano’s car pulled up to the curb, Gravano used a walkie-talkie to alert the shooters. The signal was simple. The target was there. The moment had arrived.
As Castellano exited from the passenger side of the vehicle, the gunmen moved. They shot him multiple times at close range. Thomas Bilotti, who had been driving and who was stepping out of the car when the shooting started, was also shot and killed. Both men were left dead on the Manhattan street, Castellano on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, Bilotti near the car.
The shooters fled on foot, disappearing into the crowds of holiday shoppers and commuters before law enforcement could respond. John Gotti and Sammy Gravano, having watched the assassination unfold from their vantage point across the street, drove slowly past the scene to confirm that the job had been completed.
The bodies were visible. The scene was chaos. The hit had succeeded. Gotti then drove away, and within hours news was spreading through the five families that Paul Castellano, boss of the Gambino family, had been murdered in one of the most public and brazen assassinations the city had seen in decades. The immediate aftermath brought law enforcement and media to East 46th Street in force.
Police cordoned off the area. FBI agents who had been monitoring the Gambino family arrived to document the scene. Crime scene investigators photographed the bodies, collected evidence, and began the process of reconstructing what had happened. Portable lighting was brought in as darkness fell, illuminating the scene in a way that made the whole thing look surreal.
Two dead men on a Manhattan street with Christmas decorations visible in the background. What Paul Castellano had been carrying when he died was documented. $3,000 in cash, no weapon. He had been unarmed, vulnerable, and unprepared for an attack that came from men within his own organization. The significance of the assassination extended beyond the immediate violence.
This was the most famous mob hit New York had seen since Albert Anastasia’s murder in 1957, and it represented a shift in the organizational dynamics that had governed the five families for decades. John Gotti became boss of the Gambino family that night, assuming control of an organization that federal law enforcement estimated was generating approximately $1 million per day from its various criminal operations.
The hit was unsanctioned by the commission, a violation of the protocols that required approval before a boss could be killed, and the unsanctioned nature of the assassination sparked years of animosity between the Gambinos and the other New York families, friction that would complicate relationships and create tensions that lasted long after Gotti himself was imprisoned.
John Gotti became boss of the Gambino family that night, and the man who had taught him everything and kept him in line for 9 years had been dead for exactly 14 days. What followed the assassination outside Sparks Steak House was not the consolidation of power that Gotti expected, but the beginning of the end for everyone involved.
John Gotti’s tenure as boss of the Gambino family lasted less than 7 years. In 1992, he was convicted on multiple charges, including the murder of Paul Castellano, racketeering, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy to commit murder. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
He died in federal custody in June of 2002, 71 years old, the same age Dellacroce had been when he died. But Gotti’s death came in a prison medical facility after years of legal battles and failed appeals, not in a hospital bed surrounded by family, but in the custody of the federal government that had spent a decade building the case that finally brought him down.
Sammy Gravano, who had sat in the car with Gotti and watched the Castellano assassination unfold, turned government informant in 1991. His decision to cooperate with federal prosecutors was one of the most consequential betrayals in organized crime history, providing testimony that convicted Gotti and more than 30 other mobsters and sending shockwaves through the five families.
Gravano entered the witness protection program, received a reduced sentence for his own crimes, and disappeared into a new identity, though he would later be arrested again on drug charges, years after leaving the program. Angelo Ruggiero, the nephew Dellacroce had protected from Castellano’s wrath, died in 1989 of lung cancer, the same disease that had killed his uncle.
By the time of his death, Ruggerio was estranged from Gotti, sidelined by a boss who had come to see him as a liability because of the tapes that had captured his voice discussing drug trafficking and insulting the leadership. The man whose protection had required DeLacroce’s intervention and whose survival had been one of the factors that led to Castellano’s assassination, died isolated from the organization he had served and from the friend who had once valued him.
Armond DeLacroce and Aniello’s son died in April of 1988 while hiding in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. He had been convicted of racketeering and had failed to appear for sentencing in March, choosing to flee rather than surrender to custody. When his body was found, the cause of death was determined to be cirrhosis and a cocaine overdose, a combination of chronic illness and acute drug use that ended his life at a location far from the neighborhood where his father had spent 71 years.
The son of the man who had enforced the family’s ban on drug trafficking died of a cocaine overdose, an irony that was not lost on the people who knew the family’s history. The broader consequences of the Castellano assassination played out over years. The FBI, which had been targeting the Gambino family throughout the 1980s, intensified its focus after the hit, understanding that the unsanctioned murder of a boss represented organizational instability that could be exploited.
John Gotti’s approach to leadership was the opposite of Aniello DeLacroce’s approach in almost every respect. Where DeLacroce had preferred invisibility, Gotti courted visibility, becoming a media figure, photographed outside the Ravenite Social Club, profiled in newspapers and magazines as the the Don and the Teflon Don, a celebrity mobster whose public profile made him a target for law enforcement in a way that Della Croce never had been.
The high profile that Gotti cultivated as a demonstration of power became the mechanism of his destruction, attracting the kind of sustained prosecutorial attention that eventually produced the evidence and the testimony necessary to convict him. The unsanctioned nature of the Castellano hit created animosity with the other families that persisted for years.
The commission existed in part to prevent exactly the kind of unauthorized violence that the Sparks Steak House assassination represented, and Gotti’s refusal to seek approval before killing his boss violated the protocols that had maintained a fragile peace among the families for decades. The friction that resulted made cooperative ventures more difficult, created suspicions that complicated relationships, and contributed to an environment where the federal government’s efforts to dismantle the families faced less resistance because the families
themselves were less unified. The contrast between what Della Croce had represented and what Gotti represented was a contrast between two eras and two philosophies of organized crime. Della Croce was traditional, low profile, loyal to the organizational structure even when that structure denied him what he had earned, committed to the principle that the family came before personal ambition, and that visibility were was a weakness rather than a strength.
Gotti was modern, media-savvy, willing to break the rules when breaking them served his interests, committed to the principle that power should be visible, and that respect came from fear and from public demonstrations of authority. Della Croce’s approach had kept him out of prison for most of his career and had allowed him to serve as underboss for 20 years.
Gotti’s approach made him famous and got him convicted. The counterfactual questions are impossible to answer with certainty, but impossible to avoid asking. What would have happened if Dellacroce had lived? Would Gotti have moved against Castellano if the mentor who had kept him in check was still alive and still insisting on loyalty to the boss? Would Castellano have eventually moved against Gotti and Ruggerio once Dellacroce was no longer there to protect them? Or would he have found a way to resolve the drug trafficking crisis without
executions? Would the family have survived the federal prosecutions of the 1980s and 90s if the leadership had remained stable? Or was the Mafia Commission Trial the beginning of an end that no amount of organizational discipline could have prevented? The answers are unknowable, but the pattern is clear. For 9 years from 1976 to 1985, Aniello Dellacroce held together a family that should have torn itself apart the day Carlo Gambino passed him over for boss.
He did it through loyalty, through his personal authority over the men who served under him, through his relationship with John Gotti, and through his willingness to subordinate his own ambitions to the stability of the organization. When he died, the structure he had maintained collapsed in exactly the way his presence had prevented.
14 days from death to assassination. 14 days from restraint to violence. 14 days from the hospital bed in Queens where the underboss died to the Manhattan street where the boss was murdered. The story of Aniello Dellacroce is not the story of a man who rose to power, but the story of a man who was denied power and chose loyalty anyway, and the consequences of that choice did not become clear until he was gone.
He was born in Little Italy in 1914, raised in a world where organized crime was not an external force, but the actual structure that governed daily life. Mentored by a man called the Executioner, and he learned from that mentor how violence, and discipline, and loyalty combined to create authority in a world where no other form of authority was recognized.
He rose to underboss, the second highest position in one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the country, and he held that position for 20 years while serving a boss who had been chosen over him, and he never moved against that boss, and he never allowed the men who followed him to move against that boss, and the restraint that required was restraint that most men in his position would not have been capable of maintaining.
The frigid glare that made veteran detectives look away was not theatrical. It was the visible manifestation of a capacity for violence that was real, and that required no demonstration because everyone who looked at him understood what they were seeing. Ralph Salerno and Joseph Joseph Coffee, men who had spent their careers dealing with organized crime figures, both said that De La Croche was one of the only mobsters who genuinely frightened them, and the fear they described was not fear of what he might do, but fear of what they could
see in his eyes. A willingness to kill that was not hidden or performed, but simply present. Part of who he was in the same way his loyalty and his discipline were part of who he was. The traditions he believed in and the protocols he followed were traditions and protocols that were already fading by the time he died.
The world he had entered in the late 1930s, when Albert Anastasia took him under his wing and taught him what it meant to be a soldier in the Mangano family, was a world where loyalty mattered more than visibility, and where a man’s reputation was built on what he did rather than on what he allowed others to see him do.
By 1985, that world was disappearing, replaced by a world where men like John Gotti courted media attention and where the old rules about silence and invisibility were being abandoned in favor of a public performance of power that the federal government could photograph and document and use as evidence.
De La Croche represented the last of a particular type of organized crime figure, a man who believed that the organization came before the individual, that loyalty was not optional, and that the most effective power was the power that no one outside the organization ever saw. The legacy he left was a legacy measured not in what he gained, but in what he prevented.
He never became boss despite 20 years as underboss and despite the widespread belief that he had earned the position. He never broke with Castellano despite being passed over and despite the resentment that his faction felt. He never allowed the split in the family’s authority to become a war despite having the loyalty and the command necessary to force a confrontation.
What he accomplished was nine years of peace in an organization that had every reason to fragment, and the peace lasted exactly as long as he was alive to enforce it. The neighborhood where he was born and where he died changed as neighborhoods do, but the memory of the man who never left it, who operated from a building across the street from where he had been raised, who maintained his authority without ever seeking recognition outside the world that recognized him, persisted among the people who understood what he had been
and what his absence had cost. The Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street, the headquarters where he spent most of his professional life, stood as a reminder not just of organized crime’s presence in Little Italy, but of a particular approach to that life, an approach that valued invisibility over celebrity, loyalty over ambition, and the long game over immediate gratification.
What DellaCroce understood, what made him effective for 20 years in a position that should have made him bitter and resentful, was that power in his world was not about titles or public recognition, but about the ability to make things happen and to prevent things from happening. He made John Gotti into a capo and a force within the family.
He prevented that same John Gotti from starting a war with Paul Castellano. He made the arrangement between the two factions work when logic said it should fail. He prevented the Gambino family from tearing itself apart over a succession dispute that violated every expectation and every precedent. The power was real.
The effects were measurable, and none of it required a crown or public ceremony or newspaper profile. It required only that the men who mattered understood who he was and what he could do, and they understood. The question that his life raises and that his death answered is whether loyalty matters when it is not reciprocated, when the organization that demands it does not reward it, when the boss who receives it does not visit the hospital room where you are dying.
DellaCroce answered that question by maintaining his loyalty anyway, by insisting his faction do the same, by protecting the boss who had passed him over from the men who wanted to remove him. The answer he gave was that loyalty matters, not because of what you receive in return, but because of what falls apart when you withdraw it.
He withdrew nothing. He maintained everything. And when he died, the falling apart took 14 days. He died on December 2nd, 1985, and 14 days later, the boss he had served, despite being passed over, was dead on a Manhattan street, and the organization he had held together for 9 years through nothing more than loyalty and the frigid glare that made even veteran detectives look away, began the unraveling that his presence had prevented.
The man who believed the family came before everything discovered in his final month that the boss did not believe the same thing, and the 14 days between that discovery and its consequences stand as the measure of what one man’s restraint had been worth and what the absence of that restraint would cost.
