All Of John Gotti’s Murders Explained 

John Gotti was the most recognizable Mafia boss in American history. The tailored suits, the headlines, the three consecutive acquittals that earned him the nickname Teflon Don. But behind that public image was a documented record of violence that took nearly 20 years  to fully surface.

 Some of these killings were proven in court with physical evidence and convictions. Others rest entirely on the sworn testimony of the man who stood beside him when they happened. And one remains one of the most haunting unsolved disappearances in the history of organized crime. Here is what the record actually shows, case by case, in the order it happened.

 James McBratney, May 22nd, 1973. This was the murder that launched Gotti’s career inside the  Gambino family, and the story that grew up around it over the following decades is more complicated than the legend suggests. In late 1972 and early 1973, New York’s organized crime world was being disrupted by a wave of kidnappings.

 A crew led by a man named Eddie Maloney had been  abducting wealthy mob-connected figures and holding them for ransom. A practice that violated one of the most basic understandings within organized crime, since it placed made men and their associates at personal risk in a way that the families could not tolerate. Among the kidnapping victims that winter was a Staten Island loan shark connected to the Gambino family who was eventually released after a ransom of $21,000 was paid.

 James McBratney, a large Irish-American gangster known on the street as Jimmy from Queens, was identified by Gambino-connected sources as part of the kidnapping crew. According to the most detailed reconstructions of the case, including research by organized crime historian Jerry Capeci, the identification may well have been mistaken.

 McBratney had a long record of robbery and weapons charges, but the specific evidence tying him to this particular kidnapping ring was thin. It did not matter. The Gambino family wanted a response, and Gotti, at the time a young, ambitious associate  working under capo Carmine Charlie Wagons Fatico, was given the assignment along with his close friend Angelo Ruggiero and a third man, Ralph Ralphie  Wiggs Galione.

 On the night of May 22nd, 1973, the three men entered Snoop’s Bar and Grill on Staten Island, where McBratney was drinking. They approached him posing as police officers, Galione carrying a weapon, Ruggiero carrying handcuffs, and attempted to walk him out of the bar under the pretense of an arrest. When another patron tried to intervene, Galione fired two warning shots into the ceiling of the bar.

 McBratney resisted the attempt to remove him and fought with all three men. Galione then fired three shots at close range, killing him. Gotti went into hiding for over a year. When he was finally arrested in June 1974, he and Ruggiero were initially tried separately. Ruggiero’s first trial ended in a hung jury after defense witnesses  testified he had been in New Jersey that night.

For the second trial, Gotti hired attorney Roy Cohn, who had built a reputation representing high-profile and politically connected clients. Cohn negotiated what was, by any standard, a remarkable outcome. Both Gotti and Ruggiero pleaded guilty to attempted manslaughter rather than murder. Gotti was sentenced to four years at Green Haven Correctional Facility and served approximately two before his release.

The murder elevated Gotti’s standing within the organization considerably. Not, as later mythology sometimes claimed, because he had personally avenged the murder of Carlo Gambino’s nephew. The connection between McBratney and that earlier kidnapping was, by most credible accounts, never actually established, but simply because Gotti had demonstrated the willingness to act decisively and absorb the legal consequences without naming anyone else involved.

 Ralph Galione, the man whose shots actually killed McBratney, did not live long enough to see any trial at all. He was murdered in Brooklyn in December 1973 in a killing that has never been  solved and that some historians believe was connected to internal concerns about his reliability. John Favara disappeared July 28th, 1980. This entry is different from every other one on this list and it is important to be precise about why it’s included.

There is no body, no confirmed killer, no conviction, and no formal charge connected to anyone for what happened  to John Favara. What exists is a documented sequence of events, widespread speculation about what that sequence means, and a case that the NYPD  has never closed.

 On March 18th, 1980, Gotti’s 12-year-old son Frank was riding a borrowed mini bike near the family’s home in Howard Beach, Queens when he was struck and killed by a car driven by a neighbor, John Favara. Multiple investigations  at the time concluded the death was a tragic accident. Witnesses described the boy darting into the street and Favara was found to bear no criminal responsibility. No charges were filed.

What followed, however, is extensively documented in newspaper accounts and law enforcement records from the period. In the months after the accident, Favara began receiving anonymous threatening phone calls. The word murderer was spray painted on his car. According to multiple accounts, Favara was physically confronted at least once by a man wielding a baseball bat, reportedly Gotti himself, in an encounter that several reports describe as having required Gotti’s wife, Victoria, to intervene.

Favara and his wife, by all accounts terrified, began making arrangements to sell their home and leave the neighborhood entirely. On July 28th, 1980, just over 4 months after the accident, Favara left his job at a furniture company in Long Island for the day. According to a witness account that circulated afterward, he was approached in the parking lot by several people, struck, and forced into a van. He was never seen again.

 His car was found abandoned. No body was ever recovered, and despite an active investigation, no one was ever arrested or charged. Gotti and his wife were reportedly vacationing in Florida at the time Favara disappeared, a detail that has been cited both as evidence of an alibi and by skeptics as evidence of careful timing.

 Law enforcement officials who worked organized crime in New York during that period have stated in interviews over the years that they believe the disappearance was connected to the grief surrounding Frank Gotti’s death, but belief is not proof, and this case remains formally unsolved. included here not as a confirmed Gotti murder, but because it is impossible to discuss every crime associated with John Gotti.

Honestly, without acknowledging the case that, more than any other, shaped the public’s understanding of what he was capable of, whether or not the available evidence ever rises to the level of proof. The Teflon Don years. Context before Castellano. Before getting to the murder that made Gotti boss, it’s worth understanding the five years that preceded it because they explain both his motive and the method.

By the early 1980s, Gotti was a capo running the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club crew out of Ozone Park, Queens, operating under the protection of Gambino underboss Aniello Neil Della Croche. Gambino family boss Paul Castellano  had, by this point, established a strict policy. Any member caught dealing narcotics would be killed, a rule rooted in the long-standing, if inconsistently enforced, Mafia tradition of treating drug trafficking as bringing unacceptable levels of federal attention onto the organization. The problem was

that Gotti’s own crew, including his close friend Angelo Ruggiero and Gotti’s brother Gene were deeply involved in heroin trafficking. FBI wiretaps placed on Ruggiero’s home beginning in 1980 captured him discussing drug deals in extensive detail. Tapes that when their existence became known through the discovery process of a 1983 federal indictment represented a potential death sentence for Ruggiero and an enormous liability for Gotti who was implicated by association.

 Castellano demanded copies of the tapes. Ruggiero, terrified of what they contained, refused and delayed for months. The standoff created a situation in which Gotti’s entire crew faced the possibility of being killed by their own boss for violating a rule they had been breaking for years. At the same time, Castellano was facing his own legal troubles.

 A separate 1985 federal racketeering indictment connected to the commission case that would eventually  convict the heads of all five families. Castellano had grown increasingly isolated from the street level captains, spending most of his time at his Staten Island  mansion, conducting business through a small circle that increasingly excluded men like Gotti.

 The combination, a boss who might execute Gotti’s entire crew over the drug tapes, who was himself facing prison and might begin cooperating or making deals that endangered others, and who was increasingly remote from the captains whose loyalty he needed, created the conditions Gotti used to justify what came next.

 Paul Castellano and Thomas Bilotti. December 16th, 1985. This is the murder most synonymous with Gotti’s name and the one with the most extensive courtroom documentation, including an eyewitness account given under oath by the man who helped plan it and watched it happen from a car nearby. Gotti understood that killing a sitting boss without the commission’s  approval was a fundamental violation of the rules that had governed the American Mafia since 1931.

The same rule, notably, that the organization’s founders had established specifically to prevent the kind of chaos that unauthorized assassinations  of bosses could unleash. Soliciting that approval, however, was not realistic. Castellano had long-standing relationships with the other family bosses, >>  >> and any request to have him killed would likely have been refused and would certainly have gotten back to him.

Instead, according to later testimony, Gotti secured the informal backing of senior influential figures within the Lucchese, Colombo, and Bonanno families. Enough quiet support that the other families would be unlikely to retaliate once the deed was done, even without having formally approved it. The operation was set for the evening of December 16th, 1985.

Castellano and his driver and bodyguard, Thomas Bilotti, were due to meet several capos, including Frank DeCicco, a Gambino capo who had aligned himself with Gotti and helped engineer the setup, for dinner at Sparks Steak House on East 46th Street in Midtown Manhattan. The meeting itself was the pretext. Castellano had no reason to suspect it was anything other than a normal sit-down with capos under his command.

According to Sammy Gravano’s later sworn testimony, he and Gotti were parked nearby in a car monitoring the situation by walkie-talkie while a team of shooters waited near the restaurant entrance. When Castellano’s car pulled up to the curb in violation of a posted no parking sign, exactly as anticipated, Gravano relayed the signal.

 As Castellano and Bilotti stepped out of the car, the shooters opened fire, killing both men on the sidewalk within seconds. Gravano testified that he and Gotti then drove slowly past the scene to confirm  the result before leaving the area. Frank DeCicco, who had been waiting nearby to receive Castellano, encountered Castellano’s nephew Thomas Gambino arriving separately moments later and told him simply that his uncle had been shot and that he should leave immediately.

 Within days, the Gambino family’s capos were informed that Gotti was the new boss. No formal commission meeting approved the succession in advance. It was presented in effect as a fait accompli that the other families chose not to challenge. The killings of Castellano and Bilotti were never prosecuted as a standalone case.

 Instead, they became two of the central predicate acts in the racketeering indictment that would, 7 years later, end Gotti’s career. Built almost entirely on Gravano’s account and on FBI recordings made in the years that followed. The murder had one immediate and violent aftershock that is worth noting, even though it falls outside the scope of  murders committed by Gotti himself.

 In April 1986, Frank DeCicco, the capo who had helped set up Castellano and who had become Gotti’s underboss, was killed by a car bomb in Brooklyn. The bombing is widely attributed to the Genovese family under Vincent “The Chin” Gigante as retaliation for the unauthorized killing of Castellano. Gigante reportedly believed Gotti himself would be in the car.

 It is a useful reminder of how directly the consequences of the Castellano hit rippled through the rest of Gotti’s tenure as boss. Robert DiBernardo, June 1986. Robert DiBernardo, known within the organization as “DiBee”, was an unusual figure within the Gambino family, even by the standards of an organization full of unusual  figures.

 He had built an extraordinarily profitable position controlling a significant portion of the pornography distribution business operating around Times Square, working through entities like Star Distributors. He had a reputation as one of the family’s most capable earners, someone who generated enormous revenue without the violent reputation that defined most of his peers.

 He was also, notably, one of the relatively few men in Gambino family history  believed to have been made, formally initiated, without having personally committed a murder, a reflection of how valuable his earning capacity was considered. That reputation did not protect him in the aftermath of Castellano’s death.

 According to Sammy Gravano’s testimony at the 1992 trial, the period following the Castellano hit produced significant jockeying for position among the Gambino family’s senior figures, including competition over who would fill the underboss role after Frank DeCicco’s death in the car bombing. Gravano testified that capo Angelo Ruggiero, who had his own history of friction with DiBernardo, told him that DiBernardo had been speaking critically about Gotti’s leadership, characterizing his comments as subversive,  and that Gotti had decided DiBernardo

needed to be eliminated. DiBernardo was lured to a meeting at the basement office of Gravano’s drywall company on Stillwell Avenue in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, a location Gravano controlled and that had been used for this purpose before. He was killed there in June 1986. As with several killings on this list, his body was never recovered and no specific burial site has ever been identified.

 The murder became one of the five homicides formally charged against Gotti in the December 1990 racketeering  indictment. What makes this particular case notable beyond the killing itself is what the FBI’s surveillance recordings later revealed. In conversations captured by agents in the years following the murder, Gotti was recorded attempting to characterize the DiBernardo killing, along with the Melito and DeBono killings discussed below, as having been primarily Gravano’s doing rather than his own.

When Gravano was eventually shown these recordings by federal prosecutors after his own arrest in December 1990, the realization that Gotti was attempting to shift responsibility for killings Gravano believed had been ordered by Gotti himself became one of the central factors in Gravano’s decision to cooperate with the government the following year.

 Liborio Louis Milito, March 1988. Liborio Milito’s case is distinct from the others on this list in one important respect. He was not an outside problem or a rival faction figure. He was a soldier within Sammy Gravano’s own crew, a man Gravano had worked alongside for  years, which makes Gravano’s later testimony about this killing, delivered under oath against his own former boss, a particularly stark example of how completely the relationships within the Gambino family’s upper ranks had been severed by the time of the 1992 trial. According to

the testimony presented at trial, Milito had become a source of concern for the family’s leadership during the period after Castellano’s death. The specific nature of the concern, as described in court proceedings, involved a combination of financial irregularities and broader questions about Milito’s reliability and loyalty  during a period when Gotti’s new administration was consolidating control and was acutely sensitive to anything that looked like dissent or  insubordination.

The same general category of concern, in other words, that had led to DiBernardo’s death less than 2 years earlier. Gravano testified that Gotti gave the order for Milito’s death, and that Gravano, despite his  personal history with Milito as a member of his own crew, participated in carrying it out.

 Milito was lured to a meeting under a false pretext, in a pattern consistent with the other dis- appearances on this list, and was killed in March 1988. His body, like DiBernardo’s, was never recovered. The Milito murder became the fourth of the five homicide charges in the 1990 indictment. At trial, it served as one of the clearest illustrations of the prosecution’s central argument, that Gotti ran an organization in which loyalty was demanded absolutely and enforced through murder when his own subordinates  believed it had

been violated. And that the same machinery that had been used against Di Bernardo, and would be used again against Louis DeBonno, could just as easily be turned on a man’s own crewmates when the order came from the top. Louis DeBonno. October 4th, 1990. Louis DeBonno’s case is the most procedurally documented killing on this entire list, because one of the men involved in carrying it out, Gambino soldier John Carneglia, was separately tried and convicted in 2009, nearly two decades after Gotti’s own conviction, in a case that laid out the

circumstances of the murder in considerable additional detail. DeBonno was a Gambino soldier who operated a successful drywall  and construction business, which gave him legitimate office space in the parking garage area beneath the original World  Trade Center complex. According to the federal indictment and the subsequent Carneglia prosecution, the issue that led to DeBonno’s death was on its surface almost mundane compared to the power struggles behind the other killings. DeBonno had repeatedly failed

to respond to summonses from Gotti, failing to appear for meetings when called, a pattern that, as documented extensively in earlier videos on this channel about the Mafia’s internal code of conduct, represented one of the most serious breaches of respect a member could commit toward a boss. According to testimony and court records from the Carneglia trial, Gotti’s frustration with DeBonno’s repeated refusals to meet when summoned escalated to the point where he  ordered DeBonno killed specifically for this pattern of

disrespect, a detail that prosecutors highlighted as illustrative of how absolute Gotti’s expectations of deference had become by 1990. On October 4th, 1990, DeBonno was shot to death in the parking garage beneath the World Trade Center at his own place of  business. The DeBonno murder became the fifth and final homicide charge in Gotti’s December 1990 indictment, and it was the most recent of the five, occurring just two months before Gotti’s own arrest.

 In the 2009 trial, federal prosecutors detailed John Carneglia’s role in the killing as part of a broader racketeering case that also connected him to murders going back to the 1970s, including a 1977 stabbing and a 1983 stabbing, and to a documented pattern of disposing of victims’ remains using barrels of acid. Details that, while extending well beyond Gotti’s own direct involvement, illustrated the broader culture of violence within the crew that carried out his orders.

 The Vastola Conspiracy, a charge without a killing. The final element of the December 1990 indictment against Gotti was not a completed murder, and it’s worth being precise about this distinction. Gotti and his co-defendant Frank Locascio were charged with conspiracy to murder Gaetano “Corky” Vastola, a capo in the New Jersey-based DeCavalcante crime family.

 The underlying dispute involved business and territorial tensions between the Gambino and DeCavalcante organizations. Unlike every other charge discussed in this video, this count did not allege that anyone had actually been killed, only that Gotti and Locascio had conspired toward that outcome. Vastola was never killed. He was, in fact, separately convicted and imprisoned on unrelated racketeering charges around the same period.

 The conspiracy charge against Gotti was nonetheless among the counts on which he was convicted in April 1992, and it contributed to the life sentence handed  down that June. But, it represents a planned act rather than a completed one, and it’s included here for completeness rather than as an additional body. The 1992 verdict and what it meant.

When the jury returned its verdict on April 2nd, 1992, after just 13 hours of deliberation, Gotti was convicted on all counts, including all five murders, the Vastola conspiracy, and a long list of racketeering, gambling, and tax offenses. Frank Locascio was convicted on every charge except one count of illegal gambling.

 Both men received life sentences without the possibility of parole on June 23rd, 1992. What made the 1992 verdict different from the three previous trials that had failed to convict Gotti was not new evidence about old events. It was the combination of FBI recordings made in an apartment above the Ravenite Social Club, capturing Gotti discussing several of these murders in his own words, and the testimony of Sammy Gravano, who had been present for or directly involved in most of them.

 Gravano’s cooperation agreement, five years served in exchange for admitting to 19 murders across his career, remains one of the most consequential plea deals in the history of American organized crime prosecution, precisely because of how directly it connected to the killings described above. Gotti spent the rest of his life at the United States Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, much of it in conditions close to be isolation.

 He was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1998 and died at the Federal Medical Center in Springfield, Missouri, on June 10th, 2002, at the age of 61. Seven names, one disappearance with no resolution, one conspiracy that never became a killing, and a conviction built less on any single piece of evidence than on the accumulated weight of recordings and testimony from a man who had been there for almost all of it, and who, in the end, decided that surviving mattered more than the silence he had once sworn to keep. Thanks for watching.