What Happened To The Men Who Killed For John Gotti? 

John Gotti became the most famous mob boss in American history, but he didn’t do it alone. Behind him was a circle of men who killed for him, covered for him, and helped him run the most powerful criminal organization in the country. Some of them were loyal until the end. Some betrayed him.

 Some were dead before his trial even began. Here is what happened to every one of them. Frank DeCicco. Frank DeCicco was, in many ways, the man who made John Gotti possible. Born on November 5th, 1935 in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, DeCicco had risen through the Gambino family to become a trusted capo under Paul Castellano.

 And then, in a calculated act of betrayal that changed the course of the family’s history, quietly aligned himself with Gotti’s in the conspiracy to remove Castellano from power. It was DeCicco who was responsible for securing the support of other senior Gambino captains in the weeks before the December 1985 hit outside Sparks Steak House.

 A political operation that Gotti alone could not have executed. When Castellano and his driver, Thomas Bilotti, were killed that evening, DeCicco was standing outside the restaurant waiting to receive Castellano’s nephew, Thomas Gambino, whom he quietly turned away from the scene. Within days, Gotti named DeCicco his underboss. He lasted 4 months.

Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, boss of the Genovese  family and one of Castellano’s closest allies on the Commission, was furious at the unauthorized killing and organized a response. He enlisted Lucchese underboss Anthony Casso to plan the assassination of both Gotti and DeCicco. A Genovese associate named Herbert “Blue Eyes” Piate, a former US Army munitions expert with no known connection to the Gambino family, and therefore no one who would raise suspicion,  was recruited to carry out the hit using

a remote-controlled bomb built from military-grade C4 plastic explosive and the mechanism of a radio-controlled toy car. On Sunday, April 13th, 1986, DeCicco attended a meeting at the Veterans and Friends Social Club in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn. Gotti was expected to be there, but changed his plans at the last minute.

 As DeCicco walked to his Buick Park Avenue after the meeting, accompanied by a Lucchese soldier named Frank Frankie Hearts Bellino, who bore a close physical resemblance to Gotti and whom Padden mistook for the target. Padden detonated the device from less than half a block away. The car exploded. DeCicco was killed instantly.

 His coffin was carried past the bombing site on the way to his burial. He was the only underboss in the history of the five families to be killed while in office in the post-war era. Angelo Ruggiero Angelo Salvatore. Ruggiero was John Gotti’s oldest friend. They had grown up together in the East New York section of Brooklyn, been arrested together for truck hijacking at JFK Airport in the late 1960s,  and been inducted into the Gambino family together in 1977 in the same ceremony.

 Ruggiero was also one of the primary reasons the Gambino family eventually fell apart, not through betrayal, but through an inability to stop talking. Ruggiero had been running a large-scale heroin distribution operation out of his home in Cedarhurst, Long Island in defiance of the explicit ban on narcotics that Paul Castellano had imposed on the family.

 In May 1982, the FBI placed a bug in his home that captured over a hundred hours of conversation. Ruggiero holding court in his kitchen, his den, his dining room, discussing murders, drug deals, and his distaste for Castellano in language that could not have been more direct. His nickname, Quack Quack, reflected both the duck-like stride produced by a foot condition and the endless unstoppable flow of words.

 Sammy Gravano once summarized him simply, “He had a lot of balls, not too much in the brains department. When the existence of the tapes became known in 1982, Castellano demanded copies. Ruggiero refused, knowing the tapes would expose him and Gene Gotti to the death penalty the  boss had promised for any member caught dealing narcotics.

 It was this standoff, Castellano demanding the tapes, Ruggiero refusing, Gotti unwilling to let his oldest friend be killed, that accelerated the timeline toward Castellano’s own assassination. In a very real sense, Ruggiero’s big mouth made the Gotti era possible. It also destroyed him. A federal indictment in 1983 charged him alongside Gene Gotti and John Carneglia with heroin trafficking and racketeering.

 The first two trials ended in mistrials amid allegations of jury tampering. By the third trial in 1989, Ruggiero was seriously ill with terminal lung cancer. He had smoked four packs of Marlboro cigarettes a day for most of his adult life. Gotti, by this point, had stripped him of his rank as capo and was reportedly considering having him killed for the damage the tapes had caused before Gravano convinced him that executing a dying man was not worth the trouble.

 Gotti refused to visit his oldest friend as he lay dying. Gravano later said he nearly had to drag Gotti to attend  his wake. Angelo Ruggiero died of lung cancer in Howard Beach, Queens on December 5th, 1989 at 49 years old. He died without having served a single day for the heroin conviction. He had been too sick to be sentenced.

 His drug trafficking partners, Gene Gotti and John Carneglia, were subsequently convicted and sentenced to 50 years apiece. The FBI recordings from Ruggiero’s kitchen, dining room, and den ultimately provided critical context for the investigation that would send John Gotti to prison for life 3 years later. Willie Boy Johnson. Willie Boy Johnson and John Gotti had known each  other since childhood and by every account Gotti trusted him as much as he trusted anyone.

 Johnson worked as one of Gotti’s primary loan collectors, a street level enforcer whose ease and reputation made him effective at the work  and was a constant presence in the social orbit of the Bergen crew throughout the 1970s and 1980s. He was never formally made because his heritage disqualified him from full membership, but he operated at the center of Gotti’s circle and was trusted with knowledge that most made members also carried.

 What Gotti and the organization eventually learned was that Johnson had been an FBI informant for years. The revelation came through court discovery documents in a 1985 federal trial in which his identity as a source was publicly disclosed. Confronted with the evidence by Gotti directly, Johnson confirmed it.

 What happened next was extraordinary by any organized crime standard. Gotti chose not to act. He told Johnson that he knew and allowed him to continue operating. Whether this reflected genuine loyalty to a childhood friend, a calculation that Johnson’s continued usefulness outweighed the risks, or simply an unwillingness to act against someone he cared about has never been definitively established.

The tolerance ran out in 1989. On August 29th, Johnson was shot multiple times outside his home in Brooklyn. Killed in broad daylight on the street where he lived, he was 50 years old. Sammy Gravano organized and was present  for the operation. Johnson had spent years informing on the people he had grown up with and in the end it made no difference.

 The organization killed him anyway. Two years later, Gravano would himself become a federal informant providing testimony that destroyed the man whose friendship  Johnson had banked his survival on for years. The parallel was not lost on anyone following both cases. Tony Rampino Anthony Rampino was not a made member of the Gambino family.

 His prior drug history had disqualified him from formal initiation. A limitation that, given what he did and who he was, seems almost beside the point. He was known as Tony Roach, a nickname he had earned because people thought he physically resembled a cockroach, a description that gained a second meaning when he became a heavy marijuana smoker in an era when many of his associates looked down on drug use.

He was tall and skeletal with arms that seemed disproportionately long, a rubbery face he could contort into unsettling expressions, and a reputation for using his appearance as a practical tool. Law enforcement sources  described him as genuinely frightening to look at, and he knew it. Despite his unofficial status, Rampino was part of Gotti’s innermost operational circle, a constant presence at the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club, a trusted loan collector, and a man whose role in the killing of Paul Castellano has been documented by

multiple witnesses. On December 16th, 1985, Rampino was positioned as a backup shooter outside Sparks Steak House with a specific assignment to kill any police officer or civilian who interfered with the hit team during the operation. Eyewitnesses later identified him at the scene, and a UPI story published shortly after the killing ran under the headline, “Witness identifies Castellano gunman as Gotti associate.

” At trial in 1987, Rampino was acquitted alongside Gotti and the other defendants after evidence emerged suggesting jury tampering. He walked out of the courthouse free. Two years later, his freedom was over. On June 28th, 1987, Rampino was arrested in Ozone Park for selling $30,000 worth of heroin to an undercover police officer.

The case fell under New York’s Rockefeller drug laws, which required mandatory sentences with minimums of 15 years to life. He received a sentence  of 25 years to life. By the time he filed appeals for compassionate release, citing severe heart and respiratory problems, he had spent more than two decades incarcerated.

 Every appeal was denied. He died at St. Luke’s Hospital in New Hartford, New York  on December 20th, 2010, still in state custody, 16 days after being admitted to the hospital. He was 71 years old. The man who had stood outside Sparks Steakhouse as a backup killer on the night Gotti became boss spent  the rest of his life prison hospital.

 He had been eligible for parole in 2012. Gene Gotti. Gene Gotti was the second youngest of five brothers  who all became made members of the Gambino family. And in many respects, he was John’s most loyal lieutenant before his arrest in 1989 made it impossible to be anything at all. He had been made before John, inducted in 1976 while his more famous brother was still serving time for the McBratney murder.

 He worked alongside Angelo Ruggiero and John Carneglia, running a multi-million heroin distribution ring throughout the early 1980s in violation of Castellano’s explicit ban on narcotics. The same violation that, when the FBI discovered it, set in motion the chain of events leading to Castellano’s assassination. The heroin case against Gene Gotti, Carneglia, and Ruggiero took three trials and six years to reach a verdict.

The first two ended in mistrials amid allegations that jurors had been tampered with and threatened. At one point during jury selection for a later Gotti trial, Gene and Gravano sat at the defense table with guns visibly tucked in their waistbands. A piece of theater so brazen that it appeared to be a deliberate message.

 On May 24th, 1989, the third heroin trial finally produced a conviction. Gene Gotti received a 50-year federal sentence. He maintained his silence throughout. No deals, no cooperation, no testimony. He served 29 years at the Federal Correctional Institution in Pollock, Louisiana and was released on September 14th, 2018 at 71 years old.

 He returned to his family home  in Valley Stream, Long Island. His brother John had died in prison in 2002. Angelo Ruggiero had died of cancer in 1989. John Carneglia had been released in 2018 after serving his own sentence. The FBI agent who had monitored Jean Gotti for years told the New York Daily News after his release, “He was a bonafide wiseguy.

 Are you going to retire and enjoy your grandchildren?” Jean Gotti has not been publicly associated with organized crime activity since his release. John Carneglia. John Carneglia is one of the more unusual figures in the Gambino family’s history. A man who ran a legitimate looking junkyard business in East New York as a front for operations that included narcotics trafficking, the disassembly of stolen vehicles, the disposal of murder victims, and one of the most disturbing details in the documented history of Gotti’s inner

circle, the removal of jewelry from bodies before dissolving them in acid. He and his brother Charles co-owned the Fountain Avenue Auto Salvage Junkyard and prosecutors alleged that at least some of the victims who disappeared from the organization’s enemies list ended up processed at that location. In the 1970s, he took in a 12-year-old boy named Kevin McMahon who had been sleeping  in his pool house and effectively acted as a surrogate father to the child for 15 years until his own imprisonment ended the arrangement.

Carneglia was convicted alongside Jean Gotti in the third heroin trafficking trial in 1989 and sentenced to 50 years in federal prison. He was released in 2018 after serving approximately 29 years, the same year as Jean Gotti, a parallel release of two men who had been indicted, tried, and convicted together.

During his imprisonment, his brother Charles was separately prosecuted in a 2009 federal trial that was significantly more damaging to the family’s institutional history than John’s own conviction had been. Charles Carneglia was convicted of four murders documented at trial, including the 1977 stabbing of Michael Cotillo, the 1983 stabbing of Salvatore Puma, the 1990 shooting of Louis De Bono in the World Trade Center parking garage on John Gotti’s direct order, and the 1990 killing of armored truck guard Jose

Delgado Rivera during a robbery at JFK Airport. At sentencing, the judge also determined the government had proven Charles’s role in the 1976 murder of Brooklyn Criminal Court Officer Albert Gelb, killed four days before he was scheduled to testify against Carneglia at a separate trial. Charles Carneglia received a life sentence. He remains incarcerated.

 He is 80 years old. Joseph Joe Piney Armone. Joseph Armone’s career in organized crime spanned more than five decades and two distinct eras of the Gambino family, a fact that makes him, among all the men on this list, the one with the deepest historical roots. He had been a serious criminal figure since the early 1950s, had helped oversee the family’s portion of the French Connection heroin smuggling network in the late 1950s, and had been convicted in 1965 and served 10 years in prison before resuming his career under

Carlo Gambino  and then Paul Castellano. By the time Gotti was planning the Castellano assassination in 1985, securing Armone’s support was one of his highest priorities. Armone’s standing as a respected old-timer, whose credibility stretched back to the Anastasia era, gave the conspiracy a legitimacy it would not otherwise have had.

 After Frank De Cicco’s death in April 1986 destroyed the underboss role before it had properly begun, Gotti appointed Armone, already 69 years old, to the position. The appointment lasted approximately eight months before a December 1987 conviction on racketeering, extortion, and bribery charges ended it. At sentencing in February 1988, Armone was offered a temporary release before reporting to prison if he would publicly renounce his ties to organized crime.

Gotti, who had banned family members from making any public acknowledgement of the organization’s existence, refused to allow it. Armone declined the offer, accepted his 15-year sentence, and was taken into custody. He was 70 years old. He was given one more chance before prison took him permanently. The judge, understanding that a 15-year sentence at his age was effectively a death sentence, offered a conditional release for a final Christmas with his family. The same condition applied.

 He would have to publicly disavow the Gambino family. Gotti refused the exception again. Armone served his sentence. On February 23rd, 1992, he died in federal custody of natural causes. He was 74 years old. He had never cooperated with the government, never acknowledged the organization publicly, and died precisely  as he had conducted his entire career, in complete silence about everything that mattered.

 Frank Locascio, Frank Locascio was everything John Gotti was not temperamentally, quiet, low-profile, methodical, and deeply uncomfortable with publicity. He had been a made member of the Gambino family since the 1950s, working as a bookmaker and loan shark before rising through the ranks to capo of a Bronx-based crew. After Armone went to prison in 1987, Locascio became acting underboss.

 When Gotti later reshuffled the administration to promote Gravano, Locascio became acting consigliere. Through all of these transitions, he served as Gotti’s most senior remaining lieutenant, the man who was present for the most sensitive conversations and who was captured on the FBI’s Ravenite recordings discussing criminal business with the same candor that made those recordings so devastating at trial.

The recording that most directly implicated Locascio involved the murder of Louis De Bono  in October 1990. On an FBI recording, Gotti is heard explaining his decision to have De Bono killed with characteristic bluntness. He didn’t do nothing else wrong. He’s going to get killed because he disobeyed coming.

 Locascio was present in the room. His silence in response to what the judge at his subsequent trial described as a stark pronouncement of a death sentence was treated as a scent. The judge’s characterization of that silence would eventually  be cited by Locascio himself as the key injustice of his conviction.

 He later argued, supported by a Gravano affidavit filed in 2018, that he had actually tried to talk Gotti out of killing De Bono and had been demoted from underboss to consigliere partly as a consequence of that attempt. Locascio was convicted alongside Gotti on April 2nd, 1992 and sentenced to life in prison without parole on June 23rd of the same year.

 At sentencing, he made a statement that has been quoted ever since. I am guilty of being a good friend of John Gotti and if there were more men like John Gotti on this earth, we would have a better country. He spent nearly three decades fighting his conviction through increasingly creative legal arguments while his health declined in federal custody.

 His daughter was reportedly present at the end holding him and singing Frank Sinatra songs as he took his last breaths. Frank Locascio died at the Federal Medical Center in Devens, Massachusetts on October 1st, 2021 at 89 years old, 29 years after his conviction and almost exactly 19 years after the death of the man he had publicly called his greatest friendship.

Sammy Gravano. Of the 10 men on this list, Sammy Gravano is the only one who walked out of the United States Penitentiary  in Marion, Illinois, where Gotti spent his sentence, as a free man. And the only one whose freedom was bought with John Gotti’s life. Gravano had been Gotti’s underboss since 1990 after Locascio was demoted.

 He had committed 19 murders across his career and was the single most operationally trusted figure in the Gambino administration. What ended the relationship, and effectively the organization as it had existed, was a series of FBI recordings made in an apartment above the Ravenite Social Club, in which Gotti was captured discussing Gravano’s growing business interests in ways that suggested he might be preparing to have him eliminated.

 Shown these recordings by federal prosecutors after his arrest in December 1990, Gravano made his calculation. On November 13th, 1991, he formally agreed to cooperate with the government becoming the highest-ranking member of a New York crime family to turn state’s witness  in the organization’s history. His 9 days of testimony at the 1992 trial were comprehensive and specific enough to leave the defense with almost nothing to work with.

 Gotti was convicted on all 13 counts. Gravano received a 5-year sentence for 19 murders. He served that sentence and was released in 1994. In 2000, he was arrested in Arizona for running an ecstasy distribution ring alongside his wife, son, and daughter and received a 19-year sentence. John Gotti Jr. John Angelo Gotti was born on February 14th, 1964 and was formally inducted into the Gambino family on Christmas Eve 1988.

A ceremony conducted by Gravano rather than by his father, specifically to avoid the accusation of nepotism. He was named a capo in 1990, reportedly the youngest captain in the family’s history, and became acting boss when his father was imprisoned following the 1992 conviction. He ran the family through the 1990s while his father directed strategy from Marion, communicating through intermediaries, and adapting to a more cautious operational style than the one that had destroyed his father, conducting mob business primarily

through walkie-talkies, rather than in fixed locations that could be monitored. In April 1999, with federal pressure mounting and overwhelming evidence in hand, Gotti Jr. pleaded guilty to four acts of racketeering, including extortion, loan sharking, and bribery. He received a sentence of 6 years and 3 months and was fined $1 million.

His father, still alive in prison, had advised him against the plea. He was released and then, in 2004, charged again in an 11-count racketeering indictment that included a conspiracy to kidnap Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels. The case went to trial. The jury could not reach a verdict. It went to trial again in 2006.

 Another hung jury, again in 2008. A third mistrial. A fourth trial in 2009 produced a fourth hung jury. In January 2010, federal prosecutors announced they would not pursue a fifth prosecution. Gotti Jr. has maintained since  then that he left the Gambino family in 1999 and has had no criminal involvement since.

 He has given interviews, written a book, and made multiple public appearances discussing the life he says he left behind. Whether he actually left or simply became too difficult to convict is a question that four separate federal juries declined to resolve. Ten men who built an empire around one person. One died in a car car meant for the boss.

One talked his way into a cancer ward before he could be tried. One sold the boss out for five years. One died in prison, still calling his boss the greatest man he’d ever known. And one walked four mistrial verdicts back to a life in the suburbs. The empire they served lasted from December 1985 to April 1992.

Six years, four months, and 17 days from the killing of Castellano to the verdict against Gotti. Everything else is what happened after. Thanks for watching.