Word: castellano
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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First he got threatening telephone calls. Then he found the brakes on his van had been tampered with. That was scary enough, but the chiller came last December when Piecyk read about the Manhattan sidewalk slaying of Paul Castellano, head of the Gambino crime family, one of the nation's most powerful Mafia groups. Newspapers identified Gotti, 45, who has served six years for attempted manslaughter and other crimes, as the probable successor to Castellano; some reports suggested that he might have been involved in the killing. Piecyk also read that after Gotti's son Frank, 12, was killed...
Hankering after a larger share of the New York City chicken market, Frank Perdue found he had little choice but to deal with mobsters. He agreed to supply birds to Dial Poultry, a distributing company owned by sons of Gambino Family Crime Boss Paul Castellano, the Mob chieftain who was gunned down in midtown Manhattan last December. Perdue knew with whom he was dealing. Later he turned to Castellano, unsuccessfully, for assistance in easing labor troubles in Virginia. "They (the Mafia) have long tentacles," the poultry producer testified last September before the President's Commission on Organized Crime. "I figured...
...their successors, are back on the scene. Furthermore, federal prosecutors are just starting to make use of long-enacted criminal conspiracy laws. In one of the first such cases, six reputed members of the Gambino crime family were found guilty last week of running a car-theft ring. Castellano, of course, had been convicted earlier by a different kind of jury...
Whoever gunned down Castellano, investigators say, had the approval of the Commission. The cautious mobster, whose sister had been married to the late Crime Chief Carlo Gambino, was reviled by his fellow dons. They mocked him as a dainty executive who had served only one short jail sentence (for armed robbery) and had never bloodied his hands except when he trained as a butcher in his youth. They also suspected that Castellano had been the source of information for the Government's case against the Commission, through an FBI bug planted in his neoclassical Staten Island home. The leaders were...
Authorities suspect that the Commission's contract for the hit went to John Gotti, 45, a stocky Gambino captain and protege of Castellano's ruthless second-in-command, Aniello Dellacroce, who died of natural causes earlier this month. Dellacroce apparently wanted Gotti to succeed him, but Castellano seemed to have been grooming Belotti for the No. 2 job. Though the intemperate Gotti is unlikely to rise to the top of the Mafia's largest family, the killings nevertheless may signal the ascent of a hungrier younger generation of mob leaders. The head may be dead, but the body lives...