Word: castellano
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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...
...head of the most powerful of New York's five infamous crime families (followed by the Genovese, Colombo, Lucchese and Bonanno clans), Castellano had some 400 "soldiers" under his command, as well as interests in the construction trades and the garment, meat and poultry industries. His bloody retirement may have been deemed necessary because of a series of indictments brought against him by U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani. At the time of his death, the soft-spoken don was on trial in Manhattan federal court for masterminding an international car-theft ring. The day after his murder, Castellano's co-defendants...
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...