Word: gambino
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...outward appearances, he was a successful meat salesman and a quiet, grandfatherly type. Paul Castellano, head of the Gambino crime family and reputed kingpin of organized crime in America, wanted it that way: he was determined to change the image of the Mafia from violent crime syndicate to respectable family business. "We are in a new era," he once told his fellow mob chiefs. "Legitimacy, not muscle, is what we should project...
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...
...which in Italian means "little lamb of the cross," and he took pleasure in killing people. "He likes to peer into a victim's face, like some kind of dark angel, at the moment of death," a federal agent once said of the Mafia chieftain. As underboss of the Gambino clan, the most powerful of New York's five families, he was a member and chief enforcer of "the Commission," the 11-member council that reputedly oversees organized crime around the U.S. Occasionally disguised as a priest under the alias of Father O'Neill, a play on his first name...
Though Dellacroce was not very forthcoming about his own crimes, he offered the feds a wealth of information about those committed by his enemies and the Commission. After Carlo Gambino, the capo di tutti capi (boss of bosses), died in 1976, Dellacroce told the FBI that another would-be godfather, Carmine Galante, had been marked for death. Dellacroce had reason to know: plans for the Galante hit were hatched in his own headquarters, the Ravenite Social Club in Manhattan's Little Italy. The feds were able to isolate and protect Galante as long as he was in prison for parole...
...that chased Badalamenti from Sicily drove Buscetta to the protection of the authorities. Since he began talking last year, Buscetta has been shuttled back and forth between the U.S. and Italy, fingering mobsters in both countries. Giuliani's assistants are also prosecuting Paul Castellano, 70, reputed boss of the Gambino family. He is accused with nine other men of running a racket that stole autos and shipped them off for resale with forged registrations. His case will be followed next week by the racketeering trial of New York's Colombo family and its reputed boss, Carmine ("the Snake") Persico. Next...