How a crime family turned dysfunctional
Friday, May 9, 2003
BY ROBERT RUDOLPH
Star-Ledger Staff
They were once the epitome of Mafia propriety. Their patriarch was the model for Marlon Brando's Godfather.
His successor was an impeccable dresser known to chew out underlings who wore the wrong thing to a family
gathering or wake.
But in the past 10 years, the DeCavalcante crime family - New Jersey's only home-grown Mafia clan - has
become a wretched parody of itself.
Its founder - Simone Rizzo DeCavalcante, better known as Sam the Plumber - is dead. The man who followed in
his footsteps, John Riggi, has been behind bars for years with no hopes of release. Riggi's son-in-law has
turned informant, and the family, racked by internal strife and paranoia, has been slaughtering its own people.
"It's certainly not the A-Team," said Kevin McCarthy, the former head of the U.S. Organized Crime Strike
Force in New Jersey, and the man who sent Riggi to jail.
In fact, tape recordings of behind-the-scenes gossip among mobsters have caught them comparing themselves
not to the tradition-bound "Godfather" families but to the beer-bellied street goons of "The Sopranos."
A federal racketeering trial in New York has spotlighted the degree to which the family fortunes have declined.
Many of the bosses who turned "rat" are detailing a series of bungled murders, inept conspiracies and petty
jealousies that turned the family into a virtual viper pit.
According to testimony in the trial, which began Feb. 2, the family gunned down a former newspaper editor
in the street to try to win the respect of New York crime czar John Gotti, and they killed one of their
own officers because he was so good at his job they were afraid he would pull off a coup.
They even executed their own boss after they found out he was gay. "Nobody's going to respect us if we have
a gay homosexual boss sitting down discussing business with other families," Anthony Capo, a mob soldier-
turned-informant, explained in court.
The murders became so frequent, another mobster testified, that the family had to call in its own disposal
service - a guy known as "the Undertaker" who would pick up dead bodies and take them to his property in
upstate New York.
Robert Buccino, the former chief of organized crime investigations for the state, said, "They're killing off
their own army."
The scale of murder plotting was probably the broadest since Lucchese crime family boss
Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso grew so frustrated with the antics of the New Jersey branch of his family that he
issued a blanket order to "kill 'em all." (The orders were never carried out, and Casso, charged with a later
murder, was found hiding out in the home of a former high school classmate in Budd Lake. He later turned
informant.)
According to Assistant U.S. Attorney Miriam Rocah, the DeCavalcante family - which once held a stranglehold
over the construction industry in New Jersey and was a trailblazer in setting up crooked "pump and dump"
stock deals on Wall Street - has deteriorated to little more than a gang of "thugs" scratching for a living
through low- level extortion and gambling operations.
One informer testified that two would-be "hitters," trying to gun down a victim while they were sitting in a
car, became so frantic that they shot each other instead.
"It's laughable," said Cathy Waldor, a prominent New Jersey defense lawyer who once represented Riggi. "It's
sort of like the Wild West."
This week, former DeCavalcante capo Anthony Rotondo told of a litany of killings and murder conspiracies,
some of them hatched by mob members as they huddled together in the basements of their mothers' homes.
Rotondo's father, Vincent "Jimmy" Rotondo, had served as the underboss of the New Jersey-based DeCavalcante
crime family until he was found shot to death in a car outside his home with a jar of fish on his lap. The
significance of the fish was never made clear.
In court, Rotondo, balding and dressed in an open-neck dress shirt and dark suit, appeared at ease Tuesday as
he described how a bunch of Mafia hitmen staked out the Staten Island apartment of Frederick Weiss, a Staten
Island recycling executive who had rubbed Gotti the wrong way. Weiss, a former city editor for the Staten
Island Advance, was gunned down as he walked to his car.
"We left him in the street," Rotondo said.
But that hit, designed to put the family "back on the map" by currying favor with Gotti, brought only new
problems. According to Rotondo, Joey Garafano, a mob hanger-on who had been recruited to drive a "crash car"
- with orders to crash any police car that arrived on the scene - was spotted dumping the murder weapons in
a nearby creek.
To disguise his own car, Garafano had stolen a set of license plates. But the plates were from a car belonging
to the wife of another mob figure. As a result, her husband became the first person called in for questioning
on the killing.
"I'm sorry," Garafano was quoted as saying to fellow mobsters. "I hope everybody doesn't blame me."
The mob's verdict for the mistake: the "white death," a Sicilian term for a killing in which the body is
never found.
Garafano was lured to a mobster's home with the promise the family would arrange for him to go on a trip.
He showed up carrying a packed suitcase, was invited into the garage, and was summarily shot with a silenced
handgun. The body was wrapped up in a tarpaulin and given to "the Undertaker" to cart away.
Rotondo remembered "the Undertaker" waving goodbye as he drove away.
Rotondo said they tried to report the killing to Riggi at a diner in New Jersey, but the family boss
replied: "Don't even tell me, as long as the family's intact."
According to Rotondo, the family didn't remain intact for long.
After Riggi went to jail in the early 1990s, the family set up a three-man ruling panel, but the structure
began to buckle.
At one point, John D'Amato, then the family underboss, declared, "I'm taking over," indicating he had the
personal support of Gotti.
D'Amato proved even more bloodthirsty.
Rotondo said D'Amato issued orders to kill an Elizabeth-based capo, "Fat Louie" La Rasso. D'Amato thought
La Rasso was too powerful and was "acting subversive," Rotondo said.
LaRasso was reported missing when he failed to show up for his 65th birthday party and his body was never
recovered.
Anthony Capo said D'Amato's downfall was a comment by a girlfriend who said D'Amato would take her to sex
clubs, then swap partners and have sex with men.
Other mobsters were so shocked that they felt they had only one recourse. Capo said he carried out the "hit"
on D'Amato himself.
As D'Amato hopped in a car and said, "Let's go eat," Capo testified, "I turned and shot him twice." When he
didn't die immediately, "I shot him twice more."