Subject file
John D'Amato
Known as Johnny Boy
D'Amato was acting boss of the DeCavalcante family for roughly a year while John Riggi held the title from prison. He was killed in 1992, and the reason given for it under oath eleven years later is unlike anything else in this archive.
His body has never been found. Everything on this page comes from testimony given at trial in 2003 by Anthony Capo, a member of the family who cooperated with the government and who told the court he had shot him.
The stated motive
Capo testified that D'Amato's girlfriend had told a member of the family that D'Amato had taken part in sexual activity with men, and that the decision to kill him followed from that.
The court record is the whole basis for this. Whether the underlying account was true is not established and this archive takes no view on it; what is established is that it circulated, that it was believed, and that men in this organisation treated it as sufficient.
Not a fact about D'Amato. A fact about the DeCavalcante family.
Capo's evidence was that a made man could be killed for this and that nobody would have to justify it further. Whatever else the induction ceremony and the code of conduct claimed to be about, the organisation's own senior members understood that a boss whose standing was compromised in this particular way could not remain one and could not simply be demoted.
After
The family did not appoint a successor. It went to a ruling panel of capos, and the arrangement continued in one form or another until Vincent Palermo emerged as acting boss in his own right by the late 1990s.
That decade of provisional leadership — a boss in a federal medical centre, a panel below him, and an acting boss who eventually cooperated — is the shape the December 1999 prosecution found and dismantled.
In fiction
The Vito Spatafore storyline in the sixth season of The Sopranos is very commonly traced to this killing, and the resemblance is close.
No statement from the programme's makers establishes it as a source, and no source consulted here does either. The archive files it the same way it files the Grand Theft Auto comparison on the family page: as a resemblance that a great many people have drawn, and not as a fact.
Sources
- United States District Court for the District of New Jersey trial testimony (2003)
- United States v. Palermo and others
- District of New Jersey (1999)
- Scott M. Deitche — Garden State Gangland (2017)
Stories
- The Year the Family Had No Boss An acting boss of the DeCavalcante family was killed in 1992 for a reason nobody wrote down at the time. What replaced him was a committee, and the committee lasted the rest of the decade.