Sam "The Plumber" DeCavalcante

Simone Rizzo DeCavalcante was born in Brooklyn on 30 April 1912 and raised in Trenton. He claimed descent from Italian nobility, which earned him the name The Count among people who did not entirely believe him. The name that stuck came from the business: Kenworth Heating and Air Conditioning, a plumbing and heating supply firm in Kenilworth that was both a real company and the place where the family did its work.

He took the family around 1964, after the death of Nicholas Delmore, to whom he was related by marriage. He gave it the name it still carries.

The bug

From 1961 the FBI had a microphone in his Kenilworth office. It stayed there until 1965, and it caught him doing the ordinary work of a boss for four years: settling disputes, complaining about money, arranging jobs for members' sons, and conducting the family's relations with New York.

That last part is what made him nationally significant. DeCavalcante held the family's line to the Commission, and the transcripts show him mediating in the Bonanno family's internal war — the boss of the smallest outfit in the region acting as an honest broker between much larger ones, because he was trusted and had nothing to gain.

Roughly two thousand pages were filed in federal court in Newark and made public in June 1969. The recordings could not be used against him; the bugging had no warrant and the law had since changed. Their effect was on public understanding rather than on any docket.

After

He was convicted of an extortion conspiracy in 1970 and the conviction was overturned on appeal the following year. In 1971 he pleaded guilty to running a large interstate gambling operation and served two years of a five-year sentence.

He did not resume day-to-day control afterwards. He moved to Florida and lived quietly there for two decades, and died on 7 February 1997 at eighty-four, of natural causes, which for a man in his line of work counts as an achievement.