Vincent "Vinny Ocean" Palermo

Everything recorded here about Vincent Palermo comes from federal court filings and from testimony given under oath. He is alive, and nothing beyond the public record belongs on this page.

Palermo was born in 1944. His interests included a Queens nightclub and seafood distribution, which is where the name came from. He was a capo when John Riggi went to prison in 1990, and through the decade that followed he rose through the arrangements the family used to function without its boss present: first a place on a ruling panel, then acting boss in his own right by the late 1990s.

December 1999

On 2 December 1999 federal agents arrested more than thirty members and associates of the family on racketeering and murder charges. Palermo was among them. Within weeks he agreed to cooperate with the government.

No DeCavalcante member of his rank had ever done so. Sammy Gravano's defection from the Gambino family in 1991 is the closer comparison than anything in New Jersey's own history.

In October 2000 he pleaded guilty to four murders and seven murder conspiracies, along with extortion, loansharking, gambling and obstruction of justice. He testified in the prosecutions that followed, received a sentence substantially reduced in exchange for that cooperation, and entered the witness protection programme.

Why it mattered

An informant of Palermo's rank does not merely supply evidence in one case. He supplies the structure: who held which position, which crews reported to whom, what was decided and when. The prosecutions that finished the DeCavalcante family as a functioning organisation over the following decade were built substantially on what he and the capo Anthony Rotondo provided.

Houston

Palermo relocated to Texas under the name James Cabella and did not retire. He has lived in Houston for years under that name, in the adult entertainment business he had been in before, at a club there called the Penthouse.

In 2011 a woman who had sold her interest in another Houston club sued him. Her complaint set out an agreement made in 2007 to sell for one million three hundred thousand dollars, payable in weekly instalments of two thousand five hundred, and alleged that two payments were made and no more. It further alleged that revenue was being moved between the two businesses to her disadvantage, and that she had discovered during the negotiation who Cabella had been.

The man in the round

Two things about Palermo are usually told separately and belong together.

He was the most capable earner the family had. He read what an organisation without its boss actually needed, positioned himself through a ruling panel into sole authority, and ran businesses that produced real money rather than the scraps most of his contemporaries were fighting over.

He also brought in Ralph Guarino, took him seriously as an earner, and never worked out that the man had been recording the family for the government since

1. The judgement that made him effective and the judgement that finished him

were the same judgement, applied to different people.