The Year the Family Had No Boss

John Riggi went to prison in 1990 and did not give up the title. That left the DeCavalcante family with a boss it could not consult and a day-to-day problem it had to solve anyway, and the man it handed the problem to was John D'Amato.

He held the position for roughly a year. In 1992 he disappeared, and the family did not replace him with another acting boss.

Why it took eleven years to explain

Nothing about the killing was public at the time. A man in that position simply stopped being seen, his body was never found, and the organisation carried on without any statement about what had happened or why.

The explanation entered the record in 2003, at a trial in the District of New Jersey, when Anthony Capo testified for the government. Capo said he had shot D'Amato. He also gave the reason he had been given: that D'Amato's girlfriend had told a member of the family that D'Amato had taken part in sexual activity with men.

The committee

What is stranger, and more revealing about how these families actually worked, is what happened next.

The DeCavalcante family did not appoint a successor. It formed a ruling panel of capos and distributed the authority among them, and that arrangement — in one composition or another — ran for most of the rest of the decade.

A single acting boss is efficient and it concentrates risk. Every man who had held the position recently had been imprisoned or killed, and the title had begun to look less like a promotion than an exposure.

A panel spreads the exposure. It also spreads the authority, which is why these arrangements are unstable and why the record shows them collapsing into a single acting boss the moment somebody in the group is strong enough to take it. Here that took most of a decade, and the man it produced was Vincent Palermo.

What it cost

By the time Palermo was acting boss in his own right, the family had spent close to ten years being run provisionally by men who all understood that the job had recently been fatal.

The December 1999 prosecution arrived into that. Within weeks Palermo was cooperating with the government, and the capo Anthony Rotondo followed. Capo, who had done the killing in 1992, cooperated too, which is the only reason any of this is documented at all.

Three men who had been at or near the top of the same small organisation all decided, independently, that the arrangement was no longer worth protecting.

In fiction

The Vito Spatafore storyline in the sixth season of The Sopranos is very commonly traced to this killing. The resemblance is close and the comparison is drawn almost everywhere the case is mentioned.

No statement from the programme's makers establishes it as a source, and no source consulted here does either. It goes in the same drawer as the Grand Theft Auto comparison: a resemblance many people have drawn, filed as a resemblance.

What the family's actual documented contact with the series amounts to is a federal recording from 3 March 1999 of two of its members arguing about whether the show was supposed to be them — which is a stranger and better fact than any of the resemblances.