The Real Mob Stories Are Worse Than Goodfellas

 

 

 

Goodfellas is one of the greatest films ever made. The shoeshine line, the basement card game, Henry Hill running through his last day with helicopters circling overhead. For most people, that movie is the closest they will ever get to understanding what life inside the American mob was actually like. But the film cleaned a lot of it up.

 The killings were faster on screen than they were in real life. The trail of bodies was shorter. The aftermath was tighter. Real mob life did not end in a single scene with a single funeral. It ended in a cornfield in Indiana, in the trunk of a frozen Cadillac, under the concrete floor of a Brooklyn parking garage,    in a federal prison cell at age 89.

Today, we are covering the real cases the film could only hint at.    The killings, the betrayals, and the deals with the FBI itself. What you are about to hear will change how you watch Goodfellas forever. Section one,    the murder of Billy Batts. The real killing was worse than the movie showed.

In the spring of 1970, William Bentvena walked out of federal prison and back into the streets of Brooklyn. He had been locked up since 1964, doing time on a narcotics charge in Bridgeport, Connecticut. To the public, he was just a balding middle-aged man going home to his family.    To the New York underworld, he was Billy Batts.

 He was a soldier in the Gambino crime family. He was a close friend of John Gotti, who was still climbing the ranks at the time. And by mob rules, that friendship and that membership made him untouchable. Around the same time, in a different corner of Queens, a young Lucchese family associate named Tommy  DeSimone was making a name for himself.

DeSimone was 24 years old with a quick temper and a habit of shooting first and thinking later. According to Henry Hill, who later told the whole story to author Nicholas Pileggi for the book Wiseguy, DeSimone had already taken his first life back on March 15th, 1968 when he gunned down a complete stranger named Howard Goldstein on the street just to show off.

DeSimone was not a made man. He never  could be. But he wanted to be feared and he was getting his wish. The two worlds collided at a welcome home party in late May of 1970. The party was thrown at Robert’s Lounge, a bar in Ozone Park, Queens that was owned by James Burke, the Lucchese associate who would later be played by Robert De Niro in the film.

Burke had been a mentor to DeSimone since the 1960s. Hill was there, too. And so was Billy Batts, the guest of honor, fresh out of prison and ready to get back into the loan shark and drug rackets he used to run. What happened next is the moment that set everything in motion. Batts looked at DeSimone and made a passing remark asking him if he still shined shoes.

DeSimone had worked as a shoeshine kid years earlier and Batts was making a joke about it. Batts may have meant nothing by it. He was a made man in front of guys who were not. He felt safe. But DeSimone did not take it as a joke. He leaned over to Burke and Hill and quietly told them he was going to kill Batts.

Two full weeks went by. That is the first thing the film changed.    In Goodfellas, the killing happens almost on the spot. In real life, DeSimone had time to cool off. He did not. On June 11th, 1970, Bats walked into a small nightclub on Queens Boulevard called The Suite. The Suite was owned by Henry Hill, and he had bought it using money from earlier robberies.

The place was nearly empty at closing time. Burke was there. Hill was there. DeSimone walked in. According to Hill’s later sworn account to the FBI in an internal document dated August 8th, 1980, and to the version he gave Pileggi for the book, DeSimone went straight at Bats. He pulled a handgun and started pistol-whipping him in the head, screaming about the shoeshine remark from 2 weeks earlier.

Burke jumped in and helped hold Bats down. Hill watched the whole thing happen in the bar he owned. Bats was beaten until he stopped moving. The three men assumed he was dead. They wrapped the body in a tablecloth and dragged it out the back. They loaded it into the trunk of Hill’s car. Then DeSimone told them they needed to make a stop.

They drove to his mother’s house. He went inside. He came back out carrying a kitchen knife, a bag of lime, and a shovel. The plan was to drive upstate, dig a hole on a piece of land owned by one of Burke’s friends, and bury Bats where nobody would ever find him. They were on the road when they heard the thumping.

 It was coming from the trunk. Bats was still alive in there. They pulled the car over to the side of the road. They opened the trunk. And this is where the real killing took place. The film implies a quicker ending. The sworn record is harder. According to Hill’s own account in Wiseguy, DeSimone and Burke finished Bats off right there on the side of the road using the shovel and a tire iron.

 The body was  buried at a dog kennel in Upstate New York owned by a friend of Burke. That should have been the end of it. It was not.  About 3 months later, the friend told Burke he was selling the kennel land to a housing developer. Burke could not let the body stay there. So, he ordered Hill and DeSimone to drive back upstate, dig Bats up, and move him.

According to Hill, the remains were eventually crushed in a mechanical compactor at a New Jersey junkyard owned by a man named Clyde Brooks.  In a later interview, Hill said the body was first hidden in the basement of Robert’s Lounge before being put in the crusher.  For nearly a decade, nobody outside that small group knew what had happened to Billy Bats.

The Gambino family knew he was missing. They knew DeSimone had a problem with him at that party, but they did not have proof. Burke kept his mouth shut. Hill kept his mouth shut. DeSimone kept his mouth shut. The killing of a made man without permission was the worst thing the three of them could have done. It carried an automatic death sentence under the rules of the five families.

DeSimone never made it to old age because of it. According to Hill’s later testimony, his wife reported him missing on January 14th, 1979, after he went out for what he was told was going to be his official making ceremony. Hill said the Gambinos had finally figured it out, and they used the promise of a promotion to get DeSimone alone.

He was killed for what he did to Bats.  Hill claimed on a 2007 episode of The Howard Stern Show that John Gotti himself was involved, and that the killing took a long time on purpose    because Bats had been Gotti’s personal friend. That is the part the movie could only hint at. The shoe shine remark, the two-week wait, the trunk, the tablecloth, the lime, the shovel, the tire iron, the basement, the compactor, and the nine-year wait for the bill to come due.

It all really happened, and it was just  the start of a chain of events that would end with the biggest cash robbery in American history at the time,    and a body count to match. But before the world ever heard the name Lufthansa, Burke and his crew had one more massive job to pull off, and it left a trail of bodies that stretched across two states and almost a full year of cleanup killings.

Section two, the Lufthansa heist aftermath. Jimmy Burke’s trail of bodies. Just before sunrise on December 11th, 1978, a black Ford Econoline van pulled up to the gate of the Lufthansa cargo building at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York. Six men in ski masks stepped out. They cut the padlock on the gate with bolt cutters.

They walked into the building. They rounded up the night shift workers at gunpoint. And then they did something that almost no robbery crew in American history had ever done. They walked back out 64 minutes later with $5 million in untraceable cash and another $875,000 in jewelry. At the time, it was the biggest cash robbery ever pulled off on American soil.

The whole thing was the brainchild of James Burke,    an associate of the Lucchese crime family. The same Burke who had helped beat Billy Batts to death eight years earlier. The same Burke who was the basis for Robert De Niro’s character in the film. The information had come from a Lufthansa cargo agent named Louis Werner who owed his bookmaker $20,000 in gambling debts.

 Werner knew the airline regularly stored huge piles of cash that had been exchanged in Germany by American troops and tourists. He told his bookmaker, Martin Krugman, who ran a wig shop in East New York. Krugman told Henry Hill. Hill told Burke. Burke went to his Lucchese capo, Paul Vario, and got the green light. The crew Burke picked included Tommy DeSimone, the same man who had killed Bats.

 Also on the team were Angelo Sepe, Louis Cafora, Joe Manri, Robert McMahon, and Paolo Li Castri who was sent in by the Gambino family to make sure they got their cut. Burke’s own son, Frank, drove a backup car. A friend of Burke named Parnell Edwards, who everyone called Stacks, was given what should have been the easiest job of the night.

 All Stacks had to do was take the black van after the robbery and drive it to a junkyard in New Jersey owned by John Gotti, where it would be crushed into a cube of metal. That was it. Drive it, crush it. Done. The robbery itself was clean. No shots fired, nobody seriously hurt. The crew had the inside information they needed.

 Werner had told them exactly how the double door vault worked. They were back in their cars and out of the airport before most of New York was awake. They unloaded the boxes of cash at a warehouse and went their separate ways to wait for their cuts. Then Stacks Edwards got high. He took the van, but instead of driving it to New Jersey to be destroyed, he drove it to his girlfriend’s apartment in Brooklyn.

He drank, he did drugs, he fell asleep. The van sat outside her building parked next to a fire hydrant. Two days later an officer ran the plates and they came back stolen. The van was towed and impounded. Inside it investigators found Edwards’  fingerprints on the steering wheel and a footprint that matched a shoe he owned.

Within three days of the heist the FBI had Burke’s crew on its radar. Burke went from happy to dangerous in a matter of hours. The whole point of the van being crushed was to make sure it could never be linked to anyone. Now it was sitting in a police lot with a clear chain of evidence pointing back at his closest people.

He had no choice in his own mind. He started killing. The first to go was Stacks. On December 18th, 1978, just one week after the heist, DeSimone and Seppi found him at his hideout. They shot him five times in the head while he was eating dinner. A piece of food was still in his mouth. Just like that, the easiest job from the easiest robbery had cost a man his life.

The next to disappear was Martin Krugman, the bookmaker who had brought the whole idea to Burke in the first place. Krugman had been pestering Burke for his cut. He showed up too often. He talked too  loud. Burke decided he could not be trusted to keep his mouth shut. So, on January 6th, 1979, Krugman vanished.

Hill later told the FBI that Burke and Seppi killed Krugman in a mob bar in Queens. His body was never found. In 1986, his wife Fran was officially given a payout of $135,000 from his life insurance because the courts finally accepted that he was dead. Then came Richard Eaton. Eaton was a Florida restaurant operator who had worked with Burke to launder some of the heist money and had stolen $250,000 from him in a separate drug deal.

In early 1979, two children playing near a refrigerated trailer truck in the Bronx made a discovery that ended up in court records. Eaton’s frozen body was inside the trailer, tied up. That killing was the only one Burke was ever directly convicted of. He was  sentenced to 20 years to life for it. The bodies kept piling up.

 Louis Cafora, the heist crew member nicknamed Roast Beef, had ignored Burke’s order not to make any flashy purchases. He went out and bought his wife Joanna a custom pink Cadillac. According to Hill, Burke had Louis and Joanna Cafora killed together in March of 1979. Their bodies were never found. Hill said they were crushed inside a car at an auto wrecking yard.

Joe Manri  and Robert McMahon, two more members of the actual robbery crew, were found shot to death in the front seat of a Buick on May 16th, 1979. Paolo LeCastri’s body was found in a Brooklyn dump in June.  Teresa Ferrara, who had been a girlfriend to a few of the men involved, vanished in February 1979 and pieces of her body washed up on the New Jersey shore 3 months later.

By the summer of that year, the death toll connected to the heist had reached at least eight people. Burke was never charged with the Lufthansa heist itself. The cash  and the jewelry were never recovered. Louis Werner, the cargo agent who started the whole thing, was the only person ever convicted in connection with the actual robbery.

He got 15 years in 1979 after his own girlfriend testified against him in front of a grand jury. Burke was eventually put away in 1982 for fixing Boston College basketball games on testimony from Hill. He died of cancer in a Buffalo prison hospital in 1996. The film makes the killings look quick and clean. The truth was almost a full year of cleanup work    that stretched from a Queens apartment to a Bronx truck to a New Jersey beach.

Eight to 12 people are believed to have died over a screw-up at a fire hydrant. Before we move on, if you’re enjoying this analysis, please consider subscribing. It helps the channel tremendously. But while Burke was working his way through his own crew, another mobster across town was building something even darker.

 Run out of a quiet Brooklyn bar that police would later call one of the most dangerous addresses in America. Section three, the real Tommy DeSimone, a killer even worse than Joe Pesci’s Tommy. In the film, Joe Pesci plays Tommy DeVito as a man who could go from laughing at a joke to firing a gun in the same breath. He won an Oscar for the role in 1990.

 What most people who watched the film never realized is that the real version of that character, a Lucchese family associate named Tommy DeSimone, was somehow worse. DeSimone was born on June 6th, 1946. His family had deep roots in the underworld going back two generations. His grandfather, Rosario, had been the boss of the Los Angeles crime family in the 1920s.

 His uncle, Frank, ran the same operation in the 1950s. Two of his brothers,    Anthony and Robert, were associates of the Gambino family in New York. By the time Tommy was a teenager in Queens, he was already running with the Lucchese crew at Robert’s Lounge in Ozone Park, learning how to hijack trucks, fence stolen goods, and use his fists.

According to Henry Hill, who later told the whole story to Nicholas Pileggi for the book Wiseguy, DeSimone’s first killing happened on March 15th, 1968. Hill said he and DeSimone were walking down a street in Queens when DeSimone spotted a man named Howard Goldstein walking ahead of them. Goldstein was a complete stranger.

 He had nothing to do with the mob. According to Hill, DeSimone turned to him, said, “Watch this.” Pulled out a pistol and shot Goldstein dead right there on the sidewalk. When Hill called him cold-blooded, DeSimone shrugged it off and said, “He was a mean cat.” He was 21 years old. That set the tone for what was coming.

After Billy Batts in June of 1970, DeSimone kept going.    The next victim, according to Hill, was a young man known by the nickname Spider. His full name was given as Michael Jonco. He worked as a bartender at the card games Burke ran in the basement of Robert’s Lounge. The whole thing started over a forgotten drink.

Spider was running drinks one night in 1970 and forgot to bring DeSimone his. DeSimone got angry, pulled a handgun, and shot Spider in the foot. He thought it would teach him a lesson. A week later, Spider showed up to work in a leg cast. DeSimone started making fun of him for the cast, and Spider, according to Hill’s account, told him off in front of everyone.

The basement went silent. Burke, who was also at the table, started teasing DeSimone for letting a bartender talk to him like that. He told him he must be going soft. Without saying a word, DeSimone pulled his gun out and put  three rounds into Spider’s chest right there at the card table. Burke was furious.

He made DeSimone dig a hole and bury Spider in the basement of the lounge himself. That was the night Hill said he became sure DeSimone was not just violent. He was something else. There was another killing later that same year. Hill said DeSimone and another associate were sent to talk to a New Jersey warehouse foreman    named William Reckhow, who had refused to let Burke unload stolen cargo at his building.

The job was supposed to be a beating, just enough to get the man to cooperate. According to Hill, DeSimone went too far    and Reckhow ended up dead. The next major killing happened on December 18th, 1974. The victim was Ronald Gheroth, who everyone called Foxy. Foxy was a member of the crew run out of John Gotti’s Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park.

He was reportedly very close to Gotti. Foxy was upset because DeSimone had been dating his sister. The relationship had ended badly and word reached him that DeSimone had been violent toward her. Foxy made the mistake of telling people he was going to kill DeSimone for it. When the threat got back to DeSimone, he went straight to Foxy’s apartment, knocked on the door, and shot him three times in the face at point-blank range with a .38 caliber  pistol.

That killing was the second time DeSimone had taken out a Gambino family man without permission. The first one, Bats, had already been hanging over him for 4 years. Now, there were two. Both of them had been close to John Gotti personally. The clock was ticking, and DeSimone did not seem to know it. He kept earning.

 He took part in the 1978 Lufthansa heist. A week later, he and Angelo Sepe were the ones who killed Stacks Edwards. The end came in January of 1979.    According to Hill, DeSimone was told he was finally going to be made into the Lucchese family. He was told to dress in his best clothes and wait to be picked up.

 His own godfather was supposed to take him to the ceremony. On the day it was supposed to happen, his wife, Angela, last saw him when he borrowed $60 from her. He left the house. He never came back. Hill later said in court and on radio interviews, including a 2007 appearance on the Howard Stern Show, that DeSimone had been killed by the Gambino family in revenge for Bats and Foxy.

Hill said John Gotti himself was involved in the killing, and that it took a long time on purpose because Gotti wanted DeSimone to suffer. The film shows Tommy dying quickly with one shot to the head. The truth, according to Hill and other mob sources, was a much slower ending. His body was never found.

 He was declared legally dead in 1990. He was 32 years old. The film made Tommy a memorable character. The real one had at least five known killings tied to his name and a reputation so bad that even his own crew was glad when he was gone. His story is the ground floor of a much bigger operation working out of a quiet bar in another part of Brooklyn, a place where killing was not a crime of passion, but a system run by a former butcher’s apprentice with a body count that nobody has ever been able to count for sure.

Section 4 The DeMeo crew and the Gemini method Goodfellas wishes it could show this. While Jimmy Burke was cleaning up after the Lufthansa heist in late 1978, another Gambino family operation was running just a few neighborhoods over in Brooklyn that made everything in the film look small. The man behind it was a soldier named Roy DeMeo, and the place he ran it out of was a quiet corner bar called the Gemini Lounge on Flatlands Avenue.

Roy Albert DeMeo was born on September 7th, 1940 in the Flatlands neighborhood of Brooklyn.    His parents were working-class Italian immigrants. He went to James Madison High School. As a teenager, he worked two jobs that would shape the rest of his life. The first was small-time loan sharking among his classmates.

 The second was as an apprentice butcher at a local grocery store. Both of those skills came in handy later. He graduated in 1959. In the mid-1960s, DeMeo caught the eye of a Gambino soldier named Anthony Gaggi, who everybody called Nino. Nino became his mentor. Through Nino, DeMeo started building his own crew. The first member was a teenager named Harvey Rosenberg, who went by the name Chris.

By the early 1970s, the group was running car theft rings, loan sharking, and a mountain of other rackets. They were stealing four to seven luxury vehicles a night off the streets of New York. The cars were either re-tagged and re-sold or shipped overseas to Kuwait and other countries. The crew had its own headquarters.

   It was the Gemini Lounge at 4021 Flatlands Avenue, a small bar that DeMeo eventually owned. Connected to the back of the bar was an apartment.  DeMeo’s cousin, Joseph Guglielmo, lived in that apartment, so nobody could plant listening devices in there. That apartment was where the killings happened.

 The system the crew used became known as the Gemini method. It is what made them feared more than any other group in the city. The whole point of the method was simple: no body, no case. A target would be invited into the apartment behind the bar, usually under the pretense of having a drink or talking business. Once inside, a crew member, almost always DeMeo himself, would walk up with a small handgun fitted with a silencer.

 The shot would come from behind. After that, the body was wrapped to keep it from making a mess, drained, and then taken apart in a back bathroom. DeMeo’s training as a butcher’s apprentice was put to use. The remains were bagged, boxed, and dropped at the Fountain Avenue Landfill in Brooklyn, which got so many tons of garbage every day that nothing would ever be found.

Federal investigators later said the system was so efficient that when they tried to plan a search of the landfill in the early 1980s, they gave up. The cost was too high, and the chance of finding anything was too low. To this day, most of the bodies have never been recovered. Estimates of how many people were killed by the DeMeo crew range wildly.

The lower number from law enforcement sources is around 75. The higher number, repeated by the FBI and by the book Murder Machine by Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci is up to 200. DeMeo himself was personally tied to dozens of those killings. The Mob Museum lists him as one of the top five most feared mob hitmen in American history.

The crew’s biggest names were the Gemini twins, Joseph  Testa and Anthony Senter. They were two friends who grew up on the same block in Canarsie, joined the crew in 1974 when they were both 19 and became some of the most active members. Henry Borelli was another core member. Chris Rosenberg eventually got himself killed by his own crew in May 1979 after a drug deal with Cuban suppliers went bad and threatened to start a war.

DeMeo was ordered to handle it personally. Rosenberg was lured to the Gemini, shot, and disposed of the same way he had helped do to so many others. DeMeo did finally get his button. He was officially made into the Gambino family, but Paul Castellano, who took over as Gambino boss after Carlo Gambino died in 1976, never trusted him.

Castellano thought DeMeo was uncontrollable and bringing too much heat. By late 1982, DeMeo was getting subpoenaed by federal grand juries. One of his own crew members, a man named Vito Arena, had already flipped and was telling investigators about the killings. Castellano made the call. DeMeo had to go before he could talk.

The trouble was that nobody wanted the contract. According to recordings later picked up on FBI wiretaps, even John Gotti turned the job down.  By that point, Gotti himself had a small body count. DeMeo had close to 40. The contract was eventually given to Frank DeCicco, who then handed it to DeMeo’s own men.

On January 10th, 1983, DeMeo went to Patrick Testa’s body shop in Canarsie for what was supposed to be a meeting with his crew. He never came home that day. He missed his daughter’s birthday party. His wife, Gladys, reported him missing. 10 days later, on January 20th, a businessman called police about a maroon Cadillac that had been sitting in the parking lot of the Varuna Boat Club in Sheepshead Bay for over a week.

The car was registered to DeMeo’s wife. Officers towed it to the police garage and opened the trunk. DeMeo’s body was inside, partly frozen from the cold winter weather. He had been shot seven times in the head. A chandelier from his Long Island home, which he had once planned to get repaired, was laid across his body.

Before we move on, if you’re enjoying this analysis, please consider subscribing. It helps the channel tremendously. His killing cleared the way for someone else inside the Gambino family to start planning even bigger moves. And what came next was the most brazen mob hit ever pulled off on a New York City street.

Section five, the Spilotro brothers in the cornfield, Casino’s real ending. The film Casino, made by Martin Scorsese in 1995, is the second half of the Goodfellas story. Same director, same writer, same true crime book author. The character played by Joe Pesci is a man named Nicky Santoro. Nicky was based on a real Chicago Outfit mobster named Anthony Spilotro.

The film ends with Pesci’s character being beaten in an Indiana cornfield with baseball bats and buried alive next to his brother. That ending is one of the most famous scenes in mob movie history. It is also wrong. The real Anthony Spilotro was born on May 19th, 1938 in Chicago.  He was small, only about 5 ft 5 in tall, which is where his nickname Tony the Ant came from.

 He joined the Chicago Outfit as a young man and worked his way up. By the early 1970s, his bosses sent him to Las Vegas to watch over their operations there. The Outfit was secretly skimming millions of dollars in cash from the Stardust, the Fremont, the Hacienda, and the Marina casinos. Spilotro was sent to make sure the cash flow did not stop and that nobody got too curious.

He also ran his own crew on the side, a burglary group nicknamed the Hole in the Wall Gang. The trouble for Spilotro was that he liked attention. He owned a gift shop on the Las Vegas Strip. He was photographed everywhere. He was openly seeing the wife of Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, who ran the Stardust. He kept getting arrested.

By 1986, the FBI suspected him of being involved in 22 to 25 separate killings. Worst of all, his behavior had brought heat down on the entire Chicago operation. In 1986, Outfit boss Joseph Aiuppa was sent to prison for the casino skim, partly because of testimony from people inside Spilotro’s own crew. Aiuppa was furious.

He blamed Tony for losing his freedom. In January of 1986,    the top members of the Chicago Outfit met at the Czech Lodge in North Riverside, Illinois. According to later testimony from a man named Nicholas Calabrese, the entire room agreed Spilotro had to go. A first plan to kill Tony in Las Vegas using explosives and automatic weapons was tried and failed.

So, they came up with a new plan. One that would take advantage of how loyal Tony was to his younger brother, Michael. Michael Spilotro was 41 years old. He owned a restaurant in Chicago called Hoagies. He had been an Outfit associate for years, but had never been officially made. The plan was simple.

 They would tell Michael he was finally getting his button. They would tell Tony he was being promoted to capo at the same ceremony.    The brothers would come together to celebrate. The Outfit knew that if they killed Tony alone, Michael would come looking for revenge. So, they would handle both of them at the same meeting.

On Saturday, June 14th, 1986, around 2:00 in the afternoon,    the brothers left Tony’s townhouse in Oak Park, Illinois. They drove away in Michael’s 1986 Lincoln Continental. Before he left, Michael told his wife Ann that if he was not back by 9:00 that night, something had gone wrong. According to Calabrese’s later testimony at the 2007 Family Secrets Trial, the brothers met James Marcello at a motel parking lot in Schiller Park near O’Hare International Airport.

Marcello drove them from there to a basement of a home in unincorporated Bensenville, Illinois. What happened in that basement was nothing like the film. There was no cornfield beating with baseball bats. The brothers were not buried alive. According to forensic pathologist Dr. John Plunkett, who performed the autopsies and testified at the trial, the cause of death was blunt force trauma from being punched, kicked, and stomped on by bare hands and feet along with strangulation.

When the brothers walked into the basement, they were met by a room full of about 10 Outfit killers. The list given later by Calabrese under oath included James LaPietra, John Fecarotta, John DeFranzo, Sam Carlisi, Louis Eboli,    James Marcello, Louis Marino, Joseph Ferriola, and Ernest Infelice. Calabrese said he tackled Michael and held his legs while another mobster strangled him with a rope.

He said Tony, watching what was happening to his brother and knowing he was next, asked his killers a single question. He asked if he could say a prayer. Nobody answered him. He was beaten to death right after.  The bodies were stripped down to their underwear, loaded into a vehicle, and driven about 75 mi southeast to the outskirts of Enos, Indiana.

They were buried in a shallow grave in a wildlife preserve called Willow Slough, one body stacked on top of the other. Eight days later, on Sunday, June 22nd, 1986, an Indiana farmer named Michael Kanz was spreading chemicals on his corn field when he noticed an area of freshly turned dirt where nothing was growing.

   He thought a poacher had buried a deer there. He called a wildlife biologist named Dick Hudson, who came out and started digging. About 3 ft down, Hudson hit a body and stopped. The Newton County Sheriff and his team kept digging and found two bodies. The brothers were identified the next day from dental records given to investigators by their own brother,    Patrick Spilotro, who was a dentist.

Nobody was charged with the killings for nearly 20 years. It took until April 25th, 2005, when the federal government finally indicted 14 members of the Chicago Outfit for 18 different killings. The case was called Operation Family Secrets. It went to trial in the summer of 2007.  James Marcello was convicted of the Spilotro murders on September 27th, 2007, and sentenced to life in federal prison on February 5th, 2009.

Calabrese, who flipped and testified against his old crew, was sentenced to 12 years and 4 months. He had become the first made member of the Chicago Outfit ever to testify for the government. Spilotro’s story ended in a cornfield in Indiana. But across the country in New York, the boss who had been running the most powerful crime family in America was about to die in a way the Outfit could only dream of.

In front of hundreds of holiday shoppers on a Midtown Manhattan street. Section six. The Sparks Steak House hit. The murder that made John Gotti the most famous mobster alive. The man at the top of the Gambino crime family in late 1985 was Paul Castellano. He was 70 years old. He went by the nickname Big Paul.

He had been the boss of the largest, most powerful crime family in America since 1976, when he took over after the death of Carlo Gambino.    He lived in a 17-room mansion on Staten Island that everyone in the family called the White House.    He wore silk robes around the place. He preferred running things from inside, the way a businessman ran a company,    and he kept his distance from the day-to-day street work.

Castellano had two big problems. The first was that the federal government was finally closing in on him. He had been arrested twice in 1985, once in February as part of the Mafia Commission case, where he was facing the rest of his life in prison if convicted, and again in March on a separate racketeering case tied to a stolen car ring.

 Wiretaps planted in his Staten Island home had picked up everything from sit-downs with capos to private conversations. The second problem was a Queens captain named John Gotti. Gotti was 45 years old and ran a crew out of the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park. He was loud, flashy, and popular with the rest of the Gambino soldiers. He hated Castellano.

 He thought Castellano was greedy, distant, and out of touch with how the family was supposed  to work. The two men had been on a collision course for years, but Gotti also had a personal reason to move. The wiretaps had picked up Gotti’s close friend, Angelo Ruggiero, talking about heroin deals. And Castellano wanted to see those tapes.

 If he saw them, Gotti and his whole crew were finished. The man who had been protecting Gotti from inside the family was Aniello Dellacroce, the Gambino underboss. Dellacroce had been holding the peace between the two sides. On December 2nd, 1985, Dellacroce died of cancer. Two weeks later, Castellano did not show up for the wake. To Gotti and the men who had been loyal to Dellacroce, that was a serious insult.

Worse, Castellano named his personal driver, Thomas Bilotti, as the new underboss, skipping over older, more respected men. Word also got back to Gotti that Castellano was planning to break up his crew. Gotti decided Castellano had to go. He pulled in Sammy Gravano, Frank DeCicco,  Joseph Armone, and Angelo Ruggiero to plan it.

DeCicco was a Castellano loyalist who had quietly switched sides. He was the inside man. When DeCicco found out that Castellano had a meeting set for Sparks Steak House on East 46th Street in Manhattan on December 16th, 1985, the date was set. The plan was bold on purpose. It was the height of the Christmas shopping season.

 The streets would be full of people. The hit would happen during evening rush hour, right in the middle of Midtown Manhattan.  [clears throat]  Gravano later said in court that the crowd would help them more than it would hurt them because it would create confusion and let the shooters disappear into the foot traffic. The day before the meeting, 11 men gathered at Gravano’s office to go over the plan one more time.

 Four shooters were assigned: Vincent Artuso, John Carneglia, Edward Lino, and Salvatore Scala, who was Gravano’s brother-in-law. A backup shooter named Anthony Rampino was placed across the street. Other men were stationed at 46th Street and 2nd Avenue to help with the escape. All four shooters were given matching outfits, long white trench coats, and Russian-style fur hats, so witnesses would describe a uniform group rather than individual faces.

On Monday, December 16th, 1985, at around 5:00 p.m., Gotti and Gravano parked in a black Lincoln on the corner of 3rd Avenue and 46th Street, facing east towards Sparks. they had walkie-talkies. The tinted windows kept anyone outside from seeing in. At one point, Castellano’s car stopped right next to theirs at a red light.

Bilotti was driving. Castellano was in the passenger seat. Neither man saw Gotti and Gravano sitting just feet away. At about 5:25 p.m., the Lincoln pulled up in front of Sparks at 210 East 46th Street. As Castellano stepped out of the passenger side, the four shooters in trench coats and fur hats moved in. Carneglia was the one who fired the rounds that hit Castellano.

 He went down beside a lamp post on the sidewalk. Bilotti got out of the driver’s side door, unarmed,  and was hit before he could react. Artuso’s gun jammed during the attempt, but Carneglia walked around the car and  finished the job on Bilotti. The whole thing took less than a minute. Hundreds of holiday shoppers ran in every direction.

Off-duty police officers were nearby. Nobody fired back. The shooters split up and walked into the crowd toward Second Avenue, exactly as planned. Gotti and Gravano then drove their Lincoln slowly past the bodies. Gravano looked down at Bilotti lying in the street and told Gotti he was gone. Gotti became the new boss of the Gambino family that night.

He held that position for less than 7 years before Gravano flipped on him. On April 2nd, 1992, with Gravano testifying, Gotti was convicted on 13 counts, including the Castellano murder. He was sentenced to life without parole. He died of throat cancer in a federal prison hospital in 2002. No other person was ever charged with the killings outside of him.

 Before we move on, if you’re enjoying this analysis, please consider subscribing. It helps the channel tremendously. The Castellano hit changed the mob forever. But while Gotti was busy turning himself into a celebrity boss, the man whose testimony would eventually destroy him was sitting right next to him in that car, and he had a body count of his own that nobody talks about enough.

Section seven,    Sammy the Bull Gravano confessed to 19 killings, served five years. The man sitting next to John Gotti in the black Lincoln on the night of the Castellano hit was Salvatore Gravano. Everyone called him Sammy the Bull. He was 40 years old at the time.    He was a Gambino soldier on his way up.

Within weeks of the killing, Gotti would make him a captain. Within two years, he would be the family consigliere. By 1988, he was the underboss, the second most powerful man in the most powerful crime family in America. And every step of the way, the bodies kept stacking up behind him. Gravano was born in Brooklyn on March 12th, 1945.

He grew up in Bensonhurst. He dropped out of school in eighth grade. As a teenager, he ran with a local street gang called The Rampers. His nickname Bull came from the way he fought, head down and full force. Even as a young man, his uncle Sammy noticed how much they looked alike, which is how Salvatore became Sammy.

His first known killing happened in 1970. He was 25. He was working as an associate under Thomas Spiro, a Colombo family soldier. The target was another low-level associate named Joseph Colucci. According to Gravano’s own later sworn testimony, Colucci had threatened to kill the Spiros and Gravano over a personal matter.

Gravano shot Colucci to handle it. He later said the killing won him respect with Colombo boss Carmine Persico. He was now seen as a man who would do what was needed. Over the next 15 years, Gravano became one of the most feared men in the Gambino family. By the early 1980s, he had switched over from the Colombos and was working under capo Salvatore “Toodaloo” Aurello.

He made his real money in construction. New York City in the 1980s was being built on top of the mob and Gravano had his hands in concrete pouring, drywall, demolition, and union shake-downs. At his peak, Gravano said in court he was earning between 5 and 20 million dollars a year. The full list of killings Gravano confessed to under oath includes 19 victims spread out over 20 years.

Joseph Colucci in Queens in 1970. Alan Kaiser in Brooklyn in 1977. Nick Scibetta, his own brother-in-law, in 1978. John Simone on Staten Island in 1980. Frank Stillitano in Philadelphia in 1981. Frank Fiala in Brooklyn in 1982. A man whose first name was Jackie in 1983. Tommy Bilotti and Paul Castellano in Manhattan in 1985.

Robert DiBernardo in Brooklyn in 1986. Nicky Mormando in Brooklyn in 1986. Michael DeBatt in Brooklyn  in 1987. Liborio Milito, who was his own best friend, in Brooklyn in 1988. Thomas Spinelli in Brooklyn in 1989. Eddie Garafolo in Brooklyn in 1990. Louis De Bono in Manhattan in 1990. Some of those names need to be sat with.

Nick Scibetta was Gravano’s own wife Deborah’s brother. The order to handle him came down from Paul Castellano. Scibetta had been getting into too many public fights and had insulted the daughter of a Gambino soldier. Gravano was consulted and gave the okay. Scibetta vanished. The only piece of him that was ever found was his hand.

Gravano kept that secret from his wife  for years. Louis Milito was different. Milito was Gravano’s actual best friend. They had committed crimes together since they were teenagers. They had been at each other’s weddings. When Milito got promoted into the family, Gravano had vouched for him. By 1988, Gravano was the underboss and Milito was complaining out loud about how he was being treated.

Gravano had him taken out anyway.  In a 1997 interview with  Diane Sawyer on ABC,  Gravano admitted that one tore him up because he had known the wife and the children. The end came in late 1990. The FBI raided the Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy on December 11th and arrested both Gotti and Gravano along with Frank LoCastro.

They were charged  with racketeering including the Castellano killing. While they were locked up together waiting for trial, the FBI played Gravano hours of tapes from a bug they had planted upstairs from the Ravenite.    On the tapes, Gotti was heard calling Gravano greedy.

 Gotti was heard talking about pinning the killings of Robert DiBernardo, Louis Milito, and Louis DeBono on Gravano alone. Gravano agreed to flip on November 13th, 1991. He became the first member of the leadership of any of the five families  to break the blood oath and become a government witness. He took the stand against Gotti on March 2nd, 1992 and testified for 9 days.

 He laid out the entire structure of the Gambino family, the Castellano hit, and 19 separate killings, four of which he tied directly  to Gotti. On April 2nd, 1992, Gotti was convicted on 13 counts. He got life without parole. He died in a federal prison medical center in 2002. In September 1994, Federal Judge I.

 Leo Glasser sentenced Sammy “the Bull” Gravano to 5 years in prison. Because he had already served almost 4 years waiting for trial, he was out in less than a year. The judge called his cooperation the bravest thing he had ever seen. The families of his 19 victims called it something else. Eddie Garofalo’s daughter, Laura, later said in an ABC special that someone who killed 19 people walking free after a few short years could  happen to anybody.

While Gravano was being celebrated as the man who finally took down the Teflon Don, another mob boss was watching all of it from a few miles away in Greenwich Village, dressed in a bathrobe and slippers, getting ready to run his crime family for almost two more decades while the FBI watched    and did nothing.

Section 8, Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, the boss who faked insanity for three decades. While John Gotti was in front of every camera in New York and Sammy Gravano was getting ready to flip, the actual most powerful mob boss in America was walking down a Greenwich Village street in a dirty bathrobe and slippers talking to himself.

His name was Vincent Gigante. Everyone called him “the Chin.” And for almost  30 years, he ran one of the most successful criminal cons in American history right out in the open. Gigante was born on March 29th, 1928 in New York City. His parents were Italian immigrants from Naples. He was one of five brothers.

As a teenager, he became a professional boxer in the light heavyweight division fighting 25 matches between 1944 and 1947. He was good but not great. He gave it up for the streets. By his early 20s, he was working under Vito Genovese, the boss whose name the Genovese crime family still carries today. In 1957, Gigante was the gunman in one of the most famous failed hits in mob history.

The target was Frank Costello, who was the boss of what was then known as the Luciano family. Genovese wanted Costello out so he could take over. Gigante was given the contract. He found Costello in the lobby of a Manhattan apartment building and fired one shot. The bullet only grazed Costello’s head. Costello survived.

 Gigante was charged with attempted murder, but Costello refused to identify him in court. The case was dropped. Castello stepped down from the family soon after, and Genovese took over. In 1959, Gigante and Genovese were both convicted of heroin trafficking. Gigante got 7 years. He was paroled after 5. When he came home, he was a captain.

By the late 1960s, he was running his own crew out of a small storefront in Greenwich Village called the Triangle Civic Improvement Association. This is when the act started. According to later trial testimony from multiple government witnesses, Gigante began wandering around his neighborhood in pajamas, a bathrobe, and slippers sometime around 1969.

He talked to fire hydrants. He muttered to himself. He had himself checked into psychiatric hospitals, sometimes for stays of a few weeks at a time. According to court records, he was admitted to mental health facilities at least 24 separate times between 1969 and 1995. He had real psychiatrists writing real reports saying he had paranoid schizophrenia.

His own younger brother, Louis Gigante, who was a Catholic priest, would back the story up to anyone who asked. Behind the act, Gigante was running everything. In 1981, he became the official boss of the Genovese family. He understood early on that talking on phones got mob bosses sent to prison, so he banned it.

 He understood that walking around social clubs got bosses photographed by the FBI, so he stopped going. He even banned anyone from saying his name out loud. If a soldier had to refer to him in conversation, the soldier would touch his own chin or make the letter C with his fingers. It worked. The FBI almost never caught him on tape. The empire he ran was huge.

Federal estimates from the late 1980s put the Genovese family at around 300 made men, the largest of the five families. The family controlled large parts of the New York construction trade, the docks,  garbage hauling, and labor unions. Investigators later said the Genovese family was bringing in around $100 million a year at its peak.

Gigante was, after Gotti went to prison in 1992, the most powerful crime boss in the United States. He was also still ordering killings. In April 1986, Gigante and Lucchese boss Anthony Corallo decided that Gotti had crossed a line by killing Castellano without permission from the commission. They gave the contract to Lucchese underboss Anthony Casso to handle.

On April 13th, 1986, a car bomb went off outside a social club in Brooklyn. The target was Gotti. The man who actually got into the car was Frank DeCicco, the Gambino capo who had helped Gotti plan the Sparks hit.    DeCicco was killed in the explosion. Gotti, who had canceled his visit at the last minute, walked away.

For most of the 1980s and 1990s, Gigante avoided every charge thrown at him. He was indicted in 1990 for racketeering. He was found mentally unfit to stand trial. He was indicted again in June 1993 for sanctioning the murders of six mobsters and conspiring to handle three more. He was found mentally unfit again.

The legal battles over his competence dragged on for almost 7 years. The act finally broke in 1996. Federal prosecutors brought in mob turncoats Sammy Gravano, Al D’Arco, Phil Leonetti, and a dying Genovese associate named Peter Savino, who all swore under oath that the insanity routine was a setup. In August 1996, Judge Eugene Nickerson ruled Gigante was competent to stand trial.

  The trial started in June 1997. He came to court in a wheelchair. On July 25th, 1997, the jury convicted him of racketeering and conspiracy. He was sentenced on December 18th, 1997, to 12 years in federal prison. Even from his cell, he kept running the family.  His son Andrew visited him and carried messages back and forth.

   In 2002, Gigante was indicted again on obstruction of justice charges. Prosecutors had recordings of him in prison sounding completely normal and giving orders.  On April 7th, 2003, just hours  before that trial was set to start, Gigante stood up in court and pleaded guilty.    He admitted that the entire bathrobe routine, the talking to fire hydrants, the mental hospital stays, all of it had been an act to keep himself out of prison.

It had worked for almost 30 years. He was given an extra 3 years on top of his existing sentence. Vincent Gigante died of heart disease in a federal prison medical center in Springfield, Missouri, on December 19th, 2005. He was 77 years old. Before we move on, if you’re enjoying this analysis, please consider subscribing.

 It helps the channel tremendously. Gigante built his power on staying invisible. Across town in Brooklyn, two men with badges were doing something even more shocking. They were carrying NYPD detective shields by day and getting paid by the Lucchese family to set up killings by night. Section nine,  the mafia cops.

 Epilito and Caracappa, NYPD detectives who worked for the Lucchese family. For most of the 1980s and into the 1990s, two of the most  decorated detectives in the New York City Police Department were also two of the most active hit men in the Lucchese crime family. Their names were Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa. They each had badges, pensions, commendations, and partners they worked with in the field.

They also had a Lucchese underboss named Anthony Casso paying them $4,000 a month for confidential police information, plus extra payments for contract hits. The story took almost 20 years to come together in court. When it finally did, it became one of the worst betrayals of the police badge in American history.

Louis Eppolito was born in Brooklyn on July 22nd, 1948. His family was already deep in the underworld.    His father, Ralph, was an associate of the Gambino crime family, nicknamed Fat the Gangster. His uncle James and his cousin James Jr. were both made members of the Gambinos. They worked under Nino Gaggi, the same capo who mentored Roy DeMeo.

In a strange twist, Eppolito’s uncle and cousin were both later killed by Gaggi and DeMeo themselves with Paul Castellano’s permission.  Eppolito grew up in East Flatbush surrounded by mob connections. He joined the NYPD in 1969 anyway.    He never disclosed his family ties on his application.

Stephen Caracappa was born on November 12th, 1942. He joined the same year as Eppolito in 1969. By the late 1970s, he was working in the organized crime homicide unit inside the NYPD’s major case squad. That meant he had access to the most sensitive files in the department, names of informants, details of ongoing investigations, wiretap targets.

He even helped create the major case squad himself. To the people working for the Lucchese family, that information was worth more than gold. The bridge between the detectives and the mob was a Lucchese associate named Burton Kaplan, a long-time mob businessman who ran a clothing operation. Kaplan introduced Eppolito and Caracappa to Anthony Casso somewhere around 1985.

Casso called the two detectives his crystal ball. From 1986 to 1990, according to court records and Casso’s own later testimony, Casso paid them $4,000 a month in cash for tips on who was talking to the FBI, who was being followed, and who was about to be arrested. They also got bonus payments for contract work.

Federal prosecutors said the total payments came to about $375,000 over the years. The killings the two were eventually convicted of are hard to read. The first happened on February 10th, 1986. A diamond merchant named Israel Greenwald was driving home from work in Brooklyn. The detectives pulled him over in a fake traffic stop using their real badges.

They told him he was a suspect in a hit-and-run. He got out of his car and went with them. They drove him to a parking garage in Brooklyn owned by an associate. Greenwald was killed there and his body was buried under the concrete floor of the garage. He was 34 years old. He was a husband  and a father of two young daughters.

His remains were not found for another 19 years. In December 1986, the detectives passed Casso the home address of a Gambino associate named Nicholas Guido. Casso sent his men to the address. They shot the man they found there to death.  The problem was that there were two Nicholas Guidoss in that part of Brooklyn.

The detectives had pulled up the wrong one.    The man who was killed was 26 years old, an innocent telephone installer who had no connection to the mob. He was sitting in a car looking at his new vehicle with his uncle when he was shot. He had nothing to do with anything. The most direct killing the detectives carried out themselves came on November 6th, 1990.

Casso paid them $75,000 to handle Eddie Lino, a Gambino captain who had been one of the four shooters in the Castellano hit 5 years earlier. Casso wanted Lino dead in part as payback for Castellano’s killing. Eppolito and Caracappa followed Lino’s Mercedes onto the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn.

 They flashed their badges and pulled him over. As Lino rolled down his window, they fired.  Lino was shot nine times. His car drifted across the lane and hit a fence on the service road. The two detectives were also convicted of involvement in the killings of James Hydell, John Otto Heidel, Anthony Dilappi, Bruno Facciolo, and Bartholomew Boriello.

 Plus a conspiracy to kill Sammy Gravano after he flipped. Eppolito retired from the NYPD in 1990. Caracappa retired in 1992 on a disability pension. Both men moved to Las Vegas. They lived on the same street in a gated community. Eppolito got bit parts in films, including a small role in the 1990 film Goodfellas. Caracappa took a job as an assistant security officer at a Las Vegas women’s prison.

   They were arrested on March 9th, 2005, walking out of a restaurant called Piero’s near the Las Vegas Strip. Burton Kaplan had finally agreed to talk after spending years in federal prison on a separate drug case. He gave 2 days of testimony at the trial in Brooklyn. On April 6th, 2006, the federal jury convicted both men on eight separate killings, drug distribution, and money laundering.

 On March 6th, 2009, federal judge Jack Weinstein sentenced Eppolito to life plus 100 years, and Caracappa to life plus 80 years. Each was fined more than $4 million. Israel Greenwald’s daughter, Michal, who was nine when her father was killed, gave a victim impact statement at the sentencing. Caracappa died in federal prison on April 8th, 2017.

Eppolito died on November 3rd, 2019. The story of two detectives selling out their badges for cash is bad enough on its own, but about 200 miles north in Boston, the FBI itself was running a relationship with one of the most violent mob bosses in the country, and it would take a decade and a half to bring him down.

Section  10. The Whitey Bulger deal. The FBI helped Boston’s most brutal mob boss for 20  years. If the New York mob bosses had to fake insanity, bribe detectives, or kill their own crews to stay free,    the boss of Boston’s Winter Hill Gang did something none of them ever managed. He got the FBI itself to work for him for almost two full decades.

His name was James Bulger. Almost nobody called him James. To his neighborhood and to the federal government, he was Whitey, named for the bright blonde hair he had as a kid. Bulger was born on September 3rd, 1929 in Boston. He grew up in the Old Harbor housing project in South Boston, the same project his neighbors, the Connolly family, lived in.

His brother William went a different direction. William Bulger became a Massachusetts State Senator for 25 years and later the president of the University of Massachusetts. Whitey went the other way. He was arrested for the first time at age 14. By his early 20s, he was robbing banks, and in 1956, he was sent to federal prison.

He served part of his sentence at Alcatraz before he was paroled in 1965. He came home to Boston and went straight back into crime. By the early 1970s, Bulger was working for the Winter Hill Gang, a mostly Irish-American crew based in the Winter Hill neighborhood of Somerville, just outside Boston. The gang ran the bookmaking, loan sharking, and extortion rackets in the city.

 Bulger’s main rival was the Patriarca crime family, the local Italian organization that operated out of Providence, Rhode Island. In 1975, an FBI special agent named John Connolly contacted Bulger. Connolly had grown up in the same housing project as Bulger. He had idolized Whitey as a kid. Now, he was a federal agent under pressure from his bosses to recruit informants who could help take down the Italian mafia in Boston.

 According to Connolly’s later courtroom statements, he met Bulger at Wollaston Beach in a parked FBI car and made him an offer. The FBI would protect Bulger from prosecution if Bulger gave them information on the Patriarca family. Bulger, according to Connolly, agreed but said he would never be called an informant.

 He wanted to be called a strategist. The deal worked exactly the way Bulger wanted it to. The FBI used the information he gave to take down the local Italian mafia,    including underboss Gennaro Angiulo. With his main competition gone, Bulger took over the Boston rackets. By 1979, when most of the rest of the Winter Hill gang leadership was indicted in a horse race fixing case, Connolly intervened to keep Bulger out of the indictment.

 By the early 1980s, Bulger was the most powerful figure in Boston’s underworld. The FBI was by then so compromised that Connolly’s own supervisor, John Morris, was also taking bribes from Bulger. Court records later showed that Bulger and his partner Stephen Flemmi paid Connolly around $235,000 over the years, plus cash, gifts, and cases of expensive wine to Morris.

The deal was supposed to be that Bulger gave information and stayed clean. He did neither. According to court records and the testimony of his lieutenant, Kevin Weeks, Bulger was carrying out killings the entire time he was a federal informant. He carried out 19 of them between 1972 and 1985. One of the most well-known happened in 1982.

Edward Brian Halloran, a Boston associate, walked into the FBI and offered to testify against Bulger. Connolly told Bulger about it. Bulger and another shooter ambushed Halloran in front of a waterfront restaurant. Halloran was shot.    So was a man named Michael Donahue, who was simply giving Halloran a ride home.

Donahue had no connection to the mob at all. He left behind a wife and three young sons. Two more victims, Debra Hussey and Debra Davis, both young women who had been close to Flemy, were killed by the Winter Hill gang during this time. Bulger was eventually convicted of being involved in their deaths. In 1991, Bulger and his crew muscled into a $14 million Massachusetts state lottery ticket that had been sold at a store he controlled.

He listed himself as a co-winner and started collecting payments. The deal finally fell apart in late 1994. A federal grand jury was about to indict Bulger on racketeering charges. Connolly tipped him off. On December 23rd, 1994, Bulger left Boston with his long-time girlfriend, Teresa Stanley. He soon traded her for another girlfriend named Catherine Greig.

He was on the run for the next 16 years. He was placed on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives List in 1999. The reward for information leading to his capture was eventually set at $2 million, the second highest amount on the list at the time, behind only the reward for Osama bin Laden. He was caught on June 22nd, 2011.

The FBI ran a public service announcement focused on Greig, asking if anyone had seen her. A former neighbor in Santa Monica, California, recognized her and called in. Bulger and Greig were arrested at a rent-controlled apartment a few blocks from the beach. He was 81 years old. Investigators found $822,000 in cash hidden in the walls of the apartment along with 30 firearms.

His trial in 2013 lasted 2 months. On August 12th, 2013, the jury convicted him on 31 of 32 counts, including involvement in 11 of the killings. He was sentenced to two life sentences plus 5 years. John Connolly was convicted of racketeering and obstruction of justice in 2002 and sentenced to 10 years. He was later convicted in Florida in 2008 of second-degree murder for tipping off Bulger about a witness.

John Morris was given immunity for testifying. On October 30th, 2018, less than 12 hours after being transferred to a federal prison in Hazelton, West Virginia, Whitey Bulger was found beaten to death in his cell. He was 89 years old. Two inmates with mafia ties were eventually charged in his killing. He had been a confessed informant in a world where being an informant carried a death sentence.

The mob that he had helped the FBI take down had finally caught up to him in his last hours. Goodfellas was a great film. The truth was always going to be uglier. Across these 10 cases, the same pattern shows up over and over again. The killings were slower. The bodies were harder to find. The trials took decades.

The men giving the orders ate dinner in restaurants, while the men carrying them out    ended up in cornfields, landfills, and the trunks of frozen cars.  Some of them got away with it for a time. Some of them died alone in prison cells. None of them ever beat what they had built. That was the real life behind the camera, and it never had a script.