When John Gotti was on trial for racketeering in the late 1980s, one of his top lieutenants allegedly proposed a stunning plan to distract the public: assassinate Oliver North, the former National Security Council official at the center of the Iran-Contra affair. Joseph “Joe Piney” Armone, the Gambino crime family’s underboss at the time, reportedly believed that killing North would generate headlines big enough to shift attention away from Gotti’s high-profile prosecution. The claim came from Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, who later became Gotti’s underboss and eventually a key government witness. Gravano said Armone offered him the contract to carry out the killing.
Armone was a longtime Gambino figure. Born in New York on September 13, 1917, he had a criminal record stretching back to the 1930s, including a 1936 conviction for being an accessory to first-degree murder. He and his brother Steven were heavily involved in narcotics trafficking and were close to Gambino heavyweight Joseph Biondo, who served as underboss under Carlo Gambino. In the mid-1960s, Armone was sentenced to 15 years in prison for conspiracy to supply large quantities of heroin.
He served about 10 years before being released. In 1982, Armone was promoted to captain. Four years later, after the murder of underboss Frank DeCicco, he was elevated to underboss under Gotti. It was around that time, according to Gravano, that Armone floated the idea of assassinating Oliver North.
North had been publicly implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal, in which weapons were sold to Iran to covertly fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Gravano said Armone told him that killing North would shift the media’s focus away from Gotti’s legal troubles. “If we kill him, the tension’s going to go over there,” Armone reportedly said, according to Gravano. “So I want to give you the contract to kill him.
”
Gravano said he pretended to go along with the plan to avoid insulting Armone, but never intended to carry it out. “I’m not going to kill him,” Gravano recalled thinking. “That’s crazy to take the heat off John. ”
Gravano described Armone as a likable figure who was close to the family’s older members, but said he believed Armone’s mental sharpness had declined by that point.
Armone was said to have been brought into the underboss role specifically to calm older Gambino members during a period of internal turmoil following DeCicco’s murder. In late December 1987 and early 1988, Armone was convicted on racketeering charges and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He died in custody in 1992.
The alleged plan to kill Oliver North never came to fruition, and no such attack was carried out.