On the evening of April 13, 1991, Bobby Borello stepped out of his house in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and walked toward his Lincoln Town Car. He was 47 years old, a feared figure in New York organized crime for more than a decade. He had survived shootings, arrests, and the brutal internal politics of the mob. He had killed for his boss and protected him with his own body.
He was about six feet from his car when he heard footsteps. He never heard the shots.
Frank Lasterino opened fire with a .380 automatic and emptied the magazine. Seven rounds hit Borello: twice in the head, five times in the torso. He dropped beside his own car on his own street. Inside the house, his two-year-old son sat in the kitchen. His wife, Susan, ran out to find her husband of 17 years facedown on the driveway.
Paramedics arrived within minutes. They could do nothing. Bobby Borello was pronounced dead at the scene.
This was not just another mob killing. Borello was John Gotti’s driver, bodyguard, and closest personal protector. If anyone wanted to reach the Dapper Don, they had to get through Bobby first. Everyone in New York knew it. So when Borello went down, the underworld asked the same question: who was powerful enough to touch Gotti’s own man?
The rumor on the street for years was that Gotti himself had ordered the hit, that Borello had tried to step away from the life and paid the ultimate price. The real story was more complicated and more sinister. It involved something no one in the history of American organized crime had ever managed before: a murder arranged with two active-duty NYPD detectives serving as the hired scouts.
Bobby Borello was born on March 31, 1944, in South Brooklyn. In the 1940s and 1950s, that part of Brooklyn was a place where neighborhood boundaries were drawn in blood. The Gambinos, the Genovese, and the Colombo families all had roots in the same streets, the same parishes, the same social clubs.
A kid growing up there didn’t have to look far to find men with money, respect, and power. Borello saw it all up close. His younger brother, Stevie, was tight with the Gallo brothers, including Joey “Crazy Joe” Gallo. Bobby, the bigger and more physically imposing of the two, gravitated toward the enforcer’s role.
By his early twenties, he was working as muscle for the Gallo gang. Between 1967 and 1972, he was arrested six times on charges including weapons possession, assault, larceny, and gambling. Police knew exactly who he was, but knowing and proving were two different things in Brooklyn. Borello kept walking out of precinct houses and back onto the street.
After Crazy Joe Gallo was murdered at Umberto’s Clam House on April 7, 1972, the Gallo crew’s power began to fracture. Stevie Borello helped preserve what rackets he could in South Brooklyn. Bobby, meanwhile, drifted toward a different orbit: the Gambino family, the most powerful crime organization in the United States.
John Gotti was coming up through the same streets at the same time. At that point a capo running operations out of the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park, Queens, Gotti was exactly the kind of boss a man like Bobby could respect. Gotti dressed sharp, talked sharp, rewarded loyalty, and punished disloyalty.
Somewhere in the late 1970s or early 1980s, as Gotti’s profile inside the Gambino family grew, Bobby Borello became his man. Not just an associate. Not just another soldier. Bobby became Gotti’s driver and bodyguard, the man in the front seat, the man who got out first when the car stopped, the man who stood between the boss and whatever was waiting outside.
In organized crime, that position comes with unspoken truths. You are trusted completely or you don’t last a week. You know everything because you are everywhere. And you are permanently linked to the boss’s fate.
Bobby and Gotti spent weekends together on Long Island. They gambled together. They attended shows by singer Jay Black, a childhood friend of Gotti’s. FBI surveillance teams photographed them together dozens of times. Bobby wasn’t just an employee. He was, in the fullest sense available to men in that world, a friend.
In the 1980s, Borello was formally made a full member of the Gambino crime family. His induction ceremony took place on December 24, 1988, in an apartment on Mulberry Street in Manhattan. The men led into that apartment included John Gotti Jr., Dominic Pizzonia, Craig DePalma, Nicholas LaSorsa, and Bobby Borello. The oath was administered by Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano and Pasquale Conte.
Being made in the Gambino family in the late 1980s, with Gotti as boss, meant you had arrived at the center of American organized crime. But being close to Gotti didn’t just mean sharing the good times. It meant sharing the risk.
Borello’s crew ran trucking, construction, and loan sharking operations across Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, and South Brooklyn. He associated with serious men like Angelo Ruggiero and Anthony Anastasio. The crew had a significant stake in strip clubs along the East Coast through a fixer named Steve Kaplan, who paid tribute to both Bobby and Junior Gotti.
Borello was aggressive about protecting his territory. On one occasion, he opened fire on a Genovese associate named Preston Geritano in broad daylight on a Brooklyn street. That kind of recklessness might have gotten another man killed immediately, but Bobby had enough standing with Gotti that the families negotiated a settlement rather than go to war.
Then came October 4, 1990. John Gotti had a problem. A Gambino soldier named Louis DiBono had secured a lucrative contract to install fireproofing foam on the infrastructure of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center. DiBono had been dodging Gotti’s summons, refusing to come in and account for himself.
In the mafia, that kind of disrespect has one solution. Gotti gave the contract to Bobby. Bobby carried it out. Louis DiBono was shot dead on October 4, 1990, in a parking garage at the World Trade Center. After DiBono’s death, Sammy Gravano took over the construction business. One man disappears. The money moves. Nobody asks questions.
By late 1990, Bobby Borello had been elevated to acting capo of Junior Gotti’s crew. He was running his rackets from his Brooklyn social club on Sackett Street. He was one of the most powerful men in the Gambino family.
In December 1990, John Gotti was indicted on federal charges and taken off the street. He set up a five-man ruling panel to run the family while he fought his case. Junior Gotti was on that panel, and Bobby Borello, as acting capo, held real authority in a suddenly leaderless crime family.
On the surface, this was the peak. Forty-seven years old, a made capo in America’s most powerful mob family, running his own crew. But something that happened in December 1985 was still sending deadly reverberations through New York’s organized crime world.
On December 16, 1985, Gambino family boss Paul Castellano and his underboss Tommy Bilotti were shot dead outside Sparks Steakhouse in Midtown Manhattan. The hit was orchestrated by John Gotti. It was a brilliant, audacious power grab, but it was also unsanctioned. No vote. No commission approval. Gotti killed the boss and took the throne because he could.
A Gambino informant named Dominic LaFaro later identified Bobby Borello as one of the men involved in the Castellano operation. That detail mattered enormously. Some of the other New York families, particularly the Lucchese family, had been closely aligned with Castellano. And the Lucchese underboss, Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, did not forget slights.
Casso had a list, and Bobby Borello was on it.
Anthony Salvatore Casso, born May 21, 1942, in South Brooklyn, was arguably the most homicidal figure in the entire New York mob during the 1980s. He ordered murders with the casual frequency of other men ordering lunch. He was eventually charged with 15 murders and pleaded guilty to racketeering, extortion, and murder while cooperating with the government. Prosecutors estimated his total body count at closer to 100.
Casso didn’t just want to win his wars. He wanted the other side to stop existing entirely.
And Casso had a weapon no one else in the mafia had. Two of them.
Louis Eppolito and Steven Caracappa were active-duty New York City Police Department detectives. Eppolito was physically imposing, a former bodybuilder who had written a book about his own mob family connections. Caracappa was quieter, methodical, the kind of cop who spent his career inside major case squads tracking organized crime homicides.
They were, by any external measure, serious police officers. They were also on Gaspipe Casso’s payroll at $4,000 per month.
Starting around 1986, Eppolito and Caracappa began feeding Casso confidential NYPD intelligence. They pulled files. They identified informants. They provided addresses and vehicle registrations. They facilitated multiple murders. Casso used them the way a military commander uses reconnaissance assets. Find the target. Confirm the location. Let the shooters do the rest.
By early 1991, Casso had decided Bobby Borello had to go.
The trigger was an audio cassette. Eppolito and Caracappa had provided Casso with a recording in which Bobby Borello could be heard repeatedly threatening Casso and his family. Whether that recording was made through NYPD surveillance or other means is disputed. But its contents were not. Borello had said things on that tape that Casso considered a death sentence.
Before the shooters were dispatched, Eppolito took on a different role. He needed to confirm that the Borello family had actually moved into their new home in Bensonhurst. So he drove to Bay 29th Street himself. In uniform.
He knocked on the door. Susan Borello answered. She described what happened years later to the New York Post. A big detective pushed his jacket back to show his badge and his gun, asked if Bobby Borello lived there. When she said her husband wasn’t home, he said he’d be back and drove away.
He never came back. He had what he needed. The address was confirmed. The package was delivered to Casso.
The contract was placed with Lucchese captain Frank “Big Frank” Lasterino. Lasterino was a serious operator, described in court documents as fierce, a man who got things done without noise or fuss. He did not miss.
On April 13, 1991, Bobby had spent the afternoon at Aqueduct Racetrack. He came home in the evening. Susan was in the kitchen with their two-year-old son, Bobby Jr. Patrick, their 11-year-old, was out at the movies.
Bobby stepped out of his car and walked toward the house. That’s when Lasterino stepped out of the shadows. Seven rounds. Twice in the head. Five times in the torso.
Bobby Borello went down beside his Lincoln Town Car and didn’t get up.
Susan heard yelling. She thought it was a neighbor arguing with Bobby about the driveway again, the same fight they’d had a dozen times before. She stepped outside. She saw her husband facedown. She scooped up Bobby Jr. She called 911. She collapsed when police told her he was dead.
Gotti got the news in jail. He was furious. He sent word that Stevie Borello had permission to avenge Bobby’s death and had the full backing of the Gambino family. He also ordered family representatives to meet with the Genovese family leadership about Geritano, the man Bobby had shot years earlier. Gotti wanted every loose end sealed.
But for 14 years, nobody could tell Susan Borello who actually pulled the trigger or why.
That changed in March 2005. DEA and FBI agents arrested Louis Eppolito and Steven Caracappa in Las Vegas, where both men had retired and were living comfortable lives.
The federal indictment against them was one of the most extraordinary documents in the history of American law enforcement. Eight murders. Two attempted murders. Murder conspiracy. Obstruction of justice. Drug distribution. Money laundering. The two detectives who were supposed to protect New York City had spent years operating as contract killers for the Lucchese crime family.
Bobby Borello’s murder was named in the original indictment. Prosecutors described how Eppolito and Caracappa accepted the contract to locate Borello and verified his address. Eventually, for trial purposes, prosecutors pared the indictment down, and the Borello murder was not among the counts taken to verdict. But the evidence of the mob cops’ role in setting up the hit was documented in federal court filings and confirmed by cooperating witnesses.
Susan Borello found out what happened in 2005, 14 years after burying her husband. When she saw Eppolito’s picture in the newspaper, she recognized him immediately. The big detective who had knocked on her door. Who had shown his badge and his gun. And asked if her husband was home.
She called prosecutors. Her father, who had been there the night Bobby was killed and had been interviewed by detectives, also recognized Caracappa as the cop who had questioned him at the crime scene.
The men who came to investigate the murder of Bobby Borello were the men who had helped arrange it.
Eppolito and Caracappa were convicted on all counts in 2006. A federal judge sentenced both men to life in prison plus 80 years and fined each more than $4 million.
Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, the man who ordered the hit, had turned federal informant in 1994. He eventually pleaded guilty to 70 crimes, including racketeering, extortion, and 15 murders. A judge sentenced him to 455 years in prison. He died in custody on December 15, 2020.
Frank Lasterino, the man who pulled the trigger seven times in that Bensonhurst driveway, eventually pleaded guilty to multiple murders and racketeering charges.
Stevie Borello, Bobby’s brother, remained active in the Gambino family in Brooklyn and Staten Island for years after his brother’s death.
John Gotti was convicted on April 2, 1992, on five murders, conspiracy to commit murder, racketeering, tax evasion, illegal gambling, and extortion. He received a sentence of life in prison with no possibility of parole. He was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1998 and died at the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners on June 10, 2002.
He never walked free.