John Gambino, the longtime head of the Gambino crime family’s Sicilian faction known as the Cherry Hill Gambinos, died of natural causes in New York on November 16, 2017, at the age of 77. At the time of his death, his nephew Frank Cali was serving as the family’s acting boss. Gambino’s criminal career spanned decades and linked New York’s underworld to the Sicilian Mafia’s global heroin trade. Born Giovanni Gambino on August 22, 1940, in Palermo, Sicily, he was a distant relative of Carlo Gambino, the boss of the Gambino family.
The Gambinos came from the Passo di Rigano neighborhood of Palermo, the same area as the Inzerillo clan led by Salvatore Inzerillo, to whom they were related through a series of marriages. John Gambino and his brothers Rosario and Giuseppe were brought to New York by their father Tommaso in 1964. Because they were made men from Palermo, they could not be initiated into the American Cosa Nostra, whose books had been largely closed since 1931. Instead, the three brothers formed their own Sicilian faction of the Gambino family in the early 1960s, based in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and running Café Valentino in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.
The Cherry Hill Gambinos became central to Sicilian Mafia operations in the United States, and Tommaso Buscetta, who would later become the most famous Mafia turncoat in Sicilian history, moved naturally into their inner circle. By the late 1960s, the brothers were tied into a sprawling network of Sicilian traffickers operating between Palermo and New York. John Gambino was later found to have owned 240 pizzerias that generated about $240 million annually and were used to facilitate drug sales and money laundering. The Gambinos also became partners in a transatlantic heroin syndicate that included the Cuntrera-Caruana clan and other traffickers who had resettled in Venezuela.
John Gambino set up a cattle breeding station in the Venezuelan state of Barinas in 1971, near the Colombian border. By the close of the 1970s, Sicilian traffickers were sending roughly $1 billion a year from America to Palermo through Switzerland, Liechtenstein, London, Caracas, and the Cayman Islands. A key figure in that money flow was the international financier Michele Sindona, who had risen to prominence as a corporate tax lawyer in Milan before controlling banks and corporations across Europe and the United States. Among his underground clients were the Sicilian Mafia.
Sindona’s empire collapsed in 1974, and by March 1979 he faced a U. S. indictment on 99 counts of fraud, perjury, and misappropriation of bank funds. Sindona’s most relentless opponent was Giorgio Ambrosoli, the lawyer overseeing the liquidation of his Milan bank.
After repeated attempts to intimidate Ambrosoli failed, Sindona sent a Mafia hitman from New York to Milan in July 1979 to murder him. The killing worsened Sindona’s legal situation, and the next month he disappeared from his suite at the Hotel Pierre in New York, where he was under house arrest. In August 1979, with the help of John Gambino and members of the Gambino crime family, Sindona staged his own kidnapping by a fictional left-wing terrorist group. During his disappearance, police initially believed he was in terrorist hands.
But on October 9, 1979, the person delivering a ransom note to Sindona’s lawyer in Rome turned out to be Vincenzo Spatola, and investigators discovered that Sindona was being kept in Sicily by the same Mafiosi already under investigation for running the massive heroin ring between Palermo and New York. Vincenzo Spatola’s brother Rosario Spatola, a wealthy building contractor and public benefactor, was arrested on charges of kidnapping Sindona, but it soon emerged that he was actually Sindona’s host. Sindona had spent weeks at Spatola’s father-in-law’s villa near Palermo, where he was shot in the thigh to maintain the fiction of a terrorist kidnapping. Rosario Spatola was also John Gambino’s cousin, business partner, and prime accomplice, and was laundering enormous sums of heroin money sent to him by Gambino.
In October 1979, Sindona surrendered to the FBI. The Spatola case spread across Western Europe and the Atlantic, revealing over a hundred Sicilian traffickers working between Palermo and New York, all affiliated with a single criminal gang. The case provided verifiable evidence that the Sicilian Mafia had grown into a sizable global heroin cartel. By 1982, the Gambino, Inzerillo, and Spatola holdings in Palermo alone were found to be worth around $1 billion.
In 1980, Sindona was convicted and received 25 years in New York. On March 18, 1986, he was sentenced to life imprisonment as the instigator of the Ambrosoli murder, and four days later he died of cyanide poisoning at the age of 65. In the summer of 1979, while Sindona was in Sicily, the DEA had gotten a lead on the trafficking network. John Gambino had flown from New York to guide Sindona around Palermo, and his partners had sent five kilos of heroin to his brothers Rosario and Giuseppe in New York.
DEA agents intercepted the shipment at Kennedy Airport, and after seizing two more consecutive consignments, they acquired an informant named Frank Raleigh, a Sicilian-born baggage handler for Alitalia who worked on and off for the Cherry Hill Gambinos. In March 1980, Raleigh met with Rosario and Giuseppe Gambino at the Milioluchi Café in New York. The brothers wanted to try a new, safer shipping route from Italy, and for $30,000 Raleigh agreed to set one up with Emanuele Adamita in Milan. DEA agents tailed Raleigh and Adamita across the Atlantic, watched as heroin came up from Sicily in a truckload of lemons, and observed the two shipping it to New York in a zinc container with 100 LP records of Italian pop music.
Raleigh was then taken into the U. S. Witness Protection Program, while Italian police arrested Adamita and his accomplices in Milan. The traffickers caught in Italy were tried there, while those in America became a separate case, and nobody was extradited in either direction.
John Gambino remained in New York despite repeated requests from Italian judge Giovanni Falcone. John, Rosario, and Giuseppe Gambino were arrested on the same day with several associates, and John and Giuseppe were acquitted in Italy. The New York case proceeded separately. Adamita and his accomplices were tried in Italy with 78 other Sicilian traffickers, headed by John Gambino, co-conspirator Rosario Spatola, and John himself in absentia.
It would take about four years before American authorities learned that Salvatore Catalano, Giuseppe Ganci, and their whole crew in New York had owned a large share of Adamita’s 40-kilo heroin shipment. Meanwhile, in Italy, Salvatore Riina, boss of the rival Corleone faction, viewed the Inzerillo family and its alliance with the Gambinos as an obstacle to his seizure of total control of the Sicilian Mafia. On April 23, 1981, Stefano Bontade was killed with a Kalashnikov while driving home from his birthday party in Palermo, and three weeks later, on May 11, 1981, Salvatore Inzerillo was killed with the same weapon. In October 1984, John, Giuseppe, and Rosario Gambino were indicted on federal charges of conspiracy and distributing heroin.
In December 1984, Rosario was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison, while his brothers were acquitted. On December 1, 1988, a coordinated operation between American and Italian authorities resulted in the detention of 52 people across the United States, dismantling the Cherry Hill Gambinos’ heroin operation. In parallel, Italian authorities arrested 133 additional people in connected raids, at least 22 of them on drug-related charges. The joint effort came eight months after the United States and Italy began what was described as the biggest cooperative drug case ever mounted by the two nations against alleged traffickers.
Nine of those charged were arrested together around 2 a. m. at the Café Giardino in New York, where FBI agents had planted electronic bugs. The café, run by Giuseppe Gambino, was an important meeting place for the conspirators, and among its visitors was John Gotti, identified as the current head of the Gambino family.
The operation, named Operation Iron Tower, yielded enough evidence to convict just one of the Gambino brothers, Giuseppe. Rosario had already been sentenced to 45 years, and the FBI still couldn’t gather enough evidence to jail John Gambino. John Gambino still faced a six-and-a-half-year jail sentence in Italy, confirmed in absentia by Italy’s Supreme Court in 1985. His partner Rosario Spatola, second in command under the late Salvatore Inzerillo and co-sponsor of Sindona’s fake kidnapping, vanished from Sicily in 1986.
The operation also proved that the families who had once run the old Mafia in Palermo, the so-called Gambino-Inzerillo-Spatola-Di Maggio super-clan supposedly wiped out during the Mafia War, had continued to ship heroin from Sicily throughout the conflict. John Gambino, Giuseppe Gambino, and six other defendants, including Francesco Inzerillo, were indicted on charges that they participated in the 1988 murder of Francesco Oliveri and smuggled and distributed drugs. Turncoat Sammy Gravano later claimed that John Gambino received permission from John Gotti to execute Oliveri, who was accused of killing a member of his crew. On January 4, 1990, John Gambino was arrested and later accused of violating narcotics and racketeering laws in a superseding indictment.
He was released on a $2 million personal recognizance bail the following day. On July 8, 1992, the court agreed to the government’s motion to stop Gambino’s electronic surveillance due to repeated blackouts that rendered the monitoring system useless, allowing him to leave his house during those periods. On September 1, 1992, authorities discovered that John Gambino had broken the terms of his bail arrangement and had fled the previous day. Following a protracted international manhunt, John and Giuseppe Gambino were apprehended on September 17, 1992, in a hotel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
The court then ordered that the sureties forfeit the $2 million bond. The FBI believed the brothers had friends and associates in Florida who would have helped them flee to Venezuela, where John Gambino owned an interest in a ranch. The trial against John and Giuseppe Gambino began in February 1993. The defense argued that the primary drug and murder allegations were based on the uncorroborated testimony of Marino Mannoia and Sammy Gravano, whom the defense characterized as killers and liars.
The prosecution portrayed the Gambinos as the main distributors of heroin smuggled from Italy and South America to Miami and New York by the Sicilian Mafia. In June 1993, a jury was unable to reach a verdict on the allegations of racketeering, drug trafficking, and murder, and the case was declared a mistrial. Since Italy did not have a witness protection program at the time, Marino Mannoia was accepted into one in the United States. Mannoia testified in court that he had personally met with John Gambino, who had checked the quality of the heroin being processed in Palermo.
In an agreement with prosecutors, the Gambinos eventually pleaded guilty to drug trafficking as a result of Mannoia’s testimony in June 1994, after prosecutors recommended 15-year sentences without parole. The men agreed to plead guilty to racketeering charges stemming from activity that took place from 1975 to 1992. According to turncoat Gaspare Mutolo, in 1981 the first of his ships delivered 400 kilograms of refined heroin from Thailand, half of which went to the Cuntrera-Caruana clan and half to John Gambino in Cherry Hill. John Gambino endured open heart surgery, a heart attack, and a stroke while incarcerated.
He was released in October 2005, but was then detained to answer Italy’s extradition request and released on bail. A federal judge rejected the extradition request in September 2006, ruling that Gambino had already served a 15-year term in the U. S.
for drug trafficking and murder and could not be tried for the same charges in Italy.