Fountain Avenue, East New York, Brooklyn. From the outside, it looked like any other auto parts operation in a working-class neighborhood. A 77,000 square foot lot behind a chain-link fence, junk cars stacked in rows, grease stains on concrete, the smell of motor oil and rust. Inside, according to federal investigators who spent years documenting what happened there, the operation was something else.
Stolen vehicles were stripped of their identification numbers and chopped into parts. Drugs moved through the same channels. And in the back of the property, in barrels, the Gambino crime family dissolved the people it needed to disappear. The jewelry that survived the acid was kept, hung from the rafters of the basement.
Trophies from bodies that no longer existed. Charles Carneglia ran that junkyard with his brother John for three decades. He was John Gotti’s most reliable cleaner. When someone needed to be not just dead, but gone, so completely that law enforcement could build no case around their absence, they called Charles Carneglia.
He was convicted in 2009 of four murders and sentenced to life in federal prison. He died there on April 8, 2017, at 70 years old. He never cooperated. He never gave up anyone.
And most of the people he disposed of over three decades will never be officially counted as his victims, because there is nothing left of them to count. Charles Carneglia was born August 10, 1946, in Queens, New York. His brother John was born the previous year in Ozone Park. They grew up in Howard Beach and Ozone Park, working-class neighborhoods that also served as a nexus for mob operations built around John F.
Kennedy Airport. Their entry into the criminal world came through Carmine Fatico’s crew, the same Ozone Park circle that produced John Gotti. The differences between the brothers were apparent early. John was imposing, businesslike, politically skilled.
He built relationships with the men closest to Gotti’s inner circle. Charles was volatile. He drank heavily, used drugs, carried a pent-up anger that could spill out at anyone who happened to be in the wrong moment. He was paranoid, rumored to sprinkle red pepper around his vehicles to deter FBI dogs.
But he had one quality that made all of that manageable from the Gambino family’s perspective. He was genuinely, completely unafraid of violence. Not performed fearlessness, but the real thing, an absence of hesitation that could not be taught. The Gotti-era Gambino family needed men like him.
People who could kill without creating witnesses or trails. People who could make evidence disappear. People who would do both and then go back to the junkyard and never discuss it with anyone. The template for his relationship with the criminal justice system was set early.
On March 11, 1976, Albert Gelb, a high-ranking New York state court officer, was shot three times through the window of his car in Queens while driving home. The sequence began at the Esquire Diner in Howard Beach, where Carneglia had displayed a firearm. Gelb, off-duty but still operating with the authority of his position, noticed the gun and asked to see a license. Carneglia did not have one.
He was arrested on a weapons charge. Gelb was scheduled to testify in the case. Four days before his scheduled testimony, he was shot to death. At trial, a witness described the shooter as someone who did not match Carneglia’s physical description.
He was acquitted. He went back to work. The Gelb murder was never successfully prosecuted. The junkyard was the center of everything.
The Carneglia brothers secured operational variances for the Fountain Auto Mall in 1976 and ran it for the next three decades. On the surface, it was a legitimate auto parts operation. Vehicles were brought in, stripped, and sold. One level beneath that were the stolen vehicle operations.
Cars reported stolen across the region were brought to Fountain Avenue. Identification numbers were removed, and the vehicles were either chopped into untraceable parts or given falsified identifiers and resold. Federal records documented this in detail when the junkyard’s assets were seized in a 1992 civil forfeiture action. The drug operation ran through the same property, a node in the Gambino family’s narcotics network.
And then there was what happened in the back. The acid. The barrels. The dissolution of evidence.
When the Gambino family needed someone to cease to exist, the answer was the Carneglia junkyard. The methodology involved placing victims in acid-filled barrels that would dissolve biological material over time. At the end of it, a person who had a name and a family and a history had become nothing that could be traced back to a murder. The jewelry the victims were wearing was metal.
Metal does not dissolve in acid the way biological material does. The rings, watches, and chains survived. According to prosecutors, they were retrieved and kept hung from the rafters of the basement. The acid dissolution was operational.
The keeping of the jewelry was personal. A collection built from the only artifacts the process could not destroy. In 1980, the junkyard received a problem connected to the most sensitive moment in John Gotti’s personal life. John Favara, a furniture factory manager, had accidentally killed Gotti’s 12-year-old son Frank while driving home from work.
Police cleared Favara because it was a genuine accident, but four months later, Gotti’s men took him from a parking lot in Long Island. Brooklyn federal court papers contain allegations that Charles Carneglia handled the disposal of Favara’s body. The court document stated that Carneglia killed Favara and disposed of his body in acid. The body was placed in a barrel.
The contents were eventually disposed of. Favara’s remains have never been found. The government witness who reported this information was Kevin McMahon. He was the 12-year-old boy from whose borrowed minibike Frank Gotti had been riding when he was killed.
John Carneglia had informally adopted McMahon years later, finding the young teenager sleeping in his pool house and taking him in as a surrogate son. McMahon grew up in the orbit of the Carneglia brothers, eventually becoming a Gambino associate supervised by Charles. In 2009, McMahon sat in a federal courtroom and testified against the man who had raised him. On May 5, 1981, three Bonanno family capos lay dead in a Brooklyn restaurant, and the bodies were processed at or through the Carneglia operation.
Two of the three were never found. On December 16, 1985, Paul Castellano and Thomas Bilotti were shot to death outside Sparks Steak House in Manhattan. John Carneglia was one of the four gunmen in the operation that put John Gotti on the throne of the Gambino family. No charges connected to those murders were ever filed against him.
On October 4, 1990, Louis DiBono, a Gambino soldier who had been skimming from a construction contract and refusing to meet with Gotti, was shot multiple times in his vehicle in the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center. Charles Carneglia was part of the operation. In return for his participation, he was formally inducted into the Gambino crime family. He received his button.
He was 44 years old, late by mob standards, a reflection of how his volatility and drug use had complicated his path even in an organization that valued exactly what he possessed. He went back to the junkyard. The 2009 trial was the result of a federal investigation that had been building for years. The case was part of a broader sweep that in February 2008 arrested 138 alleged mob figures.
The indictment against Carneglia charged racketeering conspiracy with predicate acts covering four murders, murder conspiracy, robbery, kidnapping, drug trafficking, and extortion. The government had witnesses. It had Kevin McMahon. It had John Alite, another Gambino associate turned cooperator.
The four murders the jury convicted him of were the 1977 stabbing of Michael Cotillo, the 1983 stabbing of Salvatore Puma, the 1990 shooting of Louis DiBono, and one additional murder. The Albert Gelb murder was not among the convictions. The John Favara disposal was referenced in court papers, but the verdict was limited to what could be proven beyond reasonable doubt. The jury found him guilty on all counts.
In September 2009, Judge Nicholas Garaufis sentenced Charles Carneglia to life in federal prison. He made no statement. He had not cooperated. He had not provided information about anyone else.
He received his sentence and was taken to prison. He died in the Federal Medical Center in Devens, Massachusetts, on April 8, 2017. He was 70 years old. He had outlived John Gotti by 15 years and the junkyard that defined his career by considerably longer.
The Fountain Auto Mall no longer exists. The site was cleared, the fence came down, the building was demolished, and the area was redeveloped. John Carneglia served his 50-year heroin trafficking sentence and was released in 2018, in his 70s. Kevin McMahon, whose testimony contributed to the life sentence, is presumably living under some form of protection as a result of his cooperation.
The three Bonanno capos whose bodies went through the Carneglia operation in 1981 were never officially accounted for, two of them never located. John Favara’s remains have never been found. His case remains officially open. The barrels are gone.
The jewelry trophies are gone. And Charles Carneglia, who never talked and never gave up anyone, took the rest of what he knew with him to his grave.