On April 13, 1991, at 7:45 in the evening, a large man stepped out of his house on Bay 29th Street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and walked toward his Lincoln Town Car. He was forty-seven years old, six-foot-three, 230 pounds of South Brooklyn muscle, and for more than a decade he had been one of the most feared men in New York organized crime. He had survived shootings, arrests, and the internal mob politics that destroyed lesser men. He had killed for his boss, protected his boss with his own body, and driven him through the streets of New York for years while federal agents photographed them from parked vans.
He was six feet from his car when he heard footsteps. He never heard the shots. Frank Lasterino opened fire with a . 380 automatic and did not stop until the magazine was empty.
Twice in the head, five times in the torso. Seven rounds. Bobby Borello dropped beside his own car on his own street and bled out on the asphalt of his driveway. His two-year-old son sat in the kitchen inside.
His wife, Susan, came running out of the house and found her husband of seventeen years facedown and full of holes. Paramedics arrived within minutes. They could do nothing. This was not just another mob killing.
Bobby Borello was John Gotti’s man: his driver, his bodyguard, his closest personal protector. If you wanted to reach the Dapper Don, you had to get through Bobby first, and everyone in New York knew it. The underworld immediately asked the same question: who was powerful enough, crazy enough, and well-connected enough to touch John Gotti’s personal bodyguard? The street rumor for years was that Gotti himself had ordered the hit, that Bobby had tried to step back from the life and paid the ultimate price.
The real story was more complicated and more sinister. It involved something no one in the entire history of American organized crime had ever managed before: a murder arranged using two active-duty New York City Police Department detectives as the hired scouts for the hit. Bobby Borello was born on March 31, 1944, in South Brooklyn. This was not the gentrified Brooklyn of today but the Brooklyn of the 1940s and 1950s, where neighborhood boundaries were drawn in blood and the streets were owned by organized crime.
The Gambinos, the Genovese, the Colombo family, all had roots in the same neighborhoods, the same parishes, the same social clubs. A kid growing up there did not have to look far to find men who seemed to have everything: money, respect, power. Bobby saw it all up close. His younger brother, Stevie, was tight with the Gallo brothers, Joey “Crazy Joe” Gallo, Albert, and the whole crew running rackets out of Carroll Gardens and Red Hook.
Bobby, the bigger and more imposing of the two brothers, gravitated naturally toward the enforcer’s role. He was feared on the streets before he was formally associated with any family. By his early twenties he was working as muscle for the Gallo gang, and between 1967 and 1972 he was arrested six times on weapons, assault, larceny, and gambling charges. The police knew exactly who he was and what he was doing.
But knowing and proving were two different things in Brooklyn, and Bobby 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, while Bobby drifted toward a different orbit: the Gambino family, the most powerful crime organization in the United States. The man who would transform Bobby’s life was coming up through the same streets at the same time.
John Gotti, then a capo running operations out of the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park, Queens, was exactly the kind of boss a man like Bobby could respect. Gotti dressed sharp, talked sharp, rewarded loyalty, punished disloyalty, and ran a tight operation. Somewhere in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as Gotti’s profile inside the Gambino family grew, Bobby Borello became his man. Not just an associate, not just another soldier orbiting the boss.
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 waited outside. In organized crime, that position carried unspoken truths. You were trusted completely or you did not last a week. You knew everything because you were everywhere.
And you were permanently linked to the boss’s fate in ways that could not be undone. Bobby and Gotti spent weekends together on Long Island, gambled together, attended shows by singer Jay Black. FBI surveillance teams photographed them together dozens of times. Bobby was not 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, in the home of Joe Butch Corrao’s mother. The men led into that apartment that evening read like a Gambino family who’s who: John Gotti Jr.
, Dominic Pizzonia, Craig DePalma, Nicholas Corozzo, 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. Bobby’s crew ran trucking, construction, and loansharking operations across Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, and South Brooklyn.
He associated with serious men like Angelo Ruggiero and Anthony Anastasio. The crew held a stake in strip clubs up and down the East Coast through a fixer named Steve Kaplan, who paid tribute to both Bobby and Junior Gotti for the privilege of operating without interference. Bobby was aggressive about protecting the operation. 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 influence with Gotti that the families negotiated a settlement rather than go to war. Then came October 4, 1990. A Gambino family 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. That was serious money, and 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. DiBono was shot dead in a parking garage at the World Trade Center.
After his death, Sammy Gravano took over the construction business. One man disappeared, the money moved, and nobody asked questions. By late 1990, Bobby had been elevated to acting capo of Junior Gotti’s crew, 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 himself 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, 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 there were deadly undercurrents. Back on December 16, 1985, Gambino family boss Paul Castellano and his underboss Tommy Bilotti had been 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, with no vote and no Commission approval.
Gotti killed the boss and took the throne because he could. A Gambino informant named Dominic Lofaro 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.
He did not let them go. Casso had a list, and Bobby Borello was on it. Casso 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 fifteen murders, and prosecutors estimated his total body count at closer to one hundred. Casso did not 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 four thousand dollars per month. Starting around 1986, Eppolito and Caracappa began feeding Casso confidential NYPD intelligence. They pulled files, identified informants, provided addresses and vehicle registrations, and 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 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 family had actually moved into their new home in Bensonhurst. So he drove to Bay 29th Street himself, in uniform, and 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, and when she said her husband was not home, said he would be back and drove away. He never came back because he had what he needed. The address was confirmed and delivered to Casso.
The contract was placed with Lucchese captain Frank “Big Frank” Lasterino, 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. Patrick, their eleven-year-old, was out at the movies. Bobby stepped out of his car and walked toward the house. That is when Lasterino stepped out of the shadows.
Seven rounds. Bobby went down beside his Lincoln and did not get up. Susan heard yelling. She thought it was a neighbor arguing with Bobby about the driveway again, the same fight they had had a dozen times before.
She stepped outside and saw her husband facedown. She scooped up Bobby Jr. , called 911, and collapsed when the police told her he was dead. Gotti got the news in jail.
He was furious. He sent word that Stevie Borello, Bobby’s brother, 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 leadership about Geritano, the man Bobby had shot at years earlier. He wanted every loose end sealed.
For fourteen years, nobody could tell Susan Borello who actually pulled the trigger or why. That changed in March 2005, when 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 down the indictment, 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 learned what happened in 2005, fourteen 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, 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 eighty years and fined each more than four million dollars. Anthony Casso turned federal informant in 1994, pleaded guilty to seventy crimes including racketeering, extortion, and fifteen murders, and was sentenced to 455 years in prison.
He died in custody on December 15, 2020. Frank Lasterino eventually pleaded guilty to multiple murders and racketeering charges. John Gotti was convicted on April 2, 1992, on five murders, conspiracy to commit murder, racketeering, tax evasion, illegal gambling, and extortion. He received life in prison without parole, was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1998, and died on June 10, 2002, at the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners.
He never walked free.