Anthony “Gaspipe” Caso was one of the most feared mobsters in American history, a Lucchese crime family leader who admitted to at least 36 murders before becoming one of the highest-ranking Mafia figures ever to turn informant. After entering the Witness Protection Program, he was eventually thrown out of it, and in 1998 he was sentenced to 455 years in prison. Born Anthony Salvatore Caso on May 21, 1942, he grew up in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Carroll Gardens and Park Slope, an area that produced notorious mob figures like Carmine Persico and the Gallo brothers. In the late 1950s, young Caso was part of the South Brooklyn Boys, a teenage gang that fought along the Red Hook docks with fists, knives, clubs, and Molotov cocktails.
His godfather, Salvatore Calabrano, was a made man in the Genovese crime family, and Caso developed into an expert pistol shot, using rooftops as makeshift firing ranges. He inherited the nickname “Gaspipe” from his father, who had worked for Vito Genovese and intimidated victims by striking them with metal pipes. Caso dropped out of high school at 16 and worked as a longshoreman. By age 20, he received his first arrest for bookmaking, which resulted in a five-day jail sentence and a $50 fine—his only conviction for the next 33 years.
On orders from Christy “Tick” Furnari, a Lucchese capo who would later become consigliere, Caso committed his first known murder in the mid-1970s. The victim, Leslie Leiffer, a Lucchese drug dealer allegedly working with federal drug enforcement officials, was lured into a social club and shot multiple times in the head with a silenced . 22 caliber pistol. At age 32, with Furnari’s approval, Caso became a made man in the Lucchese family.
Before that, Caso had formed a close friendship with another member of Furnari’s crew, Vittorio “Vic” Amuso. Despite the Mafia ban on narcotics imposed by Lucchese boss Tony “Ducks” Corallo, the two became involved in drug and marijuana trafficking. They were arrested in a major heroin transaction tied to the Sicilian Mafia, but the charges were dropped for lack of evidence. When Furnari offered Caso the position of capo in 1980, Caso declined and urged Furnari to give the job to his partner Amuso instead.
Caso was married to his childhood sweetheart, Lillian Delduca, and they lived in a modest Brooklyn neighborhood. He posed as a trucker and a construction company sales representative while Lillian ran a lingerie boutique. Caso’s hard-edged reputation was well known to rebels in the Gambino family, including John Gotti, Frank DeCicco, and Sammy “the Bull” Gravano. According to Gravano, DeCicco asked Caso for his views on the planned murder of Gambino boss Paul Castellano, and Caso said he didn’t care.
A month after Castellano’s death in December 1985, Genovese boss Vincent Gigante met with Corallo and Furnari at Furnari’s Staten Island home. The leaders agreed that Gotti had broken a cardinal rule by assassinating a boss without commission authorization, and they decided that Gotti and his second-in-command, Frank DeCicco, had to be killed. Caso and Amuso were selected to carry out the double assassination. Because a bomb was an outlawed weapon under commission rules—too many innocent bystanders had been killed, and it drew too much attention—the Genovese and Lucchese leaders wanted both targets eliminated that way to prevent Gotti’s faction from pointing fingers at them.
In the spring of 1986, Caso struggled to find an opportunity to isolate Gotti, who was usually surrounded by a thick cordon of bodyguards. But with help from Gambino capo James “Jimmy Brown” Failla, who was conspiring with the Genovese, they found a chance to take out both Gotti and DeCicco at once. Gotti was visiting Castellano faction hangouts to rally support, and one scheduled stop was Failla’s Veterans and Friends Club in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. On April 13, 1986, a C4 bomb was remotely detonated.
Frank DeCicco was killed almost instantly, and Frank “Frankie Hearts” Bellino—whom Caso’s crew had mistaken for John Gotti—survived with serious leg and foot injuries. Gotti had canceled his visit to Failla’s club at the last minute. Following the lead of the Colombo family, the Luccheses moved into gasoline tax fraud, partnering with Russian gangster Maret Balagula. “He made millions off the gas tax business and our family made a lot of money with him,” Caso later said.
On June 12, 1986, a rival Russian immigrant named Vladimir Reznikov entered the Rasputin nightclub in Brighton Beach, held a nine-millimeter Beretta to Balagula’s head, and demanded $600,000 in exchange for not pulling the trigger, plus a cut of whatever Balagula was involved in. After Balagula suffered a heart attack, Caso was furious and demanded a photo of Reznikov and information about his vehicle. Furnari gave the go-ahead for Caso and Amuso to kill Reznikov. When Reznikov returned to the bar the next day, a veteran member of the DeMeo crew, Joseph Testa, approached him from behind and shot him dead in the parking lot.
Corallo predicted that the upcoming commission trial would result in guilty verdicts, guaranteeing that the entire Lucchese leadership would die in prison. Following the family’s tradition of orderly leadership handovers, he decided to designate a successor. Caso claims he determined the outcome by endorsing Amuso as the next boss, saying he had no ambition for the family’s highest position. The two Brooklyn wiseguys, Amuso and Caso, imposed a reign of terror that left about 40 victims dead or missing, most of them Lucchese made men and associates branded as dissidents or informers—whether correctly or not.
Capo Anthony “Buddy” Longo was one of the first to vanish, allegedly because Corallo had briefly considered him as a successor. Caso allegedly told Alphonse D’Arco that he and Amuso resolved that potential problem by killing Longo. Another Bronx capo, Michael Salerno, viewed as a potential challenger, was found in the trunk of his car, shot in the head with his throat slashed. Anthony Dilapi, a Bronx soldier who moved to California and was declared disloyal, was gunned down by a four-man hit squad.
Bruno Facciolo, a Brooklyn soldier heard mingling with Gambino members, was found in a car trunk with a canary stuffed in his mouth—the traditional warning to informants. In 1988, when capo Paul Vario died in federal prison, Amuso elevated Alphonse D’Arco to capo. Two years later, D’Arco was chosen to put together a Lucchese construction panel to supervise unions and construction companies under the family’s control. In January 1991, Caso received word from a confidential law enforcement source—which he called his “crystal ball”—about an impending federal indictment.
Just before he and Amuso went into hiding, he met D’Arco at a park in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and told him he was in charge of the family until further notice. Amuso and Caso then ordered the murder of made man Peter Chiodo, a fellow Windows case defendant who had pleaded guilty without their permission. Caso delegated the hit to acting boss D’Arco, who was taken aback because Chiodo had been Caso’s close friend and confidant for years. On May 8, 1991, two shooters ambushed Chiodo at a Staten Island gas station, shooting him 12 times.
His obesity saved his life, as none of the bullets reached a vital organ, but he suffered numerous abdominal injuries and permanent damage to his right arm. Caso then threatened through Chiodo’s attorney that Chiodo’s wife would be killed if he testified. D’Arco grew convinced that Amuso and Caso planned to kill him because they blamed him for the botched assassination. In July 1991, they replaced him as acting boss with a four-man panel of capos.
Amuso was arrested on July 29, 1991, following a tip from an unnamed Lucchese insider, and Caso became the family’s de facto leader. On September 21, 1991, D’Arco called FBI agent Robert Marston at his Connecticut home because he was certain that Amuso and Caso had marked him and his family. He noted that the family had begun killing the entire families of suspected informers, which had never before been permitted. D’Arco and his family entered the Witness Protection Program.
On March 10, 1992, Chiodo’s sister, Patricia Capozzalo, was shot while driving Lucchese enforcer Michael Spinelli on orders from Amuso and Caso. She was hit in the arm, back, and neck but survived, in yet another breach of Mafia rules. In 1993, Caso planned to have Bronx capo Stephen Crea killed but failed. Caso was arrested on January 19, 1993, as he exited the shower at the home he shared with his mistress, Rosemarie Bellotti.
Held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, he continued ordering hits from jail and began making escape plans as he faced charges that all but guaranteed he would die in prison. While Caso was in custody, Peter Chiodo’s uncle, Frank Signorino, was found frozen solid in a car trunk on February 2, 1993. Ten days later, the garage of Chiodo’s 95-year-old grandmother, Annette Signorino, was destroyed in a fire set by the Lucchese family. Caso’s authority was diminished when Amuso declared him a pariah, effectively expelling him from the family and stripping him of his underboss title.
Amuso had long suspected that Caso himself had been the leak that led to his arrest, believing that Caso had betrayed him to gain control of the family. Facing trial and life in prison, Caso contacted the FBI and offered to become an informant. He revealed that eight murders had been carried out on his orders by decorated NYPD detectives who worked for him, and that many other murders had resulted from detectives leaking the names of informants to the mob. He also listed dozens of organized crime figures he had conspired with, including Genovese boss Vincent Gigante.
At a hearing on March 1, 1994, Caso finalized a plea deal, admitting guilt to 70 offenses including racketeering, extortion, and 15 murders. He was the second underboss of a New York crime family to break his blood oath and become an informant, after Sammy Gravano. In 1997, Caso was accused of numerous offenses while in custody, including bribing guards, attacking other prisoners, and making false statements about Gravano and D’Arco. As a result, he was expelled from the Witness Protection Program in 1998.
He was ultimately sentenced to 455 years in prison without the possibility of parole. On November 5, 2020, Caso tested positive for COVID-19 while imprisoned in Arizona. After developing respiratory distress, he was taken to a nearby hospital on November 9 and placed on a ventilator.
He died from complications related to the virus on December 15 at the age of 78.