Eight months after a federal agent was murdered on Staten Island, the man who killed him was found dead in the passenger seat of a car on a quiet Brooklyn street. Costabile “Gus” Farace, a 28-year-old bodybuilder with a history of violence, had been shot at close range. He was, at that moment, the most wanted man in America. What makes the case unusual is not the killing itself, but who found him.
It was not the police. For those eight months, two separate organizations had been hunting Farace with everything they had. One was the U. S.
government, running one of the largest manhunts in its history. The other was the American Mafia. The Mafia found him first. The organization that was supposed to be protecting him carried out the execution.
They did the government’s work for it, deliberately, and everyone involved understood why. To understand why Farace was killed, you have to start with the man he murdered. Everett Emerson Hatcher was a 46-year-old special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration. He was a Navy veteran, married, and had a young son.
On the night of February 28, 1989, he was working undercover, building a long-term identity as a drug buyer on Staten Island. Undercover work of this kind is slow and dangerous. Agents meet people, make small purchases, and wait. Every meeting is a test.
They cannot carry anything that reveals their identity, often cannot wear a wire because searches are routine. Support teams have to stay far enough back to avoid detection, which means far enough back to lose the agent entirely. On that night, Hatcher drove alone to a meeting. His support team lost sight of him.
At some point on a dark Staten Island road, he was shot and killed inside his car at close range. The meeting he was driving to had been routine, another step in a slow process. The man who shot him was Gus Farace. Farace was born on Staten Island in December 1960 to a large Italian-American family.
He began weightlifting as a teenager and became heavily built, earning his nickname from his physique. He used steroids heavily and was described by those around him as having a genuinely frightening temper. That combination of size and volatility gave him a reputation before he had done anything to earn it. He slid into the criminal world through small crimes and assaults before moving into drugs.
He was never an official member of the Mafia. He was an associate of the Bonanno family, meaning he was allowed to work and earn using the family’s name in exchange for loyalty. He was not a major criminal, just a drug dealer with a violent reputation in a small area. Before February 1989, there was little reason for anyone outside Staten Island to know his name.
He had a prior conviction from the early 1980s for an unrelated murder. After prison, he returned to the same trade in the same place, among the same people. The organization that allowed him to work knew he was volatile and capable of reckless killing. They let him continue because he moved product and took the risks himself.
Killing a federal agent changed everything, not just for Farace. For decades, the Mafia had operated under an unwritten but real understanding. You could run gambling, loansharking, extortion, robbery. You could kill each other almost endlessly.
What you could not do was attack the government itself, not agents, prosecutors, or judges. Not because of principle, but because of consequences. Killing a federal agent was a political problem, and political problems bring resources that no amount of money can absorb. The timing made it worse.
By the late 1980s, New York’s families were already under sustained federal attack. The RICO statute had matured into a weapon that could bring down a boss for crimes committed by people he never met. The Commission case had put leaders from multiple families in prison. Electronic surveillance had become routine.
This was the environment in which Farace opened fire. Not a confident organization with room to absorb a shock, but one already losing, already watching trusted men begin making deals with prosecutors. In the middle of that, someone no one outside Staten Island had heard of shot a federal agent on a public road. The manhunt for Farace became one of the largest in the country’s history.
Hundreds of agents, task forces, rewards. The pressure was not just to find him, but to make harboring him impossibly expensive. Every club, every crew, every beneficiary in the area felt it. Agents brought in his partners, pressured his relatives, visited social clubs repeatedly.
They made clear this would not stop until Farace was turned over. The calculation was simple and made quickly. One man or the entire business. Farace was not a valuable asset.
He was an associate, not an official member, with no powerful protector willing to bear that cost for him. There is a story that circulates about this period, that the Mafia put a bounty on Farace’s head, sometimes reported at half a million dollars. That figure appears in books and documentaries constantly, but no court record or official document supports it. It appears to have grown from informant chatter and solidified through repetition.
The pressure explains what happened without it. What the record does support is that the decision to kill Farace was made at the highest levels of the Bonanno family, the same family that had allowed him to work. Testimony from cooperating Bonanno figures, including Salvatore Vitale, described approval of the killing to relieve the pressure. For nine months, Farace remained on the run.
But he was not hiding from the law in the usual sense. He was hiding from everyone. He could not go to the police, and he could not turn to the people whose protection he would normally have relied on, because they had become the ones most eager to kill him. He moved between places, depending on a shrinking circle of friends and relatives, each of them under federal pressure and, at the same time, pressure from the other side.
Loyalty to Gus Farace had become the most dangerous position in New York. A relative who let him sleep on the couch risked a federal obstruction charge from one direction and a visit from his own neighbors from the other. He was a fugitive in New York and its outskirts, a short drive from where he had lived his whole life, surrounded by thousands of people who knew his face, none of whom could afford to know him. He likely knew how it would end.
He had been inside that world long enough to watch it happen to other people. A man who becomes an unmanageable burden is not exiled. There is only one procedure, and it does not change. The nine months were not a flight.
They were a delay. He was alone in the fullest sense of the word. According to accounts later provided by cooperating witnesses, he was eventually lured out by someone he trusted on an ordinary evening to an ordinary street in Bensonhurst. He got into a car and did not get out.
He was shot to death there on November 18, 1989, nine months after Everett Hatcher was killed. The detailed account of Farace’s murder reached public record mainly through Dominick Cicale, a cooperating Bonanno associate who worked with the FBI in the 2000s, more than a decade after the event. His testimony was a pillar of the 2007 trial of Vincent Basciano, known as “Vinny Gorgeous,” who was convicted of the murder. Cicale’s account was tested in court and held up well enough for a conviction.
But it remains one man’s version, told years later in exchange for benefits, about events for which no neutral witnesses survive. Basciano denied it. Aftermath took a very long time. Joseph D’Amico, who was present at the time of Hatcher’s murder, disappeared.
He remained a fugitive for nearly two decades before being captured, tried, and finally convicted for his role in the agent’s killing. Twenty years is a period worth pausing on. A man present at the murder of a federal agent in one of the most intensively investigated cases of that era stayed hidden for two decades. Whatever the manhunt accomplished, it did not accomplish that.
The case did not end. It simply waited. Vincent Basciano, who had risen over time within the Bonanno family, was convicted in 2007 of Farace’s murder. The Bonanno family, the organization that ordered Farace killed to protect itself from federal attention, was dismantled in the following years more thoroughly than any other family in America.
This was largely because its boss, Joseph Massino, became the first official boss of a New York family to cooperate with the government. They killed Gus Farace to keep the government off them. Fifteen years later, their boss was sitting across the table from that same government, describing how it was done. Farace spent his adult life believing he was part of something.
He was standing next to it. He was allowed to use the organization’s name and reputation for years, and the moment he became a financial liability instead of an income source, that name and reputation turned against him. He was never a real member. He was inventory.
The distinction between associate and official member, which can seem like mere ceremony, was the entire mechanism. The associate gets no protection unless he is profitable. The government’s pressure achieved a result. It simply came through the Mafia rather than the courts.
The man who killed a federal agent never stood trial, never faced a jury, was never sentenced by anyone. The Hatcher family got a killing. They did not get a verdict. Those are two different things.
It took nearly twenty years before anyone stood trial for Everett Hatcher’s murder, and the man finally tried was the accomplice, not the killer. The Mafia did not punish Farace for killing Everett Hatcher. They punished him for drawing attention. He was useful until he stopped being useful, hunted by the forces of a war too big for him, and executed by his own people to end a problem.
The murder of a federal agent was not prohibited because it was wrong. It was prohibited because it was too expensive. The moment that man became expensive, the organization discarded him without hesitation. CONTENT:
Eight months after a federal agent was murdered on Staten Island, the man who killed him was found dead in the passenger seat of a car on a quiet Brooklyn street.
Costabile “Gus” Farace, a 28-year-old bodybuilder with a history of violence, had been shot at close range. He was, at that moment, the most wanted man in America. What makes the case unusual is not the killing itself, but who found him. It was not the police.
For those eight months, two separate organizations had been hunting Farace with everything they had. One was the U. S. government, running one of the largest manhunts in its history.
The other was the American Mafia. The Mafia found him first. The organization that was supposed to be protecting him carried out the execution. They did the government’s work for it, deliberately, and everyone involved understood why.
To understand why Farace was killed, you have to start with the man he murdered. Everett Emerson Hatcher was a 46-year-old special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration. He was a Navy veteran, married, and had a young son. On the night of February 28, 1989, he was working undercover, building a long-term identity as a drug buyer on Staten Island.
Undercover work of this kind is slow and dangerous. Agents meet people, make small purchases, and wait. Every meeting is a test. They cannot carry anything that reveals their identity, often cannot wear a wire because searches are routine.
Support teams have to stay far enough back to avoid detection, which means far enough back to lose the agent entirely. On that night, Hatcher drove alone to a meeting. His support team lost sight of him. At some point on a dark Staten Island road, he was shot and killed inside his car at close range.
The meeting he was driving to had been routine, another step in a slow process. The man who shot him was Gus Farace. Farace was born on Staten Island in December 1960 to a large Italian-American family. He began weightlifting as a teenager and became heavily built, earning his nickname from his physique.
He used steroids heavily and was described by those around him as having a genuinely frightening temper. That combination of size and volatility gave him a reputation before he had done anything to earn it. He slid into the criminal world through small crimes and assaults before moving into drugs. He was never an official member of the Mafia.
He was an associate of the Bonanno family, meaning he was allowed to work and earn using the family’s name in exchange for loyalty. He was not a major criminal, just a drug dealer with a violent reputation in a small area. Before February 1989, there was little reason for anyone outside Staten Island to know his name. He had a prior conviction from the early 1980s for an unrelated murder.
After prison, he returned to the same trade in the same place, among the same people. The organization that allowed him to work knew he was volatile and capable of reckless killing. They let him continue because he moved product and took the risks himself. Killing a federal agent changed everything, not just for Farace.
For decades, the Mafia had operated under an unwritten but real understanding. You could run gambling, loansharking, extortion, robbery. You could kill each other almost endlessly. What you could not do was attack the government itself, not agents, prosecutors, or judges.
Not because of principle, but because of consequences. Killing a federal agent was a political problem, and political problems bring resources that no amount of money can absorb. The timing made it worse. By the late 1980s, New York’s families were already under sustained federal attack.
The RICO statute had matured into a weapon that could bring down a boss for crimes committed by people he never met. The Commission case had put leaders from multiple families in prison. Electronic surveillance had become routine. This was the environment in which Farace opened fire.
Not a confident organization with room to absorb a shock, but one already losing, already watching trusted men begin making deals with prosecutors. In the middle of that, someone no one outside Staten Island had heard of shot a federal agent on a public road. The manhunt for Farace became one of the largest in the country’s history. Hundreds of agents, task forces, rewards.
The pressure was not just to find him, but to make harboring him impossibly expensive. Every club, every crew, every beneficiary in the area felt it. Agents brought in his partners, pressured his relatives, visited social clubs repeatedly. They made clear this would not stop until Farace was turned over.
The calculation was simple and made quickly. One man or the entire business. Farace was not a valuable asset. He was an associate, not an official member, with no powerful protector willing to bear that cost for him.
There is a story that circulates about this period, that the Mafia put a bounty on Farace’s head, sometimes reported at half a million dollars. That figure appears in books and documentaries constantly, but no court record or official document supports it. It appears to have grown from informant chatter and solidified through repetition. The pressure explains what happened without it.
What the record does support is that the decision to kill Farace was made at the highest levels of the Bonanno family, the same family that had allowed him to work. Testimony from cooperating Bonanno figures, including Salvatore Vitale, described approval of the killing to relieve the pressure. For nine months, Farace remained on the run. But he was not hiding from the law in the usual sense.
He was hiding from everyone. He could not go to the police, and he could not turn to the people whose protection he would normally have relied on, because they had become the ones most eager to kill him. He moved between places, depending on a shrinking circle of friends and relatives, each of them under federal pressure and, at the same time, pressure from the other side. Loyalty to Gus Farace had become the most dangerous position in New York.
A relative who let him sleep on the couch risked a federal obstruction charge from one direction and a visit from his own neighbors from the other. He was a fugitive in New York and its outskirts, a short drive from where he had lived his whole life, surrounded by thousands of people who knew his face, none of whom could afford to know him. He likely knew how it would end. He had been inside that world long enough to watch it happen to other people.
A man who becomes an unmanageable burden is not exiled. There is only one procedure, and it does not change. The nine months were not a flight. They were a delay.
He was alone in the fullest sense of the word. According to accounts later provided by cooperating witnesses, he was eventually lured out by someone he trusted on an ordinary evening to an ordinary street in Bensonhurst. He got into a car and did not get out. He was shot to death there on November 18, 1989, nine months after Everett Hatcher was killed.
The detailed account of Farace’s murder reached public record mainly through Dominick Cicale, a cooperating Bonanno associate who worked with the FBI in the 2000s, more than a decade after the event. His testimony was a pillar of the 2007 trial of Vincent Basciano, known as “Vinny Gorgeous,” who was convicted of the murder. Cicale’s account was tested in court and held up well enough for a conviction. But it remains one man’s version, told years later in exchange for benefits, about events for which no neutral witnesses survive.
Basciano denied it. Aftermath took a very long time. Joseph D’Amico, who was present at the time of Hatcher’s murder, disappeared. He remained a fugitive for nearly two decades before being captured, tried, and finally convicted for his role in the agent’s killing.
Twenty years is a period worth pausing on. A man present at the murder of a federal agent in one of the most intensively investigated cases of that era stayed hidden for two decades. Whatever the manhunt accomplished, it did not accomplish that. The case did not end.
It simply waited. Vincent Basciano, who had risen over time within the Bonanno family, was convicted in 2007 of Farace’s murder. The Bonanno family, the organization that ordered Farace killed to protect itself from federal attention, was dismantled in the following years more thoroughly than any other family in America. This was largely because its boss, Joseph Massino, became the first official boss of a New York family to cooperate with the government.
They killed Gus Farace to keep the government off them. Fifteen years later, their boss was sitting across the table from that same government, describing how it was done. Farace spent his adult life believing he was part of something. He was standing next to it.
He was allowed to use the organization’s name and reputation for years, and the moment he became a financial liability instead of an income source, that name and reputation turned against him. He was never a real member. He was inventory. The distinction between associate and official member, which can seem like mere ceremony, was the entire mechanism.
The associate gets no protection unless he is profitable. The government’s pressure achieved a result. It simply came through the Mafia rather than the courts. The man who killed a federal agent never stood trial, never faced a jury, was never sentenced by anyone.
The Hatcher family got a killing. They did not get a verdict. Those are two different things. It took nearly twenty years before anyone stood trial for Everett Hatcher’s murder, and the man finally tried was the accomplice, not the killer.
The Mafia did not punish Farace for killing Everett Hatcher. They punished him for drawing attention. He was useful until he stopped being useful, hunted by the forces of a war too big for him, and executed by his own people to end a problem. The murder of a federal agent was not prohibited because it was wrong.
It was prohibited because it was too expensive. The moment that man became expensive, the organization discarded him without hesitation.