On December 2, 1985, in Mary Immaculate Hospital in Queens, New York, Aniello Dellacroce lay dying. The 71-year-old had been admitted two weeks earlier under the alias Timothy O'Neill, a name he had used for decades. Cancer had spread from his lungs to his brain. His skin had turned yellow, and his pale, ice-like eyes were closed.
A priest came. His family gathered nearby. And the man who revered him above anyone else in that life, a plane hijacker from Queens named John Gotti, had been visiting that bedside for weeks. When Dellacroce died quietly in his sleep, his most loyal disciple began counting down toward murder.
This was not just another mob death. Aniello Dellacroce was the underboss of the Gambino crime family, the most powerful Cosa Nostra organization in America. He was the man who turned John Gotti from a street thug into a killer. He was the man Albert Anastasia, the lord high executioner himself, took under his personal wing.
He wore the robes of a Catholic priest to slip past police surveillance, calling himself Father O'Neill. He allegedly used those clerical clothes once to get close to a man he intended to kill. He ran the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street like a medieval royal court. For 20 years, he was one of the most feared men in the Five Families.
This is the story of how the son of Italian immigrants from Little Italy became the conscience and the executioner of the American Mafia. How he was passed over for the throne he deserved. How he stayed loyal anyway, because that is what the life demanded. And how his death set off the most brazen assassination in Mafia history, the hit at Sparks Steak House that put John Gotti on the cover of Time magazine and tore the Gambino family apart forever.
Here is what the documentaries leave out. Dellacroce did not merely mentor Gotti. He presided over an entire wing of the Gambino family in Manhattan and Queens that operated parallel to the official hierarchy in Brooklyn. By the time of his death, the Gambino family was effectively two families under one name. Only one of them would survive what came next.
You have to understand where he came from. Aniello Dellacroce was born on March 15, 1914, in New York City to first-generation Italian immigrant parents, Francesco and Antoinette. He grew up in Manhattan's Little Italy, a neighborhood packed with pushcarts and tenements, where Italian was heard on every corner and Catholic churches stood every few blocks.
There was an implicit understanding that the law of the street belonged to men who had crossed the ocean carrying old rules from Sicily and southern Italy. Neil, as everyone called him, the Americanized version of Aniello, left school early. As a teenager he briefly worked as a butcher's assistant.
But honest work was scarce, and by his late teens he was running with a street gang that specialized in robbery, extortion, and beating people mercilessly over debts. He was small, wiry, with dark hair slicked back and those striking pale eyes that seemed to belong to a different face.
The decisive moment came in the 1930s. The Castellammarese War had reshaped the New York underworld. Lucky Luciano reorganized it into five families, and the family that would one day become the Gambinos was then the Mangano organization. Its most feared enforcer was a Calabrian named Albert Anastasia, the chief executive of Murder Incorporated, a man who would become one of the most prolific killers in American crime history.
Anastasia took one look at the young Dellacroce and saw a reflection of himself. The same cold patience, the same willingness to do what had to be done without hesitation. He brought him in, taught him, and gave him work. Over the following decades, Dellacroce built a reputation as one of the most reliable killers in New York.
He never bragged. The exact body count was never confirmed. Federal informants who later cooperated linked him to numerous murders without being able to prove any of them, and he never celebrated any of it. He went home, watched television, drank coffee with milk, and read horse-racing bulletins.
Then comes the story of the priest. At some point in the mid-century, Dellacroce noticed that detectives following him backed off whenever he approached a Catholic church. He began wearing a black suit, a Roman collar, and a small cross. He called himself Father O'Neill. He carried a rosary in his pocket.
He could walk into the back room of a social club dressed as a parish priest, sit across from a man about to be told he had a problem, and calmly explain what would happen next. Police knew him as a man whose stare could freeze the blood in your veins. Veteran NYPD detective Ralph Salerno described looking into Dellacroce's eyes as like seeing the icy gaze of a killer.
In October 1957, everything changed. On October 25, Albert Anastasia was murdered in the barbershop of the Park Sheraton Hotel in midtown Manhattan. Two masked gunmen walked in while he sat in the chair, pushed the barber aside, and fired about 10 shots. He fell dead on the floor.
The assassination was arranged in coordination with Carlo Gambino, a short, quiet, soft-spoken Sicilian who had been Anastasia's underboss and now took control of what would become known as the Gambino crime family. Dellacroce had a choice. Anastasia was his mentor, his sponsor, his protector. By the old-guard rules, Neil was supposed to demand revenge.
Instead, he sat down with Carlo Gambino and listened. Gambino offered him a trusted position, a crew, a territory, and promised more. Dellacroce understood something most mobsters did not. The life was not about loyalty to a person, but loyalty to the family, and the family had a new boss.
Over the following years, Dellacroce built his power. He controlled East Side operations, loansharking in Little Italy, cargo theft crews at Kennedy Airport, and a vast network of football and basketball bookmaking across Manhattan. In 1965, Carlo Gambino pushed aside his aging deputy Joseph Biondo and installed Neil Dellacroce as the family's de facto operational leader.
By then, Dellacroce was already one of the wealthiest and most intimidating men in American organized crime. His base was a shabby storefront at 247 Mulberry Street in Little Italy, known as the Ravenite Social Club. From the outside, it looked like nothing special. An espresso machine in front, a few card tables, an old man dozing in a chair.
But the back room of the Ravenite was where Dellacroce ran his business. Capos came to pledge loyalty. Soldiers came to ask permission. Disputes were settled. Murders were sanctioned. And in the neighborhood, the underboss of the Gambino family was a man you could, in time, ask a favor of.
Now you have to understand how the Gambino family worked in those years. Carlo Gambino ran it from Brooklyn. He was of the old Sicilian school, soft-spoken, living in a modest home. He distrusted flash and hated the spotlight. His top men controlled the waterfront piers, garment district extortion, garbage collection, and the concrete and construction rackets that covered half the building trade in New York City.
At its peak, the Gambino family was the largest Cosa Nostra organization in the country, with hundreds of made members and roughly 20 capos across New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Florida. It was said to earn about a million dollars a day from its combined criminal activities. And Neil Dellacroce, as underboss, helped oversee all of it.
This is where the family within the family took shape. Gambino kept his crews in Brooklyn under his direct control. Dellacroce ran Manhattan and Queens. And in Queens, in a small forgotten place called Ozone Park, a young thief named John Gotti was making a name for himself.
John Joseph Gotti Jr. was born on October 27, 1940, the son of a day laborer. He grew up poor in the Bronx and then in the tough streets of East New York, Brooklyn. He had several brothers. By his teens he was running with a Brooklyn street gang called the Fulton-Rockaway Boys. In his early twenties he was hijacking trucks at Kennedy Airport.
He worked under a Gambino captain named Carmine Fatico, operating out of a club in Ozone Park called the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club. Dellacroce noticed him in the mid-1960s. Gotti was reckless, loud, and foul-mouthed, everything the old school despised, but he had something Dellacroce respected. He produced money. He was loyal. And he was willing to kill.
In 1973, James McBratney, an Irish-American criminal from Staten Island, was linked to a crew that had kidnapped and killed Emanuel "Manny" Gambino, Carlo Gambino's nephew. Gambino wanted McBratney dead. The contract moved through the family to a crew that included John Gotti.
On May 22, 1973, at Snoope's Bar on Staten Island, Gotti, Angelo Ruggiero, and a gunman named Ralph "Ralphie Wigs" Galione walked in posing as detectives to try to take McBratney out. McBratney resisted. A violent brawl broke out in the bar, and it was Galione, not Gotti, who drew his gun and shot McBratney three times at close range, killing him on the floor.
Witnesses were able to see the men. Gotti was not immediately identified, but a police informant heard him bragging about the crime, and he was arrested for murder in 1974. This is where the family's influence showed. The legendary attorney Roy Cohn, the same lawyer who had worked for Joseph McCarthy, was brought in to defend Gotti.
Cohn negotiated a reduction of the murder charge to attempted manslaughter. Gotti served less than two years and walked out in July 1977. After that, Dellacroce sponsored him for full membership in the Gambino family. John Gotti became a made man, and from that day forward his loyalty belonged to Aniello Dellacroce.
That was how Dellacroce operated. He made men. He protected them. He made them rich, and in return they owed him obedience. By the mid-1970s, the Manhattan and Queens crews under Dellacroce's command included some of the highest-earning operators in American organized crime.
John Gotti's Bergin crew, the Ravenite crew running Little Italy, and the port and Bronx rackets were among his followers. Some of them were trafficking heroin. That last point would become a problem. Carlo Gambino had a famous standing order: no drugs.
He believed narcotics brought too much federal attention and long sentences that tempted men to cooperate with police. But the money was too plentiful, and by the late 1970s several crews were secretly dealing heroin and paying a cut upward. The rules existed, the rules were broken, and everyone pretended otherwise.
On October 15, 1976, Carlo Gambino died of a heart attack at his Long Island home. He was 74. The expected successor was Aniello Dellacroce. He was the operational leader. He had run day-to-day affairs for years. The men in Manhattan and Queens assumed it was a formality.
It was not. Carlo Gambino had chosen his cousin and brother-in-law, Paul Castellano, "Big Paul," massive as a refrigerator, a wholesale meat distributor who lived in a 17-room mansion in Todt Hill, Staten Island, that locals called the White House. Castellano had spent most of his life managing the family's legitimate-facing operations: construction, labor unions, and meat and poultry. He had never done street work the way Dellacroce had.
Now he was the boss. It did not help that Dellacroce was in prison on tax evasion charges at the time, unable to claim anything for himself. Here is the truth. Dellacroce accepted it. Not because he approved, but because Cosa Nostra required it. The dying boss had chosen his successor, and the family obeyed. Challenging Castellano would have meant civil war.
So a deal was struck. Dellacroce would remain the operational leader. He would keep Manhattan and Queens, his men, his interests, and the Ravenite. In exchange, he had to bow publicly. And he did. At a meeting in late November 1976, with Dellacroce present, Castellano's succession was confirmed. The capos saw it.
Over the next nine years, the Gambino family operated as two factions pretending to be one. Castellano ran Brooklyn and Staten Island. Dellacroce ran Manhattan and Queens. They rarely met. And resentment grew in Dellacroce's crews, especially at the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, with every passing year.
John Gotti hated Paul Castellano. He hated the mansion. He hated the tailored suits. He hated the way Castellano refused to visit social clubs and share meals with his men. He hated the percentage Castellano demanded from every operation. By the early 1980s, Gotti was telling his men openly that Castellano did not deserve the throne.
Only one thing held him back: Aniello Dellacroce. Neil told him to wait. Neil told him to be patient. Neil told him the day would come, but it would come the right way. And Gotti, who feared no one on earth, listened to Neil Dellacroce. Because Neil was the father he never had. Neil was the man who made him.
But the walls were closing in. The FBI was building a massive case against the family, including recordings of a Gambino soldier close to Gotti, Angelo Ruggiero, discussing heroin trafficking in detail. Castellano demanded those tapes. If Ruggiero had violated the no-drugs rule, Castellano had the right to order his death.
Dellacroce refused to hand them over. He stalled. He delayed. He invoked every old protocol he could think of. Because he knew that if Castellano heard those tapes, he might order the deaths of Ruggiero, Gotti's brother Gene, and eventually John Gotti himself.
This was the trap. Dellacroce protecting his men from his boss, Castellano demanding an obedience Dellacroce could no longer fully give, and the FBI listening to everything. By the summer of 1985, Aniello Dellacroce was dying. The cancer in his lungs had reached his brain. He stopped coming to the Ravenite.
Visitors came to pay respects, and John Gotti came again and again, sitting by the old man's bed, the two of them talking about everything except the one thing they both knew was coming. On December 2, 1985, Aniello Dellacroce died at Mary Immaculate Hospital in Queens. He was 71.
The funeral drew hundreds of men, capos, soldiers, and old-timers from every family in New York. Sammy Gravano came. Frank DeCicco came. One man did not. Paul Castellano stayed away, reportedly to avoid being photographed at a mobster's funeral while facing his own trials.
For the Manhattan faction, it was an unforgivable insult. In their world, you bury your underboss. You grieve with his family. You honor publicly the man who served you. Castellano's absence said the opposite. Then came the second blow.
With Dellacroce gone, Castellano appointed his loyalist Thomas Bilotti as the new underboss and announced his intention to break up Gotti's crew. The shield that had protected Gotti for nine years was now underground, and the man who replaced it wanted Gotti gone. So John Gotti made the decision he had postponed for nine years.
Two weeks later, on December 16, 1985, shortly after 5 p.m., Paul Castellano and Thomas Bilotti pulled up in a black Lincoln outside Sparks Steak House at 210 East 46th Street in midtown Manhattan. Castellano was heading to a dinner meeting with several capos. He had no escort car, no real security, and no warning.
Several men in long pale coats and Russian-style fur hats waited on the sidewalk. As soon as Castellano stepped out, the gunmen opened fire. Castellano was hit with six bullets, Bilotti with four as he turned in front of the car. Both men died on the sidewalk. The shooters dropped their coats, tossed them aside, and vanished into a waiting car.
Across the street, John Gotti and Sammy Gravano watched the entire scene from inside a Lincoln. After it was over, Gotti slowly drove past the bodies to confirm they were dead, then pulled away into traffic. Gravano would later testify about all of it.
The Sparks hit took seconds. Within weeks, John Gotti was sitting at the head of the table Aniello Dellacroce had occupied for 20 years. In mid-January 1986, he was formally recognized as the new boss of the Gambino crime family. He was 45 years old. What Aniello Dellacroce had refused to do for 20 years, John Gotti did in two weeks.
The aftermath fractured the family. Gotti became a celebrity boss, the "Dapper Don." Hand-painted ties, the best restaurants, television cameras chasing him in and out of court. He beat federal case after federal case, and the tabloids dubbed him the "Teflon Don."
But Sammy Gravano, the man who stood beside him at Sparks, turned on him in 1991. Gravano testified that Gotti ordered the Castellano assassination. He also admitted to committing 19 murders himself. In 1992, John Gotti was convicted of five murders, including the killings of Castellano and Bilotti, and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Gotti died of throat cancer in federal prison on June 10, 2002. He was 61.
The Gambino family never regained the power it held under Carlo Gambino. The Sparks hit and the surveillance recordings helped the FBI indict and convict nearly every leadership figure in the family during the 1990s.
Here is what this story really reveals. Aniello Dellacroce was the last of his kind. He believed in the old rules even when those rules cost him the throne. He stayed loyal to Paul Castellano for nine years because that is what the life demanded, and he taught that same loyalty to John Gotti.
But when Castellano refused to honor him in death and moved against Gotti's crew, the foundations cracked. Gotti broke every rule Dellacroce had taught him to avenge the man who taught him those rules. And by breaking them, he helped destroy the family Dellacroce spent his life building.
Neil Dellacroce killed for Albert Anastasia. He made money for Carlo Gambino. He bowed obediently to Paul Castellano. And he raised John Gotti like a son. He died in a hospital bed with cancer eating his brain, and within weeks his protégé set all of Cosa Nostra on fire in his memory.
That is the real story of the Mafia, not the suits and the speeches, but the cold arithmetic of loyalty and the men who pay the price when that arithmetic finally fails.