April 13th, 1991. Bay 29th Street, Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. 7:45 in the evening. A big man steps out of his house in the fading light and walks toward his 1991 Lincoln Town Car. He’s 47 years old, 6’3, 230 lb of South Brooklyn muscle. He’s been one of the most feared men in New York organized crime for over a decade.

He survived shootings, arrests, internal mob politics that chewed lesser men to pieces. He’s killed for his boss. He’s protected his boss with his own body. He’s driven his boss through the streets of New York for years while federal agents photographed them from parked vans.

He thought the worst was behind him. He was 6 ft from his car when he heard the footsteps. He never heard the shots. Frank Lesterino opened up with a 380 automatic and didn’t stop until the magazine was empty. Twice in the head, five times in the torso, seven rounds. Bobby Boreello dropped beside his own car on his own street, bled out on the asphalt of his driveway while his 2-year-old son sat in the kitchen inside, and his wife Susan came running out of the house to find her husband of 17 years faced down and full of holes. The paramedics arrived in minutes. They could do nothing. Bobby Boreello was pronounced dead on the scene. This wasn’t just another mob killing. Bobby Boreello was John Goty’s man, his driver, his bodyguard, his closest personal protector for years. If you wanted to get to the Dapper Dawn, you had to get through Bobby first. And

everyone in New York knew it. So when Bobby went down in that driveway, the whole underworld asked the same question. who was powerful enough, crazy enough, and well-connected enough to touch John Goty’s personal bodyguard. Here’s the thing that the newspapers got wrong.

The rumor on the street for years was that Goty himself had ordered it, that Bobby had tried to step back from the life and paid the ultimate price for wanting out. The real story is more complicated, more sinister, and it involves something that 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. This is the story of Bobby Boreello, the man who stood closest to power in the Gambino crime family and was destroyed because of it. You have to understand where Bobby came from to understand how he ended up where he did.

He was born on March 31st, 1944 in South Brooklyn, not the gentrified Brooklyn of today. The Brooklyn of the 1940s and50s was a place where neighborhood boundaries were drawn in blood. Each block had its loyalties, each corner had its bosses, and the streets of South Brooklyn were owned by organized crime.

Not just one family either. The Gambinos, the Genevies, the Columbbo family. All of them had roots in the same neighborhoods, the same parishes, the same social clubs. A kid growing up in South Brooklyn in the 1950s didn’t have to look far to find men who seemed to have everything. Money, respect, power.

Bobby Boreelloo saw all of it up close. His younger brother, Stevie, was tight with the Gallow brothers. Joey, Crazy Joe, Gallow, Albert, and the whole crew that ran rackets out of Carol Gardens and Red Hook. These were serious men, violent men, and Bobby, the bigger and physically more imposing of the two brothers, gravitated naturally toward the enforcer’s role.

He became feared on the streets before he was even formerly associated with any family. By his early 20s, he was working as muscle for the Gallow gang. Between 1967 and 1972, he was arrested six times. Weapons, possession, assault, lasseny, gambling. The police knew exactly who he was and what he was doing.

But knowing and proving are two different things in Brooklyn. And Bobby Boreello kept walking out of precinct houses and back onto the street. In the aftermath of Crazy Joe Gallows murder at Ombberto’s clam house on April 7th, 1972, the Gallow crew’s power began to fracture. Stevie Boreelloo helped preserve what rackets he could in South Brooklyn.

Bobby, meanwhile, was drifting toward a different orbit, the Gambino family, the most powerful crime organization in the United States. Here’s where it gets interesting. The man who would transform Bobby Boreell’s life was coming up at the same time through the same streets. John Goty at that point a cappo running operations out of the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park, Queens, was exactly the kind of boss that a man like Bobby could respect. Goty dressed sharp.

He talked sharp. He rewarded loyalty. He punished disloyalty. He ran a tight operation. And somewhere in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as Goty’s profile inside the Gambino family grew, Bobby Boreello became his man. Not just his associate, not just another soldier orbiting the boss.

Bobby became Goty’s driver and his bodyguard, the man sitting in the front seat, the man who got out first when the car stopped, the man who stood between the boss and whatever was waiting outside. In organized crime, that position comes with certain unspoken truths. You are trusted completely or you don’t last a week.

You know everything because you are everywhere. And you are permanently linked to the boss’s fate in ways that cannot be undone. Bobby and Goty spent weekends together on Long Island. They gambled together. They attended shows by singer Jay Black, a childhood friend of Gotty’s. They were photographed together dozens of times by FBI surveillance teams who made careers out of cataloging the Gambino family’s social arrangements.

Bobby wasn’t just an employee. He was in the fullest sense of the word available to men in that world a friend. In the 1980s, Boreello was formerly made a full member of the Gambino crime family. His induction ceremony took place on December 24th, 1988 in an apartment on Malbury Street in Manhattan in the home of Joe Butch Coral’s mother.

The men led into that apartment that evening read like a Gambino family. Who’s who, John Goty Jr., Dominic Psonia, Craig Dealma, Nicholas Lassoursa, and Bobby Boreelloo. The oath was administered by Salvator, Sammy the Bull, Graano, and Pasquual Conte. These weren’t minor ceremonies. Being made in the Gambino family in the late 1980s with Goty as boss meant you had arrived at the center of American organized crime.

But that’s not the crazy part because being close to Goty didn’t just mean sharing the good times. It meant sharing the risk. Here’s how Bobby Boreello actually operated. His crew ran trucking, construction, and lone sharking operations across Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, and South Brooklyn. He associated with serious men, Angelo Pacion, Anthony Anastasio.

The crew had a significant stake in strip clubs up and down the east coast through a fixer named Steve Kaplan who paid tribute to both Bobby and Junior Goty for the privilege of operating without interference. The operation was generating significant money and Bobby was aggressive about protecting it.

On one occasion he opened fire on a Genevese 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 juice with Goti that the families negotiated a settlement rather than go to war over it.

Then came October 4th, 1990. John Goti had a problem. A Gambino family soldier named Louis Dono 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 Dono had been dodging Goty’s summons, refusing to come in and account for himself.

In the mafia, that kind of disrespect has one solution. Goti gave the contract to Bobby. Bobby carried it out. Louie Dono was shot dead on October 4th, 1990 in a parking garage at the World Trade Center. After Dono’s death, Sammy Graano took over the construction business. The operation worked exactly as intended. One man disappears.

The money moves. Nobody asks questions. Remember this name, Anthony Gaspipe Casso. He’ll become very important in the next few minutes. By late 1990, Bobby Boreell had been elevated to acting cappo of Junior Goty’s crew. He was running his rackets from his Brooklyn social club on Sacket Street. He was one of the most powerful men in the Gambino family.

And in December 1990, John Goty himself was indicted on federal charges and taken off the street. Goti set up a five-man ruling panel to run the family while he fought his case. Junior Goti was on that panel and Bobby Boreelloo as acting Kappo held a position of real authority in a suddenly leaderless crime family.

On the surface, this was the peak. 47 years old, a maid capo in America’s most powerful mob family, running his own crew. Goti’s personal protector, elevated to one of the family’s operational leaders. But here’s what nobody wanted to say out loud. Goty’s conviction in 1985 of an earlier charge had been a disaster for family stability.

And back in December of 1985, something had happened that was still sending deadly reverberations through New York’s organized crime world 6 years later. On December 16th, 1985, Gambino family boss Paul Castellano and his under boss Tommy Bilotti were shot dead outside Spark Steakhouse at 210 East 46th Street in Midtown Manhattan.

The hit was orchestrated by John Goty. It was a brilliant, audacious power grab, but it was also unsanctioned. No vote, no commission approval. Goti killed the boss and took the throne because he could. A Gambino informant named Dominic Lafaro later identified Bobby Boreelloo as one of the men involved in the Castellano operation.

That detail mattered enormously because some of the other New York families, particularly the Lucasi family had been closely aligned with Castellano and the Lucesi underboss Anthony Gaspip Caso did not forget slights. He didn’t forget them and he didn’t let them go. Casso had a list and Bobby Boreella was on it.

You have to understand who Caso was. Anthony Salvatorei Caso, born May 21st, 1942 in South Brooklyn, 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 15 murders and plead guilty to raketeering, extortion, and murder while cooperating with the government.

Prosecutors estimated his total body count at closer to 100. Casso didn’t 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. Lies Epilito and Steven Carakappa were actived duty New York City Police Department detectives.

Epilito 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 $4,000 per month. Starting around 1986, Epilito and Caracappa began feeding Caso confidential NYPD intelligence. They pulled files. They identified informants. They provided addresses and vehicle registrations. They 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 Boreelloo had to go. The audio cassette was the trigger. Epilito and Carakappa had provided Casso with a recording in which Bobby Boreello 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 in dispute. Boreelloo had said things on that tape that Caso considered a death sentence. But here’s the chilling part. Before the shooters were dispatched, Epalito 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, he knocked on the door. Susan Boreelloo 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 Boreello lived there. And when she said her husband wasn’t home, he said he’d be back and drove away. He never came back because he had what he needed. The address was confirmed. The package was delivered to Caso. The contract was placed with Lucesi Captain Frank Bigfank Lino.

Lasterino was a serious operator, described in court documents as fierce, a man who got things done without noise or fuss. He did not miss. April 13th, 1991. Bobby had spent the afternoon at Aqueduct Racetrack. He came home in the evening. Susan was in the kitchen with their 2-year-old son, Bobby Jr. Patrick, their 11-year-old, was out at the movies.

Bobby stepped out of his car and walked toward the house. That’s when Lasterino stepped out of the shadows. Seven rounds, twice in the head, five times in the torso. Bobby Boreello went down beside his Lincoln Town car and didn’t get up. Susan heard yelling. She thought it was a neighbor arguing with Bobby about the driveway again, the same fight they’d had a dozen times before.

She stepped outside. She saw her husband face down. She scooped up Bobby Jr. She called 911. She collapsed when the police told her he was dead. Goty got the news in jail. He was furious. He sent word that his son Stevie Boreello 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 Genevese family leadership about Geritano, the man Bobby had shot at years earlier. Goty wanted every loose end sealed, but for 14 years, nobody could tell Susan Boreello who actually pulled the trigger or why. That changed in March 2005. DEA and FBI agents arrested Louis Epalito and Steven Carakappa 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 Lucesi crime family.

Bobby Boreell’s murder was named in the original indictment. Prosecutors described how Epileto and Caracappa accepted the contract to locate Boreello and verified his address. Eventually, for trial purposes, prosecutors paired the indictment down, and the Boreello murder was not among the counts taken to verdict.

But the evidence of the mob cop’s role in setting up the hit was documented in federal court filings and confirmed by cooperating witnesses. Susan Boreello found out what happened in 2005, 14 years after burying her husband. When she saw Aalito’s picture in the newspaper, she recognized him immediately.

The big detective who had knocked on her door, who had 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 Carakappa as the cop who had questioned him at the crime scene. The men who came to investigate the murder of Bobby Boreelloo were the men who had helped arrange it.

Epilito and Caracappa were convicted on all counts in 2006. A federal judge sentenced both men to life in prison plus 80 years and fined each more than $4 million US. Anthony Gaspipe Casso, the man who ordered the hit, had turned federal informant in 1994. He eventually plead guilty to 70 crimes, including rakateeering, extortion, and 15 murders.

A judge sentenced him to 455 years in prison. He died in custody on December 15th, 2020. Frank Lesterino, the man who pulled the trigger seven times in that Benenhurst driveway, eventually plead guilty to multiple murders and raketeering charges. Stevie Boreelloo, Bobby’s brother, remained active in the Gambino family in Brooklyn and Staten Island for years after his brother’s death.

John Goti was convicted on April 2nd, 1992. five murders, conspiracy to commit murder, racketeering, tax evasion, illegal gambling, extortion. He received a sentence of life in prison with no possibility of parole. He was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1998 and died at the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners on June 10th, 2002.

He never walked free