January 6th, 1992. A quiet afternoon in Mill Basin, Brooklyn. A white Lincoln pulls up to a block near a girlfriend’s apartment. The man in the back seat is 50 years old, broad-shouldered, well-dressed. He thinks he is going to lunch. He is the acting boss of the entire Davalcante crime family of New Jersey.

One of the most powerful men in the American mob. The man in the passenger seat turns around. Four shots. The acting boss says, “Oh no, two more shots.” And just like that, John Johnny Boy Damato is gone. Not arrested, not indicted, killed by his own crew by the men he trusted most.

And his body was driven upstate and buried on a farm in Newberg, New York, where it has never to this day been found. You have to understand who this man was. Johnny Boy Damato wasn’t some low-level street soldier or a mid-level earner who got himself into trouble. This was the acting boss of a crime family.

The man who sat at the top of the entire Decavalcante organization. The man who drank espresso with John Goty at the Ravenite Social Club every single Tuesday. The man whose name made men in New Jersey go quiet. And the mob killed him not for betrayal, not for stealing, not for cooperating. They killed him because his girlfriend talked.

This is the story of how the most powerful man in New Jerseyy’s most famous crime family was destroyed by a secret he kept for years. A secret that his own men decided was worth more than his life. It is the story of the real murder that the hit HBO show The Sopranos borrowed from, cleaned up, and turned into one of television’s most celebrated story lines.

But the real version, the real version is darker, messier, and far more revealing about what the mob truly is beneath all the glamour. Because here is what you need to know going in. When the news finally broke about how Johnny Boy Damato died, it stunned a federal courtroom in New York City.

It made front page headlines and it forced everyone watching The Sopranos to ask themselves a different kind of question about what they had been watching all along. Let us go back to the beginning. The D Cavalcante crime family has always been the odd one out. Every mob fan knows the five families of New York.

The Gambinos, the Geneovves, the Bananos, the Lucases, and the Columbos. They are the big names, the famous names. But sitting right across the Hudson River in Elizabeth, New Jersey, there was a sixth family. smaller, quieter, less famous, but very, very real and in some ways more ruthless than anyone across the water.

The family took its name from Simone Sam the plumber de Cavalcante, who ran the organization from his heating and air conditioning business in Kennallorth, New Jersey through the 1960s and into the 70s. The FBI bugged his office in the mid 1960s and captured hundreds of hours of recorded conversations. Sam the plumber ran gambling operations that turned over $20 million a year.

He sat on the mafia commission alongside the five families. He was respected. He was powerful. And when he retired to Florida in the early 1980s, he left the family in the hands of a man named Giovani John the Eagle Riggy. Riggy was smart, ruthless, and deeply connected to the labor union world.

He controlled locals of the International Association of Laborers and Hod carriers in New Jersey, which meant he controlled who worked on construction sites, who got hired, who got fired, and who paid tribute just to operate. The money flowed. The power was absolute. Under Riggy’s reign through the 1980s, the dicavalcounts made enormous sums from lone sharking, illegal gambling, extortion, and labor raketeering across New Jersey construction sites.

This was their world. This was their kingdom. And in that world, one man was climbing faster than almost anyone else. John Deato was born on May 12th, 1941 in New York City. He grew up in the orbit of the streets and found the mob the way most men of that era and background did gradually then completely.

His first documented arrest came in 1963, a gambling charge. He was convicted of burglary in 1971 and forgery in 1984. Standard mob credentials for that era. Nothing extraordinary on paper. But Damato had something beyond a wrap sheet. He had ambition. He had social skills and he had the ability to build relationships with powerful people.

By the mid1 1980s, Riy had promoted Damato to Capar regime captain. He had his own crew, his own operations. He was working labor and construction, raketeering alongside some of the most powerful figures in the family, men like Jakamo, Jay Kamari, and Giralamo, Jimmy Palmo. He was plugged into the illegal gambling and lone sharking operations that ran across Elizabeth and the surrounding counties.

He was a legitimate earner, a real producer. But what truly set Damato apart was his relationship with the Gambino family across the river, specifically with its boss. John Goti, the Dapper Don, the most famous mob boss of his generation. Goty liked Damato. Liked him enough to have him in his inner circle.

FBI surveillance photos from this period captured something remarkable. John Goti and John Damato greeting each other with the traditional kiss on the cheek. The Gambino boss and the Davalcante captain close enough to be photographed together outside the Ravenite social club. Goty’s headquarters on Malbury Street in Little Italy, Manhattan, where Damato showed up every single Tuesday.

That is not a casual friendship. That is a working relationship. And on April 21st, 1990, Damato was one of only three Davalcante family members invited to the wedding of John Junior Goty at the Helmsley Palace Hotel in Manhattan. Think about what that means. A wedding of the Gambino boss’s son, the inner circle of inner circles.

Johnny Boy Damato had the access that most men in his world could only dream about. Remember this detail because it will become important very soon. 1989 was the year everything started shifting. Federal prosecutors came hard at Giovani Riggy on labor raketeering and extortion charges. Riggy was indicted in late 1989. Arrested and suddenly the Davalcante family needed someone to run day-to-day operations while the boss fought his case.

The choice fell to Guyotano Corki Vasola. Vasola was a heavyweight captain in the family, a man connected to the music industry through extortion schemes that reached all the way into record label operations. He stepped up as acting boss. But Vasola didn’t last long either. Federal prosecutors hit him too on extortion charges.

And in 1990, he was sentenced to 8 years in federal prison. In 1990, Riggy was convicted of his racketeering charges and sentenced to 15 years. The boss is in prison. His replacement is in prison. The family needed a new hand on the wheel. From his federal prison cell, Giovani Riggy reached out and made his decision.

He promoted John Damato to acting boss of the Davalcante crime family. Here is where it gets interesting. Because Damato didn’t just quietly accept the crown and run a tight ship. He moved fast. And some of his moves were deeply alarming to people inside the family who were watching closely.

One of the first things Damato reportedly did was work with his friend John Goti and Goti’s powerful underboss Salvatorei Sammy the Bull Graano on a scheme to permanently remove Corki Visla. A murder plot. Think about that. The man who was still the acting under boss, the man Damato was supposed to be working alongside was targeted for death by Damato himself in cooperation with the Gambino boss.

The plot failed, but not because Damato pulled back. It failed because the Genevese crime family, which had its own relationships with Vasola, refused to approve the hit. Without that approval from the most powerful family in New York, the contract was dead. But the attempt itself told you something critical about Damato’s mindset.

He was not content to manage. He wanted to consolidate. He wanted the Davalcante family to become closer to the Gambinos. He wanted influence that went beyond New Jersey. And some people in the family started to whisper that he was more Gambino than Davalcante. That Goti had his hands on their acting boss, that Damato could not be trusted to put the family’s interests first.

The charges accumulating against Damato inside the family were building usation going around proper channels stealing from the family’s earnings delivering loyalty to an outside boss instead of their own imprisoned leader. These were the kinds of charges that in the American mob got men killed.

But none of that would prove to be Damato’s actual death sentence. Something else entirely was coming. Something no one in the family had anticipated. something that once it was spoken aloud in a room full of mobsters could never be taken back. In 1991, Damato was in a relationship with a woman named Kelly.

This is documented in court records. Kelly was his girlfriend, not his wife. Terresa Damato was still married to him. Kelly was the woman on the side, the way powerful men in that world always had women on the side. But Kelly knew things about Johnny Boy that no one else in his world knew. She knew that he had been taking her to sex clubs in Manhattan, swinger clubs, places where couples went and crossed lines that the outside world did not discuss.

And at these clubs, according to what Kelly later revealed, Damato was not just swapping partners in the conventional sense. He was engaged in sexual activity with men. Now you have to understand the culture to understand what this information meant. The American mafia in the 1980s and ’90s operated under a rigid almost medieval code of masculine identity.

Homosexuality was not just frowned upon. It was considered grounds for expulsion and in certain circumstances execution. The very concept of a gay or bisexual man sitting at the table of Lacosa Nostra making life and death decisions handling millions of dollars commanding the loyalty of hardened killers was to these men unthinkable unacceptable a contamination.

Kelly was not trying to get Johnny Boy killed. She was not a federal informant. She was a woman who had a fight with her boyfriend and in a moment of anger she said something to the wrong person. She told Anthony Rotando, “Rotando, a captain in the Davalcante family, was not just any made man.

He was the son of a Davalcante soldier. He had been in this world his whole life. He knew exactly what this information meant.” And he did not hesitate. He took what Kelly told him straight to the top. Rotando brought the information to under boss Jako Jake Amari and to Concigier Stefano Steve Vitabille, the family’s counselor, the man whose job it was to advise on exactly these kinds of situations.

Vitabil’s nickname was Steve the truck driver. He was not flamboyant. He was methodical, institutional, and he received Kelly’s revelation with the cold transactional response that men like him were built for. The family sat with this, and they added it to the growing pile of grievances against Amato, the GOTY connection, the allegations of stealing, the usurpation, and now this.

The picture they were building was of a man who was not only disloyal but fundamentally incompatible with the identity of the organization itself. In November of 1991, Stfano Vitabil authorized the murder of John Damato. Stop and think about what that sentence means. The coniglier of the Davalcante family authorized the murder of the acting boss of the Davalcante family.

the man who was technically running the organization on behalf of the imprisoned Giovani Riggy. They were killing their own leader and they did it without informing Riggy without asking the Mafia Commission in New York for permission. Both of those things were direct violations of the laws of Lacosa Nostra.

Killing a family boss required commission approval. They skipped it entirely. The contract was handed to three men, Anthony Kappo, Vincent Vinnie Ocean Polarmo, and James Jimmy Gallow. Anthony Kappo was 32 years old in January of 1992. He had grown up in South Beach, Staten Island, and had come into the Davalcante orbit through the Elizabeth faction in the early 1980s.

He ran lone sharking and labor extortion. He had already participated in a murder. On September 11th, 1989, he had driven Vincent Palmo and James Gallow to the Staten Island home of Fred Weiss, a real estate developer who John Goty feared might cooperate with federal investigators.

Polarmo and Gallow shot Weiss in the face as he stepped out to his car. Capo was the wheelman. The Dicavalcantes had proven their willingness to kill forotti. Now they would prove their willingness to kill because of what Goti’s friendship had cost them. Kapo was assigned as the shooter. The plan was simple and simple plans in this world are the ones that work.

Damato had been in Florida, effectively laying low while the atmosphere around him grew increasingly dangerous. He returned to New York in early January. He may have sensed something was wrong. Experienced mobsters develop instincts for these things, but instincts can only take you so far when the men you trust are the ones who have already decided.

On the afternoon of January 6th, 1992, Anthony Kappo and a Dicavalcante associate named Victor Diara pulled up in Diara’s White Lincoln to a block near Damato’s girlfriend’s apartment in Milb Basin, Brooklyn. Damato came out. He got in the back seat. He thought they were going to lunch.

The car pulled away from the curb. Within seconds, Capo turned from the passenger seat and shot Damato twice. Damato groaned, “Oh no.” Those were his last words. According to Capo’s own testimony, delivered to a federal courtroom in Manhattan in 2003. Kappo shot him twice more. Damato was dead. He was 50 years old.

They drove the body to the millbas home of Davalcante Capo Rudy Tootszie Ferrron where Vincent Palmo was waiting. They searched Amato’s pockets. They found $8,000 in cash and they found something that sent a chill through the room. The business card of an FBI agent. Now, that card could have meant anything.

Many mobsters carried FBI cards as a kind of dark souvenir or because agents had approached them. It was not necessarily evidence that Damato was cooperating. But in that room, at that moment, with men who had just killed their boss and were now going through his pockets, that card confirmed every suspicion they had ever had about him.

Damato’s body was wrapped in a plastic tarp loaded into a black Cadillac owned by Ferrron and driven north out of the city. Ferron and Palemo took it upstate to a farm in Newberg, New York, a property owned by a Davalcante soldier named Philillip the Undertaker Lamela. The body was disposed of there.

To this day, in the year 2026, the remains of John Johnny Boy Damato have never been found. When word reached Giovani Riggy in federal prison that his acting boss was dead, he made a decision and moved forward. He appointed Jakomao Jake Amari as the new acting boss. The organization continued. Life in the mob goes on.

In the weeks after Damato’s murder, the family made one more decision. Damato’s brother, Frank, had been in prison and was about to be released. The men who had killed Johnny Boy were afraid Frank would figure out what happened and come looking for revenge. The family administration voted to authorize Anthony Capo to kill Frank Damato as soon as he got out.

That murder was planned. It was sanctioned, but it never happened. For reasons that were never fully explained in court, the hit on Frank Damato was never carried out. For 11 years, the story of how Johnny Boy Damato died stayed inside the family. The official story on the street was that he had simply disappeared.

He was missing. Nobody knew anything. That is how it always works.