On the afternoon of January 6, 1992, a white Lincoln pulled up to a block in Mill Basin, Brooklyn. The man in the backseat was fifty years old, broad-shouldered, well-dressed, and he believed he was going to lunch. He was John “Johnny Boy” D’Amato, the acting boss of the DeCavalcante crime family of New Jersey, one of the most powerful men in the American Mafia. The man in the passenger seat turned around and fired four shots.

D’Amato said, “Oh, no. ” Two more shots followed. Within seconds, the acting boss was dead, killed not by rivals or law enforcement but by his own crew, the men he trusted most. His body was driven upstate and buried on a farm in Newburgh, New York, where it has never been found.

D’Amato was no low-level soldier. He was the man at the top of the DeCavalcante organization, the family that operated quietly across the Hudson River from the five famous New York crime families. Smaller and less celebrated than the Gambinos or Genovese, the DeCavalcantes were nonetheless ruthless and deeply entrenched in New Jersey’s labor and construction rackets. The family took its name from Simone “Sam the Plumber” DeCavalcante, who ran the organization from his heating and air conditioning business in Kenilworth through the 1960s and ’70s.

The FBI bugged his office and captured hundreds of hours of recorded conversations. Sam the Plumber sat on the Mafia Commission alongside the heads of the five families. When he retired to Florida in the early 1980s, he handed control to Giovanni “John the Eagle” Riggi. Riggi 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 gave him command over who worked on construction sites, who got hired, who got fired, and who paid tribute just to operate. Under his reign through the 1980s, the DeCavalcantes made enormous sums from loan-sharking, illegal gambling, extortion, and labor racketeering. In that world, John D’Amato climbed quickly. Born in New York City in 1941, he accumulated standard mob credentials: a gambling charge in 1963, a burglary conviction in 1971, a forgery conviction in 1984.

But D’Amato had more than a rap sheet. He had ambition, social skills, and an ability to build relationships with powerful people. By the mid-1980s, Riggi had promoted him to captain, and D’Amato ran his own crew, working labor and construction racketeering alongside some of the most powerful figures in the family. What truly set him apart, however, was his relationship with John Gotti, the boss of the Gambino family and the most famous mob leader of his generation.

FBI surveillance photos captured Gotti and D’Amato greeting each other with the traditional kiss on the cheek. D’Amato showed up at the Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy every Tuesday. In April 1990, he was one of only three DeCavalcante members invited to the wedding of John Gotti Jr. at the Helmsley Palace Hotel.

Johnny Boy had access that most men in his world could only dream about. In 1989, the federal government came hard at John Riggi on labor racketeering and extortion charges. Indicted and arrested, Riggi needed someone to run day-to-day operations while he fought his case. The choice fell to Gaetano “Corky” Vastola, a heavyweight captain connected to music industry extortion.

Vastola stepped up as acting boss but did not last. He was hit with extortion charges and sentenced to eight years in federal prison. Then Riggi himself was convicted in 1990 and sentenced to fifteen years. With both the boss and his replacement in prison, Riggi made his decision from his cell and promoted John D’Amato to acting boss.

D’Amato did not quietly accept the crown and run a tight ship. He moved fast, and some of his moves alarmed the men watching closely. According to later testimony, one of the first things he did was work with Gotti and Gambino underboss Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano on a plot to permanently remove Corky Vastola. The murder plot failed only because the Genovese family, which had its own relationships with Vastola, refused to approve the hit.

Without that approval, the contract was dead. But the attempt itself revealed D’Amato’s mindset. He was not content to manage. He wanted to consolidate, to pull the DeCavalcantes closer to the Gambinos, to extend his influence beyond New Jersey.

Some in the family began to whisper that he was more Gambino than DeCavalcante, that Gotti had his hands on their acting boss, that D’Amato could not be trusted to put the family’s interests first. The charges accumulating against him inside the family were serious: usurpation, 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 D’Amato’s actual death sentence.

Something else entirely was coming. In 1991, D’Amato was in a relationship with a woman named Kelly, his girlfriend, not his wife. Kelly knew things about Johnny Boy that no one else in his world knew. She knew he had been taking her to sex clubs in Manhattan, swinger clubs, places where couples crossed lines the outside world did not discuss.

And at these clubs, according to what Kelly later revealed, D’Amato was not just swapping partners in the conventional sense. He was engaged in sexual activity with men. To understand what this meant, you have to understand the culture. The American Mafia of 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 idea of a gay or bisexual man sitting at the table of La Cosa Nostra, making life-and-death decisions, handling millions of dollars, commanding the loyalty of hardened killers, was unthinkable. 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 Rotondo. Rotondo, a captain in the DeCavalcante family, was the son of a DeCavalcante soldier.

He had been in this world his whole life. He knew exactly what the information meant, and he did not hesitate. He took what Kelly told him straight to Underboss Giacomo “Jake” Amari and Consigliere Stefano “Steve” Vitabile, the family’s counselor, the man whose job it was to advise on exactly these kinds of situations. Vitabile, known as “Steve the Truck Driver,” was methodical, institutional, and he received Kelly’s revelation with the cold, transactional response men like him were built for.

The family sat with the information and added it to the growing pile of grievances against D’Amato: the Gotti connection, the allegations of stealing, the usurpation, and now this. The picture they built was of a man who was not only disloyal but fundamentally incompatible with the identity of the organization itself. In November 1991, Vitabile authorized the murder of John D’Amato. The Consigliere authorized the murder of the acting boss.

They were killing their own leader, and they did it without informing Riggi in prison and without asking the Mafia Commission in New York for permission. Both were direct violations of the laws of La Cosa Nostra. They skipped the rules entirely. The contract was handed to three men: Anthony Capo, Vincent “Vinnie Ocean” Palermo, and James “Jimmy” Gallo.

Capo was thirty-two years old, a man who had grown up in Staten Island and come into the DeCavalcante orbit through the Elizabeth faction. He ran loan-sharking and labor extortion and had already participated in a murder. On September 11, 1989, he had driven Palermo and Gallo to the Staten Island home of Fred Weiss, a real estate developer John Gotti feared might cooperate with federal investigators. Palermo and Gallo shot Weiss in the face as he stepped out to his car.

Capo was the wheelman. The DeCavalcantes had proven their willingness to kill for Gotti. Now they would prove their willingness to kill because of what Gotti’s friendship had cost them. Capo was assigned as the shooter.

The plan was simple, and simple plans in this world are the ones that work. D’Amato had been in Florida, effectively laying low while the atmosphere around him grew increasingly dangerous. He returned to New York in early January. On the afternoon of January 6, 1992, Capo and a DeCavalcante associate named Victor DiChiara pulled up in DiChiara’s white Lincoln near D’Amato’s girlfriend’s apartment.

D’Amato came out and got in the back seat. He thought they were going to lunch. The car pulled away. Within seconds, Capo turned from the passenger seat and shot him twice.

D’Amato groaned. “Oh, no. ” Those were his last words, according to Capo’s own testimony delivered to a federal courtroom in Manhattan in 2003. Capo shot him twice more.

D’Amato was dead at fifty. They drove the body to the home of DeCavalcante captain Rudy “Tutsi” Ferrone, where Vincent Palermo was waiting. They searched D’Amato’s pockets and found $8,000 in cash. And they found something that sent a chill through the room: the business card of an FBI agent.

The 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 D’Amato 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.

D’Amato’s body was wrapped in a plastic tarp, loaded into a black Cadillac owned by Ferrone, and driven north out of the city. Ferrone and Palermo took it upstate to a farm in Newburgh, New York, a property owned by a DeCavalcante soldier named Philip “the Undertaker” Lamella. The body was disposed of there. To this day, the remains of John “Johnny Boy” D’Amato have never been found.

When word reached Giovanni Riggi in federal prison that his acting boss was dead, he made a decision and moved forward. He appointed Giacomo Jake Amari as the new acting boss, and the organization continued. In the weeks after the murder, the family made one more decision. D’Amato’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 Capo to kill Frank D’Amato as soon as he got out. The murder was planned and sanctioned, but it never happened. For reasons never fully explained in court, the hit on Frank D’Amato was never carried out.

For eleven years, the story of how Johnny Boy D’Amato 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, until it does not. When the story finally broke, it stunned a federal courtroom in New York, made front-page headlines, and forced everyone watching The Sopranos, a show that had borrowed from this very murder, to ask a different kind of question about what they had been watching all along.