On December 2, 1985, a seventy-one-year-old man died of lung cancer in Mary Immaculate Hospital in Queens, New York. The nurses knew him as Timothy O’Neil, a quiet, polite patient who caused no trouble and received visitors. The name on his admission records was false. The man was Aniello Dellacroce, underboss of the Gambino crime family, and the alias was the final use of a disguise he had worn for decades.

Timothy O’Neil was a variation of Father O’Neil, the name Dellacroce had used when he walked the streets of Manhattan dressed as a Roman Catholic priest, a disguise that had allowed him to move unseen through the city and, on at least one documented occasion, to commit murder while wearing the vestments of the church. The disguise outlasted the man. Fourteen days after his death, Paul Castellano, the boss of the Gambino family, who had refused to visit Dellacroce while he was dying and had not attended his wake, was shot six times outside Sparks Steak House on East 46th Street in Manhattan. John Gotti watched from across the street.

Dellacroce was born on March 15, 1914, in the Little Italy neighborhood of Manhattan, the son of immigrants from the Campania region of southern Italy. His family lived directly across the street from the address that would eventually become the Ravenite Social Club, a building he could see from his window as a child and would one day own. As a teenager he apprenticed as a butcher, but work was scarce and crime was not. By sixteen he had been arrested for robbing a store and sentenced to two and a half years at Elmira Correctional Facility.

He returned to Little Italy and made the calculations that shaped the rest of his life. Those who encountered him never forgot him. NYPD Detective Ralph Salerno, who spent decades tracking organized crime in New York, said that Dellacroce possessed the frigid glare of a killer, and that only two mobsters in his entire career had ever truly frightened him. Dellacroce was one of them.

The other was Carmine Galante. A federal agent who observed Dellacroce at close range described him as liking to peer into a victim’s face at the moment of death, like a dark angel watching the light go out. A reporter wrote that his eyes had no color, as if his soul was transparent. Joseph Coffee, a veteran mob investigator, called him one of the scariest individuals he had ever met in his life.

In the late 1930s, Dellacroce entered the Mangano crime family, which would later become the Gambino family, under the mentorship of underboss Albert Anastasia. Anastasia was the operational head of Murder Incorporated, the enforcement arm of the National Crime Syndicate, responsible for an estimated four hundred to one thousand murders in the 1930s and 1940s. He was known as the Lord High Executioner. Dellacroce thrived under Anastasia, becoming a capo with his own crew.

He bought the building on Mulberry Street and established the Ravenite Social Club. The priest disguise appears to have developed during this period. One account holds that he committed a murder dressed as a priest, and the disguise worked so well that he kept using it. Another says it was primarily a counter-surveillance tool, allowing a known mob enforcer to move freely through areas where he would otherwise be photographed or tailed.

Both accounts are consistent with how the disguise worked: Father O’Neil could walk into a social club where Timothy O’Neil would have been instantly recognized, could conduct meetings without drawing police attention, and could approach targets who did not understand what was happening until it was too late. By the 1960s and 1970s, his face was too well known for the disguise to function effectively, and it became part of his legend rather than a working tool. On October 25, 1957, Albert Anastasia was shot ten times while sitting in the barber’s chair at the Park Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan. His murder had been arranged by Carlo Gambino with the cooperation of Vito Genovese.

Gambino, who had been Anastasia’s underboss, became boss of the family. Dellacroce had been Anastasia’s man, and the natural response to his patron’s murder would have been resistance or revenge. He chose neither. He sided with Carlo Gambino and committed his crew to the new boss.

He demonstrated an understanding of institutional power that would define his career: the organization was more important than any individual within it. Gambino noticed. In 1965, he appointed Dellacroce as his underboss, the number two position in the most powerful crime family in America. On October 15, 1976, Carlo Gambino died of a heart attack.

He had built the Gambino family into the dominant force in the American mob. Before his death, he made a decision that shook the family to its foundations. He did not name Dellacroce as his successor. Everyone had assumed he would.

Dellacroce was the underboss, the operational backbone of the family for over a decade, with the loyalty of the street-level soldiers who ran the extortion, hijacking, bookmaking, and loan sharking. Gambino instead named Paul Castellano, his brother-in-law, a man from the white-collar side of the family who was more comfortable with construction contracts and union negotiations than with gunplay, and who believed the future lay in legitimate business and distance from violent street rackets. Gambino may have calculated that Castellano’s focus would make the family more sustainable and less vulnerable to law enforcement. He may also have calculated that Dellacroce, serving a prison sentence for tax evasion at the time, was not positioned to take the seat without triggering a destabilizing power struggle.

He was also creating a fault line that would split the organization. The Gambino family now had two distinct factions. Castellano’s faction was the white-collar contingent, the men who ran the construction relationships, union negotiations, and legitimate front operations. Dellacroce’s faction was the street contingent, the hijackers, loan sharks, and traditional muscle.

Both understood immediately that the family was functionally divided. The question was whether it would stay together or tear itself apart. The answer was Dellacroce. He accepted Castellano’s succession without a word, attended the confirmation meeting on November 24, 1976, confirmed Castellano as boss, and went back to work.

The arrangement that emerged was specific: Castellano would be boss, Dellacroce would remain underboss, Castellano would run his white-collar operations and stay away from the street rackets, and Dellacroce would continue to run those rackets with operational independence. The family would be unified by nominal leadership but split by function. It held for nine years because Dellacroce held it. Among the men in Dellacroce’s faction, the one who generated the most friction with Castellano was a Queens-based capo named John Gotti.

Gotti had operated out of the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park since the late 1960s. Dellacroce had recognized something worth investing in: Gotti was charismatic, fearless, willing to do things more cautious men walked away from, and he generated enormous loyalty in his crew. He also dealt drugs openly, despite Castellano’s rule that drug dealing by Gambino members was punishable by death. When Castellano obtained FBI surveillance tapes documenting the drug dealing by Angelo Ruggiero, Gotti’s close associate, he demanded the tapes be handed over, wanting evidence to build a case for killing Gotti and the others involved.

Dellacroce stood between them. He delayed Castellano’s ability to act on the evidence, argued for patience, and used his standing with both factions to buy time that kept Gotti and his associates alive. Gotti understood exactly what Dellacroce was doing for him. Without Dellacroce’s protection, Castellano would have had him killed.

By early 1985, Dellacroce was dying. The lung cancer had been diagnosed. He was losing weight. He was facing two massive federal prosecutions: the Commission trial, which had indicted him alongside the bosses of all five New York families, and a separate racketeering case targeting his Manhattan and Long Island crews.

He was seventy-one years old and fighting on every front. He was also the only thing holding the Gambino family together. The tape situation had not been resolved. Castellano was still furious about the drug dealing.

Gotti was still operating. The truce between the two factions was maintained entirely by Dellacroce’s personal authority. As he weakened, the pressure on both sides built. Castellano was moving toward a decision.

Gotti was moving toward his own decision simultaneously. The two trajectories were going to intersect. Dellacroce died on December 2, 1985, under the name Timothy O’Neil. Castellano did not visit him while he was dying.

Castellano did not attend his wake. To the men of the Dellacroce faction, this was not simply a social slight. It was a declaration. Castellano was communicating that the men Dellacroce had protected were now unprotected, that the truce was over, that the boss was free to do what he had wanted to do for years.

Gotti heard what Castellano’s absence communicated. He had been planning for this moment for months. He had the support of Dellacroce’s soldiers and the operational capability. He had been waiting for Dellacroce to die, not because he wanted him to die, but because while Dellacroce lived, moving against Castellano would have meant moving against everything Dellacroce represented: the institution, the order, the structure.

On December 16, fourteen days after Dellacroce’s death, four gunmen in white trench coats and black fur hats waited outside Sparks Steak House. Paul Castellano stepped out of his car. The gunmen opened fire. Six shots.

Castellano fell on the sidewalk, and his new underboss, Thomas Bilotti, fell beside him. John Gotti watched from a car parked across the street. After Dellacroce’s death, Gotti moved into the Ravenite Social Club and put portraits of himself and Dellacroce on the back wall of the rear room. He ordered every capo in the family to appear there every Wednesday night to show respect.

The portraits were still on the wall when the FBI came through the front door on December 11, 1990, and Gotti finished his espresso before being arrested. Dellacroce’s son Armand had followed his father into the criminal world and was indicted on racketeering charges in 1985. He cooperated with the government after his father’s death and contributed to multiple prosecutions. The Commission trial proceeded without Dellacroce, and the other defendants were convicted, fundamentally altering the legal landscape of mob prosecution for the next thirty years.

The Ravenite Social Club was eventually seized by the federal government after Gotti’s conviction and auctioned off, becoming a shoe store and then a clothing store, with the cracked tile floor from Dellacroce’s era still visible under the merchandise. Dellacroce is buried at Saint John Cemetery in Queens, in the same ground that holds Carlo Gambino, Lucky Luciano, and Salvatore Maranzano. His headstone reads his real name, not Timothy O’Neil, not Father O’Neil.

Aniello Dellacroce, little lamb of the cross.