Frank DeCicco — The Underboss Who Got Bombed – Hw

 

April 13th, 1986. 1:45 p.m. Dyker Heights, Brooklyn. Outside the Veterans and Friends Social Club, 86th Street. The afternoon was ordinary until it wasn’t. A Sunday, a Brooklyn neighborhood, men finishing a meeting, heading back to their cars. Then, a shockwave, a fireball where a Buick used to be, windows gone, a gas line torn open, smoke rising black and thick over the rooftops.

Bystanders frozen on the sidewalk, not able to process what their eyes were telling them. A nearby officer pulled two men away from the wreckage. Their clothes were on fire. The sidewalk looked like a war zone. One of those two men was Frank DeCicco, 50 years old, underboss of the most powerful crime family in the United States.

A man who had spent three decades learning how to read people, how to survive shifts in power, how to make himself impossible to remove. He died before the ambulance arrived. Law enforcement knew almost immediately what this was. This was not random. This was not street-level beef. This was a bill being collected, the kind that comes due when you help murder a boss without permission, get rewarded for it, and then make the mistake of walking around in public like the debt had been forgiven.

This is the story of Frank DeCicco, and the story really starts not with the bomb, but with the man he helped put in the ground four months before it went off. Frank DeCicco was born on November 5th, 1935 in Bath Beach, Brooklyn. Not exactly a neighborhood that kept you far from organized crime. His father, Vincent “Boozy” DeCicco, was already a Gambino soldier.

His uncle was a capo in the same family. By the time Frank was an adult, the Gambino world wasn’t foreign to him. It was the water he’d been swimming in since childhood. Physically, DeCicco was hard to miss. Tall, thick through the neck and shoulders, silver hair he dyed black with streaks left showing, styled in a pompadour, a slightly flattened nose.

When he got angry, the veins in his neck would surface visibly. He didn’t look like a white-collar operator. He looked like exactly what he was. But here’s what made DeCicco different from your average muscle. He was sharp, not flashy sharp, quietly sharp. Sammy Gravano, who knew him well and would later become a government witness, described him as calculating and observant, the kind of man who watched a room before he opened his mouth.

Paul Castellano himself once told Gravano, “Frankie’s a gambler. He’s a street dog.” It wasn’t a knock. It was an assessment. DeCicco understood risk. He knew how to bet. Through the late 1960s and into the 1970s, DeCicco made his bones the old-fashioned way: hijackings, truck robberies, gambling operations. He ran craps games. He worked illegal clubs.

He moved up from associate to soldier to captain. And somewhere along the way, he developed something more valuable than muscle or money, access. Access to the top of the Gambino family and eventually access to both sides of a split that would define the family’s future. To understand what Frank DeCicco was walking into by the mid-1980s, you need to understand the fault line running through the Gambino family.

On one side, Paul Castellano, known as Big Paul, 69 years old by late 1985. He had taken over from Carlo Gambino in the mid-1970s and built the family into a genuinely sophisticated criminal enterprise. Construction contracts, labor unions, food supply chains, loan sharking on an industrial scale. Castellano dressed well.

He lived in a literal mansion on Staten Island. He wanted the Gambinos to operate like a corporation, not a street gang. He disapproved of drug trafficking, not because he was sentimental about it, but because narcotics cases carried federal sentences that made men desperate enough to cooperate. On the other side, John Gotti, 45, younger, louder, and dangerously charismatic.

Gotti had come up under Aniello Neil DellaCroce, the Gambino’s long-time underboss, and the face of the family’s street side. Where Castellano kept distance, Gotti pulled people in. He remembered names, threw parties, dressed like a movie star, and made soldiers feel like they mattered. He was everything the traditional street guys wanted in a boss, and everything Castellano didn’t think a boss should be.

When DellaCroce died of cancer in De- cember 1985, that buffer between the two factions collapsed overnight. Castellano, instead of reaching across the divide, appointed his own driver, Thomas Bilotti, as the new underboss. To the Gotti faction, that was the final insult. A chauffeur over Gotti? The decision made war inevitable, and Frank DeCicco was standing in the middle of all of it.

DeCicco had something rare in that environment, credibility on both sides of the split. He had risen under Castellano and was trusted by the bosses faction, but he had cultivated a real rapport with Gotti and the street crew as well. That made him the kind of operator every ambitious faction wants in their corner, somebody whose word carries weight on the other side.

Gravano has said that in the lead-up to the Castellano hit, senior members of the Gambino family actually believed that should be the one to take over, not Gotti. But, DeCicco was too smart to want that crown. He told Gravano plainly, “Gotti was too proud to ever take a subordinate role. Better to put him at the top, watch how it played out, and position yourself to benefit either way.

” As DeCicco put it, “We’ll give him a shot. Let him be the boss. If it don’t work within a year, me and you will kill him.” That’s not loyalty, that’s calculation. And it tells you exactly what kind of player DeCicco was. He wasn’t choosing sides based on who he loved. He was choosing based on who he thought could survive. And when he finally made his bet, he bet on Gotti.

December 16th, 1985, Sparks Steakhouse, Midtown Manhattan. The plan was precise. 11 men involved, four shooters, backup teams, getaway drivers. The shooters wore matching beige trench coats and Russian style fur hats. A detail that was deliberate, meant to create a brief window of confusion before anyone understood what was happening.

DeCicco helped lure Castellano to the meeting. That was his role. He knew Castellano trusted him. He used that trust to put the man in a location where he couldn’t survive. At 5:16 in the evening, Paul Castellano stepped out of his limousine in front of Sparks. Thomas Bilotti came around from the driver side.

Before either of them reached the entrance, the shooters moved. Both men were killed on the street within seconds of each other. John Gotti watched from a car across the street. When it was over, he drove past the bodies to confirm the job was done, then moved to consolidate control of the family. Frank DeCicco became underboss of the Gambino crime family the same night he helped arrange its bosses murder.

For a few months, it looked like the calculation had paid off. Here’s what DeCicco and Gotti underestimated. In the American Mafia’s structure, killing a boss was not something any one family could decide on their own. That required commission approval. The commission, the governing body of the five families, existed specifically to prevent the kind of freelance violence that destroyed families from within.

Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, boss of the Genovese family, understood this. He and Castellano had been close in business, in relationships, in mutual interest. And beyond the personal, Gigante controlled the commission at that point. What Gotti and DeCicco had done wasn’t just a murder, it was a constitutional violation.

They had told every other family in New York that the rules no longer applied if you had the ambition to ignore them. Gigante was not the kind of man who let that stand. He reached out to the Lucchese family, specifically to boss Victor Amuso and underboss Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, to plan a response. The target was Gotti, the method, a bomb.

Gigante specifically requested an explosive because he knew it would draw attention away from the Genovese family. Bombs were associated with Sicilian mob factions, not New York street crews. He also brought in an outside man to carry it out. Herbert “Blue Eyes” Pate, a former US Army munitions expert and Genovese associate.

Pate had no ties to the Gambino world, nobody would recognize him. Pate built the device from C4 plastic explosive and used the remote control mechanism from a toy car to detonate it. He planted it under the front of DeCicco’s Buick while it sat outside the Veterans and Friends Social Club. April 13th, 1986, the last meeting.

Both Gotti and DeCicco were supposed to be there that Sunday. The meeting at the club, run by Gambino capo James Jimmy Brown Fila, would have put both men in the same location at the same time. Perfect opportunity, and Gotti was expected. But, Gotti changed his plans at the last moment and never showed. When the meeting wrapped up, DeCicco was walking back toward his car with Frank Bellino, a 69-year-old Lucchese associate who had been present inside. Bellino needed business cards.

DeCicco had a stack of them in the car because, despite being the underboss of the most powerful crime family in America, he kept his car cluttered and disorganized, cards stuffed everywhere. So, the two men walked across the street together to the Buick parked outside the Baron Buick dealership.

DeCicco got into the passenger seat to dig for the cards. Pate, watching from a distance, detonated the device. The car became a fireball, windows shattered across the block. The blast tore through both men. A police officer on the scene pulled them from the wreckage and tried to beat out the flames on their clothing.

By the time they reached the hospital, Frank DeCicco was gone. Bellino survived, but with injuries he would carry for the rest of his life. Pate had likely mistaken Bellino for Gotti. The actual target had canceled his plans and walked away clean. The debt had been collected, partially.

The man who helped crown the king was dead. The king himself had escaped for now. Gotti was furious. According to DEA testimony, a confidential informant reported that he was threatening war, promising that when his own trial was resolved, he would find out who was responsible and answer it. He ordered every made man and associate in the Gambino family to attend DeCicco’s wake.

Over 100 people showed up to Scarpaci Funeral Home in Bensonhurst. Two days of mourning under heavy FBI surveillance. Agents with binoculars across the street, cameras rolling from a van down the block. The Diocese of Brooklyn denied DeCicco a funeral mass, citing the public circumstances of his death. He was buried at Moravian Cemetery on Staten Island, the same cemetery where Paul Castellano had been laid to rest just 4 months before.

The man he’d betrayed and the man who’d helped betray him eventually sharing the same ground. To replace DeCicco, Gotti elevated capo Joseph Armone as acting underboss. The family moved on, the seat filled. The paperwork, so to speak, was filed. But the damage was done. DeCicco had been the one voice inside the Gambino hierarchy who might have tempered Gotti’s instincts.

Without him, Gotti leaned harder into the decisions that would eventually bring him down. He elevated Sammy Gravano from capo to consigliere to underboss. The same Sammy Gravano who would flip in 1991 and hand prosecutors the testimony they needed to bury him. In 1992, Gotti was convicted on multiple counts of murder, racketeering, and obstruction.

He died in federal prison in 2002. The murder that made him boss was also part of the case that ended him. DeCicco was not careless. He was not impulsive. By every account, he was one of the more intelligent operators inside a world that ate men who weren’t careful. And he still didn’t make it to summer.

He had read the room correctly when he decided Castellano’s time was up. He had read Gotti correctly when he decided to put the more charismatic man at the top, rather than fight for it himself. He had played the inside game at the highest level, and none of it was enough. Because in the end, he had helped create a situation that was bigger than any individual loyalty.

He had helped tell every other family in New York that the old rules were optional. And the old rules had people who enforced them. The Mafia is not about friendship. It is about utility. DeCicco was useful to Gotti because he had credibility, experience, and reach. But the moment he became proof of an insult that other families refused to accept, he became a target.

His usefulness to Gotti couldn’t protect him from what he represented to everyone else. He helped build the throne. He [clears throat] stood beside the king. He died on a Brooklyn sidewalk four months later. In that world, the smartest man in the room is still just a man in the room. If you want more stories like this, the ones built from real records, real testimony, and the kind of detail that never makes the headlines, subscribe, because the history of organized crime is not short on men who thought they had it figured

out right up until they didn’t.

QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.

Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.

Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.

The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.

Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.

Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.

Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.

that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music

industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.

The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.

Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.

Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.

The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.

Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.

Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.

Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.

Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.

The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.

Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.

The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.

Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.

Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.

The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.

Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.

The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.

Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.

They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.

She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.

She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.

She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.

She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it

well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.

Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.

What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.

The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.

They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.

Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.

Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and

Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.