Anthony Capo: DeCavalcante Hits, Cooperation, and Death in WITSEC

Anthony Capo was a soldier in the New Jersey–based DeCavalcante crime family who became the first fully initiated member in the family’s history to cooperate with federal authorities, and his testimony about murders he had helped carry out — including the 1992 killing of acting boss John “Johnny Boy” D’Amato — helped drive an investigation that produced 71 convictions and resolved 11 murders. A self-admitted hitman, Capo flipped after his 1999 arrest, testified against the family’s senior leadership in 2003, and died of a heart attack in witness protection in January 2012 at age 52.¹

Who Capo Was Inside the Family

Capo grew up on Staten Island’s South Beach and rose inside the DeCavalcante organization, the largest Mafia family based in New Jersey and the group widely identified as the real-life inspiration for HBO’s The Sopranos. He started as an associate under capo Vincent Rotondo and later operated under Vincent’s son, Anthony Rotondo. His rackets ran across gambling, extortion, loansharking, narcotics, fraud, and armed robbery.²

He was known for extreme violence. He stabbed a rival in the eye with a fork at a Staten Island club, and he picked up a 1985 conviction for intimidating a debtor who owed money to Vincent Rotondo.² FBI agent Séamus McElearney, who later handled Capo as an informant, said Capo described such incidents without affect during debriefings: “He’s talking about stabbing someone in the eye with a fork. Like all the fights that he was in, so matter of fact. His emotions just didn’t kick in at all.”³

The Killing of John D’Amato

The murder most associated with Capo is the 1992 killing of John “Johnny Boy” D’Amato, the acting boss of the DeCavalcante family. The motive, Capo later testified, was that D’Amato was secretly gay, which the family’s leadership considered intolerable.

Capo said he learned about D’Amato’s activities from one of D’Amato’s girlfriends, who told him D’Amato had been frequenting sex clubs and engaging in same-sex relationships.⁴ He reported it up. “It shocked me,” he testified. “He couldn’t be acting that way. He was a leader of men.”⁵ The family’s leaders met and agreed to kill him.⁶

Killing a boss normally required approval from the commission of New York families, but seeking approval would have meant disclosing the reason. “We knew we’d have to sneak him,” Capo testified, “kill him without permission.”⁵

On an afternoon in early 1992, Capo and associate Victor DiChiara picked up D’Amato from his girlfriend’s home in Brooklyn. With D’Amato in the back seat, Capo turned from the front passenger seat and shot him twice. D’Amato moaned “Oh, no” and kept moving, so Capo fired two more shots. The body was taken to a safehouse, wrapped in plastic, and disposed of. D’Amato’s remains have never been recovered.⁶

A similar storyline later appeared on The Sopranos, in which a mobster is killed after being seen at a gay bar. The DeCavalcantes were widely known as a primary inspiration for the show.¹

The Killing of Fred Weiss

On September 11, 1989, Fred Weiss, a Staten Island real-estate developer and former city editor of the Staten Island Advance, was shot seven times outside his girlfriend’s condominium in the New Springville neighborhood of Staten Island.⁷ Capo testified that the DeCavalcantes carried out the killing at the request of Gambino boss John Gotti, who feared Weiss would cooperate against a mob-run illegal medical waste dumping operation.¹

Capo drove the getaway car while DeCavalcante member Vincent Palermo shot Weiss.² About three months later, Capo said, he ran into Gotti at a Manhattan club, and Gotti winked at him — a gesture Capo took as an acknowledgment of a job done.¹ More than half a dozen gangsters were eventually imprisoned in connection with the Weiss murder.⁷

Why He Cooperated, and What It Produced

Capo was arrested on December 2, 1999, on racketeering and murder charges.² Facing a potential life sentence, he agreed to cooperate and became the first fully initiated member in the DeCavalcante family’s history to flip. His handler was FBI agent Séamus McElearney of the New York Division’s Organized Crime Squad C-10, who built the relationship over long debriefings rather than through pressure.³

According to the FBI, the investigation built out from Capo’s cooperation produced 71 convictions, resolved 11 previously unsolved murders, and led to seven trials. McElearney and his team received the U.S. Attorney’s Office Director’s Award for the case, and the operation dismantled much of the DeCavalcante leadership structure.³

The 2003 Trial and the Appeal

Capo’s biggest courtroom appearance came at a 2003 murder and racketeering trial in Manhattan federal court. He was one of four cooperating witnesses. The three defendants were senior DeCavalcante figures:

Stefano Vitabile, the family’s consigliere for 35 years.
Philip Abramo, a captain since the late 1980s, known for running Mafia-controlled stock fraud operations.
Giuseppe “Pino” Schifilliti, a captain since 1991.

Capo testified about the D’Amato and Weiss killings in detail. The cooperating witnesses collectively told the jury the three defendants had approved four killings in 1989 and 1991. After two days of deliberations, the jury convicted all three of racketeering and charges tied to the four slayings, with a handful of acquittals on individual conspiracy and loansharking counts. All three faced potential life sentences.⁸

The convictions did not hold. In 2008, the Second Circuit vacated all three in United States v. Riggi, finding that the trial judge had improperly allowed the prosecution to introduce plea allocutions from eight non-testifying co-defendants in violation of Crawford v. Washington. The appellate panel described the allocutions as an “echo chamber of implied guilt.”⁹ Rather than face a new trial, Philip Abramo pleaded guilty in July 2009 to conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit loansharking, and receiving the proceeds of extortion. He was sentenced to 186 months.¹⁰

Death in Witness Protection

After his cooperation was complete, Capo entered the federal Witness Protection Program. He died of a heart attack on January 23, 2012, at age 52. His death was confirmed by his former attorney, Joel Stein.¹ On Staten Island, where he had built his reputation through years of violence, the response was hostile; one unnamed source told the New York Post, “There were more people celebrating this on Staten Island than the Giants’ win.”¹¹

1
New York Post. Mob Rat Squeals No More
2
Gangsters Inc. Profile of DeCavalcante Mafia Family Soldier Anthony Capo
3
Jerri Williams. Flipping Capo: How the FBI Dismantled the Real Sopranos
4
CBS News. Mob Boss Hit Over Gay Encounters
5
The Guardian. Mafia Boss Rubbed Out for Being Gay
6
New York Daily News. Mobster Killed for Being Gay
7
New York Daily News. In Plain Sight: Mob Brutality on the Streets of New York
8
The New York Times. Mob Figures Guilty of Racketeering
9
Federal Defenders of New York. Three Racketeers
10
FindLaw. United States v. Abramo
11
SILive. Former Staten Island Mob Rat Dies