DeCavalcante Soldier Dies at 52 While in Witness Protection

Anthony Capo, in witness protection,

died at 52 of a heart attack.

From the NYPOST.com:

A mob turncoat whose testimony helped doom the New Jersey crime family that inspired “The Sopranos” has died while hiding in witness protection, The Post has learned.

Anthony Capo, 52, dropped dead Monday after suffering a heart attack.

“There were more people celebrating this on Staten Island than the Giants’ win,” said one source.

The death of Capo, who once stabbed a mob rival in the eye with a fork at a Staten Island club, was confirmed by his onetime lawyer, Joel Stein.

Capo, a former soldier in the DeCavalcante clan, spilled the beans on the organization at a 2003 murder trial in Manhattan federal court, where he described how he whacked a mobster for being gay.

“There were more people celebrating this on Staten Island than the Giants’ win,” said one source.

“Nobody’s going to respect us if we have a gay homosexual boss sitting down discussing La Cosa Nostra business,” Capo said, explaining why John “Johnny Boy” D’Amato, the former acting boss of the Essex County-based crime syndicate, had to die.

Capo blasted D’Amato four times in the face in January 1992 as he sat in a car outside his girlfriend’s Mill Basin home in Brooklyn.

Capo’s canary performance helped send DeCavalcante family consigliere Stefano Vitabile and capos Philip Abramo and Giuseppe “Pino” Schifilliti to the slammer on a slew of racketeering charges.

The D’Amato hit echoed a storyline in HBO’s “The Sopranos,” in which a mobster is whacked after he’s seen at a gay bar. ...

Read the full article at the NYPOST.com