Unfinished Business From 1981 Murders Of Three Bonanno Capos

In May 2004, the Bonanno family’s first-ever “made” canary, former capo Frank Lino, became the first witness to describe the murders of the three Bonanno capos.

Where the three Bonanno capos were buried in 1981
The Hole -- the mob graveyard in Queens.

Alphonse (Sonny Red) Indelicato, Philllip (Phil Lucky) Giaccone, and Dominic (Big Trin) Trinchera had been slain together on May 5, 1981, in Brooklyn.

Lino, then-66, testified that the capos had challenged Bonanno boss Joseph Massino for control of the Bonanno family and were brought to a meeting in the basement of a Dyker Heights club run by “Sammy Bull” Gravano.

Massino and other allied mobsters awaited them with bad intentions.

The three capos had been unarmed, thinking they were going to a meeting to iron out difficulties, though they all knew they were taking a huge risk.

They were summarily murdered, blasted with shotguns, finished with pistols to the head.

While the bullet-riddled body of Sonny Red had been found in a vacant lot in Ozone Park, Queens, in May of that same year, 1981, Giaccone and Trinchera were left rotting underground for another 20-plus years.

Finally, in December 2004, the New York Medical Examiner's Office announced that it had identified the skeletons of Giaccone and Trinchera. Members of the FBI's Bonanno and Gambino squads, joined by an NYPD cold case squad, had excavated through concrete and dirt in a Queens lot for three weeks in October, based on an informant's tip. The two long-missing mobsters were buried in what the locals called the The Hole, a vacant lot near an auto-salvage yard on the Brooklyn-Queens border, near John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Giaccone and Trinchera were buried right near where Indelicato's body was found by children playing in 1981. Actually, the playing children stuff was a ruse -- a rather morbid ruse --cooked up to protect another, earlier informant who had tipped off law enforcement authorities about the location of Sonny Red's body. Yet many sources still include the fabricated information about the children playing finding Sonny Red, as was observed recently.

The source, Wahoo, was close to John Gotti who, with Gene Gotti, Angelo Ruggiero, and John Carneglia, had helped dispose of the bodies of the three capos.

Source Wahoo had told Queens cops where to find Indelicato in May 1981, not long after the three were killed.

"Go look in “The Hole,” Wahoo said as Jerry Capeci reported in Mob Star, way back in 1988.

And Indelicato was later discovered in a shallow grave in the vacant lot.

Willie Boy Johnson, 20-year top-echelon FBI informer.


Wahoo was Willie Boy Johnson, who had been a top-echelon FBI informer against the Gotti crew for nearly two decades. In the end Johnson was killed for  it.

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