Cosa Nostra News

Aniello "Neil" Dellacroce was born on March 15, 1914, in New York City and died on Dec. 2, 1985, in New York City. He took to "the life" with vigor. First arrested at 16, Dellacroce swiftly went about establishing a solid criminal portfolio for himself, making it as diverse as he could. He was charged with a range of crimes and was in and out of prison most of his life. He'd served one-two year bids for assault, armed robbery, drug dealing. But Dellacroce, a work in progress, eventually specialized in murder. And for that, the Feds never really touched the longtime Gambino crime family underboss. Neil Dellacroce Serving as Carlo Gambino's underboss, then Paul Castellano's, Dellacroce lived a life of what can only be chronicled as unimaginable violence. As protégé to the " Lord High Executioner" himself, Albert Anastasia, Dellacroce was a Murder Inc. button man. He learned how to administer death by some of the best practitione...

"Dellacroce was one of the scariest individuals I've ever met in my life. Dellacroce's eyes were, like, he didn't have any eyes. Did you ever see Children of the Damned ? His eyes were so blue that they weren't even there. It was like looking right through him." The late New York mob-buster Joseph Coffey "Of all the gangsters that I've met personally, and I've met dozens of them in all of my years, there were only two who, when I looked them straight in the eye, I decided I wouldn't want them to be really personally mad at me. Aniello Dellacroce was one and Carmine Galante was the other. They had bad eyes, I mean, they had the eyes of killers. You looked at Dellacroce's eyes and you could see how frightening they were, the frigid glare of a killer." Ralph Salerno , NYPD officer, leading Mafia authority; author of The Crime Confederation "His eyes had no color... as if his soul (were) transparent," Newspaper reporter wri...

We left off with Aniello "Neil" Dellacroce facing allegations for attempting to unseat his crime family's namesake: Carlo Gambino . The charge was levied at Dellacroce by the Joint Legislative Committee on Crime in a public forum seemingly designed after an earlier, national inquiry into organized crime, the McClellan Hearings. Where Dellacroce was arrested in 1966 for alleged plotting. To advance the story, we next turn to Dellacroce's obituary. The Gambino underboss (and historical mentor to John Gotti ) died on Dec. 2, 1985, of cancer at age 71. The mobster's New York Times obituary, written by Ralph Blumenthal (author of the important but somwhat overlooked Last Days of the Sicilians ), point-blank stated : In 1966, Mr. Dellacroce was arrested in a police raid of the La Stella restaurant in Queens, where, the Joint Legislative Committee on Crime later charged, he and other Mafia leaders were plotting to depose Mr. Gambino... ( The La  (?) S...

You sometimes come across a scrap of information in a decades-old news story that seemingly upends much of what you thought you knew about the Mafia. Aniello Dellacroce, who rose in the Gambino crime family to become Carlo Gambino's underboss, is considered historically to have been an old-school gangster,  one whose mantra seemingly was: " The boss is the boss is the boss ." Aniello Dellacroce However, Dellacroce was accused of plotting to murder Carlo Gambino.