John Gambino
Mob boss BORN AUGUST 22, 1940 DIED NOVEMBER 16, 2017, AGED 77
JOHN GAMBINO was a member of the Gambino crime gang which became one of the leading New York mafia families.
Born Giovanni Gambino in Palermo, Sicily, he joined the mafia in 1975. He became captain and head of the Cosa Nostra family’s Sicilian branch, the Cherry Hill Gambinos, after moving to New York, along with his brothers Joseph and Rosario and ran the Cafe Valentino on 18th Avenue in Brooklyn.
The Gambino family was involved in the drug trade, trafficking heroin, and it was estimated that the network he was part of, Inzerillo-Gambino-Spatola, smuggled £450million of the drug into the US every year by 1980.
That same year he was sentenced in his absence to six and a half years in prison for heroin trafficking in Palermo but managed to stay out of prison as the US refused to extradite him to Italy. He and his brother Joe were also acquitted in a New Jersey drug case that saw their brother Rosario sentenced to jail for 45 years.
In 1992, following the testimony of other mafia turncoats, John, Joe and six others were indicted on charges relating to drugs and a 1988 murder but they fled before finally being tracked down to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where they were thought to have been making preparations to flee to Venezuela. The subsequent trial ended in a mistrial but they finally agreed to plead guilty to racketeering charges.
John survived a stroke, heart attacks and openheart surgery in jail and was released in 2005 but was rearrested shortly after to face an extradition request to Italy.
Ultimately he was freed on the grounds that he had already served 15 years in an American prison and couldn’t face the same charges in Italy.
He was married to Vittoria Gambino, who with their son Tommy signed a £1.5million personal bond to get John released after he was arrested in 1990.