Reputed Gambino crime family boss shot dead outside his home
● ‘Franky Boy’ shot at least six times ● No arrests yet as police investigate
The reputed boss of New York’s Gambino crime family was gunned down outside his home by a gunman who may have staged a car accident to lure him outside.
Francesco “Franky Boy” Cali, 53, was found with multiple gunshot wounds at his redbrick colonial-style house on Staten Island on Wednesday night. He was pronounced dead at a hospital. No immediate arrests were made.
Federal prosecutors had referred to Cali in court filings in recent years as the underboss of the Gambino organisation. News accounts since 2015 said he had ascended to the top spot, marking him as the successor to the custom-tailored tabloid regular John Gotti.
Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said the mob boss emerged from his home around 9:15pm (1:15am GMT) after the gunman backed his pickup into Cali’s Cadillac SUV, damaging it. “With what we know at this point in time, it’s quite possible that was part of a plan,” Mr Shea said.
Video showed the assailant pulling a 9mm handgun and opening fire on Cali about a minute after they started talking, according to Mr Shea. At least 12 shots were fired. After getting shot several times, Cali tried to crawl under his SUV to hide, Mr Shea said.
He said there has been a slight uptick in alleged mobrelated violence in New York within the past year, but claimed it was too soon to say whether that had anything to do with Cali’s slaying.
There were reports of a blue pickup truck leaving the scene around the time of shooting.
Cali was pronounced dead at Staten Island University Hospital.
The Gambino family was once among the most powerful criminal organisations in the US, but federal prosecutions in the 1980s and 1990s sent Gotti and other top leaders to prison, diminishing its reach. The last Mafia boss to be shot to death in New York City was Gambino don Paul Castellano, who was assassinated outside a Manhattan steakhouse in 1985 at the direction of Gotti, who then took over.
Cali kept a much lower profile than Gotti.
With his expensive doublebreasted suits and overcoats and silvery swept-back hair, Gotti became known as the Dapper Don, his smiling face all over the tabloids.
As prosecutors tried and failed to bring him down, he came to be called the Teflon Don.
In 1992, Gotti was convicted in Castellano’s murder and for a multitude of other crimes.
He was sentenced to life in prison and died of cancer in 2002.
His son, the former Gambino boss John A Gotti, was stabbed in the stomach in New York’s Syosset area in 2013. He survived the attack.
Cali’s only mob-related crim- inal conviction came a decade ago when he pleaded guilty in an extortion scheme involving a failed attempt to build a Nascar motor racing track on Staten Island.
He was sentenced to 16 months behind bars and was released in 2009.
Staten Island’s affluent Todt Hill neighbourhood is renowned for its crime connections.
The location was used in the 1972 film classic The Godfather in which the compound of fictional crime boss Don Corleone was set.
Prashant Ranyal, 39, who lives in the neighbourhood, said he had been left shaken by the killing. “Whenever you see nice areas, you feel like it’s peaceful,” he said. “When something like this happens, you definitely have a second thought about it.” The Gambino operation is said to be one of the five historic Italian-us mafia families in New York.