Gotti’s Junkyard Dog Dissolved Bodies in Acid — Then Wore Their Jewelry – HT
Fountain Avenue, East New York, Brooklyn. From the outside, it looked like any other auto parts operation in a workingclass neighborhood. A 77,000 square ft lot surrounded by a chainlink fence, junk cars stacked in rows, a building with an office, grease stains on concrete, the smell of motor oil and rust, the Carnegia Brothers Fountain Auto Mall open for business. inside.
According to federal investigators who spent years documenting what actually happened there, the operation was something else entirely. Stolen vehicles were brought in, stripped of their identification numbers, chopped into parts, and redistributed through a network that reached across the region. Drug trafficking ran through the same channels as the car parts.
And in the back of the property in barrels, the Gambino crime family dissolved the people it needed to disappear. Not buried, dissolved in acid until there was nothing left that could be identified as a human being. Then the jewelry that survived the acid was removed. According to prosecutors, it was kept hung from the rafters of the basement.
trophies, personal items stripped from bodies of people who had been brought to that junkyard to cease to exist. Charles Carglia and his brother John ran that junkyard for three decades. Charles was John Goty’s most reliable cleaner. When someone needed to be not just dead, but gone when the body needed to vanish so completely that law enforcement could build no case around its absence, they called Charles Carglia.
He was convicted in 2009 of four murders and sentenced to life in federal prison. He died in that prison on April 8th, 2017. He was 70 years old. He never cooperated. He never talked. He never gave up anyone. The junkyard is gone. The site was cleared and redeveloped. The barrels are gone. The jewelry trophies are gone. And most of the people Charles Cariglia disposed of over three decades will never be officially counted as his victims because there is nothing left of them to count.
If you are watching this for the first time, subscribe right now and drop a comment telling us which state you are watching from. New York, Texas, California, Florida, anywhere in the country. Hit subscribe. Drop your state. Then let us get into this because this is not a standard mob enforcer story. Every crime family has killers. What made Charles Carneglia specifically and unusually valuable to the Gambino family was not just his willingness to commit violence though that was real and documented and extensive.
It was his operational capability beyond the killing. Anyone can pull a trigger. Very few people can make a body disappear so completely that it cannot be found 20 years later. That is a specific skill and Charles Carglia had it. This is the story of the junkyard and what went in. Charles Carglia was born August 10th, 1946 in Queens, New York.
His brother John was born the previous year in 1945 in Ozone Park. They grew up together in the Queen’s neighborhoods that sat at the edge of the city’s organized crime geography. Howard Beach, Ozone Park, the areas around John F. Kennedy Airport that were simultaneously workingclass residential neighborhoods and a nexus for the mob operations that used the airport as a cash machine.
Their entry into the criminal world came through the same route that connected most of the men in their orbit, Carmine Fatico’s crew. The same burgeon hunt and fish club in Ozone Park that had produced John Goty and Goty’s circle. Charles came into the Fatico crew around 1970, taking minor roles, initially lone sharking collections, gambling operations, the enforcement tasks that defined the bottom of the mob’s operational hierarchy.
The differences between the two brothers were apparent almost from the beginning. John Carglia had what Anthony Destano, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who wrote the definitive book about Charles’s career, described as a business-like quality. John was imposing. He had the kind of street presence and political instinct that the mob world recognized and rewarded.
He built relationships with major figures, Angelo Rugierro, Jean Goty, the people closest to John Goty’s inner circle. He was a serious person in the way the mob understood seriousness. Charles was something else. He was volatile in ways that made him difficult to trust with the political dimensions of mob life. He drank heavily.
He used drugs. He carried what Dphano described as a pentup anger that could spill out unexpectedly at allies, at associates, at people who had done nothing specific to provoke him except exist at the wrong moment. He was not calculating in his rages. He was reactive. He was paranoid. He was said to sprinkle red pepper around his vehicles to deter FBI dogs from finding anything worth sniffing.
But he had a quality that made all of that manageable from the Gambino family’s perspective. He was genuinely, completely, and entirely unafraid of violence. Not the performed fearlessness of a man building a reputation, the actual thing. The kind of absence of hesitation that is only explained by a fundamental rewiring of the connection most people have between the prospect of harming someone and any internal resistance to doing it.
Charles Carnegie fit perfectly into the Gambino family precisely because the Gambino family of the Goty era had a specific need for men like him. It needed people who could kill without the kind of deliberation that created witnesses or trails. It needed people who could make evidence disappear. And it needed people who would do both things and then go back to the junkyard and spray red pepper around their cars and not discuss what had happened with anyone.
He was that person for 30 years. March 11th, 1976, Queens, New York. a car on a Queen Street. Albert Gelb was a court officer, one of the highest ranking court officers in the New York State system. He was driving home when he was shot three times through the window of his vehicle. He died at the scene. The sequence that led to Gelb’s murder had begun at the Esquire Diner in Howard Beach sometime before.
Caraglia had been at the diner and had displayed a firearm. Gelb, who was off duty but retained the authority and the professional instinct of a court officer, noticed the gun and asked to see a license. He found that Carglia did not have one. He had Carglia arrested on a weapons charge. The gun charge was working its way through the court system.
Gelb was scheduled to testify in that case. 4 days before his scheduled testimony, Albert Gelb was shot to death on a Queen’s Street. The case against Carglia for the Gel murder was ultimately unsuccessful. A witness at trial described the shooter as someone who did not match Carglia’s physical description. Carglia was acquitted. The case was officially unresolved.
He went back to work. This sequence, the confrontation, the legal consequence, the elimination of the witness before testimony, the acquitt was the template for Carglia’s relationship with the criminal justice system for the next three decades. He would be arrested. The cases would fail. Witnesses would not cooperate or would describe someone else.
Juries would acquit and Charles Cariglia would return to his junkyard. The Gel murder was never prosecuted successfully. It was referenced in the 2009 rakateeering case, but Carglia was not convicted of it in that proceeding. It remains one of the clearest illustrations of what made him so difficult to prosecute across a career that federal investigators had been tracking since the early 1970s.
The junkyard was the center of everything. The Carglia brothers had secured operational variances for the Fountain Auto Mall in East New York in 1976 and ran it for the next three decades. 77,000 square ft of fenced industrial property on Fountain Avenue in one of the most economically distressed and least closely watched neighborhoods in Brooklyn.
The surrounding area had enough legitimate auto businesses that the Carnaglia operation did not stand out. It was simply another junkyard in a neighborhood of junkyards. What went on inside it was documented across multiple federal investigations and eventually in federal trial proceedings. On the surface level, it was exactly what it appeared to be, an auto parts operation.
Vehicles were brought in, stripped, and the parts were sold. This was the legitimate face that allowed the property to operate openly for 30 years without the kind of persistent law enforcement attention that would have shut down a more obviously criminal enterprise. One level beneath that were the stolen vehicle operations.
Cars reported stolen across the region were brought to Fountain Avenue. Identification numbers were removed. The vehicles were either chopped into untraceable parts that entered the legitimate auto parts supply chain or the numbers were replaced with falsified identifiers and the vehicles were re-registered and resold.
Federal records documented this operation in considerable detail when the junkyard’s assets were seized in a 1992 civil forfeite action. Then there was the drug operation. The junkyard served as a node in the Gambino family’s narcotics trafficking network. Product moved through the property. Money moved through the property.
The physical layout, a large fenced lot with a building, multiple entry and exit points, a legitimate business purpose that explained vehicle traffic made it useful for exactly this kind of operation. And then there was what happened in the back. the acid, the barrels, the dissolution of evidence. When the Gambino family needed someone to disappear, not simply to be killed, but to cease to exist in any form that law enforcement could find and process and build a case around.
The answer was the Carnegia junkyard. The methodology as described in federal proceedings and in reporting based on those proceedings involved placing victims in acid-filled barrels that would dissolve biological material over time. The process was not instant. It required the right concentration of acid, the right conditions, enough time for the chemical process to work completely.
At the end of it, a person who had existed, who had a name and a family and a history, had become nothing that could be traced back to a murder. The jewelry that was on the bodies when they arrived was metal. Metal does not dissolve in acid the way biological material does. The rings and watches and chains that victims were wearing when they were brought to the junkyard survived the process.
According to prosecutors, they were retrieved and kept, hung from the rafters of the basement, accumulated over time. There is a specific and documented horror in that detail that goes beyond the violence itself. The acid dissolution was operational. It served the specific purpose of eliminating evidence. The keeping of the jewelry was something else. It was personal.
It was the physical retention of proof that the person had existed and had been eliminated. A collection built from the only artifacts that the process could not destroy. John Carglia is the brother primarily documented in multiple sources as having the jewelry in his possession and displayed in the basement. The two brothers ran the operation together.
Charles was the killer, John was the processor. The distinction between their specific roles in individual incidents varies across different accounts and different sources, but the junkyard was their shared enterprise and what happened in it was their shared operation. 1980 Howard Beach, Queens. We have covered the story of John Favara in a previous episode, the furniture factory manager who accidentally killed Goty’s 12-year-old son, Frank, while driving home from work, who was cleared by police because it was a genuine
accident, who spent 4 months trying to get his family out of the neighborhood before Goty’s men took him from a parking lot in Long Island in July of that year. What we did not cover in that episode was the specific and documented allegation about what happened to Favara after he was taken.
Brooklyn federal court papers filed by federal prosecutors contain allegations that Charles Carglia handled the disposal of John Favara’s body. The court document filed in connection with the 2009 Charles Carglia raketeering case stated that Carglia killed Favara and disposed of his body in acid. The body was placed in a barrel.
The barrel’s contents were eventually disposed of. Favara’s remains have never been found. The FBI excavated a location in Brooklyn known as the Hole in 2004 based on informant tips. Two other bodies were recovered. Favara was not among them. The acid disposal, if the federal allegation is accurate, is precisely why he was not found there.
The government witness who reported this information was Kevin Mcmah. Kevin Mcmman was the 12-year-old boy from whose borrowed minibike Frank Goty had been riding when he was killed. John Carglia had informally adopted Mcmah years later, finding the then 12-year-old sleeping in his pool house and taking him in as a surrogate son.
Mcmman had grown up in the orbit of the Carglia brothers, eventually becoming a Gambino associate, supervised by Charles after J’s imprisonment in 1989. In 2009, Kevin McMahon sat in a federal courtroom and testified against Charles Carglia, the boy whose minibike had accidentally killed Goty’s son, who had grown up in the care of the men who disposed of the person blamed for that death, who had witnessed what that junkyard was used for, and who had eventually decided that cooperation with the federal government was preferable to
continued loyalty to the organization. The thread connecting the minibike and the junkyard and the testimony runs through every element of this story in ways that make it almost impossible to describe as anything other than the specific and terrible logic of the world. Carglia brothers inhabited May 5th, 1981.
The embassy terrace, Brooklyn. Three Bonano family capos, Alons, Sonni Red in Delicato, Dominic Trinera, and Philip Gakone were lured to a meeting and shot to death. The murders had been organized by Napoleano and Msino to consolidate Bonano family power under Rusty Rustelli. The shooting was accomplished. The bodies were a problem.
Three Kappos from a major New York crime family, murdered in a single operation, needed to disappear before law enforcement could process the scene and build cases. The Carglia junkyard on Fountain Avenue received the problem. John Carglia allegedly handled the disposal of the three bodies. The specific method used acid burial a combination is not definitively documented in the public record.
What is documented is that the bodies were processed at or through the carglia operation and that two of the three trencher and gakon were never found. Indelicato’s partial remains were eventually discovered months later. December 16th, 1985, East 46th Street, Manhattan, outside Sparks Steakhouse. Paul Castellano and Thomas Bilotti were shot to death on the sidewalk as they stepped out of their car.
Four gunmen in matching white trench coats and black fur hats. The operation that Goti and Gravano had organized to take the throne of the Gambino family. John Carglia was one of the four gunmen. A witness to the proceedings later stated that he saw John Carglia shooting Bellotti as Bilotti lay on the ground. The allegation that Jon was the gunman who shot Castellano in the head appears in multiple accounts of the murder.
No charges connected to the Castellano and Bilotti murders were ever filed against John Carglia. Like most of the most consequential things the Carglia brothers did across three decades, it did not produce a conviction. Charles’s specific role in the Castellano operation is not documented in the same detail as Jon’s.
What is documented is that the Carglia brothers were firmly in Goty’s camp and that Charles’s relationship with Goti deepened in the years following the Castellano murder as Goti consolidated power over the family. October 4th, 1990. The underground parking garage, the World Trade Center, Manhattan. Louie Dono was a Gambino family soldier who had been skimming money from a construction contract and refusing to meet with Goty when called.
Goty had ordered his death. Bobby Boreelloo had been given the primary role in the killing. Charles Carglia and others from the Gambino crew were also part of the operation. Dono was shot multiple times in his vehicle in the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center. He died in the car. The location, the foundations of the most famous buildings in New York City, one of the most surveiled and trafficked public facilities in the country was either extraordinary boldness or extraordinary carelessness on the part
of everyone involved. In return for his participation in the Dono murder, Charles Carglia was formally inducted into the Gambino crime family. He received his button. He became a maid man. He was 44 years old. He had been operating in the Gambino organization for over two decades, had disposed of bodies for years, had committed multiple murders, had run one of the most operationally useful criminal facilities in the family’s history.
The formal induction was a recognition that should have come years earlier by the standard calculus of mob advancement. that it came at 44 in exchange for a specific murder tells you something about how Charles’s volatility and drug use had complicated his path to formal membership, even in an organization that valued exactly the qualities he possessed. He was now a maid man.
He went back to the junkyard. The 2009 trial was the result of a federal investigation that had been building for years. The case was part of a broader sweep of the Gambino family that in February of 2008 arrested 138 alleged mob figures in a single operation. Carglia was among those arrested. The indictment against him was comprehensive rakateeering conspiracy with predicate acts covering four murders.
Murder, conspiracy, felony murder, robbery, kidnapping, marijuana distribution, conspiracy, securities, fraud, conspiracy, and extortion. The government had witnesses. It had Kevin Mcmah. It had John Alite, another Gambino associate turned government witness who testified about Carglia’s crimes.
It had decades of documented law enforcement intelligence. The four murders the jury convicted him of were the 1977 stabbing of Michael Cotillo, the 1983 stabbing of Salvator Puma, the 1990 shooting of Louis Dono at the World Trade Center, and one additional murder. The Albert Gelb murder was not among the convictions.
The John Favara disposal was referenced in court papers, but the jury’s verdict was limited to what could be proven beyond reasonable doubt. The government presented testimony about the junkyard, about the acid disposal methods, about the trophies from victims. The specific testimony that included information about John Favara came from Mcmah who told the court what he knew about how the Carglia operation had processed the neighbor who had accidentally killed Frank Goti.
The jury deliberated. The verdict came back guilty on all counts. Judge Nicholas Galfi sentenced Charles Carglia to life in federal prison in September of 2009. Carnegie made no statement at sentencing. He had made no deals. He had not cooperated. He had not provided information about anyone else. He had not done what Graano had done, what Mcmah had done, what a light had done.
He sat in the courtroom and received his sentence and was taken to prison. He died in the federal medical center in Devons, Massachusetts on April 8th, 2017. He was 70 years old. He had been there for 8 years. He had outlived John Goti by 15 years and had outlived the junkyard that defined his career by considerably longer.
The Fountain Auto Mall on Fountain Avenue in East New York no longer exists. The site was cleared. The Chainlink fence came down. The office building was demolished. The stacked junk cars were removed. The barrels, whatever remained of them, were gone long before the site was cleared. The area has been redeveloped. There is nothing left on Fountain Avenue that looks like what stood there for three decades.
John Carneglia, the older brother, served his 50-year heroin trafficking sentence and was released in 2018. He was in his 70s. He went to a halfway house. He kept a low profile. He is alive as of the time this script was written. Kevin Mcmman, who testified against Charles and whose testimony contributed to the life sentence, is presumably living under some form of protection or arrangement that resulted from his cooperation.
His specific current circumstances are not in the public record. The three Bonano Capos whose bodies went through the Carglia operation in 1981. The official accounting of where Trinera and Giaona has never been established. In Delicato’s partial remains were found. The other two have never been located. John Favara’s remains have never been found. His case remains officially open.