He Punched John Gotti in the Face — The Story of Mickey Boy Paradiso. HT

There is a specific kind of story in organized crime that defies every rule the mob is supposed to operate by. The rule says nobody touches the [music] boss. The rule says a man who raises his hand against the boss of the Gambino [music] crime family does not walk away from it.

The rule says that certain lines [music] once crossed produce certain consequences and that those consequences are measured in graves rather than grudges. [music] Michael Mickey boy Paradiso punched John Goty in the face. He lived to tell the tale. He lived [music] to become a captain in Goty’s organization. He lived to order a hit on an underboss from a rival family.

[music] He lived to have Goty put a murder contract on him. He lived to have [music] federal prison save his life by keeping him away from Goty’s hit squad. He lived [music] to see Goti go to prison for life while he walked free. He lived to be elevated to conciglier of the Gambino family in 2019 at [music] the age of 79.

He is by the FBI’s accounting a man who has spent approximately [music] 25 years behind bars during a career in organized crime [music] that has lasted over 55 years. By his own accounting, he has 10 murders on his mob resume with none on his official rap sheet. He was recorded on an FBI bug saying, “If I use my hands, I might kill somebody because I’ll kill him.

I’ll stab him. I’ll cut his throat. When I get mad, I’m just a different person.” He punched [music] John Goti in the face and walked away. That one fact tells you everything about who Mickey boy Paradiso is and [music] what kind of life he has lived. 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 career story. This is the story of a man who has spent six decades defying the specific rules that are supposed to govern mob careers. Rules about violence, rules about loyalty, rules about who you can and cannot cross and survive.

Mickey boy [music] Paradiso has crossed most of them at least once. He is still here. The men who tried to kill him are mostly not. This is the story of Mickey boy. To understand why Mickey boy Paradiso could punch John Goty in the face and survive [music] it, you have to understand where both men came from before either of them was anything.

Carmine Fatico was a cappo regime in the Gambino crime family who ran a crew out of a social club in Ozone Park, Queens called the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club. It was Fatico who took in a young John Goti in the 1960s and gave him his criminal education. It was Fatico who taught Goty how to operate, [music] how to build a crew, how to conduct himself as a mob soldier.

The Bergen crew under Fatico was the incubator for what would eventually become the Goti organization. Michael Paradiso came up through the same crew, under the same mentor at roughly the same time. He and Goty were not just mob associates. They were friends from the same operational world. Men who had learned the same lessons from the same teacher and who had spent years working alongside each other before either of them had significant rank.

That history matters. In the mob, rank is everything once you have it. But friendship that predates rank has a different quality. It exists outside the hierarchy in the specific personal familiarity of men who knew each other before they were boss and captain, before they were anything at all.

Paradiso knew Goty the man before he knew Goty the boss and Goty knew Paradiso the same way. That is why the punch was survivable. Nobody else in the Gambino organization could have thrown it. A random soldier throwing a punch at John Goty would have been dead before the end of that day. Mickey boy threw it and was still standing because the friendship underneath the rank was old enough and real enough that Goty filed it in a different category.

You do not kill your oldest friends for throwing a punch. You might want to, but you do not. Not when the friendship goes back to the days when neither of you was anyone at all. The specific circumstances of the punch, what argument produced it, what the context was, what happened in the room immediately afterward are not in the public record in any detailed form.

Jerry Capesi, the most respected mob journalist in America. And the person who broke the story of Paradiso’s elevation to Consilier in 2019 confirmed it happened and confirmed that Paradiso got away with it. The precise sequence is not documented beyond that. What is documented is the legend.

And in the mob world, sometimes the legend is the most important part of the record. Because the legend of Mickey boy Paradiso, the man who punched John Goty in the face and lived, became a piece of his operational identity. It communicated something to every person in the Gambino family who heard the story.

It said this man is someone Goti cannot or will not handle the way he handles ordinary problems. It gave Paradiso a specific and unusual kind of protection that most men in the organization did not possess. He was crazy enough to do it. [music] He was connected enough to survive it. And Goty was human enough to let it pass. By the mid 1980s, Mickey boy Paradiso had been in the Gambino organization for over two decades.

He had convictions for crimes ranging from hijacking to heroin trafficking across four of New York’s five state courts and in [music] federal courts in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Newark. He had a reputation among law enforcement as someone who combined genuine physical ferocity with an almost reckless willingness [music] to act on impulse.

The FBI would later record him saying, “If I use my hands, I might kill somebody because I’ll kill him. I’ll stab him. I’ll cut his throat. When I get mad, I’m just a different person. I don’t rationalize and I don’t like to get like that. I really don’t.” By his own count. [music] in a conversation with his brother Philillip in 1986.

A conversation that Philillip was having while wearing a wire for federal investigators probing several Brooklyn slayings. Mickey Boy let slip [music] that he had committed. 10 murders across his career. None of those murders appear on his official conviction record. All 10 exist only in his own account of his own life made to his own brother who was simultaneously transmitting every word to federal investigators.

[music] His brother wore a wire against him. That detail sits in the story of Mickey Boy Paradiso as a [music] kind of dark comedy that the mob world occasionally produces. The man who punched the boss in the face, who ordered hits on rival family under bosses, who claimed 10 murders in casual conversation, discovered that the person recording him was someone who shared his last name and his childhood.

He was not charged specifically for those statements in that immediate [music] context. The wire produced information that was useful to investigators in multiple ways, but Mickey Boy kept operating. He kept talking and eventually his talking [music] produced consequences even more dramatic than the ones that recording threatened.

December 16th, 1985, [music] East 46th Street, Midtown Manhattan, Sparks Steakhouse. John Goty and Sammy Graano watched from a car across the street as Paul Castellano and Thomas Bilotti were shot to death on the sidewalk. Goti had orchestrated the murder without commission approval. [music] He became boss of the Gambino family.

The most audacious unsanctioned [music] hit in the history of New York organized crime had succeeded. Within months, the consequences began arriving. The families on the commission were not happy about the Castellano killing. Anthony [music] Casso, the Lucesi family under boss known as Gaspipep for a rumored weapon preference of his father, was particularly hostile.

He believed Goti’s unsanctioned move against Castellano was an affront to the commission’s authority and to the structure of mob governance [music] that the commission existed to protect. He began working with other unhappy [music] commission members to apply pressure to the Gambino organization. Then in April of 1986, a car bomb exploded beneath Frank Diko’s vehicle in Brooklyn.

Dico was Goti’s underboss, one of the most important men in the new Gambino administration and a man whose death was a direct attack on the stability of Goti’s newly taken throne. The bomb was the work of the Genevves family, acting with Caso’s cooperation and approval. It was a message to Goty that the unsanctioned killing of Castellano had not been forgotten or forgiven.

Mickey boy Paradiso processed this message and decided to send one back. He organized a hit on Anthony Gaspipe Caso. In September of 1986, Gambino Associates Nicholas Guido and James Hyell along with a third unidentified man pulled up to Caso’s parked Lincoln Town Car in Brooklyn. Casso was behind the wheel. They opened fire with a 12- gauge shotgun. Five shots from close range.

They did not kill him. Casso was hit twice. Despite the point blank distance and the stopping power of a 12- gauge shotgun, Anthony Casso survived. He stumbled out of his car and found his way into the basement freezer of a nearby restaurant. He called Lucesi boss Victoriao Vic Amuso.

Amuso drove to the location and took Caso to a hospital. Caso recovered from his wounds. He had survived the most direct attempt on his life by any external force. And he had a very specific, very patient, very dangerous response to near-death experiences. He began making inquiries about who had ordered the hit.

This is where the story of Mickey Boy Paradiso [music] intersects with one of the most extraordinary organized crime stories [music] in the history of the NYPD. As we covered in a previous episode [music] about Bobby Boreelloo, Anthony Casso had two active duty New York City Police Department detectives on his private payroll, [music] Louis Epalito and Steven Caracappa, the mafia cops.

[music] They provided Casso with law enforcement intelligence, identified government witnesses, [music] and carried out murders on his behalf in exchange for $4,000 a month and [music] additional payments for specific operations. When Casso began investigating [clears throat] who had ordered the hit against him [music] in September of 1986, the mafia cops went to work.

They accessed [music] law enforcement databases. They gathered intelligence on the Gambino family’s internal operations. They produced for Caso [music] a detailed account of the organizational structure behind the assassination [music] attempt, including the identities of the men who had planned it.

The intelligence pointed at Mickey Boy Paradiso [music] and Angelo Rugiro Goty’s old friend and a key figure in the Bergen crew. [music] Caso now knew who had tried to kill him. He went to Goti with that information [clears throat] and made a specific demand. He wanted Paradiso dealt with. He wanted the man who had ordered the hit against him [music] punished by the family that man served.

Goti was in a complicated position. On one hand, Paradiso was his old [music] friend, the man who had punched him in the face and whom he had not killed for it. On the other hand, Caso’s demand had the weight of the Lucesi family and the commission pressure behind it. Goti’s position as boss was still consolidating.

He had already survived one assassination attempt. The Dico car bomb had been intended to kill him [music] and had killed his underboss instead. He could not afford an open war with the Lucases on top of everything else he was managing. [music] He eventually gave the order.

Mickey boy Paradiso, the man John Goty had promoted to captain in his own organization. The man who had punched Goty in the face and lived, became a marked man. His boss had put a contract on his [music] life. Here is where the story produces its most extraordinary twist. Mickey Boy Paradiso [music] was facing federal drug charges at the time Goty’s contract was placed on him.

He was out on bail, awaiting trial, managing his legal situation in the ordinary way of a mob figure who had been through the federal system before and had developed a practiced familiarity with its rhythms. The FBI [music] became aware of the contract. They knew Paradiso was a marked man. They knew that walking free in Brooklyn while Goti’s organization was looking for him was a death sentence.

They revoked his bail. The federal government, which was simultaneously prosecuting Mickey boy Paradiso for drug trafficking, revoked his [music] bail and put him in federal custody specifically to keep him alive. The jail cell was protection. Prison was the only place in New York City where the Gambino family’s hit [music] squad could not reach him.

He was convicted on the drug charges. He went to prison. He sat in federal custody while the world outside changed around him. The Goty era ended. In December of 1990, FBI agents walked through the front door of the Ravenite Social Club and arrested Goty while he was sipping espresso. [music] Sammy Graano flipped in November of 1991.

Goty was convicted in June of 1992 and sentenced to life in federal prison. He died in a prison hospital in 2002. Mickey Boy Paradiso walked out of federal prison in the late 1990s. His boss was in a maximum security penitentiary [music] in Marian, Illinois. The contract on his life was as dead as the man who had issued it.

He had survived the Gambino family’s attempt to kill him by spending the years of the threat in a federal prison cell. Prison had saved his life. The system that was punishing him was simultaneously the only thing keeping him alive. You might think this would be the end of the story. A man who had punched the boss ordered a failed hit on a rival family under boss, made the boss’s enemies list, survived through accidental incarceration, and emerged into a postgoti Gambino family that had been reorganized around a Sicilian faction he was not part of. You might think Mickey boy would live out his remaining years in the background, enjoying his freedom, staying quiet. He did not do that. He kept operating. He was convicted again on raketeering charges and served additional time. [music] In 2006, he was

part of an indictment that also included associates from four of New York’s five crime families, a dragnet that caught him in a web of drug trafficking, illegal online gambling, and tax fraud connected to the New York Waterfront. The indictment resulted from a 2-year investigation by the Waterfront Commission.

Paradiso, as the only made mafia member among the defendants, was the senior figure in the case. He served his time. He came out again. He kept the Gambino family’s respect through each prosecution, through each prison sentence, through the entire accumulated weight of 25 years, behind bars across a career stretching back to the 1960s.

He was by every account from law enforcement and organized crime researchers one of the most genuinely respected old school figures left in the Gambino family. Not respected in the corporate sense. Respected in the sense that people who knew him were careful around him and careful about him. Then in March of 2019, Francesco Frank Calli was murdered outside his Staten Island home by a 24 year old man who rammed his truck into Calli’s car and then shot him six times.

Calli was the Gambino family’s senior figure, variously described as boss or underboss, depending on the source. His murder created an immediate leadership vacuum in an organization that had been running with unusual stability under the Sicilian faction for nearly a decade. The Gambino family made its move quickly.

Jerry Capisi of Gangland News, the reporter who has covered the New York mob with more precision and more sourced accuracy than anyone else in the journalism business, broke the story. The Gambino family had elevated 79year-old Michael Mickey boy Paradiso to serve in the family’s administration as consiliary. Number three man in the hierarchy.

A position that put him alongside [music] boss Dominico Italian Domalu and powerful Capo Lorenzo Manino in running the organization. The man who had punched John Goti in the face. The man who had ordered a hit on an underboss from a rival family. The man who had survived Goty’s own murder contract against him.

The man who had spent 25 of his 79 years in federal custody. That man was now the conciglier of the Gambino crime family. in 2019 when he was 79 years