He Killed Gotti’s Son by Accident — Gotti Had Him Dissolved in Acid – HT
March 18th, 1980. Howard Beach, Queens. Late afternoon. It was a Tuesday. Frank Gotti was 12 years old. He had made his school football team that morning. The kind of news a 12-year-old boy carries around all day feeling it in his chest. He could not wait to tell his friends. After school, he went outside.
A neighbor named Kevin McMahon had a mini bike. He was letting friends take turns. When it was Frank’s turn, Frank took off immediately before McMahon could give him instructions on how to operate it. He rode down the block. He turned onto 87th Street. A construction dumpster sat on the side of the road.
Frank came around it into traffic. He was riding directly into the path of a car driven by his neighbor, John Favara, who was on his way home from work. Favara told police afterward that the setting sun was in his eyes. He did not see the boy until impact. He dragged Frank Gotti 200 ft down 87th Street.
Neighbors heard what was happening and ran into the street. They screamed. They banged on Favara’s windows. One climbed onto the hood of the car. Favara finally stopped in front of a neighbor’s house. He got out and saw what was pinned beneath his vehicle. Frank Gotti’s sister, Victoria, had seen her brother riding around the neighborhood earlier after coming out of a McDonald’s.
She had told him to be home for dinner at 5:00. She got home to find her mother on the phone. There had been an accident. Frank was rushed to the hospital. He was declared dead on arrival. He had made the football team that morning. He was 12 years old. And the man whose car had killed him lived directly behind the Gotti family home.
His father was John Gotti, captain of the Gambino crime family. The man who would become, within 5 years, the most feared and famous mob boss in America. 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, Florida, California, anywhere in the country, hit subscribe, drop your state, then let us get into this.
Because this story is not primarily about the mob. It is about what happens when an ordinary man is caught by circumstances he did not create in a neighborhood where the rules of ordinary life do not apply. John Favara did not kill Frank Gotti deliberately. The police investigation cleared him.
No charges were ever filed. He was a legitimate working man who had spent his entire adult life staying away from the world his neighbor inhabited. None of that mattered. He was declared legally dead in 1983. His body has never been found and the competing accounts of what was done to him, the chainsaw, the concrete barrel, the acid, have haunted the people who follow this story for over 40 years.
This is the story of John Favara and Frank Gotti and what John Gotti did when the worst thing in his life was caused by the most ordinary person imaginable. John Favara was born March 4th, 1929 in Queens, New York. He was 51 years old on the day his life ended. He worked as a service department manager at the Castro Convertibles Furniture Factory in New Hyde Park, Long Island, the company famous for its television commercials where sofas and chairs folded and unfolded to demonstrate their versatility.
He drove to work. He drove home. He lived a middle-class life in a middle-class neighborhood with his wife Janet and two adopted sons. One of those sons, Scott, was a childhood friend of John Gotti Jr. Scott had been to the Gotti house for sleepovers. The two families had known each other for years in the specific way that neighbors in a close-knit Queens neighborhood know each other, not intimately, not in each other’s business, but present on the same streets and in the same stores and at the same local events. Favara had a childhood friend
who had gone into the mob, Ettore Zappi, a caporegime in the Gambino crime family. They had grown up together. When their lives diverged, Favara had taken the straight path and kept it his entire life. He worked at the furniture factory. He paid his taxes. He raised his sons. He had no criminal record, no mob connections, no involvement in anything that should have put him anywhere near the gravity field of organized crime.
His house sat on 86th Street, directly behind the Gotti family home on 85th Street, a backyard fence between them. Two families in the same neighborhood. That proximity was the only thing that connected John Favara to John Gotti, and it was enough. Frank Gotti was born in 1968, the middle son of John and Victoria Gotti.
He grew up in Howard Beach not knowing what his father did for a living. His sister Victoria wrote about him years later with the specific tenderness of someone describing a person who died before he had the chance to become complicated. He was a 12-year-old boy. He liked football. He liked his friends.
He liked riding around the neighborhood. He was the kind of kid who made you feel good when you saw him coming down the street. On March 18th, 1980, he made his school football team. He could not wait for practice the next day. He went outside in the afternoon. Kevin McMahon had a mini bike. Frank took his turn without waiting for instructions.
He was not being reckless by any 12-year-old standard. He was being 12. The construction dumpster that sat on the side of 87th Street created a blind spot. Frank came around it into traffic. Favara was driving down the street with the late afternoon sun in his eyes. He did not see Frank until Frank was already beneath his car.
The police investigation was thorough and specific. They determined that Frank had entered the street from behind the dumpster at a blind spot. They determined that Favara had not been driving recklessly. They determined that the setting sun had temporarily impaired his vision. Victoria Di Giorgio told police that Favara had been drunk.
The investigation found no evidence to support that claim. The death was ruled an accident. No charges were filed against John Favara. This is the detail that the story needs to sit with before it moves forward. John Favara was innocent of any intentional wrongdoing. He was cleared by a police investigation. The legal system, having examined the evidence, determined that what happened on 87th Street on a Tuesday afternoon in March was a tragedy, not a crime.
He went home to his house on 86th Street. He was alive. Frank Gotti was not. And the family directly behind his backyard fence was in a grief that would reshape everything that came after. John Gotti received the news at the hospital. His daughter, Victoria, later wrote that he was emotionless, operating as if on autopilot.
He identified his son’s body. He went home. Victoria Di Giorgio, whose entire life was her children, did not contain her grief. She dressed only in black for weeks after the funeral. In the living room of the Gotti home on 85th Street, a photograph of Frank was hung over a backdrop of candles and flowers.
A Queens detective who saw it called it a shrine. Victoria broke a mirror in her grief and tried to cut herself with the glass. She took a handful of pills trying to end her own life. Her husband called a doctor who sedated her. The day after Frank’s funeral, Kevin McMahon knocked at the Gotti front door.
He wanted to know who was going to pay for his broken mini bike. One night, not long after the accident, Victoria Di Giorgio heard noise coming from the Favara house. Laughter, music. She grabbed a baseball bat and went across the backyard. She began destroying Favara’s car, the car that had killed her son. She swung at it until it was dented and broken. Favara came out.
He told her she was going to have to pay for the damages to his car. He told her she was crazy. John Gotti came outside. He said nothing. He silently took his wife by the arm and walked her back inside their house. He did not confront Favara. He did not threaten him. He did not make a scene. He walked his wife home and went to bed.
For months afterward, neighbors in Howard Beach watched a specific and chilling drama unfold on those two quiet residential streets. The word “murderer” appeared spray painted on Favara’s car. Death threats began arriving. Favara received them by telephone. He received them in person from people he did not know who appeared at his door.
He chose not to press charges against Victoria Gotti for the baseball bat assault. He was trying to keep the temperature down. On May 28th, Victoria attacked him again with a metal baseball bat outside his own house. Multiple witnesses saw it. Once again, Favara did not press charges. He put his house on the market. He found a buyer.
He made arrangements. The sale was expected to close on July 31st. He had a buyer. He had a closing date. He had a plan to get his family out of Howard Beach. He needed to hold on for one more month. In late July, John Gotti organized a family vacation to Florida. He, Victoria, and their youngest son traveled south.
They left Howard Beach. They removed themselves from the neighborhood 6 days before the July 31st closing date on the Favara house sale. The trip to Florida gave Gotti something he needed, an alibi. On July 28th, 1980, 3 days after the Gottis left for Fort Lauderdale, John Favara finished his shift at Castro Convertibles and walked toward his car.
Multiple witnesses watched as several men approached him. He was shoved into a van. The van drove away. Accounts of what the witnesses saw vary on the specific details. Some say he was beaten with a baseball bat before being forced into the van. Some say he was shot with a silenced .22 caliber pistol.
Some say both. What none of the accounts dispute is the van, [music and clears throat] the witnesses, the fact that it happened in daylight, near his workplace, with people watching. The van drove away. John Favara was never seen again. The Gotti family returned from Florida on August 4th. Detectives were waiting.
John Gotti looked at the detectives and told them, “I don’t know what happened. I am not sorry if something did happen. He killed my kid.” Victoria DiGiorgio told them, “I don’t know what happened to him. I am not sorry if something did. He never sent me a card. He never apologized. He never even got his car fixed.
” The detectives had no evidence to charge either of them. The Gotti family had been in Florida. Nobody could place them near the van or the men who had used it. The case went cold almost immediately. Favara was declared legally dead in 1983. His wife, Janet, and their two sons moved out of Howard Beach the week after his disappearance.
They left the house. They left the neighborhood. They did not return. The sale John Favara had been trying to finalize on July 31st was never completed. What happened to John Favara’s body has never been officially established. What exists are competing accounts, each sourced from different informants across different decades, and federal court papers that provide the closest thing available to an official version.
The first account, which circulated immediately after the disappearance and was reported widely in the years that followed, placed Favara’s fate in a chainsaw and a concrete barrel. According to this version, Favara was brought to a location, possibly a chop shop, where, while still alive, he was dismembered. His remains were then stuffed into a barrel.
The barrel was filled with concrete, and the barrel was dumped either into the ocean off a Sheepshead Bay pier, or buried on the chop shop property. This account gave rise to the version of the story that has been repeated for decades. It is visceral, specific, and completely unverified by physical evidence.
The second account emerged in 2009 in a 44-page evidence motion filed by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn as part of the racketeering case against Charles Carneglia, a Gambino family hitman who was eventually convicted of five murders and sentenced to life in prison. The court document, signed by Assistant United States Attorney Roger Burlingame, listed Favara’s case among several uncharged crimes linked to Carneglia.
According to the filing, Carneglia told a Gambino family associate, who had become a government witness, that he had disposed of Favara’s body by putting it in a barrel of acid. The acid would have dissolved the remains, leaving nothing to recover. The government witness who reported Carneglia’s admission was identified by sources at the New York Daily News as Kevin McMahon, the same Kevin McMahon whose minibike Frank Gotti had been riding the afternoon he was killed.
The boy who had knocked on the Gotti door the day after the funeral to ask about his broken bike. He had grown into a mob associate close to Carneglia, and in the circular logic of this entire story, he was the person who eventually reported what had been done to the man whose fate had been sealed on the afternoon Frank Gotti borrowed his mini bike.
In 2004, acting on informant tips about a suspected mob graveyard in a section of Brooklyn and Queens near Kennedy Airport known as the hole, the FBI conducted an excavation. They dug for 3 days. Two bodies were recovered. John Favara’s was not among them. His remains have never been found. The question that this story keeps returning to is not really about John Favara.
He was an innocent man who was killed for something he did not do deliberately. That conclusion is not in dispute. The question is about the nature of grief, about what grief does to a man who is used to solving problems by applying force, and about whether the logic that governs ordinary human loss, that accidents are not crimes, that the dead cannot be brought back by destroying the living, that punishment requires culpability, applies at all in the world John Gotti inhabited. FBI informant William
Battista reported something that speaks directly to that question. He said that Gotti had not initially wanted revenge, that his first response to Frank’s death was not to immediately order the death of the man responsible. Battista reported that it was only later, after an eyewitness claim that Favara had been speeding, after Victoria’s sustained and deepening grief, after months of watching his wife dress in black and light candles in front of their son’s photograph, that Gotti made
the decision. If Battista’s account is accurate, there was a window, a 4-month window, in which John Favara might have survived his proximity to the Gotti family. He tried to fill that window with the right choices, not pressing charges, putting the house on the market, staying quiet, and trying not to escalate.
What he could not control was the grief of the woman who had lost her son. And what he did not fully understand, perhaps, was how that grief translated into expectation in the world John Gotti moved through. Victoria Gotti Jr. wrote, 20 years later, that she believed Favara would be alive today if he had shown remorse and respect.
She said it was human nature to want revenge. She said she only wished he had been different. There is something important in that statement. Not a justification, nothing in this story constitutes a justification, but an explanation of the internal logic of a world where honor and respect are not abstract concepts, but operational currencies with real consequences.
Favara had taken something irreplaceable from the Gotti family. The world the Gottis inhabited had a specific expectation about how a man who had done that, even accidentally, ought to behave in the aftermath. He told Victoria DiGiorgio she was going to have to pay for the damages to his car.
He told her she was crazy. Those choices cannot be undone. They cannot be unsaid. And in Howard Beach in 1980, in the specific social and moral universe of the Gambino crime family, they sealed whatever fate Gotti was eventually going to decide. Frank Gotti would have turned 13 on October 18th, 1980.
He never did. His siblings grew up. They had children of their own. Each of those children, every Gotti grandchild born after March 18th, 1980, was given the name Frank in honor of the boy who had made the football team on the last day of his life. That detail is the most human thing in this entire story.
Every generation of the family carrying the name of the 12-year-old forward. A boy who died before he was complicated, who was just a kid on a bike on a Tuesday afternoon. Victoria Gotti Jr. dedicated years to keeping her brother’s memory alive through her columns, her memoir, the television productions she executive produced about her family.
In everything she wrote about Frank, the tenderness was total and the grief was the kind that does not resolve. She described him the way people describe someone who left before you got to know who they were going to become. His mother dressed only in black for months. The shrine in the living room stayed lit.
The doctor had to sedate Victoria DiGiorgio because grief was doing what it sometimes does to people for whom their children are everything. John Gotti went back to work. He managed his grief the way men in his world managed things by continuing to operate. By keeping his face controlled, by functioning.
By July 28th, 1980, whatever he had decided was done. John Favara’s wife, Janet, and their two sons built new lives somewhere else. They moved out of Howard Beach immediately. They moved away from the neighborhood and the house and the streets where everything had happened. Janet eventually had John declared legally dead in 1983. She died in 2000.
Their sons have not spoken publicly about their father in any sustained way. There is no grave for John Favara. There is no marker. There is a line in a court document from 2009 and a body of informant testimony and decades of competing accounts about concrete barrels and acid. The case is officially open.
Nobody has ever been charged with his disappearance or murder. Charles Carneglia, named in the court papers as the person who disposed of Favara’s body, died in federal prison in December of 2017. He had been convicted of five murders unrelated to Favara and had never been formally charged in connection with Favara’s death.
John Gotti died in the prison hospital at Springfield, Missouri on June 10th, 2002, throat cancer. He was 61 years old. He had been in federal custody since his arrest at the Ravenite Social Club in December of 1990 and had spent the last decade of his life in the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois.
He never addressed the Favara disappearance publicly beyond the remarks he made to detectives in August of 1980. The case was never prosecuted. The body was never found.