John Gotti Had His Own Top Earner Killed… Then Made Him Disappear Forever – HT
June 5th, 1986. Late afternoon, Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. A stocky, soft-spoken man in a tailored suit walked down a narrow staircase into the basement of a construction office at 1809 Stillwell Avenue. His name was Robert Deernardo, Gambino Capo, porn tycoon, earnner of millions. He thought he was there for a sitdown.
He thought he was there to talk business. He was halfway across the room looking at a blueprint on a desk when a soldier named old man Peruda stepped up behind him and fired two rounds from a silenced 22 caliber pistol into the back of his head. Dernardo dropped where he stood. No struggle, no last words, no warning. Sammy Gravano watched from 20 ft away, arms folded, jaw tight.
The whole thing took less than a minute. By sundown, the body was gone. wrapped, waited, driven out, and buried in a hole no one has ever found. 40 years later, his remains are still missing. This wasn’t just another Gambino hit. Dernardo, everyone called him DB, was one of the men who helped put John Gotti in power. He wasn’t an enemy.
He wasn’t a hold out from the old regime. He was an ally, a confidant, a money machine who poured profits upstairs and never once said no. In the mob, he was what they called a rare bird, a made man who didn’t need to hurt anybody to make a fortune. He ran pornography distribution from the backroom of a Manhattan news stand and built it into a national empire worth tens of millions.
He gave Gotti envelope after envelope. He backed the Castellano hit and 6 months later, he was dead by Gotti’s order. This is the story of how John Gutty, only six months into his reign as boss of the Gambino crime family, pulled the trigger metaphorically on a man who had done nothing wrong. This is the story of a friendship that turned into a death sentence because of one overheard sentence.
This is the story of the hit that haunted Sammy Gravano for the rest of his life. And this is the story that reveals something most mob documentaries won’t tell you. The murder of Paul Castellano was business. The murder of Robert de Bernardo was something darker. It was Gotti showing the five families and his own crew.
Exactly what the new boss was willing to do. But here’s what the history books don’t tell you. DB didn’t just earn for the Gambinos. He was the mafia’s connection to an industry the public pretended didn’t exist. An industry that generated billions. an industry the FBI would later estimate was 85% controlled by organized crime.
And the man who ran the pipeline, the quiet suburban father from Long Island who distributed half the adult material in America was about to learn that being too valuable, too smart, and too independent made you more dangerous than any enemy. To understand why Gotti killed him, you have to understand who Deardo really was. Robert de Bernardo was born on May 31st, 1937 in Hwlet, Long Island.
Middle-class neighborhood, treelined streets. The kind of place where the mafia was something you read about in the newspaper, not something you grew up around. His father ran a small business. The family wasn’t connected. DB wasn’t a street kid. He didn’t come up in the social clubs of Benenhurst or the cafes of Malbury Street.
He didn’t have a reputation as a fighter. He was cleancut, soft-spoken, almost bookish. People who met him in his 20s said he looked more like an accountant than a gangster. He wore glasses. He spoke in a low, even voice. He didn’t curse. He didn’t raise his hand. And that’s what made him perfect for what came next. In the late 1960s, DB got involved with a small softcore magazine distribution operation in Manhattan. Nothing major.
Pinup magazines, cheap paperbacks with bare skin on the covers, sold out of corner news stands and small bookshops in Time Square. At the time, the adult industry in America was a legal gray zone. Obscenity laws varied by state. Distribution was fragmented. Most of it was run by small-time operators who didn’t know what they were sitting on.
DB saw what nobody else saw. He saw scale. He saw logistics. He saw a supply chain nobody had built yet. He partnered up with a Gambino soldier named Theodore Rothstein and another operator named Attori Zappy and together they founded Star Distributors in the late 1960s. The company operated out of lower Manhattan.
On paper it was a legitimate magazine wholesaler. In reality, it was about to become the single largest distributor of hardcore pornography in the United States. Star distributors supplied peep show booths, adult bookstores, and mail order catalogs from coast to coast. By the mid 1970s, DB controlled the pipeline that fed nearly every major adult retailer east of the Mississippi.
Here’s how the scheme actually worked. The producers, mostly small outfits in California, shot the films cheap, budgets of 10,000, 20,000, sometimes less. They pressed the material onto 8mm reels and later videotape. DB’s company bought the master rights or the distribution rights. Star would then duplicate and ship the product nationally through a network of independent trucking companies, most of them connected to the mob one way or another.
The wholesale margin was enormous. A reel that cost $2 to produce was sold to retailers for 15. A videotape that cost $4 to duplicate was sold for 45. Retailers then sold to customers for 90 or 100. At every step, the mob took a cut. DB sat at the top of the pyramid. By 1975, the New York Times was running front page investigations into what they called the quote pornographic periodicals tied to organized crime.
They named Star Distributors. They named D Bernardo. They reported that DB had the last word at Star. He wasn’t hiding. He didn’t have to. Obscinity prosecutions were difficult. Federal law was unsettled. And DB had something most mobsters didn’t. He had lawyers, accountants, a legitimate looking corporate structure. He was the mafia’s first white collar keo.
The money he generated was staggering. Federal estimates place the organized crime take from adult entertainment at somewhere between$500 million and $1 billion a year during the late 1970s and early 1980s. DB personally earned tens of millions and he kicked a massive percentage of it up to Paul Castellano, the boss of the Gambino family. Castellano loved him.
Why wouldn’t he? DB didn’t ask for favors. He didn’t cause problems. He didn’t get into shooting wars. He just earned. He was the perfect soldier for Castellano’s new mafia, the white collar mafia. The suit and tie mafia that Castellano was trying to build to replace the old street level model. And that right there is the first crack in the foundation.
You have to understand the structure of the Gambino family in the mid 1980s. Paul Castellano had been boss since 1976. He’d taken over after Carlo Gambino died. Castellano was a businessman. He wore tailored suits. He lived in a mansion on Staten Island that the crews called the White House. He rarely came down to the social clubs in Brooklyn.
He didn’t drink with the soldiers. He didn’t eat with the cappos. He ruled from a distance. And he made his money through white collar rackets, construction, labor unions, meat trucks, and through deardo, pornography. Under Castellano, there were two distinct factions forming inside the family. The first was the white collar faction, Castellano’s guys.
Guys like Thomas Balotti, his driver and closest confidant. Guys like De Bernardo, who ran the high margin legal and semi-legal rackets. The second was the old school street faction. Neil Delacross was the underboss. He ran the Manhattan and Queens crews. And under Delacrosi was a hotheaded, ambitious cappo from Ozone Park named John Gotti.
Gotti hated Castellano. He called him a pansy, a stool pigeon in a suit, a boss who didn’t understand the streets. Gotti ran the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club at 101-78 Rockaway Boulevard in Ozone Park. He came up hijacking trucks and running numbers. He’d done time for manslaughter. He had dirt under his fingernails.
And he believed the family belonged to men like him, not men like Castellano. The feud came to a head in 1985. Angelo Rugierro, Gotti’s closest friend from childhood and a made man in the Gambino family, had been caught on FBI wire taps. The tapes had captured Ruggierro talking about heroin. Heroin was forbidden.
Castellano had a strict rule. Any made man caught dealing narcotics would be killed. Castellano demanded the tapes. Roger refused to hand them over. Gotti backed Rougero. The standoff became a crisis. If Castellano got the tapes, he could justify killing Rugiro, Gotti’s brother, Jean, who was also implicated, and probably Jon himself. Gotti knew that.
He knew the clock was ticking. Neil Deacross, the underboss, was the only thing protecting Gotti. Delicacross was old school. He commanded respect from every faction. He kept Castellano from moving on Gotti. But Delacrosce was dying of cancer. On December 2nd, 1985, he passed away. Two weeks later, on December 16th, 1985, Paul Castellano and Thomas Botti stepped out of a black Lincoln sedan in front of Sparks Steakhouse at 210 East 46th Street in Midtown Manhattan.
Four shooters in matching tan trench coats and black fur hats stepped forward and opened fire. Castellano was hit six times in the head and body. Bulotti was shot four times and died on the pavement. Neither man had time to draw a weapon. Gotti and Gravano sat in a Lincoln parked a block away watching. This is where DB enters the endgame of his own life.
Here’s what most people don’t know. The Castellano hit wasn’t a one-man decision. Gotti needed support. He needed capos in the family to agree, at least tacitly, that Castellano had to go. He needed their silence, if not their blessing. And Robert Dernardo gave it to him. DB had been close to Castellano.
He’d earned millions for the pope. But when Gotti and his crew approached him quietly in the weeks before the hit, DB signed on. He believed in the move. He agreed the family needed new leadership. He was tired of Castellano’s distance, his arrogance, his refusal to share the wealth beyond his own inner circle. So when the shooters stepped out at Sparks on that freezing December night, Dernardo was one of the men who had in the shadows made the hit politically possible.
In the days after the murder, Gotti called a sitdown at a Brooklyn social club. Every major capo in the family was summoned. Goti wanted to be named boss and he wanted the vote to be unanimous. DB was there. He voted yes. He didn’t hesitate. The family had a new boss. John Gotti, age 45, the hustler from Howard Beach, was now the leader of the most powerful crime family in America.
What DB didn’t know was that Gotti was already thinking about killing him. Here’s where you have to understand Gotti’s psychology. Gotti was insecure. deeply, violently insecure. He’d come up in a world of street guys who measured respect by fear. He didn’t trust earners. He didn’t trust guys who were smarter than him.
And he especially didn’t trust guys who had been close to Castellano, no matter how much they’d helped in the coup. In Gotti’s mind, anyone who had voted to kill one boss, could vote to kill another. DB was too close to the old regime. DB was too rich. DB was too respected and DB unlike Gotti was making real money.
There was another factor. Gotti had been indicted. Three months after becoming boss in March of 1986, federal prosecutors hit him with a RICO indictment tied to old hijacking and assault charges. He was facing trial. He was distracted. He was paranoid. And with Gotti locked in trial preparation, day-to-day control of the family was being handled by a rotating group of capos.
De Bernardo, as one of the highest earners, began to step forward. He attended meetings. He handled disputes. He made decisions. And somewhere in a conversation that has been debated for 38 years, DB said the wrong thing. According to Sammy Graano’s later testimony, Angelo Rogerro came to him in the spring of 1986. Rogerro told Gravano that D Bernardo had been talking.
Specifically, Rogerro claimed that DB had said while Gotti was tied up in court that maybe he de Bernardo should be under boss or acting boss that he could handle things better than the hottheheads in Gotti’s inner circle. Riierro went to Gotti with this story. Gotti exploded. In Gotti’s mind, this was treason. This was a move.
This was another capo positioning to take over while he was vulnerable. But here’s the part that matters. Years later, when Gravano became a cooperating witness and sat with federal prosecutors, he admitted he never actually heard D. Bernardo say any such thing. Rogerro had claimed it. Gotti had believed it, but there was no wire tap, no second witness, no proof.
Some in the family have always believed that Angelo Rogerro, who owed DB a significant amount of money at the time, manufactured the whole story to get out from under the debt. Others believe Rogerro genuinely heard something and exaggerated. What’s documented is that DB was condemned on the word of one man, a man with an obvious motive to lie.
Gravano didn’t want to do it. He said as much on the witness stand in 1992. He testified that D Bernardo was his friend, that DB had mentored him in the commercial side of the rackets, that DB had helped him move into the construction business. Gravano said under oath that he protested the hit. He told Gotti there was no proof.
He asked if they could wait, look into it, confirm what DB had actually said. Gotti wouldn’t hear it. Gotti gave the order. Kill him. Do it fast. Do it clean. And do it before the heat on Riro makes everything worse. Here’s how the hit actually went down. Gravano ran a construction company called SNG Construction operating out of a two-story office building at 1809 Stillwell Avenue in Bensonhurst.
The building had a basement. The basement was quiet. It was where Gravano did his paperwork, met with contractors, and occasionally did things that couldn’t be done anywhere else. Gravano sent word to De Bernardo that he needed to meet about a construction issue. Nothing unusual. DB trusted Gravano.
They’d worked together for years. On the afternoon of June 5th, 1986, De Bernardo drove his white Cadillac to Stillwell Avenue. He parked on the street. He walked up to the office. He was dressed in a suit because DB was always dressed in a suit. He went inside. Gravano greeted him. They made small talk. Then Gravano suggested they go down to the basement to look at some blueprints for a job.
DB went first down the narrow staircase. Waiting at the bottom was a Gambino soldier named Joseph Paruta. Old man Paruta, the cruise called him. Parut was in his 60s, hands like leather. He’d done this kind of work before. He was standing behind a support column holding a 22 caliber pistol fitted with a homemade silencer. DB walked past him.
DB didn’t see him. DB was focused on the desk where the blueprints were laid out. He bent slightly to look at the paper. Peruda stepped forward and fired twice. Both shots hit the back of DB’s head close range, no more than 4t away. DB collapsed onto the desk, then slid to the floor.
Gravano later testified that he stood frozen for a moment, looking down at the man who had been his friend. Then the professionals moved in. The body was wrapped in a tarp. A crew of three Gambino associates, names that have never been fully confirmed in open court, carried the body out to a waiting van.
They drove it to a pre-dug grave somewhere in the New York or New Jersey area. Some believe it was a construction site. Others believe it was a patch of wooded land in Staten Island. A few insiders have suggested it was mixed into the foundation of a building that was being poured that week. Wherever it was, the hole was filled, the earth was smoothed, and Robert de Bernardo disappeared.
His white Cadillac was later recovered. Some accounts say it was found in the Graves End neighborhood of Brooklyn. Engine off, doors locked, keys still in the ignition. The FBI opened a missing person investigation. DB’s family reported him gone within 24 hours. But in the summer of 1986, federal agents already had their hands full with the Castellano murder, the commission case against the five family bosses, and a dozen ongoing RICO investigations.
Dernardo’s disappearance was entered into the books. It would stay open for years. The aftermath inside the family was immediate and ugly. DB’s crew was dissolved. His soldiers were redistributed. His rackets, most importantly the pornography distribution network, were absorbed by other capos. Sammy Gravano himself took over a significant chunk of DB’s legitimate businesses.
Within a month, Graano was sitting in meetings where Goti joked about Dernardo’s disappearance. Gotti would say things like, “That guy always had big ideas, didn’t he?” The other Capos laughed nervously. Gravano didn’t laugh. He wrote later in his memoir and in sealed testimony that the Dernardo killing was the moment he first understood what John Gotti really was.
Not a boss, not a leader, something smaller, a man who killed out of fear and called it strategy. But here’s where it gets darker. There’s a detail about De Bernardo that Gotti used years later to justify the hit after the fact. At the time of his death, DB was under federal investigation. Not for pornography distribution, which had made him rich, for something else.
Federal investigators in New Jersey had begun building a case tying DB to the distribution of child pornography. Specifically, investigators believe that Star distributors and affiliated companies had been handling material that crossed every legal and moral line. The investigation was in its early stages.
No indictment had been filed, but rumors had reached the family. Goti used this publicly and privately to suggest that DB had deserved what he got. On tapes recorded by the FBI at the Ravenite Social Club at 247 Malbury Street in Little Italy, Gotti was heard complaining that DB had been a sick degenerate, that the family was better off without him, that the killing was a moral act, not a political one.
Some of the rank and file bought this story. Sammy Gravano never did. Gravano said decades later that if the child pornography investigation had been the real reason, Gotti would have said so before the hit, not after. The truth, Graano argued, was simpler. Dernardo was becoming too powerful. Riro wanted his debt erased and Gotti wanted to send a message. The message was this.
No one is safe. Not friends, not earners, not allies. Loyalty means nothing. The boss decides who lives and who dies. And the boss doesn’t need a reason. D. Bernardo’s legacy inside the underworld is strange and quiet. He didn’t die in a hail of bullets on the street. He didn’t go down in a courtroom. He vanished.
And because he vanished, his myth never grew the way it would have if there had been a body, a funeral, a newspaper photo of his corpse on a Brooklyn sidewalk. For years, some in the family didn’t fully believe he was dead. There were rumors he’d gone into hiding. Rumors he’d cut a deal and been given a new identity.
Rumors his body was in the foundation of the Meadowland Sports Complex or under a parking lot in Queens or waited down in the water somewhere off the Rockaways. None of it was ever proven. None of it ever will be. What happened to the men who killed him? Old man Peruta the shooter was never charged with the Dernardo murder.
He died of natural causes in the early 1990s before any charges could be brought. Angelo Rugggerro, the man whose accusation started the whole thing, never got to enjoy his freedom from the debt. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1988. Gotti, furious about the heroin tapes and now ashamed of his old friend, refused to visit him.
Rogerro died on December 4th, 1989 alone, cut off from the boss he’d helped make. He was 49. Sammy Gravano rose to underboss. In 1991, he was arrested along with Gotti on federal RICO charges. On November 8th, 1991, Gravano agreed to cooperate. He became the highest ranking mafia turncoat in American history. His testimony put Gotti away for life.
And among the 19 murders Gravano confessed to, the one he returned to over and over in his interviews, the one he said haunted him most was the killing of Robert D. Bernardo. He said it on the stand. He said it to journalists. He said it in his memoir. He’d killed rivals. He’d killed enemies. He’d killed men who had it coming.
But DB hadn’t had it coming. And Graano knew it. John Gotti himself was convicted on April 2nd, 1992 on charges that included the murder of Paul Castellano and the murder of Robert de Bernardo. He was sentenced to life without parole. He was sent to the federal prison in Maran, Illinois, and later to the medical center for federal prisoners in Springfield, Missouri.
He died of throat cancer on June 10th, 2002. He was 61 years old. And here’s the thing the movies never quite capture. John Gotti, the teflon don, the media friendly gangster in the $3,000 suits, died in a cage. His family was shattered. His son would go to prison. His empire would crumble within a decade of his arrest. The Gambino family today is a shadow of what it was in 1985.
The rackets that De Bernardo built were dismantled by federal task forces through the 1990s. Star distributors was seized. The peep show economy collapsed with the rise of the internet. Everything DB had built, everything Goti had inherited was gone within 15 years. So what does the murder of Robert Dernardo actually tell us? It tells us that the mafia at its core was never really about loyalty.
The code of silence, the oaths, the blood rituals, the kiss on the cheek, all of it was theater. The real operating principle was fear. Fear of being thought disloyal. Fear of being thought too ambitious. Fear of being thought not ambitious enough. A boss didn’t need evidence to kill you. He needed a feeling.
And if the feeling came from a trusted friend with a motive to lie, that was enough. It tells us that the white collar mafia Paul Castellano tried to build, the one that could have made the five families a quiet, permanent fixture of the American economy, was killed the moment De Bernardo hit the basement floor. Because DB wasn’t just an earner, he was a proof of concept.
He was evidence that you could make tens of millions of dollars for the mob without ever picking up a gun. When Gotti killed him, he didn’t just kill a man. He killed an idea. He killed the future. He told every white collar earner in the family that intelligence and success would get you buried faster than a street war.
And it tells us something about the reality of power. John Gotti became boss because he was willing to kill Paul Castellano. He stayed boss because he was willing to kill Robert Deernardo. Castellano’s death was strategic. Dernardo’s death was pure paranoia. The first one put Gotti on the throne. The second one revealed what kind of king he was going to be.
A king who couldn’t tolerate rivals, real or imagined. A king who killed friends to prove he could. A king whose reign would last less than seven years before ending in a federal courtroom. Dernardo’s wife, Anne Deliso Deernardo, lived in the Hullet home they’d shared for decades. For years, she held out hope that her husband might walk through the door.
She raised their children without answers. She attended no funeral. She had no grave to visit. In interviews given long after the fact, family members said the worst part wasn’t knowing he was dead. The worst part was the silence. Nobody, no apology, no explanation, just the absence where a father and a husband used to be.
40 years later, DB’s remains have never been found. Federal investigators have searched sites in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and New Jersey. They’ve dug up parking lots. They’ve probed construction foundations. They’ve interviewed every former Gambino associate still alive. Nothing. Wherever old man Peruta and his crew buried Robert Dernardo on the night of June 5th, 1986, the secret died with the men who knew. Robert D.
Bernardo made the Gambino family richer than almost any capo in its history. He earned respect without violence. He built an empire of paper, film, and distribution that changed the economics of American organized crime. He supported John Gotti when Gotti needed him most. And for all of it, for every envelope, every vote, every loyal act, he got two 22 caliber rounds in the back of his head from a man he trusted.
That’s the real story of the mafia. Not the honor, not the brotherhood, not the romance the movies sell you. The real story is this. You can be the smartest man in the room. You can be the highest earner in the family. You can help crown the new king and none of it matters because in the end, the king decides.
And the king was John Gotti. And John Gotti killed the one man who more than any enemy proved what the job really required. The willingness to murder a friend for no reason at all. If you found this story as chilling as we do, hit that subscribe button. We drop a new mob documentary every week. Deep dives into the men, the money, and the moments that built and broke the American underworld.
Drop a comment below. Do you think Goti genuinely believed Dernardo was plotting against him? Or do you think he used Ruggerro’s story as an excuse to eliminate a rival? Let us know and we’ll see you on the next one.