The Mafia Enforcer Who Cheated Death Row — And Walked Free – Ht

 

 

 

He walked away from death row and back into the streets with blood still on his hands only to kill again. If you want to know how a man can cheat the electric chair, vanish for 7 years, and still end up hunt his enemies in the shadows of Little Italy, stay with this story till the end because Carmine DiBiase proved that in the mafia, you never really leave.

 New York City, Lower Manhattan, December 26, 1951, 1:00 a.m. Carmine DiBiase walks into the Mayfair Boys Civic and Social Club at 167 Mulberry Street. He is 29 years old, 5 ft 8 in, 210 lb, wavy black hair, brown eyes. He wears a silk shirt open at the collar, gold necklace over his chest, pointed Italian shoes polished to a mirror shine.

 The club has tin ceilings, battered wood floors, a bar, pool table, scattered chairs and tables, no liquor license. It serves drinks until dawn anyway. This is his club. He runs it with his best friend Michael Eriello. Everyone calls Eriello Mikey Evans. Three people are inside. Rocky Tisi plays pool with a man called Pretty Willie. At the bar, Mikey Evans sleeps.

His head rests on his folded arms. 16-year-old Joe Luperelli sits watching the pool game. He lives across the street with his mother and sister. His father is dead. He grew up wild on Mulberry Street. He knows the mob guys. He runs errands for them. DiBiase catches Joe’s eye. He motions him outside.

 Joe follows him into the street. “Go to 13 Elizabeth Street,” DiBiase says. “Wake up Sonny Red. Tell him to bring my guns.” Joe walks three blocks to the Elizabeth Street apartment. He knocks on the door. 20-year-old Alphonse Indelicato answers. Everyone calls him Sonny Red. Joe delivers the message. Indelicato puts two revolvers in a paper bag.

 He and Joe walk back to Mulberry Street. They enter the club. Rocky and Pretty Willie see the guns. They drop their pool cues. They run for the door. DiBiase pulls out one revolver. He stands over his sleeping friend. He fires three times. One bullet hits the head. One hits the stomach. One hits the heart. Michael Eriello dies He never opens his eyes.

 Indelicato fires at Rocky and Pretty Willie as they scramble through the doorway. He misses. He clubs Rocky in the ankle with the gun. Rocky falls. Blood spreads across the floor. Joe Luperelli stands frozen against the wall. He is 16 years old. He has just watched Sonny Pinto murder his business partner, his best friend, the man who stood beside him at his wedding, the godfather to one of his children.

DiBiase drops the gun on the floor. He looks down at the body. Later, he tells a reporter, “I felt sorry because I knew I was at a hospital and I knew he was going to the morgue.” He walks out the door. He disappears into the night. The New York Police Department arrives at 167 Mulberry Street at 1:47 a.m.

 Homicide detectives photograph the scene. They measure the room. They interview witnesses. Rocky Tisi tells them everything. Two Sunnys, Sonny Pinto and Sonny Red. They both had guns. They shot Mikey Evans while he slept. The police place Rocky in protective custody. He stays there for 7 years. It becomes a New York record that still stands.

Alphonse Indelicato is arrested within days. He is tried and convicted. The judge sentences him to 12 years in Sing Sing prison. Carmine DiBiase is gone. He has vanished from New York. The police search for him. They find nothing. In 1952, DiBiase is indicted for first-degree murder. The warrant goes out.

 The FBI takes notice. They add his name to their lists. They circulate his photograph. 5 ft 8 210 lb wavy black hair brown eyes scar on his left temple and upper lip tattoo on his wrist Pinto 1949. He was born in 1922 to Gustav and Lena DiBiase, first-generation Italian immigrants. He grew up in Little Italy with his brother Gaetano.

 At 18 in 1940, he and a friend named Salvatore Granello tried to rob a tailor on Hudson Street. The robbery failed. DiBiase pistol-whipped the victim eight times. He was arrested, convicted of attempted robbery, sentenced to the State Vocational Institution at Coxsackie. He came out. In 1944, he went back. Five years at Elmira State Reformatory.

 Same crime, same pattern. Between 1940 and 1951, he was arrested eight times. The cops in New York saw him as a peanut punk, a small-time hood who would never amount to much. They were wrong. After his release from Elmira, he worked as a machinist, a millwright, a painter, a plumber’s helper, a salesman, a shipping clerk. Once, he worked as a tailor.

 He married, had two children, lived with his parents at various addresses in Little Italy. He drank Scotch whiskey. He dressed like a textbook hood, silk shirts, gold chains, monogrammed underwear, pointed shoes. He had a temper. When he was sober, people said he was nothing. When he was drunk, he would blow your head off.

 On December 25th, 1951, DiBiase got drunk, very drunk. He and Mikey Evans had been arguing for days. Word on the street said Mikey had been cheating players at the card games in the club. Worse, he had been skimming money from the poker machines, money that belonged to both of them. The partnership was broken. The friendship was dead.

 DiBiase spent Christmas Day at his apartment on Grand Street. Then he went to his mother-in-law’s house. Around 1:00 a.m., he went uptown to the Town Crest Bar and Grill. He drank more Scotch. Then he came back to Little Italy, back to 167 Mulberry Street, back to the club he owned with the man he was about to kill. The newspapers would call him Rat Face, bowlegged, a roast suckling pig.

 The FBI would call him a man who will kill without provocation. But Joe Luperelli, the 16-year-old boy who fetched guns, would remember him differently. “Sober, he was nothing,” Joe said years later. “But drunk, he would blow your head off.” On May 28th, 1956, Carmine DiBiase became fugitive number 98 on the FBI 10 Most Wanted list.

 He stayed there for 2 years. He was one of the only Italian-American mob guys to make the list. He remained on it longer than most serial killers and bank robbers who usually populated those rankings. For 7 years, no one saw Carmine DiBiase. Some said he lived with Rusty Rastelli, a soldier in the Bonanno family.

 Some said he never left New York. Some said he fled to Florida. No one knew for sure. The FBI searched. The NYPD searched. His wife stayed silent. His family stayed silent. Sonny Pinto had disappeared like smoke. Then in August 1958, DiBiase walked into a New York police station with his lawyer Maurice Edelbaum beside him.

 “I am getting older and accomplishing nothing having to stay away from my wife and children, mother and father,” he told the police. “I am glad it is over. I had come in.” Maurice Edelbaum was short, fat. He wore rumpled suits. He was also one of the most expensive and effective criminal defense attorneys in New York.

 He represented Vito Genovese, Carmine Persico, Vincent Gigante, John Franzese, Joseph Bonanno. He defended the mobsters arrested at Apalachin in 1957. If you were connected and in trouble, you called Maurice Edelbaum. DiBiase went to trial in 1959. The prosecution had Joe Luperelli. They had Rocky Tisi. They had the crime scene. They had the murder weapon.

 They had everything. On May 3rd, 1959, the jury convicted Carmine DiBiase of first-degree murder. Judge Michael D. Schweitzer sentenced him to death in the electric chair. But Maurice Edelbaum had a plan. When DiBiase surrendered in 1958, the police questioned him without his lawyer present. They took his statement.

They used it at trial. This Edelbaum argued violated his client’s constitutional rights. The appeal went to the New York Court of Appeals. In April 1960, the judges agreed with Edelbaum. One judge wrote, “The defendant had a right to the effective aid and assistance of the attorney who represented him.

 The fact that his attorney surrendered him for such arraignment in court could not possibly be regarded as a consent or invitation to secret interrogation by police or prosecutor or a waiver of fundamental rights.” The conviction was overturned. A new trial was ordered. On March 1st, 1961, Carmine DiBiase walked out of court a free man.

 A man convicted of first-degree murder, sentenced to death. Two years later, after a retrial whose records remain sealed, he was acquitted. It was a remarkable reversal. Some said Matty Ianniello, a powerful Genovese family crew boss, had helped DiBiase while he was on the run. Some said Ianniello paid Morris Edelbaum’s fees.

 Some said the fix was in. No one knew for certain. What was certain, Sonny Pinto was back on the streets. For the next 11 years, there’s little in the public record about Carmine DiBiase. FBI files show he was suspected in several murders. Harold Konigsberg, a Jewish hit man, claimed DiBiase helped kill Ollie Wafa in July 1963. Wafa was Joey Gallo’s errand bodyguard.

They ambushed him when he returned from a sea journey to the Hoboken docks. In 1968, Michael Granello was found shot dead in a car on 86th Street and Riverside Drive. Michael was a drug addict. He had been robbing made men. Once, he beat a mobster named Caserta almost to death with a baseball bat. Michael’s father was Salvatore Granello, Sally Burns, DiBiase’s childhood friend from the 1940 tailor robbery.

 An FBI confidential informant said DiBiase killed Michael. In December 1968, the FBI claimed Thomas Abbatemarco ordered the hit. Michael was dealing narcotics. In the mob, that was a death sentence. Sally Burns swore vengeance against his son’s killers. In September 1970, he disappeared. His garroted and shot body was found in a car on October 6th, 1970 at East River Drive and Hudson Street.

The FBI suspected DiBiase was involved. An FBI report from 1969 shows DiBiase running an illegal card game at 209 West 79th Street. His partners, Victor Trimalglino, Charlie Blum, Hugh Mulligan, Stanley Ackerman, Spanish Raymond Marquez, Italian, Irish, Jewish, Hispanic, a united nations of crime.

 By the late 1960s, DiBiase was living in Southbridge Towers at 90 Beekman Street in Lower Manhattan with his wife. FBI reports listed him as a made man in the Genovese family. Some sources claimed he was Colombo. No one agrees. Where everyone agrees, Sonny Pinto was a killer for hire. On New Year’s Eve 1970, Joseph Fatti Russo held a party at his home on Packanack Lake in Wayne County, New Jersey.

 Russo was connected. His uncle was a member of one of the five families. Fatti himself grew up on Mulberry Street. He knew Sonny Pinto most of his life. He made his money in drug trafficking. After midnight, the party went wrong. Russo hired two black people to work the event. Charles Shepherd, a 31-year-old musician and bartender, Shirley Green, his common-law wife who worked as a waitress in Manhattan.

 Over 30 guests attended. Children were there. By the end of the night, Russo was drunk or stoned or both. He saw Shepherd drinking his alcohol. Worse, Shepherd was dancing with Russo’s nephew’s wife. Russo stormed upstairs to his bedroom. He grabbed a loaded .38 caliber handgun. He came back down. In front of everyone, he emptied the gun into Charles Shepherd. Shepherd died instantly.

The guests held Shirley Green down as she screamed and struggled. Russo went back upstairs. He reloaded the gun. He came back down. He shot Shirley Green six times in the head. The guests fled. Three friends stayed behind. They helped Russo carry both bodies to a car. They drove 15 miles to Pinebrook Road in Montville.

 They dumped the bodies in snowdrifts along the road. The bodies were discovered on January 1st, 1971. New Jersey police traced the murders to Russo’s home. By then, Russo had moved to Florida. So had all the party guests. Expenses paid by Fatti. Sonny Pinto was also in Florida. Sun and R&R, courtesy of Joseph Russo. Russo was arrested and charged with two counts of murder.

 He turned to Carmine Persico, a powerful capo in the Colombo family. Persico assured him the case could be fixed through crooked cops and judges. Russo was tried twice, acquitted both times. Federal investigators tapped phone calls between Russo, Joe Iacovelli, and Carmine DiBiase. The calls indicated Russo was being offered help to avoid prosecution.

 On August 8th, 1972, federal warrants were issued against all three men for conspiracy. On November 13th, 1972, they were indicted for conspiring to help Russo evade justice. In September 1973, a mistrial was declared in the case against Russo and Persico. By then, both Iacovelli and DiBiase were fugitives. Less than a year earlier, Sonny Pinto had been involved in another murder, one that would echo across New York louder than any before.

 Joseph Gallo was a mobster who became a legend. Everyone called him Crazy Joe, sometimes Joe the Blond. He was 5 ft 6 in inches, 145 lb, skinny, blue eyes that people never forgot. Cold eyes, ancient eyes, eyes that watched everything. He grew up in Brooklyn with his brothers Larry and Albert. They formed a street crew called the Cockroach Gang.

 They terrorized Fourth Avenue and Sackett Street. In the 1950s, they became protégés of Frank Frankie Shots Abbatemarco, a major policy banker in the Profaci crime family. In October 1959, the Gallo brothers were ordered to kill Frankie Shots. Joe Profaci wanted him dead. Profaci was the boss. What he wanted, he got.

 The Gallos used a torpedo, Joseph Joe Jelly Joeyelli. Joe Jelly and a partner shot Abbatemarco nine times at his cousin’s tavern on Fourth Avenue and Carroll Street. The Gallos thought they would take over Frankie Shots’ policy bank as a reward. They were wrong. Profaci gave the business to his underboss Joe Magliocco.

 The Gallos were furious. They decided to go to war. From 1960 to 1963, the Gallo and Profaci war raged across Brooklyn. The Gallos never numbered more than 25 men. They fought a family of over 200 made men and hundreds of associates. It was suicidal. It was audacious. It was Joey Gallo. In January 1962, Joey was convicted on extortion charges.

He was sentenced to 14 years. The judge said, “Joey Gallo has an utter contempt for the law and is a menace to society.” While Joey was in prison, Joe Profaci died of cancer. Joseph Colombo took over family. The war ended, or so it seemed. In March 1971, Joey Gallo was released from prison. He divorced his first wife.

 He [snorts] married Sina Essary, a dental technician and former novice nun. He moved from Brooklyn to Greenwich Village. He hung out with actors, writers, artists. He socialized with Jerry Orbach. He read Sartre and Camus. He became part of the counterculture. Mafia chic, the newspapers called it. But Joey had not changed.

 He demanded tribute from the Colombo family. He wanted his old rackets back, the policy banks, the loan shark operations, the vending machines. He wanted at least 10 of his crew made into the family. On June 28th, 1971, Joseph Colombo was shot at a rally of his Italian-American Civil Rights League in Columbus Circle.

 The shooter was Jerome Johnson, a black man who was immediately killed by an unidentified gunman. Colombo survived, but was left in a vegetative state. He would die 7 years later without ever recovering. The word on the street, Joey Gallo ordered the hit. Whether he did or not, the Colombo family believed it.

 Joey was a target from that moment forward. On April 6th, 1972, Joey Gallo celebrated his 43rd birthday. He and his wife Cina, his stepdaughter, his sister, and his bodyguard Pete the Greek Diapoulos went to the Copacabana. Don Rickles was performing. They stayed until after 4:00 a.m. Then they went to Umberto’s Clam House on Mulberry Street in Little Italy.

 It had opened 2 months earlier. Joey ordered shrimp scungilli clams. At 4:30 a.m., the door opened. Men rushed inside. Guns came out. Shots filled the restaurant. Joey tried to reach for his own gun. He never made it. Bullets hit him in the back, the buttocks, the left elbow. He staggered toward the front door. He collapsed on the sidewalk outside.

 He died at Beekman Downtown Hospital. Four men were seen fleeing the scene. Joe Luparelli, the same 16-year-old boy who fetched gun for Sonny Pinto in 1951, was one of them. He was now 37 years old. He was a driver for the Colombo family. He had been at Umberto’s that night. He saw everything. Luparelli went to the FBI.

 He said the shooters were Philip “Brother” Gambino, Carmine “Sonny” DiBiase, Joseph Luparelli identified the man who walked in first, the man who fired the first shot. Carmine “Sonny” Pinto DiBiase. According to Luparelli, DiBiase was the main shooter. He fired a .38 caliber revolver. He was drunk. He was always drunk when he killed.

 “Sober, he was nothing,” Luparelli said again, “but drunk, he would blow your head off.” The NYPD investigated. They found witnesses. They found ballistics. They found blood trails. They never found Carmine DiBiase. He had disappeared again, just like 1951. Sonny Pinto vanished without a trace. On August 8th, 1972, federal warrants were issued for DiBiase in connection with the Russo conspiracy case.

On November 13th, 1972, he was indicted. He never appeared in court. He was gone. Some say DiBiase fled to Europe. Some say he went to South America. Some say he never left New York. In 1973, there was a reported sighting in California. In 1975, someone claimed to have seen him in Las Vegas. None of it was verified.

 The FBI searched. The NYPD searched. Interpol searched. Nothing. Years passed. The Joey Gallo murder case went cold. The Russo conspiracy case stalled without DiBiase. The federal indictment remained open. The warrant stayed active, but Carmine DiBiase stayed hidden. In 1978, there was a rumor. A man matching DiBiase’s description was spotted at a mob funeral in Queens.

 5 ft 8 heavy build wavy gray hair brown eyes. He stood in the back. He wore dark glasses. He left before anyone could approach. Some people swore it was Sonny Pinto. Some said it was just wishful thinking. No one could prove anything. After that, nothing. No sightings. No tips. No leads. Carmine DiBiase became a ghost. The FBI listed him as a fugitive until 1988.

Then the file was marked inactive, not closed, just inactive. The assumption DiBiase was dead. He would have been 66 years old in 1988. Old for a mobster. Old for a man who lived the way he lived. The FBI believed he died sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Natural causes or mob hit? No one knew which.

 His body was never found. Joe Luparelli, the boy who fetched the guns in 1951 and drove the killers to Umberto’s in 1972, died in 1982. He was 47 years old. He died of natural causes. Before he died, he repeated his story. Sonny Pinto killed Joey Gallo. He fired first. He fired most. He was a shooter.

 In 2021, a book was published, Mafia Hit Man, Carmine DiBiase, the wise guy who really killed Joey Gallo. Authors Frank Dimatteo and Michael Benson laid out the case. Eyewitness testimony. FBI reports. Court records. Police files. All of it pointed to one man, Carmine “Sonny” Pinto DiBiase. The NYPD never officially closed the Joey Gallo murder case.

It remains unsolved in the department’s records. But everyone who knew the players, the mobsters, the FBI agents, the prosecutors, they all believed the same thing. Sonny Pinto did it. He walked into Umberto’s Clam House at 4:30 a.m. on April 7th, 1972. He shot Joey Gallo three times. He walked out. He disappeared.

 He never came back. Carmine DiBiase’s life reads like a blueprint for the mafia enforcer who tried to leave, but never could. He killed his best friend on Christmas 1951. He fled for 7 years. He beat death row on a technicality. He walked free. He killed again and again. He became a suspect in the most famous mob hit of the 1970s.

Then he vanished for good. He never tried to go straight. He never flipped. He never cooperated. He lived by the gun. When the law closed in, he ran. When the heat died down, he came back. When the heat returned, he ran again. He spent more time on the run than he did in prison.

 7 years after the Eric Yellow murder. Another open-ended run after the Gallo hit. He died, assuming he died as a fugitive. His FBI file contains eight arrests. Two prison terms. One murder conviction overturned. One death sentence overturned. Multiple murder investigations. Two years on the FBI 10 Most Wanted list. Two federal indictments.

 One for murder. One for conspiracy. Both remained open for decades. The FBI described him as a man who will kill without provocation. Murray Seidellbaum, his lawyer, called him a good client. Joe Luparelli called him a drunk with a gun. Pete Diapoulos, Joey Gallo’s bodyguard, called him a nobody who became a killer when whiskey hit his blood.

He drank Scotch whiskey. He loved women. He hated being disrespected. He killed his best friend over money. He killed Joey Gallo over territory. He killed Michael Granello over drugs. He helped kill Ollie Waife because Joey Gallo needed him dead. He probably killed others whose names never made the files. In the end, Carmine DiBiase proved a simple truth about the mafia.

You can try to leave, but the life never leaves you. He walked away from death row. He walked away from New York. He walked away from the FBI. But he walked right back into the same world that created him. The same streets. The same clubs. The same violence. He tried to leave after killing Mikey Evans. He came back.

 He tried to leave after killing Joey Gallo. He never came back. Or maybe he did once, to a funeral in Queens in 1978. No one knows for certain. What is certain, Sonny Pinto spent his life running from consequences he created with his own hands. The NYPD washed the blood from Umberto’s Clam House by noon on April 7th, 1972. The restaurant stayed open.

 Tourists came to see where Crazy Joe died. The mob guys came to eat. Life went on. But for Carmine DiBiase, life stopped somewhere between that night and the day the FBI marked his file inactive in 1988. He disappeared into history as he had disappeared into the night. A man who killed without provocation.

 A man who walked away from death. A man who could never walk away from himself.