Slaughter on 46th Street

By Richard Stengel

To outward appearances, he was a successful meat salesman and a quiet, grandfatherly type. Paul Castellano, head of the Gambino crime family and reputed kingpin of organized crime in America, wanted it that way: he was determined to change the image of the Mafia from violent crime syndicate to respectable family business. "We are in a new era," he once told his fellow mob chiefs. "Legitimacy, not muscle, is what we should project."

They chose not to take his advice.

At 5:26 one evening last week, on a midtown Manhattan block brimming with Christmas shoppers and commuters, Castellano, 70, and his henchman Thomas Belotti, 45, pulled to the curb in a black Lincoln limousine, evidently on their way to a steak house. Three men waiting nearby pulled semiautomatic weapons from under their trench coats and cut them down. Castellano and Belotti each caught six bullets in the head and torso. As two of the gunmen ran down 46th Street toward a getaway car, the third spoke briefly into a walkie-talkie and then coolly fired a coup de grace into Castellano's skull. It took all of 30 seconds.

As head of the most powerful of New York's five infamous crime families (followed by the Genovese, Colombo, Lucchese and Bonanno clans), Castellano had some 400 "soldiers" under his command, as well as interests in the construction trades and the garment, meat and poultry industries. His bloody retirement may have been deemed necessary because of a series of indictments brought against him by U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani. At the time of his death, the soft-spoken don was on trial in Manhattan federal court for masterminding an international car-theft ring. The day after his murder, Castellano's co-defendants asked for a mistrial, citing the possible prejudice that could result from the public assassination. Castellano had also been scheduled to go on trial this spring with other purported leaders of the city's five Mafia families, accused of running the "Commission," which since 1931 has sanctioned murders and directed rackets across the U.S.

Whoever gunned down Castellano, investigators say, had the approval of the Commission. The cautious mobster, whose sister had been married to the late Crime Chief Carlo Gambino, was reviled by his fellow dons. They mocked him as a dainty executive who had served only one short jail sentence (for armed robbery) and had never bloodied his hands except when he trained as a butcher in his youth. They also suspected that Castellano had been the source of information for the Government's case against the Commission, through an FBI bug planted in his neoclassical Staten Island home. The leaders were probably convinced that they had a greater likelihood of getting off without Castellano around. Says Ronald Goldstock, director of New York's organized crime task force: "Everyone agreed that they were better off with him dead." But New York FBI Chief John Hogan asserts, "The killing does not hurt our investigation."

Authorities suspect that the Commission's contract for the hit went to John Gotti, 45, a stocky Gambino captain and protege of Castellano's ruthless second-in-command, Aniello Dellacroce, who died of natural causes earlier this month. Dellacroce apparently wanted Gotti to succeed him, but Castellano seemed to have been grooming Belotti for the No. 2 job. Though the intemperate Gotti is unlikely to rise to the top of the Mafia's largest family, the killings nevertheless may signal the ascent of a hungrier younger generation of mob leaders. The head may be dead, but the body lives on.

With reporting by Dean Brelis/New York