30 Horoscope Guide
by Kenneth IrvingN
ew York mobsters killing each
other in artfully unexpected ways
is the stuff of movie legend, but the
fact is that this kind of thing really doesn’t
happen as often in real life as it does in the
movies. There may be more than a few
“little” murders of crime underlings of
one sort or another, but all that stuff about
whacking the Big Boss is mostly the stuff
of the past. More interesting than crooks
doing things to each other is the occasional
murder (or attempted murder) of a big name
by an amateur, by which I mean someone
who has little or no crime connection at
all, much less any obvious motive to be
shooting at a major figure in organized
crime. But it does happen, and the best
known of such incidents, at least until
recently, was the apparent attempt of a man
from Yonkers, Jeffrey William Ciccone, to
take down the late crime boss John Gotti.
Gotti himself was well-known for, among
many other things, having gotten to the top
with a movie-like hit on his own boss, Paul
Castellano, back in 1985.
Ciccone had no known ties to organized
crime, despite an arrest or two for minor
drug charges between 1967 and 1971. Just
why someone like him would rise from
anonymity to try to shoot down a famous
gangster on the streets of New York no one
knows, nor will they ever know, because
justice in his case was swift. Gotti’s men
grabbed him off the street and the next time
he was seen was when his mutilated and
shot-up body was found the next morning
in the basement of a building owned by an
alleged Gotti rival.
The Ciccone shooting took place on
April 29, 1987 at 3:30 p.m. EDT, just
outside Gotti’s headquarters in Queens.
There was still no clue about Ciccone’s
motive when, 10 years later in 1997, a Gotti
associate was hauled into a court in Staten
Island, charged with Ciccone’s murder. He
was acquitted, so whether he was involved
or not, it seemed as if that was the last
possible chance for anyone to tell the back
story behind the bizarre event.
Another more recent event of a similar
nature, on March 13, 2019, at 9:20 p.m.
EDT, made me think of the Ciccone-
Gotti incident, and in this case the victim
was Francesco Cali, “alleged boss of the
Gambino crime family,” according to a
March 26, 2019 online article in New York