Jack García: Mafia Buster

Author:
Rupert Taylor
Updated:
Apr 3, 2024

Jack Garcia: attacking the Mafia from the inside
stecks05 from Getty Images

Inside La Cosa Nostra

The Gambino crime family is one of the five Mafia groups that form “The Commission” to control organized crime in America.

Working undercover, FBI agent Joaquín “Jack” García, infiltrated the Gambino clan. Through his work in the early 2000s, 32 dangerous Mafiosi were tucked away safely in prison.

Carlo Gambino forged a crime family into a formidable organization that took his name.
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The Gambino Family

Salvatore D’Aquila was born in Sicily in 1873 and emigrated to the United States in 1906. Already a seasoned criminal, he ran a cheese importing business and quickly established his own crime organization in New York City. It was to become the Gambino family.

D'Aquila ordered competitors—real or imagined—eliminated in the time-honoured way Mafia bosses use to stay alive. But there are always plots, and D'Aquila was shot and killed in 1928. Other leaders rose and fell until a particularly odious character took charge.

Albert Anastasia led the Gambino family from 1951 to 1957 (it was called the Anastasia family back then). He was a violently ruthless man who co-founded Murder Inc., a group that specialized in mob killings.

His penchant for murders led to his own demise as he was gunned down in a barber's chair. He was succeeded as head of the family by Carlo Gambino, the man who orchestrated Anastasia's killing.

Gambino led the clan that took his name for 17 years. According to the Mob Museum:

“Under his guidance, the Gambino syndicate expanded into territories and rackets it hadn’t in the past, taking almost complete control of labor unions on the New York and New Jersey waterfront, at JFK Airport and in the trucking, construction, and garment industries along the entire East Coast. They profited handsomely from an array of white-collar scams and finance-district fleeces.”

Of course, the Gambino clan engaged in traditional Mafia crimes such as loansharking, extortion, gambling, and hijacking.

His influence spread across the entire United States. Carlo Gambino died peacefully in his bed in 1976 and was succeeded by John Gotti.

The Mafia Insider

Joaquin Garcia was born in Cuba in 1952. He fled with his family when Fidel Castro came to power and grew up in the Bronx. A giant of a man (6'4" and 390 pounds), he played college football and joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1980.

With an acting skill that few Hollywood stars could match, Garcia worked in numerous undercover investigations. In the early 2000s, the FBI decided to try to plant Garcia into the Gambino crime family.

Working under the name Jack Falcone, he was given a back story that had him born in Sicily with a specialty in jewelery theft and fencing stolen goods.

He spoke fluent Italian and put the word out on the street that he was looking to invest in a topless bar in the Bronx; this drew him to the attention of Gambino operative Gregory DePalma.

The FBI agent was dealing with an extremely dangerous person who once used a power tool on the head of a man he thought was cheating him.

Garcia said of DePalma, “I would best describe him as the devil incarnate. A very evil man, very evil man.” His own wife said he was a man “devoid of any heart and soul.”

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Garcia cut DePalma into his stolen property business and the two men became constant companions. As diamond rings, flat-screen TVs, and Rolex watches (all items seized in FBI raids) changed hands, trust was built.

The relationship was so close that DePalma proposed giving Garcia “made man” status within the Gambino family.

A made man must have an Italian background and be proposed by another made man. There is an initiation ceremony in which the inductee must take the omertà oath of silence about Mafia matters.

Garcia told CBS's program 60 Minutes:

“In the mob world, in the mob culture, that is the holy grail. For an associate to be proposed for membership into La Cosa Nostra is what these criminals aspire to do. To become a made man.”

But, Garcia never got his made man ceremony, as the trap he had been setting for two-and-a-half years was sprung before it could happen.

The Gambino Clan Brought Down

While chumming around with DePalma, Garcia was wearing a recording device. He also provided DePalma with a cellphone that had been bugged by the FBI. Gregory DePalma was a talkative man and provided the agency with more than 5,000 hours of incriminating evidence.

It was March 2005 when the FBI pulled Garcia in and began assembling a case against the Gambino family. In all, 32 men were charged with racketeering and other crimes; 31 of them saw the evidence against them and cut deals by entering guilty pleas.

Arnold Squitieri, acting head of the Gambino family, agreed that “he had used threats of violence to exact payments from construction companies in Westchester County and Mineola, N.Y., and from a New Jersey trucking company” (New York Times). The 80-year-old Mafiosi received a seven-year sentence, about half what he would likely have been given without the guilty plea.

Alone, DePalma chose to go to trial. Facing 53 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) charges, DePalma sat through three-weeks of testimony and had to listen to the man he had treated as a protege give damning evidence against him. He had some choice and unprintable words for Garcia.

The jury listened to the FBI agent's tapes revealing DePalma describing “getting a former manager for Liza Minnelli to finance a $12,000 trip for mob wives to Las Vegas. The jury also heard him boast that he made a restaurant owner get an $11,000 bottle of wine and provide as much as $4,000 in free food for two dozen Gambino guests” (Associated Press).

The jury found the mobster guilty and Judge Alvin Hellerstein gave him a sentence of 12.5 years. Suffering from heart disease and diabetes, the 74-year-old DePalma complained that the length of his sentence would see him die in prison. He was right.

For the FBI, taking down the Mafia looks like an endless game of whack-a-mole.
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Today's Gambino Crime Family

The FBI undercover operation was a serious setback for the Gambino crime family, but it was not fatal.

By about 2015, the family was believed to have between 150 and 200 made men and as many as 1,100 associates.

Until 2019, Francesco Cali was the boss, but he was gunned down outside his Staten Island home.

In addition to its usual lines of crime such as extortion, gambling, loansharking, union racketeering, and fraud, the organization is now involved in drug trafficking, an activity that was not allowed by earlier Gambino leaders.

It's believed that Lorenzo “Lore” Mannino is now head of the Gambino family.

The fight against La Cosa Nostra never ends. Here's a CNN report from November 2023:

“Ten alleged Gambino crime family members and associates have been charged with racketeering conspiracy, extortion, witness retaliation, and union-related crimes in a bid for control of New York’s carting and demolition industries.”

Bonus Factoids

Joaquin “Jack” Garcia wrote about his undercover work inside the Gambino family in his 2009 book Making Jack Falcone: An Undercover FBI Agent Takes Down a Mafia Family.
Garcia chose the alias Jack Falcone as a salute to Giovanni Falcone, the Italian prosecuting magistrate and judge who was assassinated by the Mafia in Sicily in 1992.
The Vito Corleone character in the Godfather movies was modelled, in part, after Carlo Gambino.
In the mid-1970s, FBI agent Joseph "Joe" Pistone infiltrated the Mafia in New York. His evidence put many members of the Bonanno family in prison. He operated under the name Donnie Brasco, which was the title given to a 1997 movie starring Johnny Depp and Al Pacino.