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Reputed Gambino Family Crime Boss Gunned Down, Run Over In Front Of Home
Francesco 'Franky Boy' Cali was reportedly shot six times outside his Staten Island home while his family was inside.
The reputed leader of New York’s notorious Gambino crime family was shot and killed Wednesday on Staten Island.
Francesco “Franky Boy” Cali, 53, was found with multiple gunshot wounds to his body outside his home in the borough’s Todt Hill section just after 9 p.m. After being shot six times he was run over, WPIX in New York reports. He was standing outside his white SUV when he was attacked by someone driving a blue pickup, according to that outlet. His wife and kids were inside the home at the time, unnamed police sources told The New York Post.
Cali was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead. There have been no arrests.
No other information was provided by police.
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn had referred to Cali in court filings in recent years as the underboss of the Gambino organization, related through marriage to the Inzerillo clan in the Sicilian Mafia.
Multiple press accounts since 2015 said Cali had ascended to the top spot in the crime organization, although he never faced a criminal charge saying so.
His only mob-related criminal conviction came a decade ago, when Cali pleaded guilty in an extortion conspiracy involving a failed attempt to build a NASCAR track on Staten Island. He was sentenced to 16 months in federal prison and was released in 2009.
Cali’s death marks the first killing of an alleged crime family boss in New York City in 34 years. The last crime family boss to be killed in New York City was Paul Castellano. The Gambino crime boss was gunned down outside Sparks Steakhouse in Manhattan in 1985.
The Gambino Family was once among the most powerful criminal organizations in the U.S., but federal prosecutions in the 1980s and 1990s sent its top leaders, including mob boss John Gotti, to prison and diminished its reach.
Gotti was convicted of racketeering and murder in 1992. He died in prison at 2002. His son and another former reputed mob boss John Gotti Jr. was stabbed in the stomach in a CVS parking lot in Long Island in 2013 but survived, according to the New York Times.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
