1981: A Most Violent Year for New York's Mafia

Scene from A Most Violent Year. The film's story occurred in 1981.
REVISED HEADLINE
A Most Violent Year: A crime drama set in New York City during the winter of 1981, statistically one of the most violent years in the city's history, and centered on the lives of an immigrant and his family trying to expand their business and capitalize on opportunities as the rampant violence, decay, and corruption of the day drag them in and threaten to destroy all they have built.

The above statistic is true. The film is fiction, but the backdrop against which it was set, New York City in 1981, is a fact as unyielding as rebar.

The violence included mob violence but touched on a broad spectrum of crimes, as one recent report noted.

"The 365 days between January 1st and December 31st were filled with news reports of mob violence spilling out into the street, rape, robbery and other seeds of crime that had the city’s citizens fearing what their city was becoming...."
Here's only some of the high-profile criminal activity that took place in New York in 1981.

There were 2,166 murders that year versus the 648 said to take place in 2013. (2015, as you'll see, was the year things changed for the worse).

As Time magazine noted: The 1970s saw a strong uptick in violent crime, showing no signs of abating when the 1980s commenced.

Time's cover story "looked at the statistics to show the correlation between violence and robbery in cities both large and small, detailing stories of crime from Los Angeles to Birmingham, Ala."

The marked upswing in street violence really gained momentum in 1980. The public shooting of John Lennon outside the Dakota served as an odd sort of herald of this frightening trend.

For NYPD Commissioner Robert McGuire, street violence was of major concern:

"Street crime is the most serious thing we face today. It has an enormous impact on the quality of people’s lives. It determines where we walk, what time we walk, even whether we play bingo at night and whether we go to the theater

Williamsburg today is dominated by millennial hipsters who live in high-rise condominiums, dine in pricey restaurants and shop in tony retail boutiques. This neighborhood was once very different. It was literally "a hotbed of street gang and mob activity."

The consummate 1970s gangster flick, The Warriors, based in Coney Island.

And somehow, I don't think those 1980s-era gangs were anything like the ones from which mob bosses Vito Genovese and Carlo Gambino once enlisted their soldiers back in the 1950s, such as Williamburg's Jacksons Gents.

By the 1980s these were different gangs.  Known for their unparalleled brutality (some carried swords, see picture below), The Dirty Ones, the Savage Nomads, and the Black Stabbers were among the street gangs then engaged in a bloody war, prompting the Williamsburg area to be nicknamed Brooklyn’s “killing fields” due to the vast number of teenagers "senselessly killed" there.

The below map (from the NYPD) details Brooklyn's then-staggering gang problem. (And shows the burned-out gang banger hefting a medieval-looking sword. What he's holding in his other hand is -- I have no clue.)

Brooklyn's Street gangs of 1981

"LCN," The Five Families
The New York Mafia, the Cosa Nostra, the Five Families ruled the New York boroughs' underworld with an iron fist, and was supposedly at its strongest in Brooklyn and Queens.

In 1981 FBI agent Joseph Pistone — aka Donnie Brasco — was wrapping up his undercover investigation of the Bonanno crime family, which began with him meeting Colombo associates in 1975. (Wonder how the story would've played out if Pistone had stayed with the Colombo crime family.)

One month following Pistone's outing as a federal agent, in August of 1981, Bonanno capo Dominick "Sonny Black" Napolitano was murdered in a Brooklyn basement.

Although he supposedly gave his money and jewelry to a bartender, Napolitano actually thought he'd be able to talk his way out of the meeting. "We all screwed up," he'd been told, or words along that line. He was told Pistone was the family's problem, and not his alone.

Basically, Sonny Black was told what he wanted to hear.

Napolitano also was a key player in a triple homicide the Bonanno family pulled off that same violent, bloody year. Sonny Red and his guys were lined up directly against the official boss, Philip "Rusty" Rastelli, backed by Joe Massino and other capos, including Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano, and the Zips—once Sonny Red stiffed them for a consignment of heroin they'd fronted him.

The Gambinos were aligned with the Bonannos. Some speculate John Gotti's ties to Joe Massino were a key dynamic behind the strike. The triple-capo whacking was not Commission sanctioned.


Double Homicide at the Shamrock Bar
Two men drinking away an evening at the Shamrock Bar on Jamaica Ave. in Richmond Hill, Queens, were gunned down by mobsters -- right in the middle of the crowded drinking establishment. Richard Godkin and business partner John D'Agnese were shot to death in 1981, supposedly over an accidentally spilled drink that landed on the dress of Gambino mobster Frank Riccardi’s girlfriend.

Three mobsters beat the rap due to "bungling prosecutors and reluctant witnesses," as the New York Daily News reported in March of 2013. The story's thrust seemed to be that, finally, the key shooter, "Bobby Glasses" Vernace, responsible for the "senseless" 1981 shooting on "Western Night" at the Shamrock Bar was going to be held accountable. A year later he was.....

What changed, the Daily News reported, was that two key witnesses were finally ready to testify after years of fearing the mob.

FBI agents have convinced Linda Gotti, niece of deceased crime boss John Gotti (and daughter to John Gotti brother Peter Gotti, who is apparently still the official Gambino boss and is serving a prison sentence not slated to end until 2032), to identify the men who killed D'Agnese, who was her boyfriend at the time. Bartender Patrick Sullivan, who previously backed out, will also testify.

Richard, a decorated Vietnam veteran, had fathered four children with his wife by the time of his death.
Catherine Godkin (center) at her Brooklyn home with her daughters (from l. to r.) Susan, Jacqueline, and Christine.




Charges were dropped against alleged killer Ronald "Ronnie the Jew" Barlin because Linda Gotti recanted her identification.
Bartolomeo "Bobby Glasses" Vernace beat a state murder rap in 1998 for killing Godkin and D'Agnese. Riccardi was tried separately in state court and was also acquitted. He died in 2007. 

With decades having passed -- and the mob not the same fearful entity it had been in 1981, Linda Gotti and bartender Joseph Patrick Sullivan were ready to tell the jury what they knew.

In the end, only Sullivan took the stand.

One report noted of Sullivan:

During testimony in the federal trial in 2013, an eyewitness to the murders, Shamrock bartender Joseph Patrick Sullivan, testified that he had lied during the state trial about Vernace’s role in the murders out of fear of retribution. According to a press release from the FBI, the eyewitness testified in the federal case that he recognized all three assailants but that he had been afraid to testify against them because, in his words, “two men were dead over a spilled drink. I think that was reason enough to be afraid.”

Vernace, who launched his long career in the mafia in the early 1970s and ended up serving on the three-member ruling panel overseeing the Gambino family, was arrested on Jan. 20, 2011 as part of the FBI’s national sweep of almost 100 members and associates of organized crime.
After the double slayings, Vernace went into hiding. He returned years later to Queens and became an active member of the Gambino crime family.
Over the next two decades,his power grew. Law enforcement officials said he was known to have a “large and profitable crew” that was based in a Cooper Avenue cafe located in Glendale. 
Vernace was eventually sentenced to life in prison last year for the killing. In fact, he was found guilty on all of the nine racketeering acts he faced, which in addition to the two murders, included heroin trafficking, robbery, loansharking, and illegal gambling. He had rejected a plea deal that would have sent him away for only 12 years. (He tried to reconsider on the eve of the trial, but the Fed's said the agreement was no longer an option.)

Vernace allegedly just shrugged after the verdict was read. Godkin's widow and two daughters wept.
Bartolomeo Vernace was found guilty of two 1981 murders. 


As for Linda Gotti, the New York Daily News reported that she had eagerly wanted to testify in Vernace's federal trial.

The only problem? Lawyers representing Vernace didn't want the "Mafia princess" in the racketeering and murder trial.

Linda, who apparently harbors some animosity toward the Gotti clan and had hoped that by testifying she could put that part of her life behind her, appeared overly interested in talking to the court, said a source familiar with her thinking.

...Federal prosecutors also had Gotti on standby in the courthouse, but decided against putting her on the stand after a bartender who witnessed the double murder testified and appeared to hit a home run for the government, sources said. 

More than three decades ago, Linda had also witnessed the fatal shooting of her boyfriend John D’Agnese, who was gunned down with co-owner Richard Godkin over a spilled drink in the Shamrock Bar. ...

Recently she told the feds that shortly after the murders, John Gotti’s wife, Victoria, had advised her that she did not have to testify if she did not want to, sources said. 

She also claimed to have no knowledge of her father’s ties to the Mafia until the late 1980s, which seemed incredible, the source added.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld Vernace's conviction for murdering the two men in the Shamrock bar, ruling that "the cold-blooded killings may have been over a spilled drink, but the violence burnished the mobster's reputation in the street and later rise to power."

Vernace had argued that he was wrongly convicted of murder in aid of racketeering -- the slayings were part of a personal dispute and not Gambino business, he argued.


The three-judge panel, however found, that “a reasonable jury could have concluded Vernace went so far as to commit murder in a crowded bar because such a public display related to preserving (and even enhancing) the reputation of the Gambino crime family and its members.”

Crime scene photos from the 1981 shooting, which took place right in the middle of a crowded bar
on a cowboy-themed dance party night.