Joseph “Little Joe” DeFede Former Lucchese Acting Boss

[Little_Al1991]

Joseph (Little Joe) Defede, who rose from a bookie operating out of a hot dog wagon to his lofty mob perch by being a good handball partner for boss Vittorio (Vic) Amuso

Defede, an unlikely mob kingpin, used to operate a hot dog truck in Brooklyn that doubled as a numbers bank. A long time friend and handball partner of Luchese boss Vittorio (Vic) Amuso, Defede took over as acting boss in 1994, not long after Amuso's conviction and life sentence were upheld by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

“Little Joe was not a tough guy, but he had Amuso’s backing, and he often met with the leaders of the other four families,” said one law enforcement source.

DeFede was an associate of the Colombo Family for about 20 years until Amuso inducted in him into the Lucchese Family in 1989 after renewing their friendship.He later became a Capo, he was involved in gambling, extortion and loansharking.
In 1994, DeFede became the Acting Boss though it was only because Vic wanted someone he could control and because DeFede’s loyalty was completely with Amuso since he become a Made Man courtesy of Amuso.

DeFede as the Acting Boss made $6 million in profits for the Lucheses over the next four years, tucking $1.4 million away for himself.

DeFede was sentenced to prison for extorting the Garment Center in 1998, released in 2002 and decided to flip in the same year after Amuso put a contract out on him after suspecting that he was skimming money from him during his time as the Acting Boss.Steven Crea took over as Acting Boss and the profits of the Lucchese Family immediately started to rise which led Amuso to believe that DeFede was skimming from him.

DeFede is one of the most underrated figures in the Mafia, I rarely see his name mentioned and when I say rarely I would like to emphasis that.His story is interesting but nobody really talks about him and his name wasn’t even mentioned in Al D’Arco’s book

[Pogo The Clown]

Was he a Capo? I thought he went direct from Soldier to Acting Boss in the post early 1990s chaos.


Pogo

[Little_Al1991]

Was he a Capo? I thought he went direct from Soldier to Acting Boss in the post early 1990s chaos.


Pogo

DeFede confirmed that he was a Capo while testifying.

[Shellackhead]

I asked about him on here, nobody came through with info. He really was Lowkey. Is he still alive?

[Pmac2]

Died a few years back. Gave a interview crying about being broke with his wife in a trailer park in florida. His full testomony would be cool usally they have to detail there whole life of crime on the stand for a day or 2. It would be interesting. Little al never mentions him. Im guessing he would have been in bobby amuso crew.

[Little_Al1991]

I asked about him on here, nobody came through with info. He really was Lowkey. Is he still alive?

I hope that you learned something new from this information.He passed away in 2012 from a heart attack in the Witness Protection Program

[Little_Al1991]

Died a few years back. Gave a interview crying about being broke with his wife in a trailer park in florida. His full testomony would be cool usally they have to detail there whole life of crime on the stand for a day or 2. It would be interesting. Little al never mentions him. Im guessing he would have been in bobby amuso crew.

Someone needs to file a Freedom Of Information Act on Joseph DeFede, I saw that he was in Frank Lastorino’s crew on this forum

[Pogo The Clown]

Was he a Capo? I thought he went direct from Soldier to Acting Boss in the post early 1990s chaos.


Pogo

DeFede confirmed that he was a Capo while testifying.

Did he? I don't recall seeing that is in the coverage of his testimony. Can anyone confirm?


Pogo

[Dapper_Don]

in case folks here never read it, heres the spread NYtTimes did on him a while back while he was still alive

After the Mob, He’s Just Scraping By
April 30, 2010

SOMEWHERE IN SOUTH FLORIDA

A SATURDAY, 11 a.m. Seniors’ hour at the diner.

An old man with a hearing aid butters his toast. Two Jamaican nurses help a woman with a walker through the door. An elderly mother and her daughter share a stack of pancakes, the mother guiding her fork past the oxygen tube in her nose.

Sitting in one booth with his wife, the former acting boss of the Luchese crime family tucks into his $4 plate of scrambled eggs. He wears a pink Hawaiian shirt, a gold medallion, a brand-new pair of therapeutic sneakers. He is talking about the old days: everything he had, everything he lost.

“How much money?” he asks, responding to the question with a question.

“Awww, tons of money,” he answers. “It’s hard to say how much.”

This is Joe DeFede, a retired New York gangster who oversaw the rackets in the city’s garment district in the 1990s, a perch that provided him with a Cadillac, a driver, three horses stabled at Aqueduct and a home entertainment system columned in the style of ancient Greece. Like many mobsters, he walked through life with dignity and pride and, usually, with several thousand dollars in his pocket.

These days, though, he walks with a faltering step of age and with the weight of financial worry. After a five-year prison stint, legal fees and the crushing costs of creating a new identity — he entered but then left the witness protection program — the boss is almost broke. He and his second wife, Nancy, live on an annual income they said was not much more than $30,000: Social Security, a modest annuity and her pension from 20 years of working in a bank.

“That’s the fear we got,” said Mr. DeFede, 76, a slight man with a bookmaker’s grin who is known as Little Joe. “We try to keep our payments up” — for the car, the house, a recent hip replacement — “but sometimes we can’t hack it.”

Or as Mrs. DeFede, 74, explained, “We’re just scraping by.”

It might be hard to muster sympathy — especially in the midst of a recession — for a guy who once earned his living shaking down businesses and taking illegal bets, even if he served his sentence and testified at several federal trials that helped put his former Mafia colleagues behind bars. But there is no such thing as a Gangster I.R.A., so the DeFedes are living check to check (and under assumed names) on the hard edge of a sharp financial knife.

They are hardly the first to struggle in their golden years when the years that went before were lived outside the law. Before the film “American Gangster” revived his finances, Frank Lucas, who earned — then lost — millions as a heroin dealer, was living in a public housing project in New Jersey. (He is now trying to start his own fashion line.) Henry Hill, a Luchese family associate whose story formed the basis for the movie “Goodfellas,” sells signed posters as well as his memoirs and cookbooks at the Web site goodfellahenry.com.

“These people wind up as desperadoes in a sense,” said Nicholas Pileggi, who wrote, among other things, the screenplay for “Goodfellas.” “They come up with different schemes to survive without a 401(k). Don’t forget, they were hustlers to begin with.”

The DeFedes fit that mold: friendless, jobless and, faced with an uncertain future, living on their wits. Mrs. DeFede has sold jewelry — a ruby necklace, an emerald bracelet — to help support the household and has even written a book about her trials, “Life With Little Joe.”

It is a love story, sort of, opening with a startling scene of a young Mr. DeFede slapping her face. The manuscript encompasses their lives together: from obscurity to opulence, from the bulletproof vest she once found in her husband’s closet to their nervous flight into the federal government’s arms. While one might think a mob moll’s tell-all would make for an easy sale, that has not been the case. Mrs. DeFede’s agent spent an unsuccessful year shopping the book around. The couple still hopes the manuscript will provide them a nest egg. Publish or perish, Mafia style.

Last year, Mrs. DeFede took a job as a cashier at a clothing store. It paid $7.50 an hour and required cleaning toilets. She lasted three days.

“There’s not a lot of ads out there saying, ‘Wanted: Ex-crime boss of a Mafia family. Ten years experience required,’ ” Mrs. DeFede said.
HIDING “There’s not a lot of ads out there saying, ‘Wanted: Ex-crime boss of a Mafia family. Ten years experience required,’ ” Mrs. DeFede said.Credit...Josh Ritchie for The New York Times

As for her husband, she is apt to say, “There’s not a lot of ads out there saying, ‘Wanted: Ex-crime boss of a Mafia family. Ten years’ experience required.’ ”

Not unlike their law-abiding counterparts, they are filled with rage and bitterness — and violent apprehension — at their economic prospects. Mr. DeFede is so suffused with anxiety he sleepwalks and, in that state, literally punches the walls.

“Joe has fights in his sleep, cursing at some shadowy figure from the past,” Mrs. DeFede wrote one evening, jotting down thoughts for a reporter. “He has hit me several times during these episodes. Of course, he didn’t mean to harm me, but after one really bad incident, I was trying to calm him down and I got punched in the face.”

Mr. DeFede was nearing 70 when he got out of prison and discovered that a contract had been taken on his life. He was accused — wrongly, he insists — of stealing nearly a million dollars of Luchese family money. “If I did what they said I did,” he reasoned one night at the dismal bar of a chain restaurant, “you think that I’d be here?”

The DeFedes met in 1958 and married 12 years later, each with a divorce in the rear view. A couple of years ago, they settled here in a 55-and-older community— they insisted its name be withheld for security reasons — and have built a pleasant, albeit precarious, life.

Family is far away: Mrs. DeFede’s son is in New York, in the throes of a recent divorce. Mr. DeFede’s daughter is on Long Island, but visiting is difficult — she lives with his former wife.

They have grandchildren in San Diego but cannot afford the plane ticket. “It’s lonely living alone,” said Mrs. DeFede, a classic tough cookie with an Irish-American wit. “Holidays are the worst. You see other people with their families and it totally breaks your heart.”

A few years ago, her oldest friend from Brooklyn moved into the neighborhood to be with her. But there was drinking, petty fights and eventually unkind words; part of the problem was the friend started dating a retired cop. The two have parted ways, potentially forever. How does one explain oneself to the neighbors, after all?

“We don’t have a life,” Mrs. DeFede said.

What they do have is each other. Mrs. DeFede carries her husband’s glasses and double-checks his payments on the bar bill. Mr. DeFede cleans the gutters — he did, at least, until his hip went bad. She makes suggestions of what he ought to order from the menu. He drives her to the beauty parlor and waits until she is done. She back-seat drives from the front seat of the car.

When evening comes, they watch television together — the History Channel, “Divorce Court,” “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Mr. DeFede plays solitaire. He visits the barbershop, not to have his hair cut, but for company. “They’re Cubans, so they don’t speak too much English — it’s difficult,” he said.

One recent Saturday, they visited a flea market. Mr. DeFede pulled into a spot and hung his disabled parking permit from the mirror. He stepped outside and observed his front bumper, scratched like a scabbed shin.

“Five years old,” he said. “I never drove a car five years old before.” He put his hands together, palms up, and shook them back and forth in disbelief. “Remember that song?” he asked. “ ‘If My Friends Could See Me Now’?”

Inside the bazaar, Mrs. DeFede looked at several items she could not afford. A patterned blouse. A yellow purse. Shoes.

“You see what I’ve done to her?” asked Mr. DeFede, looking on. “You see this? She could’ve had anybody. Anybody. She ended up with me.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/nyre ... mafia.html

[Dapper_Don]

Heres some more info in here about his earnings

Some Made Men Struggle to Make Ends Meet
Dec. 10, 2006

Richard Martino, a slender 47-year-old, favors Prada shoes and until recently drove a sleek black Mercedes-Benz. He has owned multimillion-dollar homes in Harrison and Southampton, N.Y. He spent much of the last decade running a telecommunications and Internet business to which his expertise helped bring in hundreds of millions of dollars. By one accounting, he made tens of millions for himself.

John Setaro, 57, did not finish high school, and has worked recently managing a fast-food restaurant in Seaford on Long Island. He generally wears neat but casual clothes, and lives in a modest, vinyl-sided, colonial-style house in Franklin Square. During a difficult period several years ago, according to his lawyer, he was making $2,400 a month.

But the two men nonetheless share an extraordinary bond, according to federal authorities: Both swore an oath to the Gambino crime family in a secret induction ceremony.

The striking disparities underscore a simple truth not always understood outside the ranks of the city’s five crime families: Some mobsters reap millions from rackets, and in some cases from legitimate enterprises, but many struggle to maintain a middle-class existence, and some are routinely broke. The impoverished gangster barely eking out a living is so commonplace that mobsters have a word for these poorer men of honor: brokesters.

The archetypal Hollywood image of a wiseguy with prodigious appetites, swaggering in a finely tailored suit with a diamond pinkie ring and a fat roll of 50s, conceals the more nuanced reality of mob economics, according to some prosecutors, federal agents, organized-crime experts and a few mobsters. Crime figures are not immune to ordinary financial burdens and woes, like struggling to make car payments and finding money for groceries.

No self-respecting mobster wants to be seen as a brokester — nor would he want his peers to think he struggles to keep up with his middle-class suburban neighbors. But the pressure is great as well to keep up appearances as a successful criminal. Mobsters have even been known to borrow money from loan sharks to throw it around on the street — and to pass it up as tribute to superiors — while at the same time scrimping in the privacy of their home.

“The hours are long, there is no benefits package, there is a high risk of prosecution, and very little job security,” said Gerald L. Shargel, a lawyer who has represented a number of mobsters, rich and poor, including several members of the Gotti clan.

By most accounts, mobsters fall into two types, earners and shooters, a division in some measure between the rich and those who wish they were. An earner is a man who can scheme and develop strategies, quickly deciphering the complexities of industry and commerce and labor. He is also someone who can sit down and blend in effortlessly with legitimate businessmen — often big businessmen — and union leaders.

Mr. Martino is an earner, according to federal prosecutors in Brooklyn. His work in an Internet pornography and a phone-cramming scheme was a boon to the Gambinos, netting hundreds of millions by billing people for “free tours” on pornographic Web sites and adding small charges to hundreds of thousands of telephone bills nationwide.

In September, he started serving a nine-year prison term after pleading guilty to wire fraud conspiracy and extortion in the scheme.

Pete Savino, a Genovese family associate, is also said to be an earner. He had a window installation business and was the mastermind of a scheme in the late 1980s and early ’90s to earn millions for four mob families by billing the New York City Housing Authority for a few extra dollars on every one of the millions of thermal-pane windows being installed in the authority’s buildings.

A shooter is, well, a shooter. A leg-breaker. A killer. Someone who can readily and rapidly use violence as a business practice.

Mr. Setaro’s role in the mob division of labor seems clear. He is firmly ensconced in the mob’s middle class, according to court papers and interviews with law enforcement officials.

According to an F.B.I. source cited in a report from 2000, Mr. Setaro, in a conversation about how he hated working as a bookmaker, said that “if he is ever going to jail it is going to be for what he really is, ‘a shylock and a tough guy,’ ” referring to his work as a loan shark and a debt collector.

His prediction seems to have been accurate. He served 41 months for extortion.

James Tartaglione, a onetime Bonanno family captain who became a government witness in 2003 and has testified against fellow mobsters in several recent trials, explained the distinction to a jury in 2004.

“There’s people that go out there, just have a knack for earning money,” Mr. Tartaglione said at the trial of Bonanno boss Joseph Massino, an earner in his own right who was forced to give up more than $9 million in ill-gotten gains after he was convicted of murder and racketeering, and then agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. “They know how to put businesses together, and they are just good at what they do, as far as business. Then you got those tough guys that could go out and kill somebody and do whatever they have to do.”

It is not easy to gauge the real net worth or earning capacity of an organized-crime figure. Most are constantly scheming to hide their assets and income and not only from taxing authorities and federal prosecutors eager to seize them.

They often deceive their own crime families about schemes that are “off the books” and unknown to their superiors.

In New York’s crime families, money generally flows up, from associates to soldiers to their captains to the administration and ultimately to the family’s boss. But few procedures are set in stone.

The families do not have auditors. They rely on harsh punishment as a deterrent. In many mob murders, the victims were killed because they failed to pay tribute, or so the bosses thought, according to prosecutors and investigators.

Organized crime has many rules. Drug-dealing and prostitution are taboo; one cannot strike a fellow made man, or sleep with his wife or daughters; soldiers cannot borrow from a loan shark without approval; killing a boss is forbidden. But these rules are for people who revel in breaking rules.

Money flows into organized-crime families from almost as many sources as there are schemes in the heads of mobsters, from traditional staples like loan sharking, gambling, labor racketeering, cargo theft and bank robbery to skimming from industries that the mob once controlled and still influences in some cases: garbage hauling, construction, the piers, the garment district and the commercial linen business. Modern innovations include stock manipulation, Internet fraud, identity theft, health care schemes and everything from importing contaminated fish to counterfeiting designer blue jeans.

“There is no generally accepted percentage” that gets passed up, says Mark Feldman, who was in charge of the Organized Crime Section in the Brooklyn United States attorney’s office for a decade. “It’s a sliding scale driven by the particular greed and need and mentality of the particular individuals who control it.”

In the early 1990s, when John Gotti was at the height of his power as the boss of the Gambino family, his 20 captains each handed up $3,000 for him at Christmastime, far less than the $10,000 demanded by his predecessor, Paul Castellano.

Joseph DeFede, who served as the acting boss of the Luchese family from 1994 until 1998, required that $1,000 from each soldier be passed into the family coffers each year. Much of that money went into a fund called the Well, to pay for lawyers’ fees, to use for loan sharking and to finance other schemes, according to Mr. DeFede, a gravel-voiced 72-year-old who became a government witness in 2001.

He testified at a 2003 trial that he made about $1.14 million during the four years he served as acting boss and that the organization brought in $6 million, in a stretch of hard times for the crime family that prosecutors say continues.

Since Vincent Basciano, a former acting boss of the Bonanno family, was convicted of racketeering earlier this year, federal prosecutors have sought to seize $11.4 million from him, citing profits they say he has made over two decades, including $5.2 million from gambling operations, $6 million from joker poker and $200,000 passed up to him as tribute in 2004 alone.

Mr. Basciano, who took over the family after Mr. Massino’s conviction in 2004, revealed his thinking about the division of lucre and labor in a conversation he had just before Christmas 2003. A captain at the time, he was speaking with Anthony Urso, then the family’s acting boss, and Mr. Tartaglione, who was secretly cooperating with prosecutors and wearing a wire.

“Like I told Tony at Christmastime, I’m not taxing any of the guys that are doing the work,” Mr. Basciano said, meaning the shooters. Let the earners put up the money, he said.

Mr. Tartaglione underscored the idea that it takes people with different skills to keep the family strong. “You need a lot of different things in the pot to make a good soup,” he said.

Inveterate brokesters are a different matter. Few would argue they are a necessary ingredient in any recipe. This colorful cast of crime figures sometimes leaves prosecutors and investigators, not to mention defense lawyers, shaking their heads.

Carmine Russo and Elio Albanese are two such men, according to interviews with law enforcement officials and defense lawyers. Identified by prosecutors as soldiers in the Genovese family, the two were part of a loose-knit but active bank robbery crew in the 1980s and 90s that pulled off several high-profile heists, according to federal authorities. Mr. Russo most recently pleaded guilty to plotting to rob the payroll of a New York Times printing plant in Queens and was sentenced to 57 months in federal prison.

Mr. Russo, known as Baby Carmine, lived with his mother at the foot of Mulberry Street until she died. He and Mr. Albanese, known as Chinatown, often seemed down on their luck, according to investigators who tracked them over the years. As a rule, they quickly burned through their money and often found themselves hustling and lounging along Mulberry Street.

They found ways to scrape by. In the weeks leading up to the Fourth of July, the two men could be seen from the windows in the rear of the criminal court building in Lower Manhattan, selling fireworks by the case to people in cars who pulled up on Mulberry below Canal Street.

Mr. Russo was released from federal prison in January. A person who knows him says he had been selling plastic bags at the Fulton Fish Market before it moved and was now hoping to open a small business in his Chinatown neighborhood.

His sentence included a $7,500 fine. He has been paying it off in monthly increments of $50 or $60.

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/nyregion/10mob.html

CRIME PAYS LOUSY – MOBSTER LAMENTS HIS 250G A YEAR
January 22, 2003



Heading up a crime family is not nearly as lucrative a job as it’s cracked up to be, a mob turncoat said yesterday.

Joseph “Little Joe” Defede – testifying at the racketeering trial of Peter Gotti – said he earned only $1,014,000 as boss of the Luchese crime family from 1994 to 1998.

The approximately $250,000 a year doesn’t come close to what a corporate CEO – even an honest one – earns.

Gotti’s lawyer, Gerald Shargal, questioned Defede’s arithmetic, asking how he could keep track of his earnings in view of the fact that “the Mafia doesn’t send out W-2s.”

“It’s very simple, counselor,” Defede responded. “Add the numbers up.

“I kept it all up here,” he said, tapping his forehead.

Defede was called by prosecutors in Brooklyn federal court to give the jury an overview of how mobsters get their pay – and to back up government claims that Gotti is boss of the Gambino family, a job he allegedly inherited from his late brother, John.

Since Defede was imprisoned from 1998 until last February, when he entered the Witness Protection Program, he could testify only about the period he headed the Lucheses.

John Gotti, jailed at the time, was the official head of the Gambino family, and his son John A. “Junior” Gotti was acting boss. But it was Peter, he said, who represented the Gambinos at eight inter-family “commission” meetings at the former Lexington Hotel in Manhattan, now the Radisson Lexington.

“Junior,” he stressed, did not attend the commission meetings. The Gotti delegation consisted of Peter, then a capo, and another captain, Nick Corozzo, Defede said.

Speaking of money matters, Defede said the total take of the approximately 100-member Luchese family over the four years he headed it was about $6 million.

After Defede’s $1 million cut, a lower-ranking mobster would average only about $50,000 a year, if Defede’s figures are accurate.

Defede broke down his quarter-million-dollar-a-year take as follows: a salary of about $60,000 a year, plus $50,000 bonuses every three months.

The money, he said, was brought to him in paper bags delivered in the bathrooms of various diners.

https://nypost.com/2003/01/22/crime-pay ... 0g-a-year/

[Wiseguy]

Speaking of money matters, Defede said the total take of the approximately 100-member Luchese family over the four years he headed it was about $6 million.

While figuring money is one of the toughest things when it comes to the mob...and while I actually hold to the more conservative figures in OC income estimates...the idea that the Luccheses brought in only $6 million over a 4 year period in the 1990s is just absurd.

And for the record, DeFede's $250,000 a year 1994-1998 would be about $450,000 a year today.

[Dapper_Don]

Speaking of money matters, Defede said the total take of the approximately 100-member Luchese family over the four years he headed it was about $6 million.

While figuring money is one of the toughest things when it comes to the mob...and while I actually hold to the more conservative figures in OC income estimates...the idea that the Luccheses brought in only $6 million over a 4 year period in the 1990s is just absurd.

And for the record, DeFede's $250,000 a year 1994-1998 would be about $450,000 a year today.

Yeah I take those figures as very high level ballpark estimates from him, probably some of the Capos werent kicking up what they should have/Defede didnt know/wasnt knowledgeable about all the family operations. Makes sense if Amuso was pissed with Defede when Crea took over and all of a sudden started kicking up much more, Crea prob had a better sense of all the street rackets since he was involved as a Captain/high level for much longer than Defede,etc going on plus his involvement with Construction would allow him to influence more money going to the Boss than had been previously.

[Pmac2]

wonder what the meeting between families was about in the mid to late 90tys. pete gotti joe defede

[Little_Al1991]

Was he a Capo? I thought he went direct from Soldier to Acting Boss in the post early 1990s chaos.


Pogo

DeFede confirmed that he was a Capo while testifying.

Did he? I don't recall seeing that is in the coverage of his testimony. Can anyone confirm?


Pogo

Here’s a link to the article where I got the information about him being a Capo. https://nypost.com/2002/10/29/mob-rat-c ... er-family/ Thank you for Ur great posts Pogo, we all truly appreciate it.Also Michael DeSantis is the one who went from being a soldier and then the Acting Boss.I think that’s the first time that happened in the Lucchese Family.

[Pmac2]

Interesting guy. Wonder who he was with in the colombos. Make sense amuso was with the colombos till christy tic took him