Giovanni "John" Gambino (; August 22, 1940 – November 16, 2017) was an Italian-born American mobster. Born in Palermo, Sicily, he became a made member of the Gambino crime family in 1975 and a capodecina or captain, and head of the crime family's Sicilian faction, appointed by family boss John Gotti in 1986, according to Mafia turncoat Sammy Gravano.
Transatlantic Mafia clan
Together with his younger brothers Rosario (Sal) and Giuseppe (Joseph) he formed a faction in the crime family known as the Cherry Hill Gambinos for their base of operation in the New Jersey town of that name. Although they were distant cousins of family boss Carlo Gambino, they did not owe him allegiance. They were Sicilian Mafiosi, men from Palermo, whose father had brought the family to New York in 1964. The Gambino brothers ran the Cafe Valentino on 18th Avenue in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn (later renamed as Cafe Giardino).
The Gambinos hailed from the Passo di Rigano neighbourhood in Palermo, just as the Inzerillo clan, headed by Salvatore Inzerillo. Together the Inzerillo-Gambino Mafia clan formed a transatlantic Mafia family, based in Palermo and New York. The Inzerillo clan had been on the verge of total extermination by Totò Riina and the Corleonesi during the Second Mafia War in Sicily when in 1981 the family boss Salvatore Inzerillo was killed. With the intervention of the Gambino crime family in New York, a deal was worked out that allowed the surviving Inzerillos to take refuge in the US, with the agreement that none of them, or their offspring, could ever return to Sicily. Many went to the New York area and joined forces with the Gambino family. They were dubbed "gli scappati" (the escapees).
Heroin trafficking
Despite a ban on drug dealing, the Gambinos were heavily involved in international heroin trafficking out of Bensonhurst. John Gambino was the converging point in the United States for a consortium of heroin traffickers of the Sicilian Mafia, composed of the Inzerillo family and Stefano Bontade, and the final destination for its shipments of heroin that was refined in laboratories in Sicily from Turkish morphine base. His relative Salvatore Inzerillo was the Gambino brothers’ principal interlocutor, the central personage in Sicily, with a myriad of interests and heavy capital investments.
Giovanni Falcone, the investigating magistrate who was assigned the heroin trafficking case in 1980, estimated that by the late 1970s the Inzerillo-Gambino-Spatola network was smuggling US$600 million worth of heroin into the US each year.
Money laundering
Gambino had close relationship with the Italian banker Michele Sindona. They dined often and openly at the luxurious Hotel Pierre on Fifth Avenue or the Gambino’s Café Valentino. Gambino was a frequent guest at New York dinner parties in Sindona’s honour. When Sindona got in trouble and was indicted for the bankruptcy of the Franklin National Bank, John Gambino procured a false passport and helped to stage a bogus kidnap in August 1979, to conceal a mysterious 11-week trip to Sicily before his scheduled fraud trial.
However, Sindona also had put the Mafia’s heroin money at risk, due to his financial malpractice. The real purpose of the kidnapping was to issue sparsely disguised blackmail notes to Sindona’s past political allies – among them Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti – to engineer the rescue of his banks and recuperate Cosa Nostra’s money. Gambino accompanied Sindona’s attempt to recover the money, but the plans failed and Sindona was arrested, leading to the indictment of the Inzerillo-Spatola-Gambino network. It remains unclear if any of the Mafia money Sindona had lost was recovered.
Indicted in 1980 in relation with the heroin trafficking network, he was convicted and sentenced to six-and-a-half years jail sentence for heroin trafficking in Palermo (the sentence in absentia was confirmed by Italy’s Supreme Court in 1985). However, Gambino remained free because the US did not agree with Italian requests for extradition. John and Joe Gambino were acquitted in a 1984 New Jersey drug case in which their brother, Rosario, was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison.