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| September 13, 2001 | |||||
| By Jerry Capeci | |||||
| Feds Hit Greg DePalma With Hit Plot | |||||
 Gambino soldier Gregory
DePalma has done it again --suffered another episode of foot-in-mouth disease.This time, the aging and ailing gangster, serving six years in a federal prison hospital in Springfield Missouri for racketeering, has allegedly placed himself into a murder plot. DePalma, 69, has lung cancer and heart disease, but it hasn't deterred him from looking to kill a used car dealer who DePalma felt was cheating his wife out of her fair share of weekly cash payoffs with him away in prison. "That fat prick. I'll show him a thing or two," DePalma told an accomplice who agreed to finger the dealer for a "hitman" that DePalma had hired to |
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| kill him,
according to a complaint filed by Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent Karen Evanoski. DePalma, upset that the car dealer had cut back on weekly $2500 payoffs he had been making since DePalma was jailed three years ago, offered real estate and jewelry in return for the rubout. On Aug. 26, DePalma called a cohort and laid the groundwork for him to meet up with the "hitman," played by an undercover NYPD detective. "Do whatever he tells you, it's all right, he's a good guy," said DePalma from a prison telephone explicitly marked as monitored. To further implicate himself in the plot, DePalma wrote the telephone number of his liaison on a piece of paper and passed it on so the "hitman" could contact him, according to the complaint. The undercover cop met Richard Famiglietti, who drove to the dealer's place of business, pointed him out, and instructed the "hitman" to call when |
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| the job
was done, wrote Evanoski, noting that Famiglietti said "he did not like the
victim." Last week, the feds charged Famiglietti, 66, DePalma and another inmate at the federal prison, Sam Cagnina, 65, with murder conspiracy. The allegations against DePalma are "awfully hard to believe," his longtime lawyer, Robert Ellis told New York Post reporter Devlin Barrett. "It would be counterproductive because killing him would reduce the amount of money he's receiving to zero," said Ellis. The charges may not make much sense, but DePalma has been finding wiretapped telephones and getting himself into trouble from the night he was inducted into the Gambino crime family in
May, 1977.
That
night, in a phone call to a Colombo soldier, he was overheard on an FBI wiretap boasting
about getting "straightened out" during an investigation into the mob's
involvement in the Westchester Premiere Theatre. In this famous backstage photo taken in
1976, a smiling DePalma is between Frank Sinatra and Paul |
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 Castellano. Carlo Gambino is
third from the right and turncoat wiseguy Aladena (Jimmy the Weasel) Fratianno is second
from the right.Even his Gambino sponsor, capo Anthony (Nino) Gaggi, (left) knew he had a big mouth. "If Greg DePalma calls, I'm not home," Gaggi told his nephew, Dominick. "The guy is always shootin' his mouth off all over the lot." In 1978, DePalma, Gaggi and nine others were hit with bankruptcy fraud for driving the Theater out of business. Gaggi was furious, even after he was acquitted, and DePalma was convicted and sentenced to three years. "Serves him right," said Gaggi, "That's what he gets for shootin' his mouth off."
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In 1995 and 1996, DePalma did it again, this time in 
