Acting Colombo family boss Joel (Joe Waverly) Cacace (right) may spend the rest of his life in prison for the least of Mafia crimes: running high stakes games of chance and helping out a motorcycle gang in a beef with a Greenwich Village sex club. 

Cacace, 61, is charged in a 20-count murder and racketeering indictment with ordering four mob hits in a nine-month span, including the mistaken identity slaying of George Aronwald, father of a former federal prosecutor who was marked for death by the mob.

As Gang Land has disclosed, Cacace was tied to the murders by turncoat mob associate Frank Smith, the triggerman in two of the slayings and a participant when Aronwald, 78, (left) was shot to death by a crew that Cacace allegedly dispatched to kill his son William for an undefined “disrespect” of the mob. 

All of those murders took place in 1987, however, and in order to satisfy the legal requirements for proving they were committed as part of a racketeering enterprise, the feds will first have to convict him of committing one “predicate act” (crime) within the past five years as well as another “predicate act” within 10 years of the first one. 

That’s a difficult thing to do against the tough as nails gangster who has scrupulously avoided FBI bugs and wiretaps and survived several shootings and a bloody mob war in his long career.

That’s where card games and the motorcycle gang come into play.

Cacace allegedly ran lucrative games of chance in 2001 and allegedly

helped the bikers collect a bad debt in 1994 – important dates that serve as a bridge to the 1987 murders. 

Between October 2001 and last month, Cacace ran “five Brooklyn based illegal gambling sites,” including a high stakes casino at the Bergen Yacht Club at 2657 East 66^th St. in Mill Basin, according to court papers filed by assistant U.S. attorney Patricia Notopoulos.

“It’s a casino,” Cacace associate Jerry Esposito raved on a wiretapped telephone a year ago. “Roulette, blackjack, er, craps, everything. Three nights a week. Full bar. Full buffet. Full everything….All high class. Waitresses with bow ties.”

Cacace took over two card games belonging to capo Benjamin Castellazzo (left) when he went to prison, and he was also the power behind a high stakes card game at a Bensonhurst social club at 6608 18^th Ave. that was run by Robert (Bobby Bibbs) Cassamassino, a “close confidante” of Cacace, according to the court papers.

Cacace and Cassamassino discussed their joint gambling operation in a telephone conversation last March and met to discuss it again in June, the papers said.

Arguing that illegal gambling is not a victimless, non‑violent crime, Notopoulos pointed to a May 20, 2001 beating that Cacace crew member Carmine

Baudanza gave a gambler when “the house did not have sufficient funds to pay off the customer’s winnings."

Carmine hit a guy out there last night," said crew member Patrick (Uncle Patty Piccirillo in a taped conversation. "I think the guy won. They didn't have the money to pay the guy. . . He took him outside. I know he cracked him. The guy ran. They chased him. And uh . . . I closed up."

Seven years earlier, according to court papers, Cacace represented a motorcycle gang that had threatened the owners of The Vault, a five-floor coed sex club, when the financially strapped club owners failed to repay a debt they owed the gang.

At a "sitdown" with a DeCavalcante family wiseguy who represented the club, Cacace spoke on behalf of the bikers. (Presumably, the sitdown took place in a less distracting place than The Vault, where hard-core porn was shown on video screens and topless bartenders often played chess with customers.) In any event, Cacace "negotiated a payment schedule for the loan," actions that constitute extortion, according to the papers.

Today, Cacace and five crew members, capo Luca DiMatteo, associates Angelo Perretti, Michael (Mikey Lionheart) Florio, Benjamin Salmonese and Esposito will sit down in court and learn whether Brooklyn Federal Judge Roanne Mann thinks they are a violent bunch that should be detained without bail until their trial.

Onetime waterfront wiseguy George Barone, the 79-year-old Genovese turncoat who testified at the racketeering trial of Gambino boss Peter Gotti and whose exploits from Hell’s Kitchen to Miami were featured here last week, is the Forrest Gump of the mob.

Each week until further notice – most likely in late March when the waterfront racketeering trial of Genovese boss Vincent (Chin) Gigante, son Andrew and six others begins – we will deliver a mob nugget or two, courtesy of the ubiquitous Barone.

Today, we provide some Barone insight about Vincent (Fish) Cafaro, who like Barone, was a protégé of legendary Genovese gangster Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno (right) and a Mafia defector. Cafaro began cooperating in 1986, renounced his agreement the following year, and resumed his turncoat status in 1989.

Each came out of Salerno’s so-called Harlem crew and broke their Mafia vows of silence, but they served entirely different roles as loyal soldiers. Barone was a hitman with so many victims – 15 to 18 is a good

guess – he can’t remember them all. Cafaro was a mild mannered bookie.  

In the early 1980s, Barone gave Cafaro’s son Thomas, a Gigante codefendant, a job on the piers.

“I did this as a favor to the father,” said Barone, according to an FBI report obtained by Gang Land.

Later on, Barone learned from acting boss Liborio (Barney) Bellomo – another Gigante codefendant – that “Fish Cafaro did not fully cooperate with the FBI” and withheld much information “because of an agreement (he) made with Bellomo,” the report said.

In return, said Barone, “Bellomo (left) protected his son Tommy from retaliation” for his father’s sins.

In 1989 and 1990, the elder Cafaro testified against Genovese wiseguys and Gambino boss John Gotti and disappeared into the Witness Protection Program. Thomas pleaded guilty, served his time, and emerged in 2001 as an alleged key player in the crime family’s waterfront rackets in New York and Miami.

Mob Star: The Story of John Gotti

Mob Star: The Story of John Gotti – the book it took yours truly and Gene Mustain 17 years to do – tells the complete saga of John Gotti, from his treacherous rise to his defiant downfall. Although we didn't know it at the time, we began working on "Mob Star" in 1985, when we began covering the Gotti story as news reporters.

The first edition came out in 1988, and we finished this new edition three days before Gotti died in June 2002. We added a postscript, and Alpha Books has distributed it to the nation's bookstores.

With a 40,000-word update, the new edition contains the entire Gotti saga right up to his time in prison and his death from throat cancer.

The 378 page, full-size book uses eight additional chapters, a prologue and an epilogue to complete the story we began telling (better than any other reporters, we might add!) when we covered the Gotti-orchestrated, midtown Manhattan assassination of former Gambino boss Paul Castellano.

For the last and best words on Gotti, this is the book to have. It is specially priced at Amazon.com at $11.87, more than five bucks off the suggested retail price.

    Not Really For Idiots

Whether you're a Gang Land regular or an occasional visitor, you'll enjoy  "The Complete Idiot's Guide to The Mafia," a book I wrote for Alpha Books. It's filled with real stuff about real wiseguys and insight about the ways that mobsters make their money. It's 343 pages of true stories of life and death, honor and betrayal. Get it at your local book store, or at Gang Land's favorite, Amazon.com, where the powers that be have knocked the price down to $13.27, so low I am concerned that the Godfather of online booksellers has forgotten about my end.