Joseph DeFede

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Joseph DeFede in an FBI surveillance photograph.

Joseph "Little Joe" DeFede (b. 1934) was a New York City mobster and former acting boss of the Lucchese crime family.

In his early days, DeFede operated a hot dog vendor truck in Coney Island, Brooklyn, which he also used to run numbers from. DeFede was a close personal friend of Lucchese power Vittorio Amuso and in 1986, after Amuso became boss he inducted DeFede into the borgata. DeFede's rise and fall in the New York mob can all be attriubted to Amuso.

In 1994, after Amuso was convicted of federal racketeering and murder charges, and his life sentence was upheld by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Amuso named DeFede his acting boss. Alphonse D'Arco, the acting boss named in 1991, had since become a cooperating witness, so Amuso needed a weaker man at the top to ensure that Amuso would still maintain control of the family from his prison cell.

On April 28, 1998, Charles C. Masten, Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Labor, announced the indictment of Lucchese acting boss Joe DeFede, chargine nine separate acts of racketeering stemming from 1991 to 1996 on behalf of the Lucchese family and for supervising the family's monthly extortion of businesses in the Garment District. The Luccheses were reaping $40,000 per month from Garment District businesses since the mid-1980s, and in conjunction with the Gambino crime family and Genovese crime family lined their pockets with close to $500,000 per year from the businesses. In December 1998, DeFede pleaded guilty to the charges, and received 5 years for extorting over $2.5 million from Garment District businesses since 1991.

Amuso was infuriated with DeFede, who he believed had been hiding money from him and the Lucchese administration, and replaced him as acting boss with Steven Crea, who was the head of the family's powerful Bronx faction. After DeFede's release from prison, he received word that Amuso believed he'd been skimming money, noting the fact that family profits had gone up enormously since Crea had been named acting boss. Amuso had decided he wanted to kill DeFede, but before he had an opporunity, DeFede took the route that Al D'Arco took.

In February 2001, Joseph DeFede began cooperating with the federal government. DeFede explained the Garment District rackets, as well as protection rackets that existed in his own neighborhood of Howard Beach, Queens. DeFede would provide information leading to the indictments and convictions of Steven Crea, Louis Daidone, Dominic Truscello, Joseph Tangorra, Anthony Baratta, and a number of family captains, soldiers and associates.

While testifying against Gambino crime family boss Peter Gotti, DeFede exclaimed that all he made during his reign as acting boss was $1,014,000, a measley $250,000 per year. DeFede also stated that, based on his estimates, a low ranking soldier will average about $50,000 per year.

[edit] Further reading

Capeci, Jerry. The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Mafia. Indianapolis: Alpha Books, 2002. ISBN 0-02-864225-2
Fitch, Robert. Solidarity For Sale: How Corruption Destroyed the Labor Movement and Undermined America's Promise. New York: PublicAffairs, 2006. ISBN 1-891620-72-X
Jacobs, James B., Coleen Friel and Robert Radick. Gotham Unbound: How New York City Was Liberated from the Grip of Organized Crime. New York: NYU Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8147-4247-5
Milhorn, H. Thomas. Crime: Computer Viruses to Twin Towers. Boca Raton, Florida: Universal Publishers, 2005. ISBN 1-58112-489-9