Docs Reveal Joseph Gatto’s Intent to Change Will

The November 2013 murder of Joseph Gatto remains unsolved.

SILVER LAKE—In the months before his murder, Joseph Gatto reached out at least six times to friends and family about disinheriting his daughter Nicole from his estate according to recently filed court documents.

Additionally, police found a note handwritten by Gatto about his estate on the desk where he was found slumped over dead from a single gunshot wound to the abdomen in 2013.

The revelations are part of a 189-page declaration Gatto’s son—former California Assemblymember Mike Gatto—filed with Los Angeles Superior Court in April, contesting $250,000 in executor and $383,000 in legal fees requested by his sister, Nicole, the executor of the estate.

According to the filing, Mike submitted the documents as the “final straw” to refute Nicole’s claim that finalizing the estate has been costly, because, Nicole claims Mike and their sister, Mariann, are the cause of a “cloud of suspicion” hanging over her regarding their father’s death.

“Her own actions and my father’s own words are the source” of the suspicions, Gatto wrote in his declaration, filed under penalty of perjury.

Emails and Conversations About Changing The Will

According to the filing, Gatto has routinely updated his estate every few years since 1996. His last will is from 2009, naming Nicole as executor.

But emails Gatto wrote between July 2013 and September 2013, say he was reworking his estate plans “after some soul searching” and wanted to make the changes before Nicole went “postal” and “before anything foolishly becomes community property,” if Nicole married her then boyfriend Mark Moreno.

In a July 22, 2013 email to his friend Al Jones, Gatto didn’t mince words.

“. . . [I]t costs me $3,000 each time I have my trust updated. Just can’t see me leaving anything to the pricks my daughter Nicole chooses to share her bed [with] from time to time,” he wrote.

Additionally, Mike declared, his father told him in October 2013, a month before he was slain, he had notified Nicole of his plans.

“My father told me he had had a very tough discussion with Nicole informing he that he would disinherit her,” Mike’s declaration reads.

Further, Gatto’s brother, Frank, confirmed his sibling’s intentions, per the filing, as do other emails from Gatto to another long-time friend.

Additionally, Gatto’s cousin and accountant, in interviews with the Ledger in 2016, confirmed the same.

November 12, 2013

Police say Gatto was murdered November 12, 2013 by a single gunshot wound to the abdomen.

His body was discovered the next day slumped over his desk in his third story bedroom on Bright Lane. There was no sign of forced entry.

Nicole and Moreno were married the same day Gatto was killed, in a private ceremony with no family members in attendance.

In an interview in 2016, the couple said they wanted a small ceremony with one witness and had plans to celebrate with friends and family later.

Additionally, in 2016 Moreno said he and Gatto were close and there was no bad will between them.

While Los Angeles Police have refused to comment on the case since shortly after the murder, it is believed that they have cleared all family members of any wrongdoing.

From the onset, they have focused on a man with a gun who was seen breaking into cars in the neighborhood the same night and around the same time they believe Gatto was murdered.

Despite a $50,000 reward offered in January of 2014, there has been no arrest in the case.

Deteriorating Relationship with Nicole

While the court filing shows the Gatto family was prone to bickering, the breakdown between Nicole and her father appears to have started in the spring of 2013 when Gatto became angry that Nicole had given a house key to Moreno to watch his house while he was visiting Mike, then an Assemblymember, in Sacramento.

When Gatto returned home, per the court filing, he became further upset when he found an outdoor security light had been smashed out at his house.

According to Mike’s declaration, his father said Moreno had accidentally broken the light with a fireplace poker trying to fend off an intruder.

“This statement shocked and disturbed me,” Mike wrote, “both for its strange violence and for its lack of credibility.”

Further in Mike’s declaration he states valuables had been left behind at his father’s home the night he was killed, but the wooden file cabinet where his father kept his papers had been broken into and presumably emptied.

According to the filing, police told family members a fireplace poker had been used by the assailant to break into things in Gatto’s home the day he was murdered.

Other emails reveal Gatto deeply disliked Moreno, often using profanities to describe him.

He wrote in one such email, he was frustrated Moreno was not working and was leaning financially on Nicole.

“Sooner or later she will get upset with the boy toy,” he wrote in an email to Mike, September 22, 2013.

By the day he died, Gatto and Nicole were not speaking.

“Nicole and Mark used the handyman who did work for me, but since they no longer speak to me, I know if I asked them for his number, they would tell me to get f**ked,” Gatto wrote in an email to Mike dated November 12, 2013 around noon.

According to police, Gatto was killed that day in the early evening.

The Missing Pages from the Notepad

According to the documents, the note left on Gatto’s desk was one of several he had written on a small notepad.

Mike, who, along with his sister had been banned for the most part, until 2017 from their father’s house after Nicole changed the locks shortly after his murder, wrote repeatedly to Nicole’s attorney over the years about the whereabouts of those missing pages, thinking they could be perhaps a holographic will, meaning one written in their father’s handwriting.

For months, Nicole’s attorneys told him, according to the filing, the missing notes—as well as sentimental keepsakes from Gatto to Mike’s daughters—could not be found, because Gatto was a pack rat, his house filled with a lifetime of collections and keepsakes.

But Mike argued being precluded from entering his childhood home didn’t help matters and questioned if Nicole was hoarding items out of spite or had possibly destroyed their father’s handwritten notes about his estate.

“There is an ongoing murder investigation here,” Mike wrote in a letter to Nicole’s attorney in 2014. “We have a document that we can date to immediately before my father’s murder; that he wrote in his own hand; part of which was found at the desk at which he was shot; and that indicates very clearly that if he had lived, he intended to reduce Nicole’s share of the estate substantially, by approximately $1 million in fact.”

While Mike wrote he was not accusing Nicole, he felt the any additional notes written in his father’s hand and the one found by his side at the time of his death were central to the criminal investigation.

“The key elements of a murder investigation are means, motive and opportunity,” Gatto wrote to Nicole’s attorney. “It does not take a detective to grasp that this document is relevant to motive for at least two of the seven people the police need to clear.”

Initially, attorneys said Nicole was unable to locate any other pages from the notepad, even after hiring an outside search firm for the task, according to the filing.

But, according to her attorney, Nicole ultimately found the additional notes later in 2014, scattered in their father’s bedroom, but they were deemed not legal estate documents and were, in her words, just “brainstorming” and rough notations.

Nicole’s attorney also excoriated Mike for insinuating, in any way, her client, or Moreno, had anything to do with Gatto’s murder.

Additionally, in the filings, Mike indicates his father’s burial spot was without a headstone for a year and a half after his death, which he called a “pauper’s grave” that he could not “fathom.”

Additionally, in the filing, Mike details that in 2015, during a meeting with Nicole in the Citibank parking lot in Silver Lake, Mark unexpectedly attended “and placed his hand in his jacket pocket, in the classic B-movie, ‘I have a gun here,’ pose and said, ‘this should shut you up.’”

Nicole, Mike and Mariann Gatto did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this story. Attempts to reach Moreno were unsuccessful.

Additionally, Los Angeles Police (LAPD) detectives assigned to the case did not respond to requests for interviews and denied a California Public Records Act request on any recent documents showing movement on the case, citing providing so would endanger an ongoing criminal investigation.

