40-year mystery: Where were the police when mobster 'Sammy G' Gingello was murdered?

On the early April morning 40 years ago when "Sammy G" Gingello was killed — murdered by a bomb detonated beneath his Buick Park Avenue sedan — the downtown streets were eerily empty.

Typically, Rochester Police Investigator Gus D'Aprile would have been nearby, shadowing Gingello as he and his partner, Jerry Luciano, had done for weeks and weeks.

But D'Aprile was instead home in bed; he and Luciano had finally been given the time off that they'd long — and previously unsuccessfully — requested from their supervisors.

For years thereafter, and until his death in December, D'Aprile would wonder whether it was pure coincidence that he and Luciano finally got the night off, or if, instead, there was knowledge in police circles that a hit was planned on Gingello.

D'Aprile once told me that police colleagues and even mobsters later asked him and Luciano about their whereabouts the night Gingello died.

"Everybody had the same questions: 'Who hit (Gingello) and where were Gus and Jerry?' " D'Aprile said in an interview.

I was first told this story by D'Aprile in 2004. Over the next 13 years he and I discussed that night at least five times, both in face-to-face meetings or in telephone calls. There were times when D'Aprile was willing to tell me the story publicly, and other times when he had second thoughts, concerned that it might prove an embarrassment to law enforcement.

Mostly, D'Aprile did want the story told, even with the many questions that were left unanswered. His partner, Luciano, had died before D'Aprile and D'Aprile's friend, Livingston County resident Bill Mulligan, first approached me with the story about Gingello's death.

Only recently did I realize that we had passed the 40th anniversary of Gingello's death. I remembered my conversations with D'Aprile, and dug out my interview notes. I'd kept them, hoping to one day write the story. D'Aprile had been kind enough to trust me with his recollections of the hit on Gingello, and I felt that, to be worthy of that trust, I should tell his story.

With that in mind, I approached D'Aprile's son, David, to see if the family would be OK with my reporting the story D'Aprile told me. They were, he said.

Do I have definitive answers about what happened that April 1978 night? No.

I've talked to cops who were part of the surveillance team, and they say that night they were detoured to a raid elsewhere in the city. This was not unusual, they say, and explains why Gingello may have had a rare evening absent his police escorts.

Others still find the circumstances suspicious — including one of Gingello's bodyguards who survived the bombing. And D'Aprile felt the same way.

"There were too many unanswered questions," D'Aprile said in one of our interviews. "It bugged the hell out of me."

Rochester's mob history

Rochester’s mob history cannot be told without reference to Salvatore “Sammy G” Gingello, one of the era's most dapper criminal figures.

"You never saw him in jeans," D'Aprile said. "You never saw him in tennis shoes."

The late Frank Valenti was Rochester’s first widely known mob boss. Gingello was originally part of the Valenti hierarchy, but Gingello, along with others, forced Valenti out of Rochester after they decided Valenti was pocketing more money from mob-controlled activities than he deserved.

Gingello was a central figure in Rochester's mob wars between the so-called "A team" and "B team" in the late 1970s.

The spark of the conflict, ironically, was police misconduct: Six of the city's leading Mafioso were tried and convicted for alleged roles in the 1973 hit of mob arsonist Jimmy "the Hammer" Massaro, but it turned out that a significant piece of evidence — police notes of an alleged meeting of the accused — had been fabricated by cops.

The revelation of the police misconduct led to freedom for Gingello and the five others who had been imprisoned for the Massaro murder. When they were freed in January 1978, the new crew that had taken over the town's gambling and other illicit activities was loath to cede power.

"Little did we know that the people they left in charge did not want to relinquish control," said retired Rochester Police Investigator Paul Camping, who was one of the department's lead organized crime investigators.

Thus the wars began — and Gingello, never one to keep a low profile despite the hazardous times, became a prime target for his opposition.

Before the April 23 bombing, there were other failed attempts on Gingello. One bomb, placed in a snowbank, was detonated as Gingello walked by.

As Blair Kenny writes in his recent book, The Rochester Mob Wars, one "B team" mobster, Dominic "Sonny" Celestino, hid in the trunk of a car and triggered the bomb. He used a radio device with the antennae extended through a hole drilled in the trunk, according to The Rochester Mob Wars, which draws heavily on Democrat and Chronicle reporting from the mob era.

"Gingello was blown into the air but miraculously escaped serious injury," Kenny wrote of the failed March 2, 1978, attempt to kill Gingello.

The next time would not fail.

Sammy G's bodyguard

Tom Taylor and Tom Torpey were Gingello's beefy bodyguards. Both are now free, each having served 25 years for setting up a 1981 mob murder.

I've known Taylor for a decade, having first corresponded with him about another case while he was in prison. I figured if anyone had a firsthand view of the assassination of Gingello, it would be Taylor.

As it turns out, Taylor also wondered just where the police surveillance was when the bomb went off.

Granted, it was around 2:30 a.m. April 23, 1978, when Gingello, Taylor and Torpey strolled from a Stillson Street restaurant-bar to the Buick. But the trio was accustomed to having cops nearby watching their every move, whatever the hour.

"I had 24-hour surveillance on me," Taylor said in a recent telephone interview from his Florida home. "No matter where I went, I had it on me.

"… I used to tell Sammy, 'They're our own bodyguards. Nobody's going to make a move with them watching us. They carry guns legally and everything.' "

But that early morning was different, Taylor said.

"There was no surveillance that night," he said.

Taylor told me that he often drove. But, at the restaurant, he and Gingello argued over whether they should check beneath the Buick for explosives. Taylor wanted to do so; Gingello thought it was a sign of weakness.

"We'd been fighting for months, the two (mob) factions," Taylor said of the A team and B team. "They were bombing everything. They never got anybody."

As they left the restaurant, Gingello insisted on driving the Buick.

Gingello and Taylor had met many years before as construction workers. Gingello was then a union-represented dump truck driver. Gingello jokingly reminded him of this.

He asked Taylor for the keys, saying, "I'm the Teamster; you can't touch anything with wheels on it."

Within seconds after the three entered the car, with Gingello in the driver's seat, Taylor in the passenger seat and Torpey in the rear, the Buick burst into flames, the explosion echoing through downtown. Gingello died later at the hospital — he'd lost one leg and the other was nearly removed from his body — while Torpey and Taylor were both injured but would survive.

2015: Ex-mobster Torpey arrested on drug charges

Taylor told me that he never heard the explosion. He felt a pain in his foot, like someone had slammed a board into his sole. Later, he would be told by federal agents that the Buick's transmission plate may have diverted away from him the power of the 15 pounds of dynamite wired beneath the car.

'Backroom Bill'

In 1978, the police were aware of escalating threats on Gingello.

D'Aprile said his and Luciano's marching orders were: "Stay with him. We don't want him hurt. There's been some threats."

Gingello knew the two from their constant surveillance, D'Aprile said. "Wherever Sammy's car was, we were."

Upon entering a bar, Gingello sometimes spotted them and said, "If you guys want a drink, come on in."

D'Aprile was asleep when his phone rang around 3 a.m. April 23 with the news of the attack on Gingello. He said he was never able to get what he considered a reliable answer as to why the surveillance had been missing.

D'Aprile said he asked who would cover for him and Luciano and was told not to worry about the issue. Still, he said, the two didn't argue; they wanted a break.

The shift before, D'Aprile said, he and Luciano had asked for a break and were refused.

"We got to the point where we were both whipped," he said. "We hadn't seen our families."

The history of the Massaro murder and Rochester's mob wars of the 1970s was chronicled in the 1982 book The Hammer Conspiracies by local lawyer and author Frank Aloi, who was trusted by individuals on both sides of the law.

In the book Aloi wrote of the unusual quiet the morning of April 23.

Writing from the perspective of B team members suspected of a role in the bombing of Gingello, Aloi wrote: "Where were the cops? … Not a cop in sight. It was eerie to the killers with a job to do, The ease of the situation confronted them, and it was in a way somehow threatening. Was it a set up?"

I reached out to Aloi for his recollections from his research.

Aloi told me that, shortly after the bombing, he'd heard from some in law enforcement about the surprising lack of surveillance the night of the homicide.

A few weeks later, Aloi said, he was lunching with former Monroe County Sheriff's Office Chief of Detectives William Mahoney, whose nickname was "Backroom Bill" because of his reputation for conducting sometimes coercive interrogations that led to confessions that were not always reliable. Mahoney had resigned only months before the killing amid a grand jury investigation into Sheriff's Office corruption.

"I was talking to Mahoney, and I said, 'I heard downtown was deserted and there were none of the usual people and the usual suspects,' " Aloi said. "He kind of smiled ... and nodded 'Yes.' "

Mahoney, now deceased, was central to the fabrication of evidence in the Massaro homicide. In 1980, a federal jury convicted him of civil rights violations for the falsified evidence.

Was Mahoney's 1978 conversation with Aloi an admission of some sorts? Aloi said he can't be sure.

"This was typical Mahoney," Aloi said. "He was sly like a fox. But you have 'Public Enemy Number One' in this public place and no one is watching.

"Does that mean Mahoney was in on a fix? Who the hell knows. At a point curious circumstances are beyond ... coincidences."

Cops on a raid

Retired law enforcement officials who policed and prosecuted mobsters say they can't imagine a scenario in which the police knew of the planned assassination of Gingello and did nothing to intervene.

That's too explosive a secret to remain a secret, some say.

In an interview last month, retired federal prosecutor Anthony Bruce noted that the police fabrication of evidence in the Massaro murder became public knowledge. That proves the difficulty in keeping misconduct under wraps, he said.

"They did something terribly wrong (when fabricating evidence) and it lasted for a while and then it fell apart," he said of the illegal police acts with the Massaro murder. "My gut reaction is if somebody did something like that with (the killing of) Sammy it would have fallen apart at some point."

Retired city police Investigator Camping also well remembers the night Gingello was killed. He said there was a gambling raid the same evening that "mobilized the entire squad."

"I remember being sent on a scouting mission there with another officer," Camping told me in a telephone interview from his Maine home. "We wanted to be sure that the principals were in the club before we executed the search warrant."

Trying to re-create the night of Gingello's killing as best I could, I also reached out to one of the most honorable people I've ever met — retired State Police Investigator George Thompson.

While with the State Police, he was well known for his hound-dog tracking of the mob. When reputed mobsters gathered, Thompson would write down license tags on all nearby cars. If the same cars kept showing up at the meetings, the odds were good that the owner of the vehicle was connected to organized crime.

After leaving the State Police, Thompson went to work at the Federal Public Defender's Office as an investigator. His job there was to work on behalf of the criminally accused, poking holes in prosecutorial cases. He even ended up assisting some of the same mobsters he'd tracked years before.

Thompson had also been on the Gingello surveillance team. Like Camping, he remembers getting sent on the gambling raid. There was nothing untoward about that, Thompson said.

"Just as soon as the bomb went off, everybody dropped everything and went to that," Thompson said.

B Team members were, unsurprisingly, key suspects in the killing, but authorities never amassed enough evidence for a conviction.

"It was another one of those things that people could never get enough to prosecute," Thompson told me.

D'Aprile once told me that he and Luciano were ordered to stay glued to Gingello, regardless of what else was going on. That was one reason he remained suspicious about the lack of surveillance, even if there were police raids elsewhere in the city, he said.

D'Aprile was no fan of the mob. Their crimes offended him. But, he once told me, that didn't make Gingello's murder acceptable.

"I just don't like to see people get killed," he said, explaining why he could not shake the questions about April 23, 1978.

"I don't care who they are."

GCRAIG@Gannett.com

Editor's note

We don’t make a habit of running first-person articles because we believe the focus should be on the subjects of the story, not the reporter. We will make exceptions in columns but rarely in straight news articles. In this case Gary Craig has reported on crime and justice issues since 1990, so he has a well-established record for credibility. In writing about this infamous incident from the city's organized crime history — the car bombing of "Sammy G." Gingello — Craig draws on notes of many interviews he conducted over more than a decade, on and off, with ex-bodyguards, investigators and others with first-hand knowledge. Because several of those interviewed are now deceased, and because the way Craig had to report the story was part of the story out of necessity, we thought it best for the reader to let him tell it in the first person.

About the writer

Gary Craig has been a reporter in Rochester since 1990, focusing largely on criminal justice issues. He is the author of Seven Million, about Rochester’s 1993 Brink’s heist and its connections with the Irish Republican Army. He has written extensively about Rochester’s organized crime history, and is often asked to speak on the topic.

More mob stories by Gary Craig:

► Notorious Rochester mob hit man 'Mad Dog' Sullivan dies in prison

► Reconnecting with dad, a mob informant

► Gerald O'Connor and his alleged mob connections