Family Ties to the Old Country
Frank Cali was born in New York City in 1965 to Sicilian immigrants. Cali’s connection to Sicily would play a key role in both his personal life as well as his career as a mafioso. He married Rosaria Inzerillo, who was from a reputed Mafia family in Palermo. Cali reportedly cultivated criminal ties with his in-laws and other Sicilian mobsters and was alleged to have been a member of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and one of their key contacts in New York.
Frank Cali’s Sicilian ties no doubt helped him get connected to the Mafia in New York as well. From an early age he became close friends with Jackie D’Amico, a key lieutenant in the Gambino Family. His friendship to D’Amico, coupled with his Sicilian connects and reputation as a competent gangster helped cement his status in the Gambino Crime Family at a relatively young age. While moving quickly through the ranks was not unusual for mafiosos, some of the Gambino’s chafed at Cali’s rapid rise; one Gambino soldier, Joey Orlando, dismissed Cali as “some 30-year-old, snot-nosed kid.” Nonetheless, the Gambino’s would continue to elevate Cali in their organization as time passed.
Rising High in the Gambino Family
Frank Cali came into his prime during the height of law enforcement’s crackdown on the American Mafia. While this was a challenging time for the mob, in many ways it worked to Cali’s advantage. After the head of the Gambino Family, John Gotti, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 1992, Jackie D’Amico became a de facto leader of the family. D’Amico in turn elevated his trusted protégé to an acting capo position in the family, which gave him control of several lucrative Gambino rackets.
Cali used his Sicilian connections to become a highly effective Gambino Family capo. He was fond of using men from Sicily to run many of his key rackets in New York; in the thinking of Cali and many other late 20th Century Mobsters, mafiosos from the old country were more disciplined than their American born counterparts, and far less prone to talking or otherwise being careless. Cali’s reliance on “imported” mafiosos appeared to have paid off; throughout his decades in the Mafia, he was only convicted one time in 2008 for extortion and ended up serving less than two years in prison.
While a convicted felon, Cali nonetheless escaped the harsher sentences of many of his mafia contemporaries in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Gambino family was particularly hard hit, with much of its leadership convicted on extremely long sentences. Once again, keeping a low profile paid off for Cali: in 2015, at the relatively young age of 49, Francesco Cali became the Boss of the Gambino Family.
A Short Reign and a Dramatic End
While Cali was undoubtedly young for the boss of a crime family, he was certainly no fool. He’d grown up in a Mafia that had seen its ranks decimated by law enforcement and took measures to keep the law at bay. He had long relied on Sicilians to execute his most sensitive tasks. Now, he made every effort to use intermediaries to contact lieutenants and give them orders. One prosecutor, describing Cali’s wily leadership style, noted “He’s directing the activity from above. . . Cali did not have to get his hands dirty.”
While Frank Cali managed to evade the law as head of the Gambinos, there are other threats that the Mafiosos have to contend with, and those threats finally caught up with him. On the evening of March 13, 2019, Frank was shot six times in front of his home in the Todt Hill section of Staten Island. He was pronounced dead at the hospital a short time later. Witnesses indicated they saw a blue pickup truck speeding away from the scene, but as of this post, there are no suspects identified, or motive for the crime.
Cali attempted to operate differently than many of his Gambino Family predecessors. However, in the end, he shared the fate of one former Boss of the family: Paul Castellano, who’d led the Gambinos in the 1980’s was infamously shot to death in front of the Sparks Steak House in Manhattan in 1985. Now, nearly 35 years later, there is another dead Gambino Family boss in the streets, reminding the public that organized crime is alive, if not well, in America today.