William Cutolo, a 49-year-old Italian-American man known on the streets as “Wild Bill,” moved through New York City as a feared Colombo crime family powerbroker—an underboss with old war scars from the bloody internal feud that had split the family in the early 1990s. By the spring of 1999, prosecutors would later say, paranoia and revenge were mixing again inside the organization, and Cutolo’s rising influence made him a target.
On the afternoon of May 26, 1999, he set out for what was supposed to be a routine sit-down—summoned to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and dropped off by an auto mechanic at a park near 92nd Street and Shore Road. It was an ordinary-looking corner of the city for something so final. Cutolo vanished from that spot, never returning to the familiar rhythm of his crew’s Wednesday night dinner. At the Friendly Bocce Social Club, as his people waited, John “Jackie” DeRoss positioned himself among them, feigning surprise as the hours dragged on and prodding Cutolo’s son to start calling his father. By the next morning, DeRoss was at Cutolo’s home, pressing Cutolo’s wife, Marguerite, with questions about where Cutolo kept his money.
In court filings and later indictments, the government laid out what it believed happened after Cutolo walked into that meeting: he was lured, taken under control, and murdered as part of a plot driven by fear that he would seize leadership. One federal indictment described Cutolo being shot to death in a basement apartment tied to Dino Saracino, then buried on Long Island; investigators ultimately recovered remains on October 6, 2008, from Farmingdale. Years earlier, before that recovery, prosecutors had argued the body was likely disposed of at sea—an uncertainty that only deepened the dread around the disappearance until the grave was finally found.
As the years passed, the case didn’t simply go cold—it curdled into intimidation. Evidence introduced at trial included a covert recording made by Cutolo’s son, capturing threats from DeRoss and pressure on the family to provide false, exculpatory information to a private investigator. Witness tampering became part of the crime itself: prosecutors said the family withheld key information for years, afraid of what would happen if they spoke.
Authorities identified Alphonse “Allie Boy” Persico and John DeRoss as central suspects, alleging they ordered Cutolo’s murder. Their first major courtroom reckoning ended in a deadlocked jury and a mistrial on November 3, 2006—an outcome that left Cutolo’s fate officially unresolved in the eyes of that jury, even as the government continued pressing forward.
The second trial landed differently. In late 2007, Persico and DeRoss were convicted of murder in aid of racketeering and witness tampering connected to Cutolo’s killing, and in 2009 they were sentenced to life imprisonment. By then, the narrative the government presented was stark: Cutolo had been eliminated to prevent a power shift and to settle old scores from the Colombo war, and the cover-up had been enforced through threats directed at the family left behind.
Other suspects emerged as prosecutors pursued who they believed carried out the killing. A superseding indictment unsealed in December 2008 charged Thomas Gioeli, Dino Calabro, and Dino Saracino with murder in aid of racketeering in connection with Cutolo’s death, describing the shooting and burial and noting the October 2008 recovery. But when Gioeli and Saracino later went to trial, the verdicts split the story: in May 2012, a jury found them guilty of racketeering conspiracy while acquitting them on the murders in aid of racketeering tied to Cutolo. Subsequent proceedings left Gioeli with a 224-month federal sentence on the racketeering case, and appellate records reflect that Saracino received a much longer term after the court’s sentencing findings.
