He kept a low profile in his Staten Island neighborhood, yet he met the same bloody fate as many of his predecessors Wednesday night, gunned down in the street outside his brick home in a brazen assassination that recalled the mob wars of decades past.
Cali, 53, was shot six times in the Todt Hill section of Staten Island around 9:20 p.m., police said. Neighbors heard a staccato burst of gunshots — “pow-pow-pow-pow-pow,” one said Wednesday night — all the same volume, as if fired from the same gun. A blue pickup truck was spotted fleeing the scene, police said.
Cali was pronounced dead at Staten Island University Hospital.
The bloody attack stood out against its serene setting on Hilltop Terrace: a tree-lined, curving lane of stately homes with circular driveways and swimming pools. Cali’s body lying on the street was a throwback to black-and-white photographs from Mafia assassinations past in Manhattan.
Former Gambino boss Paul Castellano was gunned down outside Sparks Steak House in Midtown in 1985, a power grab orchestrated by a young Gotti, who ran the family through the late 1980s in his trademark showy style.
Cali rose quickly through the ranks of the family, becoming a “made” member in the late 1990s, on the way to a “swift promotion” to acting captain in less than 10 years, a prosecutor, Joey Lipton, said at a 2008 detention hearing after Cali’s arrest in an extortion case. In U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, Lipton cited Cali’s “familial and blood ties” to the Gambino family tracing back to Sicily.
His wife, Rosaria Inzerillo, had several relatives associated with the Gambino family, including her cousin, Tommy Gambino, according to a prosecution memorandum related to that hearing. Cali started out in a crew under a rising captain, John D. D’Amico, known as Jackie, who became the acting boss of the family around 2005.
Cali’s swift rise did not please everyone. One Gambino soldier, Joey Orlando, was overheard on a wiretapped call that was disclosed at the hearing complaining about Cali, whom he described as “Jackie’s guy.”
“Jackie made him a skipper,” Orlando was overheard saying. “Some snot-nosed, 30-year-old kid.”
Prosecutors said Cali tapped his connections in Italy, importing many members and associates in his crew, and where he was seen as a man of “influence and power” by other organized crime figures.
In one wiretapped call, two mobsters speaking in Italian were overheard discussing Cali. “He’s a friend of ours,” one said, “He is everything over there.”
Cali’s contacts with Italy were part of a broader trend in the 21st century of mob families importing Italian-born men, another law enforcement official who investigates Mafia cases said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for security reasons.
“A lot of the families are intentionally bringing over” people from Italy, the official said, “because they have what they believe are the old values, because the American born kids don’t have the right stuff anymore.”
Cali was observed by law enforcement at Gambino family events as early as 1990, when he was in his 20s, prosecutors said. He was present at the wake of his legendary predecessor, Gotti, who had been imprisoned and died of cancer in 2002, and at several other Gambino wakes in the years to come. Prosecutors said his own Christmas party in 2007 included among its guests D’Amico and others from the family.
Cali was arrested only once, in a 2008 extortion case involving a failed attempt to build a NASCAR track in Staten Island. The Gambino family controlled the trucking operation that would have hauled the dirt to fill the track’s foundation.
But prosecutors in that case said Cali committed other crimes for which he was never charged. He installed illegal Joker Poker video machines in a cafe in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and split the profits with the cafe’s owners after the requisite 10 percent cut for the Gambino family, according to the memo from the 2008 detention hearing.
He also took a percentage of the proceeds of an annual Italian feast in the neighborhood, and in the mid-1990s, was involved in a scam involving selling calling cards with airtime minutes from telephone companies, the prosecutor’s memo said.
Cali pleaded guilty to extortion conspiracy and was sentenced to 16 months in prison. Harlan J. Protass, his lawyer at the time, recalled Thursday: “As a client, Frank was smart, mild-mannered and low key. I feel terrible for his wife and children, who he loved very much.”
He was remembered as a good neighbor on Hilltop Terrace. “He waved to me; I wave to him; I don’t ask no questions,” said Mike Deluca, whose house was behind Cali’s. A 76-year-old woman who lives nearby recalled hearing the shots.
“It sounded like fireworks,” said the woman, who declined to give her name, “but there was no reason for it to be fireworks, so I knew it had to be gunshots.”
Cali rose to power largely by avoiding detection, law enforcement officials said. Other captains were not allowed to call him directly, and he avoided speaking on the phone. He chose to meet in person.
“He’s directing the activity from above,” Lipton, the prosecutor, said. He added: “Cali did not have to get his hands dirty.”
“He was very, very, very low key,” the law enforcement official said. “He was sort of the polar opposite of John Gotti.”
“He is as old school as you get,” the official added. “He’s basically a ghost. Where Gotti was always out, he was a ghost. You wouldn’t see him at social clubs or nightclubs or boxing matches.”
The Gambino family was once the nation’s largest and most influential organized crime group, but several of its leaders were convicted in the 1990s of crimes that included murder and racketeering.
Cali’s death arrives amid a recent spate of violence in the Mafia underworld.
In October, Sylvester Zottola, 71, a reputed associate of the Bonanno crime family was shot and killed as he waited in his SUV to pick up an order at the drive-thru window of a McDonald’s in the Bronx.
Just three months earlier, Zottola’s son, Salvatore Zottola, was ambushed by a gunman and left for dead outside his family’s Throgs Neck compound. He survived.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.