Pat Dollard

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Times Online:

Blinded by the sun, John Favara ran over and killed the 12-year-old son of his neighbour in New York when the boy rode his mini-motorbike into the street on March 18, 1980.

To his great misfortune, the neighbour was John Gotti, who was soon to become the Godfather of the American Mafia. Four months later Mr Favara vanished.

The 51-year-old furniture salesman and father of two, who had no links to the Mob, received death threats before his disappearance. His wife and two children fled their home in an Italian-American neighbourhood but were tormented by a campaign of letters containing excrement.

His body was never found, and prosecutors now believe that they know why. Almost 30 years later, an informant cited in court papers in an impending Mafia trial says that Mr Favara was murdered and disposed of in a barrel of acid. Charles Carneglia, the defendant, allegedly told the informant that acid was “the best method to use to avoid detection”.

Mr Favara lived one street away from Mr Gotti and his five children in the New York neighbourhood of Howard Beach. His son Scott was a friend of another of Gotti’s sons, John Jr, who, prosecutors say, grew up to succeed his father as head of the Gambino crime family.

The salesman’s car hit Frank, the Gottis’ youngest child, when he darted in front of him. Police accepted that the child’s death was an accident. But John Gotti, a fast-rising gangster who took over the Gambino family with the spectacular murder of its boss, Paul “Big Paul” Castellano, in 1985, was not content to let the matter rest.

Two days after the accident, a woman called the local police station and said: “The driver of the car that killed Frank Gotti will be eliminated.”

Mr Favara began receiving death threats — including an invitation to his own funeral. His car was stolen and found spray-painted with the word “Murderer”. At first he dismissed the danger, saying: “That kind of stuff only happens in the movies.”

He tried to apologise to Victoria Gotti, the dead boy’s mother, but she chased him away with an aluminium baseball bat.

After that he decided to move and signed a contract to buy a new house. While waiting for completion, however, he was snatched by a group of men as he left the Castro Convertible furniture warehouse in Long Island on July 28, 1980.

Four witnesses at a nearby diner saw a group of men beating him with a plank of wood, before shooting him in the legs and driving him away. The terrified witnesses refused to co-operate. The owner of the diner sold up and moved away after one of the suspected hitmen came in and stared at him menacingly over the counter.

Gotti, who was eventually convicted for his Mob activities and died in jail in 2002, was the obvious suspect, but the Gottis had hotel receipts showing that they were in Florida on the day that Mr Favara disappeared.

The clan began an ostentatious display of mourning for young Frank, keeping a large velvet-draped portrait of their son on display at their home and visiting his grave every day.

Despite the absence of a body, a judge declared Mr Favara legally dead in 1983 so that his wife could collect his life insurance.

Mrs Gotti insists she has no idea what happened to her former neighbour, although she is glad that he disappeared. “I’m sick and tired of hearing this garbage about how this innocent family man was hunted down,” she said in a rare interview with the New York Daily News.

Police originally believed that his body had been stuffed into a barrel that was filled with cement and dumped into the Atlantic from a pier.

A Mob informant in a forthcoming racketeering case against Mr Carneglia now says he told him that he dissolved Mr Favara’s body in a 55-gallon vat of acid.

Mr Carneglia, 62, an alleged Gambino “soldier”, is charged with five murders, including the shooting of a court officer who was scheduled to testify against him.

The Daily News identified the informant as Kevin McMahon, the former neighbour who had lent Frank Gotti the mini-bike. Mr Carneglia allegedly asked Mr McMahon to help him to move barrels of acid stored in his basement and bragged that the acid had been used to dispose of bodies, including Mr Favara’s. Roger Burlingame, the prosecutor, wrote in court papers: “In a later discussion concerning his expertise at disposing of bodies for the Gambino family, which included a discussion of a book [Carneglia] was reading on dismemberment, [Carneglia] informed another Gambino family associate that acid was the best method to use to avoid detection.”

A life of organised crime

— Born in the South Bronx in 1940, John Joseph Gotti, right, was the fifth of 13 children. His father was a casual labourer, often unemployed

— As a boy he became the leader of an east New York gang called the Fulton-Rockaway Boys, running errands for local members of the underworld

— He dropped out of school at 16, and by 18 was ranked by the police as a low-level associate of the local Mafia

— He seized control of the Gambino crime Source: Times archives family in a murderous coup in 1985, engineering the assassination of Paul Castellano

— Convicted in 1992 of 13 criminal charges including racketeering, murder, conspiracy and tax fraud, he received a life sentence

— He died in a prison hospital in 2002, aged 61, after suffering from neck and head cancer