As John Riggi is sent to prison, John “Johnny Boy” D’Amato, is made the acting head of the DeCavalcante family.

Despite being unpopular in his own crime family, D’Amato would use his close friendship with John Gotti to become head of the DeCavalcante crew.

Eventually, he is rubbed out by his own mafia family.

His crime...being gay.

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Playing a New Jersey gangster was nuanced, one part menacing, but equally comedic.

Federico Castellucio played the role of Furio Giunta , a Tony Soprano street-soldier who even tried to have a romantic fling with Tony’s wife Carmela Soprano.

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In 1997, after the death of acting boss Jake Amari, Vinnie “Ocean” Palermo is named part of a three man panel that will now run the DeCavalcante family. Vinnie Ocean is considered the most likely candidate to be the real Tony Soprano, for a number of reasons.

We trace his rise & fall in the mafia in this two-part episode.

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The Sopranos considered by many the greatest show in television history, made the New Jersey mafia water cooler talk across the country from 1999-2007.

While based on fictional characters, there was an actual mafia family neck deep in criminal activities across the Hudson River from their La Cosa Nostra contemporaries in New York.

In New Jersey, starting in the 1960’s, the DeCavalcante family ran the show and are considered the inspiration for many of The Sopranos characters and storylines that fans are familiar with today.

This season on FAMILY BUSINESS, we will look at the rise and fall of the DeCavalcante family. Sometimes truth is even more colorful than fiction...

Family Business is an 8 episode investigative audio documentary focused on the most notorious mafia crime families and their impact and relationship with Hollywood. Each season we will take on another family, another city, and another set of nefarious, deadly and sometimes even comical, characters and their stories.

We begin Season One with the DeCavalcante crime family based in Northern New Jersey.

The DeCavalcante crime family is an Italian American crime family that operates in Northern New Jersey, particularly in Elizabeth, Newark and the surrounding areas in North Jersey and it operates on the opposite side of the Hudson, from the Five Families of New York, but it maintains strong relations with many of them, as well as with the Philadelphia Crime Family and the Patriarca Crime Family of New England, Its illicit activities include bookmaking, cement, and construction violations, bootlegging, corruption, drug trafficking, extortion, fencing, fraud, hijacking, illegal gambling, loan-sharking, money laundering, murder, pier thefts, pornography, prostitution, racketeering, and waste management violations. Interviews with informants,

gangsters, defense lawyers, cops, family members, and journalists weave a true-crime tale.

In Episode One, we will trace the rise & fall of the family, beginning with Sam 'The Plumber.’ DeCavalcante.

Sam was a sitting member of The Commission, allowing his family a seat at the table with the 5 families that ran La Cosa Nostra in New York.

We will discuss Sam 'The Plumber’s' career in crime & his arrests, leading to his semi-retirement to Florida.

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In hip hop, the end of the 80s ushered in a thriving music industry, with hip hop, diversifying itself immensely.

In 1990 alone, A Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy, Ice Cube, D Nice, Special Ed, LL Cool J, Vanilla Ice, and EPMD all had seminal releases.

These artists would start to define the trajectory of hip hop music as it invaded white suburbs and penetrated the minds of American political thought as hip hop started to gain in popularity.

The traumatic events inside the crack epidemic and the war on drugs resulted with draconian drug sentences, and most of the major drug kingpins facing huge life sentences or death.

The crack trade that spawned 1000s of corner millionaires was now coming home to roost, and its path of destruction was young men and women just out of their teenage years, being shipped to federal and state jails for 30 year and two life sentences.

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There were many defining events as it relates to the intersection of crime, the War on Drugs, and hip hop throughout the 80s.

That being said, there was a singular event that took place in Southside Jamaica, Queens, in February of 1988 that arguably changed the course of policing in this country, the mythology of the drug trade, and symbolically ended the crack era for the exalted hustlers inside New York City.

This event was the execution of a rookie NYPD Cop named Edward Byrne.

The NYPD, led by Chief Bill Bratton, would form the Tactical Narcotics Team, aimed at systematically taking down all drug crews in the city.

In part 2 of our interview with Prince Miller, he discusses the ramifications of Ed Byrne’s murder and Fat Cat Nichols' cooperation with the government leading to the fall of The Supreme Team.

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The years of 1987 and ’88 ushered in the golden age of hip-hop, when a few groundbreaking artists, acting as cultural critics, show the power of this art form.

Led by the protest rap of KRS-One, Public Enemy, Eric B & Rakim, among others, hip-hop was now shining a light on the plight of the inner-city struggle, the crack epidemic, mass incarceration & other societal plights.

The presidential race of 1988 is filled with subtle racial dog whistles, aimed at scaring white America into voting for George H Bush.

On the West Coast, we witness the rise of LA street gangs such as the Bloods & Crips, while NWA releases the seminal album Straight Outta Compton.

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As hip hop and the war on drugs hit the mid 1980s, it can be argued that both commercial endeavors hit their strides in inner cities across the United States.

As crack cocaine exploded, members of the United States government enacted one of the first steps in the revolution of our criminal justice system in soaring incarceration rates.

The comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 was the first revision of the US Criminal Code since the early 1900s.

It was sponsored by a racist Strom Thurmond, a Republican from South Carolina in the Senate, and by Hamilton Fish, a Republican from New York.

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If any story defines what New York was like at that time, it's the story of New York City subway vigilante Bernard Goetz's shooting of unarmed black teens.

On December 22, 1984, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, Darrell Cabey, and James Ramseur were shot and wounded by Bernard Goetz after they accosted him on a New York City subway train in Manhattan.

In America, you would think that we would learn from our mistakes as it relates to race, class, and the divisions that have been created.

One could see this case taking place in 2024, with protests in the cable news wars elevating it into the mainstream.

In the first two episodes, we set the stage in the early 1980s with iconic hip-hop drug kingpins who came to define an era.

Those names are "Freeway" Rick Ross in Los Angeles, Lorenzo "Fat Cat" Nichols in Queens, Guy Fisher in Harlem, And finally, a mention of a crew called the Supreme Team.

These early kingpins were the table setters for what would become a new breed of hustling and the young men from Queens who launched a business idea that would revolutionize the drug trade forever.

In the Bible of hip-hop gangsters, Kenneth "Supreme" McGriff and Gerald "Prince" Miller of the Supreme Team were the top dogs.

**If you’re a fan of The Dossier, please visit our Patreon page for free and paid content featuring exclusive documents, unedited interviews, and monthly online meetups with other Dossier fans and the Dossier team.

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