Record
Hearing
1988-04-29
National Criminal Justice Reference Service, scan of the printed hearings (NCJ 125163)
Testimony of Vincent Cafaro (29 April 1988)
Vincent "Fish" Cafaro, under federal indictment and testifying without immunity, told the Senate subcommittee he became a "made" member of the Genovese family in 1974, described its hierarchy, its rules on killings, his West Harlem numbers business and the concrete "2 percent club," and said Vincent Gigante's public behavior was a guise.
- Date
- 1988-04-29
- Kind
- hearing
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Docket
- Organized Crime: 25 Years After Valachi. Hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, 100th Cong., 2d sess. (S. Hrg. 100-906)
- Rights
- A work of the United States Senate, printed by the Government Printing Office. Public domain in the United States. 17 U.S.C. § 105. The NCJRS cover sheet records reproduction permission as "Public Domain / United States Senate."
The last day of the hearings, April 29, 1988. Senator Nunn’s introduction runs to printed page 220 (NCJRS PDF page 227): Cafaro, indicted with Anthony Salerno and others, began cooperating “in October 1986,” secretly tape-recorded conversations “for several months,” was severed from the Salerno trial in March 1987, and in October 1987 told prosecutors “he no longer wanted to cooperate, and he was ordered confined pending trial.” At printed page 221 Nunn advised him of his rights, since he remained “under Federal indictment on various criminal charges in the Southern District of New York.”
Cafaro’s statement begins on printed page 222: “My name is Vincent Cafaro, known to my friends as the “Fish”.” He said he went to work for Salerno in a numbers office around 1958, wore “a wire for the FBI for 5 months,” and was testifying “independently of any agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office. … I have not been given any immunity” (printed page 223). “In 1974 I got “straightened out.” In other words, I became a “made” member of the Genovese family” (printed page 223). Describing the ceremony, he said: “From that point on, I was amico nostra, a soldier in the Genovese family” (printed page 224). He said the family had “approximately 400 members” with a boss, underboss, consigliere and 14 caporegimes (printed page 223), that no killing could take place without the boss’s approval (printed page 225), and that he ran the numbers in West Harlem (printed page 225).
He described union payments and the concrete “2 percent club” run by four families (printed pages 225 to 227); several men he named there were not charged in this record and are not repeated here. On printed page 228 he said Vincent Gigante’s “strange behavior, suggesting to the outside world that he is crazy, helps to further insulate him from the authorities,” and on page 229, asked whether it was “all a guise,” he answered, “From what I hear, yes.” These are his sworn statements, not findings. A government proffer two years earlier had called him a “captain” (794 F.2d 64); his own word here is “soldier.”