A few days after his death, Time Magazine I believe it was ran a whole article on Neil Dellacroce, and claimed that he had been a voluntary paid FBI informant since around the 1960s, and even gave the name of his alleged handler with the FBI. A question: Does anyone feel there was ANY validity to the article?

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,960415,00.html

I dont think this is truth although who knows. Whitey Bulger was a brutal killer yet he was also an informer. But Neil was a respected mobster and plus he was always under indictment it seemed

this rumor comes on discussion boards once every cpl years..

This is old news. But for what it's worth, I never believed it.

No way he is,i saw this topic on bunch of other forums.

One thing that is really interesting is how Castellano was ridiculed when it was discovered that the FBI had bugged his house. But many seems to forget that the FBI also bugged Dellacroce´s house. A bug had been placed in his bedroom. Does anyone know how that went down? And why haven´t there been any greater interest in the Dellacroce tapes?

Hell..We really need a good, solid book on Dellacroce. Ivy, are you interested?

Do you mean the tapes where he says something about "rolling it up and going to war" to John and Angelo?

Yeah! And there seems to be a lot of other stuff on the tapes that no author/writer has touched upon.

The transcripts are available in full . . . somewhere. I read them a few years ago but I don't remember if I downloaded them. Let me look around and I'll let you know.

Great! I will see if I can find anyting on the net!

I found the transcripts in bookform. So apparently I was wrong. It has already been done...

I guess simply because the agents monitoring the Dellacroce bug didn't write a book like O'Brien and Kurins.

It wouldn't be that suprising. High ranking guys like him are bound to have found themselves in a situation when they were coming up in the life where they would rather give info than serve time and have things put on hold.

How exactly can you be a VOLUNTARY PAID FBI INFORMANT? You call em and say hey for $1000 a month i will feed you info for free? Dont add up.

Think about it. You're a high up wiseguy. The Feds want people like that working for them. A guy goes to the FBI and basically takes out an insurance policy: "I give you guys some information once in a while and I don't do any hard time, capisce? And I get paid extra."

His name was Aniello Dellacroce, which in Italian means "little lamb of the cross," and he took pleasure in killing people. "He likes to peer into a victim's face, like some kind of dark angel, at the moment of death," a federal agent once said of the Mafia chieftain. As underboss of the Gambino clan, the most powerful of New York's five families, he was a member and chief enforcer of "the Commission," the 11-member council that reputedly oversees organized crime around the U.S. Occasionally disguised as a priest under the alias of Father O'Neill, a play on his first name, he traveled about the nation to impose edicts and settle disputes between rival Mafia clans. Few mobsters dared to argue with him. Dellacroce, who died in his sleep in a New York City hospital last week at the age of 71, played another role as well: for almost two decades he was an informant for the FBI.

Though Dellacroce was not very forthcoming about his own crimes, he offered the feds a wealth of information about those committed by his enemies and the Commission. After Carlo Gambino, the capo di tutti capi (boss of bosses), died in 1976, Dellacroce told the FBI that another would-be godfather, Carmine Galante, had been marked for death. Dellacroce had reason to know: plans for the Galante hit were hatched in his own headquarters, the Ravenite Social Club in Manhattan's Little Italy. The feds were able to isolate and protect Galante as long as he was in prison for parole violations, but after he was released in 1979 Galante was mowed down during an alfresco lunch in the backyard of a Brooklyn restaurant. Other information provided by Dellacroce gave the FBI leads on the still unsolved murder of Teamster Boss Jimmy Hoffa and helped break major narcotics cases, including the so-called Pizza Connection case against 22 U.S. and Sicilian mobsters for heroin trafficking.

Dellacroce's double life began one afternoon in the mid-1960s when a limousine swung up to the Ravenite Social Club. Out stepped a tall man in a somber suit carrying a Wall Street banker's briefcase. "Who's in charge here?" he demanded. Awed hoodlums ushered the uninvited guest to Dellacroce's table.

The bold stranger was an FBI agent named Pat Collins. Sitting down with Dellacroce, he began a slow courtship, gradually winning him over by convincing the wary Mafia leader that a private relationship with the federal authorities would not be a bad insurance policy in a high-risk career.

Unlike Teamster Union Boss Jackie Presser, who escaped prosecution on charges of padding union payrolls this year because he was an FBI informant, Dellacroce's cooperation did not keep him out of jail. In 1972 he was sentenced to five years in prison for income tax evasion. Collins had expected that one day Dellacroce would demand payment for his information, but that never happened. The veteran FBI agent died of a heart attack in 1980 at the age of 51. This year Dellacroce was ordered to stand trial on racketeering and conspiracy charges, along with ten other accused members of the Commission. Whether he hoped the payment would come in the form of exoneration from those charges will probably never be known. Before the trial could begin, the bloodthirsty Little Lamb slipped from the grasp of federal prosecutors.

Not to be a ballbuster but Dellacroce has nothing to do with "lamb".

edit: forget it, I guess you're including the Aniello (agnello) part. All good.

I would have an easier time believing that tony accardo was a snitch since he never spent a day in jail.I jus don't believe this

rat?neil?lol.

in all honesty,i could sit here and write story after story about oneil. he used to come over to my uncles house to pick him up and they would go out after dinner every night. so anytime i was over there playing in the street we [kids] would see him. my father knew him well. an absolute gentlemen, never crude around women or children.take my word, hes no snitch. as far as money goes? 1970 he was brooklyns shylock. everyone owed him something.and if not money,a favor.

a story my father will tell about him is,they are stting around in a club and the subject of 'hits' came up. everyone at the lunch table goes around and is talking about the 'methods' to hit some one. the general consensus is popping the victim in the back of the head in a car or a club. one of them asks neil [who has the most 'experience'.lol.] if it is better to shoot a guy when hes not looking at you. neil says with a straight face,'i guess,but that takes the fun out of it'.lol.

thats the neil dellacroce ive always heard about.

If Tony Accardo was an informant, which i doubt he was. Why wouldn't the FBI just say he was? He's dead so it wouldn't harm anyone.

status quo. revealing an informants identity could discourage others who are 'on the fence'.

yeah but he's dead so why would it even make a difference?

Dellacroce was a rat as much as Paulie Strips D'Amico is real

nicky,the fbi can make the same arguement.

it would just look bad.his kids,grandkids. former friends,partners. why bismerch a mans name if he gave you valuable information?

A $1000 bucks a month DanielPerrygin thats not a lot of money for a high ranking mobster or the avg citizen

Nah, never, he was serious old school. Wasn't he in jail when Gambino died and when he got out Big Paul made him underboss. I think it was contempt of something...

Not many informants do jail time....

actually paul waited after carlo died for neil to get out of jail bc it was respectful. paul respected neil so much that he waited for him to get out so neil could make a 'run' for boss.if he was so inclined. obviosly neil didnt even try to be boss,he let paul have the stripes. shows what gentlemen they both were.

Exactly.

The only reason they "outed" Scarpa after he died was because they knew the shit was about to hit the fan with that crooked Fed.

If you break that trust, even after a guy dies, you run the risk of losing future informants.

hahaha!

Anyone who believes this is an absolute gullible idiot.

1) Dellacroce was probably taking in £100k a month as underboss, so why would he accept £1k as an informant.

2) If he was an informant he would have brought down more then half the family, including Don Carlo and under Castellano he could have took down the entire blue collar faction, Castellano and all the capo's in white collar faction, it's that simple.

3) Informants don't do numerous stretches in jail.

The most important of all, he was an old school vicious gangster and arguably the most loyal old timer left in the 70's.

If they slapped Neil with the death penalty he would have took it like a man.