Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - True Crime This Week: Fugitive Mass Murderers

Episode Date: January 18, 2026

This week on True Crime This Week, Vanessa Richardson examines two brutal mass murderers who managed to evade justice for years. First, the hunt for Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon,” who fled Europe after World War II and built a new life in South America—until relentless Nazi hunters exposed his past. Then, the story of Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, a sadistic New York mob boss responsible for dozens of murders who continued running the Lucchese crime family while hiding just miles from FBI headquarters. From war crimes and government cover-ups to organized crime and betrayal, this episode explores how long killers can run—and what finally brings them down. If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Scams, Money and Murder to never miss a case! For Ad-free listening and early access to episodes, subscribe to Crime House+ on Apple Podcasts. Scams, Money and Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios 🎧 Need More to Binge?  Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Crime House 24/7, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Murder True Crime Stories, and more wherever you get your podcasts! Follow me on Social Instagram: @Crimehouse TikTok: @Crimehouse Facebook: @crimehousestudios X: @crimehousemedia YouTube: @crimehousestudios To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, Crime House community. It's Vanessa Richardson. Exciting news, conspiracy theories, cults and crimes is leveling up. Starting the week of January 12th, you'll be getting two episodes every week. Wednesdays, we unravel the conspiracy or the cult, and on Fridays we look at a corresponding crime. Every week has a theme. Tech, bioterror, power, paranoia, you name it. Follow conspiracy theories, cults and crimes now on your podcast app, because you're about to dive deeper, get weirder, and go darker than ever before. This is Crime House.

This week in crime history, we're investigating the cases of two brutal mass murderers who spent years on the run from justice. On January 19, 1972, escaped Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie was discovered living under a fake name in Lima, Peru. 21 years later, on January 19, 1993, police arrested family mob boss, Anthony Gaspipe, Casso, wanted in connection with up to 36 murders after three years on the run. Welcome to True Crime This Week, part of Crime House Daily. I'm Vanessa Richardson. Every Sunday, we'll be revisiting notorious crimes from the coming week in history, from serial killers to mysterious disappear. or murders. Every episode will explore stories that share a common theme. Each week will cover two stories, one further in the past and one more rooted in the present. Here at Crime House, we know none of this would be possible without you, our community. Please support us by rating,

reviewing, and following Crimehouse Daily, wherever you get your podcasts. And for ad-free and early access to Crimehouse Daily, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus on Apple Podcasts. This week's theme is fugitive mass murderers. First, we'll start on January 19, 1972, when a French newspaper published photos of former Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie hiding out in Lima, Peru. During the Nazi occupation of France in World War II,

Barbie earned the nickname The Butcher of Lyon for his brutal torture and killing of thousands of Jews and French resistance fighters. After the war, he tried to disappear in South America until a pair of relentless Nazi hunters brought him to justice. Then we'll jump ahead to January 19, 1993, when police arrested mobster Anthony Casso

at his mistress's New Jersey home after three years on the run. During his climb to the top of the Lucchase crime family in the 1970s and 80s, Casso targeted his enemies and his friends with shootings, hitmen, and car bombings. We'll start tracking down the stories of these fugitive killers coming up. On January 19, 1972, the French newspaper, LaRourre published an article about a Bolivian businessman named Klaus Altman. After decades working in the import-export business in Bolivia, Altman had recently resettled in a luxurious mansion in Lima, Peru. But the French newspaper story wasn't about Altman's business career or his fancy new home.

It was focused on who Altman was before he came to South America. The paper accused Altman of living under a secret identity. According to them, his real name was Klaus Barbie, a Gestapo officer nicknamed the Butcher of Lyon. Barbie had killed and tortured thousands during the German occupation of France, then disappeared after the war. The article showed side-by-side photos of Barbie and Altman, and the two looked identical. An anthropologist in Munich analyzed the two pictures and told reporters, If Altman is not Barbie, he is his brother, but we know that Barbie has no brother. Barbie had been identified by a 33-year-old German woman named Biatty Klaarsfeld,

who dedicated her life to tracking down fugitive Nazis. She'd been on Barbie's trail ever since recognizing him in a picture from a Bolivian business conference a few years earlier. Clarksfeld had found him at his new address in Peru and provided all the information to the newspaper. Now, reporters at LaRour were publicly asking if the French government was planning to extradite this fugitive war criminal back to France to face justice. The day after the article ran, the man known as Klaus Altman issued a statement to the press denying that he was Klaus Barbie. But these were bald-faced lies. And now that Klaarsfeld had found him, she would make sure he'd. never received a moment's peace. Before he became Klaus Altman and before he became the butcher of

Lyon, Klaus Barbie planned to become something very different. Born near the German city of Bonn in 1913, the young Barbie initially wanted to be a priest, but in 1933 the sudden loss of his father and brother altered the trajectory of Barbie's life, along with another major event that occurred that year. On January 30th, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, and the Nazi Party became dominant in all aspects of German life. The Nazis were aggressive about recruiting young men and boys into their organization, and Barbie, grieving the death of his father and brother, was eager to find some camaraderie and community. So he gave up on going to theological school and got involved with a Nazi youth organization known as the Hitler

Ugand, otherwise known as the Hitler Youth. Surrounded by thousands of other angry, nationalistic young men, Barbie had found a new family to replace the one he'd lost. It didn't take long for Barbie to become fully indoctrinated into the Nazi's hateful ideology, and he soon began to rapidly rise in the organization. In 1935, at age 22, he was a very young. He was able to get a job in Hitler's elite paramilitary group, known as the SS. Over the next few years, Barbie received multiple promotions for his dedicated service. By 1939, at age 26, he reached the rank of second lieutenant, and he was about to have a chance to truly prove his devotion to Hitler.

In September of that year, Germany invaded Poland, marking the start of World War II. A few months later, in May of 1940, German forces conquered the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. Afterwards, Barbie's SS unit was stationed in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. His job was to search the city and round up anybody Hitler considered undesirable, like communists, freemasons, queer people, and especially Jews. Barbie took his work very seriously. In 1941, he and his unit arrested 278 young men. men from a Jewish community on the outskirts of Amsterdam.

The captives were loaded onto a train and sent to a concentration camp in Germany, where all of them were killed within the next six months. Over the next year, the SS scaled up raids like these, eventually sending over 110,000 Dutch Jews to concentration camps over the course of the war. But Barbie didn't stay in the Netherlands for long. In November of 1942, at the age of 29, he was put in charge of a Gestapo unit in Lyon, France. The Gestapo was Hitler's secret police force, tasked with investigating and eliminating anybody who posed a threat to Nazi rule. In France, that meant members of the French resistance, an insurgent group who'd been fighting the Nazi occupiers with bombings and targeted assassinations for the past two years.

In Lyon, he set up shop in a local hotel and went to work dismantling the local resistance network. Barbie was good at getting people to give him exactly what he wanted. Whenever his men captured a resistance fighter, Barbie would first try to recruit them as an informant. He'd offer them bribes or threatened to go after their families. Using these methods, Barbie was able to establish dozens of spies within the resistance. If someone he captured refused to cooperate, Barbie would torture them to get whatever information he could. He'd go after captives with whips and clubs, burn them with cigarettes, and set attack dogs loose on them. But his favorite weapons were his own fists.

Over the next two years, Barbie arrested prominent resistance members throughout Lyon. He had prisoners executed in public plazas in order to intimidate the locals. And he showed the same brutality to the resistance collaborators as he did to resistance members. When Barbie found a stash of resistance weapons and ammunition in the basement of a local convent, he had all the nuns executed as punishment. Barbie's biggest prize was French resistance leader Jean Moulin, a former French civil servant who was instrumental in organizing resistance operations. After arresting Moulin at a safe house,

Barbie tortured Moulin for days to try and get him to give up information on his friends. But Moulin never talked and eventually slipped into a coma and died after an extended beating from Barbie. While Barbie was breaking the resistance, he was also tracking down Lyon's remaining Jews. In April of 1944, Barbie and his operatives discovered a farm deep in the countryside where 44 orphaned Jewish children were being sheltered by a peasant. pair of Good Samaritans named Sabine and Miron Slatin. On Barbie's orders, the children were loaded onto two trucks and sent to the death camp at Auschwitz, where none survived. It's estimated that during his two years in Lyon, Barbie oversaw the deportation and execution of 14,000 Jews and resistance

fighters. Of all his bloodthirsty acts, it was his arrest of the children that earned him the nickname Butcher of Lyon, but his reign of terror was coming to an end. In June of 1944, Allied forces led by the U.S. military landed in northern France, and the tide of the war turned sharply against the Germans. Over the next 11 months, Europe was gradually liberated from Nazi rule. Barbie retreated from France with the rest of the Nazis and took part in several battles on German soil until the Nazi surrender in May of 1945. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Barbie acted fast to make sure he wouldn't be held accountable

for his actions. He took off his Nazi uniform, buried his gun in the woods, and went into hiding with his family in the German countryside under the name Klaus Becker. By day, he did manual labor in the fields. By night, he engaged in many of the same activities as his old enemies in the French resistance, smuggling weapons, selling black market goods, and forging paperwork to help other ex-Nazis establish new identities. Eventually, these activities landed him in hot water. In the summer of 1946, he was arrested by American soldiers in the town of Marburg. The men who arrested him didn't know he was Klaus Barbie. They just assumed he was an ordinary ex-Nazi. But Barbie didn't want to give them a chance to find out who he really was.

On the way to jail, Barbie jumped out of the back of the Jeep and fled into the streets as his captors shot at him. He made his way back to his family in the countryside and laid low for a few weeks before resuming his activities. Three months later, Barbie was picked up by British intelligence operatives during a sting operation in Hamburg. They also didn't know the man they'd arrested was a notorious war criminal. He and a couple other ex-Nazis spent a few days in a lightly guarded cell, before they managed to break the lock on their door and escape out an open window. In the end, the ex-Nazi underground was dismantled using the same tactics Barbie did in Lyon, allied forces arrested members and convinced them to inform on other members until the whole group could be arrested.

This was how Klaus Barbie wound up in the custody of the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps in the spring of 1947. This time, the U.S. intelligence agents Barbie was talking to were better informed. They knew exactly who he was, what he'd done, and what he was capable of. They could have sent him to prison, but instead they offered him a job. We've asked to clients RBC what's to accumulate three-foyle an argent Canadian Tyre when they scan their card-recompens Triangle and pay with their card RBC-lié. It's super, super, super! I can't

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changed his name to Klaus Becker and laid low in the German countryside, hoping to avoid

accountability for his crimes. But in In 1947, American intelligence operatives finally caught up with the 34-year-old and put him on their payroll. The Americans knew that Barbie had done terrible things during the war, but that's also how they knew he was a gifted intelligence operative with a wide network of informants all over Germany. And most importantly, Barbie, like all Nazis, was fiercely anti-communist. In the aftermath of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union.

Union had competing visions for the world. Capitalism versus communism. With the Cold War in its infant stages, the U.S. was happy to overlook Barbie's war crimes in exchange for organizing anti-communist resistance in Soviet-controlled East Germany. Barbie had no problem working for his former enemies. For the next four years, the Americans paid him well and took care of his family as he fed them information about Soviet operations in East Germany. America's allies weren't happy about this arrangement. In 1948, the French government learned that Barbie, who'd terrorized their people for years, was alive and working for the Americans. They demanded the U.S. hand him over so he could face justice on French soil. But the Americans weren't willing to part with a valuable informant.

Also, Barbie now knew a lot about America's secretive counterintelligence operations, and his handlers worried that he'd spill his secrets if they gave him up. So they stonewalled the French for as long as they could, burying the extradition requests under a mountain of bureaucratic red tape. But by 1950, Barbie had become too much of a liability to ignore. It was now widely rumored that he was working for the Americans, and as more survivors spoke up about his reign of terror in Lyon, high-ranking members of the U.S. intelligence community knew they had to cut ties with him. But they couldn't just hand Barbie over to the French. He was living proof that the U.S. had knowingly collaborated with an ex-Gahtapo officer. Briefly, his handlers considered killing him

and dumping his body on the side of the road to cover up their involvement with him. Instead, they settled on another plan to get Barbie out of the picture. They sent him and his family to South America. Then they told the French that he'd escaped and they didn't know where he was. South America was a natural destination for a fugitive like Barbie. During the 1800s, large numbers of Germans had emigrated to European colonies in South America in search of work. By the early 1900s, there were thriving communities in countries like Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Paraguay. And in the aftermath of World War II, many former Nazis fled to these countries, hoping to start a new life on a new continent. With help from the U.S. government, Barbie changed his name to Klaus Altman and resettled with his family in La Paz, Bolivia in 1951.

It didn't take long for him to make friends in Bolivia's tightly knit German community. He was charismatic and a hard worker, and he soon found a good-paying job in the timber industry. And he had no problem leaving his old life behind. One of Barbie's first business partners was the manager of a Jewish agricultural company. community at the edge of the Bolivian jungle. Even though these were the exact kind of people Barbie had been hunting and killing just a few years before, now he was happy to work with them. But there were signs that Barbie had fond memories of his glory days in the Gestapo.

Sometimes when he got drunk with his new friends in Bolivia's German-speaking community, he'd brag about torturing prisoners during the war. Once he even drunkenly gave a Nazi salute and yelled, Heil Hitler, although he never told them his real name. It was clear he'd been more than just a foot soldier in Hitler's regime. Barbie's friends weren't shocked that he'd been a Nazi. There were a lot of former Nazis around, and the Bolivian German community had been supportive of Hitler before the war, but by the 1950s, they considered the whole thing an embarrassing incident that was best left forgotten. Eventually, Barbie's pro-Nazi outbursts got him banned from most German

social clubs in La Paz. But Barbie was always good at making new friends, and by the early 1960s, he'd found some very powerful connections in the Bolivian military. In 1964, a Bolivian Air Force General named René Barientos overthrew the democratically elected government and established a right-wing military dictatorship. Many high-level officials in the new government were close friends of Barbies, and when they needed help fighting rebel groups, they'd turned to Barbie for help. Throughout the 1960s, Barbie called on a network of other ex-Nazis throughout South America to organize shipments of guns and heavy artillery to supply Bariantos's army. He also trained military police officers in torture and other interrogation tactics.

Bariento was so appreciative of Barbie's work that in 1967, he put him in charge of Bolivia's brand-new state-owned shipping company. Barbie used the company's ships to travel the world, smuggling huge quantities of weapons into Bolivia in violation of international law. He also treated the taxpayer-funded company as his personal piggy bank and handed out high-paying executive jobs to his friends and children. When the shipping company filed for bankruptcy four years later in 1971, it was nearly a million dollars in debt. Despite public outrage, Barbie's friends in the government sealed the company's financial records and didn't conduct an investigation into where all the money went. Barbie was now a very rich man, but he was feeling the heat in Bolivia,

so in October of 1971, the 58-year-old war criminal bought himself a luxurious mansion in the neighboring nation of Peru. But his past was about to catch up with him. Barbie spent the next few months taking meetings with Peruvian businessmen, trying to set up another shipping firm there. But he didn't know he was being watched. Barbie's Hunter was a 33-year-old German woman named Biatty Klaarsfeld. Growing up in post-war Germany, Klaersfeld was ashamed of her parents' involvement with Hitler's regime. As a result, she dedicated her life to making sure ex-Nazis were held accountable for their crimes.

In 1968, she exposed the new German chancellor as a former member of the Nazi party, and even chased him off the stage at an event chanting Nazi, Nazi, Nazi. After that, she set her sights on tracking down Nazis overseas. During his four-year tenure as the head of the Bolivian shipping company, Klaus Barbie, living under his alias, Klaus Altman, was a public figure who was often photographed. Klaarsfeldt had spent a lot of time, studying pictures of fugitive Nazis. When she stumbled across a picture of the man calling himself

Klaus Altman, she recognized Barbie immediately. Klaarsfeld did more research on his activities in Bolivia, then sent her findings to the French newspaper L'Rourre. The story exposing Klaus Altman as Klaus Barbie came out on January 19, 1972. Barbie denied the allegations and pleaded with the press to leave him and his family alone. But the story wouldn't go away. Peruvian police questioned him about his past. French officials started talking about having him extradited, and on January 28th, Biotty Klaersfeld traveled to Peru to confront him personally. But Barbie had already begun his retreat. That day, he and two bodyguards sped back to Bolivia in his Volkswagen. Once he was back in La Paz, his powerful friends once again protected him from the consequences of his actions.

The Bolivian government refused France's request to have him extradited, and when Biotty-Claersfeld followed him to Bolivia to try and force a showdown, she was arrested and deported. But Barbie's secret was out, and he became terrified that he'd be targeted by assassins, seeking revenge for his participation in the Holocaust. He started living in a fortified mansion, and never left home without a police escort,

because even though he had the government's support, ordinary Bolivians weren't as willing to look the other way. A few months after he was exposed, Barbie was at a coffee shop with his wife when an old Jewish man named Gustavo Stier recognized him. Stier, who'd fled Austria in 1938 when Hitler took over, confronted Barbie, shouting that he was a bloodhound. Furious, Barbie replied,

quote, I could slap you in the face. Stier responded, Aren't you shooting people in the back anymore? Barbie just sulked and walked away. Stier saw Barbie at the coffee shop several more times over the next few years, but the former Nazi could never bring himself to make eye contact. Barbie lived in a state of constant paranoia for the next 10 years until 1982, when Bolivia's military government collapsed.

and the country transitioned back to democracy. Less than three months after Bolivia's new president was elected, he decided he wasn't interested in sheltering a fugitive Nazi war criminal, so he had the 70-year-old Barbie arrested and sent to France to stand trial for crimes against humanity. In a courtroom in Lyon, Barbie sat and listened as survivors and families of the people he'd killed testified about the suffering he'd caused. When the trial concluded, Barbie was found guilty of war crimes

and sentenced to life in prison. But even after being convicted, Barbie was unrepentant. After the verdict was read, Barbie stated, I am proud to have been a commanding officer of the best military outfit in the Third Reich. And if I had to be born a thousand times again,

I would be a thousand times what I've been. Klaus Barbie spent the remaining years of his life in a French prison cell until he died of cancer in 1991 at 77 years old. It's unfortunate that Barbie lived a much longer life than so many of his victims, but at least he lived long enough to finally face justice for his crimes. Up next, another mass killer who went on the run. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers.

You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at Love Scarborough. Ready to take on Canada's worst invasive plant? The call for proposals for the invasive Fragmites control fund is open. These funds support collaborative projects led by municipalities, conservation authorities, indigenous communities, and nonprofits that focus on Fragmites

mapping, monitoring, planning, control, and innovation. Applications must be submitted electronically by January 23, 2026 at 1159 p.m. For more information and to apply, visit our website. Oh, please, not that music. That music gives me nightmares for. from my childhood. Could we get something a little bit lighter, some lighter music here? Are you a fan of true crime TV shows? And what about Unsolved Mysteries? The show that jump started all of our love of True Crime.

I'm Ellen Marsh. And I'm Joey Taranto. And we host, I Think Not, a true crime comedy podcast covering some of the wildest stories from your favorite true crime can't be TV shows all the way to Unsolved Mysteries. Baby, you will laugh, you will cry, you'll think about true crime in a whole new way,

and you'll also ask yourself, who gave these people mics? New episodes of I Think Not are released every Wednesday with bonus episodes out every Thursday on Patreon. And every Monday you can listen to our True Crime Rundown, where we go over the top true crime headlines of the week. So come and join us wherever you listen to your podcast. 21 years after Klaus Barbie was found hiding out in Bolivia, another fugitive mass murderer was brought to justice,

but this killer targeted his allies just as often as he went after his enemies. It was just after 11 a.m. on January 19, 19, 1993, when 25 FBI agents stormed up the driveway of a spacious three-bedroom home in suburban New Jersey. The agents pounded on the front door, yelling for the residents to open up. When nobody replied, the agents used a battering ram to smash the metal door. With their guns drawn, they rushed into the foyer of the house. That's when they heard yelling from upstairs. It was a man's voice calling down to let them know that he'd heard them and he wasn't going to cause any trouble.

Moments later, 52-year-old Anthony Casso appeared on the staircase, holding his hands above his head. He was naked, except for a towel wrapped around his waist. As he explained to the arresting officers, he'd been in the shower when they knocked. At that time, Anthony Kassel was. Casso was considered one of the most dangerous mobsters in the country. He was a ruthless sadist who'd killed dozens of rivals, suspected informants, and people he just didn't like. For the past

three years, he'd been in hiding, on the run from racketeering charges. But that hadn't stopped him from running the Lucchese crime family while he was a fugitive. Now, Caso was going to have to answer for a life of crime. One that began decades earlier when he was just a kid, roaming the streets of Brooklyn. Anthony Casso was born on May 21st, 1942, and he was always close to organized crime. His godfather had been a captain in the Genovese crime family, one of the five Italian mafia families that fought for control of New York City throughout much of the 20th century. His father had once made a living as a burglar, but had given up his life of crime and found

honest work as a longshoreman. He hoped that his son would for him. follow in his footsteps and become an upstanding citizen. But even as a boy, Casso had other plans. As a child, Casso joined a street gang called the South Brooklyn Boys. He and his friends got into frequent scuffles and street fights with rival gangs, and it didn't take long for Casso to develop a reputation as a tough guy. That reputation followed him as he got older. By the time he was 21 in 1963, Casso had picked up the nickname Gas Pipe, in honor of the lead pipe he liked to use as a weapon in street fights.

Shortly after, he graduated from the South Brooklyn Boys into a much bigger criminal organization, the Lucchese crime family. The Lucchese put Casso to work as an enforcer. His job was to make sure people who owed the family money paid up and suffered the consequences if they didn't. Casso loved hurting people just for fun, which made him a great fit for the job.

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Casso rose through the organization's ranks. He bullied local businesses into signing mob-friendly union contracts, sold drugs, and ran underground gambling operations. All this lawbreaking didn't go unnoticed. Casso was repeatedly arrested on assault and drug trafficking charges. But whether he was in state or federal court, prosecutors could never make the charges stick. Everybody knew that Casso was a maniac. and witnesses were terrified to testify against him. Time after time, charges against him were dropped, and Casso went free. The leaders of the Lucchese family could tell that Casso was a keeper.

So in 1974, when he was 32 years old, they formally inducted him into the family as a made man. Now, Casso had the full backing and support of the Lucchese family, and New York would never be the same. In the mid-1970s, Casso partnered with another made man named Vittorio Amuso to put together a team of professional burglars who they called the bypass gang, named for their skill at bypassing locks and alarm systems. Relying on tips from friendly bank employees, the gang found locations with poorly secured safes in their basements. On the weekends, when the banks were closed, members of Casso's crew would get access to the base. of whatever building was next door to the bank, then break through the wall. Once they were inside, Casso's expert safecrackers would go to work

opening all the safety deposit boxes to steal the jewelry, cash, and valuables inside. By the end of the weekend, they'd be gone, leaving a big hole in the wall for bank employees to find on Monday morning. It's estimated that Casso stole over $100 million through heist like these over the next 10 years. He was a gifted thief, and he brought in a lot of money for the family, but he did his best work with a gun. While Casso was running the bypass gang, his bosses and the Lucchese family were also using him as their go-to hitman. Whenever the bosses suspected someone of stealing from them or talking to the police, they counted on Casso to take care of the situation. During the 1970s, the family

learned that one of their business partners was passing information along to the local district attorney. So, Casso invited the man to a late-night poker game at one of the Lucchese family's bars. Once the target was seated at the poker table and had ordered a drink, all the other players made excuses to get up and leave. As soon as they were alone, Casso drew a 38-calibre pistol and shot the unsuspecting target in the head. When the job was done, Casso and his friends rolled the body up in blankets, then dumped the snitch's remains in a vacant lot. A year later, in 1975, Casso learned that one of his associates in the bypass gang had been robbing other members of the gang, stealing back their ill-gotten gains. This level of disloyalty was unacceptable, and an example had to be made.

So Casso and one of his underlings ambushed the traitor in broad daylight on the streets of Brooklyn, gunning him down in front of a crowd of people. Even though there were plenty of witnesses, nobody came forward to implicate Casso in the crime. He had a reputation as a cold-blooded killer, and soon, that reputation would put him on a collision course with another bloodthirsty gangster, John Goddy. John Gotti was a captain in the Gambino family,

another one of the five mafia organizations that ran New York City. He was a top earner, Taking part in the Lufthansa heist, the theft of nearly $6 million from a cargo terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport, the largest heist in U.S. history at the time. He was brutal and never hesitated to kill anyone who got on his bad side, even his own next-door neighbor. And most of all, he was ambitious. In 1985, Gadi was upset with the leadership of the Gambino family. He felt that their leader, Paul Castellano, was weak and out of touch with the men. men on the street. And Godi didn't like that Castellano was taking a big cut of his earnings.

So he hatched a plan to take Costalano out. On December 16, 1985, Costalano and one of his top advisors were leaving a Manhattan Steakhouse when a group of heavily armed assassins ambushed them. Both men were gunned down and left to die on the street. In the aftermath, Gotti was elected as the new head of the Gambino family. Everybody knew that Gotti was responsible for the assassination. It was an unprecedented act of violence. And it was also a violation of the mafia's most sacred codes. Even though the five families were rivals, they all agreed to play by the same set of rules. And one of them was that the head of one family couldn't be killed without the consent of the heads of all the other families. The rule was there to try and keep the mafia's operations somewhat civil and avoid violent power struggles that would draw police attention.

By murdering a boss in front of a crowd of civilians, Godi had broken that rule. Now, the public was outraged and calling for reform, and the FBI was coming down hard on mafia operations all over New York. The heads of the other four families agreed that Gotti needed to be taken out, and they knew, just who they could call to get the job done, Anthony Casso. At 43 years old, Anthony Casso had become the most feared hitman in the Lucchese crime family. He was the family's go-to guy from making informants, rivals, and traitors disappear. But in 1985, he was given his biggest target yet, John Gotti, who'd just risen to the top of the Gambino crime family after assassinating them.

the previous boss. The heads of the other families wanted Godi killed, so nobody else tried to pull off a coup like his. So they hired Anthony Casso to take him out. Working with his long-time partner Vittorio Amuso, Casso bought a brick of C4 explosives, which he wired up to a radio receiver from a remote control car he got at Toys R Us. Then he handed off the bomb to a couple of underlings and had them attach it to Gotti's car while he was visiting a Brooklyn social club on April 13, 1986. Hours later, when they spotted someone getting into the car, the killers hit a button on the remote. The bomb went off, incinerating the car and scattering pieces of the driver's body all over the

street. Casso and his men celebrated a job well done, until a few hours later when they learned that Godi hadn't been the one in the car. Instead, they'd killed Godi's top advisor, Frank DeChico. But as far as Casso's bosses were concerned, the hit was still a success. Godi had lost one of his top men, and they'd sent him a powerful message. At the same time, though, Casso had made a powerful enemy, and Gotti was about to strike back. Several months later, on September 14, 1986,

Casso was driving away from a restaurant in Brooklyn when a car full of hitmen pulled up alongside him and opened fire with shotguns. Casso saw them coming and ducked just in time to avoid the gunfire. Thinking quickly, he scrambled out the passenger side of his car and ran through a hail of gunfire back into the restaurant, where he hid inside the kitchen freezer. The would-be assassins took off before the police arrived, and Casso called a friend to pick him up and take him to the hospital.

He'd been shot six times, but he was alive, and he was ready for revenge. Casso had informants everywhere, and he soon learned that one of his attempted assassins was named James Heidel. So Casso paid a pair of corrupt NYPD detectives to pick Hydel up at his home in Staten Island. The cops told Heidel he was under arrest, but instead of taking him to a police station, they took him to the basement of a mob safe house where Casso was waiting. There, Casso savagely beat Heidel until he finally confessed that John Gotti had hired him and his accomplices. As soon as Casso had the information he wanted, he pulled out his gun and killed Heidel, shooting him 15 times. Once Heidel was dead, Casso took revenge on the other assassins. One was found shot to death and stuffed in the trunk of his car.

Casso sent his men to take out another of the hitman, Nikki Guido, not realizing that the would-be killer was already in jail on cocaine charges. Instead, Casso's men accidentally killed a different and completely innocent man named Nikki Guido outside his Brooklyn home. Casso was on the warpath. But before he could take the fight all the way to John Gotti, he got distracted by a promotion. In November of 1986, the head of the Lucchasey crime family was convicted of racketeering and sentenced to 100 years in prison. Before he left for jail, the boss put Casso's friend Vittorio Amuso in charge of the family. In turn, Amuso appointed Casso as his second in command.

After a lifetime of service to the family, Casso had now made it to the second highest place in the organization at the age of just 44. But not everybody in the Lucchese family was happy about Cassos' rise to the top. Many of the captains underneath him and Amuso were resentful about having to give a cut of their earnings to two guys who were younger than they were. And some of them started loudly, publicly grumbling about the change in Lerner. leadership. Soon, Casso put his feud with John Gotti on the back burner. He needed to clean house within his own family. Michael Papadillo was Lucchese captain who frequently complained about Amuso and Casso. In the spring of 1989, he was beaten and shot to death in the back of a bagel shop, then cremated at a nearby cemetery. Later that year, Michael Salerno, another critic of the new

regime was found shot to death with his throat slit a few blocks away from his home in the Bronx. In February of 1990, another of Casso's rivals fled New York, fearing for his life, and took up residence in California. Casso used his sources in the NYPD to find the fugitive's new address, then dispatched a team of four hitmen to kill him in his home. Casso would go on to order the killings of 14 more Lucchese family members who'd been critical of him in the past. He'd justified these killings to his associates by claiming that the men he was having killed were all police informants. But in reality, Casso had gone mad with power. He'd long since eliminated his critics and was now just ordering hits on anyone he didn't like. One Lucchase

soldier Bruno Fachola hadn't visited Casso in the hospital after he was shot in 1986. That was all it took to earn a death sentence. Casso lured him to an auto shop in Brooklyn, where he was shot and stabbed to death, then left with a dead canary stuffed in his mouth. It was a message meant to suggest that Bruno had been singing, otherwise known as talking to the police. Once this message sank in, Casso killed two of Fachela's. friends, intending to eliminate them before they tried to take revenge on him.

Ironically, even though Casso killed so many of his own men he claimed were informants, he was eventually brought down by an actual snitch in the family. In May of 1990, his sources in the NYPD tipped Casso off that he and Amuso were about to be indicted on racketeering charges. A fellow member of the Lucchese family, Peter Sauvino, had implicated them both in a long-running fraud in which mob-aligned companies rigged bids for window installation contracts. It wasn't as big of a crime as the dozens of murders Casso had committed, but Savino's testimony could put him and Amuso behind bars for years. Casso was determined to stay out of jail, so he and Amuso both packed their bags and went on the run.

But he didn't let that stop his killing spree. On May 27, 1990, just six days after his 48th birthday, Casso kissed his wife and children goodbye and disappeared. He'd broken the news to them a few days before that he had to go on the run to avoid going to jail. For their own safety, though, he couldn't tell them where he was going. He and Amuso had made arrangements to keep running the family while they were in hiding. They'd call one of their captains, Al, Darco on designated payphones around New York to give him orders, which he would pass along to the

rest of the family. Besides Darko, they would have no contact with any of their old associates or loved ones. One day after Casso left, the FBI showed up at his house with an arrest warrant, but his wife didn't know where he was. Agents staked out all of Casso's usual hangouts, but he didn't show up anywhere. As far as the FBI knew, he'd fallen off. He'd fallen off. the face of the earth. In fact, Casso was just 40 miles away, living at his mistress's house in New Jersey. For the next year, Casso kept a low profile. He woke up late, took long walks, and made frequent phone calls to Al Darko to manage the family's business, and most of that business consisted of organizing contract killings. First, he tried to solve his legal problems by

getting the informant Peter Savino killed. But federal prosecutors weren't taking any chances. Savino was being kept on a military base in Hawaii where no hitman could get to him. Instead, Casso tried to order hits on the prosecutor and judge assigned to his case, but both of those attempts fizzled out as well. Instead, he turned his attention to more attainable targets and settle old grudges. Working through Darko, Casso arranged for a pair of corrupt cops to kill another one of Goddy's captains. He had Darko pay them $75,000 to pull the target over on an empty road near a high school and shoot him dead in his car. He also ordered a hit on an architect named Anthony Fava, who he'd hired a few years before to design a house for his

family in Brooklyn. Casso claimed that Fava had tried to blackmail him, but in fact, he just wanted him dead so he wouldn't have to pay him for the work he'd done. Fava's body was found in the trunk of his car, beaten, burned, stabbed, and shot to death. Eventually, Al Darko began to doubt that all the men Casso wanted killed were actually informants, but the final straw was when Casso ordered him to kill one of his longtime hit men, Pete Kyoto. Casso claimed Kyoto was about to begin cooperating with police. But Darko knew Kyoto would never rat his friends out, and he was outraged when Casso ordered him to have Kyoto's parents and sister killed as well. Ordering a hit on a mobster's family was unheard of, a violation of another one of the five families' cardinal rules.

Darko realized that if Casso was willing to go after the people closest to him like that, it was only a matter of time until he wound up with a target on his back. So in September of 1991, Al Darko put his wife, son, and parents in the car and went speeding out of New York City. He wanted to get as far away from Casso's network of informants as he could. Finally, he arrived at an FBI office in upstate New York, where he turned himself in and offered to testify against Anthony Casso. Darco didn't know exactly where Casso was, but over the next year and a half, he and a growing number of Lucchese family informants helped the FBI narrow it down. Everyone could see that Casso had gone off the deep end.

He didn't have their backs, so every member of the family who got arrested was eager to give up what they knew about him to secure a lighter sentence. It took another year and a half to figure out his exact location, But finally, in early January of 1993, the FBI was able to trace Casso's cell phone to his mistress's house in Mount Olive, New Jersey. And on January 19th, they went in to get their man. When agents broke down the door of the house, they caught Casso in a towel as he came out of the shower. Now that so many of his former allies had turned on him, the authorities had plenty of dirt on Anthony Casso. Shortly after his arrest, he was charged with 72 criminal counts, including 14 murders.

Facing a lengthy sentence, the man who'd ordered hits on dozens of suspected snitches did the unthinkable. He took a plea bargain and agreed to become an informant himself. For the next five years, Casso was held in a luxurious, low-security prison in Texas, where he gave up the names of dozens of his accomplices, including the corrupt NYPD detectives who helped him with many of his hits. At the time, he was the highest-ranking mafia figure to cooperate with prosecutors, but the arrangement wouldn't last. In 1998, the government retracted Casso's plea agreement

after learning he'd assaulted other inmates, tried to bribe his guards, and made a number of false statements about the mobsters he'd testified again. Instead, he was put on trial for his lifetime of thievery, racketeering, and murder, and sentenced to 455 years in prison without parole. Anthony Casso was willing to do anything and betray anyone to stay out of jail. Instead, he spent the rest of his life in America's toughest prison, ADX Florence, until his death from COVID-19 in November of 2020, at the age of 78.

He was the last of a dying breed of old school gangsters, and the world became a more peaceful place when he left it. Looking back on this week in crime history, we can see that eventually the law always catches up with you. Klaus Barbie spent decades building a new life for himself on a new continent. Anthony Casso spent years hiding out in a New Jersey cul-de-sac.

But in the end, both of these cold-blooded killers had to answer for their crimes and spent their final days inside a jail cell. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is True Crime This Week. True Crime This Week is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. At Crimehouse, we want to express our gratitude to you, our community, for making this possible. Please support us by rating, reviewing, and following True Crime This Week, wherever you. get your podcasts. Your feedback truly matters. And for ad-free and early access to True Crime This Week, subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts. True Crime This Week is hosted by me, Vanessa

Richardson, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the True Crime This Week team, Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Pritzowski, Lori Marinelli, Sarah Camp, Truman Capps, Leah Roche, and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening. Looking for your next listen? Hi, it's Vanessa Richardson, and I have exciting news. Conspiracy Theory's Cults and Crimes is leveling up. Starting the week of January 12th, you'll be getting two episodes every week. Wednesdays, we unravel the conspiracy or the cult, and on Fridays we look at a corresponding crime. Follow Conspiracy Theory's Cults and Cults. Crimes Now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen.