car lot in Brooklyn, the ring was backed by Scalise, now the Gambino boss. For two years, Gaggi and two associates fabricated false vehicle registrations for nonexistent Cadillacs. The gang stole cars that matched the phony vehicle descriptions and replaced their original Vehicle Identification Numbers with new fake numbers. They also gave the vehicles new license plates that matched the falsified registrations. The ring then sold the stolen vehicles in Florida, Georgia, Texas and Mexico. Gaggi married in 1955 while his auto theft trial was underway. During his trial, witnesses "forgot" their testimony on the witness stand and Gaggi's co-defendants refused to testify against him. In early 1956, Gaggi was acquitted. Later that year, Gaggi became a father. His wife and child now lived on the first floor of the three-story Gaggi house. In 1957, the Gambino family underwent a dramatic change in leadership. In June, Scalise was shot and killed at a fruit stand in the Bronx. In October, Gambino boss Albert Anastasia was shot to death in a barber's chair at a Manhattan hotel. Immediately after the Anastasia murder, Gaggi ordered his family to stay home for a few days. Gaggi's close associate, underboss Carlo Gambino, became the new boss. He appointed caporegime Aniello Dellacroce, an Anastasia loyalist, as underboss and gave him control over the Manhattan faction of the family. In October 1960, Gaggi committed his first murder for the Gambino family. He served on a hit squad that murdered mobster Vincent Squillante, who is suspected of killing Scalise. According to Montiglio, Gaggi described the murder: “We surprised him (Squillante) in the Bronx. We shot him in the head, stuffed him in the trunk, then dumped him for good.” In this case, “dumped him for good” meant that they hauled the body to the basement of a building, loaded it into a trash incinerator, and cremated it. After the Squillante murder, Gaggi was inducted into the Gambino family. DeMeo crew By the mid-1960s, Gaggi had established a large clientele of loan shark customers and was also a silent partner in several businesses. He started to dominate the organized crime world. To increase his earnings, he partnered with mobster Roy DeMeo, who was running a stolen car ring in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Flatlands and Canarsie. DeMeo had connections with the Lucchese crime family and a reputation as a capable and resourceful earner. Gaggi persuaded DeMeo to leave