Forty years ago, a faction of Gambino crime family members orchestrated and executed a brazen coup to permanently remove their contentious boss, Paul Castellano. On December 16, 1985, assailants shot and killed him in the heart of holiday shopping season in Midtown Manhattan. Born in 1915 in Brooklyn to Sicilian immigrants, Castellano grew up in a world under the influence of local Mafia crime families. That also included his own immediate and extended family. He and Carlo Gambino, his first cousin and future boss, also became brothers-in-law after Gambino married Castellano’s sister, Catherine, in 1932. Castellano’s criminal life began in the 1930s ...