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When the answer finally came, after 45 years of heartbreak for a Staten Island family with a mysteriously missing father, it brought more questions than closure.
Vincent Palmieri Sr., age 36, disappeared without warning on April 30, 1972, leaving a wife and nine kids behind in their crowded outer borough home. He was last seen around midnight after visiting with a friend at a local cab company.
One month later, some 330 miles north of New York City, authorities pulled a body from a Vermont river. The unidentified victim was executed gangland-style, his jaw broken and four bullets pumped point-blank into the back of his skull. The corpse was buried in an unmarked grave and quickly forgotten.
Back on Staten Island, the Palmieris were left to a life without their patriarch. There were money woes, with suddenly-single mom Annette forced onto welfare. The kids pitched in, taking full-time work in lieu of college degrees. Some struggled with drugs and alcohol. And a new generation of Palmieris was welcomed: 22 grandchildren arrived in Vincent Sr.’s absence.
Decades passed, nothing changed — until 2007.
With the use of vastly improved technology, Vermont State Police finally attached a name to the anonymous man killed 35 years prior in the Green Mountain State: He was Vincent Palmieri Sr. Yet it took another decade, for reasons still unclear, to contact his family.
To this day, his murder remains unsolved.
Vincent Sr. now lies alongside his wife Annette in the Staten Island cemetery where the couple was posthumously reunited in November 2017. Their peaceful repose contrasts with the uneasy thoughts plaguing their sons Vincent Jr. and Gerald. Some concern the murder itself: Who was the killer? What was the motive? Was this a Mafia hit?
The harder ones concern the investigation: Did the long-cold case go unsolved due to shabby police work — or something more sinister? Why did the investigation so quickly stall? Was there a cover-up by local law enforcement?
“If my dad was from Vermont and he was found in New York, if everything was reversed, the NYPD would have solved the case and we wouldn’t be having this discussion,” said Vincent Jr., who believes New England authorities guilty of a multitude of sins.
The Staten Island siblings, with their father finally home, dove into the distant past in search of the truth — and to perhaps find proof that their dad’s violent demise wasn’t linked to a secret, nefarious past.
Or whether, just possibly, it was.
——
Vincent Jr. was just 13 years old when he heard his mom and his uncle talking in the family’s Staten Island kitchen. His father, already gone four days, was officially a missing person. A sick feeling rose in his stomach as their words rang in his ears.
“That’s when I officially accepted … something was terribly wrong,” said Vincent Jr. “And he wasn’t coming home.”
Yes, his sons acknowledge, the elder Palmieri and his wife had issues that led to separations during their 18-year marriage. And yes, Vincent Sr. — raised on Mulberry Street in Little Italy — had a few run-ins with the law.
But the siblings insist their devoted dad had no ties to organized crime. They instead recall a sentimental soul who made time to speak with his wife or touch base with their kids, even when things turned a bit rocky at home.
A handwritten 1969 card from their dad to sister Angela was typical: “Even ‘tho we’re apart, you are now and always on my mind and heart, forever.”
The old man’s 1969 yellow four-door Chrysler was found a few months later, dumped in a long term parking lot at Kennedy International Airport. The move was an old Mafia ploy, suggesting the driver parked the car and gout out town in hurry. Cops popped the trunk just in case, but found no body.
The abandoned vehicle, apparently wiped clean, surrendered no blood or fingerprints — just a ticket to exit the lot.
For decades, Annette Palmieri held onto that voucher as if it was some sort of talisman. It bore a small stain later studied by family members like a ancient rune: Could be blood. Could be a splotch of gravy.
——
About a month after Vincent Sr.’s disappearance, the rivers of New England surrendered three bodies in a five-week stretch. Each victim was male, shot multiple times and deposited in a watery grave. The same handgun was used in all three homicides, according to what Vermont officials told the Palmieri family.
Victim No. 1 was Palmieri, identified only as a John Doe at the time (and for a long time to follow). He was found June 1 in the Passumpsic River, a Vermont tributary of the Connecticut River — a well-known Mafia dumping ground.
No. 2 was Gary Dube, a Massachusetts bad guy shot twice in the head and found June 23 in the Connecticut River.
No. 3 was Victor DeCaro, the son-in-law of notorious western Massachusetts mobster Francesco (Skyball) Scibelli. DeCaro was reportedly whacked for cheating on the Mafioso’s daughter with another made man’s wife. His corpse, stuffed inside a sleeping bag and perforated by three bullets, was found July 3 in — no surprise — the Connecticut River.
Scibelli, aligned with New York’s mighty Genovese crime family, was a man of respect among his peers, once even summoned to boss Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno’s Manhattan social club. The DeCaro execution — again, no surprise — remains unsolved.
Dube was killed by career criminal Francis Soffen, who admitted murdering his crime partner and a second man to keep the pair from snitching. Vincent Jr. believes Soffen was possibly hired to dump his dad’s body.
But whatever the man knew of Vincent Sr. was buried along with him. The inmate, denied parole 15 times, died behind bars on Nov. 30, 2015.
Former Massachusetts resident Elaine Bonavita Jaquith, in a book published two years ago, claimed she was an eyewitness to events on the night DeCaro disappeared. She’s never heard of Vincent Palmieri, but she’s fairly certain how he wound up in the waters off Barnet, Vt., a small town of 1,300 residents.
“He probably saw something he shouldn’t have,” said Jaquith, now a full-time missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. “They’ll get rid of anybody who gets in their way, if they cross the mob, accidentally or not. Back in the day, they would shoot you in the back of the head like it’s nothing.
“That’s what they do.”
Despite a detailed NYPD missing persons bulletin, Vermont authorities failed to identify Palmieri’s body for decades. The ballistics evidence linking the three murders either led investigators nowhere, or was perhaps mishandled. The Palmieri brothers are both perplexed and outraged by the inability of investigators to find any answers.
“You’re telling me you got three bodies on one gun, and your investigation doesn’t go any further?” said Vincent Jr. “This is what we don’t understand, and why we feel there’s a conspiracy of some sort.”
Palimieri recalls how the lead investigator in their father’s death refused to meet with the family in 2017 after his dad was finally identified.
Capt. Scott Dunlap, commander of the Vermont State Police major crimes unit, declined to answer questions about the long, strange case of Vincent Sr. Asked specifically in an email about the family’s concerns, Dunlap said he couldn’t comment on the murder weapon or any other aspect of the investigation.
“I am not aware of any law enforcement corruption in this case,” he added.
——
In 1997, Gerald arranged for a 25th anniversary Mass to honor their dad at his Staten Island parish. The children, all now adults, gathered against the omnipresent backdrop of their father’s disappearance.
“Look, by the time I hit 13, I knew my father was gone,” Gerald recalled. “But how? You don’t know. Was he abducted? Maybe he went to another country and started a new life? That was wishful thinking.”
Nothing would change for another decade — and when it did, still nothing changed for the family.
Vermont investigators, using a fingerprint match, finally identified the Passumpsic River corpse in 2007 as Vincent Palmieri Sr., a 36-year-old male. But nobody tracked down his family despite two obvious identifying marks: A tattoo of his wife’s name “Annette” on the right forearm and a scar on the left leg, both detailed in the NYPD’s original bulletin.
On her deathbed in 2015, Annette Palmieri asked her son Vincent Jr. one question: “What do you think happened to your father?”
She died without getting an answer.
And then, two years later, one of the missing man’s granddaughters submitted a DNA sample to Ancestry.com. She received an out-of-the-blue email from a Vermont investigator: “Are you related to Vincent Palmieri (DOB 09/13/1935) who was found deceased in Vermont in 1972?”
Vincent soon received a call from his kid sister Angela, who said something too incredible to believe: “Vinny, we found daddy.”
The Palmieris reclaimed the body and brought Vincent Sr. home, with Gerald and Vincent Jr.’s initial happiness replaced by their need for more details. Both are now fluent in New England organized crime and frustrated by local investigators disinclined to speak or explain.
The determined brothers hope their story will shake some people into sharing old secrets and bring the Palmieri clan some real closure.
“When he surfaced, I can tell you right now — I’m a man of optimism, I have a lot of faith,” said Gerard. “And I never thought he was coming back. Never, never. And all of a sudden, my father emerges again.”
