I’n 1988 Gotti has a meeting with John Riggi at the funeral home during Rotundo Sr’s wake.

At the meeting Gotti/Gambino’s officially took over the DeCalvs.
So that puts that to rest.

And it was because they had a lot of money making rackets at the time.

This is when the family was still very strong.
So it had nothing to do with them being defunct.

This was before the Weiss hit that Joe Wattts couldn’t get done and the DeCalvs were able to get done.
Afterwards supposedly they were respected a little bit more.

GOTTI WHACKED MY DAD: CANARY

By Kati Cornell Smith
August 17, 2005 4:00am
A mob turncoat testified that he blames John Gotti for his father’s murder, but denied that he is seeking revenge by taking the witness stand against the late Gambino boss’ son John “Junior” Gotti.

Anthony Rotondo, 48, a former mob capo, testified yesterday that he believes that the Dapper Don and the heads of the other four New York mob families ordered the 1988 murder of his father, a powerful capo in New Jersey’s DeCalvacante family.

“You don’t much like the Gotti family, do you, sir?” asked defense lawyer Marc Fernich, who represents “Junior” Gotti at his racketeering trial.

“Neither here nor there,” Rotondo replied during cross-examination.

“Isn’t it true that you’re testifying here to exact revenge against the entire Gotti family? In particular, you want to avenge your father’s murder by jailing the son of his suspected killer. Isn’t that a fact?” Fernich pressed.

“Nothing’s further from the truth,” Rotondo insisted.

Earlier in his testimony, Rotondo told the Manhattan federal jury that his father, Vincent “Jimmy” Rotondo, was shot to death in his car in Bergen Beach, Brooklyn.

“He was murdered in front of our house,” Rotondo testified.

During his father’s wake, John Gotti Sr. turned up with about 20 Gambino members in a “show of strength” and called DeCalvacante boss John Riggi into an office in the funeral parlor for an hourlong meeting, the turncoat testified.

When Riggi came out he “looked like he saw a ghost” and announced that the DeCalvacante crime family would from then on be “a family within a family” answering to Gotti.

“Do you believe the Mafia ruling commission in New York felt your father was too powerful?” Fernich asked.

“Yes,” Rotondo said.

Rotondo has fingered Junior Gotti for running the Gambino crime family while his father was behind bars, but yesterday said he knows very little about the relationship between the two.

“I know his father loved him very much. That I know,” the turncoat said.