Flipping Capo: How the FBI Dismantled the Real Sopranos

Séamus McElearney’s early days on an FBI organized crime squad were full of grunt work.

For months he was mired in administrative tasks, including the transcription of secret recordings of the DeCavalcante and Bonanno crime families. Eighteen months later, McElearney assisted in his squad’s arrest of thirty-nine Mafia suspects; he led the team arresting Anthony Capo, a DeCavalcante soldier linked to stock fraud and conspiracy to commit murder.

Barely a week after Capo’s arrest, McElearney accomplished what no other law enforcement agent had ever done in the hundred years of the DeCavalcante crime family’s existence: he flipped one of their made men. Anthony Capo confessed to dozens of illegal activities, including two murders and eleven murder conspiracies, and agreed to work with the government to bring down his former family.

What followed was a spiral effect of cooperation as McElearney and colleagues flipped three more DeCavalcante associates, one captain, and an acting boss. Flipping Capo resulted in the Bureau solving eleven murders, convicting seventy-one defendants, and dismantling the DeCavalcante crime family.

Thanks to the redemptive relationship he built with Capo, McElearney helped unmask a criminal network that led to the RICO convictions of the entire DeCavalcante hierarchy, just as the world was coming to know them as the “real Sopranos.”