Joe Watts
associate of the Gambino crime family
Joseph Watts (born 1942), also known as "Joe the German", is an American mobster and an associate of the Gambino crime family of New York City. He was a close confidant of former boss John Gotti and a participant in the infamous 1985 assassination of Paul "Big Paul" Castellano.
Criminal career
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Watts was an associate of the Bonanno and Genovese crime families from New York, primarily active in Manhattan and Staten Island, and he became an associate of the Gambino family during the late 1960s, with connections in Hell's Kitchen and Lower Manhattan. It is believed Watts began his criminal career with the Gambino family during the 1960s under the reign of Carlo Gambino, and he may have met Gambino a number of times prior to Gambino's death in 1976. In 1973, Watts was identified as an associate of the Carmine Fatico crew in Ozone Park, Queens. Watts was ineligible to become a "made" member of the Mafia due to being Italian only by maternal heritage, with German and Welsh origins on his paternal side, although he was nonetheless afforded the respect of a capo, similar to Jimmy Burke in the Lucchese family.
Watts became a close associate of John Gotti and allegedly served as an enforcer and "hit" man for Gotti. According to The New York Times, Watts killed and occasionally tortured a number of victims between 1970 and 1995. On one occasion, Watts reportedly visited Frank Sinatra and Jilly Rizzo after Sinatra had refused a request to perform for Gotti and threatened to personally kill the crooner if he ever turned down the Mafia boss again.
According to the testimony of former Gambino family underboss, Sammy "Sammy the Bull" Gravano, Watts stabbed and shot former Gambino family associate, Augustus "Big Gus" Sclafani, to death in 1986 at a club in Little Italy, Manhattan as Sclafani was murdered for slander, accusing Frank DeCicco, whom was the underboss of the Gambino family in 1986, of being an FBI informant.
The public source identifies “Joe Watts” as associate of the Gambino crime family. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Watts, associate and Gambino.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joe Watts” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.