July 21, 2022 — New Jersey mafia captain Charlie (The Hat) Stango was recently released from federal prison and is residing in a New York halfway house. The 79-year old Stango did seven years of a 10-year sentence stemming from a 2015 racketeering case charging narcotics trafficking, bookmaking and attempted murder dubbed “Operation Charlie Horse.”
Charlie the Hat did his time in a federal correctional facility in rural Georgia. He copped a guilty plea to the attempted murder counts.<
Stango lived between Las Vegas and Toms River, New Jersey at the time of his arrest. His crew had been infiltrated by an undercover FBI agent who rose to become Stango’s driver. According to his guilty plea, Stango tasked the undercover agent, Giovanni Rocco, with arranging a murder contract to be carried out on a DeCalvacante crime family rival in Elizabeth by members of a biker club for $50,000.
Stango wanted to kill New Jersey mob soldier Luigi (Louie the Dog) Oliveri. Following the conclusion of Operation Crazy Horse in March 2015, Rocco penned a book entitled Giovanni’s Ring with Doug Schofield. Rocco had been introduced into the DeCalvacante organization by a drug dealer working for Oliveri named James (Jimmy Smalls) Heeney and Daniel (Danny Gooms) Bertelli, a Gambino crime family soldier living in New Jersey looking after the DeCalvacantes for the Five Families in New York.