[1][2] Together with his younger brothers Rosario (Sal) and Giuseppe (Joseph) he formed a faction in the crime family known as the Cherry Hill Gambinos for their base of operation in the New Jersey town of that name.

With the intervention of the Gambino crime family in New York, a deal was worked out that allowed the surviving Inzerillos to take refuge in the US, with the agreement that none of them, or their offspring, could ever return to Sicily.

His relative Salvatore Inzerillo was the Gambino brothers’ principal interlocutor, the central personage in Sicily, with a myriad of interests and heavy capital investments.

When Sindona got in trouble and was indicted for the bankruptcy of the Franklin National Bank, John Gambino procured a false passport and helped to stage a bogus kidnap in August 1979, to conceal a mysterious 11-week trip to Sicily before his scheduled fraud trial.

The real purpose of the kidnapping was to issue sparsely disguised blackmail notes to Sindona’s past political allies – among them Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti – to engineer the rescue of his banks and recuperate Cosa Nostra’s money.

[10] John and Joe Gambino were acquitted in a 1984 New Jersey drug case in which their brother, Rosario, was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison.

[12][13] On September 17, 1992, John and Joe Gambino were arrested in a secluded motel suite in Fort Lauderdale, South Florida, where they were said to have associates who would help them flee to Venezuela, where they owned an interest in a ranch.

The prosecution portrayed them as the main distributors of heroin smuggled from Italy and South America to Miami and New York by the Sicilian Mafia, while the defense countered that the central drug and murder charges in the case were based on the uncorroborated testimony of Marino Mannoia and Gravano, whom the defense depicted as "killers and liars".

[1] The trial ended in mistrial in June 1993 when a jury was unable to reach a verdict on charges of racketeering, drug trafficking and murder.

He testified he had met with John Gambino personally, who had inspected the quality of the heroin Marino Mannoia was refining in Palermo.

[17] In June 1994, after prosecutors recommended 15-year sentences without parole, the men agreed to plead guilty to the racketeering charges stemming from activity that took place from 1975 to 1992.

The shipments were financed by a consortium of Sicilian Mafia clans, who had organized a pool to provide the money to buy the merchandise from Thai suppliers.