While he was still in primary school, Vincent Teresa developed a gambling addiction that led him to plan and execute around one dozen burglaries.

Using the mob connections of his uncle, Teresa began working for Enrico Tameleo, the underboss of the Patriarca crime family.

Teresa arranged for large groups of wealthy gamblers to be flown to Las Vegas, London and the Caribbean, where they gambled at casinos.

He rose to become the third-most powerful member of the Patriarca family and earned over $150 million for his Mafia bosses during his criminal career.

He served several months at the Lewisburg penitentiary, where he was housed on a block known as "Mafia Row", along with John Gotti, Jimmy Hoffa and Carmine Galante.

Teresa ultimately testified before at least 22 grand juries on organized crime activities, resulting in the indictments or convictions of over 50 mobsters, including Meyer Lansky.

In January 1978, Teresa filed a 300-page sworn deposition in Miami claiming to have heard Mafia bosses planning to assassinate Fidel Castro for $4 million on orders from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the early 1960s.

In the Witness Protection Program, Teresa and his family were briefly located in El Paso, Texas and San Diego, California before they settled in the Seattle area, where he lived under his new identity.

[3] His son Wayne was convicted of first-degree murder in the drug-related, execution-style shooting of William Walkins III, whose body was found dumped on a bank of the Green River in Kent, Washington.

[4] On November 27, 1984, Teresa, along with his daughter Cindy, sons Wayne and David, daughter-in-law Lynne, and an Indonesian man, Bobby Lhaksana, were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiring to smuggle $1 million worth of rare birds and animals into the United States from Australia, New Guinea and Indonesia between 1982 and 1984.

[2] By 1988, Teresa and his wife Blanche were living in poverty at the apartment of his son David in Des Moines, Washington, near Seattle, where he died of kidney failure at the age of 61 on February 21, 1990.