Shownotes Transcript
My dad was having a going-away party for this guy at our restaurant, which was in Lodi, New Jersey. This was a big night for my dad. My mom got there about 6:00.
And she noticed my father's car wasn't in the parking lot. So she asked the bartender, she said, hey, where's Joe? He goes, oh, he had to step out for a few minutes. She said he'd be back in a little bit. My mom says, okay. She didn't think anything of it. Guests start coming in little by little. The guy who the party is for comes in and my father's not there.
And my mother, when she realized my father was not going to show up, she went into the ladies room with one of her friends and she was crying. And her friend said, "What's the matter?" And she says, "I don't think I'm ever going to see my husband again." And she was right. Missing that party was a telltale that he was gone. It became like a hobby of mine to try to find out as much as I could about my father and his disappearance, pretty much from the age of 18 until now, 40 years.
My dad, he's 87 to this day, doesn't believe his brother died in 1971. There's just too many things that have happened, too many questions, things that don't make sense. I think the big question is what happened in that car and was that his last day?
On April 20, 1971, 39-year-old Joseph Rooley, better known as Joe Lupo, vanished from Closter, New Jersey. That day, Joe was hosting a party when he stepped out for a quick errand. Yet he never returned, and Joe was never seen or heard from again.
Days later, his car was discovered in Jersey City, riddled with bullets and stained with blood. The immediate assumption was that Joe had been murdered. However, testing later revealed that the blood inside the vehicle wasn't human. It was animal blood.
The mystery deepened. Had Joe staged his own death and disappeared? Or had someone killed him, leaving behind a grisly scene to confuse investigators? Joe Lupo had once been a promising boxer, a local hero with a bright future. But a diagnosis of polio changed the trajectory of his life.
When Joe disappeared, he left behind a wife and young son. That son, also named Joe, grew up determined to uncover the truth about his father's mysterious disappearance. For decades, he's tirelessly combed through the memories of family members who were adults at the time, sifting through old newspaper clippings and archival material in search of any clue that could finally explain what happened to his father on that fateful day in April of 1971.
I'm Marissa, and from Wondery, this is episode 483 of The Vanished, part one of Joseph Joe Lupo Rulli's story, A Marked Man.
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When Joe Lupo vanished in 1971, he left behind his wife, Cynthia, and their five-year-old son, also named Joe. Devastated by his disappearance, Cynthia never remarried, pouring all of her energy into raising their son alone. Today, many of the family members who were adults at the time of Joe's disappearance have passed away. But his son continues to search relentlessly for the truth behind his father's mysterious vanishing. Here's Joe.
I was five years old. I kind of sort of knew what was going on only through what the adults would tell me. It wasn't until later in my life...
I guess I was late teens. I kind of remember what really triggered me was one day I was away at school. One of the guys I became friends with, his father had died right before he left for college and he became my closest friend there. So one night we're all sitting around talking and I said, well, my father died when I was five. And somebody asked the question, how did your father die, Joe? And I said, well, he disappeared.
And I said, what? What happened? I said, well, he disappeared.
As I said it, it sounded so ridiculous. You talk about a bunch of 17, 18-year-old kids going, what do you mean he disappeared? People don't disappear. What happened? I'm like, I feel dumb, but I don't know what happened. From that moment on, I said, I got to find out what this is all about. And I started asking questions, and then I kind of got the story of what he was really involved in. I kind of made it, I don't want to call it my life's work or a hobby, but I wanted to get to know my father, even though he was gone.
I had so many great things about him. He was a charismatic person. He was handsome. He could have done anything with his life. This was a guy that I wish I would have known, and I felt like I was robbed. No one would have been closer to him than I was. Anybody who ever knew him that I came in contact with
I would interview them, ask questions about him. What was he like? Tell me some stories about him. But between friends of his that I met, old classmates that I met, obviously my mother, my uncles, I was able to find out a lot about my father.
I guess it's almost like a kid that was adopted. They want to find out where they came from. I'm 58 years old now. Probably for the better part of the last 40 years or so, I've been on this quest of information about my dad. After Joe had a revelation during this conversation with a college friend, he realized he needed to learn more about his father and immediately went to his mother to ask her for any information she could share.
Obviously, the first person I went to was my mom, who said, okay, you're old enough to know. She says, I'm surprised it's taking you this long to ask me. He was in the mafia. This happened, that happened, and she wasn't really sure of a lot of things, she said, but they never found his body.
This marked the beginning of Joe's lifelong quest for answers, not just about his father's disappearance, but about his father's life as a whole. In seeking the truth, Joe wasn't only searching for details about the mystery. He was also trying to understand the man he had been denied a chance to know. Joe shared more about what he knows of his father's life growing up in North Jersey.
My dad, he had an older brother, Dennis, who was seven years older than him. And he had a younger brother, Bobby, who was five years younger. So my dad was right smack in the middle. They grew up in Lodi, New Jersey, and they were children of two Italian immigrants.
And there was such an age gap between my Uncle Dennis and my father that especially being that they were the children of immigrants, my Uncle Dennis was like a father figure to his younger brothers. He had beaten the trail for them. He had learned everything that they needed to know, things that my grandparents couldn't teach them. My Uncle Dennis, he was a master sergeant in World War II. He came back a hero, as everybody did.
who came back. He was very popular in town, and he was the guiding light for his brothers. He took on almost a father figure role. Even though they had a father, he didn't speak the language. He barely spoke English. And my Uncle Dennis really took his younger brothers under his wing and showed them the right way and wrong way, and that's how they grew up.
Later in life, Joe found an unexpected ally in his cousin Mark, who wasn't born until a year after Joe's father had vanished. Although the cousins were separated for much of their lives, they connected at a funeral for another family member, and they bonded over their shared determination to unravel the mystery of Joe's father's disappearance. Here's Mark.
My father's Robert Bobby. I was born in 72. So my father was the youngest of the three. One's a World War II Marine who saw action. One was a local hero prize fighter that fought at Madison Square Garden, was an up-and-coming local hero that tragically ended. You go from the all-time high with a huge boxing career, an Italian kid, Italian neighborhood.
In that time in the 50s, surviving barely and then having to redirect his life. We lived obviously in northern part of New Jersey. But when I was three, my father relocated the family to northwest Pennsylvania. Hey,
A unique part of this whole conversation is I knew my dad had two brothers, Uncle Dennis, I saw several times a year, my grandmother, but Uncle Joe was never really clear what was going on. And when you're growing up, you don't know any different.
It wasn't until I had graduated high school and was about 18 years old and I was at my Uncle Dennis's and Aunt Toni's house in Lavalette. I'll never forget it. I was sitting at the dinner table with them and...
and started piecing it together. And my aunt's like, did your father never really tell you? Not blaming him, but it wasn't something everybody talked about. And I called my dad that night and I'm like, what the hell is going on? I used to watch mob movies as a kid and say, man, it's got to be in our blood. All the while, my whole family knows, my mom and dad know that what I'm saying is right, but I had no idea. And maybe they were trying to protect us.
Keep us away from that. In 1992, my grandmother, which would have been my father's mother, she passed away. And that's when I met Joey for the first time. I met Aunt Cynthia, which is his mom, all at that time. And then he and I've been in touch. It's been a while.
Mark and Joe had grown up not knowing one another, but their meeting at their grandmother's 1992 funeral was a turning point for them both. They wanted to know more about their family history and this mystery that didn't seem to be spoken about much when they were children. Now we're going to turn the clock back once again and learn more about how Joe Rulli became Joe Lupo.
As a child, Joe's older brother, Dennis, introduced him to boxing, and it quickly became a lifelong passion. Not only did Joe fall in love with the sport, but he also discovered he had a natural talent for it, too. My uncle Dennis was the first guy to take him to a boxing gym. My uncle was back from the war, and my dad was a skinny, 90-pound weakling, and I think he was getting picked on by some neighborhood kids. And my uncle said, listen,
Let's go to that boxing gym. I know the guys who run it and maybe you could learn some skills. And the guys who own that gym, just two really great guys. These guys really wanted to do something good for the town, for the young men of the town. And my father went there as like an 11 year old, 12 year old, something like that. He was tiny, smallest guy in the gym. He soon became very good. He never missed a day. He fell in love with the sport.
Joe quickly flourished in the ring, catching the attention of the local boxing community. At just 14 years old, he was eager to compete in a boxing tournament, but the rules required participants to be 16. Determined to fight, Joe borrowed a birth certificate from an older neighborhood kid with the last name Lupo, and that's how Joe Rulli became Joe Lupo.
The Golden Gloves were coming around. And this is a few years down the line. There was a sign-up sheet on the wall at the gym for anybody who wanted to enter the Golden Gloves tournament. And my father put his name on that list. And one of the trainers said, Joey, you're too young. You're only 14. You got to be 16 to fight. And he pled his case.
And they said, Joey, we don't make the rules. We're sorry, you can't do it. And that day he left the gym in a real huff. And the next day he went back to the gym and he told his one trainer, Pat, I had a birthday. He goes, in fact, I had two birthdays. Our family name is Rooley. And he produced a birth certificate from a neighbor who was 16 years old. After some discussion, the trainers let him enter that tournament as a 14-year-old.
under the name Giacchino Lupo, Jack Lupo for short. In Italian, Lupo means the wolf. So my father loved the name, and he won the tournament as a 14-year-old fighting 16-year-olds. I wear that golden glove around my neck as a necklace. It's from 1947 or 48, I believe. And his career took off from that point. He entered every fighting match under the name of Jack Lupo.
He made a name for himself in North Jersey. By the time he was 16 or 17, he was known throughout North Jersey as a fighter, as a boxer. The newspapers started noticing him. Hey, this kid's good. But they would also notice that everybody in the audience would be yelling, come on, Joey, go get him, Joey, hit him, Joey. The paper started calling him Joey Lupo. And that name stuck with him until the day he disappeared.
After his impressive win at just 14, Joe Lupo quickly became a rising star in the local boxing world. In the years that followed, he was on a track to become a national champion, with a future full of opportunities and pivotal decisions ahead of him, each one shaping his young, promising career.
Back in those days, there was a lot of fighters and there was a lot of boxing matches in VFW halls or church basements and stuff like that. They call those people club fighters. My dad was fighting at bigger places. He represented New Jersey in the Olympic trials for the 48 Olympics and he lost in the finals. If he had won that fight, he would have went to the Olympics. Now,
Now, he's a high school junior, I believe, at the time. Based off of that, he was offered a scholarship to box at Syracuse University. And he turned it down because he knew that if he turned pro, he could make money. He saw dollar signs on turning pro. He came from a poor family. They had the necessities, but they didn't have any extras in life. And he wanted the extras in life. He turns pro...
His senior year in high school, he broke the hearts of those two amateur trainers who taught him everything because they weren't equipped to handle pro fighters. They were basically really good amateur trainers. You needed people with connections. You needed people who could get you to big fights. You had people who had money that they could send you to Chicago or Florida for a fight. So he had to leave his original little cocoon of a gym
And he went to a gym in Newark, New Jersey, which was a professional boxing gym. They had guys who fought for world titles. One of the telltale signs that you were going places was if you fought at Madison Square Garden, especially on a Friday night, because all of those fights were televised.
Not everybody even had a TV back then. We're talking 1950. By the time my father graduated high school, he had had five professional fights. And his second professional fight was on a Friday night at Madison Square Garden on TV. Sometimes I look back and I think about him as an 18-year-old kid in high school listening to the teacher. And in his mind, I'm fighting on TV tonight at Madison Square Garden.
He was the pride of his hometown. For that first fight, many people didn't have cars back then in Lodi. It was a pretty poor town. St. Joseph's Church and St. Joseph's School had two school buses that they packed to the roof with people taking them over to Madison Square Garden across the river to watch my dad fight.
At the age of 20, Joe began training for the biggest fight of his career, a match he believed would launch him onto the national stage. But one day, Joe came home feeling unwell, and no one could have predicted the devastating diagnosis he was about to receive or the profound impact it would have on his promising career. He was going places. He was training for the biggest fight of his life against an undefeated fighter. It was a real test for him, and this would have put him on the map now.
nationally. He was still living at home. He was only 20 years old. As was his routine, he'd wake up in the morning and he'd go for a run and make his way back home. And my grandmother would have lunch waiting on the table for him. Then he would go to the gym at night. Well, that one day he went out for a run
And he came back within just a few minutes. My grandmother noticed he was running a fever. And she said, oh, go lay down, sleep it off. When he woke up later that evening, he was paralyzed from the waist down and actually had limited function in, I believe it was his left arm. And they called the doctor to the house that night. And the doctor gave my grandparents the bad news that my father had contracted polio, which was
basically, I guess like an epidemic in the early 50s. They took him out of the house by ambulance. He went to a hospital, Bergen-Pines, which was the only hospital in North Jersey that was quarantining polio patients. And he was placed in an iron lung. He spent, I believe it was three months in an iron lung, near death at times. The iron lung basically did what a respirator does today.
Before Joe got sick with polio, he was on a clear path to stardom. But that dream was suddenly shattered. He spent months in the hospital fighting for his life. Local newspapers closely followed his struggle with polio and the uncertainty of his future career in boxing. He had time to think about his life and his dreams were over. His fame was going to be over. The ideas he had of making money...
They were probably going to be over two. He spent six months in the hospital and he was released on his 21st birthday. He came home by ambulance. They carried him into the house and he lived the next couple of years in a wheelchair. He eventually, through rehabilitation and just perseverance, he was able to get up on his feet and walk with crutches. Think of the crutches that Forrest Gump had in the movie, aluminum crutches that had the cuffs on.
on top that wrap around your bicep to give you more stability. He had those kind of crutches. He was basically lost. In his mind, anyway, he was a has-been. Life was over for him as he knew it. Boxing was all that Joe had ever known. He started his career at such a young age, and it was the only thing he truly wanted to do. In the years that followed, he found himself languishing at home, uncertain of what the future would hold for him.
The March of Dimes bought my father his wheelchair. My grandparents didn't have the money for it. And my father had yet to make a lot of money in boxing. Even though he was successful, he hadn't gotten to the point where he was making real big money yet. Then I guess about a year later, the March of Dimes approached him and asked him to be a spokesman.
Occasionally, he would go to different civic groups and ask them to donate money to the March of Dimes and tell them his story. The March of Dimes helped him out and let's help out more people. And I can only guess that he fell into some type of a depression, maybe. He started hanging out with people who were drinking a lot. He was hanging out in bars. He was smoking cigarettes, things he never did when he was fighting. He lived a very, very clean life.
And you can almost see his life going downhill, his life arc changing in front of your eyes, according to my uncle and my aunt. They would tell me that they would see him coming home late, coming home drunk, needing help to get in the house.
Organized crime syndicates, particularly the Italian-American Mafia, had a long history of influence in boxing. Several crime families had deep ties to the sport in New Jersey before his career came to an abrupt end. Joe had crossed paths with some members of the Mafia, though he hadn't become involved in organized crime at the time.
One evening, while attending a boxing match, Joe had a chance encounter with some men he had known years earlier. That meeting would unexpectedly propel him from a once-rising boxing star into the orbit of the mafia, shifting the course of his life in ways he never anticipated.
So those were kind of like the lost years for him until one day, as I understand it, him and another couple guys went to go watch the fight. Before fights, the ring announcer will always announce the celebrities who are in the audience. Well, my father got an introduction that night and he stood up barely.
With the help of his cane, he waved to the crowd, but the ring announcer announced him as a former welterweight contender, former gold glove winner. And my father had turned to a friend of his and said, I'm 22 years old and everything is a former for me. That hit home. Everything was behind him, he thought. And it was on that same night that there was a couple of guys there that he recognized from the professional boxing gym that he was going to. And one of the guys came up to him
and said, you know, Joey, do you remember me? How are you? What are you doing for money? I made a lot of money betting on you when you were fighting. Are you okay with money? And my father said, I don't know what I can really do. And he said, why don't you come see me? My father met him and they put him to work. This obviously was a mafia guy. And the guy took pity on him and put him to work doing little errands, picking up money, dropping off money, no strong arm stuff. And they became very good friends.
And little by little, my father became more and more connected, I guess you would say. So he was eventually described in the newspapers as a rising star in the New Jersey mafia.
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That's HungryRoot.com slash vanished, code vanished, to get 40% off your first box and a free item of your choice for life. HungryRoot.com slash vanished, code vanished. Things started looking up for Joe once again. He was finding success in his new career, and in time, he met Cynthia, the woman who would become his wife. The two later married and soon welcomed their son, Joe.
He proved he had the ability to do things that they liked. He could be a successful bookmaker. He could be a ruthless loan shark. He wasn't afraid to scare people.
which was very much different than the kid that he was, than what he still was at home with his family. He was still regular Joey. He got mixed up with these guys. Things were going very well. He owned a couple bars. He met my mother. My dad was from Lodi. My mom was from Garfield. They're two towns next to each other. One of their first dates was the night that Kennedy was assassinated. J.
JFK. My mom's recollection of that. She said, it was so surreal. I went out with your dad. We were dating and we were sitting in a restaurant that had a TV on and we were watching everything about the Kennedy assassination. Hey,
His comment to her was, they got the wrong brother because everybody hated Bobby Kennedy because he was going after the mafia. He was the attorney general at the time. They met. They fell in love. They got married. My dad was about 10 years older than my mom. So his life became a little bit more grounded. He had a home. I came along a couple of years later. I was born on their anniversary. My mom was not Italian. She was Polish.
My grandmother was very against my mom marrying this guy who was 10 years older, who was in the paper all the time. My grandmother learned to love my father, and it didn't take long. Years before she died, she'd say, I hated him in the beginning, but then I loved him like he was my own son. She said he would have done anything for me. The way he treated you,
and the way he treated your mom, and the way he treated people in general. It was just amazing to watch. He was such a nice guy. He was so generous with his money. She says, you couldn't not like him. And I think that that reverts back to the way he was brought up. My father's parents raised three young men. They all left there with basically the same core values. My father went a different way, but deep down, he still had those core values.
Joe's family wasn't immediately aware that he had become involved in organized crime. As Joe was rising through the ranks of a local crime family, his older brother Dennis was making a name for himself in the New Jersey State Police. The brothers had taken very different paths in life, which sometimes put them on opposing sides. Despite their differences, and the tension that often arose between them, the brothers always shared a deep bond, and they eventually found their way back to each other when tragedy struck the family.
My grandparents owned a two-family house. My uncle Dennis married my aunt Toni. They lived upstairs and they had a baby, little Dennis. He was a state police detective at the time. I think he was just promoted to state police detective. My grandmother woke up early, early one morning and she opened the door and she sees my father's car parked halfway on the lawn.
So she went and she got my Uncle Dennis. My father was still in the car. My Uncle Dennis went out there, and when he got him inside, somehow he realized that my father had a gun in his waistband. My uncle took it.
My uncle ended up turning the gun in. Then later on, my father confronted him. He said, you talking about the pistol? Yeah, I took it from you. And they got into an argument. But my uncle wrote it off as he just made a mistake. And he got rid of it. Story over. And my cousin Dennis, from what I understood, idolized his uncle Joey. This was the first baby in the family in many years. And my father loved him. And he loved my dad. However, in 1964, at the age of 10,
little Dennis died of leukemia. At the time, my uncle and my dad were, I don't want to say they weren't talking to each other, but their relationship was deteriorating. Little Dennis's sickness and ultimate death brought them closer again. Let's forget about everything. The family's got to come together. My father was dating my mom, so a lot of times they would take Dennis out to places
They tried to make this little boy as happy as possible, I guess with the death sentence that he was looking at. They became friendly again after little Dennis' death. My parents got married a month after little Dennis died.
The wedding was planned for about a year, but out of respect for my grieving aunt and uncle, they scaled it down tremendously. There was no band. There was no dancing at the wedding. It was basically just a dinner with a lot of friends. They offered to postpone the wedding, but my aunt and uncle wouldn't hear of it. So I came along two years later to the day of their wedding. I think it was always a given that I was going to be named after my father, but my father insisted that
My middle name is Dennis. My cousin was Dennis Joseph, and I'm Joseph Dennis. The brothers were fine for a while until my father started getting into more trouble. The dynamic between Joe and Dennis becomes a central element of this story after Joe vanished without a trace. But before Joe disappeared, their very different careers led them to crossing paths in ways that were far from beneficial for either of them.
One of my uncle's investigations led right to my father. From what I understand, it was a bowling alley, and it wasn't too far from the house they grew up in. My uncle at this time was running all the undercover operations for...
for the Alcoholic Beverage Control, or the ABC, which was a division of the state police. So he had gotten a call that this bowling alley, which had a bar in it, there was a lot of gambling going on in the bar. And that's a no-no. And he put a couple men on the bar. These guys would dress as painters, I believe my uncle told me. They would come in with overalls on, with paint all over them. They would sit at the bar and they would order a couple beers. The
They're trying to see if they can sniff out any gambling that's going on. They report back to my uncle that there's definitely gambling going on. In fact, one night, the bartender rang the bell behind the bar and said, last call for numbers. Everybody's placing their bets. The mafia used to run their own lottery on a daily basis.
You could bet lottery, you could bet sports, you could bet horses. They took all the action. The bartender is collecting the money and collecting the betting slips, but there's no way he is the main guy. My uncle said, okay, stay on it. Keep working the place. They went back to the bar and they saw a guy walk in. He walked right behind the bar, talked to the bartender, and he grabbed the bag with all the money that was in it.
And he put it under his arm and he had a quick drink and he walked out. So the guys reported back to my uncle that we think we know who the guy is who has taken all this action. We haven't ID'd him yet. They said we went out to see his license plate, but somebody else was driving him around. So it wasn't his car. But he walked with a cane and he had a brace on his leg. And my uncle said, my heart just dropped. They're investigating my brother and I don't even know it.
They don't know it's my brother. After a couple more times, they realized that the guy who was picking up the money was named Joe Lupo. And even my uncle's men didn't make the connection that Joe Lupo's real name was Joe Rulli and he was Dennis Rulli's brother. My uncle, the way he explained it to me was I had man hours invested in this investigation, all documented man hours.
My guys had found what they were looking for. I was trying to preach integrity to all my men. What am I showing them if I say it's my brother, leave him alone? So it kind of put my uncle up against the wall and he made the decision. He said, okay, arrest him tomorrow. He laughed. It was only a gambling charge and your father didn't have a record. So I knew he'd probably get like a $50 fine, a slap on the wrist. And I thought it would probably teach him a lesson.
It wasn't until he got arrested and he was being processed that the guys realized his last name was Rooley. And they called my uncle. They said, this guy says he's your brother. My uncle says, yeah, what's his name? They said, Joe Rooley. He goes, yeah, he's my brother. What do you want us to do with him? He says, lock him up. And my father had to spend the night in Bergen County Jail until he got in front of a judge the next morning who released him, gave him a small fine and a slap on the wrist.
which is what my uncle figured it would be. But my father was infuriated with him. That caused some friction between them and they almost came to blows over it. But my uncle had a way of making his younger brother feel bad about it, I guess. Joe, I'm doing my job. What do you want me to do? You're the one who's doing wrong, not me. But there was several incidents like that where it pitted one against the other.
My uncle was closing down bars that were owned, maybe not on paper, but mob guys were silent owners of them. And they were leaning on my father. Hey, get your brother to lay off us. My father had no such power over his brother. But at the same time, when Uncle Dennis went to work, his superiors were saying,
What are we going to do with your brother? Your brother is in the paper every day, every couple of weeks. He was busted on a bookmaking charge. He was brought in one time as a material witness to a murder. Talk to your brother. My uncle just said, he's a grown man. I have no control over him. My uncle told me that one time there was a big meeting in
In Trenton, the FBI was running it, and it was all the state police detective as well as detectives from neighboring counties and towns for an organized crime meeting. They were going to talk about everybody in organized crime and who's controlling what, like a task force meeting. And my uncle drove all the way down to Trenton.
And when he got to the front door, he was stopped by one of his commanders and said, Dennis, we want you to sit this one out. We're going to be talking about some things that are a little too close to home for you. He took that to be that they were going to be mentioned in my father. So my uncle was embarrassed. So my uncle took that as maybe my own people don't trust me. And my father at the same time was dealing with the same thing about his brother. They both were angry at each other for different reasons, but the reasons were almost the same reasons.
Most of us are familiar with TV shows and movies about organized crime, where we've learned that when things seem to be going well, they rarely stay that way for long. For Joe Lupo and his associates, the reality began to set in in the early 70s, as shifts in their world began to take hold.
Things were going good until they weren't. Just like most typical mafia stories, you know, he was making money, money for his bosses. We had a nice life to the point where we not only had our new house in Closter, we also had a vacation home at the Jersey Shore. He had a few bad moves, I guess you could say. A few things went against him and things got a little crazy. People started getting killed around him.
Joe just mentioned that things were starting to go a little crazy and people were getting killed. Newspapers from the time described it as a mafia gang war. Joe shared what he's learned about the turmoil and the dangerous events unfolding during that period. My father had a partner who worked for the same crime family. They got jammed up on some money they lent somebody, and it was big money. I've heard a bunch of different numbers through the years, but the lowest number I heard was
was $50,000. And you're talking that was almost 60 years ago. And they went to their boss for it. He gave them the money to lend out. The way that works is the boss doesn't just give you the money. He loans you the money. And you're paying the boss...
the weekly interest on it. The guy was a developer in South Jersey who they had met when we owned our summer house at the shore. He owned, supposedly had owned all this property on the Barnegat Bay that he wanted to develop, but he needed the money to develop it. So he went to my dad and his partner for money. Now this guy had borrowed money from them earlier.
but it was always small stuff, and he paid it back in a couple weeks. This guy turned out to be kind of a con man. When he couldn't pay them, they couldn't pay their boss. They kept trying to buy time, buy time. They threatened that builder.
And the guy went to the FBI and they put him in protective custody. And this guy was going to testify against my father and his partner. Meanwhile, that money is gone now. But my father and his partner were still on the hook for it. And I believe that and a couple other things that were going on in North Jersey.
was the beginning of the end for both of that. Now, in March of 1971, my father's partner, who we were good friends with the family, we were always with them, they bought a house at the shore near us, and good times, barbecues, summer parties. He was found murdered in
Bayonne in March of 71. It was in the paper that it seemed like a mafia hit. The guy was shot once in the back, twice in the head. He was walking towards his car. Typical movie mafia hit. That's the way it works. The guy had his car keys in his hand as he was walking towards his car and he got killed.
After Joe's partner was gunned down in the street, the pressure on Joe intensified. However, one day an unexpected opportunity arose when FBI agents appeared at his doorstep with none other than his older brother Dennis by their side.
My father, I think, was getting kind of scared at this point. A few days later, he was at our house, me, him, and my mom, and we were having dinner, and there was a knock at the door, and my father told my mother, go peek through the curtains, see who it is. We had the curtains drawn and everything, and she said, it's your brother Dennis, and he's with a couple guys. And my father and my uncle at this point were barely talking to each other.
My father said, okay, let him in. My uncle walks in with two FBI agents. One of them my father knew because this guy was assigned to my father and his guys. This guy was always investigating my father and that crew of guys that he was with. The other guy was that agent's boss. And the reason my uncle was there was just to help them get in the house. They're sitting at the table. I remember this, believe it or not.
And I remember I was playing in the living room just off the dining room, and my mom told me to go play in my room. They were having a conversation for a long time downstairs. And years later, I come to find out the FBI agent had a manila envelope with him. He emptied it, put it on the table, and it was a bunch of black and white pictures. And he ran his hand through the pictures to fan them out. And it was the photographs from the crime scene from my father's partner's murder.
And you see his friend with a couple bullets in his head. My mother starts crying. My father, I think, had told her it was a robbery gone bad and they killed him. He didn't want to worry her. And the FBI agent said, listen, we have information that you're next. So they wanted our family to leave with the FBI that night to put us in protective custody to save my father. And my father was not a rat.
He took an oath and he was not going to go back on that. He argued with my uncle at the table. What are you even doing here? Why did you come to my house? And they're arguing and my mother's crying. And the FBI agents are saying a lot of guys turn informant or turn rat because they're trying to stay out of jail.
That's not the case with you. We want you to come with us so we can save your life and possibly save your family's life. My life was a little far-fetched because they don't come after families. But the FBI agent pointed out, what if they make a move on you, Joe, and you're with your son? What if you take your son to the park one day and they kill you there in front of your son? According to my mother and my uncle, my father started asking questions like, how would this work? But he was asking them in a sarcastic way.
where do we sleep tonight? You sleep at a hotel. We're going to put you up in a hotel, but you'll be in protective custody. There'll be guys outside the hotel. And my father wanted to know, was it a nice hotel? Was it a fleabag motel?
And he was making a joke of it. And my mother was getting furious with him because he wasn't taking it seriously. And then they had mentioned that they could give him a new identity. And he said, would it be an Italian name? I want to go by the name Evan O'Shea. And my mom said she sat there and she's thinking, oh, my God, he's really considering this.
And then he sat there smoking a cigarette and he said, okay, guys, well, thanks for stopping by. My wife will show you out. And they're like, what's going on? And he said, I don't know anything. Come on. I'm just friends with those guys. And they didn't buy his line of crap. The one agent got really mad at him, yelled, you're a stupid man. When I was a kid, my father took me to see you fight one time. You were really good. It's a shame what happened to you. That was a little dig at him. On the way out, my
My mother, she gave my uncle a hug and a kiss goodbye. And the one FBI agent said, Mrs. Rooley, may God be with you and your son. I guess after they left, my parents had a huge, huge argument. Life was pretty much over as she knew it from that night on. But she was never expecting what was going to happen next.
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Get started risk-free at greenlight.com slash Wondery. Joe stubbornly rejected the help that was offered to him. It's unclear whether he felt a sense of loyalty to his associates or believed his fate was sealed no matter which path he took. Regardless, it wasn't long before Joe disappeared without a trace.
About two weeks later, my father's immediate supervisor in the crime family had taken over that crew of guys because the main guy went to prison. So this guy was in charge, but now he was going to prison. And my father was very close with him. So my dad...
was having a going-away party for this guy at our restaurant, which was in Lodi, New Jersey. Name of the restaurant was the Scorpio Club. This was a big night. He's having this big party for this guy. He's trying to mend whatever fences, fix whatever mistakes he might have made.
get himself back in a good position with these guys. So about four o'clock, my dad called my mom. They only owned one car. It was a white Cadillac. And my mom was home and close. They were about 20 minutes away. My dad said to her,
what time are you coming over here? Because she was coming to the party. Do you need me to come pick you up? And she says, no, my friend is going to come to the party and she'll pick me up. So you don't have to leave the restaurant. You can stay there. And my father had brought a suit with him to wear the change into before the party started. My mom got there about six,
The waitresses were setting up the dining room and the bartenders were setting up the bar. And she noticed my father's car wasn't in the parking lot. So she asked the bartender, she said, hey, where's Joe? He goes, oh, he had to step out for a few minutes. She said he'd be back in a little bit. My mom says, okay. She didn't think anything of it. She starts with the waitress helping set up the tables. Guests start coming in little by little.
The guy who the party is for comes in and my father's not there. And my mother at that point knew he was not going to be at this party. And this was something he talked about for weeks that he was having this party. He had to do a good job at it. This guy still likes me. I could fix whatever problems I had with them. And this guy and I are friends outside of our work.
And my mother, when she realized my father was not going to show up, she went into the ladies room with one of her friends and she was crying. And her friend said, what's the matter? She says, I don't think I'm ever going to see my husband again. And she was right. Missing that party was a telltale that he was gone. When he didn't show up, everybody got really uncomfortable and the party broke up pretty quickly. My mother also left and she reported him missing a couple of days later. She hadn't heard from him.
Newspapers from the time reported that Joe disappeared on April 20, 1971. He was reported missing that Friday, and by Monday his car was found in Jersey City. When law enforcement arrived at the scene, it appeared as though a murder had taken place. But was everything really as it seemed?
about a week from when he was last seen, maybe a little bit less than a week, some kids were playing in a parking lot behind a Holiday Inn in Jersey City. Now, there was a parking lot, and then there was an overflow parking lot. The overflow parking lot was, I think it might have been like a dirt or gravel lot, and my dad's car was parked there, and some kids were playing
And they noticed that there was blood all over the car on the inside. These kids called the police, Jersey City Police, who came out and they ran a check on the registration. And they found out it was my father, it was his car. And they realized he was reported missing. All the wheels were in action now. So the word got out. And actually, as a courtesy, the state police detective who was on the scene called my Uncle Dennis.
and said, "Hey, I'm just letting you know, we found your brother's car in Jersey City." My uncle said, "I'll be right there." He pulls up and goes, "By that time, there is like a dozen cops there." And anybody who had an open investigation on him was there.
There was the state police, the FBI, Hudson County Prosecutor's Office, the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office, Jersey City cops were there. My uncle just walked up to the car and noticed the driver's side window was shot out. There was glass all on the inside of the car and the seat was covered with blood. There was a lot of blood in the car. And so one of my uncle's cop friends had said, we haven't opened the trunk yet. We're going to get a crowbar to open the trunk.
And I guess the meaning of that is it's kind of cliche, but a lot of times mob guys are found in the trunks of their cars. So my uncle basically said, your dad and I had our problems. There were times where we pretty much hated each other, but he was still my kid brother and I loved him. And I didn't want my last memory of him to be in the trunk of his car, murdered.
So I walked away. Turns out when they opened up the trunk, there was nothing in there except melted Easter baskets. Easter was, I guess, coming up or had just passed. I guess my mom had made Easter baskets for me and my cousins. They were in the trunk of the car and they were all back there, all melted. But there was no Joey Lupo back there.
Everyone assumed that Joe had been murdered on the day of the going-away party. The grisly scene inside his vehicle painted a frightening picture of his likely end. However, testing on the blood that was found inside the car flipped everyone's assumptions upside down.
Until the blood reports came back, they thought he was dead. It was animal blood. Everybody had assumed he died, that he was gone. The whole family was mourning. I remember as a little boy, we were staying with some friends. And I remember we came into the house and the house was filled with men. And these were cops. And right away, my mother's friend took me into another room with her son and we played. And I remember years later asking my mom, I said,
I kind of have this memory of walking into this house that we were staying at and all these guys being there. Am I remembering that right? And she says, yeah, that's how I found out the blood was animal blood. They had found out that morning and they went to interrogate my mother and they interrogated her there. They were all taking turns. They were there for a couple hours. She didn't remember the questions. I obviously don't know them, but
When they left, she went from being in mourning to being really confused. And I think she pretty much lived the rest of her life that way, not knowing what happened to her husband.
The pressure on Joe Lupo had been mounting. Several of his closest associates, including his own partner, had been murdered in the lead-up to his sudden disappearance. A May 7, 1971 article in The Record reported that when authorities discovered the blood inside Joe's car was actually animal blood, they began to entertain the possibility that the car had been staged to mislead them into thinking he had been slain by the underworld. Initially,
Investigators suspected that Joe was the fifth victim of a violent gang war in northern New Jersey. Over the course of three months, four other murders had been attributed to mob factions from New York, seeking to take over organized crime operations in New Jersey. We'll explore this further in part two, but Joe's reasons for vanishing may not have been solely tied to the mafia. In 1970, Joe had been convicted of illegally possessing a handgun in his home. According
According to Joe, the weapon belonged to his wife, who believed she was being followed. Facing a two-year sentence, Joe had appealed the conviction. But before he could have his day in court, he disappeared without a trace. The same article noted that the prosecutor was preparing to ask for his bail to be revoked, effectively making Joe a fugitive. The question remained, had the mafia caught up to Joe and made him vanish? Or did Joe go into hiding, knowing he was a marked man?
Over the years, stories have circulated, like tiny breadcrumbs, hinting at possible traces of Joe on the run, fleeing from either the mafia, law enforcement, or both. Mark shared one of these stories with us, a tale he heard from his Uncle Dennis that may shed some light on what really happened.
There's a story my Uncle Dennis told, some notes I jotted here from back then. I'll just read you my notes. A girl visited a prosecutor, said she knew where Joe was in Woodbridge, New Jersey. She went in the house, then came out and wanted to go to Hackensack. So my Uncle Dennis and some of the state police guys went to that house, and there was water boiling on the stove. This
This was after this all happened. This is within a couple weeks. Again, one little story, but was she lying? To get a bunch of cops to get in a car and go find this guy, it had to be compelling enough. And again, this is after that 1971 date. A few days, a week, whatever it was. Another little breadcrumb. Again, that defining time of April 20, 1971, before and then life after, there's evidence of
Joe's wife Cynthia was left to raise their son on her own. As her world began to unravel with Joe's sudden disappearance, she discovered that many of the things that she thought were theirs were not in their names, adding to the overwhelming sense of loss she now faced. Despite it all, Cynthia had to pull herself together, for the sake of their son, putting aside her own grief to ensure that he had a sense of stability amidst the chaos.
My mom was still grieving. We moved back to Lodi. The restaurant wasn't in my father's name. It was in somebody else's name. The house was in somebody else's name. We don't have a house. We don't have a restaurant. Whatever she had was the money he had in the house. And it wasn't even in the bank. Couldn't put money in a bank.
In the months following Joe's sudden and mysterious disappearance, rumors began to circulate that he had fled to Florida. However, concrete evidence to support this claim remains elusive to this day. A June 30, 1971 article in the Herald News quoted a top Hudson County law enforcement official who suggested that Joe may have left the state to escape being marked for murder.
Somehow the newspapers, I don't know, I guess about a few months after he was gone, I've never been able to find out how they came up with this. They started running reports that according to a Hudson County detective, he may be in Florida. Both me and my uncle Dennis were never able to figure out what information that detective might have had to say that, unless it came from an informant, which it might have.
But the informant obviously didn't say where he was in Florida. He may have just said he's in Florida. Never made a whole lot of sense, though. I have never come across anything. One of my father's friends, who I became friendly with later on, I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with him. This was somebody my dad was very close with.
and also in the life with him. I asked him about that Florida rumor, and he swore to me he didn't know what happened to him. But he said, Joe, when you live in New Jersey, going to Florida is like going to the shore. Everybody goes to Florida from New Jersey. If you're in the airport, you're definitely going to run into people you know from New Jersey. If he was in Florida, even if he laid low for a couple years, eventually he would have to resurface.
And even if he was under a different name, people would recognize him. He walked with a cane. He had a brace on his leg. Even if you said, hey, that guy looks like Joe Lupo. Oh, wait a minute. That guy's walking with a cane and he's got a brace. That is Joe Lupo. People would be coming back to Jersey left and right with reports that they saw him down there.
Unless he spent some time in Florida and then left Florida when the rumors made it back to Jersey. But as far as I know, there's never been anything substantial about him being in Florida. We know he had some cousins down there who he wasn't particularly close with, but he did know them. One was in Key West. One was in the Miami area. My uncle said he looked into that. They didn't know anything about it.
In the years following Joe's disappearance, it seemed as though the FBI was keeping a close watch on his family, as if they believed that the family knew where he was or might be in communication with him. While most families of missing persons are typically treated as victims, Joe's family was handled differently, under suspicion and scrutiny, adding another layer of tension to their already tragic situation.
My dad's gone a couple years. I start school and we're living in Lodi. My mother's grandfather had passed away like in the late 60s. One day, like 1973, my great-grandmother goes to visit his grave and she sees the ground was all flooded. The cemetery agreed to have his body exhumed and moved to higher grounds. But they needed somebody from the family there to witness it, that they in fact moved to higher grounds.
move the body. So the big question in the family was, who's going to do it? Everybody works. Well, my mother didn't work. She said, I'll do it. She went to this graveyard. My mom was parked on one of these little trails in her car, and she brought a couple of magazines. And all of a sudden, a car pulls up alongside her, like two cops would, and it was the cemetery manager. And he says, okay, Mrs. Lupo, we have the coffin out of the ground. We're
The guys are going to take lunch, and then we're going to go up there and put it in the new plot. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, an unmarked police car comes screeching up, and two guys jump out with guns drawn. FBI, or it might have been the state police, was watching my mother. They were following my mother for years. They were convinced that he wasn't dead.
and they were waiting for him to make contact with her. When my mom was in that graveyard, they didn't realize that 100 yards away, they were digging up her grandfather. They were thinking, why is this lady sitting in her car in the middle of a cemetery,
reading a magazine. This is probably where they agreed to meet in the middle of a cemetery. And when that guy pulled up in the other car, my mother said he almost soiled his pants. These guys came running up with guns pointed at him. One of the cops was somebody she knew because he had executed search warrants at her house and everything. And she says, I told you, I haven't heard from him. I don't know anything about what's going on. And the one guy said to her, I believe you, but I got to do my job. And
And that was that. The cops were still following her for a few years. As the years went on with no new information about Joe's fate, Cynthia was left with no choice but to move forward. Eventually, she took the difficult step of having her husband declared legally deceased.
My mother had him declared dead in New Jersey. You have to be missing for seven years. I guess the procedure is that they put a legal notice in the paper saying that if anybody has seen Joseph Rooley in the last seven years, please come to court or notify such and such a person. It ran in a couple of North Jersey papers. Nobody came forward, said they saw him or knew where he was or anything like that.
When Joe and Mark connected after the passing of their grandmother, they found themselves both drawn to the mystery of their family's past. Both intrigued and determined to uncover the truth, they became fixated on the question, did Joe really flee the state and his life, or was he murdered back in April of 1971? Their shared curiosity sparked a renewed search for answers, one that would take them deep into their family's tangled history.
I've always been interested in the family tree, both sides, mom and dad's side. And I started doing what work I could. I've researched it as best that I could, Joe and I, actually, from the redacted FBI files that you can get your hands on, heavily redacted, to talking to people, to literally going to visit my Uncle Dennis and Aunt Toni with a piece of paper and a pen and asking questions.
and just getting memories and kind of building a family tree and asking questions and getting feedback and just trying to put some structure in what was happening. And it's not until you really get into the FBI file, again, it's heavily redacted, and it's probably informants. And, you know, informants will say what they need to say to stay on the street. So some of it's probably all, you know, not accurate, but he was very busy building his career.
As you could say, both my Uncle Dennis and my Uncle Joe. We've talked about this in depth for years and years. And it's a story that there's so many question marks. Somebody has to know something. I'm afraid the people that really know are probably no longer here. But this guy in North Jersey, my Uncle Joe, was a legend, right? As a fighter and from everything that I understand, people
People that I've talked to, things that I've read, that personality, big, just full of life. You don't forget that. When somebody says, hey, after 1971, they saw Joe, you don't make that mistake. There's too many coincidences there. People don't make that mistake.
And this is where we'll pick up with part two. You've learned about Joe Lupo's life, his promising boxing career that was tragically cut short, and how he became entangled with the mafia. Joe was planning a going-away party for one of his higher-ups, a moment that was supposed to mark a turning point for him. But things had been unraveling for months. A mafia turf war was in full swing, and many of his associates had already been eliminated. Joe Lupo was a man of his word.
Joe feared he would be next, and he was even told as much. Just before the party began, Joe stepped out for a brief moment and never returned.
Days later, his car was found riddled with bullets and stained with blood. It looked like Joe's life had likely ended in that vehicle, confirming his worst fears. But when testing revealed that the blood wasn't Joe's, but animal blood, suspicions arose. Had Joe staged the entire scene to escape? With the heat turning up on him, did he plan this elaborate scheme himself? Or did someone else harm Joe in April 1971? Next week, we'll dive into the research that Joe and Mark have conducted in
in the decades since they connected after their grandmother's passing in 1992? What have they discovered in their search for answers? If you have any information regarding the disappearance of Joseph Joe Lupo Rulli, please contact the New Jersey State Police Missing Persons Unit at 609-882-2000, extension 2554. You may also reach out to Joe directly. His email address is included in the episode notes.
I can tell you that my father to this day wants to know what happened. I find myself at times just going through it again in my head and so on and so forth. And there's just a lot of pieces.
One of the things that I had asked my uncle, you know, geez, if your brother disappears, wouldn't that weigh on you forever? I don't have any brothers and sisters, but I do know that if I had a brother and he vanished under those kind of circumstances, I think I would be obsessed with it for the rest of my life.
And it seemed like everybody, after a while, just went on with their lives, as if he had died. My uncle had told me, I would say to him, years later, five years later, ten years later, when everybody was together for the holidays, did my father's name ever come up? And he says, yeah. He goes, usually we would sit there and his name would come up and we'd say, if he's still around, we hope he's having a good Christmas. They always hoped that their brother was still alive, whether or not they found him alive.
that they ever saw him or not. They, of course, hoped that he was alive, but nobody ever had any information. My father not only never saw me again or my mother again, he never saw his parents again. He never saw his brothers again. He never saw any of his friends again. For most of his life, he was the most popular man in Lodi, New Jersey. He never saw anybody in that town again.
But let's go back to what I said first. He never saw his parents again. This was his mom. The Italian family, parents are everything. Family is everything. That he never reached out to anybody was kind of puzzling if he was alive.
That brings us to the end of episode 483. I'd like to thank Joe and Mark for speaking with us. If you have a missing loved one that you'd like to have featured on the show, there's a case submission form at thevanishedpodcast.com. If you'd like to join in on the discussion, there's a page and discussion group on Facebook. You can also find us on Instagram at
If you like our show, please give us a five-star rating and review. You can also support the show by contributing on Patreon, where you can get early and ad-free episodes. Be sure to tune in next week for part two of Joe's story. Thanks for listening. If you like The Vanished, you can listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.
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