Raymond W. "Ray" Ferritto (8 April 1929-10 May 2004) was a hitman and a former US Marine who was working for the Cleveland crime family and the Los Angeles crime family.
Biography[]
Raymond W. Ferritto was born in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1929 to a family of Italian descent, and he was convicted of burglarizing two gas stations when he was just 13. He left high school at 17 to join the US Marine Corps, but he was medically discharged a month later due to the amputation of two of his toes after a bronzing factory accident. During his twenties, he was a bookmaker and vending machine route man in Erie, and he moved to Warren, Ohio in the 1950s. He was arrested for burglary in 1958 and served three years in prison, and, upon his release, he committed several burglaries in the Cleveland area. By the late 1960s, he moved to Los Angeles and killed Julius Petro for a bookmaker in 1969. In 1971, he was again convicted of burglary and sentenced to 15 years in prison, but he was released in 1974 and returned to Erie. In 1977, after the Cleveland Mob failed eight times to kill Irish Mob boss Danny Greene, Genovese crime family boss Anthony Spoleto gave Ferritto the contract on Greene. Greene was killed when Ferritto remote-detonated a car bomb in the parking lot of a dentist's office, having tipped his hat to Greene before killing him. Ferritto soon became too high-profile for Cleveland boss James T. Licavoli, who ordered his death. Ferritto then turned states, and he served less than four years in prison, having helped to destroy the Cleveland Mafia. He died in Florida in 2004.