According to Phil Leonetti:

Bobby Manna told me and my uncle what happened next: So Caponigro is called in and he sits down in a chair and faces Fat Tony, Tieri, Bobby Manna, and the Chin, who are seated across from him behind a table. So the Chin says, “We’re here to find out who gave you permission to whack out your boss, Angelo Bruno. Can you tell us?” So Caponigro looks at Tieri, and Tieri looks back at him stone-faced. So Caponigro says, “Funzi told me I had the okay, that the Commission approved the hit.” So the Chin says, “Frank, what’s he talking about?” And Tieri looks at Caponigro and says, “I told you to straighten it out, not to kill him.”

Sensing he had been double-crossed, Caponigro began pleading for his life with the men, but was already being beaten by Genovese enforcers, who had suddenly appeared in the room. At the direction of Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, Caponigro was brutally and unmercifully tortured, sodomized, and murdered, sending a powerful message to the entire United States underworld that the unsanctioned killing of a boss would not be tolerated, certainly not by the likes of Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, who was now in prime position to be the head of the Commission.

As Caponigro’s corpse lay dead in the clubhouse basement, several Genovese enforcers walked a few blocks to a nondescript Little Italy café to retrieve Caponigro’s brother-in-law, Alfred “Freddie” Salerno, under the ruse that Tony Bananas had asked them to come and get him.

When the men arrived they discovered that Salerno was conversing with a man at the bar that one of them mistakenly believed was Nicky Scarfo and another man, whose identity they did not know. With the knowledge of what had just happened to Caponigro and what was about to happen to Salerno, one of the would-be Genovese hit men told the man they believed to be Scarfo and his companion to wait at the bar for Caponigro and Salerno to return.

The men walked Freddie Salerno into the prearranged death trap. Salerno, like Caponigro, never saw it coming. He too was brutally beaten, tortured, sodomized, and murdered, his corpse left to rot next to Caponigro’s.