The Jackson Township “Cosa Nostra cemetery” search (1967)

Excavation and identifications

The roughly sixty-mile-distant-from-New-York property belonged to Joseph Celso, 49, and Rose Celso, 46. An underworld informant’s information, developed during a two-year FBI inquiry into Cosa Nostra activity in New York and New Jersey, led investigators there. Bulldozers searched the overgrown property, its ruined distillery and a water-filled cellar. A former neighbor’s report of digging across the road produced no additional body.

One skeleton was recovered from a mash pit and tentatively identified as Angelo Sonnessa, who was 48 when he disappeared in September 1961; it went to New York City chief medical examiner Dr. Milton Helpern. Another, found in a rusted oil drum under about two feet of soil in a chicken-coop corner fifty yards from the farmhouse, was tentatively identified as Kenneth Later, 55 when he disappeared in March of a year obscured by OCR. The FBI called him a stockbroker, while New York Missing Persons records called him a theatrical agent. His remains went to the FBI laboratory in Washington.

FBI section chief Richard J. Baker said investigators strongly suspected organized-crime executions. The Celsos were arraigned in Asbury Park as material witnesses and held on $100,000 bail; Joseph went to the federal detention center in New York and Rose to Passaic County Jail. These were reported investigative claims, not findings reproduced here as independently proved facts.

The farm’s organized-crime connection

Later accounts place the property on Cook Road in Jackson Township. The illegal still had been operated by Joseph “Bayonne Joe” Zicarelli, later identified as a Bonanno crime-family captain. Sonnessa, of Nutley, had been a business associate of Joseph Vecchio in All State Asphalt and had disappeared in September 1961. Reports place Later’s remains in a buried drum, but his disappearance date conflicts across accounts, as discussed below.

These later identifications explain why a former chicken farm and distillery became part of a wider federal organized-crime investigation. They do not, by themselves, establish who killed either man.

A contemporary report exposes a chronology problem

A United Press International dispatch in the Pacific Stars & Stripes of March 26, 1967, p. 3, locates both recoveries along Cook Road. It says U.S. District Judge Robert Shaw authorized the digging in Newark and traces the investigation to disappearances examined over two years. It also identifies Sonnessa as a business partner of Joseph Vecchio in All State Asphalt. Contemporary newspaper scan, Texas Tech Vietnam archive.

The printed dispatch calls Later 51 and says he was reported missing April 12, 1953. That differs from the older clipping’s age of 55 and its damaged March date, as well as later retellings. The page image confirms that 1953 is in the print, not merely an OCR error; whether the newspaper itself erred remains open. An original New York missing-person record is needed before assigning a single disappearance date. Neither this dispatch nor the reviewed follow-ups establishes a conviction for either death.