Mob Star_ The Story of John Gotti Part 15

"I told him that. He says he don't stay open."

"Ah, he's full of s.h.i.+t."

Battista gave Gotti the line on several night baseball games, and Gotti bet a dime on each. In sports betting, a dime can be more than $1,000 because bookies establish the odds on a basic unit of $5. For example, if the Bergin team were a 6-7 favorite to beat the Ravenite team, a fan who bet a dime on the Bergin is "laying" 7, the higher number, 200 times. So the bet is $1,400 to win $1,000. If the underdog Ravenite wins the game, a fan who bet a dime on it wins $1,200-200 units of 6. The bookie gets $200-his vig-of the $1,400 lost by the Bergin fan.

Gotti would have so much riding on the outcome of some games that sometimes when he was at the Bergin, crew members would turn off the television set so that he wouldn't become upset.

His temper was something to behold, as a few nongambling conversations on the Bergin tapes profanely ill.u.s.trated.

One outburst came after Anthony Moscatiello-the former real estate partner of Salvatore Ruggiero who had leased Gotti a car-failed to promptly return Gotti's phone calls.

"Hi, Buddy," Moscatiello began cheerfully when he was able to get back to Gotti.

"Buddy, my f.u.c.king b.a.l.l.s. What, I got to reach out for you three days in a-f.u.c.king advance?"

"Paul, my wife just called me."

"You know, let me tell you something. I, I got, I need an example. Don't you be the f.u.c.king example. Do you understand me?"

"Listen, John ..."

"Listen, I called your f.u.c.king house five times yesterday, now ... if you're going to disregard my mother-f.u.c.king phone calls, I'll blow you and that f.u.c.king house up."

"I never disregard anything you ..."

"This is not a f.u.c.king game ... my time is valuable ... if I ever hear anybody else calls you and you respond within five days, I'll f.u.c.king kill you ..."

Jamesy Cardinali was not allowed to attend the Little Italy dice game, the one that the Bergin bigshots were operating in 1981.

"The next thing you know, you'll be gambling...that's not for you," Johnny told Jamesy.

People might have lived if Jamesy had become addicted to gambling and not to cocaine; in March 1981, in a house in Brooklyn, he partic.i.p.ated in another white-powder murder.

Jamesy didn't pull the trigger, but it was still murder. He sucked the cocaine dealer into seemingly idle conversation while an accomplice shot him in the face. The two killers wrapped the body in a painter's tarp, took it to Howard Beach, got on a boat, and deposited another corpse in Jamaica Bay.

Q.: Did you have to do anything to the body to make sure that it didn't float?A.: He was cut open.

Jamesy doesn't remember exactly, but he got $9,000 to $12,000 for this murder "in dribs and drabs." Gotti heard he was selling drugs again and talked to him about it on June 1.

"Someone came here and said you were selling drugs."

"It's not true."

"If I find out it is true, I will kill you."

"Who told you?"

"Michael Castigliola."

The next day, Jamesy murdered Michael Castigliola as the victim sat in a car. Tommie LaRuffa, a 70-year-old comrade of Jamesy's, saw his wicked young friend pull the trigger.

Jamesy didn't go to the Bergin for a few weeks, but one Sunday night he was tapped out and dropped in to ask Gotti for a loan.

"Did you kill that guy?"

"Yes."

"Never do anything like that again. You come and ask me ..."

"John, if I asked you, you wouldn't let me kill the guy."

"You got to post everything with me. I knew it an hour after you did it."

"How did you know?"

"Somebody saw you."

Jamesy knew it was true. Incredibly, a Bergin man was turning onto the street at the time Jamesy shot Castigliola and saw it all.

Gotti told the now four-time killer that Castigliola was with another mobster. "But don't worry. I can handle [him], just keep your mouth shut."

About this time, Special Agent Paul Hayes began calling on Jamesy, who had turned up in surveillance photographs taken outside the Bergin. Jamesy wasn't supposed to hang out with criminals; the photos suggested that he had violated his parole. Sources BQ and Wahoo had identified the photos, for which some Bergin men had posed. One day they grew tired of seeing an FBI car outside the club and agreed to have their pictures taken if the agents would then leave.

The FBI wanted to talk to Jamesy about John Gotti and not, except as a possible lever, a parole violation. But Jamesy wasn't interested in talking, not then, and every time Agent Hayes came calling, Jamesy told John or Gene.

One time, after Hayes invited Jamesy to the FBI office in Queens, Gene gave him money in case "they keep you." John told him it was okay to go once. "But don't take no [lie] tests. Go and talk once, that's enough."

Naturally, Jamesy wasn't telling Agent Hayes about any murders either, and in August 1981 he put number 5 in the grave.

On cocaine, Jamesy was a greyhound chasing an elusive mechanical rabbit. He had to stay high to escape the low.

Q.: So you have to keep doing it?A.: Yes.Q.: You have to keep doing it and you have to keep doing it. You do it until it's all gone, right?A.: Then you go get some more.

Jamesy went to the Riviera Motel near the airport to get some more, after friends told him about a c.o.ke dealer holding four kilos.

At the motel, Jamesy flashed a badge and handcuffed the flush dealer. He policed him into his car, drove behind the motel, and fired a fatal bullet into his neck. Jamesy and three partners each got a kilo, a thousand grams; a thousand disco nights for Jamesy if he weren't so greedy, which of course he was. He sold some, but most of the score went up his nose.

En route to his more timid friends, Jamesy, for once, felt "bad" because the victim "looked like a college kid."

Two months later, the parents of a young man wearing a University of Pennsylvania ring on his finger were informed his body had been found behind the Riviera Motel, near John F. Kennedy International Airport, Queens, New York City.

In the meantime, Jamesy was asked to appear in a police lineup for the Castigliola murder. He was not identified, but as he left the precinct, three state parole officers were waiting. At a hearing, he was found guilty of violating his parole. The charges were using drugs, failing to report for visits with his parole officer, and "consorting" with criminals. The evidence of the latter was a photograph of Jamesy with Willie Boy Johnson outside the Bergin. FBI Agent Paul Hayes angered Jamesy by giving pivotal testimony.

Jamesy went off to do nine months in a state prison. He was one thorn out of Gotti's crown, but others were on the vine.

On September 1, 1981, the criminal aspirations of a young Queens armed robber, Peter Zuccaro, were put on hold when he was sentenced to 12 years in prison by Brooklyn federal judge Eugene H. Nickerson, who would make John Gotti's acquaintance later.

Zuccaro had been convicted of taking part in two armored-car robberies, which netted about $1.1 million. He was the nexus that bound Gotti and a former Ozone Park schoolgirl, Diane F. Giacalone, in a fierce court battle to be fought five years later.

The Zuccaro case was prosecuted by Giacalone, who became an a.s.sistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York-Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and Long Island-in 1979.

Giacalone, the daughter of a civil engineer, used to walk along 101st Avenue, past the Bergin, on her way to the Our Lady of Wisdom Academy. She used to wonder whether the men who hung out there worked only at night.

As John Gotti climbed in the Family, Giacalone climbed in the legal profession. After being graduated from New York University Law School, she went to Was.h.i.+ngton to work in the Justice Department's tax division. She then returned to New York, to live in Manhattan and work in Brooklyn.

The Zuccaro case began July 29, 1980-a time when Gotti was in Florida and a day after his neighbor John Favara was kidnapped and disappeared forever.

Zuccaro and three confederates waited in the parking lot of a Queens grocery store until an employee of IBI Security Services, an armored-car company, came out of the store with the day's receipts.

Two, maybe three, robbers followed the employee into the truck, waved their handguns, announced a robbery, and handcuffed him and the driver, Francis Higgins, an ex-cop. They drove the truck a short distance, gobbled up $310,000, and took off.

On December 26, 1980, the robbers struck again. Same truck, same driver, same routine, but in Brooklyn outside a bakery and for more than twice as much money-$750,000. They left the truck outside a New York Daily News New York Daily News printing plant. Ex-cop Higgins had had enough; he left IBI Security to work in a grocery store. printing plant. Ex-cop Higgins had had enough; he left IBI Security to work in a grocery store.

Zuccaro was indicted in March 1981; his accomplices remained free until one, Andrew Curro, became a suspect in the murder of his 19-year-old girlfriend, April Ernst. Investigating her death, police learned that April had threatened to reveal his role in the IBI Security Services thefts during an argument they had over another woman.

Cops began to pressure Andrew Curro. Early in August, he was arrested on charges of possessing a weapon, a violation of his probation. Bail bondsman Irving Newman got a call from a man who wanted to help Curro make bail-Angelo Ruggiero.

"He said that he knows the people well and not to worry about it," Newman recalled later. "He would see that I got the collateral and everything else."

A few days later, Newman was asked by others to guarantee more bail for Curro, after he was arrested again and charged with his girlfriend's murder. April Ernst had been strangled with a rope, taken to a motel, and dismembered with a machete.

The cops were told something else during their probe of Curro: He and Zuccaro also were car thieves who had sold cars and parts to the Fountain Auto Shop, owned by John Carneglia. Some of the IBI Security loot, an informant said, was pa.s.sed on to the Bergin, and thus possibly to Neil Dellacroce.

All this was easier said than proved. But a few days after Zuccaro was sentenced, Diane Giacalone began "doing Neil and Johnny," as one partic.i.p.ant of an initial strategy session recalled. The victorious prosecutor began laying plans for making a racketeering and conspiracy case against them, a "RICO" case.

RICO is an acronym for the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a legal sledgehammer conceived with the Families in mind. It had been federal law since 1970, but had only recently come into vogue at the Justice Department.

The government had conspiracy statutes prior to 1970, but RICO was a wider net. Its focus was ent.i.ties, not individuals-Families rather than soldiers. Until RICO, federal law, for the most part, saw individuals committing criminal acts; it did not see organizations whose individuals committed crimes to benefit the organization. RICO introduced two new ideas: "criminal enterprise" and "pattern of racketeering."

A "criminal enterprise" was any organization or group of individuals "a.s.sociated in fact," if not by law, which employed racketeering for group purposes. A "pattern of racketeering" was two or more violations of state and federal laws, against crimes such as murder, mail fraud, extortion, bribery, or 28 others.

Under RICO, it became a separate crime to belong to an enterprise that engaged in a pattern of racketeering. Even if the racketeering acts were committed by others, a member was guilty if he was shown to be a knowing and active member of the enterprise. RICO meant that some serious state crimes, such as murder, could be tried in federal courts.

The penalties upon a RICO conviction-up to 20 years and $25,000 in fines for each count-are much more severe than most of those provided by the 32 individual state and federal laws that can be cited in the pattern of racketeering. RICO also permits government confiscation of businesses or property obtained through the enterprise.

Defense attorneys say some RICO provisions are unfair, especially one permitting prosecutors, as part of the pattern of racketeering, to charge crimes for which a defendant has already been convicted and punished. This makes it possible, for instance, to convert two relatively minor violations into one serious RICO felony. Under RICO, a defendant may even be charged with a crime for which he has been previously acquitted, under a theory that committing the crime for the enterprise is considered a new crime.

A princ.i.p.al RICO author, G. Robert Blakey, now a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, defends RICO this way: "If you don't want any more trouble, stay away from crime."

RICO was part of a package known as the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970. It was proposed by Blakey and other young lawyers employed by a presidential commission under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson or by a Senate committee that held hearings on organized crime in the mid-1960s.

The testimony of Joseph Valachi-the Genovese mobster who first revealed the existence of La Cosa Nostra La Cosa Nostra-had already helped RICO supporters guide other anti-mob measures through Congress, laws that gave prosecutors control of grand juries and greater immunity and surveillance powers.

"RICO was designed to zap the mob, not mobsters, but the mob," said Blakey, "But few prosecutors understood it."

Many within the Department of Justice, especially the FBI, had recently discovered this concealed weapon at professional forums and law-school seminars and were pursuing investigations which they hoped would yield RICO indictments.

As early as 1979, information from Sources BQ and Wahoo was going into a "Bergin Hunt and Fish Club (RICO)" file at the FBI office in Queens. Former federal judge William H. Webster had led the FBI into a wider a.s.sault on the Families than had his predecessor, FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover, who had four agents working Family cases in New York during the McCarthy era.

Aniello Dellacroce was now considered New York's second most powerful mobster; FBI agents had learned that Castellano was in fact the Gambino boss.

Still, by starting an investigation of Dellacroce and his top skipper, John Gotti, Diane Giacalone was entering territory normally patrolled by the Eastern District's special Organized Crime Strike Force. The Strike Force was located next to the U.S. Court House, where Giacalone worked, in the so-called IRS building. The two offices were distinct enterprises with their own methods and personalities.

Giacalone, who bears a physical resemblance to comedienne Lily Tomlin, already had an uneasy relations.h.i.+p with some FBI agents. In April 1981, because Strike Force prosecutors were occupied with several political corruption cases-the result of a spectacular FBI sting operation known as Abscam-a case the FBI had against Peter Castellanna, a cousin of both Carlo Gambino and Paul Castellano, had landed on Ciacalone's desk.

Castellanna and two others had been arrested on extortion charges based on secret tapes made by the alleged victim as he was threatened with death. By September, Giacalone had not yet secured indictments. FBI agents thought she was dragging her feet; she thought the case needed more investigation.

Whatever the merits, the friction was undeniable. But Giacalone did not seem to care what they thought about her. The power and prestige of her office imbues some of its occupants with a sense of national mission and n.o.ble purpose that does not abide any distraction. She was outspoken, strong-willed, and occasionally tempestuous. In the mainly male world of cops and robbers, and agents and mobsters, she was a p.r.i.c.kly outsider.

Many of the men whose cooperation she needed didn't think the 31-year-old former tax attorney was ideally suited for the task of taking down Dellacroce and Gotti in a complicated RICO case. She felt absolutely confident that she was suited, and that she would not have had the job if her bosses didn't think so, too.

Besides, it really wasn't that complicated. Obviously, the Gambino Family-an a.s.sociated-in-fact illegal enterprise if there ever was one-existed. Neil and Johnny Boy were certainly members; there was evidence-court records, guilty pleas-that they had committed at least two violations of state and federal laws during their careers. The case was a tedious but doable matter of pulling all the pieces from all the files and persuading a few people to testify about them. This was more the work of lawyers than cops, and Giacalone was a thorough, tireless lawyer.

Giacalone's first strategy session was attended by Lt. Jack Fergerson of the NYPD's Organized Crime Control Bureau, and three detectives: Kenneth McCabe, then of the Brooklyn D.A.'s office; Joseph Coffey, then commander of the NYPD's Organized Crime homicide task force; and Billy Burns, who had worked on the IB case. Three federal agents also partic.i.p.ated: Edward Magnuson of the DEA, and Richard Robley and Stephen Morrill of the FBI.

At the time, New York State did not have a law similar to RICO; it was common for the NYPD to a.s.sign detectives to cases better brought in federal court. Among other reasons, the DEA was interested because John, Peter, Gene, and Vincent Gotti, at various times, had been named in drug-dealing investigations. Significantly, although the FBI had special organized-crime squads for each Family, the two agents it sent to Giacalone's meeting were members of a property-crimes unit. The FBI was used to taking Family cases to the Strike Force, not getting them from a.s.sistant U.S. attorneys.

All the agencies had their own informants. To varying degrees, they felt loyal to them, a result of the ironic bond that develops between good guys and bad guys during years of secret meetings under dangerous circ.u.mstances. They tended to regard their informants in a proprietary manner; informants, of course, give information, a source of power.

One informant that the DEA brought to Giacalone at the outset was Kenneth O'Donnell, an armed robber who had been an informer for the NYPD. Detective Joseph Coffey would later testify that O'Donnell was the best informer he ever had, but he had to be closely monitored.

Though difficult to handle-after some undercover work one night, he committed a robbery-O'Donnell was effective. He had introduced ATF undercover agent Dominick Polifrone to Vincent Gotti; he had set up Frank DiCicco for a loan-shark charge, eventually dismissed. He had also set up one of John Gotti's barbers, Vito Scaglione, who had a shop on 101st Avenue and delivered a silencer-equipped pistol to an undercover agent for whom O'Donnell had vouched. Vito pleaded guilty.

Lately, O'Donnell had been helping the DEA make cases against drug dealers in New Jersey. He now told Giacalone he saw John Gotti give Peter Zuccaro, the man she had just prosecuted in the armored-car case, a "bag full of money" in front of the Bergin "for drugs." The charge was never publicly made, but it fired the interest of Giacalone and the others.

In the beginning of the Eastern District-NYPD-DEA-FBI RICO investigation, there was goodwill.

18.

THE MERCHANTS OF OZONE PARK.