Mob Star_ The Story of John Gotti Part 30

"But look at Neil, he was here on this street all his life. I'm not gonna be a back-door boss. It's better this way. Everybody sees the boss and the boss sees them. Keeps everybody happy."

"Times are different."

"Times are the same. Except this here is a Cosa Nostra now. I ain't Chin, and I ain't Paul, hidin' out in my house."

Sammy let it go. Gotti's mind was made up. Soon after the Ravenite "shape-ups" began early in 1988, Gotti also showed he would not indulge non-compliance with the mandatory-attendance requirement.

The men who squawked about the recklessness and inconvenience of weekly trips to the Ravenite included Thomas DeBrizzi, a 64-year-old soldier. He ran a loan-sharking and gambling operation in Connecticut for Carlo Gambino's son Tommy; per his to-the-manor-born image, Tommy had authority over operations in the nutmeg state.

Unlike Tommy, DeBrizzi lived in Connecticut, two hours by car from Mulberry Street. He barely knew Gotti, and was in prison during Sparks. But then he made the mistake of complaining too much, in the presence of his crew leader, about the Ravenite meetings.

Falling into line, too, Tommy told Gotti, and it was all Gotti needed to hear. DeBrizzi was found dead in his car's trunk on February 5, 1988, killed by men in his own crew eager to show they were not complainers.

"A guy don't want to come in, he's gone, that's all," Gotti told Sammy.

Gene Gotti also considered the Ravenite meetings a reckless idea-and not just because his bail terms in the heroin case required him to avoid such places. "Why don't we just draw the f.u.c.kin' feds a picture?" he complained to Sammy.

"I know, Genie, but he don't think it matters."

Gene believed the Ravenite meetings symbolized narcissism more than homage to the past and Dellacroce. But Gene believed it pointless for him to be the one to tell his brother that.

"That's your job, Sammy, you're the consigliere. consigliere. He'd never listen to me. He'd think I was jealous, but John, he just wants to be the center of attention all the time." He'd never listen to me. He'd think I was jealous, but John, he just wants to be the center of attention all the time."

"He loves bein' boss, that's for sure. You know how Paul made people come to him in small groups. John seems to like it when an audience comes."

"This guy, you oughta seen him when his name started gettin' in the papers. f.u.c.kin' loved it. And when his face was on the tube? Forget about it. It was like he was gettin' off for free."

To Sammy, Gene wasn't exaggerating. Once, he and Gotti were dining in a restaurant when they noticed a young couple staring at them.

"Look at the guy and the girl over there, lookin' at us," Gotti said solemnly. "They love me."

Sammy cringed inside. He accepted someone who had been called Robin Hood and a folk-hero of "the little people" might believe strangers found him fascinating, but to hear Gotti say "love" was so startling Sammy didn't know what to say.

"They do. They love me. They can't stop lookin' over here."

"You're f.u.c.kin' nuts," Sammy smiled before trying to steer the subject elsewhere.

"I'm tellin' ya, they love me," Gotti insisted again, lifting a second martini, Boodles very dry.

Gotti also remained highly visible in Ozone Park. He usually stopped at the Bergin Hunt & Fish Club to hang out for a couple hours each afternoon, before heading into Manhattan. The club and neighborhood were part of his ident.i.ty. He still sponsored the community's annual Fourth of July celebration. Thanks to his larger-than-ever profile, the 1988 version drew many reporters and led to another round of big headlines that made official New York appear powerless next to Gotti.

"This is just something we do for the neighborhood," Gotti said early in the day, during a brief bow in front of the Bergin coinciding with the arrival of television cameras.

In past years, the celebration always ended with an unauthorized fireworks display, but this year the NYPD had warned it would enforce a law requiring sponsors to get a permit by which the sponsor agreed to safety rules. Gotti ignored the warning, and that afternoon, NYPD trucks took away two dumpsters where his men planned to launch the 'works.

As day became evening, the crowd grew restless. "We want the 'works!" about two thousand people outside the Bergin began chanting. "We want the 'works!"

They grew more excited when Gotti, wearing an all-white ensemble, appeared in the Bergin doorway again, smiling and waving like a political nominee addressing a convention. He had given away a grocery store of food and soda; his men had erected carnival rides and strung patriotic bunting along 101st Avenue. He would have been elected mayor by that crowd.

Although the dumpsters were gone, the fireworks remained inside the Bergin, and now the crowd began chanting again. Several dozen cops stood by on sidewalks south of the club; a block north, more sat in squad cars. But they had underestimated the crowd that now swelled and screamed between the cops on foot and cops in cars.

"We want the 'works! We want the 'works!"

Gotti stepped back into the Bergin and a bonfire suddenly arose in the street. Gotti's son Junior then exited the Bergin, lugging a crate of fireworks. He was followed by several muscular young men. As the crowd roared, each began throwing Roman candles, cherry bombs, and other small-size devices into the fire. Some others stood metal canisters by the fire and were soon launching larger-sized rockets and starbursts.

The crowd grew more rowdy. They were mainly teenagers, but to the police captain in charge, they had been drinking something besides soda all day and seemed drunk enough to be both stupid and dangerous. He told his men to do nothing as the fireworks burst over Ozone Park. Two firetrucks also arrived, but firefighters wanted no part of a possible riot either and soon left.

Gotti again appeared in the Bergin doorway to gaze upon the frenzy. The cops made no arrests and issued no tickets, prompting the eldest Gotti brother, Peter, a newly made man, to a gleeful and widely reported taunt: "All the police did was make themselves look foolish."

It was hard to argue. The next day, officials in New York punted. The fire commissioner, responsible for licensing, quickly pa.s.sed the buck to the police commissioner, responsible for enforcement; he would not even answer questions.

Editorial-page writers flogged away. One opined that while it was regrettable that so many citizens in Ozone Park admired that "All-American Yankee Doodle Dandy Don, John Gotti," cops standing around like helpless children was even more so: "That's a pretty dangerous image to risk adopting. Even worse is the image it promotes: That the masters of organized crime are above the law, sneering as they put the city's law-enforcement establishment where they believe it belongs-in paralysis and humiliation."

A month later, Gotti decided to end the game he was playing on one of his oldest and most reliable men, Willie Boy Johnson, and make him pay for betraying him to the FBI all those years. The game began three years earlier, when Diane Giacalone exposed Willie Boy as an informer and Gotti promised to forgive him so long as he didn't take the stand in her case.

Willie Boy stayed at the defense table. Then, after the fix came in, Gotti banned him from the Bergin, but told him to go on with his life without fear: "I'm gonna give you a pa.s.s and I give you my word no one will bother you." Willie Boy did not believe it, but could never stop wanting to. He wanted it so much he deceived himself and his wife that somehow his refusal to testify was atonement for his betrayal. The only place he ever lived was New York. He didn't want to ask his wife to give up the nice home they had in a choice neighborhood and join him in a life on the run.

In almost everyone else's mind, payback was only a matter of time. FBI records turned over to Gotti's lawyers in the Giacalone case showed that Willie Boy was the one who led police to Gotti when Gotti was on the lam in the early 1970s. They showed that it was Willie Boy's information that helped the Gambino squad build a heroin case against Angelo, Gene, and the rest.

It was what Willie Boy had not told the FBI that gave him a period of grace. "The rat will pay," Gotti told Sammy after the Giacalone case. "But we'll let 'im get comfortable first. We can't make any mistakes. There's a lot he didn't talk about. He didn't talk about killin's he knows about."

Grace ended August 29, 1988, after Gotti heard from the Colombo Family. Willie Boy had given information about some Colombo men as well, and Alphonse Persico, son of the imprisoned Colombo boss, urged Gotti to lower the boom. Gotti handed the hit to Sammy, who enlisted Gotti stalwart Eddie Lino.

As a defendant in the heroin case, Eddie also had a personal motive. He knew able killers in the Bonanno Family, which also had suffered Willie Boy's sting, whom Willie Boy did not know. He contracted them, and they surprised their target at just past dawn, outside his home, as he left for the legitimate construction job he had taken.

The first shot brought Willie Boy to his knees; six more tore open the back of his head. The killers were gone before his wife ran out and cradled his body in her arms.

Later in the day, Richard Rehbock, the lawyer who represented Willie Boy in the Giacalone case, spoke about the murder with reporters. In their stories, none noted that Rehbock had gone on to win an a.s.sault case for Junior Gotti and that he was in the Gotti camp more than the Willie Boy camp.

"He never expressed any fear [of Gotti]," Rehbock said of Willie Boy. "The only enemy that this man had in the world was the government."

30.

HEROIN REDUX.

AFTER FOUR YEARS OF PRE-TRIAL MATTERS, the case that led to Sparks-the heroin-dealing charges against Angelo, Gene, and others-finally began after Gotti's pretend peace pact with Chin Gigante in the fall of 1987. Several more crooked turns in what was already a twisted journey lay ahead.

In addition to Gene, Angelo, and Lino, the defendants included John Carneglia, a Bergin crew soldier and salvage operator who had been close to the Gotti brothers most of his life, and Mark Reiter, the heroin dealer whose arrival at the Bergin started babania babania madness. madness.

The prospect of conviction weighed heavily on Gene Gotti. He faced a 50-year sentence if found guilty at trial. For months, his lawyers had been discussing a guilty plea in return for prosecutors recommending a 14-year sentence. Lawyers for Angelo and Carneglia were involved in similar talks for recommended pleas of a couple years more. Lino and Reiter, who faced lesser charges, intended to go to trial.

Gene was 42. Under sentencing policies at the time he was indicted, he would qualify for parole after serving two-thirds of the 14 years. That meant something of a life after he got out. Angelo and Carneglia, a few years older, felt the same.

As the trial neared, however, all were reminded of John Gotti's earlier edict-prompted by Neil Dellacroce's son Armond's plea in the Giacalone case-that no one in the Family could agree to a plea in which they were required to acknowledge the Gambino Family existed and they belonged to it.

U.S. Attorney Andy Maloney and Robert LaRusso, the heroin-trial prosecutor, wanted plea deals, but would not budge on the Gambino issues, and so Gotti ordered his men to trial. Suspicious about the verdict in the Giacalone case, Maloney told LaRusso to be wary of jury tampering. "These people will try anything!" he said. "They don't believe we have the right to put them on trial!"

Attempts to tamper began soon after the jury was seated. An informant told agents that two private detectives working for the defense were trying to acquire the ident.i.ties of jurors. As in the Giacalone case, the jurors served anonymously. Next, agents learned that a Brooklyn stockbroker offered to give a new car to a man who had been chosen and then excused from the jury for personal reasons. The stockbroker wanted to ask the man about the remaining jurors.

Maloney ordered John Gleeson, the a.s.sistant prosecutor in the Giacalone case, to start a jury-tampering investigation with the FBI. As before, because the Gambino squad was part of the prosecution, non-Gambino agents began conducting checks of the jurors.

In the absence of proof, Gleeson still did not fully share Maloney's suspicion that his case was fixed. And he continued to feel that way-even after he and agents found evidence suggesting the heroin defendants might have already bribed one juror and had learned the ident.i.ties of five more.

"They did it again!" Maloney exploded.

"Maybe; it looks like it, but it'd be tough to prove," Gleeson said.

"This time, we're taking it to the judge."

Late in 1987, after he and other judges reviewed the evidence, the trial judge, Mark Costantino, found a high probability of jury tampering, and declared a mistrial.

For Gene and the rest, a mistrial was not as rewarding as what brother John got-an outright acquittal-and it meant they would have to go to trial a second time.

Publicly, Maloney said his office would mount a new trial and pursue the case to verdict or plea. Privately, he fumed. For a second time, the Gotti wing of the Gambinos had embarra.s.sed his office. It was hard for him to feel much better when, a few weeks later, the Eastern District Strike Force, the special squad of prosecutors attached uneasily to his office, won the Gambino Family hierarchy case. Jurors returned guilty verdicts against Joe N. Gallo and Joseph Armone, the old-guard Gambino leaders who had warily given their support to Gotti.

Gallo was released on bail, pending sentencing two months later. He was 77 and an informant correctly told agents he was no longer the consigliere. consigliere. Bail meant the old man could spend a last holiday season with relatives. The judge proposed another plan for Armone, 70: He, too, could get bail and the holidays with his wife and daughter-but only if he made a statement publicly renouncing a life in crime. Bail meant the old man could spend a last holiday season with relatives. The judge proposed another plan for Armone, 70: He, too, could get bail and the holidays with his wife and daughter-but only if he made a statement publicly renouncing a life in crime.

The certainty of a sentence condemning him to death behind bars broke Armone's normally iron will. In court, he indicated he would agree. The judge told lawyers to draft a statement and return to court the next day, Christmas Eve. Before Armone was returned to the Manhattan jail where federal detainees are kept, the judge told him the statement should show that Armone was renouncing any connection he might have ever had to organized crime and was resigning any position he might currently have.

That night, "Joe Piney," as Armone was known, asked a nephew to send the new Gambino boss a message asking permission to make the statement. "Piney doesn't think he's ever gonna get out when he goes away, so he just wants this time with his Family," the nephew told Gotti. "He doesn't think it matters what he says, it's just legal bulls.h.i.+t."

Having told Gene and the other heroin defendants that they could not make such agreements, Gotti could not let Armone off the hook. Frank LoCascio might now have the position, but Armone, at least officially, was still underboss.

"I'm surprised by Piney!" Gotti shouted. "This is a Cosa Nostra! We don't make no official statements! He can't do it! You tell him that's an order! He's my underboss, even if he's in f.u.c.kin' jail, until I say different!"

Armone got the message Christmas Eve morning. In court that day, he dutifully announced he had changed his mind about making a statement. He was promptly jailed to await sentencing. In two more months, he got 15 years in prison; the judge gave Gallo 10. Gallo became the oldest inmate in federal custody anywhere, but he served his time and got out. On the other hand, in 1992, Armone died of natural causes at a federal prison hospital.

The second trial of Gene, Angelo, and the rest began in the spring of 1988. The details differed, but the result was the same-mistrial. The case actually got to the jury, but after a couple days, jurors told the judge they were hopelessly deadlocked-the word "hopelessly" immediately raised suspicions in the minds of Andy Maloney and prosecutor Robert LaRusso.

It takes someone like George Pape, refusing to talk or negotiate, to make a jury hopelessly deadlocked, Maloney believed. After hearing from the jurors, the judge told them to keep deliberating. Unlike in the first trial, it was too late for agents to start an investigation into whether the case was being fixed again.

As deliberations continued, federal marshals found cocaine hidden in a jogging outfit that a woman brought to a friend on the jury. If a juror's girlfriend felt free to bring cocaine into the case, what else was going on? Maloney and LaRus...o...b..came convinced something else was going on when two jurors next told the judge in the case that they suspected FBI agents had tampered with the tape-recorded evidence.

"Too incredible to believe," Maloney said to LaRusso. "Somehow, they got to these people too."

When deliberations failed to break the deadlock, the judge declared the mistrial. There would have to be a third trial. Meanwhile, the judge decided it was no longer fair to keep Angelo Ruggiero in jail without bail. Angelo had been boiling and plotting in a federal lockup in Manhattan for 25 months while his main codefendants, Gene, Carneglia, and Lino, remained free.

At a hearing on Angelo's request for bail, his lawyer told the judge his client was a good candidate for bail because he was a good father who cared for his six children and was providing for two others left fatherless by the death of his brother, Salvatore Ruggiero, in a plane crash. To no avail, LaRusso argued the opposite: "He's got the greatest motive to flee with the evidence we have on him. If this defendant is released, he probably will not return-he will not return."

The statement was prophetic, but not in the way LaRusso intended. Free at last, Angelo fell ill before he could devise a plan for either getting "in the wind" or working his way back into the graces of the friend whose coattails he grabbed on to long ago and once telephoned each morning to go over the day's dirty agenda.

Ruggiero was diagnosed with diabetes and emphysema. Depressed by these illnesses and his legal predicaments-in addition to the heroin case, he faced a separate trial on the same charges that brought Gallo and Armone down-Angelo actually obeyed the terms of his bail. He hung out in his house on Long Island, the one in middle-cla.s.s Cedarhurst that he had remodeled with heroin cash even as Gambino squad bugs doc.u.mented the progress.

The bail conditions forbade him from contacting anyone in the Gambino Family, but it depressed him that his old Fulton-Rockaway pal, Johnny Boy, never attempted a clandestine visit or even sent a secret message of goodwill.

Instead, several times over the next several months, Gotti told Sammy that rather than forgive Angelo, he should kill him. "He's caused us so much f.u.c.kin' trouble, and not just us," Gotti said. "He don't deserve any pa.s.ses."

The change of heart was breathtaking. The trouble Angelo caused was a big part of why Gotti was now boss. Then there were the personal ties; Angelo was Gotti's oldest friend, and his eldest son's G.o.dfather. Each time Gotti talked of killing Angelo, Sammy and Frank LoCascio pointed out that Angelo's declining health made it pointless.

Late in 1988, Angelo's doctors delivered a last bit of bad news: lung cancer, and they said he probably did not have long to live. Still Gotti did not visit or send a message, and Gene-now facing a third trial because his brother would not let him plead guilty-was particularly perturbed.

"I told him the other day," Gene told Sammy. "I said, 'The guy Angelo is broken-hearted. He don't understand why you're so hot still. This guy would've jumped in front of a car for you. Ain't it time to let your beef go?'"

Gene said his brother shrugged and turned to other subjects. The indifference surprised even stone-cold Sammy. It would cost John Gotti nothing to bestow a little absolution-insincere as it would be-upon a dying old friend.

Illness would take Angelo to bed and out of the picture, but the heroin trial would have a third and final act. It would be a year more in coming because of a legal fight over whether it was fair to put the defendants on trial again. After they won that issue at the Supreme Court, trial prosecutor LaRusso and his aides chose to narrow the case by cutting loose some defendants, such as Eddie Lino, for separate trials.

It proved to be a good strategy. With fewer defendants, they were able to build a strong, simple case. Gene and Carneglia were convicted-but, incredibly, not before yet one more attempt to buy a juror. Without a break as lucky as the one John Gotti got in the Giacalone case, when a man already on the jury announced he was for sale, Gene was left to devise something on his own, and he did, quite ably, without telling his brother.

The plan relied on one of John's sons-in-law, Carmine Agnello, and Gene feared John would object; it also involved Lino, who agreed to secretly help and risk the boss's wrath, because of his special bond with his former codefendants. The plan was to force the disqualification of a seated juror and thus cause the selection of an alternate juror a.s.sessed by Gene during jury screening as sympathetic and bribable.

After employing private detectives to learn the names and addresses of the jurors, Gene found that one lived on the same leafy street as Billy Noon, an FBI agent who sat at the prosecution table with LaRusso. He sent Lino to the juror's home with orders to leave an unsigned note questioning the juror's fairness when everyone knew he was friendly with his FBI neighbor.

Gene a.s.sumed the note would provoke a hearing and the juror's disqualification, and it did. In the meantime, Gene sent Carmine Agnello to the home of the first alternate juror, the one judged sympathetic and bribable. It turned out he was both. And after the other juror was excused on grounds that the note might have rendered him incapable of objectivity, the alternate took his place.

It was an artfully crafted scheme, but doomed. Rather than stay strong during deliberations and refuse to discuss anything but an outright acquittal, the alternate's feet turned to clay. He sent a note to the judge saying that he was concerned about his and his family's safety and must get off the jury because the wrong people knew where he lived. He didn't mention the $25,000 he'd been promised.

Still, the judge smelled something rotten. He granted the alternate his wish, then ruled the case would be decided by the eleven remaining jurors, who took only three hours to lower the boom on Gene and Carneglia and bring down the curtain on the longest federal prosecution in history.

The judge allowed both to remain free on bail, pending sentencing. But both had already decided they were not going to flee. Because the case began in 1983, it fell under federal sentencing rules that were not as punitive as rules that came into effect in 1985 and that John Gotti had confronted in the Giacalone case.

A few weeks later, however, Gene and Carneglia got much stiffer sentences than they expected-thanks to the sc.r.a.pyard czar, Carneglia. He had reverted to his Fulton-Rockaway days and promised a reporter that some day he would "p.i.s.s on the grave" of the trial judge, John R. Bartels, an 89-old jurist who had dozed off a few times during the more boring parts of testimony.

Bartels, a Harry Truman appointee, remembered the slight at sentencing, and gave Carneglia and Gene sentences requiring them to serve more than 20 years before they had a chance to qualify for parole-and, in Carneglia's case, carry out an ill-advised vow.

The end of the case continued the devastation of the original core of the Bergin Hunt & Fish Club. Peter Gotti, John's older brother, was still around-and John made him acting captain of the Bergin-but Gene, Angelo, Willie Boy, John Carneglia, and Anthony Rampino were now in jail, dead, or dying.

Their boss had no time for regret or remembrance. The night before Gene was to surrender and begin serving his sentence, brother John told Sammy he had bawled Gene out after Gene finally spilled the details of his artful but failed fix.

"I told him, 'You used Eddie and you used my son-in-law and you don't think you have to tell me.' He says, 'I didn't want to involve you.' Involve me. I'm the f.u.c.king boss and he don't want to involve me! He says, 'Well, maybe you wouldn't have let me do it, 'cause Carmine's your son-in-law.' Well, yeah, maybe, but I am the f.u.c.kin' boss!"