Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (65 page)

Four miles away in a utilitarian, tidy office on bustling Queens Boulevard, the specter of John Gotti preoccupied FBI agent J. Bruce Mouw, the supervisor of the bureau’s Gambino Squad. Overnight, Gotti’s ascension to the Cosa Nostra’s top rung had elevated him to the head of Mouw’s priority list. Almost the same age, the two men from starkly dissimilar cultural and social backgrounds were destined to be duelists. Gotti at forty-five, the product of a clamorous big-city environment: boisterous, garrulous, boastful, hard drinking, incorrigibly defiant of laws and the government to the point that one day he would wish for the defeat of America in war. The forty-two-year-old Mouw was an offspring of quintessential American small-town virtues; reared in the agricultural heartland, he was reserved, laconic, a virtual teetotaler, and a decorated naval officer who had volunteered for an extremely dangerous assignment during the Cold War.

From the day he became the Gambino boss, Gotti envisioned himself as a
mythic
Mafia leader who would inspire a new Cosa Nostra golden age. That same day, Mouw set himself the arduous task of unearthing every aspect of Gotti’s life and destroying his criminal realm.

His baptismal name was John Joseph Gotti Jr. He was born on October 27, 1940, in the South Bronx, the fifth of thirteen children—two of whom died in infancy—raised by John and Fannie Gotti. Both parents, children of immigrants who arrived in steerage from the Naples region of Italy, had a hardscrabble life caring for their large brood, mainly because
of the elder
Gotti’s difficulty in holding on to jobs as a construction worker and factory hand. Moving frequently from one working-class neighborhood to another multiplied the normal growing pains for young John Gotti and his siblings. He would retain painful memories of childhood, and among friends he disparaged his lackadaisical father’s inability to care for his children. He told about being sent to school in unmatched shoes, and of bullies tormenting him for his ragged appearance. The incidents taught Gotti a lesson on retaliation. “I went in the school yard and fought them,” he recalled proudly. “That’s what people respected. The next day you see them, they salute you. I was tough when I was ten years old.”

Gotti’s nomadic parents finally brought a small measure of stability to the family by settling in Brooklyn’s East New York section when he was twelve. The
neighborhood was a blend of one- and two-family row houses, apartment buildings, and factories for light industry. It was also a battleground for rival youth gangs and the perfect terrain for Gotti to exhibit his martial skills. A strapping teenager with fast fists, he organized the Fulton-Rockaway Boys, a gang named after a major neighborhood intersection.

During Gotti’s adolescent years, East New York was thriving territory for the Cosa Nostra, with illegal bookmaking openly conducted in storefront clubs and pool rooms. Gotti’s gang-war exploits and reputation were noticed by the local mafiosi and wannabes, and he eagerly ran errands for a Mob crew headed by Carmine Fatico, a capo in the crime borgata then headed by Albert Anastasia. By the time he was fourteen, Gotti and his pals developed a harder edge. They stole cars, mugged drunks, and pulled off two-bit burglaries. An attempt to steal equipment from a construction site ended disastrously when a portable cement mixer toppled onto Gotti’s left foot, causing the amputation of a toe. The injury induced a permanent odd spring to Gotti’s step that made him appear to bounce jauntily when he walked quickly.

Despite a respectable IQ of 110, Gotti was an inattentive student, his school records thick with complaints of his defying teachers and assaulting students. Formal schooling ended at sixteen when his obliging parents allowed him to drop out of Franklin K. Lane High School. For a year or two he held dead-end jobs as a trucker’s helper and as a pants presser in a garment factory. His true calling was as an enforcer for Carmine Fatico’s crew which, after the 1957 assassination of Albert Anastasia, became part of the renamed Carlo Gambino family.

Gotti relished the ambiance of Fatico’s club. Here were rough, wisecracking men with ready cash and large cars, at leisure all day. Unlike his father, they were treated with fulsome respect in the neighborhood. For the impressionable teenager, the club possessed the trappings of a select, privileged, revered society that young Gotti wanted to enter.

A police department intelligence report on the Fatico crew ranked seventeen-year-old Gotti as a low-level tyro. Over the next eight years, the rookie mobster’s arrest sheet described a path of undistinguished crimes from street fighting, to intoxication, to possession of a gun, to petty burglaries in New York and Long Island. None of the arrests led to penalties of more than six months in a county jail. In one of the few extant records typifying Gotti’s early escapades, a Suffolk County police officer, Edward Halverson, came across him using a crowbar to break into a tavern in Selden, Long Island, in the early morning of
March 31, 1965. When Gotti tried to flee, Halverson warned, “Don’t move a muscle or I’ll blow your head off.” The twenty-four-year-old future don stopped dead in his tracks. “Don’t worry about me,” Gotti told the cop. “Just worry about that [trigger] finger.”

Despite his tawdry crime record, Gotti, in his late teens, made an important Mob contact through an introduction to the Gambino underboss, Aniello Dellacroce. The highly placed mobster took an immediate shine to the cocky young hood who was astute enough to show him proper veneration whenever they met.

Several of Gotti’s first nine recorded arrests were in company with Angelo Ruggiero, his boyhood gang mainstay and a constant companion at Fatico’s club. A bit of a poseur, Ruggiero encouraged other wannabes to falsely believe that he was a nephew of Dellacroce, frequently referring to him as “Uncle Neil.” Angelo, commonly known as “Fat Ange” for his rotund shape, hinted to others that his special relationship with the underboss had allowed Gotti to become acquainted with the Gambino’s number-two leader. However, it was the other way around: through Gotti, Angelo had been permitted to meet Dellacroce.

Domestic life also was landing Gotti in court. After an on-again, off-again romance, he married the strong-willed teenager Victoria DiGeorgio in March 1962. He was twenty-two and she was nineteen. A daughter, Angela, had been born to them a year before their wedding vows. Vicky’s parents—her father was an Italian-American and her mother of Russian descent—were divorced, and she took her stepfather’s surname after her mother remarried. Beset by John’s arrests, the birth of a second daughter, and money problems, the early years of the marriage were stormy, with several separations and Vicky hauling him into court for nonsupport.

The newly wed father was dodging another problem—military service. He had failed to show up for his induction into the army on November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was assassinated, and the FBI caught up with him two years later. “Gotti advised he did not realize he was delinquent with his draft board in as much as he is married and has two children,” says an FBI memo dated January 7, 1966. “He further advised he felt because of this and the fact he had been previously arrested he was not eligible for the armed forces.”

Eventually, Gotti’s draft and domestic problems vanished. His arrest and conviction record for stolen cars and burglaries disqualified him as a soldier, and the wrangling with Vicky was eased by his advancement in Fatico’s crew
through involvement in more remunerative crimes: hijackings, bookmaking, and loan-sharking. Vicky’s stepfather, a construction contractor, helped out with gifts of money and mortgage assistance. The reconciled couple and their expanding family of three sons and two daughters became prosperous enough to move out of a cramped apartment into a comfortable house of their own in Howard Beach, a leafy, middle-class Queens neighborhood.

Howard Beach was close to John F. Kennedy International Airport and also to the new headquarters of the Fatico crew. Distressed by the influx of African-Americans and Hispanics into East New York, Carmine Fatico, the Gambino capo, had moved his headquarters to a storefront in the predominantly white and Italian working-class neighborhood of South Ozone Park. The hangout was incorporated—sardonically—as a nonprofit association called the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club. The name apparently was a nostalgic misspelling of Bergen Street in East New York, the gang’s roots.

Transferring the club to South Ozone Park, with its proximity to JFK airport, was a sensible tactical decision by Fatico. The airport, with its growing volume of cargo and passenger traffic, was replacing the Brooklyn waterfront as a prime Mafia target for pillaging. It was the world’s largest air-cargo center in the 1960s, handling more than $200 million in freight every year. Thousands of employees were ripe for bookmaking and loan-sharking exploitation, and as a source of inside information for profitable felonies.

Capitalizing on the airport’s riches, John Gotti, his younger brother, Gene, and their boyhood chum Angelo Ruggiero teamed up for a series of truck hijackings. During these hijacking capers, Ruggiero coined a private nickname, “Black John,” for Gotti—as much a reflection of his menacing personality as his swarthy complexion. An older mobster, impressed by Gotti’s take-charge characteristics, bestowed a more admirable nickname, “Crazy Horse,” comparing the young hoodlum to the indomitable Sioux Indian warrior.

All went well for the hijacking trio until 1968 when, during an operation to stifle mounting thefts at the airport, FBI agents staked out at a cargo area observed the Gotti brothers and Ruggiero loading stolen dresses into a U-Haul truck. Through the JFK arrests and with the aid of witnesses identifying mug shots, the FBI implicated the trio in three cargo heists and two hijackings. John Gotti, then twenty-eight, pleaded guilty to his first major felony and was sentenced to three years in the maximum-security federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. His brother Gene and Ruggerio got similar prison terms.

At Lewisburg, Gotti confronted Carmine Galante, the sinister Bonanno
shark, who was serving a narcotics sentence, and in effect was the “warden” of the prison’s Mafia wing. Although not a made man, Gotti had the nerve to complain to Galante that he was bribing guards to get steaks, other delicacies, and booze only for himself and nine or ten Bonanno wiseguys and associates. The upstart Gotti demanded that the don share the wealth with other imprisoned mobsters. Gotti’s boldness and poise so impressed Galante that he expressed interest in enlisting him in his own family. Informers reported that Galante said, “I’d like to have him in my crew,” and was disappointed to hear that John “belongs to Neil,” a reference to Aniello Dellacroce.

Paroled in 1972, after three years in prison, Gotti was handed a promotion. His crew capo, Carmine Fatico, had been indicted for loan-sharking, and while awaiting trial had to stay clear of the denizens of the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, a condition of his bail. When Gotti came home, with Dellacroce’s endorsement, Fatico designated him as acting capo, his eyes and ears until his legal problems were resolved.

A grateful Gotti idolized Dellacroce, praising him to his confederates as “a man’s man.” Tall, broad-shouldered, and tough-talking, Neil Dellacroce had served as a hit man and capo for Albert Anastasia. On at least one kill, he was reputed to have masqueraded as a priest wearing a clerical collar, calling himself Father Timothy O’Neill. Dellacroce had been a strong Anastasia supporter, but Carlo Gambino in a deft political move chose him as underboss after arranging for Anastasia’s assassination and then usurping control of the family.

Under Don Carlo, Dellacroce became the family’s street viceroy, an exacting disciplinarian whose intimidating gaze kept capos and troops in line. Organized-crime detective Ralph Salerno said that the only mafiosi whose icy eyes propelled a shiver down his spine were Carmine Galante and Aniello Dellacroce. “You looked at Dellacroce’s eyes and you could see how frightening they were,” Salerno said. “The
frigid glare of a killer
.”

Dellacroce was widely known as “Neil” an Americanization of his given Italian name. Because of his rugged Slavic peasant looks and square-shaped face, Gambino members among themselves nicknamed him “the Polack.” But no one dared utter the name in his presence.

Little Italy was Dellacroce’s home turf; he held court on Mulberry Street in a converted tenement store named the Ravenite Social Club. Windowless and fortified with a red-bricked facade, the Ravenite resembled a makeshift
bunker. Long a hangout for criminals, it had earlier been a meeting place for the legendary Charlie Lucky Luciano in the 1920s and 30s. The inbred, suspicious nature of the neighborhood’s residents provided a protective screen for Dellacroce. Tenants and merchants were ad hoc lookouts, hampering law-enforcement agents from surveilling Dellacroce and visitors to the club.

Because of the Commission’s temporary ban on new soldiers, Gotti had not been inducted as a made man. But his designation in 1972 as the Bergin’s acting crew chief marked him as a future star. His new post required frequent meetings at the Ravenite to fill in Dellacroce on the Queens gang’s activities, and to deliver the weekly share of Bergin’s loot to the Gambino administration. Dellacroce willingly assumed a mentor’s role, captivating his new acolyte. Both men had much in common: they were heavy gamblers in dice and card games and loved to bet on sports, they were profane speakers, and calcified practitioners of violence to obtain results. Dellacroce’s intriguing tales of past Mafia glories under Albert Anastasia—the Lord High Executioner and founder of Murder Incorporated—influenced Gotti to adopt Anastasia as his role model.

A huge opportunity came for Gotti in early 1973 when he carried out a high-priority assignment for the borgata’s godfather, Carlo Gambino. A nephew of Gambino’s had been abducted and murdered despite the payment of $100,000 ransom. The Gambino’s intelligence network fingered a stickup man and small-time criminal, James McBratney, as the kidnappers’ ringleader. Don Carlo wanted revenge.

On May 22, 1973, three men, impersonating detectives, accosted McBratney in Snoope’s Bar and Grill in Staten Island. After a brief struggle, they fatally shot him. It was hardly a flawless crime; witnesses picked out two of the phony detectives, John Gotti and Angelo Ruggiero, from rogue’s gallery photos. With the police hunting for him, Gotti left Vicky and their five children and hid out from the murder rap. A year later, he was arrested in a Queens bar after an informer from his own Bergin crew tipped off the FBI. A grateful Carlo Gambino hired the politically influential and expensive Mob lawyer Roy Cohn to represent Gotti and Ruggiero. The third suspect wanted for McBratney’s murder vanished and was widely believed to have been whacked to prevent him from testifying for the prosecution.