Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (66 page)

Although the defendants were indicted for murder and had been identified by witnesses, Cohn manipulated a bargain-basement deal with the Staten Island district attorney’s office. The artful lawyer persuaded the DA to drop the murder charges in exchange for guilty pleas by Gotti and Ruggiero
to the lowest possible homicide count of attempted manslaughter. Cohn also procured lenient sentences for both men, a maximum of four years. The DA never explained why he compromised—or caved in to Cohn’s blandishments.

Gotti whiled away his second felony sentence weightlifting and obtaining peculiar perquisites at a state prison. Seemingly in good health, he was taken on three 120-mile round trips from the Green Haven Correctional Facility in upstate New York to Brooklyn, ostensibly for examinations by a private physician. State investigators later discovered that, on each journey, guards were bribed to make private detours to his home in Howard Beach and to restaurants for meetings with fellow mobsters.

His godfather, Carlo Gambino, died in 1976, while Gotti was in prison. By normal rights of succession, Gotti believed that underboss Neil Dellacroce should have assumed the throne. But before his death Gambino had selected his brother-in-law and cousin, Paul Castellano, as heir. Dellacroce’s consolation prize was remaining as the borgata’s number-two leader and controlling ten of the family’s twenty-odd crews.

When Gotti was paroled in 1977, he was a sturdily built two hundred-pound figure, five-feet ten-inches tall, his shoulders squared like a West Point plebe. For slaying McBratney he served little more than two years, a shorter stretch for murder than for his earlier hijacking conviction. At Green Haven he was the uncontested controller of the prison’s Mafia row. His appreciative jail-mates threw him a farewell party and presented him with an engraved plaque: “To a Great Guy, John Gotti. From the Boys at Green Haven.”

Returning to his favored life, Gotti found that his younger brother, Gene, who had been the Bergin crew’s caretaker during his prison stretch, had preceded him by becoming a made man in the Gambino family when the Commission reopened the books for all families. It was now John Gotti’s turn to get his Mafia button, and there was no dispute that he had made his bones by murdering the kidnapper McBratney. The Gambino boss Castellano officiated at the induction ceremony, where Gotti swore his oath of fealty to Big Paul, his new godfather, and to Cosa Nostra. With Dellacroce’s blessings Gotti was appointed a full-fledged capo in charge of a Mafia
decina—the
Bergin crew.

Back home, Gotti was reunited with Vicky and their five children in their white, split-level, eight-room house. It was an unpretentious home, similar to others in Howard Beach, with an attached garage and a tiny front yard. Apparently aware of her husband’s true occupation and his distrust of strangers, Vicky
herself did all the household cleaning. To ease her chores, Gotti placed television sets in every room so she could watch soap operas as she tidied the place.

Needing proof of legitimate employment to obtain parole, Gotti claimed he would be a roving salesman for a plumbing company. The firm was owned by his boyhood friend Anthony Gurino, who gave Gotti the phantom no-show job. Rather than meandering around Queens seeking plumbing contracts, Gotti established a private office in one of the two rooms at the Bergin Club, a short drive from his home.

For intelligence purposes, the FBI’s hijack squad kept an occasional watch on the new capo, openly following him. “Most of the time, we were less sophisticated in those days with the LCN,” says Stephen Morrill, the agent assigned to keep an eye on him. “They knew who we were when we were following them.” Twice, in restaurants, Gotti, with a mischievous smile, sent over a bottle of wine to Morrill and another agent. Each time, Morrill sent the bottle back.

Morrill quickly learned that the plumbing salesman was not strapped for cash and was an avid gambler. A few paces behind Gotti at the Meadowlands Harness Race Track in New Jersey, Morrill saw him plunk down $8,000 on a single race. Suspecting that the mobster had “an inside tip,” the agent placed a “more modest amount” on the same horse. The horse finished almost dead last.

“You’re ruining me, John,” Morrill said to Gotti in the grandstand when the race was over. “What do you want from me?” Gotti countered. “You know I’m a degenerate gambler.”

Regardless of his good-natured bantering with agents, Gotti’s inclination toward violence and his unquestioned authority were soon evident. A frightening example of his cruelty came after a personal tragedy. In March 1980, Gotti’s second-youngest child, twelve-year-old Frank, darted into the road on a mini-motorbike and was killed by a car driven by a neighbor, John Favara. The death was ruled accidental and no charge was brought against Favara, whose children were playmates of Gotti’s kids. When Favara tried to express his condolences to the Gottis, Vicky menaced him with a baseball bat. After death threats were left in his mail box and the word “murderer” was spray-painted on his car, Favara decided to move out of the neighborhood.

On an evening in July 1980, four months after the boy’s death, Favara, fifty-one, was walking to his auto in a parking lot near the Castro Convertible furniture store in New Hyde Park, Long Island, where he worked as a service manager. Witnesses saw a man club Favara over the head and, with the assistance of other assailants, shove him into a van. Never seen again, Favara is presumed to have
been murdered, and the disposal of his body remains a Mafia secret. His car was believed to have been destroyed, as if to erase all memory of the fatal accident of Gotti’s son. At the time of Favara’s disappearance, John and Victoria Gotti were in Florida; they both denied any knowledge of the incident. From the start, investigators suspected that Bergin crew members killed the unfortunate neighbor as a favor to the vengeful Gotti, and that the Florida trip was made to establish an alibi for him.

Annually for decades, on the date of their dead son’s birthday, Vicky and John Gotti placed “In Memoriam” announcements in the
New York Daily News
, which read: “Dear Frank, even though you have gone away, you are never very far from us. Distance may separate us, but love holds us close. You are always here in our hearts. Loving you, Mom & Dad.” And Gotti rarely let a week pass without visiting his son’s crypt.

The tragic death of Gotti’s son and the brutal murder of Anthony Favara occurred while the FBI and state and city law-enforcement agencies were reorganizing their campaigns against the Mafia’s Commission and the leaders of the five families in New York. Outside of his home borough of Queens, Gotti was not high on the target list of Cosa Nostra investigators. One of a score of mid-level Gambino family capos, he was unknown to the media, his name never prominently mentioned in news accounts of the Gambino family’s rackets. The official keeping the closest full-time watch on him was Remo Franceschini, the New York detective lieutenant who was one of the police department’s few Mafia experts. In 1977, the year Gotti was paroled from state prison, Franceschini was put in charge of the Queens district attorney’s detective squad. As a new commanding officer, Franceschini was primarily concerned with Mob encroachments in his jurisdiction. He soon discovered that Gotti was heading one of the most powerful gangs in the borough. As one measure of the growing respect accorded Gotti, other mobsters only used admiring nicknames for him: “Johnny Boy” or “the Good-looking Guy.” The days of calling him “Black John” behind his back were over. It was too dangerous to be caught referring to him derogatorily.

Clues from an informer and from surveillance made it easy for Franceschini to conclude that Gotti was overseeing a large gambling and loan-sharking operation from the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club. Around the corner, Gotti widened his domain by setting up a younger brother, Richard, to preside over a bookmaking
and gambling annex called the “Our Friends Social Club.” (Insiders understood that “Our Friends” was code for made men.)

Obtaining a secret court order, the DA’s office in 1981 planted a bug and tapped two telephones in the Bergin club. To their amusement, the DA’s technicians found that the thrifty gangsters had rigged a pay phone to enable them to make free calls without the necessity of dropping money into the coin slot. More important, the eavesdropping unveiled a character sketch of Gotti as a brutish, tyrannical captain of a crew that included his brothers Gene and Peter, and their constant partner in crime, Angelo Ruggiero. Frequently, Gotti was taped launching profanity-drenched tirades, demanding respect and total obedience. On one telephone tap, he was recorded scorching one of his soldiers, Anthony Moscatiello, for failing to return his calls.

“Listen,” Gotti bellowed, “I called your fuckin’ house five times yesterday. Now if your wife thinks you’re a fuckin’ duskie, or she’s a fuckin’ duskie, and you’re gonna disregard my motherfuckin’ phone calls, I’ll blow you and your fuckin’ house up.”

Even if Moscatiello was unfamiliar with the meaning of that obscure word, “duskie,” he got the drift of Gotti’s harangue, replying abjectly: “I never disregard anything you say …”

G
OTTI
: “Well you call your fuckin’ wife up and you tell her before I get in the fuckin’ car and I’ll go over there and I’ll fuckin tell her.”

MOSCATIELLO: “All right.”

G
OTTI
: “This is not a fuckin’ game. I don’t have to reach for you for three days and nights there. My fuckin’ time is valuable… . You get your fuckin’ ass down and see me tomorrow.”

M
OSCATIELLO
: “I’m going to be there all day tomorrow.”

G
OTTI
: “Yeah, never mind you’ll be there all day tomorrow. And don’t let me have to do this again, ‘cause if I hear that anybody else calls you and you respond within five days I’ll fuckin’ kill you.”

Franceshini’s investigation broke up a high-stakes gambling den in Little Italy involving Gotti’s crew, which provided grounds to raid the Bergin club in a search for evidence of bookmaking. Not one of the dozen men in the raided club could produce a driver’s license or any form of identification.

But Gotti and his closest Bergin cronies were untouched by the raids and arrests. For the most part, Gotti appeared imperturbable when Franceschini notified him that his headquarters had been bugged and that his conversations could be used as possible evidence against him. What did roil Gotti, Franceschini
recalls, was the news that detectives had heard him flippantly insulting Castellano and referring to Dellacroce as “the Polack,” the forbidden nickname.

“I told him, ‘Neil is not going to like this,’ and it was the only time I ever saw him look remorseful,” Franceschini said.

While the DA’s investigation did little to crimp Gotti’s gambling and loan-sharking rackets, the telephone taps exposed a personal weakness. They disclosed his brother Gene and Angelo Ruggiero grumbling behind Gotti’s back about his huge gambling losses. The capo dropped $60,000 in one crap game, and his chronic bad bets with bookies from other families were draining the crew’s profits. A losing streak in the 1982 college football bowl games cost Gotti $90,000. But neither Gene nor Ruggiero had the nerve to confront him directly with advice about his gambling addiction.

At FBI headquarters, Gotti remained a secondary quarry in the early 1980s. Determined to dismantle the Mafia’s hierarchies, the Gambino Squad was concentrating on the family’s talented leadership: the boss Paul Castellano, the underboss Neil Dellacroce, and longtime consigliere Joe N. Gallo (no relation to the Gallo brothers in the Colombo family). In the intermediate echelons, Gotti’s stature was dwarfed by other capos with significantly more economic clout and influence in several of New York’s multimillion-dollar industries. For starters, there was James “Jimmy Brown” Failla, who dominated much of the city’s private garbage-carting system; Tommy Gambino, the son of Carlo, the Garment Center’s trucking mogul; Pasquale Patsy Conte, a major narcotics distributor with corrupt business links to supermarkets; and Danny Marino, the behind-the-scenes controller of exhibition halls used for trade shows in Manhattan.

Nevertheless, Gotti’s close ties to Dellacroce and the vicious bent of his crew merited attention, and the Gambino Squad was looking for a weak spot. Bugging Gotti’s home was rejected because he never met in the house with mafiosi, and his home-phone records showed that calls were made only to “civilians,” non-Mob friends and relatives. Instead of going directly after Gotti, the FBI in late 1981 obtained a court order to tap the home phones of his lieutenant, Angelo Ruggiero. It was one of many electronic intrusions then under way to penetrate the New York borgatas for evidence and intelligence purposes. Expectations were modest as to the value of leads that could be gained by eavesdropping on Ruggiero. A braggart, who exaggerated his supposed relationships to Mob chieftains, Fat Ange was mixed up mainly in gambling and
loan-sharking for Gotti and was viewed as an old-style strong-arm type. The Ruggiero ploy, however, would unintentionally create a series of events with enormous ramifications for the entire Gambino family. The inspiration to zero in on Ruggiero came from the Gambino Squad’s new leader—Supervisory Special Agent J. Bruce Mouw.

Quack-Quack