Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (67 page)

I
f the FBI needed a poster image for the prototypical G-Man, Bruce Mouw (rhymes with “Wow”) was the model. Lean, six-feet three-inches tall, square-jawed, Mouw, in his late thirties, resembled a resolute Clint Eastwood-Gary Cooper screen lawman. His roots were concrete-solid Middle America; he was born in Iowa on a farm settled by his Dutch grandparents and was steeped in the virtues of hard work and loyalty to flag and country. There were no luxuries while growing up for John Bruce Mouw (he preferred being called Bruce to distinguish him from his father, whose given name was also John). When he was six, hard times forced Mouw’s parents to leave the farm, and with their three children move to the nearby market town of Orange City (population 2,700), where his father found work and his mother was a librarian.

At fourteen, Mouw held two after-school and weekend jobs: a printer’s devil or general assistant at the weekly newspaper, the
Sioux County Capital
, and night desk clerk at his grandmother’s inn, the Village Hotel. Putting in a thirty-five-hour work week while in high school, Mouw found it convenient for studying to live in a tiny room at the hotel. Encouraged by his mother, he was a voracious reader, and although the nearest body of water was a small lake ten miles distant, he was captivated by seafaring tales. Dreaming of becoming a naval officer, and banking on his excellent grades and a stratospheric IQ, he
applied to the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. While his admission chances were slim, the teenager understood that his family’s economic straits meant that a scholarship, a stipend, and full room-and-board at Annapolis was his only hope of a college education.

His prospects seemingly were dashed when the local congressman nominated another applicant, coincidentally the son of his next-door neighbor. The congressman’s candidate, however, flunked his eye examination and the midshipman’s appointment was given to the first alternate—J. Bruce Mouw. Rail thin, the seventeen-year-old six-footer narrowly passed his physical with a weight of 152 pounds, the minimum requirement for his height. As graduation from Annapolis approached, Mouw had to decide in which branch of the navy to serve. His choices limited because he had been violently seasick as a midshipman training on surface vessels, the new ensign opted for nuclear-powered submarines. Cruising deep beneath the seas most of the time, the subs were as smooth as flying in an airliner for the queasy twenty-one-year-old officer.

At the peak of the Cold War and Vietnam War era, Mouw was assigned in 1966 as a navigator in the newly commissioned nuclear attack submarine USS
Lapon
(named for a rockfish native to the Pacific Ocean). Operating mainly under the equivalent of wartime conditions, the
Lapon’s
main objective was to trail and, if necessary, destroy Soviet subs that were armed with thermonuclear missiles capable of obliterating American cities. Other secret patrols were in the Barents Sea off the coast of Murmansk, a strategic Russian naval base. While Mouw served on the
Lapon
, the crew was awarded a rare Presidential Unit Citation in 1969 for obtaining intelligence data on an advanced class of Soviet nuclear strike submarine. The sub tracked one of the powerful Russian vessels at close range for forty days.

“I loved it; it was great, exciting duty, playing blind man’s bluff,” Mouw said afterward. But four grueling years’ duty on tense seventy-day underwater missions were enough for him. A shortage of experienced submarine officers meant that he would most likely be permanently assigned to engineering duties that he disliked, and in 1970 Mouw resigned from the navy with the rank of lieutenant. “I don’t know what I want to do, but I no longer want to be a career naval officer,” he explained to friends.

Back home in Iowa, he was working on dreary construction jobs when an FBI recruiter, sifting through service records of newly discharged officers, spotted Mouw’s. Out of the blue, Mouw decided after listening to the recruiter’s pep talk that becoming an agent sounded enticing. In August 1971, at age
twenty-seven, he joined the bureau. J. Edgar Hoover was still running the show, and Mouw’s first posting was in St. Louis, where he cut his teeth for more than a year on the director’s favorite investigative priorities: recovering stolen cars and arresting bank robbers and truck hijackers. A transfer to New York in December 1973 should have been a valued promotion, but it was blemished by culture shock. The agent from the vast plains of Iowa felt confined living in a pint-sized apartment, trapped in an untidy, raucous urban environment. Relaxing in a big city after a taxing workday was difficult. Opportunities to play golf or other outdoor sports were rare, and a drive into the countryside was impossible because it was too expensive to keep a car in Manhattan. “I wasn’t crazy about New York,” he admits.

Another disappointment was the prevailing atmosphere at the bureau, even after Hoover’s death in 1972. “We had some tremendous, talented agents. But we were in the Dark Ages when it came to working complex criminal matters. Hoover’s spirit was still alive and everything was numbers-oriented—better to close out thirty-five picayune cases than go after two quality ones.”

Because of the engineering background he had gained in the Navy, he was reassigned to Washington as a desk-bound coordinator with contractors erecting the FBI’s new headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building. The last months of a five-year stint in Washington in 1979 were spent “doing some real work” in the organized-crime section, as the revamped bureau under its new director, Judge William Webster, began focusing on the Mafia. At the end of the year, Mouw was offered a promotion if he returned to New York. “I wanted a supervisor’s job but I didn’t want to go back to New York. Hell, no!” Swallowing his frustration, Mouw accepted the reassignment with a proviso: he would head the newly formed Gambino Squad, one of the five units that began functioning in 1980 under agent Jim Kossler’s realignment plan for combating the major New York borgatas. “You bet I want the Gambino family,” Mouw told Kossler. “It’s the biggest family, the most challenging, and pretty much untouched.”

Assuming command of a new squad, named C-16 in FBI patois, Mouw found the intelligence cupboard on the Gambinos almost totally bare. It consisted mainly of useless files dating back almost two decades to the 1960s, when Attorney General Robert Kennedy had compelled Hoover to use wiretaps, bugs, and other investigative tools. The stream of intelligence information, however, dried up in the 1970s when Hoover deemphasized Mafia investigations. There was not a single active case against a member of the Gambino hierarchy or capo in the New York office. “We start with literally nothing,” the
pipe-smoking Mouw informed his newly assembled squad. “We’re up against guys who have been in the same business for fifty years, and they’re way ahead of us.”

Realizing it would take a year or two to develop essential intelligence dossiers on the Gambino’s leading figures, Mouw assigned each of his agents to concentrate on one of the family’s top-drawer leaders. The unit of at most fifteen agents was confronting an underworld powerhouse of approximately four hundred made gangsters and several thousand associates. An added obstacle was the bureau’s shortage of experienced Mafia investigators. Mouw quickly recognized that several of his inherited agents were incapable of working Mob cases. “These investigations take years to develop, and one of the strong assets for organized-crime agents is patience. Some agents are not mentally suited; they want cops and robbers stuff, breaking down doors and making arrests quickly.”

Sizing up his squad, he got rid of those who sat around the unit’s Rego Park office waiting for tips to materialize, and began recruiting eager-beavers who understood his philosophy: “My motto is, you don’t develop informants or cases sitting on your ass in the office.” His rudimentary orders emphasized leg work and surveillance. Agents had to hit the bricks, reconnoiter Mob neighborhoods and hangouts, verify where the big-shot mobsters lived, what cars they drove, what businesses they were involved in, where they met and with whom.

Single, without friends or close relatives living nearby, Mouw put in long days and expected his troops to do the same. His culling of indolent, underachieving agents inspired those who stayed with the unit, and who admired his zeal, to tag him with a good-humored nickname, “Chairman Mouw.”

Relying on the most fundamental element of police work, Mouw emphasized debriefing old informers and finding new ones as the surest method of getting results. “You won’t have any problem getting money to pay informers,” he promised. “These guys are putting their lives on the line. The information is priceless as far as saving us manpower and time and telling us where to put bugs.” Like himself, most of the squad’s agents were not native New Yorkers or familiar with the city’s Italian-American culture and neighborhood mores. Mouw believed it was a myth that New York-bred agents were best suited to work Cosa Nostra cases. “If a wiseguy is jammed up in a criminal case or has a grudge against one of his bosses, he’ll talk to you no matter where you come from,” he lectured newcomers to the squad.

Practicing what Mouw preached, the C-16 agents began trolling for Gambino informers, cultivating them for intelligence nuggets that would produce an
important case for the squad. Two years went by without a breakthrough against any of the family’s big shots, but Mouw’s patient tactics paid off in one Gambino outfit—John Gotti’s crew. Several low-level associates of the Bergin club, none of whom were made soldiers, were regularly feeding agents tips about Gotti and his crew’s activities. Gotti was far from the apex of the FBI’s Mafia agenda, but convicting him and wrecking his crew were worthwhile objectives.

Under standard FBI security procedures, none of the squad’s informers at the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club knew that other Gambino associates in the crew were working secretly for the bureau. Analyzing their separate reports Mouw concluded that the weakest component in Gotti’s inner circle might be his longtime pal Angelo Ruggiero. Fat Ange, according to the helpful canaries, acted as Gotti’s executive officer, checking the crew’s loan-sharking and gambling books to certify that Gotti got the largest share of the loot. What made Ruggiero appear to be vulnerable was the informers’ consensus that he was an uncontrollable gossip. Among Bergin regulars, his penchant for incessant chatter provoked the derogatory nickname “Quack Quack.” One informer mentioned that the overconfident Ruggiero bragged that he had created a foolproof method to evade telephone taps; for Mob business he used a pink Princess phone listed in his daughter’s name and which was on a separate line.

Based on the informers’ assertions about Ruggiero’s alleged criminal acts, a court order was obtained in November 1981 to tap phones—including his daughter’s Princess model—at his home in Howard Beach, the same neighborhood where Gotti lived. At first, the eavesdropping failed to uncover incriminating evidence or a strong lead, and a gap occurred when Ruggiero moved to Cedarhurst, Long Island. FBI technicians had to get another court order and tap the new phones. This time, the bureau slipped into Ruggiero’s new house and installed a concealed mike in a dinette, where informers reported Ruggiero liked to meet with other mobsters. It was the dinette bug and Ruggiero’s garrulousness that would unexpectedly devastate the Gambino high command.

The first mafioso compromised by Ruggiero’s loose talk was the godfather, Paul Castellano. Every other Sunday, Ruggiero ventured to Castellano’s Staten Island mansion, and as soon as he returned to Cedarhurst, Quack-Quack was on the phone with Gotti and Bergin mobsters, recapping his conversations with Big Paul and narrating what he had heard Castellano discuss with other wiseguys. To the delight of agents recording the calls, Ruggiero blabbed about Mafia controversies that had to be resolved by the Commission. His obsessive chatter was an invaluable gift to the FBI and prosecutors, providing them with
“probable cause” to bug and wiretap the home of Castellano, their number-one target. As an added gratuity to the government, Ruggiero presented enough incriminating information about Neil Dellacroce to justify a court order to bug the underboss’s home in Staten Island. From one fruitful bug in Ruggiero’s dinette, the two mightiest Gambino kingpins were for the first time placed under secret electronic surveillance. Eventually, the eavesdropping provided vivid evidence that implicated Castellano and Dellacroce in the groundbreaking Commission case and in other crimes.

Fat Ange also unwittingly expanded the FBI’s insight into John Gotti’s lifestyle and personal habits. Around noon on most mornings, it was Ruggiero’s valet task to wake Gotti, whose night-owl partying, or card and dice games, rarely ended before 4:00 or 5:00 A.M. The calls fell into a typical pattern.

“Hey, John, it’s eleven-thirty. You better get up. How you doin’?” “Okay, Ange, okay,” followed by throat-clearing coughs, grunts, and yawns.

Gently rousing his capo, Ruggiero reminded him about priorities for the day. “John, we got this thing around two o’clock, remember?”

Fifteen or twenty minutes later, Ruggiero usually made a follow-up call. “You got your coffee?”

“Okay, okay, Ange. C’mon, okay.” And so Gotti’s day began.

A crisis for Ruggiero and another dramatic turn for FBI eavesdroppers occurred in the spring of 1982. On May 6, Angelo’s brother Salvatore died in a private jet plane crash off the Georgia coast. A heavy heroin trafficker, Salvatore had been a fugitive for years, and his sudden death revealed Angelo’s involvement in the narcotics trade. From bugged conversations in the Cedarhurst dinette and references to a Sicilian term,
babania
, a Mob code word for heroin, agents cobbled together evidence that Angelo had inherited his brother’s drug network. The dinette talks also implicated Gene Gotti, John’s brother, several other Bergin members, and a lawyer in a venture to obtain Salvatore’s hidden heroin stockpile and to collect up to $2.5 million in profits from a recent drug deal.

Suspecting that he was now being trailed by agents, Ruggiero brought in a retired city detective to examine his home for taps and bugs. Alerted by informers, the FBI turned off their concealed mikes on the day that Ruggiero’s home was swept for electronic listening devices. The former detective informed Ruggiero of the “good news”; he had no bugs to worry about. But, there was “bad news,” too: his phones were tapped. Believing he was secure and that his house was free of electronic bugs, Ruggiero avoided compromising
telephone calls, but inadvertently aided the FBI by talking even more freely with other mobsters about drugs and other crimes in his bugged dinette.