Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (68 page)

The former-detective-turned-technician for the Mob was put on the grill by Mouw’s agents. They warned him about the consequences of performing future “cleaning jobs” for wiseguys. The intimidated man swore repeatedly that he had uncovered none of the bureau’s devices at Ruggiero’s home and, to justify his large $1,000 fee, had lied to him about finding a telephone tap.

In the FBI’s war with the Mob, informers worked for both sides. Through a leak to the Mafia, Ruggiero learned several months later that mikes actually had been planted in his home. The news came to him obliquely. A Genovese soldier, Federico “Fritzy” Giovanelli, mysteriously obtained a draft copy of the FBI’s court affidavit for the Title III eavesdropping and handed it to Ruggiero. Circumstantial evidence later pointed to a woman stenographer employed by the bureau as having supplied the confidential document to Giovanelli. Seething at the dire news that his home had been bugged, Ruggiero began making foul-mouthed threats against Donald McCormick, the agent who had signed the affidavit.

Ruggiero’s menacing outbursts brought about the first face-to-face meeting between Bruce Mouw and John Gotti. One morning in 1983, at 10:00 A.M., Mouw and McCormick showed up at Gotti’s Howard Beach front door and directed his wife to wake him.

“We have a problem with your crew,” Mouw said caustically to a yawning Gotti, dressed in pajamas and slippers. “One of your guys is trashing my agent, Don McCormick. You know that’s not allowed. Tell Angelo to cease and desist.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but thanks very much, agents,” Gotti replied, ending the terse encounter between the two combatants.

Several days later, an informer divulged to a Mouw agent that an irate Aniello Dellacroce appeared at the Bergin to chew out Ruggiero for insulting Don McCormick and bringing the FBI to Gotti’s home. The Gambinos’ supreme leader, Big Paul Castellano, had a graver reason to be disturbed by Ruggiero’s behavior. In August 1983, Fat Ange, Gene Gotti, and three accomplices in the Bergin crew were indicted by a federal organized-crime strike force on narcotics charges stemming from Salvatore Ruggiero’s death and evidence derived from Angelo’s gossiping and conferences in his dinette.

By 1985, serious legal troubles were exploding for Castellano and others in the Gambino power structure—partly because of the bug in Ruggiero’s home and partly because of a festering dispute between the Castellano and
Dellacroce factions. After years of investigations by federal, state, and local agencies, grand juries were preparing a wave of RICO indictments: Castellano and Dellacroce in the Commission case; Castellano in the Gambino luxury-car theft ring; and in a separate inquiry, Dellacroce and John Gotti for gambling and loan-sharking.

Hints supplied by informers had given Mouw blurry snapshots of the increasing enmity between the rival Gambino camps. Clearer confirmation came in 1983, when agents listening to a bug at the Casa Storta Restaurant in Brooklyn heard Gerry Langella, the acting Colombo boss, and capo Dominic Donny Shacks Montemarano discuss the Gambino internal friction with dinner guest Angelo Ruggiero. An irate Ruggiero said Castellano had forbidden his militants any contact with Dellacroce, adding, “I think he’s looking to whack Neil.” Langella and Montemarano joined in, saying they believed Castellano also planned to kill “Johnny,” a reference to Gotti.

Violating an ancient Cosa Nostra rule against criticizing a boss to members of another family, Ruggiero insulted Castellano, saying he “badmouths his own family.” The remark prompted Langella to describe a recent meeting with Dellacroce. “I think I told Neil I know this cocksucker’s [Castellano] badmouthing you. Let me tell you something, he ain’t gonna get away with it no more, somebody’s gonna …” Langella failed to finish the sentence but it was obvious to agents that he was suggesting that Castellano was inciting homicidal opposition inside his own borgata.

The loquacious Ruggiero’s bugged dinette chats and telephone conversations were rife with contempt for Castellano’s overbearing manners, mocking him as a “milk drinker” and “a pansy.” He disparaged Castellano’s sons who ran Dial Poultry as “chicken men.” Agents listened avidly to the gravelly voiced Ruggiero rebuke the millionaire Castellano for hypocritically banning the lower ranks from drug deals under penalty of death, while he accepted sizable cash offerings from Gambino capos he knew were heroin dealers. Fat Ange and his narcotics partners were certain Big Paul had a financial stake in supporting the winning side in the Bonanno family’s civil war in the early 1980s. Among themselves, the Bergin club gangsters speculated that their family boss was getting secret payments from the Bonannos’ narcotics undertakings. What gave him the right, they groused, to deny them equal opportunities? Gotti’s crew was echoing common knowledge within the New York Mafia: the prohibition against capitalizing from narcotics was broken more often than followed, even by the men who made the rules.

From informers at the Bergin Club and from Ruggiero’s telephone calls, agents gleaned that the crew’s martinet leader Gotti was terrified of Castellano. The normally fierce capo, the snitches said, shook like a leaf when Big Paul peremptorily demanded Gotti’s presence at his mansion. “Why does he want to see me? What’s going on?” agents heard Gotti moan on the phone to Ruggiero whenever Castellano summoned him for a must-attend session. Informers said he dreaded going there, knowing full well that Castellano commanded a brigade of stone-cold killers in the family and could also call upon the sadistic Irish gang, the Westies, to commit murders for him. The same FBI spies noted that Gotti was understandably “gloating” over Castellano’s indictment headaches and the possibility of his being convicted and imprisoned for life.

Awaiting his own criminal trials, Castellano nevertheless displayed his wrath at Ruggiero and
Gene Gotti
for getting arrested on narcotics charges. If the accusations were true, it would be proof that both soldiers had violated his edict against trafficking—which was decreed a capital offense. The case hinged on bugged conversations in Ruggiero’s dinette, and Castellano was incensed that his name had been bandied about by Fat Ange. When the evidence was turned over as discovery materials to Ruggiero’s lawyers, Castellano demanded the tapes and transcripts for his personal inspection. Under Big Paul’s rules, Gotti as the Bergin capo was responsible for the misdeeds of his crew members. In effect,
the drug
indictments and the revelatory tapes gave Castellano an opportunity to weaken Gotti and break up the strongest pro-Dellacroce crew.

Refusing to let Castellano get his hands on the tapes, Ruggiero urged Dellacroce to intervene on his behalf. Ruggiero’s cover story was that he was overheard merely trying to straighten out the financial affairs of his dead brother, and that he had been uninvolved in the drug commerce. His brittle explanation for withholding the tapes from Castellano was his wish to spare relatives from hearing embarrassing personal details about the Ruggieros and to protect Mob friends.

It was an unconvincing excuse, and Castellano in the spring of 1985 kept pressing Dellacroce for the tapes. Battling cancer and undergoing chemotherapy, Dellacroce was largely confined to his home in Staten Island. On June 8, the ill underboss reviewed the problem in his bedroom with Gotti and Ruggiero; FBI agents secretly tuned in through a bug placed in the room. Ironically, authorization for the eavesdropping had come from evidence supplied by Ruggiero’s dinette disclosures.

“I’m gonna tell you something” Ruggiero argued, “if you two never bother with me again, again in the rest of my life, I ain’t givin’ them tapes up … I can’t. I can’t. There’s some, some good friends of mine on them fuckin’ tapes.”

Lecturing Ruggiero about his obligation to obey Castellano and Mafia rules, Gotti admonished him for being caught on the tapes talking about the sacred Commission. “Angelo, what does Cosa Nostra mean? Cosa Nostra means, that the boss is your boss. You understand? Forget about all this nonsense.”

An exasperated Dellacroce explained that he had delayed a showdown over the tapes for months, hoping Castellano would simmer down.

“I’ve been tryin’ to make you get away with these tapes,” he told Ruggiero. “But Jesus Christ almighty, I can’t stop the guy from always bringin’ it up. Unless I tell the guy, ‘Hey, why don’t you go fuck yourself, and stop bringin’ these tapes up.’ Then you, then we know what we gotta do then, we go and roll it up and go to war. I don’t know if that’s what you want.”

Laying it on the line, Dellacroce warned that continued refusal to heed Castellano would ignite a devastating conflict between the Gambino factions. “Don’t forget, don’t only consider yourself… . And a lot of other fellas’ll get hurt, too. Not only, not only you could get hurt. I could get hurt. He [Gotti] could get hurt. A lot of other fellas could get hurt. For what? For what? Over because you don’t wanna show him the tape.”

The meeting ended in stalemate, with Ruggiero adamantly refusing to surrender the tapes. The transcripts never reached Castellano.

It was Monday evening, December 16, 1985, and some 150 law-enforcement officials, FBI agents, detectives, prosecutors, lawyers, and professors were gathering for a conference at New York University’s Law School in Greenwich Village. In town that night as principal speaker was Notre Dame professor G. Robert Blakey, the originator of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. His topic, naturally enough, was “RICO and Organized Crime.” The group was in a holiday mood, idly chatting over their predinner drinks when cellphone beepers began resounding through the conference room. By the time Blakey was ready to speak, more than half of his audience had rushed out of the chamber. Agents, detectives, prosecutors, federal and local officials had gotten the same jolting news: Paul Castellano had been assassinated. “I lost half of my audience in a flash,” Blakey said. “Those who were left joked that I came to New York to arrange a hit.”

On that first night of the murder investigation, knowledgeable Mafia prosecutors and investigators like Bruce Mouw, who were clued in on the internal turmoil in the Gambino family, latched on to one prime theory: John Gotti was the most likely mobster to profit from the murder of Paul Castellano and his devoted henchman, Tommy Bilotti.

Previously, John Gotti had been an obscure mobster. Suddenly he was prominently featured in the first accounts of the double murder in the city’s major newspapers, The New York Times, the Daily News, and the Post. Overnight prosecutors, agents, and detectives thrust the Howard Beach capo into the national limelight through speculation over who was behind the assassinations. The slaughter of a prominent godfather in midtown Manhattan was the most sensational gangland hit since the barbershop execution twenty-eight years earlier of Albert Anastasia. At the time of Anastasia’s slaying, he was the boss of the Cosa Nostra family later renamed for Carlo Gambino, whose treachery led to the murder. Anastasia’s demise occurred in 1957, when a teenager named John Gotti was beginning his Cosa Nostra apprenticeship in the backwaters of Brooklyn.

Theories by federal and local authorities about Gotti’s involvement in Castellano’s homicide were not admissible courtroom evidence. For half a century, omertà prevented Mafia murders from being solved through trials and convictions. On isolated occasions, solutions might be found through a canary like Abe Reles, who helped convict Louis Lepke Buchalter and other Murder Incorporated hirelings. Without a songbird, most Mob hits were dead-end investigations. It would take Mouw’s Gambino Squad six years to find a participant who could unravel the enigmatic details of Big Paul Castellano’s fatal dinner date.

The scenario for Paul Castellano’s murder was conceived after Neil Dellacroce became mortally ill in mid-1985. The main planner was John Gotti.
Gotti
knew Castellano would either demote or kill him once Dellacroce, his protector, was gone. Contemplating the murder of a Cosa Nostra
godfather
without secret approval from a majority of the Commission was an incredibly bold act. It violated the Mafia’s First Commandment and Golden Rule (Thou shall not kill a boss without just cause and without consent by Commission members), promulgated by Lucky Luciano when the five families were formed.

Before 1985 Gotti’s success rested on brute force and his reputation as the custodian of a hardened band of pea-brained hijackers, loan-shark collectors, gamblers, and robotic hit men. In organizing a rebellion, he demonstrated unforeseen talents as a Mob strategist and diplomat.

From the onset, Gotti’s three brothers, especially Gene, with whom he was most closely bonded, were excluded from roles in the conspiracy. A Mafia dictum discouraged brothers from participating in the same dangerous undertaking so that at least one would survive and take care of their relatives if disaster struck.

Gotti’s first conspiratorial step was to dispatch Angelo Ruggiero as an envoy to sound out likely defectors from Castellano’s own wing of the family. Fat Ange tested the waters in a blunt conversation with Salvatore Sammy the Bull Gravano, an ambitious mafioso of Gotti and Ruggiero’s generation. Gotti correctly surmised that Gravano, an accomplished killer and a huge earner, was disenchanted with Castellano. Although only a soldier in a Brooklyn crew, Gravano accelerated Gotti’s scheme because of his partnership with Frankie DeCicco, a popular capo presumably in Castellano’s corner. Gravano could be used to approach DeCicco, who might be accommodating because he was friendly with Dellacroce and was an admirer of Neil’s tough, old-school Mob style.

The convoluted strategy worked. It turned out that DeCicco and Gravano silently resented Castellano’s demands for larger and larger cuts from rackets at the expense of themselves and rank-and-file soldiers. Both men were dismayed by Castellano’s construction-industry extortion partnerships with the Genovese family, which enriched him personally while depriving other Gambino members of illicit profits. There was one more grievance. The two gangsters believed Big Paul had betrayed and dishonored his own borgata by authorizing the Genovese borgata to whack a Gambino capo in Connecticut over a money dispute. “He’s selling out the family,” Gravano confided to DeCicco.