Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (69 page)

DeCicco and Gravano worried that Big Paul’s tactics were irrevocably dividing and damaging the family. Sammy used an anecdote to illustrate Castellano’s rampant hostility to Neil Dellacroce, his trustworthy underboss. The previous year, 1984, Gravano delivered his mandatory Christmas envelope filled with cash to Castellano at his mansion. He mentioned that he was on his way to the Ravenite Club in Little Italy to pay his respects to Dellacroce. “He looked at me as if I had five heads. What are you going down there for? You’re on my side,’” Castellano rebuked him. “What sides?” Gravano replied. “I thought we’re all in one family. Neil’s our underboss.”

DeCicco had a personal gripe arising from a rumor. He understood that Castellano had decided, if he was imprisoned, that he would designate Tommy Bilotti as the acting street boss. The decision rankled DeCicco, who believed he was more deserving than Castellano’s lapdog Bilotti of a top slot in the family.

Gotti’s intuition was accurate about two other malcontents long in Castellano’s
corner. He persuaded Robert “DiB” DiBernardo and Joseph “Piney” Armone to secretly defect. Armone, a family elder and capo in his late sixties, was a pivotal player for Gotti. Once Castellano was removed, Armone’s ties to old-timers in the Castellano crews could fend off a civil war, and his support would lend credibility to the Young Turk plotters who were in their forties. Jealousy appeared to be the main reason the stolid Armone welcomed Gotti’s revolt. After years of suppressed envy of Castellano’s wealth and position, Armone saw a last-chance opportunity to advance into the Mob’s hierarchy. The nickname “Piney” had stuck to him from younger days, when he specialized in stealing and selling Christmas trees.

DiBernardo, a soldier without a crew who dealt directly with Castellano and was close to Gravano, was a financial asset. With a creative business mind, DiB had built up a multimillion-dollar pornography distribution network for the family, and he handled construction-industry payoffs for Big Paul through control of a vital teamsters’ union local, 282, which delivered concrete and other materials to major building sites in the city.

Once they eliminated Castellano, the plotters counted on winning widespread internal support with a coordinated political theme: he had to be whacked to unify the borgata and to spread the wealth to everyone. Five conspirators—Gotti, DeCicco, Gravano, Armone, and DiBernardo—picked a symbolic name for their cabal as if they were reenacting a scene in an espionage novel or movie. Each would represent a finger of a lethal hand called “the Fist.”

No attempt was made to directly solicit authorization from the godfathers of the other four borgatas. At the time, before the start of the Commission case trial, it was too
dangerous
to approach the established bosses, all of whom had long-standing relationships with Castellano. Instead, Gotti used a backdoor maneuver. His co-conspirators discreetly canvassed important figures in the Lucchese, Colombo, and Bonanno families—mobsters of Gotti’s generation—to gauge their feelings about the possible removal of Castellano. Ange Ruggiero met with close friends Gerry Lang Langella and Donnie Shacks Montemarano of the Colombo family. “They say, What are you waiting for? Make the move,’ “Ruggiero excitedly reported to Gotti. Approaching the fifth family, the Genovese, was too risky. Their leaders were friendly with Big Paul and the merest hint to a Genovese mobster could tip off Castellano to the impending danger. Later, Gotti would claim, through contorted Mafia logic, that the hit had been tacitly supported by “off-the-record contacts” with three families, who thereby comprised a majority of the five families.

The decision to move against Castellano was accelerated by Neil Dellacroce’s death from cancer on December 2, 1985. Ever conscious of surveillance, the seventy-one-year-old underboss was vigilant even in his final days at a hospital. He registered as a patient under one of his assumed names, Timothy O’Neill. With Dellacroce gone, the collective reasoning of the plotters was that Gotti had to strike preemptively before Castellano could demote him, break up his crew, or whack him and Ruggiero for disobeying his narcotics prohibition and for Ruggiero’s compromising tapes.

If the conspirators needed another emotional motive and rationale for killing Castellano, he handed it to them by refusing to appear at Dellacroce’s funeral. Big Paul told intimates that law-enforcement agents would photograph him if he showed up, and the resulting publicity could hurt his chances of acquittal at his RICO trials. Nevertheless, his absence was viewed by Mafia traditionalists as both cowardice and disrespect for a venerated Gambino leader.

Frank DeCicco provided the essential information for ambushing Castellano and Bilotti. Frankie was one of three trusted capos Castellano invited for a dinner meeting in a Manhattan restaurant to begin at 5:00 P.M., on December 16. Armed with that insider’s knowledge, Gotti assembled an eleven-member assassination squad to waylay their prey outside the restaurant. The murder team consisted mainly of proven killers from Gotti’s Bergin crew. They were alerted the day before the event with vague instructions from Gotti: “We’re going on a piece of work tomorrow. There’s gonna be two guys killed. It’s a huge hit and it has to be done.”

To maintain secrecy, Gotti waited until almost the last hour before revealing the identities of the intended victims and the site of the attack—Sparks on East 46th Street between Second and Third Avenues. Shortly before 5:00 P.M., the assassins gathered for a final rundown in a park in Lower Manhattan. Two gunmen would be stationed on the sidewalk at the restaurant’s entrance and two directly across the street. The four prime triggermen were given white trench coats, Russian-style fur hats, and walkie-talkie radios. Similar clothing, Gotti figured, would make identification by passersby on a normally crowded street difficult and confusing. Other shooters were placed on both sides of the entrance to the restaurant along 46th Street, to sandwich or encircle the victims. The additional hitters would finish off the job in case the four front-line gunmen missed Castellano and Bilotti when they arrived at the restaurant, and tried to flee on foot.

The two backup team members were Gotti and Gravano. Gotti was behind
the wheel as they sat in a parked Lincoln Town Car with tinted windows at the corner of 46th Street and Third Avenue, half a block from Sparks. Shortly after five o’clock, another Lincoln Town Car stopped alongside them for a red light. Winter darkness had set in. But to Gravano’s astonishment, the dome light in the other Lincoln was switched on and, from several feet away, he saw Castellano and Bilotti talking. On his walkie-talkie, Gravano radioed to the waiting assassins that their targets were “coming through.”

From their vantage point, Gotti and Gravano saw Castellano’s car halt in front of the restaurant. White-clad figures descended upon the auto, followed by flashes of gunfire. Gotti turned on the engine and drove eastward across Third Avenue toward Sparks. As part of the plot, Gravano was an emergency shooter to assist the principal killers if there was any resistance by Bilotti or trouble with the police or foolhardy pedestrians. When they pulled alongside of Castellano’s Lincoln, Gravano saw Bilotti’s body sprawled in the pavement. “He’s gone,” Gravano whispered to Gotti.

Sammy the Bull and Gotti drove off to Brooklyn for a celebratory meeting with other conspirators. All members of the hit team escaped untouched in cars parked on Second Avenue. On the way to Brooklyn, Gotti and Gravano heard a radio news bulletin: Paul Castellano had been shot to death. John Gotti’s daring assassination plan had unfolded flawlessly.

Encountering no resistance from the now-leaderless Castellano partisans, Gotti went through the motions of democratically installing himself as boss. The only Gambino hierarchy leader left after Castellano’s murder and Dellacroce’s natural death was the consigliere, Joe N.
Gallo
. Powerless, without a tough crew behind him, and lacking the stomach for a fight, the seventy-five-year-old Gallo collaborated in arranging Gotti’s formal coronation. Mafia protocol required the selection of a boss by a majority of a family’s capos, and complying with Gotti’s orders, Gallo presided at a meeting of most of the family’s capos several days after the double murder. The conclave was held after closing hours at Caesar’s East, a restaurant only a few blocks from Sparks, and partly owned by one of the arch conspirators, Sammy the Bull Gravano. Everyone in attendance knew that Gotti had engineered Castellano’s slaying, but Gallo and the capos all pretended ignorance. Following Gotti’s script, Gallo gravely announced that an internal investigation was under way to find and punish Castellano’s killers. The other New York families, he continued, were being informed that the Gambinos were intact, strong, and united. Until a boss was formally designated, Gallo, Gotti, and Frankie DeCicco would run the
family temporarily. The real news—understood by all the capos—was that Gotti was in charge, and that the plotters had agreed among themselves never to admit they had violated a cardinal Mafia rule by murdering a boss.

If investigators needed confirmation that Gotti was at the helm, they got it on Christmas Eve 1985. Concealed in a van in Little Italy, John Gurnee, a New York City organized-crime detective, witnessed a striking scene outside the Ravenite Club, Dellacroce’s old hangout. “Numerous people bypassed others on the street and went directly to John Gotti and kissed him,” Gurnee reported. Gambino capos and soldiers had gathered at the Ravenite to openly pay homage to the de facto boss. His formal investiture came at a meeting of some twenty capos on January 15, 1986. There was only one nominee, John Joseph Gotti, and at age forty-six he was unanimously elected the Gambinos’ godfather.

“Shame on Them”

J
ohn Gotti’s meteoric rise did not go unnoticed. At the start of the new year he was promoted to the top of Bruce Mouw’s FBI “must-get” chart of the Gambino leadership. Other law-enforcement agencies had the same priority. Soon enough the bureau, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn and Manhattan, the Queens district attorney’s office, and the State Organized Crime Task Force were stumbling over one another in separate quests to get the goods on Gotti. At the time it was unclear to investigators that Paul Castellano’s murder had been a byproduct of the FBI’s electronic eavesdropping on Ruggiero and Castellano’s demands to hear the controversial tapes. Now, investigators were seeking authorization for more electronic intrusions. At one point, agents from the FBI, the Queens DA’s office, and the state task force almost simultaneously had penetrated the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club to install mikes, unbeknownst to one another. These multiple electronic invasions were a continuation of the historic, sometimes comic jurisdictional rivalries that chronically plagued the vast array of investigative agencies operating in the New York area.

The first unit to bug the new Gambino boss was the state task force. Like the FBI and the Queens DA’s detectives, state investigators had unearthed an informer—an arrested small-time narcotics dealer looking for leniency, Dominick Lofaro—whose information generated bugs at the Bergin Club. Lofaro,
a Gambino associate, wore a wire and recorded a conversation with Gotti about gambling and loan-sharking by the Bergin crew. It was sufficient for court authorization to eavesdrop on Gotti’s office. The electronic ears actually had sprouted in March 1985, nine months before Castellano’s murder, and long before Gotti became a headline gangster. Microphones were secreted in two desk telephones, located in an unmarked storefront with a separate street entrance through a red door, next to the Bergin. Gotti had converted the space into his private quarters. Unattached to the club, it was the place where investigators believed Gotti conducted his confidential conversations, feeling more secure there than inside the Bergin’s larger room. The busy, noisy club was otherwise a holding pen or reception area for people waiting to see him, not for sessions about Mob business. State investigators knew he was wary of telephone taps, but they counted on his not suspecting that two private phones in his office had been wired or bugged. Every conversation in his private chambers could be recorded by live microphones in the telephones when they were not being used for incoming or outgoing calls.

Gotti ranked as a capo when the devices were first turned on. His conversations failed to dredge up criminal evidence, and the mikes were shut off in October 1985. Two months later, citing the Sparks murders, Ronald Goldstock, the task force head, got court permission to reactivate the bugs hibernating in the phones. This time, there were interesting results. As boss, Gotti surprisingly dropped his guard, talking freely in his office with close comrades about his plans to reshape the Gambinos’ organizational structure, reassigning soldiers, and prospective hierarchy appointments. One of the first pronouncements in January 1986 was his “hell of a legacy” goal: to construct an unconquerable Cosa Nostra family. The state tapes recorded Gotti ridiculing consigliere Joe N. Gallo as a nice old man, an ineffectual figurehead whom he intended to replace. However, he had no intention of appointing coconspirators Fat Ange Ruggiero or Sammy Gravano to the consigliere’s post. Angelo, “he ain’t bright enough,” Gotti told a confidant; and Gravano at age forty-one, “he ain’t old enough.”