Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (70 page)

The state investigators learned that about this same time, in a meeting with Ruggiero, Gotti had selected Frank DeCicco as his number-two man, his underboss. Without specifying his reasons, the godfather had decided to temporarily prohibit the induction of new soldiers. “These guys are going to be in for a shock,” Gotti chortled. “Look, fuckin’ six months to a year we can’t do none of them. We cannot do one,” he was overheard telling Ruggiero.

As guidelines for the nation’s largest borgata, Gotti directed Ruggiero to notify all lower ranks that he would be too busy to burden himself with routine problems and requests. “Forget about business here,” he decreed, referring to himself. “Go see Angelo, go see your skipper, go see somebody else.”

The whirling tapes provided the task force with news that Gotti was shifting his headquarters from the Bergin Club in Queens to the Ravenite in Little Italy. It was intended as a symbolic move, notifying his own family and the other clans of his rise from a provincial capo to a Mafia divinity. “Angelo,” he declared, “I ain’t comin here [
Queens
]. I’m going right to New York every fuckin’ day. Right to New York. That’s where I’ve been [inaudible word] since the day I [inaudible] live and I’ll die there.”

Befitting his lofty status, Gotti’s personal mode of living underwent a sea change. As a capo, he had dressed neatly but in typical gaudy, wise-guy style, usually in turtleneck pullovers or open-collared shirts, a gold or silver pendant dangling on his chest. Sometimes he wore a black-and-silver Oakland Raiders jacket and loafers. Reinventing himself, he adopted a foppish color-coordinated appearance. Instead of windbreakers and sports jackets, he now appeared resplendent in custom-tailored double-breasted Brioni and DiLisi silk suits, accessorized by hand-painted floral ties. The once ragged, embarrassed school boy with unmatched shoes was swathed in cashmere overcoats and monogrammed silk socks. Almost every day, his silvery black hair was trimmed and his prominent widow’s peak styled in a swept-back coiffure. Overnight, he became the Mob’s Beau Brummell.

Where once he had spent most of his time at the Bergin Club and ate at simple neighborhood restaurants in Queens and Brooklyn, Gotti began frequenting Manhattan’s trendy cafés and night spots. He was accompanied by a corps of brawny protectors, several resembling the massive Luca Brasi character in The
Godfather
, and was accorded effusive courtesies by his attendants; even his brothers Gene and Peter helped him don and doff his coat and held umbrellas over his head. One of two bodyguards accompanied him into restaurant and public washrooms, turning the water taps on and off for him, and obsequiously handing him fresh linen towels.

While redesigning the Gambino family and himself in early 1986, Gotti had to attend to two criminal accusations left over from his thuggish capo days. Two years earlier, he had double-parked near one of his bookmaking joints in Queens. Gotti’s car had blocked a refrigeration mechanic named Romual Piecyk from driving through the street. A tall, beefy, hot-tempered individual,
the thirty-five-year-old Piecyk blasted his horn and then approached Gotti on foot as if primed for a fight. The argument ended with Gotti and a Mob pal, Frank Colletti, smacking around Piecyk, who drove off and summoned the police. A search located Gotti and Colletti in the nearby Cozy Corner Bar and Grill, and Piecyk filed charges that they had assaulted him and lifted $325 in cash from his wallet.

Unaware of Gotti’s underworld standing when he originally identified him, Piecyk then had wanted revenge. Ordinarily, charges involving a minor parking dispute without serious injuries would have stagnated in the city’s clogged court system before being dismissed. The Queens DA’s office, however, seizing upon the opportunity of reaping publicity by proving that the newly notorious John Gotti was a brutal hoodlum, insisted on prosecuting him. Far from ignoring the trivial case, the DA eagerly set a trial date for March 1986. Piecyk, the prosecution’s only witness, now knew that Gotti was a kingpin mobster, and he was having nightmares about being murdered. Refusing to cooperate with prosecutors, the frightened mechanic had to be dragged into court by the DA’s men. Looking like a zombie and wearing dark glasses, Piecyk recanted the identifications he had made before a grand jury. “To be perfectly honest,” he testified, “it was so long ago, I don’t remember. I don’t remember who slapped me.”

Without the necessity of jury deliberations, the presiding judge voided the charges. The New York Post characterized the proceedings in a cleverly apt headline: “I FORGOTTI.”

A beaming Gotti left the courthouse with his newly retained lawyer, Bruce Cutler, a former Brooklyn assistant district attorney with the Homicide Bureau. A natty dresser, still retaining a husky build from his days as a high school champion wrestler and college football team captain, the thirty-eight-year-old Cutler physically resembled Gotti. At the brief trial, Gotti seemed pleased with Cutler’s bellicose courtroom style; he had ripped into Piecyk as a deranged instigator who had flung himself on the innocent John Gotti in a drunken attack. The scrum of reporters besieging Gotti discovered he was an unorthodox godfather. Even while dodging questions, he smiled affably, not trying to hide or escape from the TV and photographers’ lenses. The new Mafia don basked in the attention and respect enveloping him.

The nuisance assault case disposed of, a more serious and complex set of charges awaited Gotti in Federal District Court in Brooklyn. In March 1985, months before the Castellano murder, Gotti, his brother Gene, and a batch of
Bergin crew tough guys had been indicted on a RICO complaint. Gotti was only a secondary suspect in the original case; the lead defendant was Neil Dellacroce, who was then alive. As the principal subject of the investigation, Dellacroce had been accused of supervising two Gambino crews, one of which was Gotti’s. Dellacroce’s death, Castellano’s murder, and Gotti’s emergence as boss turned him into the lead defendant and catapulted the trial into a highly significant Mafia case for the government. The realignment of defendants meant that federal prosecutors had to hurriedly alter their strategy to focus mainly on Gotti instead of the deceased underboss.

While preparing in the spring of 1986 for the start of the RICO trial, Gotti warmed to his new duties as a don. An enjoyable part of his on-the-job training was discovering the copious wealth that would flow into his private coffers. Schooled in the more violent Mafia crimes, Gotti learned that he was entitled to shares of the borgata’s sophisticated arts, most of which he had never practiced. Millions of dollars in kickbacks were now his largesse from an assortment of corruption and union rackets, including the waterfront, construction, and private garbage-carting industries. Besides getting slices from the borgata’s traditional gambling and loan-sharking activities, he had become a partner in porno sales and in the forbidden fruits of narcotics traffickers. A bug at the Bergin Club heard his astonishment at a soldier’s report that the Gambinos were getting a cut along with other Mob families from the theft of gasoline excise taxes through the daisy-chain system of phony wholesale fuel distributors devised by Russian gangsters. “I’m talking about two cents a gallon on 20, 30 million gallons a month,” an underling pointed out. “That’s six hundred thousand dollars,”
Gotti replied
appreciatively.

Before getting bogged down in what loomed as a long RICO trial, Gotti began visiting crews that had been close to Castellano. He intended solidifying their loyalty to him by demonstrating that, unlike the reclusive Big Paul, he understood the ordinary trench soldier’s needs. On the Sunday afternoon of April 13, 1986, the new don was scheduled along with his underboss Frank DeCicco to give a pep talk at the Veterans and Friends Club in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. It was the storefront headquarters of James Failla, a capo who as the head of a Mob-dominated business-trade association controlled many of the city’s major private trash-collecting companies.

Beefy and potbellied, Failla had grown up in Bensonhurst and still spent most of his time at his club in the neighborhood, although like many mobsters he lived across the bay in more suburban Staten Island. Failla was first noticed
as a “comer” in the family when in his early thirties he was selected by Carlo Gambino, then the underboss, as a chauffeur-bodyguard. After assuming control of the family in 1957, Gambino placed Failla in charge of the borgata’s new interests in garbage-carting. Without drawing much law-enforcement attention, Failla had been handling the carting rackets in the city and in Long Island for thirty years and running a crew out of Bensonhurst.

But Failla had been more than just a big moneymaker for the previous regime. His crew members had served Castellano as hardened “hitters,” and Gotti wanted Failla and his soldiers to play the same roles for him: converting trash into cash and serving as efficient hit men.

Over the years, Failla became stuck with his underworld nickname “Jimmy Brown,” because of his propensity to wear drab brown clothes. Unlike his new, flamboyant godfather, he had no interest in publicity. Approached once by a New York Times reporter for an interview about the garbage-hauling industry, he snarled, “Eat shit.”

A loyal Castellano follower, Failla had been waiting inside Sparks Steak House for Big Paul on the murder night, the previous December. To greet their new boss, John Gotti, Failla assembled some thirty crew members and wannabes in his storefront base. The place symbolized Failla’s prudence in warding off electronic eavesdropping. It had no telephone, and he had prominently displayed on a wall a large picture of a cockroach wearing a headset with the caption: “Our Bugs Have Ears.”

At the last minute, Gotti canceled the visit to Failla’s club, from which he was scheduled to ride in DeCicco’s car to the Ravenite Club in Manhattan. The sudden change in plans may have saved Gotti’s life. That afternoon, a remote-controlled bomb killed DeCicco when he entered his auto, parked across the street from Failla’s club. Investigators learned from bugs and informers that an understandably perturbed Gotti was certain that the blast had been meant for him, but he was mystified as to who was behind the hit. Diehard Castellano supporters bent on revenge were the logical suspects, but Gotti thought he had assuaged all of Castellano’s and Tom Bilotti’s gangland relatives and potential avengers. The use of a remote-controlled explosive was baffling to both Gotti and lawmen. Traditionally, American mafiosi had never resorted to bombs because they could kill and injure innocent passersby and galvanize extraordinary law-enforcement pressure. Zips, Sicilian immigrant mobsters, or screwballs, like the Irish Westies, might attempt a bombing, but why would they be out to kill John Gotti? All that a puzzled Gotti could do was tighten
security around himself and guard against an assassin getting close to him and his chauffeured limousines.

The bombing death incited a spate of headlines and stories about Gotti and the Gambino family; too many for Federal District Court Judge Eugene Nickerson, who had just begun picking a jury for Gotti’s racketeering trial in Brooklyn. To avoid impaneling jurors tainted by adverse publicity about the lead defendant, Nickerson postponed the trial for four months. Appearing unruffled at the pretrial hearings, Gotti enthralled the press, especially television reporters. Unlike stereotyped, shadowy bosses, he was a radically different version of a violent mobster; he was graced with a mischievous smile, held doors open for women reporters, waved politician-like to spectators outside the courthouse, and responded to a barrage of questions about allegations of being a Mob godfather with a standard sound bite: “I’m the boss of my family—my wife and my kids.”

Embellishing the public relations spin to news-hungry writers, lawyer Bruce Cutler portrayed his client as a hardworking plumbing salesman and a devoted father. If he had a son, Cutler said, he hoped the boy would model his character after the virtuous Gotti’s. FBI agents, trailing Gotti on his extracurricular rounds, drew a much different diagram of Gotti’s fidelity to hearth and home. From routine surveillance and from information volunteered by hotel detectives, the FBI watchdogs—without any prurient intent—knew that he was cheating on his wife. One of the longest affairs was with a daughter born out of wedlock to Neil Dellacroce. Philandering and entertaining a goombata mistress was a common practice among Cosa Nostra mainstays, an accepted symbol of virility. The assignations with Neil’s daughter, however, violated the Mafia’s code of honor because she was married to a Mafia gangster. Gotti therefore was cuckolding a fellow mafioso, an act punishable by death in the kingdom of Cosa Nostra.

Gotti’s freedom and rakish night life were soon curtailed on a motion by Diane Giacalone, the lead prosecutor in the Brooklyn RICO case. She contended that the trial delay would increase the possibility that Gotti and his cohorts would intimidate witnesses. Cited as evidence in her motion was the previously undisclosed harassment and fear that befell Romual Piecyk, the refrigerator mechanic who got cold feet on the witness stand at Gotti’s assault and robbery trial. Before the reluctant Piecyk testified, the brake linings on his van were cut, he received threatening telephone calls, and he was followed on the streets by menacing-looking men, one of whom kicked him in the behind.
Agreeing with the prosecution that Gotti was a potential danger to the community, Judge Nickerson revoked his bail in May and ordered him detained until the end of the trial.

Giacalone’s request to remand Gotti was a jolt to the state’s Organized Crime Task Force director Goldstock. He pleaded with her and the interim U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District, Reena Raggi, to allow Gotti to remain free. “We have a bug on him and we’re picking up phenomenal stuff,” Gold-stock notified the federal prosecutors. He pledged that if Gotti continued using his private office adjacent to the Bergin Club, he would share the evidence from the active eavesdropping with federal prosecutors for additional cases against Gotti and other mobsters. Once more, overlapping law-enforcement jurisdictions were at loggerheads over tactics. The federal prosecutors decided that the state’s tapes were of dubious value and that their own priority for a conviction trumped Goldstock’s future possibilities. On the day Gotti was jailed to await trial, a judicial order required that the bug be shut down.