Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (71 page)

Pretrial detention meant Gotti would be off the streets for months and created administrative problems for him. His first consideration was establishing a system to keep the Gambino family running smoothly while he was locked up in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the federal jail in Lower Manhattan. Before going behind bars, he arranged a method for being briefed in prison and transmitting orders. Messages would be relayed back and forth through authorized visitors, his brothers and Angelo Ruggiero. He placed control over nitty-gritty daily operations in the hands of a committee of three capos who had conspired with him to kill Paul Castellano. The panel consisted of his longtime crony Ruggiero, Joe Piney Armone, and a new deputy, Salvatore Sammy the Bull Gravano.

Gravano had been waiting inside the Veterans and Friends Club for Gotti when the explosion on that Sunday afternoon in April killed underboss Frank DeCicco. Since that mysterious, violent death, Gotti had brought Gravano into his small cabinet of advisers, consulting him on borgata business.

Before the plot against Castellano was spawned, the two relatively young mobsters, Gotti and Gravano, had been acquainted but had not worked together on a criminal venture. The forty-one-year-old Gravano, five years younger than Gotti, had grown up in Brooklyn but in less straitened circumstances than his future boss’s indigent childhood. Gravano’s Sicilian immigrant parents were sufficiently prosperous to own a small dress factory, a brick row home in Bensonhurst, and a vacation cottage in Long Island. An only son,
Sammy like so many other future mafiosi, took an early dislike to formal education and was an unrepentant disciplinary problem.

A slow learner,
Gravano
felt humiliated at school, and compensated for his inferiority complex by lashing out at children who laughed at him. After slugging two teachers, he was transferred to a strict “600” school for troublemakers, and at sixteen—like Gotti—he was a dropout. Later in life, Gravano faulted school authorities for contributing to his educational woes by failing to recognize that he was dyslexic, and not providing the remedial help he needed to learn to read.

Bensonhurst in the late 1950s, Gravano’s neighborhood during his teenage years, was home to phalanxes of ambitious wiseguys and brawling wannabes. Slender, barely five-feet five-inches tall, Gravano took boxing lessons to protect himself from bullies. “You don’t have to know how to read to learn how to box,” he told friends. His Napoleonic-style pugnacity earned him a nickname. A local mobster, watching the enraged Gravano in a fist fight, observed, “He’s like a little bull.” After that, he was forever dubbed “Sammy the Bull” or “Sammy Bull

While a teenager, he chalked up several years of experience as a burglar, a car thief, and a ski-masked stickup man. Caught trying to break into a lumberyard, Gravano was on the receiving end of a beating by cops. The arrest was long before the Supreme Court’s Miranda ruling on a defendant’s rights to remain silent, and the police worked him over in a vain attempt to identify his accomplices. Appearing in court with his nose broken and eyes blackened, Gravano agreed to a deal negotiated by his lawyer. The eighteen-year-old pleaded guilty to a reduced misdemeanor charge, and was released after promising the judge he would join the army.

Gravano
lied about enlisting, but a year later, during the Vietnam War, he was drafted. Never shipped overseas, Gravano employed his mobster street training to make military life comfortable for himself. Paying off the military police, he ran barracks crap games, and matured into a GI loan shark. Home again after two years in the army, and unreformed, he resumed his occupation of petty rackets and muggings. Seeking bigger opportunities he went “on record,” as an associate, working for a soldier in a Colombo family crew headed by Carmine the Snake Persico. As an obliging wannabe, Gravano was one of the scores of demonstrators dispatched by Joe Colombo to picket the FBI’s offices in Manhattan during Colombo’s civil rights protests in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

Trying to make his bones and gain admission into the Colombo family, Gravano committed his first murder at age twenty-five, whacking another wannabe who had offended a made man. “I felt a surge of power,” Gravano related years later. “It’s just that killing came so easy to me.” Gravano attended the victim’s funeral, shamelessly offering his condolences to grieving relatives. About this same time, to impress Carmine Persico, who wanted a businessman worked over, Gravano brutally fulfilled the assignment. He proudly described using a blackjack to sever one of the man’s fingers.

The homicide and the savage assault marked Gravano in the Colombo family as “a comer,” a reliable, iron-nerved enforcer. But a feud with the relative of a Colombo capo could be peacefully resolved only through Gravano’s departure from his chosen borgata. To avoid bloodshed, and acknowledging Sammy’s competence, Colombo leaders authorized his switching allegiance to a Gambino crew in Bensonhurst. His new leader was Salvatore “Toddo” Aurelio, a capo who became Sammy the Bull’s Mafia instructor and benefactor.

The move enriched Gravano. Under Aurello’s guidance, he established himself as a decent earner and a big-time loan shark. Before long, Gravano’s rough tactics and the Gambino family’s links with corrupt unions allowed him to diversify his criminal portfolio. He extorted construction companies for labor peace, and by having the muscle to arrange promanagement union deals, he started his own companies and operated as a semilegitimate building subcontractor. Flush with illicit profits, he invested as a partner in several restaurants and discothèques, convenient justification of high income on his 1RS tax return.

Married to Debra Scibetta, a neighborhood sweetheart (whose uncle was a Bonanno soldier), and the father of a daughter and son, Gravano’s personal life seemed smooth. In 1975, when the Mafia Commission reopened the books for the infusion of recruits, he was one of the first to be welcomed into the Gambino borgata.

Capo Toddo Aurelio was Sammy’s sponsor at the induction ceremony presided over by Big Paul Castellano in a Brooklyn basement. Afterward, what most persisted in Gravano’s memory were Castellano’s solemn words, “You are born as of today,” and swearing an oath of absolute devotion and loyalty to Cosa Nostra, Our Thing. “In this secret society, there’s one way in and there’s only one way out,” Castellano intoned. “You come in on your feet and you go out in a coffin. There is no return from this.”

Aurelio was a capo firmly committed to Castellano, and the boss often called upon his crew for “a piece of work,” a murder. Gravano’s turn came in
1977. Castellano’s contract was carried out by Sammy, who never knew the victim’s identity or the motive for his second Mob hit. Another contract from Castellano involved personal entanglements and demonstrated Gravano’s unswerving dedication to his Mafia oath. Nicholas Scibetta, the brother of Gravano’s wife, Debra, was an associate and minor player in another Gambino crew. A small-time cocaine hustler, Scibetta dipped into his own product and evolved into a quarrelsome addict. Reports reached Castellano about Scibetta’s blatant violations of his no-drugs edict and of concerns that if “Nicky” got busted he would become “a rat,” endangering the family. Wasting no time, Castellano ordered Scibetta rubbed out. The job was given to friends of Gravano who told him “off the record” that his brother-in-law was in imminent danger. Deciding that his allegiance to Castellano and omertà surpassed life and death obligations to a relative, Gravano remained silent instead of warning Nicky to flee from harm’s way. Scibetta’s body was never found, although a hand wearing his ring turned up. Again, Gravano comforted the victim’s relatives, this time his wife and in-laws.

By the early 1980s, money was rolling in from Gravano’s rackets and Mob-connected construction and nightclub businesses. Sammy’s golden touch even extended to his wife, who won an $800,000 New York state lottery. Many of Gravano’s Mob enterprises were in tandem with his brother-in-law Edward Garafola, also a Gambino made man. Gravano built a lavish $800,000 home in Staten Island, and acquired a thirty-acre farm in New Jersey for weekend jaunts and to raise harness racing horses. The financial successes brought him increasingly to Castellano’s attention, and he was often selected for important acts of violence. Through Castellano he was given a contract in 1980 on John “Johnny Keys” Simone, a Philadelphia mobster who was opposing Nicodema Scarfo, the Commission’s choice as boss of that city’s Mafia family. Personally orchestrating the hit, Gravano abducted Simone and looked on coolly as an accomplice blew off the back of Simone’s head.

Despite Castellano’s praise of him, Gravano’s loyalties to Big Paul gradually wavered, and he became an avid early recruit in Gotti’s deadly conspiracy against their boss. His alliance with Gotti was rapidly and richly rewarded. One of Gotti’s first moves was to promote Gravano to capo of the Toddo Aurelio crew; the old captain, Sammy’s tutor, was allowed to retire peacefully and unharmed. As a capo, Gravano rapidly built up a $1.5 million loan-sharking book enforced by his crew, which ensured him a steady yearly profit of $200,000 to $300,000.

Away from their gangster jobs, Gotti and Gravano found opposite ways of relaxing. Gotti, usually out with the boys gambling heavily and drinking, rarely spent a night with his wife and kids. Gravano profited from usurious loans to gamblers but never risked his own money on sports bets or cards. An early riser—unlike most mobsters—he could usually be found at home in the evenings. After his last prison stretch, Gotti gave up on heavy physical exercise, preferring less strenuous playboy recreation. Sammy the Bull, even with his increased borgata duties, was obsessed with keeping in tiptop shape and retaining his athletic image. To bulk up, he spent up to $3,000 a week on anabolic steroids, hired a professional trainer, and was a regular at a gym where he boxed younger men and sparred with professionals.

The revocation of Gotti’s bail and his jailing before his RICO trial brought Gravano more deeply into the ruling council. In the first six months of 1986 he had soared from the rank of soldier to one of the family’s three acting street bosses. Fully committed to the new regime, Gravano willingly carried out Gotti’s directives—even if they required the murder of a friend and fellow conspirator in Castellano’s murder. Using Angelo Ruggiero as a messenger, Gotti ordered Gravano to arrange the execution of Robert DiBernardo, the family’s porno king and bagman for construction-industry shake-downs. Ruggiero explained that DiBernardo had to die because he was criticizing Gotti behind his back.

Years later, Gravano claimed that Gotti acted on false rumors spread by Ruggiero. Ange owed more than $250,000 in loan-shark debts to DiBernardo, who had disparaged Ange’s leadership talents. According to Gravano, DiBernardo had insulted Ruggiero to his face: “You have the balls to be under-boss, but not the brains.” Maintaining that he could not contradict a command from Gotti, Gravano complied with his wishes. He invited DiBernardo to a meeting in his office on the pretense of discussing Mob construction-extortion matters. As the two men chatted, a Gravano triggerman shot DiBernardo twice in the back of the head. The body of the Mafia porno millionaire was never found.

Two months after being jailed, Gotti was in a courtroom facing his new antagonist, Diane F. Giacalone, an assistant U.S. Attorney in the federal Eastern District and the lead prosecutor in his RICO trial. Giacalone had a remote association
from childhood with the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, the vortex of the Mob crew on trial. She had grown up in South Ozone Park, and on her way to a Catholic parochial school passed near enough to see the disreputable characters milling outside the Bergin. Her indefatigable perseverance was largely responsible for the charges against Gotti, his brother Gene, and five other crew members. Over six years she had stitched together the case, largely as an outgrowth of an investigation of armored-car robbers who had paid cash tributes to Gotti to stay on good terms with him. Although Gotti was uninvolved in the heists, the inquiry expanded into RICO enterprise-accusations, including murder and loan-sharking by the Bergin crew.

But Giacalone encountered severe hurdles from the start. The original indictment had been tailored to convict Neil Dellacroce, and his death forced her to reshape the case with Gotti as the new prime defendant. When Gotti, then one of the lesser suspects, was arraigned on the charges in March 1985, he was so obscure that the judge and his clerk were uncertain how his name was spelled. A relatively inexperienced prosecutor, Giacalone had tried only one organized-crime case previously; it was against a low-ranking soldier and she lost. Her limited Mob-trial background, and her overall strategy for convicting the suddenly important Gotti, worried Mafia specialists. At that time, lawyers from the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Strike Force handled most Mob trials in the Eastern District. The semiautonomous unit, which zealously guarded its preserve, opposed bringing the revised charges against Gotti. Ignoring standard protocol, Edward A. McDonald, the strike force’s director, went so far as to advise Justice Department officials that Giacalone’s evidence was weak. He cautioned that an acquittal would disallow future use of hard-gained evidence gathered against Gotti, immunizing him from all crimes he committed before 1985. The clash between Giacalone and McDonald had the earmarks of a prosecutorial race over who would be the first to bring down Gotti. Backed by her boss, Raymond J. Dearie, the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District, Giacalone got the green light from Washington to go after the new Mafia celebrity.