Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (72 page)

Before a witness could be called, Giacalone was fighting another rancorous in-house battle, this one with the FBI. Preparing for the trial, Giacalone had discovered that one of the indicted Bergin crew defendants, Wilfred “Willie Boy” Johnson, was a paid FBI informer. She decided to expose Johnson’s undercover acts and compel him to become a prosecution witness who could buttress essential points of the indictment. Johnson pleaded with Giacalone to
maintain his secrecy, warning that he and his family would be slaughtered if Gotti learned what he had been up to. Under the code name “Wahoo,” Johnson for fifteen years had been a valuable FBI source, and the bureau had promised that he would never be forced to testify. Supporting Willie Boy, the FBI argued vigorously that his secrecy had to be maintained. Agents knew that reneging on Johnson’s agreement would discourage other potential informers and cause incalculable harm to ongoing and future investigations.

Giacalone was adamant. Despite Johnson’s vehement denials that he was a rat, the prosecutor announced in open court that he had clandestinely cooperated with the FBI. She counted on the pressure of exposure as a sure means for changing Johnson’s mind, and offered him security in the Witness Protection Program. The gambit failed. Johnson feared Gotti’s powers of retaliation more than the government’s, and he refused to cooperate. At the trial, he remained at the defense table sitting alongside Gotti and the other codefendants, repeatedly protesting to them that he had never been a squealer.

Most of the counts against Gotti stemmed from evidence dug up by agencies other than the FBI. When the Johnson controversy flared up, angry FBI officials retaliated against Giacalone by cooperating only marginally with her in the last stages of preparing the case. To add to the internal government feuding, another valuable informer, Billy Batista, a bookie and hijacker in the Bergin crew, was exposed by Giacalone, who also planned to use him as a trial witness. The FBI placed Batista in a hotel in New Jersey without constantly guarding him. After a month largely on his own, he vanished. In the empty hotel room, Batista’s handler, Agent Patrick Colgan, found a note: “Thanks for everything, Pat. I’m out of here.” Precipitated by Giacalone’s decision to unveil him as a witness, Batista’s flight severed another secret FBI source, further infuriating bureau officials.

Willie Boy Johnson’s plight opened a window on the murky existence of Mob informers and their motives. He and Gotti had been teenaged terrors in the Fulton-Rockaway Boys gang, and both had worked as musclemen for Carmine Fatico’s crew in East New York. Because Johnson’s father was a Mohawk Indian iron worker and Willie Boy was only half Italian, he was prohibited from becoming a made man, even though he robbed and killed for Fatico, Gotti, and other wiseguys. Johnson grew resentful when Fatico failed to properly support his wife and children while he was in prison for armed robbery. Later, when Gotti led the Bergin crew, the 250-pound six-feet-tall Johnson was a loan-shark knee breaker for him. Gotti, however, contributed to Johnson’s concealed anger, referring to him as the “Redskin” or “the half-breed.”

Arrested by the FBI for gambling and extortion, Johnson saw a way out by
becoming
an informer. Upset at being derisively treated by mafiosi partners and seeking FBI intervention in case he got jammed up again, Johnson signed on with the bureau. The gambling-extortion crime was placed on the back burner so long as he produced information about the Gambinos and other families. Agents knew that he had to be involved in loan-sharking to remain in the Mob’s good graces, but they winked at that so long as he was not arrested for other crimes. For the FBI it was a rational arrangement: letting a two-bit gangster—a minnow—off the hook in return for priceless tips on Mafia sharks was a reasonable bargain.

The competition between law-enforcement agencies was almost comically displayed through Johnson’s activities. While aiding the FBI, he was picked up on a narcotics rap, carrying a $50,000 heroin payoff, by Lieutenant Remo Franceschini’s detectives in the Queens DA’s office. Grasping at an opportunity to penetrate Gotti’s lair, the DA’s men cut a deal with Johnson, turning him into an informer to betray the Gambinos. The $50,000 in drug money was confiscated. As a legal sword over Johnson’s head to guarantee his cooperation, the DA held a sealed indictment against him for the attempted bribery of arresting detectives.

For over a decade, Johnson supplied similar tips and intelligence to the FBI and the DA’s office, without either agency knowing he was serving two masters. One of his priceless gifts to the bureau was Angelo Ruggiero’s boast that he had a “safe” means at his home of communicating with the crew—his daughter’s Princess phone.

Gotti’s RICO trial in Brooklyn lasted from August 1986 to March 1987. Giacalone
and
another young prosecutor, John Gleeson, depended on thirty hours of audiotapes and ninety witnesses to implicate Gotti and six codefendants in three murder conspiracies and on racketeering charges. The defense’s aggressive, scorched-earth strategy and tone was set in the opening statements by Bruce Cutler. In a throbbing harangue, the lawyer attacked Diane Giacalone’s integrity, accusing her of concocting a secret underworld organization, the Gambino family, that did not exist, in order to advance her own career. Holding a copy of the indictment above his bald dome, Cutler paced back and forth in the well of the courtroom. “It’s rotten. It makes you retch and vomit,” he fulminated, pointing to the document. “This is where it belongs,” he concluded theatrically, slamming it noisily into a wastebasket.

The prosecution relied heavily on seven turncoat witnesses, all low-level gangsters, to reinforce the indictment. In a slashing counterattack, Cutler tore into the defectors, stressing that they were confessed murderers, kidnappers, or perjurers, who had evaded life sentences and obtained money and other favors from the government for testifying against Gotti. He tried to deprecate the taped conversations, insisting they were mere humdrum discussions by “knock-around guys,” crude-talking gamblers and card players with unorthodox lifestyles, not mobsters or criminals.

The defense’s insinuating attacks on Giacalone were extraordinary, bordering on being loathsome, with one defense witness calling her “a slut” during his testimony. At the opening of the trial, Giacalone, in her mid-thirties with shoulder-length raven black hair, wore a red dress to court, prompting Cutler to demean her as “the Lady in Red” when later addressing the jury, even when she wore another color.

Giacalone had intended to use an admitted bank robber, Matthew Traynor, to identify Gotti as a capo and crew chief, but he was dropped after prosecutors caught him lying. Instead, the defense called him as a witness to impugn the prosecutor, claiming that she had badgered him to frame Gotti. Traynor testified that Giacalone had offered him illegal drugs, and even tried to relieve his sexual frustrations in prison. “She gave me everything,” he said. “Even her panties out of the bottom drawer, to facilitate myself when I wanted to jack off.” (After the trial, Traynor was convicted of perjury arising from his incendiary testimony about Giacalone.)

Shortly after the trial began, a new U.S. Attorney, Andrew J. Maloney, was appointed to head the Eastern District office. Gregarious, with a ready smile for strangers, Maloney’s exterior pose was deceptive. Underneath, he was an amalgam of an exacting drill sergeant and a case-hardened lawyer. A West Pointer, he had served as an officer in the Army’s Ranger Corps before switching careers and graduating from Fordham University Law School. He then spent twelve years as a federal rackets prosecutor in Manhattan and head of a Justice Department anticorruption white-collar division. Maloney had not been involved in obtaining the Gotti indictment or in the trial preparations. But after looking in on the court proceedings, he was outraged by the enormous latitude Judge Nickerson was permitting the defense team. Gotti partisans in the courtroom were chortling over Cutler’s corrosive cross-examinations, complimenting him for “Brucifying” prosecution witnesses. “Nickerson can’t handle these guys,” Maloney thought, observing the defense lawyers’ tactics.
“The judge is a gentleman’s gentleman and he’s allowing them to turn the trial into a circus.”

Maloney grew concerned about Giacalone’s health. Rail thin, resembling the actress-comedienne, she appeared increasingly worn down during the stressful trial. “She’s very tough, but she’s knocking heads with the defense and even the FBI hates her over the Johnson controversy. She’s very stretched out; she looks ready to go into a hospital.”

Another concern for Maloney, which he withheld from Giacalone, were tips coming in to Bruce Mouw’s Gambino Squad. “The FBI had unconfirmed reports that the wiseguys were making moves on the jury,” Maloney said. “They were trying to reach two jurors.”

The jury-fixing information turned out to be accurate, but five years would elapse before the accusations could be verified. Incredibly, a member of the anonymous jury, a middle-aged suburbanite named George Pape, volunteered, for a price, to hold out for an acquittal. At the start of the trial, Pape reached out to his friend Bosko Radonjich, who happened to be the new leader of the murderous and predominantly Irish Westies in Manhattan. (Bosko, a Serbian immigrant, took over the gang when most of the Irish leaders were jailed.) Beset by money problems, Pape wanted $120,000 to guarantee, at a minimum, a hung jury. Sammy the Bull, serving as Gotti’s negotiator, whittled the bribe down to $60,000, and happily passed it along to Pape through Radonjich before the trial ended.

After listening to evidence and arguments for six months, the jury deliberated for a week before reaching verdicts. It was a Friday, the 13th of March 1986, and waiting apprehensively for the jury’s return, U.S. Attorney Andrew Maloney sensed that it was an unlucky day for his staff. “I’d seen a lot of tough guys in my years as a prosecutor and there’s always some anxiety,” Maloney said. “But Gotti was sitting there as cool as a cucumber. It was unbelievable how relaxed he was. I knew he must have succeeded in fixing the jury.”

Maloney’s fears were accurate. A Cheshire cat smile on his face, Gotti heard the jury announce “Not guilty” verdicts on every count against him and his codefendants. A decade after the trial, Daily News reporters Jerry Capeci and Gene Mustain wrote that at first a majority of the jurors favored convictions. Pape, however, refused to budge, parroting Cutler’s line that Giacalone hated Gotti and that she had failed to prove her case. Gradually, Pape’s argument prevailed in arguing that there was sufficient reasonable doubt to acquit every defendant.

It was a stinging defeat for the government’s campaign against the Mafia, the first time it had lost a significant RICO trial. And John Gotti, the godfather who
had turned the tables on Justice Department lawyers, gloated with malicious satisfaction. “Shame on them,” he snarled, shaking a fist contemptuously at Diane Giacalone and John Gleeson, the young prosecutors. “Pd like to see the verdict on them.”

“He’s Like Robin Hood”

J
ohn Gotti’s trial in Brooklyn was one of two huge and simultaneous courtroom clashes between the government and the Mafia in 1986. Across the East River, in Manhattan, only two subway stations away, the Commission case had ended with one hundred-year sentences for three reputed bosses and their closest henchmen. “That has nothing to do with me,” Gotti said to reporters, dismissing the Commission case as inconsequential. It was a lie and he knew it. In one blow, the Commission convictions had removed much of the Mob’s Old Guard. In contrast, Gotti’s stunning acquittal had turned him into the Cosa Nostra’s most significant symbol of resistance to law enforcement since Al Capone had cavorted in Chicago a half century earlier. A repositioning of godfathers was under way and Gotti, the only boss to emerge victorious in court, had become the nation’s preeminent Mafia outlaw. His national and international status was such that he was the first gangster since Capone to make the cover of
Time
magazine, his face portrayed by Andy Warhol. The prestigious Sunday
New York Times Magazine
also presented Gotti on its cover with an unflattering close-up photograph of his baleful, gimlet-eyed stare.

For the first time since ascending to power, Gotti was unencumbered by a pending trial or the threat of imminent jailing. Exultant, Gotti the Boss bragged to Sammy Gravano that he would change the face of Cosa Nostra, setting an
example on how to defeat the government. A swashbuckler, he had no intention of cowering in the shadows even though he knew his movements would be under tight scrutiny by the FBI and other agencies. Indeed, his daily routine became familiar to a horde of investigators. At noon almost every day, he was picked up at his Howard Beach home by a bodyguard in a Mercedes-Benz, a more upscale auto than the Lincoln models he had previously favored. Wearing a jogging suit, he was driven to his office at the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, which he had remodeled with multiple mirrors into a dressing salon containing a professional barber’s chair and a curved sink for shampoos. A blown-up photograph of himself from the Time magazine cover and a picture of his dead son Frank were prominently displayed. One of the first orders of daily business was having his hair styled by a barber; his grooming routine often included a manicure and sun-lamp treatments to retain his tan. A complete wardrobe of suits, shirts, underwear, monogrammed socks, and shoes were kept there for him to change into before leaving in the late afternoon for the Ravenite Club on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. Every day his black Mercedes was washed and polished to a gleam before transporting him to Manhattan. Capos and other high-ranking members of the new regime were required to appear at the Ravenite at least once a week to report directly to Gotti. FBI agents sometimes got within earshot at the Ravenite to hear the Gambino entourage on the sidewalk entrance fawning over Gotti, telling him how wonderful he looked. Obviously aware of the government’s electronic eavesdropping abilities, he was frequently seen with ranking mafiosi strolling the streets near the Ravenite in what investigators called “walk-talks,” clearly out of earshot of interior bugs.