Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (73 page)

Seemingly enjoying the thrill of the chase, although he was the quarry, Gotti boldly displayed his contempt for the pursuers. Spotting detectives or agents on stakeouts, he taunted them by rubbing one finger against another, mouthing the words “Naughty, naughty.” Seated one afternoon at an outdoor café on Mulberry Street, Gotti saw Rudolph Giuliani, the U.S. Attorney, eyeing him as he slowly drove by. Laughing at the prosecutor, Gotti gave him the naughty-naughty treatment, implying that Giuliani was spying on him. On other occasions, he turned toward detectives following him, mockingly formed his hand into the shape of a gun, and mouthed, “Bang, bang.”

The night was party time for Gotti; he rarely missed an evening at Regines, Da Noi, or other voguish restaurants or supper clubs. His favorite drinks were invariably among the most expensive, often Remy Martin Louis XIII brandy or Roederer Cristal Rose champagne, each at $1,000 a bottle. His notoriety and
his glamorous image always turned heads as people eagerly tried to get a look at him. Dining one night with Gotti, Sammy Gravano asked if he disliked people constantly staring at him. “No, no,” Gotti exclaimed joyously. “This is my public, Sammy. They love me.” Gravano thought Gotti had come to view himself as an heroic figure, genuinely admired by most New Yorkers.

At a period when celebrity gossip was a staple for many newspapers and TV news programs, Gotti’s cavalier insouciance became an entertaining sidelight. News editors and TV producers relished fluffy yarns illuminating the social and private behavior of the smiling mobster. He was headlined by the tabloid press as “the Dapper Don” and “the Teflon Don,” two appellations that he considered pleasing compliments. “Dapper” of course signified his near obsession with his high-style appearance. “Teflon” was a headline writer’s transfer to Gotti of a title first widely applied to Ronald Reagon, the “Teflon President,” because of his ability to avoid blame for blunders and scandals in his administration. Simply put, like food in a Teflon pan, no criminal charges stuck to the new godfather.

With Gotti’s notoriety, every event in his life was grist for the media. How could editors ignore the extravagant wedding of his son, John A., more widely known as “Junior”? Held in the ornate Versailles Room at the Helmsley Palace, one of New York’s most regal hotels, the nuptial reception cost nearly $100,000. The guest list of 200 included the top tier of the nation’s Cosa Nostra. At the insistence of the bridegroom’s father, the hotel flew the Italian flag over its main entrance, an honor normally extended only to visiting heads of state and foreign dignitaries.

Fed with items supplied by Bruce Cutler and other lawyers, reporters had ample yarns about Gotti’s endearing, charitable personality. There were stories about his popularity in South Ozone Park; how he paid for July 4th block parties with free food, drinks, and fireworks, and appeared dressed in an immaculate white suit; how a local hospital, the Baptist Medical Center, honored him with a huge lobby plaque for donating $10,000; how he could quote Machiavelli.

Investigators knew that the amiable personality Gotti displayed in public was a fraudulent mask disguising a narcissistic tyrant with an incendiary temper. His lawyers claimed that he hated narcotics. Unlike Paul Castellano, however, Gotti never issued an edict that Mob execution awaited Gambino soldiers who were caught trafficking in narcotics. Castellano hypocritically accepted payoffs from soldiers secretly involved in drugs, but he never met openly with
suspected big-time dealers. Gotti did. In addition to his brother Gene and Angelo Ruggiero, who were indicted in a major heroin transaction, he conferred and dined with international dealers. Two of them, the brothers John and Joseph Gambino, were distant cousins of Carlo Gambino, and ran a Sicilian-born crew in New Jersey and in New York for Gotti.

Additionally, one of Gotti’s first moves as boss was to order a capo, Patsy Conte, to revive his heroin pipeline with the Sicilian Mafia. Gotti knew that Conte had regularly supplied Castellano with huge sums, and once, as a Christmas present, had presented him with a new Mercedes. A furious Gotti sent Gravano to lecture Conte. Terrified by the dressing down, the abject Conte said he had stopped trafficking only because he believed Gotti was opposed to it.

“I don’t care what you have to do,” Gravano warned. “You brought in tons of money under Paul, and in this administration you’re bringing in nothing. I don’t want to know anything about it [heroin deals]. What I want, what John Gotti wants, is money, the same situation that Paul had.”

The fate of Willie Boy Johnson, the disgraced FBI informer, exemplified Gotti’s implacable vengeance. At the RICO trial in Brooklyn, Gotti cast Johnson out of his Mob organization. But he swore to Johnson on the memory of his dead son that there would be no deadly retaliation for his treachery. Staying clear of the Bergin crew, Johnson got a legitimate job and moved to the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. On August 29, 1988, sixteen months after the trial, three men were waiting for him when he left for work. Ten shots were fired, with six striking Willie Boy at close range. Police and the FBI had no doubt that Gotti had bided his time and then exacted his revenge. Of course, Gotti had an alibi for the murder. Confronted by a
New York
Post reporter for his reaction to the slaying, Gotti was concise: “Well, we all gotta go sometime.”

Through informers, investigators heard of the behavioral theme that Gotti wanted his capos to impart to soldiers. Even if arrested, his troops were not to skulk nor appear repentant like ordinary criminals. At trials, they were required to imitate his style: dress expensively, wear jewelry, and appear fearless. “Put it in their face,” Gotti urged Sammy the Bull Gravano. “They want to see fucking lions and tigers and that’s what we are.”

Gotti’s glamorization by the tabloid press and his truculent challenges to authority lay like sharp-edged bones in the throats of the city’s top law-enforcement officials. Most were prohibited by internal agency rules from publicly condemning Gotti since he was not charged with a crime. The exception
was Jules Bonavolonta, one of the first FBI agents to recognize the importance of the RICO law. Now supervising the bureau’s organized-crime division in New York, Bonavolonta was affronted by Gotti’s favorable press treatment. “He’s a former two-bit hijacker and a degenerate gambler who rules right now because he is ruthless and vicious,” Bonavolonta told reporters. (From informers’ scuttlebutt, the FBI knew that even Gambino soldiers were astonished at some of Gotti’s high-stakes losing sprees, including $300,000 in sports bets with non-Gambino bookies in one weekend.)

As the nation’s largest investigative force, which had trumpeted its intention to demolish the Mafia, the FBI was under pressure to crush the arrogant Gotti. Within the bureau, responsibility for results fell on the Gambino Squad and its supervisor, Bruce Mouw. He refused to be stampeded into hastily assembling a rickety case that Gotti might again overcome. Despite the hoopla about Gotti, he was a newly installed boss, and Mouw understood that a new plan was needed to lasso him. Mouw’s choice for the case agent who would work exclusively on digging up evidence against the Teflon Don was George Gabriel. Six-feet four-inches tall and athletically built, Gabriel had been working Mob investigations with the squad for only a year. The thirty-year-old agent had previously been assigned to hostage rescue and antiterrorist SWAT units, but Mouw considered him “one of the sharpest, most aggressive agents I ever met.” Mouw also recognized that Gabriel’s size and muscle would discourage any of Gotti’s gorillas from trying to intimidate him in a tight spot.

“Agents fight for this kind of case, and I could see how excited George was for the challenge when I offered the job to him,” Mouw recalled. His instructions to Gabriel were similar to his basic guidelines for the entire squad: “Be patient, focus on making a viable prosecution, don’t go on endless, wild-goose white-collar crime chases. Concentrate on what Gotti knows best—murder, extortion, and shylocking.”

While Mouw began searching for irrefutable evidence, federal and state prosecutors were maneuvering and jousting among themselves over future Gotti prosecutions. Andrew Maloney, the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District, began the contest by taking the short subway ride from downtown Brooklyn to the Manhattan office of his counterpart in the Southern District, Rudolph Giuliani. Several years earlier, Maloney had been in the running for the esteemed Southern District post. Upon Giuliani’s appointment, Senator Alfonse D’Amato offered Maloney a consolation prize, nomination to the Eastern District’s top job. Disappointed and considering himself “a Southern District man,”
having been a prosecutor there for ten years, Maloney turned down D’Amato’s first offer. Three years later he changed his mind, leaving a private law practice to accept the senator’s endorsement and President Reagan’s nomination for the Eastern District post.

The Southern District is viewed in the legal profession as the Justice Department’s crown jewel. Maloney knew he was taking charge of a district overshadowed by its neighbor’s reputation, and which many lawyers and prosecutors jokingly thought had a collective “inferiority complex.” Gotti’s RICO acquittal was a severe drubbing to the Eastern District’s prestige, and Maloney, a canny litigator and a knowledgeable hand at Justice Department politics, was dedicated to quickly repairing his office’s image. A welterweight boxing champion at West Point, Maloney knew the importance of landing the first solid punch.

When Giuliani and Maloney met in the spring of 1987 for a confidential tussle over who would get John Gotti, Maloney was a new U.S. Attorney without a distinguished record. In contrast, after three years of overseeing dozens of high-profile cases—the convictions of the Mob’s Commission, billionaire Wall Street inside-traders, and corrupt politicians—Rudy Giuliani had been enshrined by his admirers as the country’s super-prosecutor.

Unfazed by Giuliani’s aura, Maloney brusquely got to the point: the Eastern District would prosecute the next RICO indictment against Gotti. Both prosecutors knew that each of their offices could claim rights to the case under the crazy-quilt jurisdictional map of the region. The Gambino family had extensive operations in Manhattan, the Bronx, and the suburban counties north of the city, all in the Southern District. Moreover, the Castellano-Bilotti murders eighteen months earlier, outside Sparks Steak House, had occurred in Manhattan, and Giuliani had impaneled a grand jury, which was hearing evidence about the slayings.

Maloney’s jurisdiction included Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and Long Island, which, he countered, was the Gambinos’ “main power base.”

“It’s a matter of honor for my office,” Maloney said firmly to Giuliani. “I want you to back off. I don’t want the FBI going in three directions with different prosecutors and with your office and my office competing for information. I know you think no office can try a case as effectively as yours, but you’re wrong; we can.”

Besides the two federal prosecutors, the Manhattan district attorney’s office also was involved, collaborating with Giuliani on the Sparks slayings. Homicide
cases, even if they are Mafia-related, are normally the responsibility of local police and state authorities. But the importance of Castellano’s murder had led to a combined FBI and police inquiry. Under a bill that agents dubbed “the Hit Man’s Statute,” Congress in 1984 empowered federal attorneys to prosecute mobsters for murders committed in aid of racketeering or for enhancing a position in a RICO enterprise, such as a Mafia family or a drug cartel. Saying he was committed to a joint investigation with the politically important Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau, Giuliani refused to discontinue the murder probe or turn it over to Maloney.

The meeting, which Maloney referred to as “a sit-down,” ended in a split agreement. Giuliani’s office would handle and prosecute the Castellano-Bilotti murders with Morgenthau, and Maloney would be in charge of a initiating a RICO enterprise case. With Giuliani’s strong connections to the Justice Department’s highest officials, he almost assuredly would have prevailed in an internal political battle if he had asked Washington to resolve the RICO jurisdictional contest in his favor. But another political conflict might have affected Giuliani’s decision. A New York election was near, and Giuliani was contemplating a run for mayor. A RICO case can take years to develop, leading to speculation by prosecutors about Giuliani’s prime reason for quickly conceding the larger RICO inquiry to Maloney. The consensus was that Giuliani knew that by the time an indictment of Gotti was ready, he probably would no longer be a U.S. Attorney and get the applause for nailing him.

Another prosecutor in the race to indict Gotti was the state’s Organized Crime Task Force director, Ronald Goldstock. His office had a valuable asset: audiotapes from the bugged conversations in Gotti’s private offices adjacent to the Bergin club, recorded shortly after he became boss. Several days after Diane Giacalone’s case went down the drain in Brooklyn, Giuliani wanted to hear the tapes of Gotti’s incriminating remarks. According to Goldstock, he and Giuliani planned to pool their resources to investigate Gotti for a RICO indictment, including the murders of Castellano and Bilotti. “We both felt that Gotti was mocking law enforcement, and every day he was out there was bad for our credibility,” Goldstock said. But Giuliani abruptly withdrew his offer, telling Goldstock, “I’d love to have this case but I can’t do it. Maloney has drawn a line in the sand. I don’t want to be seen stealing his case. You have to go to the Eastern District.”

Confident that he had the foundation of a “great enterprise case” against Gotti from the tapes, Goldstock met with Maloney and Edward McDonald,
from the Eastern District’s Organized Crime Strike Force. All regional strike forces reported directly to the Justice Department in Washington, and there were often ill feelings between these units and their respective U.S. Attorneys. It was McDonald who had belittled Giacalone’s evidence before she took on Gotti in her RICO indictment.

Goldstock now pitched his electronic-eavesdropping evidence at the two federal officials who ran separate prosecutorial units. The state’s bug in Gotti’s office had been reactivated immediately after Castellano’s murder, picking up conversations between Gotti and some of his closest cronies for four months, until Giacalone jailed him for the duration of his trial. Goldstock enthusiastically reported to Maloney and McDonald that the eavesdropping had caught Gotti threatening a loan-shark victim, authorizing an assault on a union leader, boasting about bookmaking joints in his Queens domain, and discussing organizational changes he was making in the Gambino borgata. “It’s really excellent material and evidence for RICO with Gotti as the head of an enterprise,” Gold-stock declared. “He’s talking continually about how he was elected boss, where money is coming from, and who’s going to control what.”