Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (74 page)

Maloney and McDonald each had authority to use Goldstock’s evidence for a RICO case. But they were unimpressed. Echoing each other, they thought the bugged remarks were too vague and circumstantial. The bugs, they agreed, were insufficient to convict Gotti on predicate counts—that he actually knew or participated in the crimes. “We need more evidence to back up the bugs,” Maloney insisted. “Your evidence won’t stand up against this guy. If we’re going to bring him down, we have to make sure he’s dead center in our sights. The evidence has to be more than just solid, it has to be overwhelming; otherwise we’re going to make him look really invincible.”

Maloney accepted Goldstock’s tapes as a starting point, but he was far from ready to present their contents to a grand jury. Sizing up Gotti as an overconfident braggart, Maloney was relying on Mouw’s FBI squad to find the “smoking gun” guaranteed to destroy the haughty Gambino godfather.

Free from jail and courtrooms, John Gotti rarely left the New York area. The fearless mobster abhorred flying. After Salvatore Ruggiero, the narcotics merchant, died in a private plane crash, Gotti vowed never to step aboard a plane and place his fate in the hands of a pilot. His longest holiday trips were to a hotel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he traveled by train with a covey of
card-playing bodyguards. The journeys were working vacations, giving him the opportunity to confer with Gambino members handling the family’s extensive rackets in southern Florida. Boats were more to Gotti’s liking, and he piloted cigarette speedboats off the Florida and New York coasts; his boat in Florida was named
Not Guilty
. The aquatic excursions paralleled his penchant for fast cars. Before becoming a boss, he was stopped four times for speeding and other violations, and once had his driver’s license suspended for driving while impaired by alcohol. Closer to home, he took brief summer vacations in a private cottage at fashionable Gurney’s Inn in Montauk, at the eastern tip of Long Island. For weekend getaways he bought a $300,000 house in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, deeded in the name of his eldest son, John A. There was no nameplate or mailbox on the house. But a Pennsylvania Dutch hex sign affixed to a stone veranda, spelled out “LOVE.”

Undaunted by the campaign he knew law-enforcement agencies were waging against him, Gotti had vast criminal businesses and organizational questions that demanded his attention. The FBI electronic eavesdropping in Angelo Ruggiero’s Long Island home had not trapped Gotti. Fearful of telephone taps, Gotti had been circumspect in his telephone conversations with Fat Ange, and he had never ventured into Ruggiero’s bugged dinette. The bugs and Fat Ange’s incessant talking had been a godsend to the government. McDonald’s Organized Crime Strike Force had used the recordings to indict Ruggiero and Gene Gotti on heroin-trafficking charges. Ruggiero’s chatter also helped McDonald’s prosecutors construct RICO cases against two Gambino veterans, Joe Piney Armone, Gotti’s second underboss, and Joe N. Gallo, the elderly consigliere.

Two trials of Ruggiero and Gene Gotti on the narcotics accusations ended in mistrials as, each time, extra-vigilant prosecutors and FBI agents uncovered apparent jury-tampering attempts. Ruggiero became terminally ill with lung cancer and was severed from a third trial in the spring of 1989. This time, Gene Gotti was convicted and sentenced to a minimum
term of twenty
years.

Armone and Joe Gallo, both in their seventies, were found guilty of enterprise racketeering, which for them meant almost certain death in prison before completing their sentences. Citing Gallo’s poor health and age, the judge allowed him to be released temporarily to spend a last Christmas with his relatives before going off permanently to prison. For Armone, the judge would only permit a Christmas leave if he admitted to a lifetime of crime and membership in the Gambino borgata. Upon taking control, one of Gotti’s first rules was that
capos and soldiers could never acknowledge the existence of the family, even if it meant a reduced sentence. Desperate for a last visit with his personal family, Armone sent a message to Gotti, asking for permission to accept the judge’s conditions. “No, we can’t do that,” Gotti chided Armone’s nephew, capo John Handsome Jack Giordano, who delivered the plea. “It would send out a wrong message.”

Armone rejected the judge’s offer. Gotti’s cold refusal was intended as a directive to all Gambino members that the boss was pitiless, his rules unbreakable. Old friend Fat Ange Ruggiero received a dose of similar mean-spirited treatment. Infuriated by the damage caused by Ruggiero’s careless talk, Gotti demoted him from capo to soldier at a time when Ruggiero, his 250-pound frame reduced to a weight of less than 150 pounds, lay fatally ill with cancer. Despite fervent requests from Ruggiero’s friends and relatives, Gotti refused to visit or telephone his devoted follower in his final days. Ruggiero died in 1989 at age forty-nine.

The imprisonment of Gotti’s underboss Armone and consigliere Gallo required a hierarchy realignment. Gotti’s choice for the number-two post as underboss was Frank “Frankie Loc” Locascio, a capo who had been aligned with Neil Dellacroce before Gotti’s takeover. An old-school gangster, Frankie Loc was an expert practitioner in gambling and loan-sharking, but untutored in sophisticated extortion and white-collar rackets. Now in his mid-fifties, his claims to Mafia fame were that he was one of the youngest wannabes ever made, inducted when he was in his early twenties, and that he ran the Bronx and Westchester County rackets for the family with an expert hand. To replace the imprisoned Gallo as consigliere, Gotti in 1987 named Sammy the Bull Gravano, the capo he had come increasingly to rely on. Reviewing management techniques with his new counselor, Gotti thought Gravano was overly generous in sharing the wealth with his closest lieutenants and helpmates. “Listen to me,” advised Gotti, who before reaching the top had chafed at Paul Castellano’s greed. “Keep them broke. Keep them hungry. Don’t make them too fat.”

When it came to dividing the family’s lucre from the construction industry, Gotti had no compunction about accepting the meatiest portions. Gravano, the family’s construction-rackets specialist, was delivering to Gotti about $2 million a year, 80 percent of his own shake-downs, and keeping the remaining $500,000 for himself.

Learning about the regime changes from informers and FBI surveillance intelligence reports, Bruce Mouw arrived at his own appraisals of the new regime.
“Locascio is as loyal as a sheep dog,” the FBI supervisor concluded. “John will never have
to worry that Frankie
will do to him what he did to Castellano.” Mouw thought Gotti wanted a stolid “Yes sir, no sir type” underboss, not an ambitious one with a large entourage of his own who might someday challenge him. Gravano, a big earner, had a loyal following from his old crew, and if he wished could gain additional adherents by cutting them in on his construction-industry largess. Puffing on his ubiquitous pipe and trying to plumb Gotti’s state of mind, Mouw reckoned that Sammy the Bull, not Locascio, was the strong man next to the throne and the godfather’s real right hand.

Because of a conversation in a toilet, Mouw soon had a valid reason for a second personal get-together with Gotti. In the summer of 1987, as part of an investigation of the Genovese family in New Jersey, the bureau’s Newark office had placed a bug in a rest room at Cassella’s Restaurant in Hoboken. The restaurant was owned by a Genovese soldier, and agents had figured out that the rest room was used for Mob conferences. Listening in one night, agents heard Louis “Bobby the Thin Man” Manna, the family’s consigliere, discussing with other wiseguys possible methods of bumping off John Gotti and his brother Gene. The essence of the conversation was that the hit contract came from the Genovese boss, Vincent “Chin” Gigante.

Obligated by bureau policy to warn Gotti of the threat, Mouw and George Gabriel, the Gotti case agent, arrived at his Howard Beach home well past noon. Gotti was still in bed, and Mouw told Vicky Gotti that there was a good reason to wake him. A huge Rottweiler on the lawn began barking fiercely, leading Mouw to wonder how it would look in news stories if he were attacked by Gotti’s dog and had to shoot the animal in self-defense. He could imagine the headline: “FBI Whacks Gotti’s Pet.”

Shuffling downstairs in a bathrobe, Gotti calmed the Rottweiler. “Great dog, I love him,” Gotti said, seemingly undisturbed by the sight of two FBI agents on his doorstep. “What’s up?”

“This is official,” Mouw began. “We have information that your life is in danger. Another family is going to take you out.”

“I got no problems,” Gotti said, laughing. “I got nothing to worry about. Thanks, fellas.”
But his expression
changed when Mouw added, “It’s the West Side,” a reference they all understood meant Vincent Gigante’s turf, Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.

Mouw later related, “He blinked when I said ‘the West Side,’ because that meant something to him.” Mouw withheld from Gotti the specifics of how the FBI had unearthed the death threat and which gangsters were involved. Too many details, he worried, might trigger a war between two Mafia families. From informers and surveillance, agents immediately noted that Gotti took Mouw’s warning seriously. The Gambino boss quickly altered his daily travel patterns and increased the number of bodyguards accompanying him on his business and social rounds. Gotti also mulled over the warning with Gravano and other confidants, according to informers. Was Mouw’s message a trick by the FBI to incite friction with the Genovese family or was the warning accurate? For the first time, Gotti speculated that his first underboss, Frank DeCicco, might have been blown to bits on orders from Chin Gigante, in retaliation for the murder of his fellow boss and business partner, Paul Castellano. Gotti ordered that his Mercedes and all his cars be vigilantly inspected for bombs.

As an insurance policy, Gotti sent out signals through Gravano to the Genovese administration that he harbored no ill feelings toward Gigante. Indeed, within a year, the two bosses agreed to convene a truncated Commission meeting, signifying that neither of them was hostile to the other. It was the first formal gathering of godfathers since the Old Guard bosses had been convicted in the Commission case, two years previously. Besides Gotti, Gigante, and their deputies, the leaders of the Lucchese borgata took part in the conference. Excluded were the unsettled Colombos, because a permanent successor had yet to be chosen for Carmine Persico, that family’s imprisoned boss, and the outcast Bonanno family, which remained under interdiction because of its past narcotics violations and infiltration by an FBI agent.

The representatives of the three largest borgatas met in the autumn of 1988 in the Greenwich Village home of a brother of a Gambino capo, Frankie D’Apolito. It was in a huge apartment complex called Washington Square Village, built by New York University mainly for its faculty. But the relatives of more than one mobster had managed to obtain apartments in the highly desirable neighborhood. In fact, Vincent Gigante’s relatives had an apartment in the building where the gangsters met, and at the time of the Commission meeting he was occupying it while recuperating from open-heart surgery.

As Gotti and Gravano were escorted into the building through an underground garage by D’Apolito, they encountered the Lucchese boss, Vittorio “Little Vic” Amuso, and his underboss, Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso. “What a great
place for a hit,” Casso murmured to the others as the tempting targets moved en masse through
the basement
.

One issue discussed at the meeting was whether to approve a seat on the Commission for Vic Orena, at that time Persico’s choice as acting boss of the Colombos. Gotti endorsed Orena, and he also wanted to restore the Bonannos to the Commission by permitting its new acting boss, Joseph Massino, to sit in and have a vote. Gravano knew that Orena and Massino were Gotti allies, and with
them in his corner
he would control a majority on the Commission and become the supreme leader of the nation’s Cosa Nostra.

Gigante and the Luccheses had no objection to seating Orena as the Colombo representative to the Commission, but Gigante was cool to readmitting the Bonannos to the Mafia’s ruling body. Before the meeting ended, the Gambino boss announced that his son Junior had recently been inducted as a
made man
. “I’m sorry to hear that,” Gigante said, disappointing Gotti. Gotti had expected congratulations on his son’s career choice, but Gigante commented that he would never bring his own sons into the perilous orbit of the Cosa Nostra.

On a wintry Wednesday evening two months after the Commission meeting, Gotti was engaged in a walk-talk with capo Handsome Jack Giordano. They were strolling on Prince Street, around the corner from the Ravenite Club, when a car screeched to a halt alongside them. Four men with drawn guns jumped out, shouting, “Stop right there! Police!” Gotti, shoved face forward against a wall, with legs spread apart and his hands raised above his head, was roughly frisked by an expert, Joe Coffey, a former New York detective working for the state Organized Crime Task Force. “Are you wearing a gun, you cock-sucker?” Coffey, a brash, old-school cop growled,
touching
a metallic object on Gotti’s waist. “It’s only my belt buckle,” Gotti said, as his hands were cuffed behind his back. He was hustled into a waiting car and driven a short distance to police headquarters in downtown Manhattan for booking.

Less than two years after being acquitted on federal RICO counts, Gotti was again under arrest. Confronting him this time were state felony accusations that he had ordered
the shooting of
a union official. “Three-to-one I beat this charge,” Gotti quipped with a smirk when Coffey read the official complaint to him.

The new indictment for assault and conspiracy arose mainly from the persistence of the state task force’s Ronald Goldstock, and a bug his investigators had
planted in Gotti’s office sanctum next to the Bergin Club. In February and May 1986, his first months as a boss, the electronic spying picked up discussions between Gotti and his men, apparently about a plan to punish a carpenters’ union leader in Manhattan named John F. O’Connor. From the drift of the conversations, Goldstock believed that Gotti held O’Connor responsible for wrecking a new restaurant secretly owned by Philip Modica, a Gambino soldier. While constructing his Bankers and Brokers Restaurant in Battery Park City, Modica had refused to bribe O’Connor or hire union carpenters. O’Connor was connected to the Genovese family and later would be convicted on corruption charges, but he apparently was unaware that the new restaurant was “protected,” and the Gambinos blamed him for vandalizing the place in retaliation for his not getting payoffs or union jobs.