Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (75 page)

One May morning in 1986, O’Connor, the business manager and top executive of Local 608, was waiting for an elevator in the lobby of his Midtown office building. Suddenly, he thought he heard thunder and felt searing pain throughout his body. Spinning around, he saw a man pointing a gun at him. As O’Connor slipped to the floor, more shots were fired at him. He was hit several times in the legs and buttocks. Based on clues from the bugged conversations in Gotti’s office, Goldstock and his investigators were certain the attack on O’Connor had been arranged by Gotti; it was another example of the sordid Mob and union treachery plaguing New York’s construction industry.

Andrew Maloney, the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District, had reviewed the fragments from Goldstock’s tapes and believed they were too weak and inconclusive to use in a trial against Gotti. Goldstock’s interest in the case was revived in late 1988, when a killer from the Westies gang named James McElroy, searching for an escape hatch to wriggle out of a life prison term, reached out to the authorities. For a reduction in his sentence he could implicate the nation’s most prominent mobster, John Gotti, in the O’Connor shooting. “I wouldn’t rat out an Irish guy, but the Italians, who gives a shit?” McElroy candidly told a detective.

McElroy’s testimony, Goldstock hoped, would bolster evidence his office had collected through audiotapes and would clinch Gotti’s conviction. The turncoat’s account of the shooting sounded accurate. He swore that he had met with Gotti, and that the Gambino boss had farmed out the O’Connor contract to the Westies. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, however, again rejected Goldstock’s theory, viewing the sleazy McElroy’s claims as too fragile for a conviction. After being rebuffed a second time by Eastern District prosecutors,
Goldstock brought the evidence to Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. Because O’Connor had been shot in Manhattan, Morgenthau had state jurisdiction. A former U.S. Attorney in Manhattan and the son of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, he had one of the most impressive prosecutorial records in the country. His personal influence and the prestige of his office was on a par with that of U.S. Attorneys, and his decision to prosecute Gotti lent extraordinary weight to the indictment. Moreover, neither Morgenthau nor Goldstock could deny that sinking John Gotti would be a magnificent milestone for both of them. Framing the importance of the case, Morgenthau announced that if Gotti were convicted, he would seek to have him sentenced as a “persistent predicate felon,” a three-time loser, subject to a harsh prison term. The two felony convictions on Gotti’s record were for hijacking and the attempted manslaughter of James McBratney in Staten Island, performed as a favor for Carlo Gambino. Under New York law, a third felony could brand him as incorrigible, subjecting him to a minimum sentence of twenty-five years and a maximum of life.

A year after being arrested on his walk-talk, in January 1990 a beaming Gotti was center stage once more in a Manhattan courtroom. Originally, he was joined by two codefendants, Angelo Ruggiero, his former close confederate, and Anthony “Tony Lee” Guerrieri, a soldier, both of whom were caught on the tapes allegedly helping Gotti arrange the assault. Ruggiero’s indictment was severed because of his terminal illness.

Maintaining his sartorial splendor for the duration of the trial, Gotti was appropriately elegant in one of his custom-tailored silk double-breasted suits, set off with floral ties and matching lapel handkerchiefs over his heart. The sixty-year-old Guerrieri, a bookmaking and loan-sharking lightweight, was an inconsequential, almost invisible extra at the defense table. The headline attraction was John Gotti. Unlike his well-tailored boss, Guerrieri appeared in wrinkled suits and checkered jackets, often in noisy hues of chartreuse and fire-engine red.

Before Gotti’s RICO victory over Diane Giacalone’s prosecution, his lawyer Bruce Cutler had been a minor figure in the criminal-defense bar. His widely publicized triumph in the RICO trial, combined with Cutler’s histrionic courtroom tactics and his outspoken jibes against prosecutors, had turned him into a legal celebrity. Cutler’s opening speech was an attempt to put the prosecutors in the dock. It was a rerun of the defense strategy at the earlier RICO trial in
Brooklyn, another scathing personal vilification of the prosecutors. His voice rising to theatrical levels, Gotti’s counsel paced before the jury, at times pounding on a desk, a bible, or a lectern, as he derided the prosecution’s case. He termed Ronald Goldstock a “publicity mad” official who had “peddled” the Gotti tapes for years, looking for a prosecutor who would do his bidding. Robert Morgenthau was characterized as “hungry for political power,” willing to frame Gotti in a witch hunt fueled by “Mafia hysteria” and “a lust for headlines.”

Dressed in imitation of his client in a double-breasted suit and flowery necktie, Cutler portrayed Gotti in softer tones as a rehabilitated ex-convict who had refocused his life to become a community leader and a model citizen. Twice he had been cleared of biased charges brought by unscrupulous prosecutors. Comparing his client’s exemplary character to that of James McElroy’s, Cutler accused the prosecution of contriving a case on the words of a “psychotic killer, a lying bum,” who would say anything to get a lenient sentence for his own horrific crimes.

Lead prosecutor Michael G. Cherkasky, a battle-hardened trial lawyer, took eleven days to meticulously present his evidence. Cherkasky’s strategy for conviction hinged primarily on six words said by Gotti on Goldstock’s tape: “We’re gonna, gonna bust him up.” On February 7, 1986, shortly after the Gambino-controlled Bankers and Brokers Restaurant had been severely damaged, Gotti and Guerrieri were heard talking about locating O’Connor, the head of Carpenters’ Local 608. According to the prosecution’s interpretations of the bugged conversation, Gotti instructed Guerrieri before the assault was carried out to determine if O’Connor was associated with any crime family. Cherkasky played the salient excerpt for the jury.

G
OTTI
: “608, John O’Connor 608, er, at 16 something Broadway, 1694 Broadway somethin’ like that, Broadway, Carpenters.”

GUERRIERI: “In other words you want to see if…”

G
OTTI
: “Ah, he’s a business agent.”

GUERRIERI: “TO talk, or somebody who could talk to him.”

G
OTTI
: “No, we want to see who he’s with.”

GUERRIERI: “Oh, oh.”

G
OTTI
: “We’re gonna, gonna bust him up.”

Those last six words, “We’re gonna, gonna bust him up,” comprised the marrow of the prosecution’s indictment. Cherkasky also relied on segments from ten other tapes, which he contended showed Gotti ordering the attack. Another relevant conversation was recorded on May 7, 1986, several hours after
O’Connor was shot. In that one, Gene Gotti came in to interrupt Gotti and Ruggiero.

G
ENE
G
OTTI
(
WHISPERING
): “John O’Connor’s been shot four times. They hit him in the legs. I heard it on the news. Angelo, it went off just like that.”

R
UGGIERO
: “Oh, yeah.”

G
ENE
G
OTTI
: “Heh, heh, heh (unintelligible). Heard it on the news.”

After playing the tapes, Cherkasky argued that Gotti as a new boss had a motive for retaliating against O’Connor. He had to quickly demonstrate his authority and power to the entire Mafia underworld in New York.

Except for the tapes, the prosecution depended on a single turncoat, the Westie James Patrick McElroy. Before getting to his star witness’s testimony against Gotti, Cherkasky had to acknowledge McElroy’s gory catalogue of crimes and lies. Husky-voiced, his eyes panning the courtroom, McElroy said that starting at age fourteen, he participated in murders, assaults, knifings, armed robberies, drug deals, loan-sharking, and bookmaking—too many episodes to remember. Now forty-five and convicted on RICO charges, he was serving a minimum of sixty years before becoming eligible for parole. Despite having frequently lied in the past on the witness stand, McElroy said his testimony implicating Gotti was the truth.

McElroy’s version began in April 1986, when he accompanied James Coonan, the Westies leader, to the wake in Brooklyn for Frank DeCicco, the Gambino underboss blown apart in the mysterious auto explosion. Years earlier, Coonan had made a handshake deal with Paul Castellano for the Westies to work as a farm team for the Gambinos. At the funeral home, Coonan introduced McElroy to Gotti, who asked, “Is this the kid?” Later, after he and Coonan met privately with Angelo Ruggiero, Coonan told McElroy that the Westies had an assignment from the Gambinos. “He said we want to break this carpenter guy’s legs. John O’Connor, because he messed up some guy’s restaurant.”

“Did he tell you who you were going to do it for?” asked Cherkasky.

“Yes,” replied McElroy. “John Gotti.”

On the morning that O’Connor was wounded, McElroy said, he was one of four Westies who ambushed the union leader but he did not fire at him.

During four hours of cross-examination, Cutler and another defense lawyer, Gerald Shargel, tore into McElroy, trying to raise doubts about his account of having met Gotti. Calling him a “yellow dog,” “a Benzedrine head,” “an equal-opportunity killer,” the lawyers got him to admit that his one slim chance of
getting out of prison was helping the prosecution and being placed in the Witness Protection Program.

Ironically, the only defense witness was the victim of the Westies attack, John O’Connor. Under investigation at the time and later convicted for labor racketeering, O’Connor had refused to testify before the grand jury that indicted Gotti or to answer questions about his links to the Mafia. However, he aided the defense, saying he had never been warned by state investigators that his life might be in danger, thereby suggesting that the authorities had not considered Gotti’s secretly recorded talks as a threat.

The rules of evidence prevented the prosecution from explaining or offering testimony as to why O’Connor had not been forewarned. Before the shooting, state investigators considered Gotti’s words about O’Connor too vague to constitute a threat. “On the tapes Gotti was angry about many people,” Goldstock said. “That doesn’t mean he was trying to kill them.”

O’Connor also testified that he was involved in rancorous union conflicts and had numerous enemies within the union. The statements provided the defense with a theory that rivals had motives to assault O’Connor.

Staring placidly at the jury, which had deliberated four days, John Gotti listened to the verdicts. “Not guilty,” the jury foreman announced on the counts, two charges of assault and two charges of conspiracy. The forgotten defendant, Tony Lee Guerrieri, was also acquitted, but Gotti was the one who counted. It was Friday, February 9, 1990, and outside the courthouse, more than one thousand people cheered as Gotti emerged, raising his right arm in a gladiatorial victory salute. A maroon Cadillac idled at the curb, and Gotti, protected by his brawny brother Peter and a bodyguard, ducked into the car for the ride a few blocks away to his Mulberry Street redoubt. Another crowd roared, and fireworks were detonated as he strode into the Ravenite Social Club, where a grinning Sammy the Bull Gravano, and a throng of mobsters, waited to offer hosannas and congratulations.

In South Ozone Park, red balloons bedecked the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club. Pennants were strung from the club to a lamppost, and a sign in the window proclaimed: “Congratulations John and Tony. We love you.” At Gotti’s home in Howard Beach, yellow balloons, a symbol of remembrance of hostages and prisoners of war, were tied to a wrought-iron fence. People in passing cars honked their horns and shouted, “Terrific! Great!”

Among the cheering fans on the narrow street outside the Ravenite, a local resident, who gave his name to reporters as Louis D., summed up the adulatory
views of many spectators who believed Gotti was being persecuted. “He’s like Robin Hood,” Louis exclaimed. “All the people cheered for him when he won.”

Questioned by reporters, jurors discounted the
prosecution’s
basic pillars. They critiqued the audio quality of the tapes as poor, and said that many of the conversations were difficult to hear and understand. Although Gotti’s “bust him up” phrase was clearly heard, it was unconvincing proof to the skeptical jury of his intent to harm O’Connor. Equally important, none of the interviewed jurors found James McElroy, the prosecution’s prize witness,
credible
.

The court triumph, his third acquittal in four years, magnified Gotti’s reputation for invincibility and as the undisputed icon of organized crime. Lawyers wondered if law-enforcement agencies would risk prosecuting him again unless they could build an absolutely airtight case. Amid the uproar over Gotti’s latest success, Jules Bonavolonta, commander of the FBI’s
organized-crime
section in New York, pointed out an overlooked fact. “Listen,” he told
The New York Times
. “The FBI hasn’t brought a case against Gotti yet. When we do, he can take all the bets he wants, because he’s going away to prison for a long time.”

Mrs. Cirelli’s Holiday