Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (77 page)

“When DiB got whacked, they told me a story. I was in jail when they whacked him. I knew why it was being done. I allowed it to be done, anyway.”

He attributed the second murder partly to his reliance on Sammy the Bull Gravano. The victim, a Gambino soldier named Louis DiBono, had a history of disputes with Gravano over the division of profits from construction rackets. Gotti suspected that Gravano had personal reasons for wanting DiBono killed. In retrospect, he believed that Sammy had lied about DiBono’s cheating him and the Gambino administration. Even if he doubted Gravano, Gotti said, he wanted DiBono eliminated for another reason: he had defied Gotti’s summons to appear for a showdown session.

“Louie DiBono,” Gotti continued. “You know why he’s dying? He’s gonna die because he refused to come in when I called. He didn’t do nothing else wrong.”

For good measure, Gotti implicated himself in a third murder that he had approved. In a virtually unbroken monologue to Locascio, he dropped the name of the victim, a Gambino soldier from the Castellano faction named Li-borio “Louie” Milito. A former partner of Gravano’s on hits and in profitable construction projects, Milito had fallen out of favor and was seen by Gotti as a disobedient malcontent.

That night in the Cirelli apartment, Gotti also was peeved at Gravano’s construction-industry deals. Expressing his concern that Gravano was using construction rackets to mold a private power base inside the family, Gotti raged, “You’re creating an army inside an army. You know what I’m saying, Frankie?”

“End up creating another faction,” Locascio chimed in.

“That’s right,” Gotti shouted back.

Ticking off his complaints about Gravano, Gotti implied that Sammy the Bull was fomenting unnecessary murders of his illicit business partners. “Every fucking time I turn around there’s a new company popping up. And every time we got a partner that don’t agree with us, we kill him.” Obviously wound up about Gravano’s plans, Gotti added, “And, I tell him a million times, ‘Sammy, slow it down. Pull it in a fuckin’ notch. Slow it down! You, you, you come up with fifteen companies, for Christ sake! You got rebars [metal rods]; you got
concrete pouring; you got Italian floors now. You got construction; you got dry-wall; you got asbestos; you got rugs. What the fuck next?’”

Insisting that he was not acquisitive, Gotti nevertheless asked, “Where’s my piece of these companies?” He said that while remanded to jail during Diane Giacalone’s RICO case, he was delighted that Gravano and other earners gave him ten percent of a new drywall construction scam they had originated. “They sent me word in jail that you got ten percent. Guy did nothin’ in his life; a fuckin’ jerk like me. Best I ever did was go on a few hijackings. Never had nothing in my life. You’re telling me, I got ten percent of a million-dollar business.”

Relating details about his shares of the family’s rackets, Gotti said he used his brother Peter to collect some of his payoffs, about $10,000 a month from one company. Without giving specific amounts, Gotti talked about booty he received from sources besides Gravano. “Well, let me put it this way, Frankie. I was getting X amount of moneys the day I became the boss when he [Gravano] had nothing to do with this.” Another item that Gotti mentioned was a surprise contribution from his capos. “He turned in sixty-three thousand was my birthday money. Youse gave that to me as a birthday present.”

The tapes in Mrs. Cirelli’s apartment began whirring as Gotti prepared to go on trial in state court for the shooting of the carpenters’ union leader John O’Connor. Publicly Gotti glowed with confidence, telling reporters that he would escape unscathed on the assault charges. But on January 4, 1990, as the trial was about to start, he was evidently deeply worried. That night in the Cirelli apartment, the Teflon Don was planning for the future in the event he was convicted. His discussions gave the FBI a tape replete with evidence that he controlled a RICO enterprise with the authority to appoint the hierarchy and to induct members.

At first, Gotti was alone in the Cirelli apartment with Gravano, and Gotti was now full of admiration for him, contrary to the concerns he had expressed several weeks earlier to Frank Locascio. In fact, he was designating Sammy the Bull to replace him if he were imprisoned again.

G
OTTI
: “Hopefully, we got time. Tomorrow I wanna call all our skippers [capos] in. I’m gonna tell them: I’m the representante till I say different. Soon as anything happens to me, I’m off the streets, Sammy is the acting boss. He’s our consigliere.’… So, I’m asking you how you feel. You wanna stay as consigliere? Or you want me to make you official underboss? Acting boss? How do you feel? What makes you feel better? Think about it tonight.”

Without waiting for an answer, Gotti expressed doubts that Frankie Loc Locascio could handle the assignment as competently as Gravano. Saying, “I love Frankie,” Gotti nonetheless wanted Gravano to succeed him as the head of the gang.

“I’m going to make our skippers understand that,” Gotti went on. “This is my wishes that if, if I’m in the fucking can, this family is gonna be run by Sammy. I’m still the boss. If I get fifty years, I know what I gotta do. But when I’m in the can, Sammy’s in charge.”

A list of candidates for membership in the Gambino borgata was on Gotti’s agenda that night. Looking over the wannabes, Gotti cited his priorities. “All right, let me tell you what, Sam. I wanna throw a few names out, five or six. I’m not. I’m trying not to make people (inaudible). I want guys that done more than killing.”

Joined by Locascio (whose son was a mafioso), Gotti seemed discouraged by the difficulties of finding able new soldiers. Demographic changes were hampering the Mafia’s traditional recruitment program. Solidly Italian-American neighborhoods were disappearing as residents moved to the widely scattered suburbs, and a better-educated generation of young men were opting for lives as legitimate professionals rather than swaggering mafiosi. The mobster talent pool was shrinking.

“And where are we gonna find them, these kinda guys?” Gotti asked rhetorically. “Frank, I’m not being a pessimist. It’s gettin’ tougher, not easier! We got everything that’s any good. Look around, ask your son someday, forget who you are, what you are. Talk to your son like his age. Put yourself in his age bracket, and let him tell you what good kids in the neighborhood other than the kids that are with you… . You know what I’m trying to say? I told you a couple of weeks ago, we got the only few pockets of good kids left.”

More proof that Gotti was an absolute ruler came from an admission that he had paid $300,000 to lawyers handling the appeals of his former underboss Joe Piney Armone and consigliere Joe N. Gallo. He was outraged at the fees paid to Bruce Cutler and Gerald Shargel, the lawyers in the O’Connor assault case. “Where does it end? Gambino crime family? This is the Shargel, Cutler, and whattya-call-it crime family. You wanna go steal? You and your fuckin’ mother.”

Gotti told Gravano and Locascio that in a talk with Cutler, the lawyer had complained that he was making him “an errand boy” by requiring him to find out if another “pinch” was coming down. “We’re making you an errand boy,” Gotti countered. “High-priced errand boy. Bruce, worse yet.”

He concluded by belittling the lawyers for trying to butter him up with pledges of loyalty. “They got a routine now, the two lawyers. Muck and Fuck I call them. When I see Bruce, ‘Hi, Gerry loves you,’ he says. ‘He’s in your corner one hundred percent.’; When I see Gerry, ‘Hi, Bruce loves you. He’s in your corner a hundred percent.’ I know youse both love me? Both fuckin’ (inaudible). I didn’t think (laughter) dumb fucks, you know?”

On January 14, 1990, Gotti was upbeat, confident that if he were acquitted at the O’Connor trial he would never be prosecuted again. “They can’t take no more punishment, Sammy,” he said to Gravano. “Not if I win this one. If I lose this one, forget about it. But if I win this one, how the fuck could they, you know, they’d be punchy. This like you keep fighting the guy, he keeps knocking you out in the first round. What you kidding, he could last the second round? Minchia! (Gullible idiot).”

Even as his conversations were being secretly recorded, the threat of government wiretaps and bugs obsessed Gotti. Electronic surveillance was on his mind as he met on January 24 with Gravano and Locascio. He had to admit that he had been a prime offender, that his own words from bugs at the Bergin Club were the primary evidence against him in the O’Connor case. “I’m sick that we were so fucking naive. Me, number one.”

To thwart the government, he wanted everyone in the family warned that loose lips would be severely punished. “And from now on,” he said, “I’m telling you if a guy just so mentions ‘La’ or if wants to say, ‘La, la, la, la.’ He just says ‘La,’ the guy, I’m gonna strangle the cocksucker. You know what I mean? He don’t have to say, ‘Cosa Nostra,’ just ‘La,’ and they go.”

A few minutes later, Gotti seemed worried that his ongoing trial and possible conviction might encourage dissidents in the family. In fact, he had a report of one soldier’s disloyalty. Without identifying the culprit, Gotti had a solution for anyone who defied him. “And he’s gotta get whacked! Because he’s getting the same, for the same reason that Jelly Belly’s getting it. You wanna, you wanna challenge the administration? Well, we’ll meet the challenge. And you’re going, you motherfucker.” (Jelly Belly was a reference to the 300-pound Gambino soldier Louis DiBono who was gunned down in his parked car in an underground garage at the World Trade Center.)

In winter months, conferring was measurably more comfortable and convenient fot Gotti in the Cirelli apartment than walk-talks in the frosty streets. But
in mid-January, Gotti received a hint that the cozy apartment might have been detected by the government. The alert apparently stemmed from the overlapping and rival investigations of Gotti by prosecutors in the Southern and Eastern Districts. Walter Mack, a federal prosecutor in Manhattan’s Southern District, was investigating the Castellano-Bilotti murders at Sparks Steak House. A reluctant witness before the grand jury was Jimmy Brown Failla, a Gambino capo who had been waiting for Castellano inside the restaurant on the murder night. After the grand jury session, Failla reported to Gotti that he had been questioned if he had ever met with Gotti, and where. That question about meeting places, though not specifically about an apartment, was an alarm signal that helped persuade Gotti to discontinue using the apartment.

The question about meeting sites displayed the lack of cooperation and communications between separate law-enforcement agencies investigating Gotti. Within the FBI and the Eastern District prosecutor’s staff, only a small number of people knew about the breakthrough bug in the Cirelli apartment. Because the FBI and the Eastern District were withholding information from the Southern District, Walter Mack’s questions to Failla might have inadvertently tipped off Gotti to the possibility the apartment was under surveillance.

Although Gotti was avoiding the Cirelli apartment, Andrew Maloney, the Eastern District U.S. Attorney, and Bruce Mouw, the Gambino Squad honcho, were certain Gotti had already talked himself into an ironclad conviction. After four years of seeking a smoking gun to get Gotti, Maloney believed he had been given a thundering cannon.

Maloney’s choice for lead prosecutor to construct the courtroom case was John Gleeson, the assistant to Diane Giacalone in the 1986 RICO trial in which Gotti had been acquitted. Giacalone had left the office, but Gleeson had blossomed from an untried novice into a superb litigator. The quasi-independent federal Organized Crime Strike Forces had been phased out by 1990, and Maloney, with total oversight for all Mafia indictments, had put Gleeson in charge of the Cosa Nostra section. Thin, wearing tortoiseshell glasses, and cloaked in an academic demeanor, Gleeson had won a string of Mafia convictions that impressed the Mob’s lawyers. Respectful of his quick mind, legal skills, and concise summations, opposition lawyers had nicknamed Gleeson “the Jesuit.” The prospect of indicting and convicting Gotti offered the thirty-seven-year-old Gleeson a rare second chance to atone for the Eastern District’s earlier courtroom debacle with Gotti and his fiercely combative lawyers.

Armed with tapes from five crucial meetings in the Cirelli apartment and
from several bugged hallway conferences in the Ravenite building, Gleeson had to gather the FBI’s video and still photos and witnesses to flesh out the evidence and put it into logical context. Meanwhile, in the summer and fall of 1990, Maloney was battling on another front: the perennial jurisdictional quagmire and rivalries with the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District. Maloney thought he had worked out an agreement in 1987 with Rudolph Giuliani that the Eastern District in Brooklyn would handle a Gotti RICO case and the Southern District in Manhattan would take on the Castellano-Bilotti assassinations. Under the Hit Man’s Statute, the U.S. Attorney Otto Obermaier, who had succeeded Giuliani, was still seeking a federal indictment on the Sparks murders jointly with Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau.

After preliminary feelers from Maloney about whether the murder or the RICO case should be tried first, Obermaier and Morgenthau offered another plan. They proposed to consolidate both cases into one broad RICO trial in Manhattan, in the Southern District. They contended that there was more valid jurisdiction in the Southern District since the Ravenite building tapes had been obtained in Manhattan and the most shocking crime—the gunning down of Castellano—occurred in that borough.

“After we had put together a strong RICO case,” Maloney complained, “I outlined our facts to the Southern District. We didn’t want the Castellano murder case in the RICO indictment; it wasn’t that strong. But no good deed goes unpunished. Obermaier and Morgenthau suddenly wanted the whole enchilada. They wanted the headline part of the case—the RICO part.”

The dispute could only be settled by the Justice Department’s brass, and in November 1990, the warring districts debated the issue before their superiors in Washington. Obermaier was accompanied by the widely respected Morgenthau—a former U.S. Attorney in the Southern District for ten years—whose views could sway the Washington bureaucracy. Morgenthau supported Obermaier’s main points that the Southern District judges were better qualified than those across the river in Brooklyn, and less likely to be bulldozed by the militant lawyers Gotti was certain to retain. Another weakness in the Eastern District, Morgenthau and Obermaier contended, was a vulnerable pool of jurors. Gotti and the Gambino family had a history of attempting to corrupt or intimidate juries.