Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (78 page)

In rebuttal, Maloney countered that the two courthouses were barely a mile apart. “Gotti can just as easily find a way to fix a case in Manhattan as in Brooklyn,” Maloney told the Justice Department executives. Stressing that his office had prepared the entire RICO case—the heart of the pending indictment—he
was irate. “What chutzpah these people have to come in and ask for someone else’s work!”

Prepared for Obermaier and Morgenthau’s criticisms of Eastern District juries, John Gleeson had a formula to forestall jury tampering. The scholarly prosecutor had composed an intensive questionnaire for potential jurors that would eliminate anyone remotely connected to the Mob or susceptible to its persuasion. Additionally, the prosecution would move to have the jury sequestered for the entire trial, guarded by U.S. Marshals, and therefore out of the reach of Gotti’s hirelings.

Two weeks later, Maloney received an 8:00 A.M. call at his Westchester County home from Robert S. Mueller III, administrator of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “We’re going with you guys,” Mueller said. It was a green light for the Eastern District although Mueller wanted Maloney to fold the Castellano-Bilotti murders into the indictment, extend a large measure of credit to the Southern District, and allow its prosecutors to participate in the trial.

Reflecting on the jurisdictional squabble, Maloney believes behind-the-scene endorsements from knowledgeable FBI agents influenced the Justice Department’s decisions. Gleeson’s strong presentation of his strategy for convicting Gotti and his plans for safeguarding the jury helped win the day. Privately, Maloney told aides that he would have resigned if the RICO trial had been turned over to the Southern District.

Maloney, however, looked askance at incorporating the Sparks murders in the indictment. Direct evidence against Gotti was thin at best, and Maloney evaluated the police department’s investigation as full of gaping holes. The Southern District had counted primarily on circumstantial evidence and two witnesses. A passerby claimed he had seen Gotti on the sidewalk near the murder scene, looking at his watch and peering at the restaurant. It was a nighttime identification that Maloney feared would be shredded by defense lawyers. The second witness was Philip Leonetti, the turncoat Philadelphia Mob underboss, who would testify that Gotti had admitted to him that he had stage-managed Castellano’s assassination. But Maloney doubted that uncorroborated evidence from Leonetti, who had obtained a leniency deal with the government, was sufficient to link Gotti to the crime.

Moreover, the defense would surely have a field day with Gotti’s taped statement in the Cirelli apartment that the police had killed Castellano. Maloney viewed Gotti’s cracks about the murders as an absurd joke, but they would give a jury a reason against convicting him on that count, and thereby soil the entire
RICO case. ‘The Castellano murder doesn’t belong in the indictment. But we have to eat it for bureaucratic reasons. That’s the price we have to pay to Washington for getting jurisdiction,” Maloney reasoned.

The proud Southern District office rejected Maloney’s offer of a junior partnership in the RICO trial in a Brooklyn courtroom. With the jurisdictional underbrush cleared away, Gleeson obtained a sealed indictment in November 1990 against the entire Gambino regime—John Gotti, Salvatore Gravano, and Frank Locascio. Although Gotti appeared composed and unruffled during his daytime business and nighttime social pursuits, by the autumn of 1990 he was aware of the imminent clash with the government. All he had to do was pick up a newspaper or turn on his television set to find out that the prosecutors’ turf contests had been settled. News leaks warned that a plethora of new accusations would be aimed at him. Bruce Cutler boldly announced in November, “We’re ready for them,” acknowledging that another showdown loomed.

Bruce Mouw wanted the trio of Gambino leaders corralled in simultaneous raids as soon as they were indicted. Press reports, however, created a hitch in Mouw’s plan. Uncertain who else might be accused along with him, Gotti ordered Gravano to go on the lam. Gotti had recently promoted Sammy the Bull to underboss and switched Locascio to consigliere. That way, whether or not Gravano was indicted, he would be free to supervise the family while Gotti almost assuredly would be locked up without bail awaiting trial. Following orders, Gravano grew a beard and hid out in his father-in-law’s vacation house in the Pocono Mountains, and then in southern Florida. With weeks going by and nothing happening, a more relaxed Gotti lowered his guard and recalled Gravano for a summit meeting. It was scheduled for the night of Tuesday, December 11, at the Ravenite. After fruitlessly searching for a sign of Gravano, FBI agents in their observation post two blocks from the Ravenite saw him enter the club about 6 P.M. Frank Locascio also was there. Minutes later, Gotti arrived in his Mercedes, and over a walkie-talkie Mouw signaled George Gabriel, the Gotti case agent, to apprehend the indicted Gambino leaders in a single raid.

About thirty Gambino soldiers and wannabes were in the club and outside on the pavement when the agents rushed in, ready to snap handcuffs on Gotti and his two highest generals. There were murmurs and expletives from Gotti’s bodyguards and stooges, but no resistance as Gabriel read the defendants their Miranda rights. Still exhibiting his authority and insouciance, Gotti ordered Norman Dupont, the club gofer, to pour cups of espresso laced with anisette for him and the other two arrested big shots. Mouw arrived as Gotti, seated at his
usual table, nonchalantly sipped coffee. Picking up the club’s phone, Mouw called Lewis Schiliro, the FBI’s organized-crime supervisor at the bureau’s New York headquarters. “I’m in the Ravenite,” Mouw reported as calmly as he could. “We just arrested Gotti and his pals Gravano and Locascio. Everything’s cool.”

The three Gambino overlords, their hands cuffed behind them, were led separately into waiting cars by a detachment of agents and detectives for the short ride to FBI headquarters, where they would be booked and fingerprinted. As usual, Gotti dominated the fashion scene. Draped in a dark cashmere overcoat with a striking yellow scarf flapping around his neck, Gotti smiled serenely as he left for a jail cell. Bent over, the pudgy consigliere, Frankie Loc Locascio, exhibited his rage, cursing and scowling at the agents as he was taken away. Dressed in his customary austere work clothes of jeans, a white T-shirt, and a leather windbreaker, underboss Salvatore Gravano made no pretense of defiant resistance. Of the three, however, the only one who looked shocked, downcast, and disheartened was Sammy the Bull.

“I Want to Switch Governments”

T
he morning after their arrest, the big-three Gambino leaders, looking haggard and sleep-deprived, got their first inkling of the magnitude of the charges leveled against them. At a joint arraignment, Gotti and his codefendants Gravano and Locascio were indicted as leaders of a Mafia enterprise and on a gamut of thirteen RICO counts, including murder, conspiracy to commit three murders, illegal gambling, loan-sharking, obstruction of justice, and income-tax evasion. Gotti alone was indicted on the most sensational charge, participating in the Castellano-Bilotti homicides.

Ten days later, all three were hit with a real shocker: the disclosure that their private conversations in Nettie Cirelli’s apartment had been recorded by the FBI. At a hearing closed to the public, John Gleeson moved to deny them bail as high-risk and dangerous defendants. To reinforce his point, Gleeson played portions of the tapes in which Gotti spoke about his reasons for authorizing hits on three Gambino members, Robert DiBernardo, Louis DiBono, and Liborio Milito. The sinister colloquies gave Federal District Court Judge I. Leo Glasser abundant grounds to order the three men detained without bail for the duration of the trial.

One tape was the long parley between Gotti and Locascio on December 12,
1989. It staggered Sammy the Bull. He heard Gotti heap scorn on him for prospering from construction-industry scams, and revile him for building his own rival Mob power bases. Even more ominous-sounding to Sammy’s chances of acquittal were Gotti’s remarks pinning the blame for a multitude of murders on him alone; supposedly the slayings were committed to resolve Sammy’s financial disputes with Mafia business partners.

Another body blow to the defense soon followed when Judge Glasser disqualified Bruce Cutler as Gotti’s trial lawyer, and Gerald Shargel as Gravano’s. Bugged conversations between the attorneys and Gotti in the hallway behind the Ravenite Club gave Gleeson, a tenacious prosecutor, grounds for removing them on conflict-of-interest issues.

Other tapes indicated that Gotti had covertly paid the two lawyers fees for the defense of several Gambino family clients, thereby, in the prosecutor’s words, making them “house lawyers” for the Mob. Gotti also was heard suggesting that he made under-the-table payments. “If they [the authorities] wanna really break Bruce Cutler’s balls, what did he get paid off me,” Gotti said to Frank Locascio. “… I paid tax on thirty-six thousand. What could I have paid him?”

Judge Glasser ruled that the transcribed conversations between Gotti and the lawyers, and references to Cutler and Shargel on the tapes, had turned them into potential witnesses. He declared that the attorneys had compromised themselves in the obstruction-of-justice charges that were part of the indictment. Glasser’s elimination of the lawyers unsettled Gravano more than it did Gotti. In 1986, Shargel, a lawyer for numerous mobsters, had won an acquittal for Gravano in a million-dollar tax-evasion complaint. With deep faith in Shargel’s skills, Gravano had counted heavily on his handpicked lawyer to extricate him from the RICO morass.

Believing that their chances of beating the charges were dismal, Gravano grew desperate enough to contemplate an escape from their cells on the eleventh floor of the federal Metropolitan Correction Center (the MCC) in Lower Manhattan. He reasoned that a jail breakout would be easier than busting out of a maximum-security penitentiary. His plan was to bribe guards to smuggle in ropes, and with help from accomplices on the outside, they would descend through a window. Gotti sneered at the idea as too reckless; he was leery of rappelling eleven stories on a rope. He had a different escape route. “Somewhere down the road,” he told Gravano, “we’ll put together $4 million or $5 million, bribe the president, and get a pardon.” He reminded Gravano that Jimmy Hoffa, the corrupt and mobbed-up teamsters’ union president, had pulled off a similar trick. In 1971 Hoffa’s long
sentence was commuted after he arranged contributions and political support for President Nixon’s reelection campaign. Gravano thought “a window was a better shot” than counting on a presidential pardon or commutation, but he could not override Gotti’s veto. In the same cell block, the two gangsters were drifting apart. Gravano had served in the army, and he was disgusted by Gotti’s unpatriotic comments during the 1991 Gulf War. Watching television news at the MCC, Gotti said that in revenge for the government’s campaign against him and the Mafia, he hoped America would be defeated by Iraq.

Gravano also brooded over Gotti’s disparaging him behind his back in the taped meeting with Locascio. He had viewed himself as an unquestioning, loyal consigliere and underboss to Gotti. Although he had turned over about $2 million a year of his own illicit earnings to Gotti, the recordings exposed Gotti’s resentment and jealousy of Gravano. Sammy’s disenchantment mounted during their ten months in close quarters, listening to Gotti’s daily bluster and self-admiration. He became convinced that Gotti was fashioning a strategy to save himself by directing the defense lawyers to imply at the trial that Gravano—not Gotti—was really the criminal brain behind the string of murders and other felonies. Gotti’s edicts to the new legal team kept Gravano in the dark about the prosecution’s most critical evidence. He refused to allow Gravano and Locascio to hear the prosecution’s tapes, read the transcripts, or meet privately with their own lawyers. Finally, Gotti rejected Gravano’s request for separate trials as the best hope that one of them might beat the rap and be liberated to preserve the Gambino family. According to Gravano’s account, Gotti offered an egomania-cal reason for opposing a trial severance. “It’s not about me now,” Gotti told Gravano in a cell block tête-à-tête. “Everything has to be to save Cosa Nostra, which is John Gotti. Cosa Nostra needs John Gotti. You got a problem with that?”

Sammy
did have a problem with that. He and Locascio both resented Gotti’s demeaning treatment of them, and they conspired on steps they would take if, by some miracle, they beat the charges against them. “At one point, Frankie and I agreed to kill John,” Gravano recounted. In the early fall of 1991, a jail visit by Gravano’s brother-in-law, Edward Garafola, planted in Sammy the Bull’s mind a radical solution. Garafola proposed that Gravano defect and become a cooperating witness for the government.

Betray or be betrayed were Sammy the Bull’s alternatives. Gravano’s self-interest was clear. He would desert the Mob. “I was disgusted with the whole thing,” he later testified, saying he could no longer stomach Gotti’s arrogance or abide by Cosa Nostra’s strictures.