Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (80 page)

Testifying for nine days, Gravano was the predominant witness of the trial. Seated a dozen feet from the defense table, he and Gotti engaged in several stare-down duels without Gravano blinking or appearing unnerved. Responding to Gleeson’s cordial questions, Gravano admitted a litany of heinous crimes, capped by his involvement in nineteen murders, ten of which occurred during Gotti’s era as Gambino boss. His description of the planning and rationale for Paul Castellano’s execution, and a compelling minute-by-minute reconstruction of the murders outside Sparks, were the firmest columns buttressing that specific charge.

Gotti’s facetious speculation on one of the tapes made in the Cirelli apartment that the police must have killed Castellano was the defense’s strongest point for exonerating him in Big Paul’s murder. Present in the apartment when Gotti made the comment, Gravano dismissed the remark as a lie, an inside joke. “When he says the cops did it, probably the cops did it, he’ll do an expression and move his hands, give a smirk,” Gravano testified.

At most Mob trials, prosecutors use agents and detectives to interpret the significance of esoteric Mob expressions picked up on bugs. Sammy the Bull was a more convincing expert witness than any agent or cop when it came to deciphering Mafia argot and Gotti’s bizarre remarks. Through Gravano, the prosecution offered the jury a priceless primer on Cosa Nostra customs and traditions. The Gambino family’s chain of command, the movement of money to Gotti, the reasons for Gotti’s actions, and the motives for five murders ordered by Gotti were minutely explained by Gravano.

As Sammy sat deadpan on the witness stand, the tension around him crackled. Two women tried to burst past guards at the court’s entrance, shouting that he was covering up his own crimes. “Murderer! I want to spit in his face,” one of them screamed, managing to get to the courtroom door. She later told reporters that Gravano had been responsible for the slaying of her two sons. Bomb scares became almost routine, forcing the evacuation of the entire courthouse three times. Nor was Judge Glasser immune from the vitriolic atmosphere. He was placed under twenty-four-hour protection after the receipt of death threats.

Over five days, Gravano was subjected to mordant, rapid-fire interrogation from Albert Krieger, Gotti’s lawyer, and Anthony Cardinale, a nimble attorney representing Frank Locascio. Through barbed questions, they tried to undermine Gravano by implying that he was framing Gotti for crimes that he himself had committed without Gotti’s knowledge. Krieger and Cardinale castigated Sammy the Bull as “a little man full of evil,” “a snake” without a conscience. Krieger pounded at him to admit that the only way he could obtain amnesty for a lifetime of crimes was by delivering Gotti’s “head on a silver platter to the government.”

Not rattled, Gravano acknowledged that he wanted to avoid spending the rest of his life in jail. “I was looking to turn my life around and part of it was telling the truth about my entire lifestyle,” he replied, repelling the defense’s attack. Despite adroit efforts, the lawyers were unable to damage Gravano by exposing glaring inconsistencies or an outright lie in any phase of his testimony. A compelling witness, he added depth to what was already a powerful prosecution case, based on the tapes.

The longer Gravano testified, the more Gotti’s composure dissolved. He smiled less often at his supporters and was visibly testy in whispered conversations with his own lawyers. Only one witness was called by the defense, a tax lawyer, who asserted that Gotti had been exempt from filing returns with the
Internal Revenue Service because he had been under investigation for alleged crimes. The lawyer’s opinion was patently wrong, and under cross-examination his testimony was punctured as worthless. Otherwise, the defense relied on cross-examinations to refute the other counts. Judge Glasser refused to permit the defense to call several witnesses to challenge the auditory reliability of the Ravenite tapes and to question Gravano’s mental stability. Glasser’s rulings that the witnesses were unqualified as experts brought a vigorous protest from defense lawyer Cardinale. The attorney’s barrage of fiery objections sparked a glow in Gotti’s face. He warmly shook Cardinale’s hand, gratified that at least one of his lawyers was battling and defying the judge’s authority.

The summations by both sides centered on the twin pillars of the case—the tapes and Gravano. Krieger and Cardinale tried to minimize the recordings as conversations taken out of context, excusing Gotti’s language as hyperbolic horseplay, exaggerated street talk to crude individuals and gamblers—not the comments of a Mob boss authorizing murders or talking about crimes. If actual murders had occurred, the lawyers contended, they had been committed by the prosecution’s star witness, Sammy Gravano. In behalf of Locascio, Cardinale argued that his mere presence during conversations while uttering hardly a word, was insufficient to convict him for RICO crimes. Both lawyers railed at Gravano as a fabricator of tales to magnify his importance as a witness and purchase a pardon. To most observers, it appeared to be a feeble strategy. Try as they might, the lawyers had been unable to impugn Gravano, and Gotti’s voice had come through crystal-clear on the recordings.

Gleeson’s summation concentrated on his two contentions. The jury, he stated, could find overwhelming evidence to convict on every count based solely on Gravano’s testimony or on the tapes alone. In effect, the prosecution had substantiated what Andrew Maloney had promised to prove in his opening statement: “This is a case of a Mafia boss brought down by his own words, his own right arm [Gravano].”

Having listened to recordings and witnesses for six weeks, the jury needed only fourteen hours over two days to arrive at verdicts. On April 2, 1992, Gotti was found guilty on all thirteen RICO counts, and Locascio was convicted on all except one minor charge of illegal gambling. Surrounded in the courthouse by prosecutors and agents who had labored for years to destroy Gotti, Jim Fox, the highest FBI official in New York, summarized the government’s jubilance.
“The Teflon is gone. The don is covered with Velero, and all the charges stuck.”

Two months later, Gotti reappeared before Judge Glasser for the formality of sentencing. Arms folded and smirking, he passed up the opportunity to speak before sentence was pronounced. It was no surprise: life imprisonment without parole. Receiving the same sentence, Frank Locascio, the almost forgotten defendant at the trial, spoke up in praise of his fallen leader. “I am guilty of being a good friend of John Gotti. If there were more men like John Gotti on this earth, we would have a better country.”

Ronald Kuby, then a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer who was assisting Gotti’s legal retinue, thought the Dapper Don “a class act” that day. Moments after Gotti heard the sentence, Kuby and the other attorneys saw him in a holding pen, where he was changing from an expensive dark double-breasted suit, silk shirt, and yellow tie into a prisoner’s plain jumpsuit. In addition to the life sentence, Judge Glasser, in a pro forma requirement, had assessed Gotti $50 for court paperwork costs.

“He was completely relaxed and had a big smile on his face,” Kuby recalled. “The first words out of his mouth were, ‘That judge, he sure knows how to hurt a guy with that $50 assessment.’”

Outside the courthouse a crowd, many from the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club crew, chanted, “Free John Gotti.” Upon hearing the sentence, the protesters erupted into a mini-riot, overturning cars and scuffling with the police and court guards until reinforcements dispersed them.

Gotti was returned to his cell at the MCC, but not for long. He was awakened in the middle of the night, and before dawn transferred in a police motorcade to a small airport in Teterboro, New Jersey. John Joseph Gotti, who had previously refused to fly because of his fear of airplane crashes, was put aboard a small government jet plane. His hands and feet shackled in irons, and surrounded by U.S. marshals, he was flown to a maximum-security penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, then the harshest prison in the federal penal system. That morning of June 24, 1992, he was placed in a special isolation wing in which he was “locked-down,” kept virtually in solitary confinement for the rest of his life.

Bitter Aftermath

T
he good guys won, but at a price.

The big winners were the vindicated Eastern District’s prosecution team and Bruce Mouw’s FBI Squad, the lawyers and agents whose strategy had unseated John Gotti. Placing the case in a larger framework, Justice Department and bureau officials pictured Gotti’s defeat as a severe psychological shock not only to the Gambino family but to the entire Mafia. Jim Fox, the FBI head in New York, and U.S. Attorney Andrew Maloney happily pinpointed the reasons for the Mob’s increased distress. Number one: the guilty verdicts demonstrated that the government could convict even the most formidable Cosa Nostra godfather. Perhaps even more important was reason number two: Sammy the Bull Gravano’s betrayal, the officials were certain, had corroded the Mafia’s strongest asset—omertà. By becoming the nation’s top turncoat, he had publicized the effectiveness of the Witness Protection Program created in the RICO statute. He proved that mobsters anywhere in the country could save their hides and start anew by testifying against a higher-up. The widely respected Gravano’s apostasy surely increased operational difficulties for bosses and capos, who now had to wonder about the loyalty of their troops and closest confederates should an indictment crisis occur.

While New York’s law-enforcement aristocracy publicly expressed its unanimous
delight at toppling Gotti, behind closed doors the acrimony stemming from the investigations had soured relationships between high-level officials. Underlying the resentment was the fallout from the sharply competitive race to convict Gotti, and the policies adopted by the FBI and Maloney.

The FBI bull’s-eye in bugging Mrs. Cirelli’s living room left a backwash of resentment in other agencies. Several of the most startling tapes were obtained in early 1990 during Gotti’s trial in Manhattan on state charges that he had ordered the shooting of John O’Connor, the carpenters’ union leader. FBI agents recorded Gotti talking about vital matters affecting the office of Manhattan DA Morgenthau and the state Organized Crime Task Force, led by Ronald Gold-stock. The tapes revealed Gotti’s possible scheme to fix the assault case by reaching a juror. Morgenthau and Goldstock’s staffs were then jointly prosecuting the O’Connor case after years of intensive investigative digging. On one tape, Gotti was heard discussing an attempt to contact a juror named “Boyle” or “Hoyle” who was believed to be a utility company employee. Gotti’s idea was to dispatch Irish members of the Westies to locate and influence the juror, who presumably had an ethnic Irish background.

Another tape contained the startling item that the Gambinos had a law-enforcement mole spying for them. From talk in the Cirelli apartment, it was clear that the spy had tipped the mobsters that Sammy Gravano’s construction company office in Brooklyn was being bugged by the state task force. Gravano at that time had recently been promoted from consigliere to underboss, and the bug could have opened productive areas for investigation. Equally disturbing was information that in return for payoffs, the mole was providing confidential information about state investigations and pending indictments to the Mob.

With the concurrence of the FBI, Maloney, whose federal prosecutors were vetting the Cirelli apartment tapes, decided to withhold this new information from Morgenthau and Goldstock. The conversational fragments about jury tampering, Maloney decided, were “too vague” to be of value to the state prosecutors while they were trying Gotti. “There was nothing to tell them about tampering with a juror or obstruction of justice,” asserted Maloney, who admittedly was influenced by the bureau’s objections to unveiling the existence of the Ravenite bugs to other agencies. “The FBI didn’t trust Goldstock’s office because they thought there might be a leak,” Maloney later confided.

Mouw agreed with Maloney that there was insufficient evidence of jury tampering. The FBI’s main concerns, he said, were running the Ravenite wires successfully and tracking down the traitor burrowed in a law-enforcement
agency. Federal officials were concerned about their own priorities, and the slightest hint during the O’Connor trial that Gotti was being overheard might have cut short the Cirelli apartment eavesdropping at an early stage, and ruined the RICO case being prepared by the Gambino squad and the Eastern District.

Months after suffering a humiliating defeat in the O’Connor case, Morgenthau was infuriated to learn that the FBI withheld from him their suspicions and evidence of a possible attempt to fix the jury. Bribing and intimidating jurors was a Gambino trademark, well known to prosecutors. Therefore, before the start of the assault trial, the DA had tried to prevent potential pitfalls. He and the second-in-command, Barbara Jones, exacted promises from Jim Fox to alert them if the FBI picked up any indication of a contaminated jury. Morgenthau went a step further, and asked William Webster, the bureau’s director, for the same help. And Michael Cherkasky, the lead prosecutor, thought he had obtained a similar commitment from Mouw.