Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (81 page)

Evidence from the Cirelli apartment tapes about a discussion and plans to reach a juror could have led Morgenthau to ask for a mistrial. Additionally, the recordings would have strengthened the state’s evidence, since Gotti talked about collaborating with the Westies—a major issue in the assault charges against him.

“The FBI lied to me,” a seething Morgenthau complained to top aides. “They think they’re a government unto themselves.”

Goldstock, the state’s ranking organized-crime prosecutor, felt doubly betrayed by the FBI and Maloney’s silence. They had failed to alert him about the potential jury problem, and had not informed him that his office’s expensive electronic eavesdropping in Gravano’s office had been exposed by a mole. Compounding Goldstock’s anger was the knowledge that he had gone all out to help Maloney and the FBI in their RICO investigation. His office had provided federal prosecutors with tapes of Gotti’s incriminating remarks in the Bergin Club, obtained soon after Castellano’s murder and Gotti’s takeover of the family. One of Goldstock’s prosecutors also had worked full-time for Maloney on the Eastern District’s case against Gotti. “We’re supposed to be part of a joint investigation, and they never tell us they have information from the Ravenite that affects our cases,” Goldstock protested. “When I asked Maloney for an explanation, he told me, ‘I don’t apologize for anything. The FBI didn’t want you to know about it and we didn’t tell you.’”

After Gotti beat the O’Connor assault charges, Goldstock was embittered to learn of a conversation his investigator Joe Coffey had over drinks with an FBI
agent. “He told Joe,” Goldstock said, ‘We’re just drooling. We were waiting for you to lose so we could prosecute him,’” a candid Maloney agreed with Gold-stock’s assessment of the competitive squabbles over hooking Gotti. “The bureau was surely happy at the acquittal in the state’s case,” Maloney acknowledged. But the prosecutor and the FBI stuck to their guns, maintaining that no substantive evidence was ever turned up that Gotti’s allies contacted or influenced a juror in the state assault trial.

Goldstock remains convinced that the Gotti tapes his investigators provided the Eastern District, supported by other available evidence, could have convicted the Teflon Don on RICO charges two or three years before the FBI came up with its Ravenite bugs. “It’s not jealousies,” Goldstock insists. “It’s just the knowledge that the FBI had to do it by themselves and get all the glory. They didn’t want another agency’s evidence as the foundation for convicting Gotti.”

For Mouw, unearthing the Gambino’s law-enforcement spy was a consuming priority. With barely a clue from the tapes to help him, Andris Kurins, a resourceful agent on the Gambino Squad, tracked down the traitor. Kurins’s skimpy leads from the tapes were that a Gambino associate, George Helbig, was somehow involved in the spying. A non-Italian, Helbig was an enforcer and loan shark for Joseph “Joe Butch” Corrao, a Gotti capo. Concentrating on Helbig’s business links and records of his telephone calls, Kurins solved the mystery.

The informer was a detective named William Peist, assigned to the police department’s Intelligence Division, the elite branch that coordinated complex Mafia investigations with the FBI and other agencies. Peist, nicknamed “the Baker” because he once worked as a chef, had a spotless police dossier. He was placed on light duty at the Intelligence Division after his left leg was amputated because of injuries suffered in an auto accident. An insurance company awarded Peist $1,345 million for the disability, but the police department rejected his claim to retire on a tax-free line-of-duty pension because the injuries were sustained when he was off-duty.

Apparently in revenge for being denied the pension and early retirement, Peist arranged with a cousin by marriage, Peter Mavis, to feed confidential information to the Gambinos. The detective knew that Mavis, beset by financial headaches, was a loan-shark client and occasional business partner of Helbig, the Gambino hood. Peist had access to classified information from police and state Mafia files and was willing to sell it. He never met with Gambino
mobsters, transferring information to them through Pete Mavis. The secrets were passed on to Helbig, who relayed them to Joe Corrao, who then gave them to Gotti.

Because
none of the mobsters knew his identity, Peist felt secure. And, although he had a million-dollar nest egg from his insurance settlement, the detective sold out to the Mob for a pittance of about $20,000 over several years. All of the conspirators were traced by the relentless Kurins, mainly by linking them through telephone records. In 1993 Peist pleaded guilty to a federal racketeering charge and was handed a prison term of seven and a half years.

Peist’s conviction was a bittersweet finale to the O’Connor assault case. From Peist’s admissions, Morgenthau and Goldstock somberly evaluated the full extent of the damage he had inflicted on their offices and the years of investigative efforts that he had wrecked. At the O’Connor assault trial, Peist had been assigned the sensitive job of guarding the anonymous jury and had slipped the Gambinos the name of at least one juror. He also was responsible for exposing the state’s eavesdropping bug in Gravano’s office and ruining any hope by state investigators of obtaining potential evidence and leads about Gambino operations. In toto, a single dirty cop may have prevented Morgenthau and Goldstock from being the prosecutors who defeated the Dapper Don.

Even the tightly disciplined FBI was roiled by dissension over the fame and financial gains generated by the high-profile investigation of the Gambino family. Agents Andris Kurins and Joseph O’Brien resigned amid a furor in 1991 over their book Boss of Bosses, an account of the investigations of Paul Castellano, John Gotti, and other Gambino movers and shakers. The agents wrote about investigative tactics and published excerpts from bugs that bureau officials said were unauthorized because the tapes had never been introduced as court evidence. Angry agents and officials blasted Kurins and O’Brien for allegedly inventing incidents, exaggerating their own exploits, and taking credit for the accomplishments of other investigators. There were details of Castellano’s sex life in the book, which by law, should have been expunged from FBI files, further embarrassing the bureau’s brass. A bedrock issue in the dispute was a sacrosanct FBI tenet: agents shall not profit from confidential evidence obtained while working for the government. Kurins and O’Brien reportedly expected to share $1 million in royalties and movie rights.

“What they have done is personally disgusting to me and virtually every
agent on board,” Jim Fox, said at the time. “It’s a terrible precedent.” According to Fox, the agents gave the Mafia “a textbook” on FBI undercover and surveillance methods.

The two agents in their mid-forties quit the bureau under pressure, only months before they would have qualified for pensions. O’Brien was the “tall” agent who, the state Organized Crime Task Force claimed, deliberately botched their attempt in June 1983 to videotape Mafia leaders arriving and leaving a Commission meeting on the Bowery. Before the book was published, both agents were highly praised, and O’Brien received the attorney general’s Award for Distinguished Service, mainly for his work in the Castellano investigation.

Years later, defending the book’s authenticity, O’Brien denied that it contained sensitive information that helped the Mob. Asked if his and Kurins’s roles in indicting Castellano and other Gambino mobsters were exaggerated, he replied, “With some exceptions, it was the most accurate account ever written. Nothing is 100 percent accurate.”

Sammy the Bull also became the hero of a book dealing with brutality and bravado in the Gambino family. Gravano’s sterling performance at the Dapper Don’s trial had lifted him from the role of second-banana mobster to star billing as a rehabilitated celebrity gangster. Eighteen months after the trial, he appeared in the same court before Judge Glasser to hear his own sentence for multiple murders and racketeering. The hearing resembled a testimonial dinner, with officials competing to outdo each other in extolling, with honeyed adulation, Gravano’s contributions to law enforcement and society in general. Some ninety prosecutors and investigators wrote to Glasser, effusively commending Gravano.

John Gleeson, the lead prosecutor, while stating that the government recognized the “scope and seriousness of Gravano’s criminal conduct,” characterized him as “the most significant witness in the history of organized crime.” Besides the downfall of Gotti, Gleeson credited Gravano’s testimony, or just his threat of testifying, with bringing about convictions or guilty pleas from at least thirty-seven mobsters and helpers in the Gambino family and in other borgatas. As recognition of Gravano’s exceptional services, the FBI’s Jim Fox presented him with a private award that he handed out exclusively to agents for valor—a specially designed wristwatch with an American flag on its face.

Before pronouncing sentence, Glasser quoted the opinion of an FBI agent
who characterized Gravano’s decision to testify against Gotti as “the bravest thing I have ever seen.” The judge seemingly agreed with the appraisal of Gravano’s supporters that he had metamorphosed from an unprincipled mobster to a law-and-order advocate. “There has never
been
a defendant of his stature in organized crime who has made the leap he has made from one
social planet
to another,” Glasser declared.

Gravano’s pact with the government called for a maximum twenty years in prison. Citing Sammy the Bull’s “invaluable” aid in the war against the Mafia, Glasser reduced the sentence to five years imprisonment and three years of supervised release. The lenient term meant that Gravano spent nine more months in pampered custody, occasionally testifying at Mob trials, before being permanently sprung. When the official custody period ended, Gravano, a free individual under a new name, Jimmy Moran, settled with his wife and two children in Arizona. At the time of his defection, Gravano’s “shylock book,” $1.5 million in loan-sharking money that he had on the streets, was gobbled up by the Gambinos. He had been pulling in at least $300,000 a year from that racket alone. The government allowed him to keep $90,000 of his multimillion-dollar assets in cash and property, and gave him $1,400 a month for startup living expenses.

Finding government financial aid and security regulations too restrictive, Gravano stayed in the Witness Protection Program only eight months before dropping out in December 1995, to fend for himself. In 1997 he negotiated a deal with writer Peter Mass for a biography centered on his Mob adventures. To promote the book, Underboss, Gravano appeared on television interviews, revealing that he had not substantially altered his appearance. The only change in his face was the straightening of his twice-fractured nose by plastic surgery. Although not disclosing his assumed name and new residence, Gravano said that he had no fear of being whacked in revenge by his former comrades. “I’m not running from the Mafia,” he snapped defiantly.

A sanitized version of his odyssey from hoodlum to Cosa Nostra millionaire, Underboss either offered apologias for his appalling murders and misdeeds, or simply omitted them. Sammy blamed his dyslexia for forcing him to leave school at an early age. He blamed the overbearing Cosa Nostra atmosphere in his Bensonhurst neighborhood for enticing him to enroll as a mobster. (Gravano harped on the same misleading theme that he had been victimized as a youth when he testified against his former crime associates. At trials, he described himself as a “product of a ghetto environment,” although the Bensonhurst of his boyhood was a viable middle- and working-class area of well-kept
streets and tidy lawns, and his family was affluent enough to spend every summer in a vacation bungalow in Long Island. “It was a place where wiseguys taught kids how to steal, how to rob and congratulated them when they killed,” Gravano asserted. “This is a ghetto as far as I’m concerned.”)

He contended that his survival as a made man depended on obeying orders, even if they required killing and betraying relatives and friends. The repentant gangster portrayed himself as having been a semilegitimate construction contractor and restaurant owner, a Mafia reformer trying to discourage Gotti from murderous rampages and excesses. In Gravano’s version of events, after five years of loyal service to Gotti, he defected upon realizing that his boss planned to betray him at their joint trial. After a quarter century of membership, he had a remarkable inspiration: the Mafia’s respected codes of honor were fictitious. “It was all about greed and power,” Gravano wrote of his unconvincing, belated discovery of the Mob’s ethics and values. “In reality, it was a total joke.”

The book netted him at least $250,000, enough capital to finance a swimming-pool construction company in Phoenix, called Marathon, the name he had used in Brooklyn for one of his mobbed-up concrete firms. Over the years, Sammy kept in touch with prosecutor Gleeson, who had prepped him for Gotti’s trial. Appointed a Federal District Court Judge in 1994, Gleeson usually got a telephone call from Gravano around Christmas. Neither he nor the FBI agents who had befriended Gravano suspected that he was in any kind of trouble, but in February 2000, Sammy the Bull’s life came full circle. Together with his wife, his son, his daughter, and her boyfriend, he was arrested in Arizona on state and federal drug charges. An indictment accused him of being the director and financier of a ring that grossed about $500,000 a week selling Ecstasy pills, an illegal stimulant favored by young people.

Narcotics had been an issue raised in cross-examinations of Gravano at the trials of Gotti and other mobsters. Defense lawyers tried vainly to discredit him by suggesting that he had engaged in drug deals. Both on the witness stand and later in his book, Gravano adamantly denied having the slightest links to trafficking, insisting that one of his underworld principles was a ban on narcotics. “I’m personally against them—drugs,” he testified several times. “I was a gangster. I preferred not to be in the drug business.”

Discussing another moral issue in
Underboss
, he excoriated Gotti for encouraging John Junior to become a made man. Gravano wrote that he would never allow his son, Gerard, or any relative to follow his path into the Mafia or any aspect of crime. “I was dead against it,” he testified in 1996. “I want my kids
to be legitimate kids, to have nothing to do with what I did and ‘the life.’” “Five years after being hailed as the government’s model witness, he was a disgraced embarrassment, a drug merchant who had enlisted his closest relatives—not only his son, but his wife and daughter—in his schemes.