Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (82 page)

Sammy’s deceit had fooled the FBI and he remained on good terms with agents until his narcotics bust by Arizona authorities. In September 1999, shortly before his arrest, he was a big-name lecturer at a national conference of bureau supervisors in Phoenix. His topic: How organized crime functions.

After pretrial hearings, in the same Brooklyn federal courthouse in which he had often testified as a prosecution witness, Gravano and his son pleaded guilty to conspiracy to sell dangerous drugs. The same type of evidence that had tripped up Gotti, secretly taped conversations and testimony from turncoats, now incriminated Gravano. On telephone taps, Gravano was heard discussing drug profits with his wife and daughter. Young, hero-worshiping members of his thirty-strong Ecstasy crew testified that Gravano liked being addressed as “Boss” and “Big Man.” He tutored them on the best weapons and tactics to be used in hits, and in his raspy voice spoke of organizing a new kind of Mob in Arizona. “He couldn’t sit in Arizona and be a pool salesman or run a construction company,” Linda Lacewell, an assistant U.S. Attorney, said at a hearing. “He wanted the old days back; he wanted ‘the life’ back, the power back.”

Following his arrest, Gravano, a dedicated bodybuilder, was diagnosed as suffering from Graves’ disease, a progressive thyroid ailment that left him looking gaunt, with sunken eyes and large protruding ears on a hairless skull. As a result of the case, Arizona authorities seized $400,000 from Gravano’s properties and book royalties, on the grounds that the proceeds of Underboss were traceable to his racketeering days. The state planned to distribute the money to families of Gravano’s murder victims.

Assailing Gravano as incorrigible for violating the leniency and trust extended to him by the government and the judicial system, Federal Judge Allyne Ross sentenced him to twenty years. The term was four more years than recommended in sentencing guidelines, indicating the government’s outrage at Gravano’s betrayal. Combined with a guilty plea in Arizona on state narcotics charges, he is ineligible for parole until the ripe age of seventy-seven. Sammy’s son, who called himself “Baby Bull,” got nine and a half years.

The narcotics arrest may have saved Gravano’s life. In July 1999, the
Arizona
Republic
newspaper reported that he was alive and well in that state, and expressing his disdain for the Mafia. Gravano claims that he tried to suppress the story but was “blackmailed” by the newspaper into an interview because it would otherwise have disclosed that his wife and children had joined him in the Phoenix area. The story was picked up nationally, and mobsters in New York were incensed at his living openly in Arizona and taunting his former compatriots to hunt him down. Gravano’s effrontery was a raw insult to the Gambino hierarchy. According to investigators, other families goaded the Gambinos into whacking Gravano for his disrespect of Cosa Nostra, and to provide a vivid example of what happens when traitors brazenly defy the Mob.

An experienced killer himself, Gravano was ready for the hit team he knew sooner or later would be searching for him. He was always armed, wore a bullet-proof vest, moved frequently to different apartments which he rigged with extensive alarm systems, and kept a guard dog in his home.

One of the men entrusted to kill Gravano with a bomb or a gun was his brother-in-law, Edward Garafola, who would have had no difficulty recognizing him. The designated hit men tracked Gravano, but their efforts were frustrated by the Arizona police. Before the mobsters could lay a trap for Sammy, he was jailed on the Ecstasy rap.

Another mystery from Gravano’s past arose in 2003, when professional underworld killer Richard Kukinski implicated him in the 1980 slaying of a rogue New York detective. Serving four life sentences in New Jersey, Kukinski claimed that Gravano gave him the contract and supplied him with the shotgun used to murder Detective Peter Calabro near his home in Saddle River, New Jersey. Gravano pled not guilty to that “cold case” crime, and Bergen County, New Jersey, prosecutors declined to specify a motive for the hit. But after Calabro was killed, he was suspected of having been on the payroll of a Gambino car-theft ring. A one-man Murder Incorporated, Kukinski bragged that he had committed more than one hundred hits for the Mafia and for other clients. His sobriquet was “the Iceman,” a reference to his custom of freezing his victims’ bodies before disposing of them.

In retrospect, government officials and Judge Glasser, who collectively were responsible for Gravano’s gentle five-year sentence, were driven by their fixation: demolishing the myths of John Gotti’s invincibility and his ability to outclass them in courtrooms. The federal authorities went overboard in extolling
Gravano’s value, his aid in convicting Gotti, and his presumed character transformation. Gravano’s testimony, prosecutors later conceded, was captivating but not decisive, except in convicting Gotti on the charge of programing Paul Castellano’s slaying. The Ravenite tapes alone, implicating Gotti in three other murders, would have been sufficient to ensure guilty verdicts and an automatic life sentence. Defending their recommendations to extend maximum leniency to Sammy the Bull, prosecutors and agents exaggerated the ripple effect that he caused in inducing other Cosa Nostra defections. (RICO’s harsh penalties and the government-financed Witness Protection Program had already produced a bumper crop of Mafia songbirds.) Rightly or wrongly, officials advertised Gravano as irreplaceable for convicting numerous killers and racketeers before they could cause more incalculable harm to the entire community.

Yet in weighing Gravano’s contributions, the criminal-justice system lost sight of his selfish motives and submerged his sordid criminal curriculum vitae. He switched sides fully aware that a mountain of evidence against him from the Ravenite tapes was a guaranteed ticket to life imprisonment. He had no other option. Like all mafiosi impaled by RICO, he knew the prosecutors’ mantra for a soft sentence to induce cooperating witnesses: “First in (to cooperate), first out (of prison).” Even a maximum of twenty years was a bargain price to pay for nineteen murders and his repugnant record as underboss. The contract that Gravano signed for testifying as a prosecution witness was the most successful steal of his criminal career—and he knew it.

“He got the deal of a lifetime,” Bruce Mouw, the former head of the Gambino squad, said in assessing the difficulties of nurturing Mob turncoats. “Using some of these guys is like taming a wolf. You can feed them out of your hand but they’re still wolves, and you can never trust them. Sammy was in that category.”

Self-Worship

C
onfined deep inside the federal penal system, a thousand miles from his Cosa Nostra family and personal relatives in New York, John J. Gotti had no intention of relinquishing his title as boss of the Gambino borgata. It was a sacred rule, established in 1931 at the creation of the American Mafia, that a godfather could be removed only by death or abdication. And in 1992 John Gotti invoked that mandate. From bugs in Gambino clubs and intelligence reports from informers, the FBI knew that he was determined to hold on to a semblance of power and to maintain a voice in major policy decisions. The government was equally determined to foil his plans by making his prison conditions as onerous as possible. The Bureau of Prisons shipped him to what was then its most tightly guarded penitentiary, the super-security “correctional institution” at Marion, in southern Illinois. Opened in 1963 to replace the oppressive Alcatraz, Marion was reserved for 350 to 370 inmates who were classified as dangerous, or who had caused disciplinary problems in other prisons.

Designated as inmate number 182-053, Gotti was placed in Marion’s most restrictive cell block for an indefinite period of solitary confinement. Most days he was locked in for twenty-one to twenty-three hours, in contact only with guards. His meals were passed to him on a metal tray through a slit in his cell door. The fastidious Dapper Don’s sole change of clothes were identical jump
suits, and his constant environment was a six-by-eight-foot concrete-walled cell, containing a stainless-steel toilet and wash basin, an eighteen-inch-wide concrete slab bed covered by a thin mattress, and a twelve-inch black-and-white television set. Every day, for recreation, he was permitted to walk, hands and legs shackled, for fifty minutes along a narrow thirty-six-foot-long tier inside the prison. Once or twice a month he briefly breathed fresh air with other prisoners in a small outdoor exercise yard. His only permitted visitors were lawyers and relatives, who could see him twice a month, separated from him by a glass wall, speaking with him on a telephone. All incoming and outgoing mail was screened by prison authorities.

During the first year of imprisonment, Gotti could harbor a glimmer of hope that attorneys would get his conviction overturned. Within eighteen months that hope was extinguished. His strongest appeal point—that Bruce Cutler’s disqualification denied him his lawyer of choice and a fair trial—was unanimously rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The court ruled that Cutler “had allegedly entangled himself to an extraordinary degree in the activities of the Gambino crime family,” and he had been properly excluded from the trial. (Cutler’s feistiness resulted in his being convicted in 1994 of criminal contempt for violating a pretrial gag order by Judge Glasser, prohibiting defense and prosecution lawyers from commenting to the media. For attacking the prosecution in interviews, Cutler was subjected to ninety days of house arrest and suspended from practicing in the Eastern District for six months. The extremely rare charge against a lawyer came under justifiable fire from civil libertarians and journalists as an abuse of Cutler’s free-speech rights and as a biased attempt to stifle attorneys from vigorously representing organized-crime defendants.)

Gotti’s defense also claimed that Gravano, the principal prosecution witness, had committed perjury at the trial, and that prosecutors had covered up evidence of his involvement in undisclosed murders and in cocaine trafficking. These assertions were denied as groundless. (The appeals decisions came down six years before Gravano’s Arizona drug arrest.)

When the Supreme Court in 1994 refused to consider Gotti’s appeal, the entire Gambino family knew that their boss was doomed. Though his fate was sealed, Gotti, following in the footsteps of Carmine Persico, the imprisoned Colombo boss, schemed to retain the top title for himself and establish a Cosa Nostra dynasty. The heir apparent was the elder of his two sons, John Angelo, widely known as “Junior.” (Junior’s middle name was bestowed in honor of his
father’s former bosom crime comrade, Angelo Ruggiero.) Another important motive was money. So long as Gotti was the undisputed boss, a huge portion of the family’s illicit “take” would continue to flow to his son and to other relatives.

Long before his conviction, Gotti began grooming John Angelo as his successor. In many respects, Junior (a name he came to detest) was a carbon copy of his father in looks and attitude. Powerfully built, he became a weightlifting addict as a teenager and was a mediocre student. Lieutenant Remo Franceschini, the head of the Queens DA’s Detective Squad, listened in to several tapped telephone conversations in the early 1980s between the father, then a capo, and his teenaged son. “It was clear he was instructing him how to behave as a wiseguy, telling him the do’s and don’ts, how to behave with other made guys and when to keep his mouth shut,” Franceshini said.

After attending New York Military Academy, a boarding school near West Point that stressed military-style discipline and accepted scholastic underachieves, Junior overnight became a prosperous businessman. By his early twenties, he owned trucking and real estate companies that never encountered union problems or competition in landing business. Much of his success was due to name recognition and the Gambino family’s influence with teamster locals and with construction contractors.

Still in his early twenties, and like his father a habitual night owl, Junior and a clique of young toughs were embroiled in several brawls. Once he was charged with slugging an off-duty cop who tried to aid a patron being roughed up by the combustible Junior and his pals. None of the assault charges stuck, because victims were too frightened to testify or witnesses recanted original versions they had given to the police. Like fathers, like sons, two regulars in young Gotti’s inner circle were sons of his father’s Mafia buddies: Salvatore “Tore” Locascio, the son of Frank Locascio, the family’s underboss-consigliere; and John Ruggiero, the son of the late Angelo Ruggiero.

At age twenty-four, two years after his father became a godfather, Junior was inducted as a Gambino made man, according to the FBI and New York Mafia detectives. “We know that his father gloated with pride,” Franceschini noted. The son had gotten a waiver of the previously inviolable Mafia rule that both parents of a soldier had to be of full Italian heritage; Junior’s mother was of Italian and Russian descent. The Gambinos, obliging the senior Gotti, had instituted a rule change that only a father’s Italian family line was necessary for membership. Two years later, in 1990, shortly after Junior’s marriage and lavish Helmsley Palace Hotel reception, Gotti gave him a unique Christmas present.
He promoted his son to capo, making him at twenty-six the youngest man in Gambino history to hold that title and to lead a crew.