Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (83 page)

From day one of Gotti senior’s imprisonment in Marion, Junior was his primary ally and emissary to the rest of the borgata. Before his sentence was imposed, Gotti had deputized Junior as acting boss, with a panel of three capos, including his brother, Peter Gotti, to assist in daily operations and to offer advice on necessary quick decisions. The promotion was an exceptional act, making the twenty-eight-year-old one of the youngest mobsters in history to be nominally in charge of a Mafia family.

As a close relative, Junior was permitted to see his father twice a month and talk for several hours. Though all visits to Gotti were monitored on video and audiotape, the FBI was certain that the father and son used code words and subtle exchanges to discuss Mob family matters.

Back in New York, lessons learned from his father’s slipups obviously guided Junior in relaying instructions from his father or mulling over pressing borgata problems with trusted Gambino professionals. Extremely wary of listening devices and wiretaps, he favored walk-talks in the streets—and these only with his Uncle Peter and senior capos. He avoided Peter’s Queens encampment at the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, and the government had closed his father’s Ravenite Club in Little Italy. The five-story brick Ravenite building on Mulberry Street had been owned by Joseph “Joe the Cat” LaForte, who was identified by the FBI as a Gambino soldier. Under a 1993 court order declaring the club a hub of racketeering activities, the building was forfeited to the government and auctioned off to a new landlord. Symbolic of the gentrification of the neighborhood and changing demographics, the drab Ravenite, which had served as a Mafia lodge for seventy years, was gutted, and the interior remodeled into a shop selling women’s accessories. The photo of John Gotti and Neil Dellacroce was gone, and Amy Chan, the boutique’s proprietor, hung a spotlighted portrait of Mao Zedong in the now brightly lit entrance.

Realizing that he was under surveillance and investigation, Junior tried to modify his public image. His previous schedule of late nights in bars and discos ended. Evenings were spent at his fourteen-room, $1.3 million waterfront home on Long Island’s North Shore, overlooking Oyster Bay, with his wife, Kim, and their four children. More conservatively dressed than in the past, he frequently showed up at PTA meetings and brought cookies to parties at his children’s schools. Junior’s lawyers, acting like spin doctors, forwarded to reporters news of his scholarly pursuits: he had become an avid collector of books and artifacts
on American Indian life and was taking paralegal courses to obtain a better understanding of the legal system.

A shakeup of the family’s table of command was urgently required in the swift undertow caused by Sammy Gravano’s betrayal and the wholesale convictions of capos and soldiers. With reduced ranks, Junior set about consolidating crews and installing new capos. But his lightning-fast rise to surrogate boss was widely resented in the family as unmerited, and his leadership abilities were questioned by more experienced wiseguys. Disrespect is a cardinal sin in the Mafia, and older capos were offended by the young acting boss’s haughty posturing. Reports from informers to the FBI’s Gambino Squad highlighted appraisals within the family and from other families that the acting boss was clumsy and inept. Analyzing the younger Gotti’s performance, Bruce Mouw noted in a report, “He loves the adulation, attention and most important the money that’s coming in to him. It’s gone to his head.” Junior’s bungling was costing Gambino capos and soldiers money in interfamily disputes over loan-sharking and extortion turfs. The Genovese gang thought so poorly of Junior that they refused to negotiate with him, and the Gambinos were on the losing end of most sit-downs with other borgatas. “He’s a laughingstock,” Mouw summarized.

Despite his stumbles, Junior reigned for five years, about the same length of time his father had been free on the street and boss, before his conviction. In 1998 Junior was in effect dethroned by RICO. A broad-based indictment accused him of succeeding his father and receiving payoffs from an array of extortion, gambling, loan-sharking, and labor-racket rip-offs. The most splashy counts centered on shake-downs by the family totaling $1 million over six years from Scores, a trendy topless club on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, popular with celebrities and tourists. According to prosecutors, witnesses were ready to testify that the club’s owners and employees were forced to pay protection money to Gambino family hoods for permission to operate, and that at least $100,000 had been passed on to John Gotti Jr. as his share.

Prosecutors added to Junior’s humiliation by releasing evidence turned up in a raid on his business office in Queens to support their charges that he was a Mafia prince. Stashed in a wall safe were $358,000 in cash that Junior could not explain, and unregistered guns. The epitome of his carelessness was a list found in his office identifying scores of soldiers inducted in 1991 and 1992 into the New York borgatas. Investigators believed that the names had been given to the Gambino family for vetting, a traditional Mafia procedure. By allowing the authorities to find the registry, Junior had endangered dozens of mafiosi in
other families and besmirched the Gambinos’ reputation for reliability throughout the Cosa Nostra. Leaders in other mobs were dumbfounded by his holding on to the candidates’ list for years; as a basic security measure it should have been destroyed immediately.

Junior seemingly had a penchant for maintaining lists. A second one found in his office files was another embarrassment for him and a bonus for law-enforcement intelligence dossiers. It was a record of $348,000 in cash gifts he had received from 173 selected guests at his 1990 wedding, many of the donors prominent mobsters in the five New York families. Tommy Gambino, one of his father’s wealthiest capos, gave $70,000, and Sammy the Bull Gravano, $7,500. Prosecutors planned to use the nuptial offerings as circumstantial evidence to prove Junior’s magnified position in the Mob and the recognition of his importance by other borgatas.

On the eve of his trial and after most of his codefendants had thrown in the towel and pleaded guilty to reduced charges, Junior Gotti copped a plea. The Scores extortion counts against him were dropped, but he admitted to loan-sharking, illegal gambling, and extortion, including the use of phony civil-rights activist groups to threaten construction work stoppages over the issue of minority-hiring quotas. For good measure, he was convicted of evading income taxes. At his sentencing in September 1999, Junior used one of his father’s favorite aphorisms: “I’m a man’s man. I’m here to take my medicine.” His lawyers, Gerald Shargel and Serita Kedia, had negotiated a hard bargain, and, at age thirty-five, he was sentenced to six years and five months’ imprisonment, and a $750,000 fine, a much lighter penalty than the twenty years in store for him if convicted at trial.

Possibly even more galling to both Gottis was the presentencing release of transcripts of taped conversations in the Marion prison between the father and relatives. In memos to the sentencing judge, prosecutors claimed the conversations verified Junior’s high-ranking status in the Gambino family, and that his father had been aware of his son’s criminal activities and had tried to guide him in running the gang.

The most candid tapes were obtained on January 29, 1998, when the imprisoned godfather was visited in Marion by his brother Peter, and his daughter Victoria Gotti Agnello, shortly after Junior was arrested. Though he knew his conversations were being recorded by prison authorities, Gotti’s remarks about his son were laced with sarcasm and disappointment. He called Junior and his younger son, Peter, “assholes” for associating with untrustworthy associates,
“garbage pails” in business deals. Gotti senior had read the indictment and lambasted Junior for getting involved with a codefendant known for “talking a lot … and getting people in trouble”—in other words, a mobster who might incriminate him.

Describing several codefendants in the indictment as “imbeciles,” Gotti lamented, “If you stay in business with imbeciles you’re going to get as wacked out as they are.” He was upset that his son had delegated important assignments to low-level associates: “Why do you need all these butlers and waiters for,” a coded suggestion that Junior had relied on unproven wannabes.

But most distressful to Gotti was his son’s decision to store hundreds of thousands of dollars and lists of new mobsters in his basement office, alongside several guns. “Look what he gives them to hang their hat on,” Gotti rattled on angrily. “Funny money in the basement. I’m not saying he gave them the list, whatever it was. Guns behind the wall. Insane asylum!”

Saying that his son had been “stupid” for allowing himself to get indicted, Gotti discounted statements by Junior’s lawyers that he was being victimized because of his father’s reputation. “And this you can’t blame on names… well, you can’t blame it on last names.”

His son’s misfortunes provoked a stunning statement: “Why do you think this group of people fell apart without me?” he asked his brother and daughter. “Everyone became their own boss, set their own moral codes, set their own reasons, their own rhyme, and that’s the end of it. That’s the end of the ball game.”

At that 1998 prison visit, Victoria Gotti Agnello defended her brother Junior. An author of mystery novels, she vigorously professed his innocence and the government’s bias against her relatives, including her husband, Carmine Agnello. Gotti had tried to scuttle Victoria’s romance with Agnello, according to FBI agents. Mouw said that Gotti dispatched enforcers to work over Agnello with baseball bats soon after he started dating Victoria. Later, Gotti relented, allowed the marriage, and okayed the induction of his son-in-law—a “chop shop” specialist in cannibalizing stolen cars and valuable auto parts—into his own borgata. Gotti used the prison visit with his daughter to ridicule her husband, who suffered from manic depression. “Is he feeling good?” Gotti inquired. “Is he feeling good? Is his medication increased … Does he get in the back seat of the car and think someone has stolen the steering wheel?” Later, referring to Agnello’s frequent brushes with the law in his auto-salvaging and towing businesses, Gotti stressed that his son-in-law needed his help. “He’s gonna get
indicted any day, this moron. He’s built himself a gallows. He’s bought the noose. There’s no question of my love for him but he needs me out there.”

Three years later, in 2001, Carmine Agnello was caught in a police sting, threatening to burn down competitors. Pleading guilty to racketeering and tax frauds from his scrap metal operations, he was sentenced to nine years and fined $11 million. His marriage to Victoria Gotti ended in divorce.

John Gotti Sr.’s tenuous hold over the family faded quickly in the new century. He was diagnosed with neck and head cancer in 1998, and his health gradually deteriorated after surgery in a prison hospital. He died at age sixty-one, on June 10, 2002, at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisons in Springfield, Missouri. New York’s tabloid newspapers and television stations, which had relished his activities for fifteen years, treated the news of his passing and funeral with the gravity accorded the death of a president or a royal princess.
The New York Daily
News filled fifteen pages of type and photographs to document his life, and the New York Post gave him a thirteen-page spread. Even the staid
New York Times
, which normally downplays villainous gangsters, ran a 2,500-word obituary on page one.

The end of Gotti’s life was recorded in greater depth by the nation’s journalists than all the eminent American Mafia dons who had preceded him, including Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Carlo Gambino, Vito Genovese, Joe Bonanno, and Tommy Lucchese. Although he was denied a public requiem mass in church by the Brooklyn Roman Catholic Diocese, Gotti’s departure was in keeping with his grandiose lifestyle: newspapers reported that his funeral cost about $200,000. After a wake at a Queens funeral chapel, his gold-encrusted bronze coffin, engraved with the dates of his birth and death, was transported through Queens. Following the hearse were twenty-two limousines, hundreds of private cars, and nineteen flower cars. The floral displays were artfully designed to reflect favorite aspects of his life: a martini glass, a racehorse, a royal flush in hearts, a cigar, and the New York Yankees logo. With thousands of onlookers, many grasping to touch the hearse, and with four television news helicopters hovering overhead, the cortège wound for ninety minutes through Queens, past his home in Howard Beach, and slowing in front of the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in South Ozone Park. Near the Bergin and around Howard Beach, banners were strung reading “John Gotti Will Live Forever.” At St. John Cemetery, his closest relatives, including his mother, Fannie, were in
attendance for a brief prayer service conducted by a priest. Interred in a family mausoleum, John Gotti was placed next to his father and his son Frank, the twelve-year-old who died in an auto accident.

St. John Cemetery, dubbed by morbid punsters as the resting place for “Deadfellas,” contains the graves of numerous significant mobsters. Buried near Gotti are his mentor Aniello Dellacroce, Carlo Gambino, Lucky Luciano, Joe Profaci, Joe Colombo, Carmine Galantine, and Salvatore Maranzano.

In the beginning, John J. Gotti said that all he wanted was one year as boss to fulfill his legacy: the creation of a Mafia family that would never be destroyed. That was the “hell of a legacy” boast picked up on a law-enforcement bug in January 1986, only weeks after Gotti seized control of the Gambino family. As a nascent godfather, he inherited a criminal superstate, custom-designed over three previous decades by two innovative Mob entrepreneurs, Carlo Gambino and Paul Castellano. Gotti had five years of absolute power on the streets to complete his goal of forging an indestructible borgata. He began his reign overseeing the largest and probably the most powerful criminal organization in the nation’s history. When he left, the Gambinos were a disintegrating, besieged clan. And, he was chiefly responsible for the whirlwind that tore apart both the borgata and his own personal family.