Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (86 page)

Another brother, Richard V. Gotti, a Gambino capo, and his soldier son, Richard G. Gotti, codefendants with Peter, were brought down by similar racketeering charges. A theatrical sidelight to the trial of the three Gottis was a Hollywood foray by the family. The jury heard testimony that a Gambino crew tried to shake-down the martial-arts movie actor Steven Seagal for $3 million, to resolve a contract dispute with a Gambino associate.

Even after their initial convictions, there was no escape for Peter and Junior Gotti from deeds performed on behalf of John Gotti. In December 2004, Peter was convicted on separate charges of ordering at the behest of his brother the failed attempt to whack Sammy Gravano. Highlighting the prosecution’s evidence were
video
-taped conversations in 1996 and 1997 of visits by Peter to John at the Marion prison, in which John railed that he was
unable
to sleep thinking of “rats” like Gravano enjoying freedom and profiting from having betrayed him.

“But that’s a bill that’s gotta be paid some day, just like every other bill, you know what I mean …” John ominously urged Peter. Still ranting about retaliating against Gravano, John vowed that if he ever again encountered Sammy the Bull, “I’ll eat his fucking liver for him.”

Grousing after his convictions and the probability of spending the rest of his life behind bars, Peter spoke up in court: “My name is Gotti. If my name wasn’t Gotti, I wouldn’t be here.” It was an excuse of guilt-by-association, which Peter’s brother John had once chastised his son for using to explain his legal woes.

And, as Junior Gotti prepared to leave prison in 2004 following his racketeering conviction, his parole was abruptly canceled by a new RICO indictment. The most startling revelation was an accusation that he had issued a contract in 1992 to kill Curtis Sliwa, a self-designated crime-fighter who had demeaned John Gotti on his radio talk show. Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels’ civilian patrol group, was shot and severely wounded in an attack allegedly sanctioned by Junior to punish Sliwa for vilifying his father.

The verdicts and indictments in 2003 and 2004 meant that four Gotti brothers—John, Gene, Peter, and Richard—and two of their sons wound up in prison for RICO or for drug violations. (The Gotti name, however, may have benefitted a female relative, John’s daughter Victoria. She has published novels under her maiden name and wrote a newspaper gossip column. Victoria also became the star of a popular cable television show, “Growing Up Gotti,” which centered around her problems as a divorced, single mother bringing up three generally unruly teenaged sons in a luxurious Long Island estate.)

The prospects of the Gotti tribe wielding power again in the borgata appear slim. “The Gambino family is sick and tired of the Gotti family,” Mouw believes.

However, Mouw and other Mafia watchers believe that John Gotti’s relatives are in solid financial shape. “All they did was take the money,” Mouw says of the Gotti wing. Reviewing the fifteen-year rule by the Gottis, Mouw is confident that they prospered at the expense of the rest of the crime family. He estimates that John Gotti alone was worth $20 million to $30 million in cash when he was packed off to prison. “Where it is? God only knows,” Mouw admits. “Offshore? In suitcases? We’ll probably never find it.” The scope of illicit wealth reportedly obtained by Gotti and his relatives over a decade is based on information from Sammy the Bull Gravano and other defectors about systematic payoffs to the Gottis from rackets in the Garment Center, the construction and
garbage-carting industries, and from waterfront companies. The Gottis also richly profited from the earnings of the family’s gambling and loan-sharking rings.

An FBI forfeiture-seizure squad had limited success in the 1990s, trying to trace Gotti’s buried treasure. “It’s less than $100 million but in the multimillions,” Jim Fox, the bureau’s New York official, said of the vain search for Gotti’s cache. Gravano told his FBI interrogators that Gotti’s primary bagmen were his brother Peter and his son Junior. But Gotti never dropped a clue to Gravano of how and where he concealed the immense loot. “It was the biggest secret in the Mob,” Mouw adds. “Even Sammy didn’t know.”

There was plenty of money to go around when Gotti became the Gambino godfather in 1986. From testimony at later Mob trials and from seized confidential records, federal and New York investigators estimated conservatively that in the mid-1980s the Gambino family grossed about $500 million a year. At the start, Gotti was handed profits from a galaxy of rackets run by twenty-one crews in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Florida. By the time of his death, there were perhaps fifteen to eighteen functioning crews, the number of active soldiers not
imprisoned
was reduced to fewer than two hundred from a high of over four hundred, and several of their richest rackets had been
smashed
.

The damage to the Mafia caused by Gotti extended beyond his own borgata. New York’s other Mob families, believing they had been directly harmed by the Dapper Don’s excesses and the unwelcome notoriety his escapades brought upon the entire Mafia, expressed their disfavor of him in a symbolic manner. Not one important mafioso from another family showed up at Gotti’s wake and funeral—a profound insult understood by all Cosa Nostra members.

Gotti’s final bleak years in prison were darkened by estrangement from his wife of four decades. Prison authorities said Vicky stopped visiting him, and he was heard on a recorded conversation with Peter Gotti saying that one of his sons had pleaded with his father to prevent a divorce. FBI officials asserted that Mrs. Gotti, angered by her husband’s bringing Junior into the crime family, blamed him for their son’s arrest and conviction. “What father, if he had any love or compassion for his son, would encourage him to become a Mob boss or even a mobster,” Mouw said, confirming the Gottis’ dispute over their son’s fate. The marriage may have been driven onto the rocks long before Gotti’s conviction, when FBI surveillance reports of his affairs with other women were leaked to the news media.

During a recorded prison conversation with brother Peter in 1997, Gotti burst into a foul-mouthed condemnation of his wife. Denouncing Vicky as a traitor, comparable to Gravano, Gotti said he regretted having married her, and cursed her for blaming him for the impending imprisonment of their son Junior.

On the first anniversary of Gotti’s death, his four children placed “In Memoriam” announcements in the New York Daily News. “Although your suffering was immense, you died the way you lived, proud and with honor,” John Jr. said in his notice. The message from daughter Victoria was: “Dear Dad, not one day goes by without a thought of you, a tear from me—your strength, loyalty, dedication and love will live on forever inside.” Significant by its absence that year was a tribute or remembrance from his wife. In later years, her name was included in the newspaper memorials.

Probably the largest flaw in Gotti’s character and the underlying weakness that destroyed him and mauled the Gambino family was narcissism. Even in prison, his self-worship was unrestrained. Entombed in Marion, he could not resist boasting about his exploits and the difficulties he had created for the government before it could defeat him. “You know why I’m here?” he asked his daughter Victoria and his brother Peter, in a tape-recorded visit on January 29, 1998. “It took them $80 million and three lying cases, and seven rats that killed a hundred people in the Witness Protection Program, to finally frame me? You understand?”

Justifying his chosen Mafia path as predestined, he told Victoria and Peter, “My life dictated that I take each course I took. I didn’t have any multiple choices. Listen to me carefully. You’ll never see another guy like me if you live to be five thousand.”

Gaspipe

H
is aptitude for violence developed at a tender age.

It was evident early on when, as a teenager, he delighted in brawling and in shooting hawks with a .22 caliber rifle. Careful to avoid attention and arrests—stealthy traits that later aided his criminal success—he killed birds from rooftops with silencer-equipped guns. Slaughtering hawks was his first taste of blood. Over three decades as a mobster, he participated or conspired in the murders of at least thirty-seven human victims. At a minimum, another twenty-five targets were on his must-kill list, including a judge and a prosecutor. Several of the intended victims were shot and wounded; most escaped unscathed when his plans went awry. Although his homicidal history far exceeded those of more conspicuous contemporary Mob leaders—the Gambino family’s John J. Gotti and Salvatore Sammy the Bull Gravano—his reign of terror and his name were virtually unknown outside the Mafia’s confines. It was a different story inside New York’s Cosa Nostra. In the aftermath of the Commission case, he vaulted to the zenith of power in the Lucchese borgata. Among the five families, his fearsome passion for vengeance was universally recognized, and he operated under a dreaded nickname: “Gaspipe.”

Gaspipe’s baptismal name was Anthony Salvatore Casso. Born in 1942, he grew up in a gritty slice of Brooklyn’s Park Slope and Carroll Gardens, a Mafia
hatchery and environment that produced such renowned mobsters as the Persico and Gallo brothers. It was a neighborhood swarming with tough guys, and in the late 1950s young Casso was a swaggering member of the South Brooklyn Boys, a teenagers’ gang that battled along the docks in Red Hook with fists, knives, clubs, and Molotov cocktails. Like many mafiosi, he was not physically imposing at five-feet six-inches and barely 150 pounds, but Casso nevertheless gained a macho reputation for his cast-iron demeanor, and especially for his marksmanship with a rifle and a handgun.

Using roofs as makeshift firing ranges with bull’s-eye targets pinned to chimneys, he had developed into a crack shot with a pistol, able to hit a soda can at a distance of about one hundred feet. A former detective, who was reared in the same section of Brooklyn, says that Casso and his chums evaded police scrutiny by rigging up homemade gun silencers with cotton and cardboard wadding. Roofs served as recreational areas in the densely populated neighborhood, and a common hobby was tending pigeon flocks in rooftop coops. Young Casso’s shooting skills were in great demand by pigeon-fanciers seeking to protect their birds from predatory hawks. “People used to call me all the time, ‘Could you come over and get this hawk,’” he said in an interview. “I was like a doctor on call.”

Despite New York’s rigid gun-registration laws, gang members easily acquired illegal pistols and revolvers. “It was like buying a gun in a grocery store, everybody in my neighborhood had one in the house—if not ten.”

The youngest of three children, Casso inherited his taste for weapons from his father, who took him on hunting trips starting at age nine. From his father he also acquired the bizarre name, “Gaspipe.” Neighborhood gangsters jocularly branded the father with the moniker because he used a metal pipe as a bludgeon to intimidate victims on Mob assignments. The elder Casso never qualified as a made man, but in the 1920s and ‘30s, before becoming a longshoreman, he and his gas pipe were often dispatched by Vito Genovese to threaten and assault dissidents in a Mafia-controlled union that represented employees in New York’s burlesque theaters. Casso the son detested the nickname, simmering with rage at anyone who used it, although he allowed a handful of close accomplices to refer to him as “Gas.”

A high school dropout at sixteen, Casso followed his father to the docks, starting out as a longshoreman. On the Brooklyn piers, he showed a sadistic streak that would become his trademark. One day, Casso heard a stevedore boasting about his new metal-reinforced work boots. “Gaspipe took over a forklift
and dropped about five hundred pounds of cargo on the guy’s feet and broke most of his toes,” the ex-detective who grew up in Park Slope recalled. “Afterwards, he laughed and said he wanted to see how good the new boots were.”

Soon enough, Casso caught the eye of a Mafia capo in Brooklyn, Christie Tick Furnari, who one day would become the Lucchese consigliere. Furnari’s apprenticeship program for his rookie gangster was the customary Mafia training schedule. Gaspipe became a loan-shark enforcer and a bookie. At age twenty, Casso
chalked up his first arrest
, for bookmaking, that landed him in jail for five days and cost him a $50 fine. It would be his only conviction for the next thirty-three years, despite five more collars between 1965 and 1977. Aided by the Mafia’s formula of hiring sly lawyers and scaring witnesses, he won acquittals and dismissals for a variety of serious felonies: assault with a gun, fencing stolen merchandise, bribing a parole officer for the release of a gangster friend, bank burglary, and narcotics trafficking.

Gaspipe’s first recorded
murder occurred
in the mid-1970s; the contract came from Furnari. The task: kill a drug dealer working for the Lucchese family, Lee Schleifer, who was thought to be cooperating with narcotics agents. Casso lured Schleifer to a Mob social club and finished him off with a volley in the head from a silencer-equipped .22 caliber pistol. The hit was proof positive that Gaspipe had made his bones and, with Furnari’s blessings, he became a Lucchese made man at thirty-two.