Gangsters' Wives (12 page)

The truth is, I liked the money and the lifestyle. I liked the thrill of socialising with people like John Gotti. It’s very glamorous when you’re in it, with the jewellery and the new cars, but underneath it all I had very low self-esteem – lower than an ant’s.

I met John Fogarty in 1986 when I was thirty. He was very good-looking, very charming. Some guys exude power because of the clothes they wear, the car they drive, but with John it was simply how he conducted himself.

He had a place in Florida, drove a Mercedes and gave waitresses hundred dollar tips. At first I thought he made all his money from his construction company, an excavation firm, but I soon found out he was involved in dealing drugs. First marijuana and then large quantities of coke which he brought to New York through a Florida connection. He’d pick up the coke, wrap it up like a birthday present and bring it on the plane in his carry-on bag. Being Irish, he wasn’t actually in the mob, but he was as closely connected as it’s possible to be.

John got on well with my little brother Johnny, who’d been a criminal all his life and committed his first murder at eighteen. He’d shot a rival drug dealer in the back of the head and disposed of the body in a patch of wasteland. Afterwards my mother had insisted on being taken to see the body to make sure he’d done it right. I didn’t like the idea of the two of them working together. I knew it could come to no good.

But at first business prospered. I was wrapped in fur and bedecked with jewels, jetting around the country like I was the princess of Staten Island. I used to tell my girlfriends that if I couldn’t have a manicure, a pedicure and a massage at least three times a week, life wasn’t worth living.

The problem was, John not only dealt drugs, he started using them too, going off on long coke binges where I wouldn’t know where he was, or who he was with. It got to the point where the real loves in John’s life were me, and using and selling cocaine.

I had no illusions about the business my brother Johnny and John were involved with and I knew they’d killed people or had people killed. Once you’d killed with somebody it was like getting married, a kind of private ceremony.

John had a Cuban associate, Aldo, whom I really liked. He always treated me with respect and was fond of my kids (by this stage I had two sons from previous relationships).

Aldo used to come up from his home in Florida every couple of months for ‘business’ and stay with us. One night in June 1987, Aldo disappeared. What I didn’t know was that Aldo had tried to rip John off over a business deal a few months before, and John had ordered him to be killed. John would later claim that he had called off the hit at the last minute, but it had gone ahead anyway. Whatever the case, John came home one day wearing Aldo’s watch – a beautiful vintage Patek Philippe. I never asked him about it.

On more than one occasion John came home with blood all over his clothes, which I then had to wash for him. And once he came home for dinner with blood on his shoes, saying he had two bodies in the trunk of his car. A different time he came back to our place on Staten Island and I could tell something unusual had happened. I heard the shower running upstairs and headed up. The bathroom was filled with steam and John’s clothes were in a pile on the floor. I knew that he’d killed somebody. I could just tell. I didn’t have to ask, and he didn’t have to tell me what to do. I took his wallet and keys out of his trouser pocket then I picked up all his clothes, ignoring the smell of gunpowder, and took them into the bedroom. Then I found a plastic garbage bag and stuffed everything into it, including his belt.

As John’s addiction to drugs worsened, the distance between us grew. Even the birth of our son Keith in February 1989 didn’t bring us closer together. John’s moods were wild and unpredictable, and grew more so as business faltered and he stopped making as much money as he had before.

When his erratic behaviour started to endanger the kids, I took out a restraining order against him. For two weeks he stayed away, but one night he came back, and it was obvious he’d been on one of his binges.

‘John, I don’t want you here,’ I told him.

He stood up and said: ‘I’ll put a bullet right in your head.’ Then he pulled out a nine-millimetre gun from the waistband of his trousers and held it to my head, threatening to kill me, the kids and then himself.

And yet still I took him back. The truth was I loved him like I’d never loved a man before.

On Christmas Eve 1990, our daughter Brittany was born but any hopes that her birth would set John on the straight and narrow were short-lived.

John and Johnny were trying to get back into the big money with a hundred-thousand-dollar pot deal. They needed to raise the money fast, but had only scraped together $30,000. John really wore me down and in the end I signed papers agreeing that if he borrowed the rest of the money from a loan shark and didn’t come through with the cash after the transactions, I would have to pay him back myself by selling my house.

What John didn’t realise was it was all a set up. The guy had been acting as an informant for the DEA and our phones had been tapped the whole time. On 7 November 1991, John was arrested. After plea-bargaining, he received a sentence of eight years.

Meanwhile, I had to pay back the loan shark. A lot of people owed John money for drugs, and my brother Johnny went round calling in the debts, and then re-investing the money in deals he and John had set up.

In July 1992, Johnny came round. He told me he had a nagging suspicion he was being followed, that the DEA was watching him.

Immediately after that, I started to notice a lot of strange cars going up and down our block but I didn’t think much of it.

On the day the kids were due to go back to school after the summer break, the phone rang at five to six in the morning.

‘This is the DEA. Open the door or we’re going to break it down.’

I opened the door and by the time I did I could hear agents storming through the kitchen and into the house. There must have been at least fifteen agents in my house, and two of them took me aside and started to read me my rights and the charges against me. ‘You are under arrest for conspiracy to distribute cocaine, you are under arrest for …’

I was only wearing a thin T-shirt and shorts. I felt degraded, humiliated and very scared – for my kids as much as myself. I kept saying, ‘Please let me go to my kids’.

The agents escorted me down the hallway towards Brittany’s room and one of them picked her up and was feeling her nappy for drugs. I elbowed him aside and took Brittany away from him, furious that they’d think I’d hide drugs on my baby.

I was taken to Fort Hamilton on Staten Island to be processed, which is where I discovered that twenty-one people had been arrested on Staten Island that morning, amongst them my brother Johnny and his wife Christine.

I didn’t understand the drug charges, since nothing was ever in my house. I never had any guns there, and I had never done any dealing myself. As hard as it may be to believe, at that moment I really believed that I hadn’t done anything to distribute drugs. I really didn’t understand the conspiracy charges.

I kept running the situation through my head. I’d put thirty thousand dollars in the streets. I gave it to John and Johnny to make me back more money. I knew they were investing it in drugs and that I would get my money back, and much more, later on. They took my money to make money selling drugs.

The investigators told me I was facing a long sentence. What freaked me out, though I didn’t let on, was that they quoted word for word things I’d said on the phone in talking to John and Johnny. I had never figured that our phones might have been tapped, but it turned out they’d been watching us for months.

Their questions confirmed what I’d suspected. They weren’t interested in putting me away as much as they wanted the two Johns and, more importantly, what they knew. They advised me to cooperate with them, tell them what I knew, in return for a lenient sentence.

I didn’t want to go to prison, but I knew I could handle myself there. What really worried me was that my kids needed a mother, and what became clear to me was I needed them just as much.

My whole life I’d heard that you never come forward with the truth when dealing with the cops. Lie, lie, lie. That’s all I ever heard. And while I wasn’t officially in the mob, I knew about the code of silence; it wasn’t just a mob thing, it was a street thing. But I wanted to save my ass and take control of my fate. Looking back, that was the first step in saving something more important than my ass – saving my soul.

When John rang from prison, I told him I was going to tell the truth for the sake of my integrity and my honour. I wasn’t even going to take a deal, I was just going to tell them everything and I advised him to do the same.

John exploded. ‘Are you fucking out of your mind? You can’t do that. You’ll never get out.’

The DEA needed two witnesses to independently corroborate each other’s testimony, in order to put away the other twenty people who’d been arrested that day.

I set about persuading John and Johnny to cooperate with the authorities. Both were hugely reluctant but were eventually persuaded by the threat of jail sentences hanging over both me and Johnny’s wife. In return for their full cooperation they were promised their sentences would not be longer than twenty years apiece.

When the formal indictments came down and none of the four of us – the two Johns, Christine or me – were named, everyone knew what had happened.

I was paralysed by fear and uncertainty and my instinct was to cling to what was familiar but the government agents kept telling me I had to get out of my house as they’d picked up on a phone tap that someone was planning on killing me.

I wasn’t scared about the hit. I was more afraid of leaving the house that I loved, uprooting my kids from their schools and moving somewhere unfamiliar without a man.

For the kids’ sake I didn’t want to go into the Witness Protection Program which would have meant living under aliases in a secret location. My son John-John’s father had won custody of him, and I was scared of losing him altogether.

But the DEA told me they were relocating me regardless as my life was in imminent danger. We found a place in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, just across the New Jersey state line – a townhouse with three bedrooms.

That was 1992 and, once the charges against me were dropped, we had to start our lives all over again, and I had to find a way of making a living.

Since then, my life has changed drastically. A single mother, with four children, I somehow managed to keep a roof over our heads, setting up a little cleaning business, then running a B&B and now a small trucking company. I live a quiet, serene life. I practise yoga and go for long walks in the countryside.

The children are grown up and I’m so proud of them. They’ve done incredibly well. My daughter is a fulltime college student. She’s highly educated. Sometimes I can’t help thinking about how different my life could have been if my parents had educated me. I have lots of regrets on that score, but I refuse to allow them to poison me. I’m going to move forward.

My book came out in 2004 and I have my own website. I do a lot of public speaking, trying to raise awareness of how it is to live in an abusive relationship. I’ve been amazed how much feedback I’ve had. I’ve had women contact me from all over the world, who’ve been involved with abusive men in some way or another. I tell them to take the time to think about what’s happened and to develop strength within themselves.

John and Johnny both entered the Witness Protection Program but John left in 2001 so he could rebuild a relationship with his children. He’s built his life up since then, and set up a business. I don’t see him on a regular basis, but we keep in touch. I never visited him while he was in prison. I drew a line. I had to for my own sanity.

So much has happened to me over the last few years and, while I wish I’d made different choices earlier in my life, I’m very content with where I am today.

Now when I look back on those years up until 1992, it seems like someone else lived that life. I’m a totally different person now.

Divorced from the Mob
is published by Da Capo Press

Anne and Carlton Leach live in a cul-de-sac of newly built homes in a village in Essex. Carlton always prefers a culde-sac because no one can idly drive past. Despite the difference in ages – Carlton is fifty and Anne twenty years his junior – the two seem settled into a life of easy domesticity with daytime telly playing on the wide-screen TV, washing fluttering in the breeze on the line in the compact garden, and a toy-sized dog making itself very much at home on the sofa. Anne is heavily pregnant when we meet – in marked contrast to the photos of her highly toned lap-dancing days which Carlton proudly shows off – and has since given birth to the couple’s first child, Alfie (Carlton has six other children by previous relationships)
.

Anne wasn’t even born when Carlton was first getting into trouble with the law as one of the ringleaders in the organised football violence that flared up in the 1970s and 1980s. From there he followed the well-trodden gangster route running security on the doors of Essex nightclubs and
effectively policing the drugs scene in the area with his ‘firm’ the Essex Boys. When three of his close friends were killed in the infamous Range Rover murders in Rettendon in 1995, Carlton decided to turn his back on the violence, and go straight. Since then, his life has been made into a cult film
, Rise of the Footsoldier,
and he has written an autobiography, called
Muscle.
Anne first came face to face with the truth about her new husband’s violent past at the Leicester Square premiere of
Rise of the Footsoldier.
But for her, Carlton’s criminal activities are a foreign country – to which all links have been resolutely severed. Underneath her thick make-up and baby-fine blonde hair, Anne is a determined character, set on giving her son a ‘normal’ childhood. The couple are hoping that the bar Carlton has just opened nearby, together with his debt-collecting business, will provide a steady income on which to raise little Alfie – and a new direction for the former gangster
.