Mob Star (12 page)

Gotti intended to do the same. In the last few days, he had been mulling a replacement for Frank DeCicco. His brother Gene had urged him to consider “the tall kid, Joseph Corrao.

“I know you got candidates for that,” Gene said, “But why don’t you just … entertain it?”

John had other ideas, and as the brothers talked, it was clear that Paul Castellano was still a factor in Family politics.

“Ah, just think about it, John. You know better than I do. Just put him in one arm and see what you come up with. He, he, he’s good friends with, uh …”

“The other side,” John filled in. “Good with Paul.”

In a few days, informants told the FBI that Gotti had chosen Joseph Armone, who wasn’t so good with the other side, as the new underboss. Armone was the capo who set Gotti up with the record-industry producers at the Helmsley Palace Hotel. He had been convicted in the French Connection heroin scandal of the mid-1960s—a few years after the Gambino Family had first banned drug dealing, but during a “grace” period for getting out.

During Armone’s trial, a Playboy bunny and nightclub dancer, Patricia De Alesandro, visited a juror, a shoe salesman, at the store where he worked. She bought a pair of white go-go boots and invited him to dinner, where she revealed herself to be a friend of Armone’s, and could the salesman use a trip to Europe, his own shoe store, and $5,000?

“No thank you,” the shoe man said. De Alesandro got 5 years for attempted bribery.

Armone was now 66. His advancing age might have been his biggest attribute. His glory was behind him. A younger man might be more tempted to make a play for the top spot while Gotti was away in jail.

 

 

On Gotti’s last weekend of freedom, spent entirely in Queens, he was bird-dogged by FBI agents, detectives, and reporters, including Mike McAlary of
Newsday,
whose story included these details:

On Friday about noon, Gotti ignored several red lights as he sped from his home in Howard Beach to the Bergin. Over the next nine hours, several men came in and out of the club and several were seen hugging and kissing him on the sidewalk along 101st Avenue.

On Saturday, Gotti stopped to have his silvery mane trimmed at the V. G. Stylarama Hair Design shop a few doors from the Bergin. Later, he played stickball in a bank parking lot with his 12-year-old son, Peter, and other kids. At one point, he struck out.

He went home to freshen up for dinner that night with his brothers and crew members at Altadonna’s, a restaurant in Queens that was always open for Johnny Gotti.

“I’m just going out to get something to eat,” he smiled at detectives as he left his house. “I’ll be right back. Why don’t you wait for me here?”

On Sunday, he relaxed in the front yard of his home with his young grandchildren before holding court at the Bergin for two hours. Then, in a scene almost too perfect to believe, he went to a nearby church for a baptismal ceremony. He was to be the baby’s godfather.

Afterward, the godfather stood on the church steps and fed the baby from a bottle. Several churchgoers came up and kissed him on the cheek.

“It’s a beautiful day,” Gotti said. “You have to admit that much.”

“John is ready for whatever happens,” added Richard Gotti. “He’s a man.”

 

 

Some non-Family citizens of Ozone Park and Howard Beach were in genuine mourning the following morning as the airwaves filled with stories about Gotti going off to jail. They chose to see him as a strong, dashing, self-made man who hosted big Fourth of July fireworks displays and barbecues. They saw him in the narrow light he allowed, a friendly, godfatherly glow. At worst, he might be a bookmaker or loan shark, but they, like him, felt that only the law called these crimes.

He left his house early that day and drove his Mercedes to the Bergin. He then switched to a Lincoln piloted by Bobby Borriello. He was due to surrender at noon in Brooklyn, but he rode into Manhattan first, to visit Joseph Corrao at his social club, the Andrea Doria, in Little Italy.

The Andrea Doria, which was listed in the phone book as the Hawaiian Moonlighters Society, was down the street from the late Neil Dellacroce’s Ravenite Social Club, which was listed under the name Martin Lucan. It featured two display windows with ceramic sculptures, one of Christ and one of San Gennaro, the patron saint of Naples, the homeland of Gotti’s forebears. Over the door to Corrao’s club was a gag plaque:

The club was virtually in the shadow of the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where Gotti would be confined following his surrender. Gotti had spent about five years of his life behind bars; compared to slammers he’d known, the MCC, as it was called, would be easy time.

It is a modern, 12-story, dormitory-style facility near the complex of civic buildings and monuments around Foley Square. It has six units of sixteen 9’ by 12’ rooms otherwise known as cells. Each unit has a communal area with color television, pool tables, exercise equipment, and games. The computerized security is almost invisible and heavy plastic panels, rather than iron gates, separate the units.

Dressed in a tan safari suit, Gotti left the Hawaiian Moonlighters and walked across the street to Caffe Biondo, a place where Little Italy tourists dine with live mobsters. It was owned by Corrao, who got it—and a Gambino crew—from his late father, James “The Blond” Corrao. “Biondo” is Italian for blond.

About 11:30 A.M., Gotti climbed back into the Lincoln, which headed across the Brooklyn Bridge to the courthouse on Cadman Plaza. “I feel good,” he told reporters as he got out of the car, a few minutes before Bruce Cutler arrived with a small reprieve—a three-hour delay while a panel of the court of appeals considered an emergency appeal.

“Hey, John, we got time,” Cutler said. “We got till three o’clock.”

Appearing before the appellate judges that morning, Cutler had asked for a stay of Nickerson’s order. He argued that the lower court had not heard from Piecyk himself. “There’s not a scintilla of evidence to connect my client with threats,” he said.

Cutler, who had become fond of his client and regarded him a friend, went off with Gotti back to the Caffe Biondo. While there, Cutler checked in by telephone and glumly learned the news.

“The stay is denied—that’s it,” Cutler told Gotti.

Gotti arrived back at the courthouse a few minutes after 3 P.M. and was soon in the middle of another mob of media and bystanders. The throng weaved through the large, concrete antiterrorist planters protecting the courthouse entrance. Gotti took off his tan loafers and slipped into a pair of Reebok sneakers.

“Let’s go,” he said. “We’re ready for Freddy.”

“Freddy” was the undertaker in a comic strip,
Li’l Abner.
The boss was keepin’ ’em laughin’ all the way to the joint.

Inside, he was searched, fingerprinted, and photographed—a familiar routine. He was placed in leg irons and handcuffs, and with five other prisoners was put in a van and driven out of the courthouse garage. He smiled agreeably at reporters as the van emerged, and then disappeared across the Brooklyn Bridge to the MCC.

Cutler would keep fighting, vainly, in the court of appeals, where a full hearing was held on May 29. “Hopefully, we will win on appeal, and if not, we’ll win the trial,” he predicted—boldly, the way his client would.

At the MCC, Gotti was processed. He had to give up his diamond pinky ring and gold watch. Inmates were not allowed to wear anything worth more than $25—which put Gotti’s Reeboks in technical violation. He would be treated the same as the MCC’s 799 other inmates, a prison official announced.

That night, dinner consisted of fried fish, macaroni and cheese, beets, salad, and Jell-O—a healthy meal but a pale mockery of the hearty feast of stuffed clams, veal marsala, and spaghetti carbonara he might have ordered at Altadonna’s.

By 10:30 P.M., he was, as required, in his 9’ by 12’ room for the night, an eerie time in prison, a time when men settle into their enemy foxholes, when the quiet makes loud the odd sounds of torment emanating from distant cells.

Gotti was used to it, though he had successfully avoided it since 1977. He silently measured the dimensions of his new compartment and acquainted himself with the desk, the chair, the wash basin. Then he undressed, flicked off the light, pulled the prison-issue blanket back, slid into bed, and stared down the darkness.

So much had happened in his life, so fuckin’ much.

 

 

THE DAY AFTER JOHN Gotti became a grandfather in 1984, he won $55,000 playing “the numbers”—the widely patronized though illegal Family lottery. He celebrated by buying his grandson a $10,000 bond, worth $20,000 at maturity.

“Second day of his life, the kid has twenty thousand dollars,” John told Dominick Lofaro. “Me, I had two fuckin’ cents.”

John Joseph Gotti Jr., born October 27, 1940, in the Bronx, also had a dozen brothers and sisters. He was the fifth child of a construction worker and his wife, Fannie. Two brothers and twin sisters, all less than 5 years old, preceded him. And over the next 11 years they were joined by four more boys and two girls. Two other siblings died during childhood.

John Joseph Gotti Sr. was a hard-working but low-earning man of Neapolitan origin. With 13 kids in 16 years, he was barely able to provide. When the namesake son’s freedom was at stake in Brooklyn more than four decades later, his lawyer painted a portrait of a proud man whose fastidious appearance lay in the fact that he overcame a childhood of severe deprivation.

“He doesn’t apologize for growing up poor,” Bruce Cutler would say.

The family lived in the South Bronx, now a wasteland, then a livable area of apartment complexes containing working-class families. Like others his age, John’s earliest memories include his family gathered around a radio, listening to the latest war news.

Though many Italian-American longshoremen demonstrated their loyalty by securing the docks of New York against sabotage, many citizens descended from other nationalities regarded immigrant Italians suspiciously, good for economic exploitation, but not much else. Public slurs were common. A
Life
magazine profile of baseball hero Joe DiMaggio, for instance, mocked the Italians for being “bad at war” and said DiMaggio was a “testimonial to the value of general shiftlessness” who, amazingly, kept his hair slick with water “instead of olive oil.”

Like black heavyweight champion Joe Louis,
Life
concluded, DiMaggio was “lazy, shy, and inarticulate.”

For a boy with many brothers to tag along with, the South Bronx had many attractions. The Harlem River was a haven for urban Huck Finns and only a few blocks away. The Bronx Zoo was a short ride on the elevated train, but best of all, a boy could walk a few blocks up the Grand Concourse, turn left at 161st Street, and find himself at Yankee Stadium, where Giuseppe Paolo DiMaggio didn’t hang up his cleats until 1951.

Just across the river, in northeast Manhattan, was the largest colony of Italian-Americans in the country. At that time Italian Harlem was a teeming town of 150,000 immigrants, mostly Sicilian and southern Italian, jammed into a one-square-mile area of five-story tenements.

The customs of the old country survived in these aromatic streets. In open-air markets along the main drag, Pleasant Avenue, housewives haggled for fresh fruits and vegetables and sifted through the racks of merchants for bargains in clothes and household goods. In private social clubs, men swapped stories and played cards. In cafés and restaurants, couples sipped espresso, and sampled fresh cannoli and sfogliatelli.

Most people worked hard and obeyed the law. They played the numbers, but, as now, few considered it illegal. If a rich man could play for millions on Wall Street, why couldn’t a poor man bet a 30-cent combination on Pleasant Avenue? Everyone knew the lottery was run by men who belonged to secret Families. The same men also loaned money—the interest was high, but banks gave credit only to the rich.

The men were known to be violent when they fought over gambling territory or when someone fell behind on a loan. Some extorted tribute from shop owners, but better to pay them than the police. They were bad men to cross, but good men to know if you needed a favor or something hard to get—such as, during the war, gas for your car. One such man, Carlo Gambino, a Sicilian who came to America as a 19-year-old stowaway in 1921, was making a fortune dealing in stolen gas-ration stamps.

Walking the streets of Italian Harlem with his family, little John Gotti glimpsed a world soon to be fragmented by black and Hispanic migration and by immigrant assimilation. In time, when John joined the aging Family men of this world, they would favor him—partly because he had briefly seen the way it was.

The same forces that affected Italian Harlem caused John’s family to move away from the Bronx during the middle of his fourth year at P.S. 113. They moved into a two-story wood-frame house on East Thirteenth Street in Sheepshead Bay, a tranquil community in the far southeastern corner of Brooklyn, near the Atlantic Ocean.

John enrolled in P.S. 209; classmates included kids whose parents had achieved more prosperity than the Gotti clan. John began to see that in some minds a kid’s status was unfairly tied to his parents’ status, which was measured by income. It wasn’t his fault he was poor; a little river of resentment began to flow through John, and occasionally it bubbled up as a cocky strut and a sharp tongue.

 

 

The nation was at war again, in Korea, and hysterical about communism and fearful of the Doomsday Bomb. The toughest guy in fiction was Mike Hammer, a crudely violent hero created by Brooklyn writer Mickey Spillane.