Mob Star (13 page)

Television was becoming a consumer phenomenon; in New York City, the most-watched program in 1951 was a U.S. Senate hearing in Manhattan on organized crime. After days of testimony by bookmakers, pimps, and thieves, the Kefauver committee concluded:

Young Brooklyn boys like John Gotti learned about the Mafia on the streets, not in classrooms, and so they knew little about its origin. “Mafia” is a derivative blend of Sicilian and Arabic expressions for many concepts: place of refuge, the righting of wrongs, and protection from the powerful. Regarding individuals, it came to mean strength of body, mind, and spirit. In Sicily, Mafia was a way of life; a Mafioso was a man.

Sicily was exploited by generations of conquerors. Unable to take part in the rule of their own land, subjugated by the whimsical laws of other cultures, the Sicilians developed a strong distrust of any governmental authority. They turned to their own families for protection and justice. Loyalty became owed only to the family.
Sangu di me sangu.
Blood of my blood.

The ideals of family loyalty and the Mafia way of life developed together. Over time, plundering and feuding over depleted resources caused groups of families to form large Families led by powerful
vomini di rispettu,
men of respect, who co-opted the past and became as lawless as their former oppressors. By the time Italy was unified in the nineteenth century, so-called “Mafia bosses” ruled Sicily. Many followers or their descendants came to the United States to seek opportunity or survive a purge by Benito Mussolini.

In this country, they had no power and little knowledge, except for the Mafia way of life. They altered their tradition further by accepting into their Families other immigrants the Old World Mafia bosses regarded as flashy, emotional, and recklessly violent: the Neapolitans.

 

 

In 1952, the future crime boss completed the sixth grade. This was the year 12-year-old Johnny Gotti, according to Bruce Cutler’s trial portrait, went off “on his own”—and the year the Gotti clan was forced to move again after their house was sold.

John’s parents had few housing options. They finally moved to the Brownsville-East New York area of Brooklyn, a neglected working-class community that was home to thousands of southern Italian immigrants and Eastern European Jews who had abandoned stacked Manhattan ghettos.

The best-known people in Brownsville-East New York were criminals, and among the area’s numerous teenage street gangs they were regarded in the way other boys regarded sports heroes. One superstar of crime was Albert Anastasia, who had murdered his way to the top of the Family that included Carlo Gambino. A Brownsville alliance of Italians and Jews disposed of many men for Anastasia, who was called the Lord High Executioner by the newspapers. In ten years, they executed eighty people, many at the behest of Families now called the Mafia. They became infamous as Murder, Incorporated.

Young John enrolled in Junior High School 178 on Dean Street. Most students in this school were poor and they came from homes in constant stress. They tended to measure status by toughness. Only the weak earned their reputations in the classroom; smart-aleck boys with cocky walks chose the street.

In 1954, John showed how tough he was. Clowning around with friends, he had an encounter with a cement mixer, which ran over his feet. He spent the summer in Lutheran Hospital, East New York. It took him more than three months to heal, and by the time he was discharged and walked into high school, it was without benefit of the second toe on his left foot.

Teens at Franklin K. Lane High School had many competing street gangs to choose from. John joined the Fulton-Rockaway Boys. Brother Peter already was a member; brothers Richard and Gene signed up later. Another member was Angelo Ruggiero, a pudgy-faced, pigeon-toed kid who was called “Quack Quack” and became John’s pal. As was the custom, the Fulton-Rockaway Boys, whose name came from a street intersection a few blocks from school, adopted special colors; theirs were black and purple, the color of bruises. In such gangs, poor teenagers found self-esteem and group identity. The year John joined the Fulton-Rockaway Boys, Marlon Brando starred as Johnny, the rebel hero of
The Wild One,
a popular film about a gang taking over a town.

In 1956, the year a new singer, Elvis Presley, sang “Jailhouse Rock” in New York and nearly caused a riot, John quit school and became a full-time Rockaway Boy. He was 16 years old.

School records indicate he had scored 110 on an IQ test, which was in the average-intelligence range. Much later, he told people he had taken another test in prison and scored 140—near genius. Maybe he exaggerated, but aside from two future probation officers who weren’t impressed by him, he seemed to impress most people as having more than average intelligence.

By the year John dropped out, other sons and daughters of immigrants who came from the poor villages and farms of Sicily and southern Italy had begun moving into the mainstream of American society. Their parents or grandparents still worked with their hands, but they had been encouraged to obtain an education and enter the professional world of doctors, lawyers, and executives.

But Johnny Boy came from a particularly large family and had been on his own since he was 12. And when he turned 16, he obtained the legal right to quit school regardless of what his parents might have said. He hit the unsavory streets of Brownsville-East New York with too little education and too much time on his hands.

Another boy who later got in trouble with heroin, went to prison, and testified before a presidential commission said the neighborhood’s tough teenagers knew who the racketeers were. And that once they began running with a street gang like the Rockaway Boys, the next logical thing was to work their way up to the big time—the Families.

 

 

A secret New York City probation report compiled years later stated that John, after dropping out of high school, “became involved in antisocial behavior.” This was an officially understated way of saying that he became a punk.

As a Rockaway Boy, he cultivated a defiant image. At age 16, he was 5 foot 7 and 150 pounds; he was solid and strong and he went around with a straight back, squared shoulders, and a glare that said
I dare you.

John’s gang formed an alliance with the Fulton-Pitkin gang and together they faced off against black gangs such as the Brownsville Stompers, the Mau Mau Chaplins, and the Ozone Park Sinners. On May 15, 1957, a gang fight led to John’s first arrest. The charge was disorderly conduct. Two months later, he beat the charge. It was a good way to start a rap sheet. He didn’t even have to put up a defense; the judge dismissed the case.

The gang rumbles over turf were a fierce New York tradition, romantically evoked at the time in a Broadway play,
West Side Story.
The Rockaway Boys also feuded with the Ridgewood Saints, a particularly violent gang, according to Matthew Traynor, an ex-Saints gang leader who went on to bank robbery and other crimes. In one fight, a Rockaway bled to death after he was stabbed and tossed through a window. Another incident involving a Rockaway landed Traynor in jail.

“I stabbed a guy from John’s gang,” Traynor recalled. “I was fifteen, the guy was nineteen or twenty, a real jerk. He was in our neighborhood without permission. We found out he was over at some girl’s house. We rang the bell. And when he came down I stabbed the shit out of him. I was pretty violent in those days.”

In a world in which violent death was possible, gang members were measured by their ability to control fear. In John’s mind, he became the Rockaway Boy against whom all should be measured. He feared no one. Thirty years later, he told a friend how this had benefited him:

“I never have to lie to any man because I don’t fear anyone. The only time you lie is when you are afraid.”

Men who manage fear become candidates for leadership. And Traynor said John exhibited command presence in another way.

“Most of the people in the gang were crazy, nuts, but not John. He was tough, but also a politician. He could talk to people and they listened. It was the difference between him and the others. He didn’t have to be wild to impress people.”

Eventually, the neighborhood’s older gang members, who called their gang a Family, heard about this boy who talked like a politician and wasn’t afraid. Pivotally, two of these adult-gang members were Carmine and Daniel Fatico, who, the boy-gang members knew, were connected to a large Family led by Albert Anastasia, who was so important his name was only whispered.

The Fatico brothers operated out of a storefront they called The Club and were active in hijacking, extortion, gambling, and loan-sharking. They killed only when necessary, the boys thought. Carmine was older and cagey; he had been pinched more than a dozen times but had hardly spent any time in jail.

Besides the Fatico brothers, plenty more of the wrong role models lived close by. Two of them, Wilfred “Willie Boy” Johnson and William Battista, would become important members of John’s crew in Ozone Park. Willie Boy was a sausage stuffer by day, a bookmaker by night, a part-time boxer, and part American Indian. He had a violent and justifiably tough reputation, having fatally stabbed his brother-in-law and survived a bullet to the head fired by the dead man’s friend.

Battista was a gambler, too, but his early fame was based on a truck hijacking he had staged using inside information from a secretary who lived on Bergen Street, around the corner from John. Battista waited until the truck driver took his coffee break at the time and place the girl indicated, and then just hot-wired the rig and drove off with $75,000 worth of new clothes.

The Fatico brothers were always looking for a few good men. In time, Willie Boy and Battista would be recruited. So would Angelo Ruggiero and his younger brother Salvatore. And John and Gene Gotti. And another pair of brothers who hung out in the neighborhood, John and Charles Carneglia.

 

 

Two days before John’s seventeenth birthday, the neighborhood crooks led by the Fatico brothers got a new boss. As sometimes happened, the transfer of power was bloody and resulted in a new name for one of the five Families. The director of death, Albert Anastasia, was executed in the barbershop of the then-Park Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan.

It was the type of murder—public, flamboyant—that Families reserved for bosses. Soldiers and associates were stuffed into car trunks, concrete or scrap-metal recyclers; bosses were dismissed in offices or restaurants. The distinction was a final sign of respect that had practical benefits: the body would be found, and people would know someone else was in charge.

Other Family leaders didn’t trust Albert the Executioner, whom they called “The Mad Hatter.” They believed he was power-hungry and might actually be mad. In the 1930s, he proposed killing Thomas Dewey, a special prosecutor who later ran for president. The Families never killed prosecutors or cops; it caused too much heat. Besides, cops were simply doing their jobs.

Anastasia had taken control in 1951, when Family boss Philip Mangano was killed and his brother Vincent vanished. By 1957, he had left Brooklyn and wasn’t an easy target; he lived in Fort Lee, New Jersey, in a fortified mansion overlooking the Hudson River. The plotters were led by the Genovese boss, who had taken over his own Family in a similar way. He persuaded the number-two man in Anastasia’s Family, Carlo Gambino, to join them. Gambino arranged for Anastasia’s bodyguards to exit the barbershop while the boss was given a final shave.

Betrayal and inter-Family intrigue thus accompanied the dawn of what became known as the Gambino Family, which included a crew led by Carmine Fatico, who was about to recruit some promising boys from the neighborhood.

One Anastasia soldier who vowed to avenge the boss’s death was a violent hood named Aniello “Neil” Dellacroce. But Dellacroce also was a realist and after another would-be avenger disappeared, he accepted Gambino’s invitation to sit down and talk about his future. To his surprise, Gambino made an offer too good to refuse: Neil became the new underboss.

A few weeks after the hit, more than 60 Family men from around the country were arrested in an upstate New York community after a raid on a farmhouse sitdown called by Vito Genovese to review inter-Family rights and wrongs. Carlo Gambino was driven to the farm by his brother-in-law and cousin, Paul Castellano, who would later prove his mettle by doing a year in jail rather than answer a grand jury’s questions about the so-named Apalachin Conference.

He did talk about it much later, in May of 1983, while he was being secretly taped. In a conversation with his son, Paul Jr., and his nephew, Thomas Gambino, he recalled how the conference of bosses adopted two rules: no drug dealing, no cop killing.

The reasons were simple—both brought too much pressure. Defendants facing drug charges also had a habit of betraying Family secrets.

What was feared in 1957 was more feared in 1983, as a conversation a month later between Castellano and
consigliere
Joe N. Gallo demonstrated. They were taped while discussing whether because of extenuating circumstances an unidentified drug-dealing violator should be given a pass; the usual punishment was murder.

“The problem is,” said Gallo, “give a guy a pass, Paul, twenty years later, somebody comes in and makes a federal [conspiracy] case [against us].”

At the time, the Apalachin Conference was considered to be evidence of a nationwide criminal conspiracy, and the extensive newspaper coverage was a handy primer to all the restless dropouts of Brooklyn, who would someday seek a pass from Paul.