Mob Star (14 page)

The more time he spent with the Rockaway Boys, the more John gave himself over to the notion he was not going to succeed in life on the square.

Unlike other gangs, the Rockaways were not just a forum with which to establish tough teenager credentials. The Rockaways began to deal in “swag,” stolen merchandise fenced by neighborhood thieves and hijackers. It began to resemble a sort of farm team—for the Family league.

En route to the majors, John made rookie mistakes. At 17, he was arrested for burglary after he and a few confederates were caught in the act of stealing copper from a construction firm. He pleaded guilty and was placed on probation.

The terms of his probation required him to shun unsavory places and characters—a nearly impossible burden for anyone in Brownsville-East New York. Now a committed juvenile delinquent, John continued to hang out in poolrooms, bars, bookie joints, and racetracks.

In 1959, he was arrested for the first time as an adult. The charge was unlawful assembly; he had been caught in a raid on a gambling location. Theoretically, he had violated his probation and could have been jailed immediately. Instead, he was allowed to remain free. Nearly a year later, after he had been arrested again and fined $200 for disorderly conduct, the unlawful assembly charge came up on the court calendar.

John was given a 60-day sentence, but it was suspended. He sauntered out of the courtroom a free man. Two months later, his probation expired and he was “discharged as improved.” John naturally had a hard time taking seriously a system so easy to beat.

As in Italian Harlem, gambling was rampant in John’s neighborhood. It seemed like everyone played the Brooklyn numbers. The Faticos also made sure that anyone could also bet on a horse, the Giants, Dodgers, and Yankees, or anything else that moved. John grew to love the action.

Gambling required money. Still a novice at crime, John needed a job and went to work operating a garment-pressing machine in a Brooklyn coat factory. He thought too highly of himself to do such mundane work, but it was pocket money and gas for his car—and it pleased his parents. In the back seat of the car, in case of emergencies, he kept a billy club; and when he was curbed by the cops in May 1961, it would be found and he would be arrested again.

John Gotti was clinging to familiar terrain at the same time John F. Kennedy was promising a New Frontier. But John didn’t know too much about the world beyond his home turf, though he had heard about a handsome Italian kid from Belmont Avenue in the Bronx, Dion DiMucci, who as lead singer of Dion and the Belmonts had all the Italian girls drooling over such songs as “Lonely Teenager” and “A Teenager in Love.”

One of these girls was Victoria L. DiGiorgio, a pretty, raven-haired girl with brown eyes, a petite figure, an outspoken nature, and a new boyfriend named Johnny Gotti. She was two years younger than he and had dropped out of Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall High School in her senior year. She was the daughter of a sanitation worker and his wife.

Her parents hoped she’d find a boy who had finished school and begun a career more promising than that of a coat presser. Victoria was strongly attracted to John. She saw a rakish young man, now barely over 5 foot 8 and 170 pounds, who had a strong, memorable face and dark hair which he dashingly combed back into a duck’s tail that brushed the collar of his black leather jacket. He was a rebel and talked smart, like he knew all the angles. But around Victoria, he was surprisingly gentle and well-mannered—Marlon Brando’s Johnny and Victoria’s Dion in one tightly wound package.

Victoria didn’t see bad Johnny; all she saw was good Johnny. Soon she was pregnant.

In 1986, as her husband was going on trial in Brooklyn, Victoria told a
New York Post
reporter she had been married 26 years, which would mean she got married in 1960, the year she dropped out of high school. A secret report written in 1969 by a probation officer who interviewed John, Victoria, and other family members states the couple was married on March 6, 1962.

Whatever the case, the couple’s first child, Angela, was born in April 1961. After her father became a Gambino capo, he told an acquaintance he was so poor when the baby was born he sneaked into the hospital at night and took mother and child home without paying the bill.

 

 

After the baby’s birth, John left the coat factory and took a job as a truck driver’s helper for the Barnes Express Company. By design or happenstance, it was an astute career move. He learned how to value goods and how shippers and warehouses operated. Concepts and words previously vague—wholesalers, bills of lading, shipping manifests—became understood. Unlike the abstract lessons he had rebelled against in school, this was worthwhile knowledge.

He wasn’t making much money, however. Between the family and the car and the hanging out, he was always broke. And he and Victoria kept having kids: three in three years. Angela was followed by another girl, Victoria, and a son, who was named John. Money woes and his nocturnal touring of pool halls, gambling dens, and honky-tonks caused the young parents to fight; they separated several times.

Some separations were forced. In 1963, John went behind bars for the first time—20 days in a city jail after he and Salvatore Ruggiero, Angelo’s brother, were arrested in a car reported stolen from the Avis rent-a-car company. Salvatore was a bright boy who would go far in crime, too, but not as a Family man. Sal would become a very rich drug dealer.

John’s scrapes with the law troubled Victoria, but he was not the type to take his wife’s advice; in 1965, he demonstrated this repeatedly. In January, he was arrested for unlawful entry and possession of bookmaking records in Queens. In March, he was caught breaking into a tavern on Long Island. In October, he was accused of attempted petty larceny in Brooklyn.

He was acquitted of the January charges, but pleaded guilty to the attempted theft and was jailed for several months in 1966. This cost him his job with the Barnes Express Company and a lot of goodwill with his wife. Struggling to support three small children whose father was a jailbird caused her to seek public relief from the New York City Department of Welfare and to file support petitions against him in Domestic Relations Court in Brooklyn.

Any reluctance to completely embrace crime as a way of life melted away in the wake of these humiliations. In the next year, John would not find another job; he would become a professional hijacker.

John was only 26, not too old to seek the education or training which might have opened a legitimate door of opportunity. But he was too impatient and too scornful. He had a wife, three kids, and expensive appetites. He had them
now.
What could he be? A store manager? An insurance salesman?
Forget about it.

When John thought of successful men, he thought of Carmine and Daniel Fatico. They wore fine clothes and drove big cars. At the track, they could lose with cheer as opposed to despair. They were respected, maybe not by the wider world, but by the young men of John’s world.

He also knew the story of the new boss of the Faticos, Carlo Gambino, who came to America as a stowaway and through guile and cunning rose to the top of an exciting and dangerous empire—an empire known by many names: Mafia, mob, syndicate, the outfit. It was there, he didn’t create it. Some men pray, others prey. This was the way the world was. In the story of Gambino, John saw a message: Not all the doors to opportunity were closed.

Something else pushed John toward crime. Blacks were moving into the old neighborhood. John needed money so he could follow the Italian-Americans who had fled north and east, into Queens, and even out of the city onto Long Island, where the building lots were bigger, the houses better, and the people whiter.

Carmine Fatico, for instance, had moved to Long Island and bought a house in West Islip; he now commuted to the social club he had in Brooklyn, at the corner of Rockaway Avenue and Herkimer Street, near John’s former home on Dean Street. The club was called the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club. The “Bergin” may have been a misspelled salute to Bergen Street, two blocks away.

Even before he lost his job as a truck driver’s helper, John, through his friendship with the well-connected Angelo Ruggiero, was occasionally at the Bergin. Now that he was to be a hijacker, the club became his office.

The Rockaway Boy became a Bergin Man.

A
S JOHN GOTTI BECAME an associate of a Gambino crew, a prisoner in the Queens House of Detention became an informer on the Gambino Family.

The prisoner decided on this dangerous occupation shortly after he was brought to Queens for sentencing on a burglary charge. He described himself as a Gambino “muscle man.”

“He expressed disgust for the syndicate,” an FBI agent wrote in the first of many secret memos, “and feels he has been used by them and that his wife and children have not received the financial help that the syndicate should have extended to them.” Because he never “wants to be separated from his wife and children as a result of confinement,” the prisoner “wants to cooperate right away.”

So he did, and so he would, for nearly two decades, beginning that day with the identification of photographs and information about a counterfeiting case. During nearly all of Gotti’s years in crime, this new informer—Source BQ 5558-TE, who sometimes used the code name “Wahoo”—would be there chronicling the story—first out of revenge, and then later, when he believed he was immunizing his own illegal conduct, out of self-interest, but always for cash.

Such was the world John Gotti was entering, but it looked good to him. The man holding the door was Carmine Fatico, who exuded style and authority, though he stood only 5 foot 4. At the racetrack, Carmine entered the gate reserved for members, horsemen, and owners, though he was none of those. At the Bergin, he lectured the men on their personal behavior.

In 1966, under the 56-year-old Fatico’s direction, the 26-year-old Gotti began to learn firsthand about the Gambino Family. He learned, for example, that for all the world knew, Aniello Dellacroce was a $200-a-week salesman for a soda distributor, but in reality he was Carlo Gambino’s second-in-command, and Fatico, as a
caporegime,
or crew leader, reported to him regularly in Manhattan.

Gotti learned that just a few miles away from the Bergin was a vein of riches mined by all the New York Families—John F. Kennedy International Airport, a vast facility spread over 5,000 acres, the equivalent of Manhattan from the southern tip to Times Square.

The former truck driver’s helper would get a chance to put his knowledge to use when Fatico moved the Bergin even closer to JFK and set up shop in a bland, three-story brick building on 101st Avenue, on the other side of the Brooklyn border, in Ozone Park, Queens. Gotti and others under Fatico’s control began to treat JFK like a giant candy jar, using as many devious means as they could contrive to take away goodies. Sometimes it was easy, but not always productive.

 

 

At 6 A.M. on November 27, 1967, probably after an all-night card game, Gotti telephoned George Beatty, a cargo agent for United Airlines at JFK. He identified himself as a representative of a well-known freight forwarding company.

“What have you got waitin’ there for us?” Gotti asked.

“Just a minute,” said Beatty, who rummaged through papers and read off a list of airway bills of lading.

“Okay, fine, I’ll be right over. So long.”

About 15 minutes later, Gotti arrived at the United cargo area in a rented Hertz truck. He was accompanied by a younger, slimmer man later said to have looked like Gene Gotti.

“Where’s our stuff?” John asked Beatty.

“Right over there, we’ll help you load it.”

The two hijackers, aided by two cargo agents, loaded forty-seven cartons containing $30,000 worth of women’s clothing, electrical gear, and aircraft and machine parts into the truck.

Beatty handed John the airway bills. “Got everything?”

“Sure, no problem.”

“I’ll need your signature.”

“No problem.”

John signed the name of the man he had impersonated. He and the slim man then got into the truck and drove away, leaving behind the most valuable carton of all—a box of furs.

Three days later, in Glen Oaks, Long Island, the truck, which had been rented by a man using phony identification, was found abandoned with most of the load still on board. Only ten cartons of women’s clothing were missing.

The mostly intact load was evidence of a poorly conceived crime, a random stab at grabbing anything, which resulted in the most valuable item—the furs—being left behind. It showed that John Gotti had room to grow.

Most of the load was hard to fence; among the sidewalk salesmen and flea markets of New York, no great demand exists for aircraft and machine parts. Not so with women’s clothes. What didn’t wind up adorning the frames of wives and girlfriends found their way onto the racks of neighborhood merchants eager to beat wholesale prices.

 

 

After better scores, the hijackers gambled and partied. It was a time of great turbulence in America, the Vietnam era of protest and cultural change, but it had nothing to do with them. Gotti patronized a gambling club located above a car wash on Eastern Parkway run by a former Fulton-Pitkin ally. At night, he retired to such shot-and-beer establishments as the 101 Bar, Bullock’s Lounge, Tutti’s Bar, and the Colony Bar, according to Matthew Traynor, one of Gotti’s former gang rivals. Traynor began hanging around the Bergin in the late 1960s and told the FBI he helped in more than twenty hijackings.

The Colony was in Brooklyn, and Traynor said that after Gotti acquired a taste for loan-sharking he acquired part ownership of the bar when the owner went arrears on a loan. That same year, Gotti threw a party and strutted around the bar charging round after round to the house.