Mob Star (17 page)

Source Wahoo told the FBI about the stolen watches and said Gotti had started hanging out at another social club, the Nevermore, which was in Maspeth—still Queens, but far from the Bergin. At the club and a nearby bar, the Sportsman’s, Gotti was loansharking with the son of a top official of a dirty Teamsters local.

With Dellacroce behind bars and Carmine Fatico laying low, Gotti began seeing Carlo Gambino himself. FBI agents saw him—on several occasions—entering and leaving Gambino’s apartment on Ocean Parkway in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood.

John took great pleasure in passing along Carlo’s orders. For instance, early in 1973, John told the troops that the old man wanted them to lay off trucks connected to companies associated with various Families; he wanted them to avoid committing certain crimes: counterfeiting, stock and bond fraud, drug dealing, and the kidnapping of other criminals.

All these crimes are violations of federal laws; Gambino was well aware that federal agencies had been granted sweeping new powers to attack the Families; he knew the federal law bureaucracy was less corruptible than the state’s. He had banned kidnapping other criminals for an additional, personal reason. His 29-year-old nephew Emanuel Gambino, who operated his own version of the Bergin’s beer-and-peanuts business, had been grabbed off a Manhattan street the previous May.

Given all the criminal opportunities in New York, it’s a wonder crooks should choose to kidnap other crooks, especially a nephew of a powerful crime boss. But at the time, at least two gangs of kidnappers specializing in bookmakers and loan sharks were prowling around card games and after-hours bars.

Emanuel Gambino’s kidnappers contacted his wife and demanded $350,000. She collected about $100,000 from relatives, turned it over to an unknown person, and waited for her husband to come home. He never did. On January 26, 1973, he was excavated from the grounds of a federal ammunition depot in New Jersey, a bullet in his head.

 

 

James McBratney, age 32, was not a part of the Gambino kidnap scheme, though some people may have believed it. He was a large, ruddy man who belonged to another gang; unlike the first gang, whose members were all Irish, McBratney’s gang cut across ethnic lines. It had recently kidnapped a Staten Island loan shark and gotten $21,000. But some neighborhood kids saw the snatch and passed along a license-plate number to neighborhood Family members.

McBratney and his partners soon learned they were wanted, but not by the police. One partner was Edward Maloney, who ran away from an orphanage to begin a New York crime career at 15. He would have a bad night in Gotti country a decade later, but now he fled the city. McBratney put a machine gun in his car and stayed put on Staten Island. A bad mistake.

A
BOUT 11 P.M. ON MAY 22, 1973, John Gotti, Angelo Ruggiero, and another Gambino aspirer, Ralph Galione, entered a homespun tavern on Staten Island called Snoope’s Bar & Grill.

The barmaid, Miriam Arnold, age 26, a part-time student, later said Snoope’s was so well-lit that it was possible to read a book and so she recognized the trio instantly. She remembered that they were in the bar a month earlier, and that they looked around, acted suspiciously, and left without having a drink, although the one she later learned was John used the men’s room.

This night, they were preceded by a few minutes by a large, fair-skinned man who sat at the bar next to a regular customer, Lawrence Davis, age 29, a mechanic. The barmaid didn’t know Jimmy McBratney, who had left his machine gun outside, but when he ordered his drink she said it sounded like he had a bad cold.

McBratney sat quietly sipping his 65-cent crème de menthe on the rocks as John, Angelo, and Galione came in and strode to the rear of the bar, past a half-dozen or so tipplers. Miriam Arnold, who was serving three friends celebrating a birthday, remembers sensing danger when the trio of men turned and walked back toward the big Irishman.

Quickly they surrounded him: Angelo on his left, Galione on his right, and John behind; Galione had a gun; Angelo had a pair of handcuffs. All began pulling McBratney up and away from the bar.

“You’re under arrest,” Galione said to McBratney, who was trying to pull away. “You’ve been this route before; don’t give us any trouble.”

“Hey, who are you?” a patron named Red McManus yelled.

“We’re police,” Galione said.

“Let’s see a badge.”

Galione fired a shot into the ceiling, ending further requests for identification. Two customers fled the bar; two darted into a cellar. Galion ordered the others to stand against a wall, but Miriam Arnold, keeping her cool, had already slipped to the end of the bar—and onto a pay telephone.

McBratney was off the bar stool now, struggling to free himself from Angelo and John. But the Bergin buddies had Lewisburg muscles and McBratney, though he, too, was strong and actually managed to drag all of them several feet toward the end of the bar, couldn’t get free.

John and Angelo, with McBratney wedged between them, ended up in front of Miriam Arnold, on the phone with a 911 operator. “I realized I was in a rather bad position, if something was going to happen,” she recalled. “So I moved away.”

“Where do you think you’re going?” demanded Galione, who now had the rest of the bar under his control.

“The hell out of your way. I don’t want anybody to get hurt.”

Too late for that. Galione walked toward McBratney, a standing duck between John and Angelo, and fired three times at close range, producing in the smoky air streams of a fine pink mist. McBratney would kidnap no more.

A few Family men have said an associate will not be made until he participates in a murder. This frustrates infiltration by undercover agents. The rite of passage was once described as “making your bones.” Gotti, then 32 years old, was making the best of his bones. The victim was a Family menace.

Even so, it was a sloppy murder. Why not wait for McBratney to leave the bar? Why not attempt to conceal faces? Who would buy the cop charade without a badge to display?

In July, two of McBratney’s killers, Angelo and Galione, were picked out of a police photo spread by Miriam Arnold and Lawrence Davis. They were quickly arrested, but the police had no idea who the third man was. They probably never would have if Gotti hadn’t succumbed to the common habit among criminals of boasting about their crimes.

A month after Angelo and Galione were arrested, Source Wahoo heard Gotti bragging about the McBratney hit and Carmine Fatico vainly advising him to lay low. The FBI tipped the NYPD, which showed a photo of Gotti to the witnesses, and on October 17, a few days before his thirty-third birthday, a state grand jury indicted him on a murder charge. This time he listened to Carmine Fatico and went into hiding. He left Victoria and the kids, but not the Crime Capital.

The police called on an FBI hijack squad to help search for the fugitive. The FBI called on Source Wahoo, who “was given a specific assignment to locate John Gotti and set him up for apprehension.” Nearly a year after the murder, Wahoo reported in. He said Gotti avoided the Bergin, but “on a daily basis” was at the Sportsman’s Bar or the nearby Nevermore Social Club in Maspeth “with the exception of weekends when he goes off with his wife.” He was driving a Mark IV Lincoln registered to an Ozone Park restaurant. He got messages from a pay phone across the street and regular visits from his brother Gene and Foxy the hijacker and cocaine dealer. He was often in the company of Tony Roach Rampino, the heroin dealer, Bergin hijacker, and “John’s man.”

“Source stated Gotti, to his knowledge, is not carrying a gun and will not resist apprehension,” an FBI memo said.

On June 3, 1974, as Gotti and Rampino chatted in the Nevermore, FBI agents arrived, arrested the murder suspect and turned him over to the NYPD. Wahoo “was the sole basis for the apprehension of Gotti, who is a bonafide organized crime figure under Carmine Fatico and Dellacroce,” an FBI agent wrote in support of a $600 payment to the source.

Gotti was held on $150,000 bail until his parents and his inlaws—who had helpfully provided a job cover after his release from Lewisburg—put up their houses to secure a bond.

His in-laws were already doing a lot for Gotti, their daughter Victoria, and their grandchildren. They had recently purchased a house for them in Howard Beach, directly south of Ozone Park on Jamaica Bay. Finally, Gotti had made it out of Brooklyn apartments and into a Cape Cod house in a suburb by the sea. He hoped he wouldn’t have to go off to prison too long.

The Gotti house was white with black trim. It had five rooms on the first floor and three bedrooms upstairs. This was plenty of room even though Victoria was pregnant and soon expected to give birth to another boy, who they would call Peter. The house was on Eighty-fifth Street in the Rockwood Park section of Howard Beach, an area containing about 3,000 single-family homes built in the early 1950s on filled-in marshland.

Howard Beach lies directly beneath the airplane approach to Runway 31-L at JFK Airport, but most residents don’t even notice the big jets anymore. Generally, they are more prosperous and professional than their neighbors in Ozone Park; but they share the same community attachment, the sense of having escaped the madness of the metropolis, of live-and-let-live, and of minding your own business.

In midday traffic, the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club was now a six-minute drive from Gotti’s home.

 

 

Free on bail, Gotti was hopeful his lawyers could work something out. He had more than the usual reasons for wanting to avoid prison. Carlo Gambino was growing old, Dellacroce was in jail,
consigliere
Joe N. Gallo was laid up with a heart attack, and Carmine Fatico had just been indicted on another loan-shark charge. The new case was instructive: Fatico was accused of collecting usurious interest from ten businessmen on loans of five hundred to several thousand dollars. When debtors fall behind on such loans is when underground bankers acquire part of seemingly legitimate enterprises as well as a way to wash illegitimate money.

Gotti had a few enterprises to tend to. Back at the Bergin after a few years in Florida, Matthew Traynor was told Gotti had acquired a piece of a motel and a Chinese restaurant. Source Wahoo said Gotti was the hidden owner of a Queens disco and that he ran a crap game with Carmine Fatico’s money in a second-floor loft on Church Avenue in Brooklyn.

Gotti now kept a private office at the Bergin, “which could not be entered without an appropriate reason,” an FBI agent wrote after interviewing Traynor, who said it was clear that “John was the boss.” Angelo was John’s top aide and in their absence Gene was in charge.

At day’s end, Traynor hung around with crew members in the 101 Bar, another establishment he was told Gotti had gotten a hook into. Source Wahoo was getting expense money from the FBI to hang out in such joints, and he kept delivering. His tip led to the recovery of a load of Canon calculators and cameras from a Gambino Family drop in New Jersey.

 

 

At the time, Wahoo’s control agent was Special Agent Martin J. Boland, then stationed at an FBI office in New Jersey. Boland debriefed Wahoo on the phone or met him at quiet places in Brooklyn and Queens; he occasionally summed up for his superiors how valuable Wahoo was:

“Source converted to top-echelon criminal informant [in] February, 1971. Since then [source has been] responsible for solving numerous FBI cases which resulted in arrests of Cosa Nostra figures and recovery of over $300,000 in stolen property, national publicity in [a Luchese Family fraud] case and the arrest of Sal Polisi in a bank robbery.”

Informants whose value depends on maintaining criminal credibility can be troublesome. They test the patience and resourcefulness of agents, as Special Agent Boland noted:

“Case agent has handled this informant single-handedly; has had to contend with the informant being arrested [for] counterfeiting, … receiving stolen property … and armed robbery … the above arrests and informant’s activity within the underworld has presented problems which Agent Boland has handled efficiently without recourse to higher bureau authority. It is noted Agent Boland received a letter of commendation in [a fraud case] for handling liaison with the Brooklyn District Attorney.”

 

 

Matthew Traynor acted as a wheelman in several hijackings pulled by the Bergin crew after his return from Florida. One of his drinking companions was Tony Roach Rampino, a gangly man with sinister eyes, hollow cheeks, and pockmarked skin who favored sharkskin suits and gaudy ties.

Rampino was a worker bee in the Bergin gambling games; he also collected loan-shark debts. He boasted that his menacing appearance accounted for his successful collection rate. He told Traynor that Gotti helped kill “the Irish guy” for “the little big man, Carlo,” and that everyone in the crew benefited.

“We’re going to take over everything some day,” John’s man added.

Rampino advised Traynor to tell businessmen who needed money to see John Gotti, as the acting Bergin boss wished to go “legitimate.” This was after Rampino returned from Canada with money he collected for Gotti from the “Greco brothers.” Rampino wanted to get close to the brothers.

“They’re big dope guys,” John’s man said.

Many years later, Angelo would get close to one of the Greco brothers; it was on a big heroin deal that caused grave problems for the Family within the Family.

Traynor was told by another Bergin associate that Gene Gotti might be dead had it not been for John. Gene had gotten into a dispute in a Manhattan bar and slapped around a relative of a Gambino captain, who threatened mayhem. John stepped in and restored everyone’s dignity with negotiated regrets about the misunderstanding.

The older hoods liked the younger hood—he was capable and respectful, even if sometimes a little too outspoken and aggressive. “Dellacroce will sponsor Gotti to Cosa Nostra membership when Gambino opens the books. Gotti is a well-respected hoodlum and has gained much stature since the killing of McBratney,” Boland wrote after another Wahoo chat.