Mob Star (18 page)

Gotti no doubt was disappointed that Gambino had closed the membership “book” and was making men only when members passed away. Carlo was worried about adding men affiliated with Dellacroce, who would surely want to take over once Carlo was gone. He also wanted to keep the Family a manageable size and was wary of initiating an informer or anyone connected to drugs. At the time, the Family was said to include 500 made men and 1,000 more associates, making it far and away the nation’s largest.

Although Carlo was keeping Gotti waiting, FBI informers were saying that around the Bergin the acting captain would refer coyly and mysteriously to special favors that the old man had called upon him to provide.

“He didn’t get specific about the favors,” an FBI agent said. “He let them use their imaginations.”

A story going around in Queens bars that the FBI later heard had Gotti killing a man and chopping off the victim’s head and storing it in a hatbox in a refrigerator. Gotti “got credit, in the minds of some crew members, for hits he did not do. But a story like that, even if it isn’t true, embellishes a guy’s reputation,” the agent said. “It helps build a mystique.”

 

 

The police and the FBI were not always able to sort out all the details, but at the end of some tales about Gotti and his crew they found dead bodies. Such was the case with Sally Crazy Polisi’s hijack buddy, Foxy, who passed away on December 18, 1974, the victim of three .38-caliber slugs, two to the head.

Four years after the fact, Traynor talked to the FBI and to Queens detective John Daly about Foxy’s murder. He said the Gotti brothers were angry at Foxy for skimming hijacking proceeds and he was asked to drive two Bergin associates to Foxy’s apartment in nearby Howard Beach and wait in the car while they went inside. They returned in a few minutes.

“I guess we’ll have to go to Foxy’s funeral,” one said.

Traynor had heard no shots, and the man didn’t elaborate, but three days later Traynor was in his Cadillac with Richard Gotti, driving to Foxy’s funeral. During the funeral, Traynor heard Gene Gotti ask Foxy’s sister to turn over to him a boat her brother had. She later did.

Traynor said crew members decided to concoct a story and pin the murder on one Tommy DiSimone, yet another hijacker who preyed on the JFK Airport as a member of a gang associated with a Luchese Family capo, Paul Vario.

Traynor would give this version of Foxy’s death to federal agents again—essentially the same way—in 1986. In between the two stories, Sources Wahoo and BQ insisted to the FBI that Tommy DiSimone, aided by his brother-in-law, did in fact kill Foxy over a girl, not money. The girl would not talk to the police about it, but she did tell Gotti, and he swore revenge.

Sally Crazy heard of Foxy’s demise as he began an eight-year stretch in Lewisburg federal prison. Angelo was then on a return visit to Lewisburg for another hijacking—a fellow inmate was convicted hijacker John Carneglia—and he told Polisi that Foxy was killed by Tommy DiSimone.

“Well, then, I will kill Tommy,” Polisi responded.

“You can’t kill Tommy. John and I are going to take care of Tommy,” Angelo retorted.

In January 1979, not long after he got out of prison, not long after he was suspected of taking part in a stunning armed robbery—the theft of nearly $6 million in untraceable dollars from a Lufthansa German Airlines vault at the airport—Tommy DiSimone, who had gotten over the girl who fell for Foxy and married the daughter of a Gotti crew member, disappeared and was not seen again. His brother-in-law, Joseph Spione, had disappeared earlier.

Source BQ gave a chilling description of how Spione was dispatched. He said Spione was beaten with bats and dismembered by four crew members in the back room of the Bergin. The pieces were placed in several plastic bags and dumped in the ocean.

With regard to DiSimone, BQ gave a chilling account of Gotti’s use of his power. He said Gotti ordered DiSimone’s father-in-law, crew member Sal DeVita, to set up his son-in-law by bringing him to a street corner where two other crew members were waiting in ambush. The two gunmen were John’s man, Tony Roach Rampino, and Michael Roccoforte, an eventual cocaine dealer.

Source BQ said Rampino and Roccoforte waited for five hours before deciding that Sal and Tommy weren’t coming. Later at the Bergin, BQ saw DeVita crying and asking Gotti not to be angry with him, but he just couldn’t set up his daughter’s husband.

“Tommy will be killed,” John Gotti said, according to BQ.

Four days later, Gene Gotti told BQ that Sal DeVita would not have to worry about setting up Tommy anymore; Tommy was gone. Source Wahoo said Tommy was taken on a sea voyage, weighted down, and thrown overboard, thus joining his brother-in-law in the Jamaica Bay cemetery off Howard Beach.

I
N 1975, THE ACTING CAPTAIN of the Bergin crew wasn’t acting like a man out on bail for murder. John Gotti went about his and the Family’s business as though nothing had changed.

He was moving up fast and there was no time to waste—he might have to go to prison for the killing of James McBratney. Looking for the best possible deal, Source Wahoo said, “Carlo and the capos chipped in” and hired Roy M. Cohn to help Johnny Boy out.

Cohn was one of the best-known and most powerful lawyers in New York. His client list was eclectic: leading businessmen, politicians and entertainers, the Roman Catholic Church, and several Family leaders, including Aniello Dellacroce.

The McBratney case had seen a few major developments since Gotti, Angelo Ruggiero, and Ralph Galione were arrested. For one thing, Galione, age 36, had been ambushed and murdered in the hallway of his Brooklyn apartment building early one morning.

Angelo had gone to trial without Galione, had gotten a hung jury, and was now facing a retrial with Gotti, who had been apprehended later. In the first trial, witnesses for Angelo had said he was in New Jersey the night McBratney died. Cohn knew the hung jury meant the prosecution might want to deal down the charges against both Angelo and Gotti. He sent feelers to the authorities on Staten Island and once again Gotti wound up with a great deal.

He and Angelo, whose earlier defense was that he wasn’t even in the state at the time, pleaded guilty only to attempted manslaughter. It meant time, but not heavy time. At a hearing on June 2, 1975, Cohn made it all sound so noble: “After a long and difficult reflection and discussion … realizing the jury did in fact sharply disagree at the last trial … we nevertheless did determine that the interest of justice would be served in the acceptance of a plea.”

Now the District Attorney’s Office on Staten Island did Gotti another favor. As a pre-sentence investigation was being prepared by the Probation Department, the D.A. declined to attempt to classify him as a persistent felony offender, though he was—and it might have meant a longer prison term.

A probation officer who interviewed Gotti noted the D.A.’s action on another confidential report prepared for the judge who was to sentence him. In this report, the officer gave Gotti’s account of the McBratney incident and his account of Gotti, which was not flattering.

Gotti told the officer he didn’t know Galione was armed and that he merely came to the aid of his friends when they began tussling with McBratney. Gotti would say something similar in 1984, when he and a friend were accused of assaulting a refrigerator mechanic in Queens: He was only helping his friend.

“The defendant showed no remorse for his involvement and appears to take his [presumed] incarceration as one of those things,” the officer wrote.

Gotti said he was not connected to any organized crime group. He had worked day-to-day jobs as a construction worker since his release from Lewisburg, but had no documentation. He said he was a gambler who won most of the time and that his in-laws would help out his family while he was in prison again.

The probation officer didn’t buy any of it. He wrote, “Prior investigations indicate the defendant is irresponsible and has exhibited a criminal pattern of behavior since 1958. [He] has found theft and other antisocial and illegal behavior more profitable and desirable than gainful legitimate employment.”

Understandably, the officer was gloomy about Gotti’s future. “This defendant is an individual of average intelligence who has not met his family’s needs and it appears that he has embarked upon an amoral type of existence to the exclusion of all other responsibilities. The defendant’s prognosis is extremely poor and there is no indication that he has made any attempt to reform.”

Gotti did not care what the probation officer said. What was important was what the judge said.

“Four years,” Judge John A. Garbarino said on August 8. Gotti knew that this was likely to mean two, and it would. He would do less time for a body on the floor at Snoope’s Bar than he had done for hijacking $7,691 worth of women’s clothes at JFK Airport.

 

Gotti now entered the crisis-prone New York State corrections system, which guards more inmates than the entire U.S. Bureau of Prisons. He would do most of his time in the Green Haven Correctional Facility, 80 miles north of Howard Beach. Green Haven was one of three prisons for the state’s most recalcitrant and recidivist criminals. One who went in at about the same time was Johnny Boy’s friend, Willie Boy Johnson, who had been sent away for armed robbery in Brooklyn.

Gotti and Johnson and 1,700 other hard-core convicts were jammed into lockups built for 1,200 prisoners. The yard, the mess hall, and the cells were segregated along ethnic lines. Guards were inexperienced and poorly paid. Tensions ran high. In 1976, two inmates were murdered and prison officials announced a shakedown; literally dozens of homemade weapons, assorted drugs, and bottles of liquor were confiscated.

Gotti swept floors once in a while, lifted weights, attended classes in Italian culture, played cards, and survived. Even if he was able to wind down at night with a dry martini, it was a hellish way to throw away two years of his life. The thought of going away to such a prison was too much for some men. Salvatore Ruggiero, Angelo’s brother, was such a man.

 

 

Salvatore was not as rugged as his brother, and not as interested in the Family, although he was a hijacker and was interested in money. Source Wahoo met him in the early 1970s. In 1974, he reported that Salvatore also was in the real estate business with Anthony Moscatiello, who leased the Cadillac that Gotti was then driving and who later became a kind of accountant for the Bergin crew. Wahoo said Salvatore had amassed $500,000 worth of Long Island properties.

Two months later, Wahoo said Salvatore had decided to make his money grow by going into another business, the
babania
business.
Babania
was a Family word for heroin. Soon Salvatore was making a lot of trips to Florida and spending money like an oil baron; several years later, the crew still talked about a party he held aboard a yacht and the $70,000 he spent providing food, booze, entertainment, and girls for his guests. By May 1975, Salvatore was a millionaire and had been indicted as a large supplier of heroin for the drug addicts of Harlem.

Angelo admired his younger-by-five-years brother and his deal-maker charms. “He coulda been anything he wanted in life,” he once said. “A doctor or lawyer. This kid, he could sit down with anybody.”

Salvatore did not want to sit in prison, so he went into hiding just before he was indicted; at the time, he also was under investigation in a tax-evasion case. He learned that he might be indicted in the heroin case while watching a television news report at his summer home in the Hamptons. Angelo was later overheard on tape talking about his brother’s decision to become a fugitive:

“[Sal] said, ‘Listen, I’m gettin’ indicted on income tax. I’m goin’ on the lam.’”

“‘For what? Income tax,’ I said.”

“He said, ‘Angelo, listen. I got a feelin’ somethin’ else is comin’ down.’”

“I said, ‘Don’t go home. Don’t go no place. Get in the fuckin’ wind.’ And that’s what he did.”

Salvatore kept a stash of cash—$500,000—for such a purpose. He told Angelo, “I don’t care if I’m broke, ’cause I’m not goin’ to be broke. In case anything happens, I take the five hundred thousand dollars, the two kids, my wife, and I go.”

Angelo’s brother got into the wind before the heroin indictment was returned; as he predicted, he also was indicted on an income-tax charge, as was his wife, Stephanie. In between, he also was indicted in a hijacking case. By 1977, when John would leave Green Haven, Salvatore was wanted on three federal warrants. Only a few people knew where he was, and sometimes he wasn’t far away, not from the Bergin and not from
babania.

 

 

In 1976, Source BQ 11766-OC, Source BQ for short, began appearing in FBI files, and proved helpful right away. He told his control agent, Patrick F. Colgan, the Bergin crew had recently grabbed $150,000 worth of frozen lobsters from the wrong fishermen; the company that owned the lobsters was owned by another Family.

The crew wisely decided to return the seafood, but Source BQ alerted Colgan, who alerted the hijack squad, who arrested two men as they left a warehouse to throw back the lobsters. With Gotti away, the semiretired Carmine Fatico had to be called in to smooth things over in a sitdown with the other Family.

Two months later, Source BQ tipped off the FBI to another hijack—of 2,555 mens’ suits, but these were peddled before the FBI could do anything. After he was arrested and decided to talk to the FBI, Matthew Traynor also talked about hijacks the crew pulled while its unofficial leader was away.

Besides hijackings, Gene Gotti, the new unofficial leader, looked after his brother’s interests in another way, Traynor said—a way that required a dose of John’s now-famous verbal ferocity.

Both Sources Wahoo and BQ had said many times that John had become a secret owner of a discotheque on Northern Boulevard in Queens; it was the nightclub that “Son of Sam” killer David Berkowitz followed one of his victims home from one night. According to Traynor, the main owner of the disco fell behind on a debt to John, which prompted a visit from Gene, the fearsome-looking Rampino, Traynor, and others—most of whom were armed. Traynor said Gene told the owner he would get “whacked” unless he made good. Traynor said that the Bergin men never paid a cover charge or for their drinks when they visited the nightclub.