Mob Star (19 page)

Traynor said that he also made a few more cocaine runs to Florida on Peter Gotti’s behalf. He said Gene was present when Peter gave the Florida merchandise to three men in Cono the Fisherman, the Maspeth restaurant where John would be arrested for the Romual Piecyk assault. Peter gave Traynor $1,500 and a quarter-ounce, seven grams.

“Here’re some scrapings for you,” he said, according to Traynor.

Traynor said he also shared the proceeds of a burglary with Richard Gotti, who gave him a tip about Fortunoff’s, a store on Fifth Avenue known for its expensive merchandise. He said a friend of Richard’s was an “alarm man” and if Traynor smashed the display window, he would have a “safe three minutes” to grab the merchandise and run. He would and he did, with gold chains he later sold for $1,500. He said he paid Richard $200 for the alarm tip.

On October 15, 1976, Carlo Gambino, who looked more like a lovable uncle than a crime boss, lay in his bed in Massapequa on Long Island. In a half-century of crime, he had spent 22 months in jail, for operating a half-million-gallon whiskey still in Philadelphia. Now he was 74 years old and frail from three heart attacks that had successfully thwarted the government’s attempts to deport him. He asked to see a priest, was given the last rites of the Catholic Church, and then died “in a state of grace,” according to the Reverend Dominic A. Sclafani.

In the obituary columns, Gambino also was identified as a former consultant in SGS Associates, a labor consulting firm, whose clients included the owners of the Chrysler Building, a New York landmark. He was preceded in death by his wife, the former Kathryn Castellano, and survived by three sons and a daughter. He had sent one son, Thomas, to a private school to be educated with the future shah of Iran and the future dictator of Nicaragua.

Thomas Gambino and his brothers owned many trucking and manufacturing firms operating in the midtown Manhattan garment district, where most of the wardrobe of America’s women was designed and produced. The Gambino and Luchese Families had dominated the district since the 1930s. Joe N. Gallo, the Gambino
consigliere,
was the major force in the Greater Blouse, Skirt and Undergarment Association, a trade group that negotiated contracts with the district’s 700 employers. By controlling the association and the trucking companies, the Families controlled the price of clothing and the lives of thousands of frequently exploited workers.

Over the next few days, the newspapers ran many stories on Carlo Gambino’s possible successors. Aniello Dallacroce was the most popular choice; Paul Castellano was hardly mentioned. In fact, however, Dellacroce was in jail and Castellano was already in charge; like the nation, the Families move fast to replace a fallen leader.

Carlo had passed the word that he wanted Cousin Paul to replace him.
Consigliere
Gallo and crew leaders such as James Failla and Ettore Zappi immediately gave Castellano their allegiance. But like John Gotti a decade later, Castellano did not officially become boss until a few weeks later, after Dellacroce got out of jail on Thanksgiving Day.

The transfer of power presaged another. Paul, too, was under federal indictment, accused of running a loan-sharking ring that charged 150 percent vig. His nephew, who had worn a wire in Paul’s presence, was the chief witness. A cousin of Paul’s had already pleaded guilty. The case went to trial November 8, three weeks after Carlo had passed away.

When the nephew took the witness stand, he demonstrated a familiar condition—amnesia. He couldn’t remember conversations he secretly recorded. No witness, no crime. “What happened here is that somebody got to this defendant,” the assistant U.S. attorney complained to the judge.

The nephew was sentenced to two years in prison for criminal contempt. Paul Castellano had gotten off as boss just the way John Gotti would when Romual Piecyk forgot who assaulted him. He’d beaten the charge.

Paul’s coronation took place a few weeks later in a house on Cropsey Avenue in Brooklyn. The house was owned by Anthony Gaggi, a soldier soon to be a capo. Gaggi’s nephew, Dominick Montiglio, lived upstairs. Montiglio was a thief and a loan shark and eventually became a drug addict. He later betrayed Castellano and Gaggi by testifying against them at the stolen-car trial.

Gaggi taped a gun underneath the kitchen table prior to the arrival of Castellano, Dellacroce, Gallo, Failla, and other Family leaders. He told Montiglio to take another automatic weapon and go to his upstairs apartment, which looked out on the driveway.

“If you hear any shots from the kitchen, shoot whoever runs out the door,” Uncle Anthony said.

Guns weren’t necessary. Paul didn’t like them. He offered Dellacroce virtual control of the Gotti-Fatico money tree and other crews, as long as they avoided drug dealing. Castellano, who had driven Carlo Gambino to the Apalachin Conference, was reaffirming the drug ban as a plank in his platform. Dellacroce, a free man after four years in jail because of his tax conviction, accepted Paul’s terms, just as he had accepted Carlo’s terms twenty years earlier when Carlo took over for Dellacroce’s mentor, Albert Anastasia.

“Paul’s the new boss,” Gaggi told Montiglio after the visitors left. The sitdown had lasted only 20 minutes, but long enough to plant the seed for a Family within a Family.

 

 

Back at the Bergin, the men anticipated Gotti’s release from Green Haven. Gene had been acting captain to the acting captain, but there was no doubt that John would take over as soon as he turned in his prison broom. Source BQ told the FBI on July 21 that Gotti was getting out in a week and the crew had bought him a new Lincoln. And, like a lot of crew members, Source BQ thought that Dellacroce was running the Family, and he told Special Agent Colgan this boded well for John Gotti.

Gotti got out on July 28, 1977, a little less than two years after he went into prison for the McBratney murder. After visiting Victoria and his quintet of happy children, he tried out his new blue and brown Mark V Lincoln, with New Jersey license plates, and found it satisfactory. At the Bergin, he hung a plaque that his former fellow inmates had given him during a party the night before his release.

The plaque read: To John Gotti—a Great Guy.

F
RESH OFF THE DISABLED LIST, John Gotti reclaimed his position in the Bergin lineup, acting captain of what was still technically Fatico’s crew.

Carmine Fatico was now 67 years old. Recently, he had been cheered up by a doubleheader sweep—he won both his loan-sharking cases. The first fell apart at trial after, on successive days, two alleged victims refused to tell what they had told a grand jury. One had worn a hidden microphone to a loan conference with Fatico, enabling agents to overhear him, but the meeting was not recorded and thus there was no way to rebut the man—and therefore no case.

“Justice prevailed, that’s all,” said Carmine as he left a Long Island courtroom with his dismissal.

Four months later, the second case ended similarly: The main witness said he had lied to the grand jury.

Carmine still wanted to lay low, however. He had been convicted in a hijacking case with his brother Daniel and the brothers Carneglia, and was awaiting sentencing. Carmine and Daniel had copped pleas, betting they would get probation rather than prison.

The Great Guy of Green Haven, antsy to climb the Gambino ladder after two years in the can, was hoping they would lose the bet, according to source BQ; Gotti believed he could step up faster if his one-time mentor was out of the way.

“Source spoke to John … and he is actually hoping that both Faticos get jail time,” Special Agent Patrick F. Colgan wrote after talking to BQ, who said Gene Gotti felt the same way. Jail time for the Fatico brothers would enable “the Gotti brothers to obtain more power and influence.”

Gotti was especially restless because Angelo and Gene had been made while he was away. But now that he and his new mentor, the powerful Neil Dellacroce, were out of jail and Paul Castellano had opened the membership book that Carlo Gambino had shut, crooked Johnny Boy would finally get straightened out.

 

 

No Gambino man has ever testified about the ceremony in which associates are baptized as soldiers. Members of other Families have. Although some differences are likely, so are similarities.

“Jimmy the Weasel” Fratianno, a West Coast mobster, recounted his initiation while testifying at a 1980 trial. He described a room full of Family men and a table on which a gun and a sword formed a cross. Then: “They all stood up. We held hands. The boss said something in Italian. It lasted two or three minutes. Then they prick your finger … until blood draws. Then you go around and meet each member of the family. You kiss them on the cheek and you are a member.”

Fratianno said the membership rules were then listed. “The first thing they tell you [is], you can’t fool around with narcotics. Secondly, you can’t fool with anybody’s wife or their daughters or girlfriends. Third, they never kill an FBI agent or any officers because it creates too much heat.”

By testifying, Fratianno was violating
omerta,
the code of noncooperation with the law originating in feudal Sicily. “You can’t never divulge anything about the organization,” he said. “You can’t talk to any officials of any kind. You can’t go to any grand juries and tell the truth. You can’t take depositions … They also tell you, ‘You come in alive and go out dead.’ There is no way out of the organization.”

Eight other men were inducted into the Gambino Family the same night as John, according to Peter Mosca, the son of Ralph Mosca, the Queens capo. Many years later, Peter was caught reminiscing about the night while in the company of Carmine Fiore, a Mosca crew member, and Dominick Lofaro, the secret state Task Force informer whose body wire helped agents record the conversation:

MOSCA: The night I got straightened out, I met Johnny. He was with me. I was right behind him.

FIORE: They held it up for him. They were waiting for him to come home [from prison].

LOFARO: They used to make a lot of guys in those days.

MOSCA: Oh, it was good … coming home that night. Oh, it was marvelous … That night was nine.

 

 

Gotti’s parole terms required that he have a job. Fortunately, the Bergin was located near the Arc Plumbing and Heating Corporation, which was owned by two brothers, old friends of his. In theory, Gotti now became a salesman for Arc, which would provide similarly helpful services for Angelo Ruggiero and his drug-fugitive brother, Salvatore.

Over the next several years, Arc Plumbing prospered. It won pieces of many substantial city contracts, including construction of the new police station for the 106th Precinct, which served Ozone Park and Howard Beach. Arc Plumbing secured other public jobs at city parks, housing projects, Shea Stadium, and the National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadow.

At one point, the company was barred from doing business with the city for three years. Arc president Anthony Gurino failed to mention, when the company submitted its bid on the construction of a new city jail, that he and his brother Caesar were under indictment for helping Salvatore Ruggerio elude the law. This led to a hearing at which Anthony Gurino was asked what type of sales work Gotti did.

“What John does is point out locations,” he said.

 

 

A month after John Gotti’s release, Matthew Traynor made another cocaine trip to Florida for Peter Gotti. He was to meet a supplier in a Fort Lauderdale parking lot, but the police had been tipped off. The supplier got away, but Traynor was arrested. He was released in a few days and returned to New York empty-handed.

Traynor decided to go into banking. At gunpoint, on September 1, he withdrew $25,000 from a bank on Long Island. A few days later in the 101 Bar, Gene demanded a cut because he considered Traynor part of the crew, which was entitled to a tribute—“or you will be hurt or arrested.”

Traynor handed over $10,000 and flew off to Las Vegas to spend $7,000 more.

A month later, Traynor was shot during another bank job and arrested. Recovering from his wounds, Traynor, an unmade man trying to help his case, decided to talk. The FBI opened a drug investigation on Peter, Gene, and John Gotti.

“Traynor advised that he is an ‘errand boy’ and ‘courier’ for John and Peter Gotti who operate in Queens County,” an agent wrote. “Source advised John Gotti … remains in the background insofar as the narcotics … operation is concerned.”

The FBI closed this investigation 18 months later when Traynor flunked a lie-detector test in connection with another story he had told about a fellow inmate’s plot to murder a police officer. Traynor’s wife had provided corroborating evidence of his trips to Florida, but his polygraph performance discredited him as a witness.

Sources BQ and Wahoo said John Gotti—leery of violating his parole—was careful not to discredit himself in the months following his release from Green Haven. Though he still lived an underworld life and made illegal money, he made no waves.

BQ said that Gotti and Willie Boy Johnson ran a gambling operation, which, along with loan-sharking, was providing Gotti with “a small but steady income.” Wahoo said Gotti avoided riskier crimes like hijacking and fencing.

Gotti instructed his men “not to bring heat on the club,” BQ added. He told them to stop loitering in front of the Bergin and to park their cars elsewhere.

In February 1978, Gotti’s 81-year-old father-in-law died and his mother-in-law moved to Florida. In November, the mortgage on the Howard Beach house they had bought for him and Victoria was transferred to her, and she legally assumed the monthly payments. Angelo, who had gotten out of Lewisburg a second time, now lived in Howard Beach, too, in a home owned by his wife’s parents. He, too, was supposedly working for Arc Plumbing and he was then the father of four children; the oldest was a boy named John. An occasional babysitter, who also had moved to Howard Beach, was John Joseph Gotti Sr., now retired.