Mob Star (23 page)

“What happened was Family business,” Zappi said. “It’s over. There will be no more trouble.”

Detectives believe Favara and his car were compacted into a small block of bones and steel, but no evidence was ever found. In 1986, a court declared him dead.

At one point, the detectives got a tip that a notorious gang of killers and car thieves known as the “DeMeo crew” was responsible for Favara’s death. The crew was led by Roy DeMeo, who reported to Anthony Gaggi, who was one of Paul Castellano’s top captains.

The DeMeo crew would be accused of 22 murders, many in connection with a stolen-car racket, for which Castellano was on trial when he was murdered. One victim of the DeMeo crew was hacked to death, after which the killers went out for pizza, one later testified. Another victim was Castellano’s former son-in-law, Frank Amato, who had strayed from Constance Castellano during their marriage and was held responsible for her miscarriage. Amato disappeared a few months after Favara.

Two years after Favara vanished, a newspaper updated the story and quoted Sgt. Schriffen, who then got a call from an agitated Victoria Gotti, who asked him to stop talking to the press.

“If my husband knew I was calling you, he’d kill me,” she added. “Let my son die in peace.”

I
N THE FALL OF 1980, the father of the boy on the minibike was gambling heavily and losing big—about $30,000 a weekend, according to Source BQ.

Gotti beat bookmakers out of many of his losses, but BQ said, “He does not have the money he used to.” Meanwhile, crew members were beginning to grumble about their own financial woes, BQ added.

Crew associates Tony Roach Rampino, Michael Roccoforte, and the man told by Gotti to set up his son-in-law Tommy DiSimone for murder, Sal DeVita, were identified as “just a few” who were “considering taking action” on their own if Gotti didn’t start arranging scores for them.

“Source states there is a lot of hard feeling and animosity among members of the club toward Gotti,” Special Agent Colgan wrote.

Source BQ flatly predicted Gotti and the men closest to him would start dealing drugs in a big way—at the risk of getting killed by Paul Castellano if they got caught by the authorities.

Gotti would attempt to insulate himself by only putting up investment money, BQ said; Angelo, Gene, and Willie Boy would be more actively involved. BQ cited two bits of circumstantial evidence: Salvatore Ruggiero, with whom Gotti was once arrested in a stolen car, was recently in town and seen by Gotti and Angelo; in addition, a young dealer named Mark Reiter had begun hanging around the Bergin.

“The informant knows Reiter is heavily involved in the sale and distribution of cocaine,” Agent Colgan wrote. In fact, Reiter would soon be indicted in Manhattan for selling heroin.

Though Gotti himself would be seduced by the easy money in drugs, he had recently condemned drug dealing, BQ said.

“Source states Gotti himself has laid the law down to his crew that he will not back them if they are in any way involved [in drug deals], but apparently Gotti was just following orders given him and is not abiding by these same rules.”

 

 

At the time BQ was making his predictions, the Queens District Attorney’s office detective squad was just beginning to investigate John and Angelo. They got underway after learning from Manhattan detectives that the pair hung out on Mulberry Street with Neil Dellacroce.

Detectives noticed that the men who hung out on 101st Avenue kept walking back and forth between the Bergin and a seemingly empty storefront only 10 feet away. The detectives then noticed that there were two pay telephone booths inside the store.

A check with the telephone company disclosed that the Bergin itself did not have a phone. New York Telephone records indicated that the name of the subscriber to the storefront phones was Vito Maccia’s Candy Store; but neither Vito nor candy was inside, just a few chairs and the pay telephones along one wall.

The detectives installed court-approved pen registers, devices that track dialed numbers and count incoming calls. They gave a new name to the phantom candy store: “The telephone room.”

The registers produced frequently called numbers. One was traced to an apartment in Ridgewood, Queens. Detective Jack Holder, a veteran of many gambling investigations, hid in the hallway outside the apartment. He kept hearing “Hello” without hearing a phone ring. Many bookmakers use phones that announce calls with a light instead of a ring so as not to annoy neighbors.

“Hello, yeah, who’s this?” Holder heard the voice say. “Okay, go ahead … one hundred twenty-eight for ten. Two hundred fourteen fox six …” Holder now knew: The apartment was a “wire room.”

Further surveillance showed the apartment was occupied from noon to 2 P.M. and from 6 to 8 P.M., the standard times bettors get down with bookies for the afternoon and evening action at tracks and stadiums.

Holder obtained a search warrant and found evidence of $5,000 in daily receipts. Tacked to a wall, he found a list of telephone numbers. Two belonged to the candy-store phones. One rang at Our Friends Social Club and another at Lolita’s across from the Bergin. The other numbers were for phones in other social clubs or businesses in Queens and Brooklyn.

The occupant of the apartment, Peter Schiavone, was arrested on misdemeanor charges, pleaded guilty, and was fined $250. The detectives were certain that Schiavone was only a clerk, not the boss of the operation. However, they continued to watch.

Within weeks, Schiavone was spotted going in and out of a new apartment. The candy-store pen registers now showed calls to that address. Outside the Bergin, Detective Michael Falciano overheard Billy Battista and a man they knew as Frank Guidici talking about a bet that had been recorded inaccurately.

“That fucking ticket was for a thousand dollars. What does he mean, he put it in for five hundred?” Guidici said angrily. “As far as I am concerned, he owes five hundred yet.”

“What the fuck you getting excited about? Call him on the fucking phone,” Battista said.

Guidici entered the Bergin telephone room and called the new wire room occupied by Schiavone. The call and Guidici’s words led detectives to believe that Guidici was Schiavone’s boss. His actions were not those of a mere bettor. If the $500 “ticket” had been his bet, he hardly would have complained if he had lost; if he had won, he would be owed more than $500.

Back in September, Guidici had been listed along with Gotti and Angelo as targets of the Queens investigation. Here was evidence that Guidici was running a gambling operation with ties to the Bergin, which was the field headquarters of Gotti and Angelo—two disciples of the man thought to be the king of the Gambino Family, Neil Dellacroce.

The detectives intensified their investigation, taking time off only for Christmas.

On Eighty-fifth Street in Howard Beach, the Gotti home was dark; it was the first time it was unlit for Christmas holidays since the family moved there in 1973.

The still-acting boss of the Bergin, who usually went to the Yonkers or Roosevelt Raceway on Friday nights, continued to gamble and lose heavily in 1981.

The second weekend in January was a big football weekend. Gotti lost $21,000. The next weekend, he lost $16,000. Meanwhile, Source BQ said, crew members like Tony Roach, Sal DeVita, and Billy Battista could hardly afford to play the daily number.

When it came to gambling, there was more to Gotti than horses and games. On February 4, BQ told the FBI two days later, Gotti brought Atlantic City to Queens when he opened a gambling hall for Family men on the second floor of the Bergin. The main event was dice and the minimum bet was $500. It would be open six nights a week until 4 A.M.

On the first night, men from other Gambino crews and other Families dropped by. Frank DeCicco came and went away without $15,000. The hosts lost, too. Willie Boy dropped $13,000, Angelo $8,000, and Gotti $3,000. Later in the week, Mark Reiter, the future heroin defendant, won $20,000.

A month later, BQ said the game was going so well that Gotti would move it to Manhattan, to make it more accessible and to attract bigger gamblers, including “legitimate people” with Family connections. He might even admit women gamblers—an absolute taboo at the Bergin.

Early in March 1981, the game did move to Manhattan, to a building on Mott Street in Little Italy, around the corner from the Ravenite Social Club. The game, as it had in Ozone Park, rested on Saturday, but remained a boys-only event. “Street talk indicates at this time that this particular dice game of Gotti’s is the best in the New York area,” a FBI memo noted.

Because the dice men were up late, they slept late, and Gotti razzed those who didn’t seem to show the energy he did. A call—secretly taped—that he placed one day about 6 P.M. to a groggy Willie Boy illustrated this. Gotti wondered why Willie Boy hadn’t shown up at the Bergin yet.

“It’s a new game now? Whoever goes to the fucking crap game can sleep all fucking day?”

“I’m there every night, John.”

“And where the fuck do you think I am? … There’s things to be done here. I can’t do them all by myself.”

Source BQ said the house of dice began each night with a bank of about $40,000 put up by twelve partners, including DeCicco and the old JFK hijack squad, John, Gene, and Angelo. “According to the informant, the house has never lost,” Special Agent Colgan wrote.

Gotti, however, continued to lose. Being an owner of the game, he could borrow against the house money. At one point, he became concerned about how much others had borrowed and ordered an accounting, which showed he was the largest debtor, for $55,000.

Gotti’s losses endangered the game’s profits. On May 13, he lost $30,000, causing Angelo to wonder whether the only way to detoxify his
gumbah
was to close the game. The next day, he called Gene Gotti to complain. They used “dollar” and “balloon” as synonyms for $1,000; they also used unflattering terms to describe a man they loved, most of the time.

“You gotta do yourself a favor and everybody else a favor, too,” Angelo began. “We gotta see how we gonna close this fucking joint in New York.”

“Yeah, what happened now?”

“That fucking hard-on, you know that hard-on, the guy that your mother shit out.”

“Go ahead.”

“He lost thirty dollars last night.”

“We were on top sixty balloons! I left there one-thirty, we were on top sixty balloons! We didn’t need him in the fucking game!”

“I’m by the club now.”

“We were on top sixty balloons—what, is he kidding somebody or what, this guy? Who the fuck needed him there? So what is he looking to do now? Just take advantage of people or what?”

“Let’s see how we got to do it, Genie.”

“Oh fuck him, I don’t give a fuck. What is he looking to do this, this guy? Is he abusing his position, or what?”

Angelo responded with a comment that indicated the night hadn’t been a total loss.

“I won ninety dollars.”

In June, Willie Boy Johnson was rewarded for lost sleep and won big, too. BQ said Willie Boy was not a good gambler, “but one of the luckiest individuals I’ve ever known.”

Source Wahoo ran into bad luck on January 27. He left the Our Friends Social Club and was followed to his home in Brooklyn by the detectives working on the Bergin gambling case.

After Wahoo parked his car and opened the trunk, the detectives walked toward him. He saw them and began throwing money from his pockets into the trunk. The detectives then announced who they were.

“Oh good. I am glad it’s you guys,” Wahoo said. “I thought it was someone else. Go ahead. Take it. I don’t see anything.”

“What are you talking about?” replied Detective Holder, who looked in the trunk and saw bundles of cash.

“Take what is yours.”

“What do you want me to take that for?”

“If my parole officer saw this, I would be in a lot of trouble.”

Holder said he would take the bribe, but would have to clear it with his boss. Wahoo nodded and Holder arrested him on the spot for attempting to bribe him with the $50,000 in the trunk.

Wahoo was indicted by a state grand jury in Queens. The indictment was kept secret because he had decided to begin a second dangerous relationship. He did not inform the Queens district attorney that he was a Top Echelon informer for the FBI and he did not tell the FBI that he was now a confidential informant for the NYPD—a violation of the agreement he had made the previous March with his new control agent, James Abbott.

The D.A.’s detective commander, Lt. Remo Franceschini, tried to talk Wahoo into becoming more than an informant. He told Wahoo that he had a close working relationship with the FBI and the special federal Organized Crime Strike Force in Brooklyn and Wahoo would probably qualify for the federal witness-protection program; he would be able to get a new identity and be relocated in another state if he would actually testify at trials.

“I will never testify. I would rather go to jail,” Wahoo said.

Over the next few months, for the Queens detective squad, Source Wahoo was a kind of talk-show expert, a studio commentator, on happenings in all the Families. He paid them well for his guest shots—his $50,000 was deposited in the police pension fund.

On a few occasions, Wahoo got specific. On May 18, 1981, he told Queens cops where to find the body of Alphonse “Sonny Red” Indelicato, a Bonanno capo who was caught on the losing side of yet another internal power dispute in that Family.

Go look in “The Hole,” Wahoo said.

“The Hole” was a vacant lot near an auto-salvage yard on the Brooklyn-Queens border, near the Lindenwood Diner, where John Carneglia, who owned the Fountain Auto Shop, hung out with other Family soldiers and friends. Six days later, Sonny Red’s body was found.

Indelicato was one of the plotters who had waited at the Ravenite Social Club with Neil Dellacroce two years earlier for the killers of Bonanno boss Carmine Galante to return from their assignment. Now Indelicato and two other capos who had plotted against Galante’s successor had gone the way of Galante, which is how it goes in the Crime Capital.