Mob Star (24 page)

The triple hit caused a few tense moments for the Gambino Family in the summer of 1981. Indelicato’s son, Anthony, swore to take revenge and felt that his father’s murder resulted from Dellacroce’s mediating again in Bonanno Family problems. It was a logical suspicion; Anthony had helped murder Galante at the behest of Dellacroce.

Anthony, or “Bruno” as he was known, was considered violent even by Family standards. He was a big cocaine user, always armed, and he dipped his bullets in cyanide.

 

 

Vincent Gotti, the youngest Gotti brother, was another big coke user, according to Wahoo. Early in June, Wahoo told detectives that Vincent had gone into hiding after he was indicted in a cocaine-selling case.

Vincent, age 28, had begun a rap sheet in 1969 when he was arrested for rape. The charge was dismissed, but in succeeding years he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor theft and felony theft; in the latter case, while employed as a construction laborer, Vincent employed a fake gun to rob a gas station of $84. Agents say his degenerate gambler brother had banished him from the Bergin because of his degenerate cocaine use.

Dominick Polifrone, an undercover agent for the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms division of the Treasury Department, met Vincent in a Brooklyn bar. Polifrone had been asked to adopt an underworld guise by the NYPD, which was investigating illegal arms dealing.

Vincent told Polifrone he had “connections” to both guns and drugs. “He reminded me of John,” Polifrone later recalled. “He was a typical wiseguy. He mentioned that his brother was an important wiseguy, but he was earning on the side. He didn’t want his brother to know anything.”

When the gun-running investigation stalled, a Manhattan grand jury led by a special narcotics prosecutor indicted Vincent for selling 2.5 ounces of cocaine to Polifrone for $5,400; but when the cops later went to arrest him he could not be found.

Vincent turned up in 1986, just as his brother was taking over the Gambino Family. After a routine traffic stop, upstate cops had discovered that his driver’s license was phony; a computer search turned up the outstanding drug warrant from Manhattan. Vincent pleaded guilty in an empty courtroom and was sent away on a six-year-to-life prison term.

While on the lam, one alias he used was Frank Gotti. Source Wahoo also told the Queens detective squad about John Gotti’s dice game in Little Italy.

Members of the squad, armed with 40 pairs of handcuffs and three paddy wagons, rode into Manhattan on June 24 and busted the game. Even at 1:30 A.M., the sight of 30 neighborhood celebrities being detained and questioned drew a large and mostly sympathetic crowd that razzed the raiders.

The Bergin was informed almost immediately.

“They just pinched the game,” a caller told Peter Gotti at 1:50 A.M.

The cops confiscated $100,000, two loaded revolvers, a professional dice table, nine pairs of dice, and 775 poker chips. “This was not your average after-hours joint,” one detective told reporters. “This was strictly for card-carrying gangsters who are high rollers.”

Seven men were arrested, including Frank DeCicco, Tony Rampino, and Billy Battista, on charges of promoting gambling. Tony and Billy also were charged with being “dressed up,” or possessing weapons. A 61-year-old Gambino man, Peter Tambone, also was arrested on the gambling charge, but he would face far more serious problems involving drugs in just a few months, and would feign craziness to save himself.

The arrestees were taken to nearby Manhattan Criminal Court for arraignment. The court, which operates around the clock, is so busy the ordeal of booking, fingerprinting, and checking suspects’ records for outstanding warrants can take more than 36 hours, if all goes well. An arrestee can’t be released until he is formally charged, admitted to bail, or pleads guilty. The dice men would sleep a night in the slammer.

Eighteen hours after the arrests, Tony Roach called the Bergin from jail to find out if Bergin lawyer Michael Coiro and his partner were on the case and if bail plans were being made. He spoke to Gene Gotti.

“They’re there, they’re on it, the bondsmen, they’re on it,” Gene said. “[The police] are fucking you around with your prints.”

Tony Roach complained he was hungry and Gene teased him by saying, “We’re eating now, mother fuck.”

The next morning, with Michael Coiro by their side, all the men pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor gambling charge and were fined $500 each. The gun charges were put over for grand jury action because they were felonies. All were released.

Detective Victor Ruggiero, a veteran of the Ravenite Social Club investigation now assigned to Queens, conducted surveillance at the court. He saw Coiro with two men he did not know; Coiro gave one of them a copy of the arraignment papers, which indicated that the cops were tipped off by an unnamed informant. The man went to a pay phone in the lobby and Ruggiero slipped in beside him.

“Hello? Johnny Boy?” Ruggiero heard the man say. “You got a rat, a fuckin’ rat … I’ll personally take care of it … I’ll kill the motherfucker.”

Learning about an informant in the crew’s midst was an important piece of information, but nothing over which to stop gambling. On the very next day, the game moved across Mott Street to a larger room, where the gaming tables were replaced, and the dice rolled again that night.

According to Source BQ, however, the game never really recaptured its former popularity. He said the tension caused by the Bonanno Family murders put a damper on attendance. Indeed, Indelicato’s vengeful son waved a weapon at Angelo and Gene as they were driving on an expressway one day, but they were able to veer away before meeting up with any cyanide bullets.

Few people have the nerve or acting ability to play the games Sources BQ and Wahoo were playing, especially Wahoo, who was committing crimes while revealing only selected others to agencies unaware of his double-agency. He was dancing on a high wire without a net and, so far, getting away with it.

The day before the Mott Street raid, Wahoo checked in with the FBI. He said Willie Boy Johnson had become partners with Gotti in an auto-body repair shop. He said, however, that Angelo remained Gotti’s “main man, emissary, and trusted messenger.”

Wahoo also provided extensive details about the interior of the Our Friends Social Club—which was managed by Richard Gotti—across the street and around the corner from the Bergin. Such details would be useful if the FBI sought to install a bug or telephone taps. Wahoo had already supplied the layout of the Bergin itself, and now he told Agent Abbott about the telephone room adjacent to the Bergin. The sugarless-candy store was more than a telephone room. It was a fireworks depository; in a rear room, $20,000 worth of holiday explosives were stored.

On June 30, 1981, Manhattan cops, along with the FBI, rode into Queens and raided the telephone room. The cops, members of the Manhattan South vice squad, wanted the fireworks; the FBI wanted to scout the room to size up its bug potential. The FBI, by this time, had heard enough about the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club to open a formal investigation.

Special Agent Donald W. McCormick had been working the case since March. Inside the room, as the fireworks were being carted off, he went to one of the two pay phones to tell his boss the raid went well.

“Be careful what you say on the phone,” Bergin associate Jackie Cavallo smiled. “Santucci’s got a tap on it.”

Santucci was John Santucci, the elected district attorney of Queens. McCormack smiled back and dialed Bruce Mouw, his FBI supervisor, and also called a sergeant on the vice squad in Manhattan.

Moments after Mouw was called, his boss, Ed Sharp, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s New York office, got a call from someone in the Queens District Attorney’s office congratulating the FBI on the fireworks raid. The NYPD vice sergeant also received a similar call. Cavallo wasn’t kidding; the pay phone
was
tapped.

Later, Special Agent Mouw met with District Attorney Santucci and others to “discuss the conflict of interest between the FBI and the Queens D.A.’s office regarding electronic surveillance” of John Gotti and the Bergin, Mouw said later.

The Queens D.A. told Mouw that his men had tapped both pay phones and installed a bug in the rear of the Bergin. The bug never came to life; the taps produced many gambling tapes, enough to indict 15 to 20 people, but not much else. Santucci said taps at social clubs were not as good as bugs in the Family homes.

The meeting had a “competitive air,” Mouw said, but the D.A. did agree to ease up on the Bergin surveillance and forget about trying anything similar at the Our Friends Social Club. But Santucci also indicated he would continue his investigation, hopeful of getting something more important than gambling charges.

In September, another meeting was held. The Queens officials said someone with access to secret documents was leaking information about their not-so-secret Bergin surveillance. “They were greatly disturbed [that] they had a leak or some sort of compromise in their office,” Mouw said.

The Queens contingent also admitted the presence of another embarrassing situation. The D.A. had issued subpoenas for the telephone records of Angelo and crew associate Michael Roccoforte, but failed to insert a “do-not-notify” clause in the subpoenas; both men were told by the telephone company their records had been subpoenaed.

Mouw agreed to schedule a meeting between case-agent Donald McCormick and the Queens case-detective, Jack Holder, but this meeting was never held. Neither side really wanted to work with the other, a not-unusual example of a failure-to-communicate situation between rival law-enforcement agencies.

“We didn’t feel that information would be secure by sharing it with the Queens D.A.’s office,” Mouw said. “I never contacted [them] and they never contacted me.”

Of course, Source Wahoo contacted the FBI. He said that Bergin lawyer Michael Coiro was “friendly” with an unnamed assistant district attorney in Queens. He also said that Gotti had recently told the crew, “We’re all going to jail.”

The candy-store taps went in on May 7, after the Queens D.A. used the surveillance by Holder and others, the pen-register information, and the arrest of Peter Schiavone to obtain the required court approval. The D.A.’s affidavit said the taps were necessary because:

“A misguided sense of loyalty, combined with the criminal wall of silence and the fear of personal reprisal, make it extremely unlikely that even after receiving immunity any member of the conspiracy or criminal associate of the targets would testify truthfully against any other members of the community.”

The taps lasted only until August. The targets, who knew the candy-store numbers were found in the Schiavone wire room, were cautious on the phones. For instance, near midnight on June 2, Angelo called Gotti and began to speak about someone identified only as an “asshole,” but Gotti cut him off.

“Forget about this phone.”

Angelo then started talking about other subjects, but later returned to the first one.

“Please,” Gotti said. “You know, you got a car. Why don’t you drive here when you want to talk with people?” [Or] call me. I’ll drive … Just tell me you wanna talk to me. I’ll get in the fucking car, you know?”

Gotti demonstrated similar restraint many times on the Bergin tapes, but when it was time to place a bet, he didn’t care who was listening in.

I
T IS ILLEGAL TO BE a bookmaker, but not to bet with one.

During the three months the candy-store taps were on, they sizzled with action. A constant melody of tips, hunches, lines, odds, and bets entertained monitoring cops. John Gotti sizzled—and fizzled—most of all.

Near the end of the first week, Gotti was heard calling the telephone room to learn how two horses he’d gotten tips on made out. One had “ran out,” bolted the track.

“Fucking fuck bastards with their fucking tips,” Gotti screamed when he heard the news. “I bet every bookmaker [I] could find.”

“Ah, I believe that,” the man answering the phone said.

With his multiple contacts and interests, Gotti was always getting tips. They came from other bettors, racetrack fiends, friends of track employees, stable owners—everywhere.

“The Pope gave me two tips,” he told a man a week later. “Two seconds [second-place finishes], on my mother’s life!”

When Gotti bet on a horse race, he bet to win, and almost always bet $1,000, a “dime” as he called it. A man who bet thousands like dimes demanded quality service.

“Give me a dime on him and a dime on Prospect,” he told a bookie one day.

“Prospect is in the fifth race?”

“What the fuck’s the difference what race? You know the horse, so you look for the race!”

When Gotti couldn’t get through to a bookmaker when he needed him, he turned the job over to one of his Bergin minions.

“Call around and see if you can get me in the fourth race, Sun Ray Classic,” he ordered a minion one night.

“In the fourth?”

“Yeah. It’s a nine-oh-eight post time, so you got about twenty minutes. See what you can fucking do.”

“Sun Ray, what did you want on it?”

“A dime!” Gotti was incredulous. “What do I want on it?”

In a similar conversation a few days later, Gotti gave a possible clue about his attraction to gambling.

“Call me in a bet on the last race, too, all right?” he told a different Bergin man.

“How much? Dime?”

“Yeah, what the fuck. I’ll get myself really in fucking jeopardy.”

One of the few times Gotti was overheard betting less than $1,000 was on May 20, when he hunch-bet $500, a “nickel,” on a horse whose name he liked: John Q. Arab.

“That’s all?” the surprised bookie replied.

“That’s all, I ain’t going crazy no more.”

Gotti broke the vow that very night, and was furious because he almost was not able to get a dime down in time for a late race; it was all because a bookie had left his wire room a little early that evening. Later that night, he tracked the man down and complained.