Mob Star (27 page)

“I’m way out of debt now,” he told an acquaintance. “I’m no fuckin’ millionaire, [but] I’m sitting on four hundred thousand dollars.”

The furtive-phone-calls tip was evidence of a conspiracy to conceal a fugitive. The FBI intensified its surveillance of Angelo, John, Gene, and other Bergin men.

On November 24, Anthony Moscatiello, who had been forwarding mail to his old real estate partner, Salvatore, was stopped and searched by FBI agents. Tony quickly called Sal’s brother.

“Two guys just took me out of the car.”

“You’re kidding,” Angelo said.

“Guns drawn”

“For what?”

“[They] told me [it] was the company I keep.”

Angelo called another Howard Beach neighbor, Joseph Massino, soon to be acting boss of the Bonanno Family.

“I don’t know what the fuck is going on over here,” he told his and John’s longtime friend. “Every time somebody leaves my fucking house … agents grab them on the corner.”

“What the fuck they want you to do?” Massino said. “Hang out with doctors and lawyers?”

Later that day, Angelo called John.

“There’s a little green car circling your block and my block.”

“Yeah, all right.”

“Broken taillight.”

“Yeah … fuckers.”

On December 1, the Angelo wiretap was removed because he moved from Howard Beach to nearby Cedarhurst, Long Island, to a house that he was having renovated. Angelo told informants it was a good move for him—the FBI wouldn’t know where he lived. In fact, pen registers at the Our Friends Social Club had disclosed several calls to Cedarhurst and FBI agents were watching on the day Angelo moved in.

The agents had increased physical surveillance of Angelo and John, suspecting they might be doing what they had not yet talked about on the phone: dealing drugs. Source BQ had just reported that they booted heroin dealer Mark Reiter, age 33, out of the crew—“to have everyone at the club think that they are on the outs with him. In reality, Reiter is arranging deals.”

On December 30, two telephones in Angelo’s safe house were tapped.

 

 

If John Gotti resolved to stop gambling in the New Year, he broke his resolution on New Year’s Day—and lost $90,000 on bowl games he bet on with three bookies.

“The man is fuckin’ nuts,” Angelo told Massino a few days later. “The man is mad.”

Angelo frequently trashed John behind his back, the wiretaps showed. John was a “sick motherfucker” whose “fuckin’ mouth goes a mile a minute.” He was always “abusing” and “talking about people” and was “wrong on a lot of things.” Even so, Quack Quack loved Johnny Boy “like a brother”—their bond was now three decades in the making.

By law, when they’re “up” on someone’s phone, FBI agents must suspend monitoring if the conversations “are not criminal in nature.” This is known as “minimization.” As a practical matter, however, personal or unrelated comments are frequently made during “relevant” conversations. Sometimes, on Angelo’s phones, the results were amusing.

For instance, Gene was taped talking about a horror movie he was watching when Angelo called one day.

“I just watched them shrink a head!”

“Shrink whose head?”

The Amazons, creatures of the Amazons.”

“Yeah?”

“They didn’t show you capturing the guy, they just show you his head. Forget about it.”

“Yeah? I got to go watch it.”

On occasion, touching comments about family members became part of impersonal Department of Justice transcripts.

Angelo, now the father of six children, was taped telling John about telling his young daughter a bedtime story. “So I told her about ‘The Three Little Pigs.’ And I forgot to tell her about the third little pig with the brick house. [Would] you believe, this morning when I woke up, she said, ‘What happened to the other pig, Dad?’”

Eighteen months after Frank Gotti’s death, John was taped telling Angelo where he’d been that morning.

“I went to see some hard-on and I went to see the fuckin’ cemetery.”

“Oh.”

“My route, my daily route.”

On January 10, Angelo’s “mad man” went to see the Pope on Death Hill on Staten Island. Out of respect for Carmine Fatico, Gotti wasn’t “officially” captain of the Bergin crew yet, according to what Angelo told a friend, but he “reports directly to the boss.”

Gotti was accompanied by John Carneglia and observed by FBI agents lurking outside the Castellano White House. The two Johns spotted the agents, who decided to come out in plain view and take down a license-plate number, to let the spotters know they knew they were being watched.

Three days later, Angelo told Gotti that the agents were trying “to put something”—a bug—in Castellano’s home. Angelo had the right idea, but the wrong house—at that time, anyway.

Late on January 14, Queens detectives began arresting the first of many crew members on bookmaking charges. As usual, the legal arrangements were handled by Angelo.

About 3:30 A.M., Angelo woke up Gotti, sick with the flu and in a grouchy mood. After Angelo filed his report. Gotti wondered whether they might get busted, too.

“What are they going to get us for?” Gotti seethed. “Sucking a fucking cunt?”

Having lost nearly $200,000 during the last few months of the football season, Gotti was annoyed that he might be arrested. “Maybe they want to help me borrow to pay,” he said about the Queens cops. “ ... maybe they want to pay the [loan-shark] rate.”

Angelo said ten, maybe twelve, men had been arrested so far.

“One bigger fuckin’ bum than the other they locked up, uh?” Gotti grumbled.

“They’re looking for your brother Richie.”

“Like I said, one bigger bum than the fuckin’ other … no matter how many cocksuckers they get, they wanna bother the motherfucker assholes in the world. I can’t believe this.”

Gotti’s harsh reference to his brother Richard would not have surprised Source BQ. Only two months earlier, BQ had told the FBI it was “common knowledge” that John, Gene, and Richard “do not talk regularly” and frequently communicated through Angelo, who had known them all since childhood. BQ considered Gene the most intelligent of the Gotti brothers.

His tirade over, John said he had something important to tell Angelo, but not over the phone, and, in case anyone was listening in, he left this message:

“Meantime, these fuckin’ bums, the money they’re wastin’ to tap these phones for release cases like us, they coulda went and spent it on good tapes. You know what I mean? Or lend it to us, these fuckin’ bums.”

The men listening in didn’t think they were wasting tax dollars, but the more agents and their supervisors heard Gotti betting nickels and dimes on horses and games, the less optimistic they were about persuading a jury that a man who bet so heavily also was a big bookmaker.

As the sun rose, Angelo was back on the phone with Michael Coiro, the Bergin bail-out specialist.

“Being that this is only a gambling case, you know, you shouldn’t run into any problem on the bail,” Coiro advised.

Angelo next called Tony Moscatiello and assigned him to come by and pick up money, take it to Queens Criminal Court, and bail the Berginites out.

Finally, Angelo called Gene, who asked, “What’s the story?”

“It’s misdemeanors and stuff and fines. We’re going to take the fucking thing and forget about it.”

As it turned out, Angelo and Gotti were able to forget about being arrested themselves; and for a brief while, Gotti forgot about gambling. He stopped after Frank Guidici, who was suspected of running the Bergin bookmaking operation for John, Gene, and Angelo, complained he wasn’t making any money because he had to cover John’s personal losses with other bookmakers.

“He thinks he’s got to go on welfare,” John griped to Angelo.

Angelo said he would pacify Guidici by putting him on the payroll of Mercury Pattern Service, run by Marty and Tommy, who were still sending “shirts” to Angelo. The firm now also employed Angelo—or so its books might say—and soon Marty would even solicit more shylock customers/victims for him.

“I’ll send him some place where [Guidici] can make a few hundred a week,” Angelo added. “I make five hundred dollars a week myself.”

Gotti laid off the action, at least through the 1981 Super Bowl on January 24. This surprised Johnny Boy-watchers like Neil Dellacroce, who was so informed when Angelo telephoned him to talk about their bets.

“Johnny’s the only one that didn’t bet,” Angelo said. “He gave up betting. He’s just going to watch.”

“Who?” Neil asked. “Johnny?”

“Yeah.”

“No kiddin’.”

 

 

A few months after Angelo’s phones were tapped, Diane Giacalone learned, unofficially, about the FBI-Strike Force wiretaps. In the world of agents and cops chasing the same suspects, especially among the fraternity of organized-crime experts, secrets are difficult to keep, despite official policy.

Although the wiretaps weren’t hers, Giacalone decided to try to use them in her effort to link Dellacroce and Gotti to the IBI armored-car robberies. She would “tickle the wire”—prompt more conversation on the tapped phones—by issuing a grand jury subpoena for John Carneglia, the man Angelo sponsored into the Family. Two IBI robbers, Andrew Curro and Peter Zuccaro, were thought to have stolen cars for Fountain Auto Sales, a used-car lot and scrap-metal business run by Carneglia, whose rap sheet included several arrests for car theft and related crimes.

If the tickling turned up indiscreet talking about the cash disbursements of the armored-car jobs, the FBI agents monitoring the wiretaps would have to inform the property-crimes specialists working for Giacalone.

A subpoena commanding him to testify before an Eastern District grand jury under Giacalone’s control was served on John Carneglia early on February 8.

“Two hard-ons just left here, gave me a subpoena,” Carneglia told Angelo in a call a few minutes later.

“For what?”

“I don’t know, something to do with … that kid Andrew [Curro], or some shit.”

Crazy Sally Polisi would later say that Carneglia offered to hook him up with Curro and Zuccaro so they could steal cars for him, which he could then sell to Carneglia. Now, however, Carneglia told Angelo that he told the agents he had nothing to do with Curro and Zuccaro.

“These kids are junkie motherfuckin’ kids half my age,” he quoted himself.

Carneglia said the agents replied they knew he didn’t and the subpoena was “bullshit,” but a “lady prosecutor” had insisted.

“What’s her name?” Angelo asked.

Carneglia didn’t remember offhand, but he had seen it on the subpoena, which was signed by a “real, real Italian lady.”

Charles Carneglia also got a subpoena. Crazy Sally Polisi would testify later that Charles told him “we whacked out” a court officer—a reference to Albert Gelb, who was to testify against Charles in a gun-possession case. James Cardinali would testify that John Carneglia told him—as they talked about what they would do if a cop ever happened on a crime-in-progress—that he had “whacked” a court officer.

According to court papers, on the night Gelb arrested Charles Carneglia for carrying a weapon, Carneglia threatened to kill him. Over the next thirteen months, Gelb, who had won three medals for heroic off-duty actions, received many threats. He became “very fearful of testifying” but decided to go ahead.

Gelb, age 25, was shot dead in Queens early one morning a few days before the trial began. A man in a white car followed Gelb home from his job in Brooklyn Night Court, cut off Gelb’s car, jumped out, and fired four times through the windshield.

If Giacalone hoped remembrances of Gelb would turn up on Angelo’s tickled wire, she was disappointed.

Angelo and John Carneglia did talk several more times about the subpoena, but not incriminatingly. Angelo advised Carneglia that all he had to do was take the Fifth Amendment—refuse to answer any questions—if the real Italian lady didn’t give him immunity.

A grant of immunity, Angelo correctly told Carneglia, would have to come from Washington.

“Takes seven to eight weeks to get it,” Angelo said.

“Yeah?”

“They can get it in three weeks if they want.”

“Oh …?”

“Listen, the fastest they can get it is two weeks.”

“No.”

“They could have it waitin’ for you, don’t get me wrong.”

Without immunity, Carneglia appeared before the grand jury on February 17.

“How’d you make out?” Angelo asked.

“Yeah, good, Fifth Amendment, that was it, no nothing, no immunity … two seconds I was in and out.”

 

 

James Cardinali got out of prison a few days after Carneglia got out of the grand jury. Police in Brooklyn considered him a suspect in the murder of Michael Castigliola, the man who told John Gotti that Jamesy was selling drugs. A witness to the murder, Jamesy’s 70-year-old friend, Tommie LaRuffa, now went up in flames with his house. Jamesy said he believes he knows who torched Tommie and he wasn’t him.

Under his new parole terms, Jamesy wasn’t supposed to be seen with John Gotti, so he avoided the Bergin and hung out at a small storefront in Brooklyn that Willie Boy Johnson used as the base of a small bookmaking operation.

After a few months, Willie Boy told him that Gotti was wondering why Jamesy wasn’t around. “You never go over there. Just go over there and show your face.”

Jamesy went, but had only a hello-good-bye conversation with Gotti, who had people waiting in the Our Friends Social Club. A few weeks later, he saw him again, long enough for Gotti to say one of his former drivers, Richard Gomes, had the same parole terms as Cardinali, but occasionally came by anyway.

In fact, two months earlier Gomes had been arrested by FBI agents who found seven-and-a-half kilos of hashish hidden in the closet of a house in Providence, Rhode Island, where he was apprehended.