Mob Star (33 page)

In the middle of the night, Willie Boy called Jamesy and scripted the score. He told him to meet some accomplices in an after-hours bar. One of these told Jamesy:

“The boat is leaving in a few hours. Go by my house, wake my wife, get the bag with the guns and badges, and come here.”

At 4:30 A.M., many fishermen clogged the way to the
Lucky Lady.
The others wanted to call it off, but Jamesy strolled past the unknowing anglers and onto the unguarded yacht, opened an unlocked door and began handcuffing the surprised occupants, except for one.

“The captain of the boat was giving me a hard time. When I woke him and said, ‘Police,’ he was trying to get up. I kept pistol-whipping him with the gun.

The
Lucky Lady
gang got about $10,000 in jewelry and cash. But Jamesy’s luck had just run out. He was arrested for the murder of Michael Castigliola, who was killed for ratting Jamesy out to Gotti. Jamesy was looking at 25-to-life, and he spent the night in a Brooklyn jail, alone with his thoughts.

Some of these arrived later in a letter to a
Daily News
reporter. “I would be willing to sell a story … or possibly doing a book. I have a lot of interesting stories about Johnny and our crew. Johnny and I were exceptionally close.”

At the jail, for cops the next morning, Cardinali summed up his thoughts this way: “I would be willing to talk.”

Late in August, he was taken to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office and began talking about one of his other murders—the one he felt bad about, the collegiate-looking kid at the Riviera Motel at JFK Airport—but he told Mark Feldman, deputy chief of the homicide bureau, that he wasn’t the shooter. It wasn’t a candid start for someone seeking to deal down a big charge. Feldman, however, told Jamesy to continue talking and so long as he told the truth, nothing he said would be used against him.

Blessed with this absolution, Jamesy admitted he was the Riviera Motel triggerman, but offered nothing about the three victims whom nobody with a badge knew anything about: the two coke dealers in Florida and the Brooklyn dealer anchored in Jamaica Bay. He did offer another body, however, and when he connected the murder of court officer Albert Gelb to John and Charles Carneglia and the Gambino Family, he was on his way to protected status.

Jamesy told Feldman he knew little about Paul Castellano, but he knew a lot about John Gotti.

“Who?”

“He’ll be the boss after Paul and Neil are gone.”

Feldman worked homicide in Brooklyn, so it isn’t surprising he hadn’t heard about the capo from Queens. He called then-NYPD Detective Kenneth McCabe, who verified Jamesy’s Family observations and called in Detective Billy Burns, who was still working with FBI-less Diane Giacalone.

Giacalone was ready for good news. She had recently lost an extortion case against Castellano’s cousin, the case that had caused tension between her and some FBI agents even before the FBI pulled out of her RICO case. Her lost case was based on tapes, but the most memorable line of dialogue came from a witness who quoted an enforcer as saying: “This is
La Cosa Nostra
—what’s yours is ours and what’s ours is ours.”

Now, Diane told Jamesy: “Tell me everything you know.”

Though Jamesy kept his three other murders a secret, he talked all day. It was the first of many marathon sessions and the beginning of a tortuous, fateful relationship between him and Diane, kids from Queens born a year apart who grew up as polar opposites. They fought constantly. To him, she was a deceitful bully. To her, he was a remorseless punk. But as much as they hated it, they needed each other.

After that first day, Giacalone felt her investigation was taking off. Jamesy’s stories would have to be tested against others before any deals were made, but they sounded true. In the meantime, Jamesy was transferred to federal custody and lodged in a special dormitory, a prized murderer.

 

 

Multiple murderers were part of Paul Castellano’s camp, too, and now he began to pay the price as the first shot in the federal Family assault was fired. Early in 1984, the Pope was indicted as a beneficiary of a conspiracy to steal luxury cars and sell them overseas.

The announcement was made by the new U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, Rudy Giuliani. Paul and 21 others were indicted, making it one of the largest RICO cases ever. The charges were a bloody lesson on how quickly the Family kills, and not just its own. The defendants were accused of varying roles in 30 murders tied to the ring’s car-theft enterprise. Most of the victims were hoodlums, but one was a twenty-year-old man who happened to witness a double homicide; a second was the nineteen-year-old girlfriend of a suspected informer.

Besides Paul, the key figures in the case were Anthony Gaggi, in whose house Paul had been crowned, and a dead man, Roy DeMeo, whose name had popped up in the death of the Howard Beach service manager, John Favara. The indictment stated that Paul ordered Gaggi to kill DeMeo, a maverick Gambino hit man who fell into disfavor when one of his victims was found in a barrel and the Family got some bad publicity. DeMeo then sealed his fate by refusing to show up for a sitdown.

DeMeo’s name had also popped up in an FBI affidavit in support of the White House bug. The affidavit said Paul had “put out feelers” to the Gotti crew about killing DeMeo. It paraphrased one of the last conversations secretly recorded at Angelo’s house in 1982—a lengthy Angelo-Gene chat in which Gene seemed wary of accepting a contract on DeMeo because DeMeo had a “small army” around him.

Gene said he and his brother John had “done” only seven or eight “guys” while DeMeo had “done” 37.

DeMeo’s army apparently deserted him early in 1983, when he was found dead, shot five times, in the trunk of his car. While DeMeo was alive, the indictment in the stolen-car ring case now charged, Paul had ordered him, Gaggi, and a third man to kill a father-and-son Gambino team who helped stage a phony charity event attended in 1979 by First Lady Rosalynn Carter. The scheme was said to have embarrassed Paul, the upright businessman.

Like Carlo Gambino had been, the Pope was only vaguely acquainted with courtrooms. But now, at age 68, he realized his retirement years might be spent behind bars.

John Gotti realized it, too, and was pleased, according to Source BQ, an associate of the crew, but not as active as Wahoo—and also not as big a Gotti fan. Days after the indictment, Gotti and friends were “already contemplating their rise to power.” Gotti knew Paul’s problems “will only mean better times for himself.” Gotti had been at a restaurant in Little Italy and “was quietly gloating in the troubles that have recently befallen” Paul, who was pressing for details on the Angelo heroin-trafficking indictment, but was still being denied “the whole truth.”

Wahoo didn’t comment on Gotti’s state of mind, but he did express surprise that Angelo and the others hadn’t met up with no-drugs-enforcer Chin Gigante on some rooftop; he offered this explanation, as rendered by Agent Abbott:

“Angelo, et al. may have drafted a phony indictment to display to Big Paul and Neil to tailor their excuses and get them off the hook.”

Wahoo also added a bulletin from another front: “James Cardinali has become a rat because he is jammed up with a murder charge.” Jamesy had “given up” Willie Boy and was talking about assaults on a cocaine yacht and a bodega owner.

 

 

Another rat was about to crawl into a trap laid by cops in Queens. Crazy Sally Polisi was arrested in Ozone Park as he handed over serious cocaine to an undercover detective. Polisi was dealing again because he was broke. He had moved upstate and sunk all his money, including the $90,000 shopping bag of 20-dollar bills from John Carneglia, into a 50-acre weekend retreat for go-cart fans. The property had two tracks, a house, a restaurant, and few go-cart fans. Polisi lost $600,000.

Like Cardinali, Polisi was facing 25-to-life. Lt. Remo Franceschini, who convinced Wahoo to become a Queens informer, knew Polisi had mob ties. He invited him into his office and pointed to a photo gallery of Family men, Queens branch.

“Would you be interested in helping us?”

“Never, never, never.”

Polisi was unable to make bail and was jailed. Over the next two months, “never” became “maybe.” But what he was maybe ready to give had too much to do with Queens. He was afraid to trust anyone from Queens and so he called the federal probation officer he met on his bank robbery case in 1975 and asked him to take him to Edward McDonald, boss of the Eastern District Organized Crime Strike Force.

McDonald wanted to use Polisi in the case that he and the FBI had underway against the Gambino hierarchy, but Polisi set another agenda when he said: “I can give you a judge in Queens. I paid Mike Coiro $50,000 to fix a stolen-car case against me, my wife, and brother-in-law, and he did. Mike Coiro is the man who can fix cases in Queens.”

When Giacalone’s boss, Raymond J. Dearie, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District, was told about Polisi, he took control of him because his staff was probing corruption in Queens County courts; Polisi went into the witness-protection program, was wired up, and set out to get a judge. He would make a bribery case against one who had fixed Family cases for 15 years. As part of the deal, his case in Queens was dropped in favor of a less-punitive federal charge. Instead of 25-to-life, he faced zero-to-15, closer to zero if he continued to cooperate, which is why dates with Giacalone and the trial of John Gotti were in his future.

Giacalone was busy arranging Cardinali’s deal. Jamesy had proven his value in appearances before her grand jury. And now he would plead guilty to the Castigliola murder in state court, for a 5-to-10-year sentence. As to his other crimes, including the “I-felt-bad” college-kid murder, forget about it. He would not face any punishment for any as long as he continued to tell the truth and testified at trial against Dellacroce and Gotti.

Minutes after his deal was signed, Cardinali revealed a truth to Edward Magnuson, the DEA agent assisting Giacalone. He had killed two drug dealers in Florida; when Giacalone was told, she screamed bloody murder.

“Tell me everything now! Don’t hold back!”

“Well, there was this other murder in Brooklyn.”

Jamesy had sandbagged Giacalone. She could respond in either of two ways: She could revoke the deal and cripple her investigation by depriving it of the main witness, or she could carry on with the unseemly baggage of a five-time killer in her corner. She knew that defense attorneys would capitalize on that, but it was nothing new for the government to use creepy witnesses. Often, it is the only way to make a case. Giacalone carried on. It was a legal calculation with an unspoken moral ingredient: The men she was after were more important than the killer of drug dealers.

Jamesy returned to the witness-protection program. He had dealt away five bodies—including two in Florida, which has the death penalty—for one, for which he would get a short hitch in the more palatable federal prison system.

“I think that I made a fantastic deal,” Jamesy said.

I
N THE CRIME CAPITAL, 1984 was the year of mobspeak and, for FBI informers, the beginning of doublespeak.

New-age surveillance—a bug was placed in the Jaguar of the Luchese boss—was producing miles of transcripts detailing all the Family monopolies. In addition to Giacalone’s case and the Family hierarchy cases, a Southern District team—just as the Pope predicted—was targeting the Commission, which Rudy Giuliani was defining as one tremendous conspiracy.

Author Joseph Bonanno was made to regret his anecdotage; he was forced to review passages in his book pertaining to the Commission for a grand jury. Later—when prosecutors feared he might die before he could testify at trial—they sought to preserve him on videotape. The ailing Bonanno refused, and, at age 82, he and his oxygen tank were thrown in jail.

In October, the dominoes started falling. Eleven men described as the entire leadership of the Colombo Family were indicted in the Southern District. The announcement was made two weeks before the 1984 national election, and Attorney General William French Smith came up from Washington to hold a press conference with Giuliani and take political credit.

“We’re one down and four to go,” Smith said.

In the Colombo wake, the first sketchy public report on Giacalone’s case appeared in the
New York Daily News.
The newspaper said a grand jury had been working on it for 18 months. No targets were named, but a source was quoted saying that soon “Smith might be in a position to say, ‘Two down and three to go.’”

Several insiders snickered when they read this; they were the agents and attorneys on the Gambino hierarchy case, based in part on the White House bug. Castellano, Dellacroce, and several capos—not just John Gotti—were all targets.

Gotti tried out a low profile. Worried about bugs, he opened a satellite office on 101st Avenue. He was concerned about “the possibility of a rat in the Family,” Source Wahoo reported; and he also worried about Neil, now stricken with cancer and undergoing chemotherapy.

Angelo called on Neil almost every day and still refused to turn over to Paul any tapes or transcripts—they contained, he said, too many embarrassing remarks; he, Gene, and Carneglia had already spent about $300,000 in legal fees.

Neil won a small legal victory in the fall. The U.S. Tax Court ruled the IRS had incorrectly assessed him taxes on an unreported bribe. He was able to savor it only briefly. In a month he was arrested on another tax case, by some of the same IRS agents who had arrested him 12 years earlier.

The tax men found a shrunken Neil at the Ravenite Social Club, in the company of Gotti, Angelo, and others who spotted them coming. Neil ducked into the men’s room, followed by Angelo. Most of the others skipped out a back door, but not Gotti, who hung around as the agents coaxed Neil out of the toilet.