Mob Star (39 page)

Citing concerns about witness safety, Giacalone and Gleeson withheld material about another member of the witness-protection program, Crazy Sally Polisi, until after his direct testimony. When the defense argued it had no time to prepare its questions, Nickerson delayed the trial and then because of a scheduling problem allowed Maloney to go on the witness stand before Polisi got back on for cross-examination by the defense.

Cutler’s cross-examination of Maloney introduced Larry King and his colleagues to the idea that what is heard in direct testimony is not always all there is to know. When Polisi came back for his turn in the defense shredder, the point was made consecutively.

 

 

In the Polisi material that was turned over to the defense were transcripts of tapes that Polisi—the ex-marine who defrauded the Marine Corps—made with a writer who wanted to feature him in a book. On October 15, Barry Slotnick began exploring the tapes for the benefit of the jurors, especially Larry King, Willie Mays, and the other ex-marine as well as the other black on the jury.

“I think I left off … asking you about the fight you had in jail with a black man. Is that correct?”

“That is correct.”

“I believe I asked you whether you had expressed some opinions about the fact that you believed that black people were the lowest form of humanity?”

“That is correct.”

“And later on when you start kidnapping black people you indicate that … is [a] reason why you kidnap black people.”

“Correct.”

“You told the author … that black people could not count, right?”

“Correct.”

“When you told her this, you claim to this jury you were normal and sane. Is that correct?”

“Correct.”

Polisi had nowhere to hide, and Slotnick kept him in a corner, asking Polisi if it were true that when he faked a judge into giving him probation, all he had on his mind was getting out of jail “to go out and steal.”

“That is correct.”

Slotnick asked if it were true that Polisi fraudulently took $300,000 from the Veterans Administration over a 20-year period after feigning insanity to get out of the Marine Corps.

“Sounds like a reasonable estimate.”

As Slotnick demolished Polisi, the defendants couldn’t contain their glee, and cracked jokes and laughed.

“Excuse me, Your Honor,” interrupted Giacalone. “May we have an admonition as to the comments coming from behind me?”

“Yes, please don’t talk.”

Nickerson would use the word “please” a lot in the days ahead.

Slotnick picked up where he had left off. In addition to the VA fraud, he revealed that Polisi got a $400 monthly disability check from the Social Security Administration.

“Isn’t it a fact that every day of your life, you woke up and said to yourself, ‘Who can I rip off today?’”

“At one point in my life, I would say that’s correct.”

Cutler also got in his licks at the would-be antihero of a never-published book whose working title was
Kicks.

“Mr. Polisi, haven’t you spent your adult life taking advantage of the weak, the infirm, the diseased, and women?”

“No, sir.”

Cutler called Polisi a “yellow dog” for punching a black inmate, running away, and causing a race riot while in prison. He got him to agree that Gotti was “loved and revered” in the Queens neighborhoods that Polisi had polluted with drugs.

Nickerson raised his voice when Cutler inserted the name of federal Judge Mark Constantino into the trial. The judge had been quoted in newspapers as calling Polisi a “lowlife” because Polisi had said a case in Constantino’s court was fixed.

Cutler wanted to use Constantino to bash Polisi some more. Nickerson tried to stop him, but Cutler kept punching, after the bell.

“Did you find out yesterday that Judge Constantino called you a lowlife and a liar?”

“Objection!”

“Stop, stop. Don’t do that again, Mr. Cutler.”

“I wanted to know if he knows it.”

“Stop. The objection is sustained.”

“I wanted to know if he knows it.”

“The objection is sustained.”

“I won’t ask.” Cutler asked again.

Later, at sidebar, Giacalone asked Nickerson to admonish Cutler if he “continues to behave improperly before the jury.”

“You shouldn’t ask a question like that about Judge Constantino,” Nickerson told Cutler. “Don’t do that.”

“I just asked if he was aware.”

“Don’t do that. You know it’s improper.”

“I don’t believe it’s an accident,” Giacalone said. “It’s happened over and over again. I don’t believe the government will be able to get a fair trial if counsel continues to use these tactics.”

“I think you will get a fair trial,” Nickerson said.

When Giacalone got her chance to question Polisi again, on redirect, she tried to establish that he was a reformed man.

“Mr. Polisi, are you proud of the way you played your life in the past twenty years?

“No. I think it’s completely un-American, and I’m ashamed of the way I lived my life.”

Moans from the defense table. Cutler objected to the answer and asked that it be stricken. Giacalone asked that Cutler’s “performance” be stricken. Cutler denied performing and the judge overruled another lawyer’s request to strike Giacalone’s characterization of Cutler’s objection.

In a recross of Polisi, Cutler got in a final shot when he asked him when he had acquired “this new religion? Tell us so we can free the jails of lowlifes like you.”

 

 

When Giacalone, unable to do much with Maloney, put on other witnesses about the McBratney case, Cutler agitated her more. Her contempt for him was now heartfelt and she would soon make her first demand that he be cited for contempt.

A man in Snoope’s Bar the night McBratney died was on the witness stand. During his cross, Cutler sought to plant the fact that the first state trial in the McBratney killing—when John Gotti, on the lam, was not a defendant—had ended with a hung jury.

Each time Cutler tried to plant, Giacalone objected and Nickerson sustained and told Cutler to stop, but Cutler ended up just shouting out what he wanted the jury to hear.

As Giacalone rose to object again, Cutler said: “Ms. Giacalone is getting up. I don’t know if she is doing it for the exercise of getting up …”

“Those comments aren’t useful,” Nickerson said. “Please.”

After two more objections were sustained, Cutler yelled: “Will the government stipulate there was a hung jury …?”

“Just a moment, please, please don’t shout like that, Mr. Cutler.”

“I’m asking if he knows it.”

“Please don’t shout like that. Please disregard those comments, members of the jury.”

Later on, Cutler sneaked in an appeal to the jurors’ sense of fairness by suggesting there is a double-jeopardy issue with the RICO statute—an idea held baseless by appeals courts on the theory that when a punished crime shows up as a predicate act in a RICO case, it’s merely evidence of a new crime—the crime of racketeering to benefit an illegal enterprise.

“Did you ever hear of someone going to jail twice for the same crime?” Cutler asked.

“Objection!”

“Sustained.”

A turn, a look of woe. “Thank you,” said Cutler.

“All right,” said Nickerson. “Let’s have lunch.”

After the jury had filed out, Giacalone asked Nickerson to cite Cutler for contempt. Cutler had made it “very obvious” he intended to introduce improper evidence and questions “that contain facts that are irrelevant.” He intended to “shout” and “make comments” and “take this courtroom and turn it into a music hall for Mr. Cutler.”

Though he agreed, Nickerson demurred. “I don’t think I am going to hold him in contempt now, but the questions were plainly improper and have been with respect to several of the witnesses.”

“You know what I think?” asked Cutler. “Ms. Giacalone doesn’t like the way I question people because I show the jury the scum that they are.” Cutler said witnesses in the case had called him to complain about how “Ms. Giacalone threatens them, how Mr. Gleeson threatens them. And then they get up in a nice little dress and a nice suit and say in front of the press, ‘John Gotti is going to influence witnesses.’ … I don’t care, Your Honor. I care about my client most of all. The government doesn’t like it. Their case is sliding down the tubes.”

Richard Rehbock, Willie Boy’s attorney, spoke up here. He implied Giacalone was “floating” stories in the press. The “most famous” one—that as a schoolgirl she had walked by the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in the 1960s—was “absurd.”

“You will see, Your Honor, it didn’t exist there. It wasn’t in Ozone Park [then],” Rehbock said.

The jury didn’t hear this factual offer, but near the end of the trial it would hear a completely contrary one—from a defense witness.

Cutler’s comment about witnesses contacting him was a tipoff that some big surprises lay ahead in the trial of John Gotti. Some would involve James Cardinali, who had spoken to Cutler months earlier, after a shouting match with Giacalone. Some would arrive with a man from the past: Matthew Traynor, who had known Gotti since their teenage gang days. Giacalone had intended to call Traynor, who was in jail for bank robbery, but dumped him after another squabble. Traynor then called Cutler.

“I went to see Mr. Traynor,” Cutler told Nickerson on October 20, “and … we were together three hours.”

Cutler and others executed trial strategies approved, and sometimes conceived, by Gotti. A key strategy: rattle Giacalone, get on her nerves, get her to lose control in front of the jury, put her on trial.

Gotti got into the game on occasion, once while Victor Ruggiero, a former NYPD detective, was on the stand. Michael Santangelo was giving Ruggiero a hard time and Ruggiero was being hard right back, dodging questions in a challenging way—if Ruggiero were still a cop, his bosses would not have been happy. At one point, Nickerson ordered him to be responsive.

Snickers in the court. Giacalone asked for a sidebar: “Something happened on the last question.”

Nickerson sent the jury and Ruggiero out of court.

“Your Honor, as you were explaining to the witness, Mr. Gotti said distinctly, ‘He is doing it because we threatened him, that is why.’ If I can hear him [being sarcastic], there is a chance the first juror could.”

“It’s not true, Your Honor,” Gotti said, arms out, palms up, a look of exasperation. “If anybody is making comments, it’s her.”

“My client doesn’t make comments unless I am there,” Cutler added. “Is this really necessary? She cleared out the courtroom and does a little song and dance. We would like to try the case.”

As the trial dragged on, Gotti began regularly tossing off lines for reporters. “They got no case,” he would say. “If my kids ever lied as much as these guys lied, they’d have no dinner.” All the while, Gotti, his codefendants, and their lawyers kept studying the jurors—looking to see if “Death” was showing any sign of becoming “Life.”

“THIS IS OUT OF GRIMM’S
Fairy Tales,
” was a line John Gotti tossed off on December 2, after two days of listening to James Cardinali link him to what certainly sounded like an illegal enterprise.

Gotti was putting on a good face. Cardinali had come across as the “critical witness” he was billed; he had spoken calmly and in great detail and tied Gotti and the others to all three murders cited in the racketeering count. Cardinali had put Giacalone’s case back on track, and the defense was alarmed.

Despite his murderous pedigree, whacking out Cardinali on cross-examination wasn’t going to be the tea party it was with Maloney and Polisi, even though the defense was holding a few extra cards.

Several months earlier, during the pretrial preparations, Cardinali had become furious at Giacalone and written angry letters to, among others, Senator Alfonse D’Amato of New York, who wrote a “What’s-going-on-here?” letter to Giacalone. More importantly, from prison, Cardinali called Cutler and trashed her in tape-recorded comments. As it turned out, some of his anger was based on a misunderstanding, and by the start of the trial, he had made his peace with her and stopped talking to Cutler.

Once, however, would be enough. Knowing he was on tape, Cardinali could hardly run from his earlier comments; moreover, he could hardly deny the blood on his hands and his motivation for cooperating. The way to handle these realities, he decided, was to be agreeable, almost cheerful. During much of his cross, he came across as a happy-go-lucky killer who had snookered the government into an incredibly generous deal. The defense used him to implement part of its strategy: put Giacalone on trial.

The carnage began on December 4 and lasted two weeks. Gene Gotti’s attorney, Jeffrey Hoffman, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan, was first up. His job was to test the witness’s candor, and from the start Jamesy was very candid.

“Would it be accurate to say that you have one primary reason for testifying?”

“Correct.”

“And have you described that primary reason as to save your own ass?”

“Exactly.”

“Did you have meetings where she [Giacalone] or others in her presence threatened you?”

“Yes.”

“[Did] Miss Giacalone ever lie to you?”

“In my opinion, yes.”

Hoffman got Cardinali to admit he was looking to do well in his testimony to attract book-and-movie deals. He got him to admit he knew when he began to cooperate he wasn’t going to get a good deal if he didn’t have good evidence.

“They very specifically let you know that you have to produce for them, right? Or, you were valueless?”

“Absolutely.”

As Jamesy answered questions, he occasionally looked over to the defendants, as if to say,
I’m sorry, but I couldn’t do the time; I’m still one of you, you know that.