Mob Star (42 page)

When Cutler spoke to Traynor, Gleeson charged, he “found a person” willing “to tell a lie to hurt the prosecution.” At the time, however, “Mr. Cutler had in his possession … proof that the lie he had at that point, that Traynor was telling at that point, wouldn’t work, wouldn’t fly.”

Gleeson continued: “It turned out later on … Mr. Traynor came up with some more allegations against the government, some more and different ones, that wouldn’t be refuted by the tape that we believe exists.”

“All right,” said Nickerson. “Who would like to be heard on the other side?”

“Mr. Hoffman,” said Cutler.

“Mr. Gleeson,” Jeffrey Hoffman began, “has indicated that he believed that Mr. Cutler had a witness who he knew would lie and that he suborned that witness’s perjury by calling the witness in that case,” said Hoffman.

“That’s not what I understood him to say,” said Nickerson.

“I didn’t say that,” said Gleeson.

Gleeson didn’t say it, but he had inferred it, and after the trial, a grand jury would begin a perjury investigation.

Nickerson ended the discussion by telling the lawyers not to destroy any tapes or notes.

 

 

On March 2, for almost five hours, Diane Giacalone summed up her case. She was tired and even thinner than she was at the start of trial seven months earlier. Her voice was raspy and weak and several times she identified people using the wrong name.

She played portions of tapes made at Neil’s house, when Neil booted a capo out of the family. But she was not allowed to play the parts featuring Gotti asking Angelo about
La Cosa Nostra
because the tapes were made after Gotti was indicted. Nonetheless, she said, the evidence showed the Gambino Family was a “frightening reality” whose members “exercised their power without regard to the law or human life.”

Over at the defense table, two men dressed almost exactly alike, John Gotti and Bruce Cutler, sat stoically as Giacalone dealt with the million-facts problem. She said the jury’s job was “not to look at the pieces of the puzzle one at a time.” Rather, “each piece of evidence is to be considered in the context of the other pieces of evidence.”

Now, it was Cutler’s turn. Like Gotti, he wore a gray double-breasted suit, white shirt, red tie, and matching pocket hanky. Only the shade of the suit was different as he rose to make a last pitch for his client. And now, for the first time in the trial, he turned down his volume and sounded like a discussion leader in a book circle.

He pointed out that no witnesses had testified they saw Gotti commit a crime, or shared the proceeds of a crime with him, or were ordered by him to commit a crime.

“You want to get John Gotti? Get some evidence on him. You want to bring him to trial some other place, go ahead and do so. Find that he did something wrong. Find a witness. Do it the right way. The ends do not justify the means.”

The jury couldn’t convict John Gotti, Cutler said, merely because the government didn’t like his lifestyle.

“The government is people. It’s my government, it’s John Gotti’s government. It’s your government. But it’s people. People do things wrong. You are the only shield we have against abuse of power, against tyranny.”

 

 

The jurors deliberated for a week. They asked that parts of Cardinali’s testimony be read back, but not Traynor’s. That was considered good for the government. The day before they came in with a verdict, they asked for a chart prepared by the defense showing all the crimes committed by the witnesses. That was considered good for the defense. But it was all guesswork, as it always is.

On Friday the 13th of March, juror No. 10, Larry King, the foreperson, sent a note to Judge Nickerson shortly after the lunch recess: “We have reached a unanimous verdict.” The agonizing wait for the only judgments that mattered was over.

“We’re walking out of here,” John Gotti said with the surety of a man betting on a fixed race, as he and the others took their places one final time.

The news that a verdict was in swept the courthouse and now the courtroom filled up as it did on the trial’s opening day. After so much farce, the play was ending on a moment of pure drama.

In walked the keys to freedom, anonymous but so familiar by now. Eyes cast downward, they showed no emotion. They were a solemn file staying their secret to the end.

Suddenly it was overwhelmingly quiet.

“Would you take the verdict from the foreperson?” Nickerson asked his clerk, William Walsh.

Walsh read from a form: “Count one, the conspiracy count, how do you find John Gotti, guilty or not guilty?”

Larry King’s voice was diplomatically even: “Not guilty.”

A collective gasp seemed to suck all the air out of the room. Gotti clenched his fist and suppressed a smile. What would the jury do with the others?

“Count one, John Carneglia, how do you find?”

“Not guilty.”

Another gasp. And now whispers and murmuring. And an electric momentum as the clerk kept calling for the fates of the five others. And five more times, “Not guilty,” the words crackling like sparks from a downed power line.

Gotti punched Cutler in the shoulder, but it wasn’t over yet. The jurors had said no as to a conspiracy, but what about the racketeering count? Would they even the score?

“Count two. How do you find John Gotti?”

“Not guilty.”

Exultation at the defense table. Raised fists and cheers from the Family section. Disbelief on the press row. In front of the jury, sunken prosecutors. On the bench, a crumpled judge.

Once again, around the table, the clerk kept calling, and the foreperson kept answering: “Not guilty.”

“Justice!” someone screamed.

Pandemonium now in the well of the court, on one side. Hugs, slaps and, suddenly a standing ovation by the defense for Larry King and the others.

“Please don’t do that,” Nickerson said.

Nickerson then ordered the release of John Gotti, and the release of the keys to his freedom—the jury—which had heard the facts and found reasonable doubt that Gotti and the others conspired to commit crimes for something called the Gambino Family.

“Does the court exonerate all bail conditions for all defendants?” Jeffrey Hoffman asked.

“Yes, of course.”

Those three words brought the curtain down. And as the press rushed Gotti for reaction, Diane Giacalone and John Gleeson slipped away, silently.

“Shame on them!” Gotti said, wagging his finger. “I’d like to see the verdict on them!”

Gotti put off the press by saying he might talk later, but he had no intention of doing so. He might make pithy remarks, but he didn’t hold press conferences. Cutler would do that. Gotti was led out of the courtroom by the back way and taken down an elevator to clear up some paperwork at the federal marshal’s office, which Philip Messing of the
Post
had staked out.

“I told you so,” Gotti told Messing.

Gotti wanted to avoid the melee going on outside the main courthouse exit; surrounded by marshals, he headed toward a basement garage. Messing tagged along.

“They’ll be ready to frame us again in two weeks,” Gotti said.

Messing tried another question, but Gotti didn’t want to say much, so Messing asked the man with a penchant for sports betting which baseball teams would be the best in 1986.

“Come on, you know how I do on those things. You don’t really want me to answer that.”

For a few minutes, Gotti waited by the garage door for his driver to pull up. He fidgeted and paced; everything had happened so fast. One minute he was facing the rest of his life in prison, the next he was free, and now he was going home. So much had happened in his life, so fuckin’ much.

Finally, his car pulled up and Gotti dashed out the door toward it;
Post
photographer Don Halasy captured him hopping over a curb, aided by a bodyguard.

In the lobby of the courthouse, federal Strike Force prosecutor Laura Brevetti called her boss, Edward McDonald.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “They beat the whole case.”

McDonald looked out onto the street from his office, three floors up. He saw more cars pulling up to pick up the defense lawyers and other defendants who were shouting and punching air. He rummaged through his desk and found a copy of his memo predicting Gotti’s acquittal, glanced through it, and flung it across the room.

The reporters went back into the courthouse and up to the United States Attorney’s office. “A jury verdict is the end of the case,” said Giacalone without any visible emotion. “My personal feelings are mine.”

Up and down 101st Avenue in Ozone Park, the word was spreading, “Johnny beat the case! Johnny Boy beat the case!”

A man in a coffee shop across from the Bergin said to another man, “Queens has two world champions—the New York Mets and John Gotti.”

About 4:30 P.M., a gray Cadillac with Gotti inside pulled up outside the Bergin. Several club members came out to greet him and he went inside for a few minutes. Then he went down the street to the barbershop. The only boss acquitted in the federal assault on the Families—fueled partly by the loose tongue of Angelo Ruggiero—got himself a trim.

Next, the chief suspect in the murders of Paul Castellano and Thomas Bilotti climbed into another car and was driven home to Howard Beach. He ignored another crowd of reporters and, escorted by his son John, moved grandly up the sidewalk to a side door.

“Way to go, Mr. G!” called out a passing driver, who surely never heard Gotti say, “Tommy and the other guy will get popped.”

Gotti’s daughter Angela, holding his grandson Frank, opened the door and Gotti went inside his home for the first time in nearly a year. Up and down the street, people had tied yellow ribbons around trees—a welcome home message for their hostage mob star.

W
HILE JOHN GOTTI AND HIS SUPPORTERS celebrated, his opponents retired to their boss’s office and gathered near a case of beer. It was their boss’s idea. Andrew Maloney became U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District after the case began, and while he knew the FBI and the Eastern District Strike Force, among others, had opposed putting Gotti into Giacalone’s case, he strongly backed her and John Gleeson throughout the trial.

For reasons he could not tell them about earlier, he also harbored suspicions that somehow Gotti—despite the secrecy surrounding the jurors’ selection and their deliberations—managed to fix the case.

“Look, you will be replaying the trial for the rest of your lives,” Maloney said as the prosecutors and their colleagues began to relax. “It’ll never go away, but I’m telling you, Gotti was too cool during the trial, especially for the verdict.”

Maloney was standing up for his troops, but also believed what he was saying. A former commander of an elite United States Army Ranger unit, he was good-natured and informal—most people called him “Andy”—but highly combative; while at West Point in the early 1950s, he was a welterweight boxing champion.

“I don’t care who they are,” he continued, “when the jury’s out for a week, defendants start to sweat.”

Giacalone and Gleeson thought Maloney was just being gracious until he began describing a memo the FBI’s Gambino squad sent weeks earlier. It quoted an informant saying Gotti had reached someone on the jury. Maloney had not shared the memo with his lawyers or Judge Nickerson; that likely would have caused a mistrial, and without anything but the unsubstantiated word of one informant, would have been foolish.

Because one of its agents was a witness in the trial, the Gambino squad asked another FBI squad to investigate. The Eastern District’s chief judge gave that squad the identities of the anonymous jurors, and checks led to vague suspicions about two, but without anything more specific from the informant, the agents could go no further.

Giacalone and Gleeson remained dubious as Maloney told the story. They instead wondered whether they had failed. If they had performed better, they reasoned, at least a few jurors would have believed enough in the case to refuse to go along with an acquittal and would have fought for a hung jury—which would have meant a retrial—no matter how much a secretly crooked juror trashed the case in deliberations.

Maloney wasn’t dubious at all. “We may never prove it, but the case was fixed,” he was soon saying, as the mood in his office lightened. “What happened in Nickerson’s courtroom wasn’t justice. It was fraud. We may not get Gotti for that, but we will get him.”

In a few months, Maloney got the Justice Department to give Giacalone and Gleeson $5,000 bonuses for their work. Giacalone’s statement at a post-acquittal conference with the press—“my personal feelings are mine”—were her last public words on the subject. In a few months more, despite her promotion to special prosecutions chief, she resigned for a job with the local transit authority.

Gleeson, who clashed with Bruce Cutler during a fiery moment in the trial—“he is not a lawyer”—would stick around.

 

 

Gotti celebrated his first night of freedom in nearly a year with a five-hour dinner at his favorite Queens restaurant, Altadonna’s. Over the next couple days, he visited son Frank’s grave and attended a wake for Angelo Ruggiero’s father. Angelo himself stewed in prison on the heroin charges, much to his chagrin.

In the days after, Gotti vacationed in Florida without his wife. Persuaded now more than ever by Salvatore Ruggiero’s death to stay off airplanes, he took the train and stayed in a $730-a-day suite at the Marriott Harbour Beach Resort in Ft. Lauderdale under the name “Russo.” This was a gag on the FBI, which had recently arrested a little old lady by that name, a federal courthouse clerk, for passing secrets about gangster cases to a Family capo.

While in Florida, he and his entourage—including son Junior—piled into a sleek cigarette speedboat owned by Carlo Vaccarezza, a New York restaurant owner whom he had befriended a few years earlier. Vaccarezza had named the boat “Not Guilty,” and the men reveled in the in-joke left for boaters tossing in their wake.