Mob Star (43 page)

Gotti also visited Lewis Kasman, a Garment Center businessman whom he also had befriended a few years earlier. Kasman had a winter home at tony Williams Island, where actress Sophia Loren and singer Whitney Houston also had homes. The acquitted don caused a stir at the resort’s clubhouse; actor-comedian Eddie Murphy, a guest of Houston, stopped by to say hello and congratulate him, as did Sophia herself.

In addition to Junior, Vaccarezza, and Kasman, the Gotti group also included two other men who had become close friends in recent years—Jack D’Amico, a roguish type who, like Gotti, looked straight out of Central Casting’s gangster division, and Joe Watts, who became part of the inner circle by doing some of Gotti’s dirty work. The in-group also included Eddie Lino, who again put the lie to Gotti’s claim that he avoided drug dealers. Lino was out on bail in the heroin case involving Angelo and Gene.

The Florida contingent did not include a man who also had grown close to Gotti in recent years—a man who would now become increasingly important, Salvatore Gravano. Virtually no one knew him by that name, however; in the Family and in the construction trades that provided him seeming legitimacy and growing wealth, Gravano was known by either of his two nicknames, Sammy Bull or Sammy.

Sammy didn’t like to travel, much less hang out in places where he could be seen associating with known gangsters. He thought the gangster life meant being undercover, and that is how he tried to live. He looked like a construction foreman, and usually wore clothes to match. So far, he had managed to avoid much law enforcement scrutiny, even though he had been living the gangster life since 1968, when at age 23 he joined a Mafia farm team in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where he grew up. He committed his first murder two years later; the victim was a friend who had broken some gangland rule. It was the beginning of Sammy’s reputation for cold-bloodedness.

Unlike Gotti, Sammy grew up middle class. But the Mafia pulse in New York beat loudest on the streets of Bensonhurst, and Sammy embraced it as a teenager when he saw his father—who owned a small dress factory—and other ordinary people give cash and respect to the neighborhood’s “connected” men. Their status appealed to him. Growing up, Sammy was badly teased because he was short and people thought he wasn’t that bright.

But Sammy was bright; he did poorly in school because his dyslexia was never diagnosed and because he stopped trying. As a criminal, he quickly proved how capable he was. Unlike so many others, he didn’t throw his money away gambling. He built up businesses. At 32, Sammy became one of the “connected” men. The business-minded Gambino boss, Paul Castellano, gave Sammy his “button” in 1977, the same year as Gotti but in an earlier ceremony. Over the next eight years, he became one of the Family’s most respected “earners” and also one of its most steely killers. By 1985, however, he was among the many who were unhappy with Paul’s leadership. They believed Paul was only interested in accumulating personal wealth. With the crisis ignited by the heroin case involving his men, Gotti’s reasons for disliking Paul were different, but he and Sammy became secret allies.

When Gotti’s bail was revoked in the Giacalone case, he asked Sammy and two others to run the Family. Sammy accepted, but did not attend any of Gotti’s trial. A
Daily News
story had recently described him as a little-known gangster on the rise. He didn’t want to bring more attention to himself by going to the biggest media event in town.

Behind the scenes, however, Sammy was the trial’s most pivotal figure. He was the person who arranged to do exactly what Andy Maloney feared had happened—fix the case.

It was fixed almost from the beginning, when the jurors were chosen. Soon after taking his seat in the jury box, George Pape, a middle-aged suburbanite with a drinking problem, contacted a man he thought might know someone in the Gambino Family and offered to sell himself. That man, Bosko Radonjich, the boss of a gang of mostly Irish-American thugs known as the Westies, took the offer to Sammy, who bought Pape for $60,000. Pape would vote “not guilty” no matter what.

It was the best-kept secret in New York. Only Gotti, brother Gene, Sammy, and Radonjich, who passed the money from Sammy to Pape in installments, knew the story. Someone got wind of it—the informant who tipped the FBI—but did not know enough to give agents anywhere to go. Pape gave Gotti the confidence to predict acquittal. Gotti devised the get-Giacalone strategy to give his ringer on the jury something to work with in deliberations, but he knew almost from the start that he would get at least a hung jury.

Radonjich and Pape had met on a construction job years before. Radonjich moved into the Westies and Pape into odd jobs and periodic unemployment. He was 48 years old and lived on Long Island with his wife, two children, and his drinking problem. After reporting for jury duty and realizing he might get picked for the Gotti trial, he recalled that Radonjich’s gang, the Westies, was affiliated with the Gambino Family. Suddenly, jury service became a financial opportunity.

During jury selection, Pape lied several times when asked questions designed to eliminate jurors who might know people connected to Gotti or who had participated in legal cases that might affect their independence—as Pape had when he was a character witness for Radonjich in a deportation proceeding nearly ten years before.

The special steps taken by Judge Nickerson to assure the jury’s integrity were no match for one man’s greed. His decision to empanel the jury anonymously was meant to prevent defendants from contacting jurors; it did not imagine the opposite problem. But soon after the trial began, Pape contacted Radonjich, who contacted Sammy, who sent word to Gotti through brother Gene, free on bail and able to visit him in prison.

“Unbelievable that this fuckin’ drops out of the sky like this,” Gene said during a meeting with Sammy in Gene’s lawyer’s office. “My fuckin’ brother has nine lives.”

Pape kept his end of the deal. In the jury room, on the first day of deliberations, he said: “This man Gotti is innocent. They are all innocent, and as far as I am concerned, there is nothing left to discuss.”

Several jurors thought otherwise and urged Pape to deliberate. He said it was a waste of time; obviously, Giacalone was out to get Gotti, but had not proved her case. For three days, the others deliberated almost as if Pape was not there. Most leaned toward conviction.

At night, at the hotel where they were sequestered, Pape refused to mingle. Some jurors began to suspect that somehow the defendants had threatened Pape. This suspicion heightened the danger some felt in the courtroom stares of Gotti and his men, and made them dwell on unpleasant thoughts. Over the last two days of deliberation, an unspoken group paranoia took hold and the tide turned, creating a beach of reasonable doubt upon which early beliefs in the government case were gradually discarded. Not guilty.

Naturally, the verdict—the only not-guilty one in all the recent Mafia cases—fed the wildest blizzard yet of myth-making publicity. Gotti did seem a genuine phenomenon, a modern-day Al Capone, an underworld “untouchable,” and a headline writer gave the Dapper Don a new tabloid handle that captured that idea perfectly: “Teflon Don.”

All the stories soon to be written about the Teflon Don—that he was a modern-day Robin Hood, that his acquittal symbolized the nameless little guy’s contempt for the faceless government bureaucrats who run his life—were built on the lie that he had won fair and square. The coverage awed and intimidated even the cynical men in his Family. Like the rest of New York, they didn’t know the fix was in. Even to them, Gotti was a phenomenon.

 

 

In the previous five years, in cities across the U.S., the government had critically wounded or decimated all 23
Cosa Nostra
families. In New York, it had won a virtual life sentence against Philip Rastelli, boss of the Bonanno Family, and actual life sentences against three other bosses who pillaged the city for decades with nearly the same impunity as Carlo Gambino—Carmine Persico of the Colombo Family, Antonio Corallo of the Luchese Family, and Anthony Salerno—a Chin Gigante stand-in—of the Genovese Family.

If the gangster from Central Casting had not come along, any of those bosses would have been an apt choice to illustrate, as Gotti was when his trial began, a
Time
magazine cover story on the
Cosa Nostra
crackdown. But now that he was the boss who got away, the
Time
cover became a dartboard for agents and prosecutors; by wagging a finger at Giacalone and Gleeson, and taunting them while celebrating, Gotti also made sure that agents and prosecutors would come at him with the kind of gusto reserved for those who have been personally wronged.

Just as there was the get-Giacalone defense, there would be a get-Gotti offense, and it would begin that very day, a Friday the 13th in March of 1987.

Bruce Mouw, boss of the FBI’s Gambino squad, was driving across the Brooklyn Bridge with his car radio tuned to an all-news station when an announcer broke in with a bulletin about the Gotti acquittal. Mouw cursed the announcer’s voice. He had just left a meeting at FBI headquarters in Manhattan and was bound for the courthouse in Brooklyn to meet the Eastern District Strike Force lawyers on the so-called “Gambino heirarchy” case against Armone, Gallo, Angelo, and others—a case Gotti would have been in, had the Strike Force won its turf war with Giacalone years before.

The courthouse was just a couple minutes over the bridge. Mouw calculated that by the time he arrived, Gotti, his men, and their lawyers and supporters would be spilling into the streets and dancing to their cars—sights he did not care to see. He instead drove to the FBI’s office in Queens, and began reviewing his squad’s latest intelligence reports on Gotti.

Mouw had been investigating the Gambino Family since 1979, when the bureau’s New York bosses reorganized their organized crime section into distinct squads—one for each of the city’s five families—and Mouw was plucked out of a desk job in Washington to lead one. Organizationally, the squads were like crews and Mouw was like a capo.

It was a long way from his first job—sports reporter for his high school paper in Des Moines, Iowa. He did so well in school, he won an appointment to the United States Naval Academy, then his commission. In the Navy, he was involved in the highest-stakes game the world has ever known—the underwater hide-and-seek game pitting the navies of the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. He was a navigator on a submarine capable of killing millions; tracking Soviet subs, but never provoking a response the world would regret, was a game requiring skill and patience.

He joined the FBI in 1972. After a year in St. Louis, he went to New York, where he spent two years investigating Genovese Family loansharking. The FBI was just then beginning to learn how the families were organized, thanks to illegal eavesdropping it conducted in the 1960s and to a hood named Joseph Valachi—the first to reveal the existence of
La Cosa Nostra.

In 1979, Mouw took over the Gambino squad just as the FBI decided on a major
Cosa Nostra
offensive. In 1981, after Ronald Reagan’s election and after Congress gave the FBI more money and eased restrictions on electronic surveillance, the campaign was launched. With his background, Mouw was inclined to surveillance, and his squad’s first major target was Angelo Ruggiero, who had bragged that his home telephone was “safe.”

The Angelo Ruggiero tapes led to many unforeseen consequences—bad ones for Paul Castellano and Thomas Bilotti. But they also shot Gotti to power, and Gotti’s victory now made the squad’s triumph against Angelo, who hadn’t even been brought to trial yet, look small. It really was time to start a new case.

Three months after his crooked victory, Gotti annoyed authorities even more. His muscle-bound son Junior, who had been accused of slugging an off-duty cop in a bar brawl a few months after his father slugged refrigerator mechanic Romual Piecyk, was found not guilty.

In a virtual replay of the Piecyk case, a waitress forgot what she had seen, and a man hurt during the brawl—the man whom the cop was trying to help—testified for the defense. Gotti went to the courthouse to escort Junior through the media pack.

“They gotta try to rig a case to get us,” he crowed.

“TEFLON” WAS A MORE APT METAPHOR for John Gotti than headline writers knew. Because of the law’s double jeopardy provisions, his pre-paid acquittal on racketeering charges also immunized him for crimes committed prior to indictment in March 1985. He had been in prison nearly half the time since. Maloney, Mouw, and several others in law enforcement would have to build cases from scratch. They needed time and mistakes by the target, who would get what he was overheard asking for on the Bergin bug, shortly after Sparks: “If I can get a year run without being interrupted, get a year, I’m gonna put this thing together where they could never break it, never destroy it, even if we die.”

Potential interruptions abounded. Many gangsters in and out of his Family—notably, Chin Gigante of the Genovese Family—were angry that Gotti was now boss of the Gambinos. They did not like him, or how he grabbed power. Traditionalists like Chin believed in the Commission rule that a boss cannot be removed from office by murder unless the other Family bosses agree.

Gotti believed he could get away with this infraction by simply denying he had anything to do with Paul’s murder. Still, in the weeks following the verdict, many reprisal rumors reached him. Several involved avenging relatives of Paul and Bilotti, and so Gotti always had several bodyguards around. In the post-Sparks atmosphere, trigger-happiness was never far away, and six weeks after the verdict, it led to the murder of a man in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The man was walking past a florist’s shop opposite the Bergin when a truck backfired. Gotti had just walked out the door, and, fearing gunfire, he ducked back in as a bodyguard pulled a gun and pointed it across the street at Jeffrey Ciccone, a mildly mentally disabled distant relative of a Gambino soldier. He saw the gun and ran. Several Gotti men gave chase; chief bodyguard Bobby Borriello fired a single shot that hit Ciccone in the buttocks.