Mob Star (44 page)

In view of bystanders who later claimed to have seen nothing, the men tossed Ciccone into the trunk of a car that glided up from the Bergin. It was driven by another bodyguard, Dominick Borghese. He and Joe Watts, one of the men who helped Gotti celebrate in Florida a few weeks earlier, drove to a store owned by a Gambino capo on Staten Island, so that there, in the basement, Gotti’s men could interrogate the wounded and presumed would-be assassin before killing him.

But the more Ciccone was beaten and questioned, the more he wailed that he didn’t know what his tormentors were talking about. He denied firing a shot and frantically quoted Bible passages. In time, Gotti’s men began to suspect he was not an assassin, but a disturbed man who decided on his own to try and kill Gotti.

Meanwhile, of course, back at the Bergin, Gotti played dumb.

“Nothin’ happened here,” he told George Gabriel of the FBI, after Gabriel heard of a “shots-fired” report from the NYPD and went to the Bergin to inquire in his newly acquired role as Gotti “case agent” for the Gambino squad.

“We’re nice guys,” Gotti continued. “We don’t have to duck nobody. You’re the ones who should be duckin’, the way you treat people.”

“You’re right, John. But just make sure you stay indoors. We don’t have the manpower to protect you from your enemies.”

While Gotti and Gabriel bantered, Gotti’s men continued to believe Ciccone had fired a shot. They also concluded he was a crackpot acting on his own. Joe Watts, the main inquisitor, grew tired of pummeling Ciccone and sent Gotti a message asking what they should do with Ciccone.

“Kill ’im,” the Teflon Don said.

Watts, a Paul loyalist before switching to Gotti, and Dominick Borghese, a 400-pounder, bound Ciccone’s feet and hands; someone produced an orange body bag, into which Ciccone, bawling and pleading, was stuffed. Watts zippered it shut; aiming to please, he fired six shots into Ciccone’s head.

Intending to return and remove the body once they arranged a disposal site, Watts and Borghese left the store for a few hours. Amazingly, while they were away, burglars hit the store. They did not enter the basement, but left the store’s metal gates open. A passerby called police, who searched the basement and found the body.

Back at the florist’s shop, lips were sealed when the cops came by. “It looks like what we have here is a John Lennon-type situation,” a top police official soon announced, as the case went into the unsolved murder files. “It looks like some individual had a thing about John Gotti.”

Ciccone’s only thing was bad luck. He was an occasional carpenter, 38 years old, who lived with two aging aunts in Queens, one of whom later said he had “mental problems.” His distant relative, Sonny Ciccone—a Gambino capo who ran what rackets were left at the city’s aging, Mafia-ransacked shipping piers—rushed to the Bergin to emphasize how distant.

“Forget about it,” Gotti said boisterously. “But good thing he was a lousy shot!”

 

 

A gambler on a hot streak, Gotti set about cementing his control of the Family. He promoted Sammy Gravano to
consigliere
after seventy-seven-year-old Joe N. Gallo, tired and on trial in one of the Strike Force cases, asked if he could retire. He agreed to allow sixty-seven-year-old Joseph Armone, on trial in the same case, to remain underboss if Armone were found guilty, but this was only symbolic thanks for Armone’s treachery toward Paul. He made Frank LoCascio, a bookmaker and loan shark who had moved into the inner circle, acting underboss with non-acting authority. He also made brother Gene boss of the Bergin crew after Angelo from his prison cell—without Gotti’s okay and for some personal slight—tried and failed to orchestrate the murder of an important gangster in another Family.

Beyond his Family, Gotti shored up relations with other bosses, including the sly stickler for Commission rules, Chin Gigante of the Genovese Family. They even met after Mouw and Gabriel visited Gotti and warned that FBI agents had overheard two Genovese men discussing a plot to kill Gotti and Gene to revenge Paul and Bilotti. The men were overheard in a bathroom where agents had installed a listening device; in such cases, FBI policy requires agents to warn the targets.

“We have solid information about a threat against you and Genie, a legitimate threat,” said Gabriel on the doorstep of Gotti’s home in Howard Beach in the fall of 1987.

“There’s a million plots, so what?” Gotti said.

“All we can say is that this one is for real.” Gabriel rubbed his chin mischievously. “By the way, John, it’s coming from the Genovese Family.”

Gotti frowned. “There’re my friends. Chin is my friend. Everybody’s my friend.”

The warning may well have saved Gotti’s life because he decided to let Chin know he knew. Sammy set up the summit, and also invited Luchese Family leaders; the man Angelo had conspired to kill from prison had become Luchese underboss, and Gotti thought it best to at least try to repair the damage. With three of the five New York bosses in the same room, it was the first Commission meeting in years—and probably the most preposterous ever. Everyone in the room was lying and everyone knew it.

“Whatever was said, if it was said, was not authorized by me,” Gigante told Gotti, referring to the plot captured by the FBI’s bathroom wiretap. “We got enough problems with the FBI all over the place, to bring more problems on ourselves. Our Families have always had a good relationship.”

“I agree with you, hundred percent,” Gotti said. “We can’t fight amongst ourselves. We fight the government!”

“Paul was fightin’ the government when he was killed. He was standing up to two RICOs, like a man.”

“I swear to you,” Gotti said. “I’m as angry about that as you. We don’t know who killed Paul. I’ve been tellin’ Sammy and everyone else, the fuckin’ cops might’ve killed Paul.”

 

 

Feeling ever more flush, Gotti revealed he was making the Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy—the clubhouse of his mentor, Aniello Dellacroce—his headquarters. He also announced he would hold weekly meetings there of top associates, attendance required. The news shocked his men. The Ravenite was within a few blocks of the headquarters of almost every important law enforcement agency in New York, including the FBI and the NYPD.

As
consigliere,
Sammy Gravano was obliged to speak up about these decisions, albeit politely. He did so at a meeting with Gotti and acting underboss Frank LoCascio at a Little Italy restaurant owned by Joseph Corrao, a Manhattan crew leader, a few blocks down Mulberry Street from the Ravenite. Corrao, or “Joe Butch,” fell quickly in step with Gotti after Sparks. Some had even urged Gotti to make Joe Butch, not LoCascio, acting underboss.

“I know the idea of being in [Dellacroce’s] club feels good, John, but we maybe oughta be more undercover,” Sammy said.

“I’ve been comin’ down here fifteen fuckin’ years! What’s the big deal?”

“You’re the boss now. You gotta be more careful.”

“I could stay in bed like the Chin, and they’ll still come after me!”

“Maybe, but what I was thinking, you could put Frankie in charge of The Bronx, let everybody up there answer to him. You and Genie stay out in Queens. Joe Butch will stay in Manhattan. I’ll stay in Brooklyn. We’ll get together when we gotta, in the middle of the night when the fuckin’ agents are sleeping, in a graveyard or some place.”

“We don’t have to run and hide! What’re we afraid of? It ain’t a crime to meet and get together. We’re Italians. That’s the way the Italian people are.”

“The old-timers used to hide and sneak and stay in the neighborhoods,” Sammy said.

“But look at Neil, he was here on this street all his life. I’m not gonna be a back-door boss. It’s better this way. Everybody sees the boss and the boss sees them. Keeps everybody happy.”

“Times are different.”

“Times are the same. Except this here is a Cosa Nostra now. I ain’t Chin, and I ain’t Paul, hidin’ out in my house.”

Sammy let it go. Gotti’s mind was made up. Soon after the Ravenite “shape-ups” began early in 1988, Gotti also showed he would not indulge non-compliance with the mandatory-attendance requirement.

The men who squawked about the recklessness and inconvenience of weekly trips to the Ravenite included Thomas DeBrizzi, a 64-year-old soldier. He ran a loan-sharking and gambling operation in Connecticut for Carlo Gambino’s son Tommy; per his to-the-manor-born image, Tommy had authority over operations in the nutmeg state.

Unlike Tommy, DeBrizzi lived in Connecticut, two hours by car from Mulberry Street. He barely knew Gotti, and was in prison during Sparks. But then he made the mistake of complaining too much, in the presence of his crew leader, about the Ravenite meetings.

Falling into line, too, Tommy told Gotti, and it was all Gotti needed to hear. DeBrizzi was found dead in his car’s trunk on February 5, 1988, killed by men in his own crew eager to show they were not complainers.

“A guy don’t want to come in, he’s gone, that’s all,” Gotti told Sammy.

Gene Gotti also considered the Ravenite meetings a reckless idea—and not just because his bail terms in the heroin case required him to avoid such places. “Why don’t we just draw the fuckin’ feds a picture?” he complained to Sammy.

“I know, Genie, but he don’t think it matters.”

Gene believed the Ravenite meetings symbolized narcissism more than homage to the past and Dellacroce. But Gene believed it pointless for him to be the one to tell his brother that.

“That’s your job, Sammy, you’re the
consigliere.
He’d never listen to me. He’d think I was jealous, but John, he just wants to be the center of attention all the time.”

“He loves bein’ boss, that’s for sure. You know how Paul made people come to him in small groups. John seems to like it when an audience comes.”

“This guy, you oughta seen him when his name started gettin’ in the papers. Fuckin’ loved it. And when his face was on the tube? Forget about it. It was like he was gettin’ off for free.”

To Sammy, Gene wasn’t exaggerating. Once, he and Gotti were dining in a restaurant when they noticed a young couple staring at them.

“Look at the guy and the girl over there, lookin’ at us,” Gotti said solemnly. “They love me.”

Sammy cringed inside. He accepted someone who had been called Robin Hood and a folk-hero of “the little people” might believe strangers found him fascinating, but to hear Gotti say “love” was so startling Sammy didn’t know what to say.

“They do. They love me. They can’t stop lookin’ over here.”

“You’re fuckin’ nuts,” Sammy smiled before trying to steer the subject elsewhere.

“I’m tellin’ ya, they love me,” Gotti insisted again, lifting a second martini, Boodles very dry.

 

 

Gotti also remained highly visible in Ozone Park. He usually stopped at the Bergin Hunt & Fish Club to hang out for a couple hours each afternoon, before heading into Manhattan. The club and neighborhood were part of his identity. He still sponsored the community’s annual Fourth of July celebration. Thanks to his larger-than-ever profile, the 1988 version drew many reporters and led to another round of big headlines that made official New York appear powerless next to Gotti.

“This is just something we do for the neighborhood,” Gotti said early in the day, during a brief bow in front of the Bergin coinciding with the arrival of television cameras.

In past years, the celebration always ended with an unauthorized fireworks display, but this year the NYPD had warned it would enforce a law requiring sponsors to get a permit by which the sponsor agreed to safety rules. Gotti ignored the warning, and that afternoon, NYPD trucks took away two dumpsters where his men planned to launch the ’works.

As day became evening, the crowd grew restless. “We want the ’works!” about two thousand people outside the Bergin began chanting. “We want the ’works!”

They grew more excited when Gotti, wearing an all-white ensemble, appeared in the Bergin doorway again, smiling and waving like a political nominee addressing a convention. He had given away a grocery store of food and soda; his men had erected carnival rides and strung patriotic bunting along 101st Avenue. He would have been elected mayor by that crowd.

Although the dumpsters were gone, the fireworks remained inside the Bergin, and now the crowd began chanting again. Several dozen cops stood by on sidewalks south of the club; a block north, more sat in squad cars. But they had underestimated the crowd that now swelled and screamed between the cops on foot and cops in cars.

“We want the ’works! We want the ’works!”

Gotti stepped back into the Bergin and a bonfire suddenly arose in the street. Gotti’s son Junior then exited the Bergin, lugging a crate of fireworks. He was followed by several muscular young men. As the crowd roared, each began throwing Roman candles, cherry bombs, and other small-size devices into the fire. Some others stood metal canisters by the fire and were soon launching larger-sized rockets and starbursts.

The crowd grew more rowdy. They were mainly teenagers, but to the police captain in charge, they had been drinking something besides soda all day and seemed drunk enough to be both stupid and dangerous. He told his men to do nothing as the fireworks burst over Ozone Park. Two firetrucks also arrived, but firefighters wanted no part of a possible riot either and soon left.

Gotti again appeared in the Bergin doorway to gaze upon the frenzy. The cops made no arrests and issued no tickets, prompting the eldest Gotti brother, Peter, a newly made man, to a gleeful and widely reported taunt:

“All the police did was make themselves look foolish.”

It was hard to argue. The next day, officials in New York punted. The fire commissioner, responsible for licensing, quickly passed the buck to the police commissioner, responsible for enforcement; he would not even answer questions.

Editorial-page writers flogged away. One opined that while it was regrettable that so many citizens in Ozone Park admired that “All-American Yankee Doodle Dandy Don, John Gotti,” cops standing around like helpless children was even more so: “That’s a pretty dangerous image to risk adopting. Even worse is the image it promotes: That the masters of organized crime are above the law, sneering as they put the city’s law-enforcement establishment where they believe it belongs—in paralysis and humiliation.”