Mob Star (46 page)

After employing private detectives to learn the names and addresses of the jurors, Gene found that one lived on the same leafy street as Billy Noon, an FBI agent who sat at the prosecution table with LaRusso. He sent Lino to the juror’s home with orders to leave an unsigned note questioning the juror’s fairness when everyone knew he was friendly with his FBI neighbor.

Gene assumed the note would provoke a hearing and the juror’s disqualification, and it did. In the meantime, Gene sent Carmine Agnello to the home of the first alternate juror, the one judged sympathetic and bribable. It turned out he was both. And after the other juror was excused on grounds that the note might have rendered him incapable of objectivity, the alternate took his place.

It was an artfully crafted scheme, but doomed. Rather than stay strong during deliberations and refuse to discuss anything but an outright acquittal, the alternate’s feet turned to clay. He sent a note to the judge saying that he was concerned about his and his family’s safety and must get off the jury because the wrong people knew where he lived. He didn’t mention the $25,000 he’d been promised.

Still, the judge smelled something rotten. He granted the alternate his wish, then ruled the case would be decided by the eleven remaining jurors, who took only three hours to lower the boom on Gene and Carneglia and bring down the curtain on the longest federal prosecution in history.

The judge allowed both to remain free on bail, pending sentencing. But both had already decided they were not going to flee. Because the case began in 1983, it fell under federal sentencing rules that were not as punitive as rules that came into effect in 1985 and that John Gotti had confronted in the Giacalone case.

A few weeks later, however, Gene and Carneglia got much stiffer sentences than they expected—thanks to the scrapyard czar, Carneglia. He had reverted to his Fulton-Rockaway days and promised a reporter that some day he would “piss on the grave” of the trial judge, John R. Bartels, an 89-old jurist who had dozed off a few times during the more boring parts of testimony.

Bartels, a Harry Truman appointee, remembered the slight at sentencing, and gave Carneglia and Gene sentences requiring them to serve more than 20 years before they had a chance to qualify for parole—and, in Carneglia’s case, carry out an ill-advised vow.

The end of the case continued the devastation of the original core of the Bergin Hunt & Fish Club. Peter Gotti, John’s older brother, was still around—and John made him acting captain of the Bergin—but Gene, Angelo, Willie Boy, John Carneglia, and Anthony Rampino were now in jail, dead, or dying.

Their boss had no time for regret or remembrance. The night before Gene was to surrender and begin serving his sentence, brother John told Sammy he had bawled Gene out after Gene finally spilled the details of his artful but failed fix.

“I told him, ‘You used Eddie and you used my son-in-law and you don’t think you have to tell me.’ He says, ‘I didn’t want to involve you.’ Involve me. I’m the fucking boss and he don’t want to involve me! He says, ‘Well, maybe you wouldn’t have let me do it, ’cause Carmine’s your son-in-law.’ Well, yeah, maybe, but I am the fuckin’ boss!”

Sammy, though growing weary of Gotti’s rants, listened as Gotti ranted on.

“I don’t mind them trying to fix a case. That’s what we do, but I’m the boss. I’m gonna wring the neck of that no-good son-in-law of mine. Can’t believe he didn’t tell me!”

S
OON AFTER HE REVEALED IT, informants told the FBI that Gotti was making the Ravenite his headquarters and requiring men to report weekly. The news astonished Gambino squad boss Bruce Mouw and his case agent, George Gabriel. The club opened onto the sidewalk of a narrow street in one of the city’s busiest areas. Until late at night, because Little Italy and the adjacent Soho and Chinatown neighborhoods were all tourist centers, the area was jammed with people and cars. It seemed the worst place for regular meetings between the boss and his men.

Surveillance showed that the informants were right. In January of 1988, Gotti began going to the Ravenite almost every weekday, arriving between five and six in the evening. A special FBI surveillance squad also saw dozens of other men—including many they recognized, but many they did not—entering and leaving the club over several days. The Ravenite meetings promised to open rich veins of information about the breadth and depth of the Gambino Family.

“Some secret society,” Mouw gleefully said, when he informed Andy Maloney.

To both men, the biggest implication of Gotti’s moves was immediately clear. Mouw, the former nuclear submariner who believed mightily in the value of electronic surveillance, had been mulling where to launch an eavesdropping attack on Gotti. The target had just provided the answer.

Mouw now decided to complement eavesdropping with video surveillance of the sidewalk in front of the club. Visitors frequently loitered there. The video surveillance would help identify them and, if a case could be brought against Gotti, help establish the “enterprise” requirements of the RICO law. Defense lawyers would find it difficult to argue their clients did not belong to the Gambino enterprise if jurors could see them on videotape meeting regularly, hugging, cajoling, and taking furtive walks around the block that the FBI dubbed “walk-talks.”

The key question with the video was where to install the camera. The buildings directly across the Ravenite on Mulberry Street were not options; many residents were as fond of Gotti as they had been of Neil. Gotti was a familiar figure on the street for nearly 15 years. Now that he was such a celebrity, many loved having him in their midst even more, and would quickly let him know if they noticed something odd in the windows of the buildings across from the Ravenite.

Telephoto lenses made it possible for Mouw to consider locations farther away, as long as they afforded a view of the Ravenite entrance. After scouting locations, he settled on a high-rise apartment tower two and one half blocks north of the Ravenite—far enough out of the Little Italy milieu, but near enough for a long lens. The building was at the northeast corner of Mulberry and Houston Street. One of its apartments, which was for rent, offered a view directly down Mulberry.

In February of 1988, a federal judge secretly authorized the squad to begin audio and video surveillance of Gotti and several others at the Ravenite after Gabriel submitted an affidavit saying rather un-surprisingly that the FBI had cause to believe crimes were being committed there.

The “video plant” was quickly set up. The next trick was getting a listening device or “bug” inside the Ravenite, a ground-floor storefront in a plain four-story, brown-brick building. The club, just two large rooms filled with cheap chairs and tables, had its own street-level entrance, but it also could be entered through a door in the hallway of the building’s main entrance, which was used by tenants of the apartments on the upper floor.

It would take time to discover the significance of this, but the tenants included someone important to Gotti, an elderly woman named Nettie Cerelli. Her late husband, a Neil soldier, had been the club’s longtime caretaker.

While at the Ravenite, Gotti normally sat at a table in the rear room, beneath two framed photographs—one of Neil and one of Gotti. The latter was a copy of a photo on the cover of a newly published book chronicling Gotti’s rise to power. It was a tight head shot, taken when a scowling Gotti was outside the Brooklyn federal courthouse and stared directly into a photographer’s lens, and thus now into the eyes of anyone who looked at it.

Mouw wanted the bug as close to Gotti’s table as possible. With informants’ help, Gabriel diagrammed the Ravenite interior for the bureau’s Special Operations squad. In February of 1988, S.O. agents—maybe the best locksmiths in the world—descended on the club long after Norman Dupont, its caretaker and Nettie Cerelli’s nephew, closed for the night.

While others waited in the shadows, ready to distract passersby, two S.O. agents walked into the tenants’ hallway, picked the lock of the side door and entered the Ravenite. Dressed all in black, they ran wires, tapped into power sources, and installed a tiny transmitter that was never found—even though Gotti and his men were always looking for one. After the S.O. agents left, agents at an “audio plant” a few blocks away at the main New York FBI office could operate it from their desks.

Maloney beamed when Mouw reported the FBI now had an electronic ear in the Ravenite. “Fantastic!” he said, “the big mouth’s going to talk himself right into jail!”

 

 

Not so fast. Optimism spawned by the installation of the video camera and the bug soon faded. The camera worked fine, but agents in the audio plant could overhear only fragments of conversations and sometimes only the unintelligible noise of several men talking at once, coughing, laughing, and dragging chairs across floors.

Gotti’s arrival also always raised the decibel level. It was just too many people talking too excitedly in too confined an area for the bug to capture coherent talk. It also became apparent that Gotti—having been burned by the Bergin bug—was being cautious. The few times it sounded as if he might be talking about something incriminating, his voice dropped to a barely audible whisper. Frequently, he left the club and—joined by Sammy, LoCascio, or others—went for a “walk-talk.”

Though frustrated by the problems with the bug, Mouw was delighted with the video. Every morning, he reviewed the tape from the day before, and began compiling physical descriptions and other data on all the men making their required appearances.

“This is great,” he told Gabriel. “John is introducing us to everyone in his Family. We got guys coming in cars from New Jersey and Connecticut. We’re gonna get to meet everybody.”

Men they didn’t recognize were listed as “unsubs,” for unsubstantiated. But depending on with whom the unsub arrived, agents would know which of their files to pull, which informant to contact, or which law-enforcement agency might be able to help. Steadily, they began identifying many previously unknown soldiers and associates in the Family’s 21 crews—as well as men from other Families who dropped by.

“The secret society meeting in broad daylight!” Mouw exclaimed on another day. “The administration of the Gambino Family strolling down Mulberry like tourists!”

The audio tapes were not as pleasing to review. But while they did not add up to anything incriminating, they did offer enough snippets to satisfy the legal requirements for keeping the bug in place—and to open the window on Gotti’s world a little farther. They showed, for instance, he was still worried about the Sparks stories heroin junkie Anthony Rampino might have told after his arrest several months before. And although Roach had decided to stay loyal and was sitting in a state jail awaiting trial, Gotti still wanted to kill him.

“Go ahead, I want him dead,” he said, after another man wondered if it was possible to kill Roach in jail.

“You want him dead?” the man asked again.

“Yeah, I feel sad. But that’s what he gets for being dumb. He can carry away everybody.”

After overhearing this conversation—and others in which a contract on Roach also was discussed by Gene Gotti—Gambino agents alerted jail officials, who enhanced their security around Rampino.

On another day, Gotti was overheard using the words “ice” and “hit” and “whack” while apparently discussing a series of homicides. “You get that sort of respect with murder,” was the only intact sentence to emerge from the jumble of whispers.

At other times, the bug overheard fractured comments about construction jobs, waterfront shakedowns, union extortions and ghost payrolls, loan-sharking schemes, and gambling percentages. Taken together, however, they only proved that the Ravenite was not a Boys Club.

“We’ve got to get a microphone on the street,” Mouw told Gabriel, “or find out where they talk when they really want to talk.”

 

 

The fruits and frustrations of the FBI operation were not shared with other law enforcement agencies, some of which had their own get-Gotti ambitions. In the fall of 1988, a gangster trying to save himself offered information that fortified these ambitions and gave the media a story to rival Johnny Boy’s still seemingly legitimate acquittal in the Giacalone case.

The gangster was James McElroy. Along with members of the Gambino farm team known as the Westies, he was convicted in a case that led to Bosko Radonjich—broker of the juror, George Pape, arrangement—becoming Westies boss.

Like Rampino, McElroy was a violent, drug-addicted gopher; unlike Rampino, he felt no loyalty for Gotti. “I have done some things with Johnny Gotti,” he told the state’s Organized Crime Task Force, which earlier had failed to persuade Andy Maloney to mount a Gotti prosecution based on tapes made when it bugged the Bergin in 1985 and 1986.

McElroy was puffing his connection to Gotti. But one thing he said resonated: He was at a wake in 1986 when a former Westies leader departed a meeting with Gotti and said Gotti had just enlisted the Westies to deliver a stern warning to some union leader.

The story seemed to fit with other facts the state agents and others—including NYPD cops on the Manhattan District Attorney’s detective squad—had collected since the May 1986 shooting, in Manhattan, of John F. O’Connor, the corrupt boss of Local 608 of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, the largest local in the United States. One of the main facts was an excerpt from the Bergin tapes in which Gotti seemed to be promising some malice: “We’re gonna, gonna bust ’im up,” he said in his often repetitive way, or so it sounded.

O’Connor survived the shooting, but would not even answer questions about motive. However, the state agents thought they’d overheard Gotti providing the motive two months before, in February of 1986, when underlings told the new boss that O’Connor ordered a squad of carpenters to ransack a Gambino-backed restaurant newly built by non-union carpenters.