Mob Star (8 page)

“I’m thinking all night long how the fuck to resolve this motherfucker,” the underboss said.

“You gotta understand we gotta be a little strong,” the boss replied. “We gotta be strong against other people who are strong.”

Gotti told DeCicco they didn’t want to be lulled into a false sense of security, like Paul Castellano was.

“Frankie, you know what I’m saying … that’s what this guy allowed himself to be tricked into, Frankie.”

Not all of the new boss’s business was about such serious enterprises as concrete, steel, and construction. The boss was wherever a buck was, or might be.

A periodic topic on the Nice N EZ bug was an ice cream company in New Jersey. Gotti, Angelo, and two members of the DeCavalcante Family had somehow acquired part ownership three years before. Gotti, who said he owned seventeen percent, wasn’t very happy with his lack of return or the company’s prospects.

On January 10, NYPD detectives tailed Gotti to a meeting in which he reviewed the matter with the DeCavalcante fellows. Beforehand, he told Angelo the agenda: “Do I want my money out of it, or get rid of it?”

The next day, at the Bergin annex, he gave a report. “So I said, ‘What’s this company worth?’ They said, ‘Four million right now. If we sold it, we owe nothin’.’”

Gotti was displeased that his investment would yield nothing, but the men insisted that “in two weeks” the company’s fortunes would turn around. The boss agreed to wait, but wasn’t convinced.

“I told my partners, all nice fellows, I said, ‘If conversation had calories in it, I’d be the fattest guy in the world, ’cause that’s all I’m getting, conversation.’”

In March, the subject came up again when an associate of Gotti apparently came in with the latest nonprofit statement.

“You tell me the ice cream business is worth this? This?” the boss fumed.

Gotti compared his investment to what he could earn by investing the same money in loan-sharking—the illegal lending of cash at usurious interest rates. He cited a loan-shark rate of 1.5 percent of vigorish, or interest, a week, and launched into an amusing tirade:

“This guy told me in two weeks we’re gonna see money! That’s two and a half months ago. I’m not his fuckin’ kid! We’ll make Dee Bee [a Gambino captain] buy me out. Corky [a DeCavalcante man] buy me out. Any fuckin’ body buy me out. I’ll sell it for fifty dollars!”

“No you won’t,” the associate said.

“Fuck I won’t. My end, I’ll sell it.”

Gotti was clearly weary of it all. “Afraid this ain’t my fuckin’ day,” he added. “Ain’t my fuckin’ day.”

He wondered if he should visit the company, investigate why ice cream wasn’t profitable in New Jersey, but the associate advised against it: too many surveillants around.

“This is pathetic,” Gotti complained again. “I don’t even get ice cream out of it. If I want ice cream I have [to see another person]. I love those fuckin’ frozen red somethin’s. We got the company three years, never saw a dime. Never seen an ice cream bar out of it! If you took [the money] and you put it on the street for a point and a half, we’d be rich over three years! We’d be rich without all the ice cream meltin’ or nothin’.”

 

 

Gotti’s impatience was easy to understand. He was in a much higher world of commerce now. On March 6, an unidentified man asked him to meet three others seeking to acquire control of gambling casinos in Puerto Rico. The men already owned a casino in the Bahamas. What the bug overheard was limited, but it appeared that the men wanted to give Gotti a piece of their action if he would solve a problem they were having with a disposal company they owned.

It was probably no problem at all. James Failla was an official of the Manhattan Trade Waste Association, the management group, and other Family men dominated the sanitation unions.

Another man, identified only as Joey, enticed Gotti with a story about gasoline. Two soldiers in another Family recently had been indicted by a grand jury because of a scheme to skim money from the sale of gasoline by not paying federal and state taxes. But Joey said that didn’t mean similar opportunities were not available.

“A fuckin’ twenty-eight cents [a gallon] you can steal,” Joey said. “I’m talkin’ about doing twenty, thirty million gallons a month.”

Gotti did some quick figuring, noting that even at two cents a gallon on 30 million gallons, “It’s six hundred thousand dollars.”

“Wow,” an unidentified person in the room said.

“I gotta do it right now,” Gotti said. “Right now, I gotta do it. I gotta call this guy …”

Gotti picked up a telephone, dialed one of his bodyguards and asked him to contact someone he referred to as “Bobby the Jew” and “tell him to call me.”

Gotti was free to receive such propositions because he had been granted bail after his indictment in the federal case. Ironically, a young and well-educated movie producer, who also was a capo in the Colombo Family, was being held without bail and preparing to plead guilty and pay $15 million in restitution for the largest gas-tax ripoff in history. The case was before the same judge who would preside at Gotti’s trial.

Somewhere in a schedule clogged by men bearing gifts, deals, and problems, Gotti was able to find time for his lawyers. To properly manage his Family, take advantage of opportunities, and enjoy his status, he had to stay out of jail.

The nagging business with the Queens mechanic he was accused of assaulting and robbing was about to come to trial. The case had taken a few remarkable turns since the events in December—unusual is usual in Family cases—and by the time it was over, there would be many more.

Even after the case was officially closed, the turbulence around Gotti would keep it unofficially open.

T
HE CASE OF THE MECHANIC versus the mobster began

September 11, 1984, the day an empty double-parked car blocked the impatient way of Romual Piecyk. He was a gruff, burly man who earned a living wage fixing cooling equipment, including the large walk-in refrigerators used to hang animal carcasses.

Piecyk was 35 years old, and no saint, at least not from 1972 to 1979, when on different occasions he was arrested for drunkenness, possession of a weapon, and assault. He was 6 foot 2 and considered himself a tough guy.

He ran into some other tough guys while in Maspeth, a tough working-class neighborhood in Queens. His car was blocked by the double-parked car outside two gambling dens under John Gotti’s control, a social club and the Cozy Corner Bar. He got in his car and leaned on his horn. Again and again.

Out of the Cozy Corner Bar came an associate of Gotti’s, Frank Colletta. He reached in through the open driver’s window and smacked Piecyk in the face, according to the testimony of police officers who interviewed Piecyk moments later. Piecyk had just cashed his paycheck, and Colletta lifted $325 from his shirt pocket, apparently a fee he charged for aggravation.

Piecyk left his car and the pair began scuffling. Gotti then appeared and slapped Piecyk in the face; Gotti stepped back, glared, and made a motion with his hand, as if he were drawing something from the waistband of his trousers.

“You better get the fuck out of here,” he said.

Piecyk did, and so did Gotti and Colletta.

Someone had called the police, and a car from the 106th Precinct arrived within minutes. Sgt. Thomas Donohue and Officer Raymond Doyle found the refrigerator man standing on the corner of Seventy-second Street and Grand Avenue. His face was puffy and he had cuts and blood on one hand and an arm.

“Two guys just beat me up and took my money,” he said.

“All right, we’ll make out a report,” Doyle replied.

Piecyk pointed toward the Cozy Corner Bar, but it was now empty. Piecyk then looked through the window of a restaurant next door.

“There they are!”

Inside, Gotti and Colletta were sitting at a table with eight other men. Piecyk pointed them out and Sgt. Donohue told them they were under arrest and ordered them to stand.

In a showy display of solidarity, everyone at the table stood, and Sgt. Donohue, in a brief, tense scene, ordered all but Gotti and Colletta to sit down.

“Do you know who I am?” Gotti wanted to know.

“Step out,” said Doyle, who didn’t.

“Let me talk to this guy,” Gotti said as Sgt. Donohue handcuffed him.

He wouldn’t, and the heir to Carlo Gambino was led away like a miserable Times Square mugger.

Piecyk went to the precinct on his own and charges were filed based on his story. Gotti was booked and released on his own recognizance, pending action by a grand jury. A lawyer later involved in the case described it as “an example of one bully meeting another, except the first bully would be reformed.”

 

 

At the time, FBI agents were regularly meeting with two daring men who knew a lot about the Gotti crew—they were part of it. They were not cooperating witnesses like the secretly wired Dominick Lofaro. They were informers. Years earlier, for revenge, for money, and to buy a little insurance against their own criminal acts, they had begun talking about Gotti and others as long as they never had to testify. Their tips enabled the FBI to make many arrests and recoveries of stolen goods. One, a personal friend of Gotti’s, had been talking since 1966. The other had “gone bad,” which is how the Family described such men, in 1976.

For legal reasons, the information they gave to the FBI was never made a part of Gotti’s federal case in Brooklyn, but it is documented in secret FBI files. Every time an agent met or spoke with them—and there were hundreds of contacts—a memo went into the files.

To keep their identities secret, even within the FBI, the informers were known by code designations. The longtime personal friend of Gotti was Source BQ 5558-TE, “BQ” for Brooklyn-Queens and “TE” for Top Echelon, the highest informer rank in the RBI. The other was called Source BQ 11766-OC, “OC” meaning Organized Crime. The first source also was known as “Wahoo.”

FBI agents always contacted their sources after a major event in Gotti’s life such as the Piecyk incident. As in this case, the sources didn’t always have startling information; sometimes they just had little brush strokes, little interesting details.

Source BQ 11766-OC, for instance, said Gotti told the officers who arrested him that he had $3,000 in his pocket and did not need to grab money off Piecyk. He said Gotti was shocked to learn that Piecyk didn’t know him and had filed charges. Source Wahoo told how Neil Dellacroce reacted to his top captain’s arrest. Neil told Gotti, he said, not to “interfere with the victim” because it will “bring heat on the Family.”

 

 

A few days after the incident in Maspeth, Piecyk testified before a grand jury, which returned an indictment against Gotti and Colletta on felony assault and theft charges. The authorities said Piecyk was told Colletta and Gotti were wiseguys; he later said he was only told they were “punks.” More than a year later, after the Sparks murders, a trial date was set, but now Piecyk began to read and hear more than he wanted to about Johnny Boy, who obviously wasn’t just a punk, or even just a wiseguy.

Piecyk began looking over his shoulder. He bought a gun, which prompted his pregnant wife to temporarily move out. Exactly what happened during the next three months will most likely never be publicly known, but Piecyk did decide not to say any more nasty things about Gotti and Colletta. A lawyer familiar with the case said Piecyk couldn’t get his mind off the idea of being found dead in one of the meat refrigerators he repaired.

Piecyk dictated a letter to his wife—which came to light later—in which he recounted the Cozy Corner encounter and said: “As time went on, my wife and I saw the name of one of the men who assaulted me, John Gotti, appearing in the [
New York
]
Daily News.
The media printed that he was next in line for godfather. Naturally, my idea of pursuing this matter dropped, and I cut off communication with [the Queens District Attorney’s office].”

Piecyk said that after the cops arrived in Maspeth, “everyone connected with Gotti came out of the restaurant, looked my car over, and took the [license] plate number down.” He sold the car, but “everyone knows who I am and probably how to find me.”

Piecyk said he was told by cops that he would have to testify only to the grand jury—his name would not be revealed and the file would be sealed. For a man who had been arrested several times, this was a remarkable statement; it would seem that he was familiar enough with legal processes to know that a defendant has a constitutional right to face his accusers in court.

“I feel I have been lied to by the laws that are supposed to protect us,” Piecyk wrote. “I have been a pawn in the power game between the government and the mob. I help to expose the bad factors of one organization, and then neither needs me anymore … I can’t and will not live the rest of my life in fear.”

On February 24, 1986, Sgt. Anthony Falco of the Queens District Attorney’s detective squad visited Piecyk to discuss the trial, now only a few days away.

“I ain’t testifying,” Piecyk said.

Sgt. Falco recalled later: “He stated he was in fear of his life, as well as the safety of his wife. He was afraid for his life because of Gotti’s people.”

Piecyk told Falco he had been receiving anonymous phone calls at odd hours from people who hung up. He said the brakes on his mechanic’s van were cut, but that he did not want the police to investigate because “he was afraid our presence might further endanger his life.”

On February 28, an assistant district attorney in Queens, Kirke Bartley, asked a judge to withhold the names of jurors in the case. He cited a “strong likelihood of juror tampering or harassment” and said Piecyk had received death threats.

On March 5, on the eve of court arguments on the juror question, Piecyk was interviewed by Stewart Ain, a
Daily News
reporter. He denied receiving death threats or having his brakes cut. He said he would appear in court—on Gotti’s side.