See No Evil (22 page)

T
hat night when Elliot returned to his home in Englewood, New Jersey, a 1985 Mustang convertible was parked in the driveway. He understood that this was not his insurance agent, and no doubt someone sent from one of the families, probably the Gambinos, who would be acting a lot more like an undertaker.

Of course, it would have been easy to just keep driving, but Elliot understood the choice that he’d made and its
consequences
. Now it was time to face the music. He had a
family
that he loved and a career that had taken him to high places within his profession. He wasn’t going to run. He’d done enough of that in his life for reasons that he might never fully be able to explain. Nevertheless, those days, for him, were over.

He parked his ’Vette alongside the Mustang, turned the key to the lock of his front door, and entered to find Angelo Ruggiero waiting for him in a house that looked nearly vacant.

Ruggiero, whom he’d known peripherally for a number of
years dating back to his days in emergency at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, just stared at him blankly like he couldn’t believe Elliot was stupid enough to simply show up as if nothing had happened.

“Your wife and kids have gotten the fuck out, Dottore. There was a group of us came over, which I don’t think the missus liked too much. If you ask me, she ain’t comin’ back. Probably thinks your gonna get whacked, which ain’t too fucking far from the truth.”

Elliot stood perfectly still in the foyer. Ruggiero walked up to him. Through the archway he could see the kitchen table with a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s on it. Ruggiero cocked his arm back then slammed his open hand across the side of Elliot’s face, sending him flying back into the closed door.

“Ya know you’re a stupid cocksucker, don’t ya? Ya know, every-fucking-body that knows your fucking name wants to see you fucking iced, or are you too dumb to know that?”

“I kn-know,” Elliot answered, “but I also know that I’m not a murderer. I’m a doctor.”

Ruggiero reached over and grabbed him by the front of his shirt, he cocked his hand back again as if to hit him, but then seemed to think better of it. He let go of his shirt and took a step backward, shaking his head at what must have been even to him a pathetic sight.

“Ah, what the fuck! It’s all over anyway. I’m a fucking dead man, no matter how all of this shit goes down. Once it’s
settled
, I’m fucked. Like you, I made mistakes. I guess we all make fucking mistakes. Me? I talk too much. Quack, quack,” he mimicked, “but I still remember what you did for my nephew. I still remember that.”

“What are you going to do to me?”

The brutish, bearlike Ruggiero assessed him. “Everybody wants to kill ya. They say you betrayed us, and that’s true. But
then Johnny said somethin’ that was also true. He said you weren’t a made man, hell, you ain’t even Italian. Then some guys said that over the years, you done us some favors. So the vote was to let you disappear. Get the fuck out of town. Don’t ever show your fucking face in New York or even on the East Coast. You leave your work, which has already been arranged. You get the fuck out of this house, which is now our
property
, and you live to see another day.”

“Thank you,” Elliot said.

Ruggiero nodded. “Yeah, right,” he said. Then, as Elliot turned to leave, he added, “You’re a lucky man, Dottore. Most guys don’t get no second chance.”

Frontiersman Hotel

Sioux City, Iowa

December 14, 1986

The cramped hotel room in Sioux City was not unlike the one in Cleveland, Ohio, or Rochester, New York, or Madison, Wisconsin, for that matter. Hot and humid, the air was
pungent
with the odor of sour beer, stale cigarettes, and human smells of every variety. The air conditioner, like the ancient heaters in the winter months, exploded into activity, jarring him from his reverie. He was beginning to feel his inner life was like a kaleidoscope. Sparkles of one mood slipped into another, all of them revolving in his mind. More and more these days, he consulted the mirror. And there he was: Elliot Litner, M.D., face blank and emotionless, a tiny stream of
perspiration
wending its way down the side of his face as he
lifted
his Bic pen, jotting the final notes for what would become
Il
Dottore.

In the days that followed the operation, Elliot took the advice given him and went “into the wind,” as they say. He
bought a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and headed west, at least for a time, but not before contacting two of his most
intimate
colleagues at the hospital.

When he called Dr. Dak immediately following Scopo’s successful surgery, he was informed that there was no longer a place for him at Mount Sinai. It seemed Dak had heard from several board members, notably Al Rosengarten, that Elliot had relationships with “unsavory” characters and
perhaps
, even ties to organized crime. When Dr. Dak referred this information to Special Agent Hogan, with whom he’d developed a friendship, the U.S. Attorney’s Office was quick to corroborate details that would suggest Elliot was in some way associated with the infamous Gambino crime family.

It was much the same with his old friend, Frank Silvio. When Elliot called Silvio’s office at Mount Sinai, Silvio couldn’t get off the phone fast enough. “Look,” he told Elliot, “from now on I don’t know you, do you understand that? I want you to take my name out of your Rolodex and out of your address book. I need you to forget that we ever knew one another because this isn’t over, Elliot. The shit is about to hit the fan, and I don’t want to be involved directly, indirectly, or at all!”

O
f course, Elliot couldn’t know what Frank Silvio meant during their final telephone conversation since his old pal was off the phone before he could ask. So, he was left to wonder, but not for long. On December 16, 1986, at 5:30
P.M
., Paul “Big Paulie” Castellano and his underboss, Tommy Bilotti, were gunned down by six assassins, all dressed in
identical
trench coats, as they left their black Lincoln outside of Sparks Steak House on East 46th Street in Manhattan, on their way to a sit-down with Gotti and four other Gambino Family members.

According to detectives piecing together eyewitness accounts, it was Gotti associate Tony “Roach” Rampino who shot Bilotti and John Carneglia who pumped six rounds into Castellano. It was then that a third unidentified killer walked up to Big Paulie’s bullet-ridden body and fired a final round at point-blank range into his head.

As planned, it was the assassination of Castellano that established John Gotti as the new boss of bosses and put an Andy Warhol original portrait of him on the cover of
Time
magazine. Unlike Maranzano, Bonanno, Gambino, and other
bosses of the Mafia’s Sicilian branch, Gotti’s reign was high profile, volatile, and ultimately disastrous for La Cosa Nostra. Virtually thumbing his nose at law enforcement after his acquittal in the Piecyk case, Gotti’s arrogance fanned the flames of relentless government pursuit. In the years to
follow
, he would be brought to trial and found not guilty of RICO conspiracy charges in February 1987, as well as four assault and two conspiracy charges stemming from the
shooting
of union official John C. O’Connor in February 1990.

As the Teflon Don was soon to discover, however, the prosecution did not rest. In December 1990, both Gotti and Sammy “the Bull” Gravano were arrested by FBI agents, charged this time with the murders of Paul Castellano and Tommy Bilotti. So intense was the government’s obsession with putting Gotti behind bars that hit-man-turned-
government
witness John Carneglia would testify that when he offered prosecutors information about an international
narcotics-trafficking
ring that “made millions selling drugs,” they had no interest, stating simply, “Look, what we want is Gotti, and we want him at any cost.”

Having been brought to trial four times at that point in the past four years, even the
New
York
Times
had empathy for the new godfather’s plight, sensing something more than the carriage of simple justice in what was happening.

“They arrested John Gotti again the other night the same way they arrested him before,” a December 1990 editorial read, “flamboyantly and theatrically … why all the
melodrama
, including handcuffs and a platoon of 15 FBI agents? The only obvious purpose is for the prosecution to preen for the cameras.”

Denying bail on January 18, 1991, Judge Leo Glasser ordered that Gotti be put in “locked-down” for twenty-three hours a day, then in a move of questionable constitutionality,
disqualified his entire legal team of Cutler, Shargel, and Pollock. The prosecution’s coup de grâce was, of course, the devastating testimony of Sammy Gravano, who later turned government witness against Gotti.

Involved in no less than nineteen murders, Gravano cut a deal with Asst. U.S. Attorney John Gleeson that let him enter into the government witness-protection program after
serving
only five years in prison. Hammering away at the
credibility
of a witness so vested in Gotti’s destruction and so jaded by his past as a “sick, serial killer,” Gotti’s lawyer, Albert Kreiger, suffered a devastating setback when Judge Glasser disqualified five of the six witnesses he had intended to
testify
on Gotti’s behalf.

On April 1, 1991, John Gotti was found guilty of all charges stemming from the Castellano-Bilotti hit and later sentenced to life without parole. Like Al Capone who stood broadly grinning, dressed to the teeth in a “heather-purple pinchback suit” for his sentencing more than sixty years
earlier
, Gotti wore a $2,000 custom-tailored suit, joking with reporters afterward as more than one thousand of his
supporters
many holding “Free John Gotti!” placards, turned over cars and set fire to police vans outside the courthouse.

Also like his hero, Gotti died in ignominy confined to a six-by-eight cell at the U.S. penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, without so much as a chair for twenty-three hours a day. Gotti’s treatment, clearly punitive in nature, would later be protested by Amnesty International as “cruel and inhuman” since most Marion inmates with life sentences were
transferred
to regular maximum security within months while Gotti’s isolation went on for more than four years.

Finally, after years of battling throat cancer discovered in September 1998, John Gotti, the most powerful criminal in America, died in prison on June 10, 2002.

So far as Rudy Giuliani, the second member of Elliot Litner’s Brooklyn-Bronx triumvirate, there remain few unaware of his post-September 11 destiny as
Time
magazine’s “Person of the Year” just five months prior to his
archadver
sary
’s death. What not everyone is aware of, however, is the path that led him there. “Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, and Rudy was no exception.

Much as the targeting of notable crime lords had
catapulted
Thomas Dewey into the limelight, Giuliani’s orchestration of the Commission case transformed him into a modern-day gangbuster and media darling. A
New
York
Times
headline for Thursday, November 20, 1986, says it all.
U.S. JURY
CONVICTS
EIGHT AS MEMBERS OF MOB COMMISSION
,
Giuliani
Asserts
Decision
Will
Dismantle
Ruling
Council.
Sentences ran one hundred years for Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno (Genovese Family), Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo (Lucchese Family), and Carmine “the Snake” Persico (Columbo Family). Anthony “Bruno” Indelicato (Bonanno Family) got forty, Gennaro “Gerry Lang” Langella (Columbo Family) sixty-five; and Ralph Scopo (Columbo Family) who ironically never did turn state’s
witness
, received thirty years.

After his triumph in the Commission case, Giuliani again followed the carefully trodden path of his childhood hero. It was not the conviction of notorious mob figures that
deposited
Dewey at the gates of the White House, but the toppling of Jimmy Hines, the most powerful man in Tammany Hall. So it was for Rudy, who declared war on Wall Street insider trading, starting with Drexel Burnham investment banker Dennis Levine. Soon after, financial colossus Ivan Boesky, about to be fingered by Levine, not only surrendered
voluntarily
, agreeing to pay a $100-million penalty, but was
persuaded
by Giuliani to wear a wire and participate in the
successful
prosecution of ten additional financial arbitragers charged with inside trading.

Clearly on a roll, Rudy decided to test New York City’s political waters by running for mayor in 1989, a move he’d planned since confiding to his Lynbrook High girlfriend, Kathy Livermore, that he wanted to be the “first Italian, Catholic president.” Losing to David Dinkins in that round, he tried a second time, launching a successful campaign for mayor against the liberal-minded Dinkins in 1993.

Basing his administration on a “take back the city”
agenda
, Giuliani became the best-known mayor in America since Richard Daley in Chicago. Crime rate statistics for assault, burglary, auto theft, rape, robbery, and murder plummeted during his term. But the price for these programs was large, particularly for the minority community where police had taken free rein to do what they felt needed to be done with
little
fear of consequence.

In 1994, Anthony Baez, a twenty-nine-year-old Puerto Rican man, was kicking a football around with his brothers in front of their home when the ball accidentally hit two parked patrol cars. It was then that Officer Frank Livoti put Baez in a choke hold, kneeling on his back while handcuffing him as Baez’s father screamed warnings that his son suffered from chronic asthma. Baez died an hour later in a hospital.

In 1997, during Rudy’s second term as mayor, Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, was sodomized with a stick in a precinct bathroom by arresting officers who mistook him for someone who had tried to punch one of them outside a nightclub. Louima’s intestines and bladder were punctured, and he was dumped in a holding cell hemorrhaging.

Then, in 1999, with Rudy’s potential Senate bid versus Hillary Clinton heating up, Amadou Diallo, a West African immigrant, was shot at forty-one times, and hit nineteen times in the foyer of his Bronx home by four cops who had
followed him home. His fatal mistake, it seemed, was
reaching
into his pocket for a wallet to show them identification.

No, all was not well for Rudy Giuliani moving into September 11, 2001. Not in his role as mayor, where three months after the Diallo case, Dante Johnson, an unarmed
sixteen
-year-old, was shot dead by police. Not in his personal life where he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and Donna Hanover was suing for divorce while taking a role in an
off-Broadway
production of
The
Vagina
Monologues.
Not in his potential Senate campaign where New York tabloids
threatened
to expose his love affair with socialite Judith Nathan and he would be forced to answer questions, not about his spouse’s conduct like Hillary Clinton, but about his own.

So it was that Rudolph Giuliani became suddenly more human declaring on May 19, 1999, that he was “not a
candidate
” for the Senate based on health and personal
considerations
.

Giuliani’s fate took an astounding about-face on September 11, 2001, when terrorists attacked and destroyed the World Trade Center towers as part of the most devastating assault on American soil in US. history. Acting strongly and bravely, while President Bush was in hiding, he became “America’s Mayor” overnight and arguably the most admired man in the nation.

As for Elliot Litner, everything has changed since December 1986 when his world came apart. To some extent, his journey as a person has been like his family’s sojourn out of Russia and captivity to the United States and freedom. As a child, he would listen to his Uncle Saul as he told of their
chilling
flight chased by soldiers as they crossed the frozen Dniester River into Romania on foot, then to Austria and Germany by rail, finally arriving by ship into North America. Like them, he, too, has traveled a great deal in his life over some painful and treacherous geography.

After years of working in various hospitals around the country, in fear for his life much of the time, in 1989, Elliot returned to the East Coast where he established himself as director of cardiac surgery at a well-known hospital in New Jersey. Hanna, who remained separated from him, died of
ovarian
cancer in 1998. Samantha and Rachel are now fully grown and following careers of their own, outside of medicine.

“So, would you do it again?” the very few Elliot has
confided
in about his life sometimes ask. “Was it worth all the
suffering
in the end to live like you did?” Today, he is happy, remarried, and the proud father of a beautiful, three-year-old daughter named Jennifer. So the answer to those questions must be “yes.” The reason is that he knows now that each of us must live our own lives and fulfill our own destinies. If, in the end, a man can love himself and others around him, then the things he has done, good and bad, in his life to reach that point must have been correct and an important part of his life’s journey.

For those reasons, in part, Elliot Litner decided to share his story. He is not ashamed of the things that he’s done because he has learned from them. Pity those who never live, who are neither proud nor ashamed, and learn nothing from the days that pass each moment around them.