Surviving the Mob (29 page)

“It was. An examination confirmed that the remains were his. Many times I’d given up on God and law enforcement bringing that closure. Because one of the men convicted for the murder was an avid sailor, I figured they might have dumped his body at sea. So my confidence in anybody ever finding him was slim to none.

“My father’s burial site was on Long Island in a small town called Farmingdale. The morons that killed him were too lazy to get rid of the body. They buried him fifteen minutes from the private home of the family’s new street boss. He was wrapped neatly in a tarp with a single gunshot wound to the back of his head. The scars on his right arm and dental records confirmed that the corpse was indeed my father. My family was relieved at that moment and they were able to move on. But I wasn’t. I’m still not the same person I was before my father’s murder and I never will be.

“The difference between me and other people involved in my father’s life is that I finished what I started. I had the means to an end. I never had to actually take the stand against his killers. However, I did get to sit in the courtroom about fifteen feet from two of them. I sneered at them and they wouldn’t look at me. There wasn’t even a jury present and they were afraid to look at me. I remember saying to them before the judge came in and only the lawyers were present, ‘What’s the matter, you ain’t got nothin’ to say? You two bastards don’t even have the balls to look me in the eye?’

“When court was over, the judge thanked me for all my work and dedication. And most importantly for not falling
through the cracks of society. On my way out of the courtroom, I made sure I waved to the morons.

“Today I’m active in the wars against organized crime and domestic violence. And I try to help solve cold cases whenever I can. I think that’s important, because if we all walked around with our heads in the sand, nobody’s disappearance would ever get solved. I love being an activist in this crazy world. I love knowing that I can and do make a difference. I instill that idea in my children and I am greatly rewarded for that each day when I open my eyes and put both feet on the floor. I know that’s what my father would have wanted. I still miss him so. And I speak with him daily in my thoughts and prayers.

“Looking back on it, I know I could have hurt a lot of other guys, but I didn’t. Many of my father’s crew and associates loved him and I knew who they were. Anybody that got caught in the crosshairs of my cooperation with the law has only himself to blame. If they want to know why they’re in jail, they only have to look in the mirror. I was taught at a young age that any moron can hurt someone. But it takes a man to extend his hand and help that person back up. And that’s the way I see myself today.

“Closure is a very fickle word. It has different meanings to other families and individuals. It doesn’t bring a loved one back. But it puts your heart and mind at ease knowing that the person you cared so much for has been laid to rest. Knowing my father’s murderers will die in prison helps, too. It doesn’t take away the hurt, though. I wish I could say it did for me, but that would be a lie. The pain will always be there.

“I do have to say that after all the years we went without knowing for sure where he was, I now take nothing for granted. I stop and smell the roses and appreciate human life for all that it is. I’m happy with the choices I made then. I wasn’t in any legal trouble and I wasn’t facing jail time. I did
what I did because I was tired of the life and it was the right thing to do. I want to be remembered for that.

“Today I’m the boss of a family. It’s a family that consists of my wife and children. And they don’t call me capo or the don. In my family, they call me Dad.”

Another of Andrew’s former associates was involved in some action in 1999. That December, electronics expert and bank robber Sal “Fat Sal” Mangiavillano paid a visit to Phoenix, Arizona. His mission: Kill super-rat Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, John Gotti Senior’s former lieutenant.

The story came to light in June 2002, when Sal was still locked up on a 2001 arrest for bank-burglary charges. He contacted the FBI and told them that he had information that could implicate Peter Gotti, John Gotti Senior’s brother and the current Gambino family boss, in a murder plot. Were the feds interested in talking deal?

They were. And what Sal had to say hadn’t been heard by government ears before: that Peter Gotti had sanctioned a hit on the despised gangster-turned-snitch Sammy Gravano, the man who put Gotti Senior behind bars.

Mangiavillano told agents that on Peter Gotti’s orders, he and former Gravano crew member Thomas “Huck” Carbonaro headed for Phoenix in December 1999 to kill the traitorous Gravano. Driving Sal’s 1992 Mercury Grand Marquis, the pair made it to Amarillo, Texas, before a severe snowstorm forced them to spend three nights in the basement of a church. When the weather finally cleared, they went on to Phoenix.

Fat Sal may have been a rather odd choice to be asked along on a hit. His reputation was as a bank burglar and a master of electronic gadgetry. That made him valuable to the family as an earner, but he wasn’t known as a killer.

However, he had a proven track record for being extremely resourceful. Sal had committed more than 30 bank burglaries from Brooklyn to South Carolina, usually by angling a homemade gaff and three-pronged spears into night-deposit boxes to pluck out the loot. For one Brooklyn heist, he rigged a remote-control drill to cut through concrete and steel. His organized-crime pals dubbed his capers “Fat Sallie Productions.”

After an 18-month prison stretch in the mid-1990s for burglary, Mangiavillano was deported to Argentina, where he had original citizenship, but slipped across the Canadian border by negotiating his nearly 400-pound frame onto a Jet Ski for a ride across the Niagara River.

Back in Brooklyn in late 1999, while reuniting with his wife and three children, Sal got a call from Carbonaro, who pitched the idea of killing Gravano. Never much of an earner, Carbonaro had taken over Gravano’s loansharking book, estimated to be worth more than $2 million, after Gravano flipped. But after a while, most refused to pay back a “rat’s money” and the cash flow dried up.

However, according to prosecutors, what Carbonaro was good at was killing. During their cross-country trip, Carbonaro confided to Mangiavillano that the only person he regretted killing was his good friend Nicholas “Nicky Cowboy” Mormando, whom he murdered on Gravano’s orders.

Carbonaro went to his bosses in 1999 to ask permission to kill Gravano, who, after leaving Witness Protection, suggested in a newspaper article that anyone foolish enough to come after him would be going home in a body bag.

“He [Gravano] was an embarrassment to them,” Mangiavillano explained. “He was slapping them in the face.”

If the hit was successful, Carbonaro would have been promoted to captain and Mangiavillano would have become a made man—a prospect that was not so enticing to Mangiavillano. As a made man, he’d be required to kick up money
from his bank heists. Still, Sal felt he had little choice. If he refused, he probably would have been killed. “I couldn’t tell him no,” Mangiavillano said. “Once he asked me to go with him, I had to go with him.”

After arriving in Phoenix, Carbonaro grew a beard and put hoop earrings in each ear. He took the name Henry Payne, which he thought sounded American. Mangiavillano chose Paul Milano.

They staked out the house on Secretariat Drive where Gravano’s wife was living and considered hiding in a horse trailer to shoot him. Mangiavillano contemplated crafting a directional bomb that would shoot 12-gauge shotgun pellets. They also entertained sniping him from a spot behind his business. If they got too close, Mangiavillano feared, Gravano would kill them.

After a couple of reconnaissance missions, from New York to Arizona, the plot was ready to go. But in February 2000, when Mangiavillano was driving along FDR Drive, word came over the radio that Gravano had been arrested on drug-distribution charges.

“I had regrets that we didn’t get to accomplish the mission after all the work we’d put in,” Mangiavillano said.

Months later, Peter Gotti complained to associate Michael “Mikey Scars” DiLeonardo that he’d spent $70,000 on the Gravano hit and had no body to show for it. He questioned whether Carbonaro and Mangiavillano had actually made it to Arizona.

The FBI confirmed that they had. Over several months, Special Agent Theodore Otto retraced their route westward from Brooklyn to Phoenix. It all checked out, right down to the snowstorm in Amarillo.

Based in large part on Fat Sal’s statements, federal prosecutors in Manhattan leveled new charges against Peter Gotti and Carbonaro, both of whom were already under an unrelated indictment in Brooklyn. And on December 22,
2004, on the strength of testimony from Mangiavillano, DiLeonardo, and two other mob turncoats, Gotti and Carbonaro were convicted of their roles in the plot to kill Gravano.

During his three days on the witness stand, Mangiavillano told jurors, “I pray to God at night that freedom comes.”

A few days later, his prayers were answered. A Brooklyn judge released Mangiavillano from prison into the federal Witness Protection Program.

As 1999 came to a close Andrew was still incarcerated, but he too was beginning to see a flicker of light at the end of the tunnel. If he could win a reduced sentence for his parole violation, freedom might not be that far away.

21

For Andrew the year 2000 started out with anticipation. He was sure the government was putting together additional cases that involved his past information and future testimony. But which cases were they? The government didn’t disclose its intentions to witnesses until they felt the time was right. So guys like him were left to wait and wonder what was going to happen next.

While biding his time, Andrew also wondered when prosecutors would get around to charging Nicky Corozzo and Mike Yannotti in the murders of Robert Arena and Thomas Maranga, for which he’d provided them with information when he rolled in 1997. Going on three years later, he was still waiting to hear that arrests had been made or indictments issued.

Andrew was sure that from the time his cooperation with the government became public in 1998, Corozzo, Yannotti, and many others had been waiting for the law to knock on their door with an arrest warrant. And as the drug dealers and bank robbers were reeled in, the others had to know their turn was just a matter of time. So he probably wasn’t the only one playing the anticipation game.

Nicky Corozzo and Mike Yannotti were his main interests, though. He had to give up the dealers and robbers
in order to fulfill his agreement with the government. But Nick and Mike had been responsible for the death of his best friend. And that put them in a different category.

Corozzo was already in prison on racketeering charges unrelated to the Arena murder and wasn’t scheduled for release until 2004. But Yannotti was still on the streets.

Andrew recalls what was going through his mind at the time.

“I was curious about what it was like for Mike. And every so often, I tried to put myself inside his head and the heads of some of my other former crew members who still had their freedom. They’d committed crimes with me and they knew how the government operated. Their witnesses were required to tell all they knew about everybody. They couldn’t pick and choose who they gave up. With that knowledge, what was their stress level? I’m sure that as time passed and they weren’t arrested, they tried to tell themselves that I’d held back and they weren’t going down. On the other hand, they had to know that was just wishful thinking. They knew the knock would come. It was only a matter of time.

“The other thing I thought about a lot was my own freedom. My federal sentence expired in November. But I still had the state parole sentence to complete. As it stood, I was looking at an additional five years behind bars. If I could somehow get that sentence reduced I—or the new me—could be back on the streets much sooner than 2005.

“I was determined to pursue a sentence reduction and spent a lot of time doing research in the law library. I learned that the parole department held what they called ‘reconsideration hearings’ once a month throughout the state for selected cases. In order to get a hearing, the inmate had to file paperwork giving all the reasons he felt his sentence should be reduced. Although getting selected for a reconsideration hearing was a long shot, it was the only chance I had for an early release. I completed the application. But before I could
send it out, I had what I like to call an intervention from above.