The Good Rat (15 page)

“What was the worst thing to happen to the outfit?” he is asked.

“Gotti,” he says slowly. “When he had the case against him with a woman prosecutor and he fixed the jury. That got the government mad. Nobody was safe after that. They got Gotti, and then they came after everybody else. Because of him, all of a sudden I’m standing out here alone.”

In my years in the newspaper business, the Mafia comes down to one thing: circulation. On the Sunday in 1985 that John Gotti started his famous swagger through the city and onto every TV screen in America, the
New York Daily News
sold 1.8 million papers. After so many years of photos and headlines and suits and ties and haircuts and murders, after all of it, Gotti is dead. His son Junior just spent time in prison and on trial three times in this same twenty-sixth-floor federal courtroom in Manhattan. He doesn’t sell forty papers. The
News
on Sunday now has a circulation of 770,000 and falling. The worst thing you can say about a Gotti is that he doesn’t sell papers.

“I am proud that my son got made,” John Gotti one day announced to Vincent Gigante.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Gigante said. Sometimes in nepotism you get nepotted.

The Mafia was already in decline when Gotti arrived. The way I knew it was to listen or walk the streets. The crime family named for the late Carlo Gambino, a slight, scheming man, was taken over at his death by his cousin Paul Castellano. He lasted little. Gotti had him shot to death. Fame by pistol. The old man of the Gambino crew, Joe N.
Gallo, told Gotti, “It took a hundred years to put this together and you’re ruining it in six months.”

He appears to have been right. This old organization started in Naples and Reggio Calabria and the narrow, wet alleys of Palermo. Hungry young men came by packed ships to the streets of the Lower East Side of New York. Their names were Joe the Boss and Lupo the Wolf and Lucky Luciano. Soon their children were growing up ferociously on crowded cement. Their murderous, larcenous hands reached everywhere. They swore one another to secrecy.

In a trial in Brooklyn, the judge asked the defendants to stand when their names were called so the jury would know them. Gotti rose, a Roman conqueror, and with a small, pleasant smile, half nodded and half bowed to the jury, Look at me, I am humbling myself before you, you fucking commoners.

In his home club, the Bergin Hunt and Fish, coming in to start the day at eleven, Gotti looked at the newspapers on a table, and if his name or picture wasn’t in any of them, there was no living with him. He would stomp into the rear room and sit in a barber chair and bellow. He made a bright day miserable.

These imbeciles got so excited when they saw themselves on television or their pictures in the paper that they could barely breathe. There was no significant trend in organized crime that you had to be brilliantly perceptive to see. All you had to do was let a mafioso read a newspaper each day
and give him time to watch the six o’clock news, and the whole thing would come crashing down on its own.

As gangsters did not have the legs to remain standing on street corners all day, and most certainly could not sit at home or their families would flee, they opened their own social clubs. There these men could sit and do nothing, at which they were excellent. Carmine Lombardozzi had a clubhouse on Seventy-fifth Street in Brooklyn. Greg Scarpa and Carmine Persico were on Eighty-fifth and Eleventh. Anthony Spero was around on Bath Avenue. Some blocks to the west were the clubs of John Gotti, including the Café Liberty, under the Liberty Avenue el on Eighty-fourth Street, where there were so many known bugs in the walls and ceiling that all members were ordered not to talk but instead to write notes to each other. Peter Gotti tried, but soon his hand pained him. He also realized that the notes were useless, because his friend Skinny Dom Pizzonia couldn’t read. Peter began talking again. Skinny Dom welcomed the sound and talked back. Soon there were so many wiretap tapes of them that the courtroom needed a disc jockey.

All the tough guys, Skinny Dom and Fat Andy and Sal Reale and Peter Gotti, sat in the Liberty club and strangled time. The doors and windows were sealed, and since all inside smoked, one after the other, the place was a fogbank.

There was a round table where everybody sat on folded metal chairs and choked side by side.

“We ought to stop smoking,” Reale said.

“No,” everybody answered.

“We get an air conditioner,” Reale said.

“No.”

He went and opened the back window. The air coming in only stirred up the smoke. Then he went and boldly opened the front door, and women shoppers had their first look at the mysterious gangland club. It showed nothing but age and a broken espresso machine. Still, the police and the federals had the phone tapped and almost every foot of the place bugged. You knew then that the secret life of the Mafia would soon exist only in court transcripts.

Now John Gotti is playing cards in his clubhouse, Bergin Hunt and Fish, on 101st Avenue. He concentrates on his hand. The priest from Nativity Church, just around the corner, comes in. Gotti pays rent for the outdoor carnival he is running in the church parking lot. The carnival consists of two games where children could win a teddy bear or a baseball cap. And ten different kinds of wheels, dice games, and card games, all made legal by the seal of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Walk on, policeman.

“Yeah?” Gotti says, not looking up at the priest.

“I’ve been watching the receipts for the last couple of nights,” the priest said. “I think I should get twenty-five thousand dollars more.”

Gotti still does not look up from his cards. “Sal, do you know how to give the last rites?”

“No, John.”

“Anthony, do you?”

“What is it, like extreme unction?” Anthony asks.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know nothin’ like that.”

“We better get somebody,” Gotti says. “Because when I look up from these here cards and I see a priest, I am goin’ to kill the priest right here on the fuckin’ floor, and I don’t want to do that if we can’t give him the last rites.”

Gotti put his cards down and looked up. The priest was gone.

Nobody could harm the Mafia on the magnitude of John Gotti’s destructive flare-ups. He violated New York’s revered rush-hour rules when he had Paul Castellano killed in the middle of it. It was brazen, and Gotti loved it. He had no idea of how this infuriated lawmen. As he never listened to anything but hosannas, he never heard the sound of tank treads on Mulberry Street. Right after they picked a jury for one big federal trial in Brooklyn, there was a line of cars in front of the Bergin Hunt and Fish club on 101st Avenue. Inside, they were plotting how to put all the people from the Gotti outfit, perhaps a thousand men, to work going door-to-door almost, to ask if somebody knew a juror. I watched the cars pull up and leave and was disturbed. Could these morons be capable of fixing a trial? Where was the FBI?

They found a street guy in the Astoria neighborhood, Bosko Radonjich, who knew George Pape, who was a juror and was broke. Sammy Gravano bought him for sixty thousand dollars. During the trial Andrew Maloney, the U.S.
Attorney, learned of the fix. He did not tell the prosecutor, Diane Giacalone, because he said catching everybody in the fix was more important. It was cheap and shameful.

Diane Giacalone was a soft flower and simultaneously a bundle of steel wiring. She came out of the neighborhood, from the old Our Lady of Wisdom Academy a few doors up from 101st Avenue. Always, she walked past the men who stood on the avenue as if they owned it. She knew who they were and thoroughly disliked them, Gotti foremost. Her father was an engineer who did not look to get rich. Hers was the great story, the finest example of fighting crime: a young woman raised amid mobsters who grew up to shatter them. The white males in dark suits in the U.S. Attorney’s office wanted her to drown. They had more than one of their tiny law-school classroom games going. They also had a stool pigeon in the Gotti lineup, a part Indian named Willie Boy Johnson.

So she had a fixed juror and a rat defendant, all unknown to her. The fixed jury acquitted. John Gotti ran out the back door of the courthouse and into a car that took him to a celebration at his Ravenite Club. He was the Teflon Don. You put me on trial, I fix your fucking jury and walk out in your face.

He was certain that it would remain like this forever. And during that party at the Ravenite, I was talking to Joe Butch, a tall, gray-haired guy who brought anisette and espresso to court. As we spoke, I noticed a door off in a corner. “Where does that go?” I asked. Joe said it went up
stairs. It sure did. Gotti used that door to go up to an apartment on the second floor where an old woman proudly let him hold his conferences. The apartment had more bugs than a flophouse.

And there came a night in his clubhouse when Gotti, in overcoat and scarf, looked up to see uniformed cops walking in his clubhouse with FBI agents and federal warrants. He didn’t argue. Whatever it was, he would beat it. In handcuffs, he walked out into the police car, and his last step on the sidewalk was the last of his life outside prison.

“We’re the only fuckin’ people in the whole courthouse that are any good,” he announced one day. “The judge is no fucking good, the prosecutor is a motherfucking rat, and the girls he got working with him are fucking whores. The lawyers all should drown.”

Their eyes glistened with anticipation as the guards let them into the large, crowded courtroom where they could strut to the defense table with the entire throng watching every hair on Gotti’s head, then shifting to his number two, Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, who had a record of such violence that he, too, drew glances of excited awe.

That they could be going away for the rest of their lives only increased the drama. Gotti loved it. He knew that fear was a fraud, for he, John Gotti, could never be convicted anywhere on earth. Sammy didn’t like it quite as much, but for now he would bask in the fame.

In court one day, they played a tape of Gotti’s calling Gravano a stupid coward who shoots people in the back.
At day’s end, as they were leaving the courtroom, Gravano put his face up to Gotti’s and threatened him. Guards broke it up.

It took months, but before too long Sammy Gravano, sitting in the misery of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Manhattan, told the guard that he wanted to see a federal agent. When the FBI heard that Gravano wanted to meet, they sent a platoon of agents to the jail. How would they like his testimony against John Gotti in exchange for his nineteen homicides? Wonderful, they said. They decided to get him out of there right away. The call was made to the control booth that Gravano was coming down. Guards and agents quietly brought him to the lobby. People in the control booth had the name Gotti up on the screen alongside Gravano’s, because they regarded the two as the same, and if Gravano was being taken out, they figured, then so, too, was Gotti. So they brought him down also.

Gravano was in the lobby about to leave the building with the agents when the other elevator door opened and he saw Gotti inside.

“You’re setting me up!” Gravano yelped at the agents.

One of them ran over to the elevator and told the guard to take Gotti back upstairs, where he went to bed in the first true pretrial agony of his life, knowing what was coming.

Gravano walked out of the foul air of the Metropolitan Correctional Center and into the clear, chilly Manhattan night. Soon he would be called the most famous gang turn-coat in the last half century.

On the witness stand, in a double-breasted suit and with quiet voice, Gravano put Gotti into murders. He described the Castellano shooting as if he was describing a school-yard game. The mobsters met “down water park,” which is a playground in downtown Manhattan, along the East River. He went on and on without pause.

Soon the Ravenite clubhouse, a shabby cathedral of organized crime, was out of business. The former site was open for all on Mulberry Street to see. First it was a sumptuous dress shop, with an Asian woman standing in the middle of a row of expensive outfits. “Gotti?” she said. “I don’t know who that is.”

Months later she was out of there, and in its place was a shoe store, which catered to feet made of gold.

Nor in Queens would you bother to walk down 101st Avenue. The curb at the Bergin Hunt was empty. The clubhouse had been cut in half. A butcher was operating in a narrow shop, and he needed no card tables.

Meanwhile, Gotti is in my house. He is on a silver DVD that came in the mail from a guard at the Marion federal penitentiary, where the ex-gangster was in solitary several floors under the earth. I open the package, and here in my hands is over an hour of John Gotti talking about the Mafia and I won’t even transcribe it myself. I’ll get somebody to do it. Because when you have a thing like this, clean work dropped in your lap, then it should be kept perfect. Before we know it this will be a book all its own,
unsullied by my labor. Then I can pose and say how hard it was to get.

Good boy, Breslin.

And then my wife puts the DVD on and leaves the room as John Gotti appears on the screen. He is at a table in a cell with a phone in his hand. You see him through a window. Sitting there and listening is the back of some Ozone Park guy in a sweater. He holds a phone, too.

And John Gotti, the man who is going to make my life so much easier, starts off.

“You f——, c——, c———, f——.”

His right shoulder drops, and he sits there tilted.

“You f——n’ hear me? You dopey f——n’ c———. F——! S——a——, p———…”

He goes on and on and on and it covers more than one day, because suddenly his brother, Peter Gotti, is the visitor and then his daughter, Victoria, and even then Gotti doesn’t change his tone or his language.

Here comes the reason the guard sent me the disc.

“Jimmy Breslin says I get mentioned fifty-one times in the papers. That’s more than Abraham Lincoln.”

I listen through another twenty minutes of useless filthy language, and then Gotti says:

“Nobody wants to f——n’ help me, the dirty f——s. They don’t f——n’ do nothing. F——them all. I go to Jimmy Breslin, and he puts me on the front page tomorrow. F——all these f——s.”

He heaved as he spoke and tilted to his right some more,
and I knew I wouldn’t see him again, not strutting down Mulberry Street, or stepping into his car in Howard Beach with a guy holding the door for him, or signing autographs for women from out of town at Regine’s nightclub on Madison Avenue, autographs and champagne for John Gotti, party of sixteen.