Chin

by Larry McShane

  “Vincent Gigante wanted John Gotti,” said D’Arco, who would eventually become boss of the Luccheses. “He just didn’t want him killed first.”

  One of the things that Gigante most despised about Gotti actually kept the Gambino boss alive: Johnny Boy’s constant attention from the FBI and the press wrapped him in a security blanket, making it hard to hit the new boss. The storefront Ravenite in Little Italy was tucked amid cramped and crowded streets, which made a Mob killing almost impossible in the neighborhood.

  “He’s all the time being watched by the government and the news media,” griped Lucchese underboss Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso. “John Miller’s feet are sticking out of his ass half the time.”

  Miller, then a local television reporter, would leave the media for law enforcement and become the NYPD’s antiterrorism czar.

  “He loves the attention,” Gigante replied. “He thinks he’s in show business.”

  “Yeah,” said Casso. “Seems so.”

  “What I wouldn’t do for a little privacy,” replied the oft-surveilled Chin.

  The meeting ended with hugs and a kiss on the cheek.

  * * *

  On April 13, 1986, almost four months to the day from the Castellano hit, the Genovese family received word that Gotti and DeCicco would visit a Brooklyn social club for a sit-down with the Gambino family’s new hierarchy. The Chin’s plan of a slow death for Gotti was instantly jettisoned.

  It was a cloudy, overcast day when DeCicco parked on a Bensonhurst street and headed inside. When DeCicco emerged, he was accompanied by a man who had a close resemblance to Gotti—but was actually a Lucchese family soldier named Frank “Frankie Hearts” Bellino. In a cruel twist it was the Luccheses who agreed to handle the hit for Gigante. It was decided to use a bomb fashioned from the plastic explosive C4.

  Using a bomb was against the usual Mafia regulations, and was typically a method left to the Sicilians. The bomb was chosen precisely because an explosion would point the finger away from the Chin, who was a noted nitpicker for Mob protocol, murderous or not.

  The killers swung into action, affixing the package of plastic explosives beneath the Buick Electra. Gravano was inside the Veterans and Friends Social Club with DeCicco as the killers worked outside.

  When DeCicco returned to his car with Bellino, the bombers watched and waited, with one finally pressing a remote control from a toy car purchased at a Toys “R” Us. DeCicco was killed instantly, blown right out of his shoes, which still held his toes. Bellino miraculously survived.

  After nearly four months of quiet following the Castellano murder, Gotti never saw it coming.

  “I don’t know what the fuck is going on,” he told Gravano, “but we’ve got problems.”

  Gotti, as Gigante had hoped, never suspected the Chin was behind the bomb blast.

  “Our first thought was the Genovese family,” said Gravano, who was bumped up as the new underboss. “But the Chin was a real stickler for the rules of our life, and one of the rules was you don’t use bombs.”

  Gotti even reached out to the Philly Mob for help in figuring out what happened.

  “They were looking for us to help, to figure out who made the bomb and who planted it, because of how Phil Testa was blown up,” said Leonetti. “But we didn’t know much about that bomb, except it was loaded with nails.”

  The patient Chin crossed one name off his list. It took another four years, but Castellano killer Eddie Lino was next on the hit parade.

  * * *

  The Gambino soldier was driving home from a Mob social club in his black Mercedes on the morning of November 6, 1990, when an unmarked police car flipped on its lights and pulled the gangster over on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn.

  The routine traffic stop quickly became something else; the men inside the police vehicle were a pair of crooked NYPD detectives collecting a monthly $4,000 retainer from Gaspipe Casso. They had followed Lino until they reached a section of the highway where he could pull off onto a grassy stretch of shoulder.

  Gaspipe “wanted to be involved in retribution for that [Castellano hit] because it was unsanctioned,” his old friend and illegal business associate Burton Kaplan later testified. The Lucchese bigwig reached out to Louie Eppolito, a highly decorated NYPD detective who grew up in a Mob family before launching a career in law enforcement.

  Eppolito checked with his partner, the equally mercenary Steven Caracappa, soon to live in infamy as “the Mafia Cops,” the most corrupt officers in the NYPD’s long and storied history. The two decorated detectives signed on as Mob hit men, although not without some difficulties.

  The cops, unwilling to use their service revolvers in service of Mob murder, asked if Gaspipe could provide two guns. The mercurial and murderous Gaspipe exploded at the request.

  “Jesus!” he snapped. “Don’t these two guys do anything for themselves?”

  Casso eventually provided the weapons. The “Mafia Cops” did the rest.

  The two cops pulled up behind Lino’s car. Before getting out of their own vehicle, the detectives put on their NYPD badges so Lino would know they were cops, not killers. The gregarious Eppolito did the talking, and the taciturn Caracappa handled the shooting.

  “Hey, Frankie, how are you?” asked Eppolito—a reference to Eddie’s cousin, a member of the Bonanno family.

  A smile of relief came about Lino’s face.

  “I’m not Frankie Lino,” the doomed man said. “I’m Eddie Lino.”

  Eppolito pointed to something on the passenger-side floor, asking Lino if he could pick it up. When the made man leaned over, Caracappa opened fire, and didn’t stop until Lino’s bullet-riddled body slumped down in the front seat. Eppolito blithely explained why Caracappa handled the actual killing: “Steve is a much better shot.”

  * * *

  On April 13, 1991, Bobby Borriello pulled into the driveway of his Brooklyn home at about 7:30 P.M. His wife, Susan, and their two-year-old son were waiting for Daddy inside, but Borriello never made the front door. A fusillade of bullets followed, with the Gotti loyalist struck ten times in the head, back and arm.

  His wife rushed outside to find her murdered husband face-down in a pool of his own blood. She later charged that Caracappa and Eppolito fed the killers inside information culled from the NYPD to target her husband.

  This murder struck Gotti particularly close to home. He had once assigned the trusty Borriello to his son John Jr.’s crew to keep an eye on the Mob scion and future Gambino boss. Gravano said later that Gotti never suspected the deft hand of the Chin in any of the killings.

  * * *

  Gotti learned in 1987 about the Chin’s plans for his death after the DeCicco hit, after the FBI planted a bug inside the ladies’ room of Casella’s, a Hoboken restaurant owned by mobster Martin “Motts” Casella. The details of the plot, ostensibly for Gotti’s unwanted intrusion into Genovese business in North Jersey, emerged from the women’s room in the summer of that year. The man organizing the murder was old Genovese hand Bobby Manna.

  “Remember I told you it was a big hit?” Manna said on one tape. “John Gotti.”

  Two unidentified voices chimed in with suggestions and predictions.

  “The only way to do it is in Rockefeller Center,” said the first. “Make your hit solo.”

  Manna was typically joined in the bathroom sessions by Casella, retired police lieutenant Frank “Dipsy” Daniello and Mob enforcer Richard “Bocci” DeSciscio. Before one of their conversations began, a female customer walked in to answer nature’s call.

  “Go piss in the street, lady,” one of the gentlemen advised her. “This is a fucking business meeting.”

  Manna was among the Chin’s most trusted aides, with a history of violence and an unshakeable belief in his sworn oath of omerta. A 1972 New Jersey report on organized crime tied Manna to the late Tommy Eboli, and identified him as the Genovese family’s man on the waterfront—responsible for bookmaking, loan-sharking and numbers operations.

/>   When subpoenaed that year in a Mob investigation, the Hudson County hard-ass not only refused to testify, but he refused to be sworn in. His silence landed him in the state Correctional Center in Yardville, where he first met fellow true believer Little Nicky Scarfo. The two became fast friends, walking the yard and discussing their Mafia ambitions.

  He had one other qualification for the job, recounted Genovese Squad head Pritchard: “Bobby Manna was a stone killer.” The gangster shared one other characteristic with his boss, Vincent Gigante: He didn’t like people throwing his name around. The skinny Manna, sometimes known as “the Thin Man,” preferred his associates to raise one pinky finger when referring to him.

  Manna’s suggestion was to take a shot at Gotti in his natural habitat, out near the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park.

  “Wear a disguise,” the consigliere advised. “It’s an open area.”

  “Do you know where you’re going to hit him?” asked Daniello.

  “Yeah,” said Casella. “On that corner.”

  Daniello later declared, “The godfather . . . ain’t getting home.”

  The Gambino Squad, as required by law, visited with Gotti on September 30, 1987, to deliver news of the planned killing. Mouw recalled that the agents never mentioned Gigante by name during a short session with the Gambino boss outside his Howard Beach home.

  “We didn’t say Gigante,” he recalled. “We just said the West Side—the Genovese family.” Gotti read between the lines, so he began traveling with a bodyguard.

  The bathroom tapes indicated that the Hoboken plotters were undeterred by the FBI heads-up, and continued scheming until they were indicted and arrested.

  “Hey, John Gotti knows,” Casella said on a later tape.

  Manna even upped the ante by mentioning Gotti’s dope-slinging brother Gene as another target. “Gene Gotti’s dead,” he declared in a bugged January 12, 1988, chat.

  “When are you going to hit him?” asked co-conspirator James Napoli.

  “Gene Gotti’s dead,” Manna repeated evenly.

  “We’re gonna be paying for this, you know, for the rest of our lives,” Napoli replied.

  Gotti ordered a hit of his own on Gigante, but the purported retaliation was more pipe dream than pipe bomb. There was a single Gambino response to the Chin’s offensive: Vincent “Jimmy” Rotondo, a Genovese waterfront racketeer, was found shot to death inside his car. In an old-school touch, a bag of fish was left on the dead man’s lap.

  But Gotti remained improbably clueless about the Chin’s lethal and laser-like focus on taking the Gambino boss down. In a secretly taped November 30, 1989, conversation with Gravano, the Dapper Don recounted how one of his underlings had praised him for an era of Mob goodwill.

  “He says, ‘Since youse was here, this is the first time that they could remember in years that the families ain’t arguing,’ ” Gotti boasted. “ ‘Nobody’s arguing. None of the families are arguing with nobody.’ ”

  “No,” agreed Gravano.

  “Everybody sedate,” Gotti replied.

  * * *

  The ultimate meeting between the pair came in 1988, when the two bosses were undisputedly the most wanted figures in organized crime. They sat together, the slovenly Gigante and the impeccably attired Gotti, to discuss the state of the city’s crime world. It was the Mafia equivalent of Ali and Frazier breaking bread.

  Gigante sported a five-day growth of wild stubble. He wore a robe and pajamas. His skin was so filthy that white flecks of dirt fell to the ground. And yet the old-timer schooled the younger, more aggressive gangster.

  First was the meeting’s location: an apartment in Lower Manhattan, in a building that was home to a Gambino capo. The sit-down was arranged by Benny Eggs and the Bull, with Gravano later acknowledging he was surprised by Gigante’s agreement to meet there.

  It turned out the Chin had a relative in the building. The perpetually paranoid Gigante spent the night in his apartment, and walked through the building to thwart any hit teams waiting outside. Lucchese boss Vittorio “Little Vic” Amuso and Gotti, in contrast, met on the street, leaving both men wide open.

  Gotti proposed recognizing the Bonanno family, a recovering collection of dopes and dope dealers reeling for the last decade since FBI undercover Pistone infiltrated the family. They were now headed by acting boss Vittorio “Little Vic” Orena, with Gotti’s ally and Howard Beach neighbor Joseph “Big Joey” Massino among the family’s up-and-comers.

  The Chin, backed by Amuso, vetoed the idea until the next commission meeting, denying Gotti an ally on the ruling board.

  Gotti next suggested opening the books to induct new members, including forty spots in the Genovese family. The Gambino boss figured any new Genovese inductees would learn the openings came courtesy of Gotti, who hoped to make inroads into Gigante’s family. The Chin nixed that one, too.

  “Chin stared straight at John and said, ‘When the time comes, I’ll make those moves inside my family. I appreciate your concern, but I’ll do it when I’m ready,’ ” Gravano later recalled.

  There was some small talk during the ninety-minute meeting. At one point Gigante lifted his pajama top to display the scar from his recent aortic valve replacement. He warned all involved that these types of get-togethers were not destined to become a regular feature of his schedule.

  “I’ve put a lot of time into this crazy act, and I don’t want to get caught in any of these meetings or picked up or bugged,” the Chin told them.

  D’Arco, a top Lucchese capo, later revealed that Amuso and the Chin only allowed Gotti to attend in an effort to dupe the Dapper Don into believing he was a welcomed equal at the commission meetings.

  Gigante delivered the coup de grace when Gotti boasted about his son’s Christmas Eve induction as a made member of the Gambinos.

  “Jeez,” the Chin replied. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Gravano, in the room as his boss’s second, left astounded by everything he had just seen and heard.

  “So here was the Chin, who’s supposed to be crazy, saying who in their right mind would want their son to be made,” Gravano recalled. “And there was John, boasting about it. Who was really crazy?”

  Gotti called Gravano the next day to praise the Chin’s deft handling of everything. Gigante was “smart as a fox,” said the Chin’s bête noir.

  * * *

  Police found a crude bomb outside Gotti’s Ravenite Social Club after an anonymous phone call, a year later, reporting a “gift for John Gotti” left on Mulberry Street. Officials were unsure if it was a pointed message or some kind of stunt. Chief of Detectives Robert Colangelo opined that both were possibilities.

  “It’s either a warning to Gotti that he is vulnerable or his club is vulnerable,” he said. “Or it could have been a prank.”

  There was one more failed plot to kill Gotti. In 1990, when Chin was under indictment, Amuso and Casso approached D’Arco about contacting a mobbed-up Pittsburgh cousin to provide a “remote control bomb” to blow up the Dapper Don.

  D’Arco was concerned that the bomb might be traced back to him, because his relative had ties to the Genovese family.

  “Don’t worry about it. ‘The Robe’ knows about it,” Gaspipe told him, using his own alias for Gigante.

  * * *

  The two warring Mob bosses were once on the same side, albeit under strange circumstances. An undercover Drug Enforcement Agency agent was posing as a cocaine dealer when he went for a Staten Island sit-down with a mobbed-up drug dealer in 1989.

  Everett Hatcher, a forty-six-year-old father of two, arrived in the desolate section of Staten Island and never returned. The DEA agent was shot to death inside his car, his body left slumped over the steering wheel. The cold-blooded execution sent the city’s law enforcement community into an all-out, no-holds-barred manhunt for the killer, Constabile “Gus” Farace.

  The suspect’s Mob ties ran deep: Farace had an uncle in the Gambino family, and cousins in the Bonanno and
Colombo enterprises. DEA investigators immediately put intense pressure on the city’s five families to turn Farace in, with appeals made to Gotti and Gigante to exert their influence on the underworld in closing the case. Robert Stutman, the head of the DEA, personally appealed to Gotti in a visit to the Mob boss’s Howard Beach home.

  “We tried everything,” Stutman acknowledged.

  There was precedent for the unusual move: Genovese capo Ianniello agreed to help authorities searching for a six-year-old named Etan Patz after the boy disappeared on a Manhattan street in 1979.

  Farace, though never arrested, did receive a death sentence. He was sprayed with sixteen bullets to the head, neck, back and leg in a November 17, 1989, Mob execution. Two Lucchese family associates later pleaded guilty to performing the Mafia-sanctioned murder.

  * * *

  John Gotti survived the Chin’s assorted murder plots, although he couldn’t escape arrest. When his son assumed command after the Teflon Don was busted on December 11, 1990, the Genovese hierarchy—in a final slap at the elder Gotti—refused even to meet with the Mafia novice.

  CHAPTER 14

  IT AIN’T ME, BABE

  THE COMMISSION CASE FINALLY WENT TO TRIAL IN 1986, WITH A brilliant young prosecutor named Michael Chertoff winning convictions across the board after a ten-week trial that drew unprecedented media attention. All nine defendants were found guilty, with the jury forewoman brushing away tears as she read the lengthy verdict.

  Salerno and the rest showed no emotion during the twenty-minute recitation. The triumphant Chertoff declared the newly convicted Mafiosi were “directing the largest and most vicious criminal business in the history of the United States.”

  Salerno and the other bosses were sentenced to the max: one hundred years, with no possibility of parole. He would die three years later after suffering a stroke at the federal prison medical center in Springfield, Missouri. By then, the rest of the world would know the secret that Fat Tony took to the grave: Vincent Gigante was the true head of the Genovese family.