“All that heat hurt business,” Andrew recalls. “And then we heard that there was a witness who was going to finger Anthony and Mike. They found out it was the recruiter and asked me to do whatever it took to get him to keep his mouth shut.
“At this point, my relationship with Mike was strained over some personal issues. You see, Nicky liked his crew to work well together, but not to be too close. Nicky knew that if two guys were fast friends and one of them had to go, the other guy might not be willing to do the work [the killing]. So he became an expert at instigating and causing friction when he sensed crew loyalty might be in question. He put a little wedge between me and Mike, making us more like rivals than friends. That didn’t matter, though. There was too much at stake for me to refuse to help. It was also a way for me to extend an olive branch to Mike, so I agreed.
“The next day I walked into the recruiter’s office, using the ploy that I was interested in enlisting. After a half-hour conversation, I lured the recruiter outside where my fellow crew member Mario was waiting. We pounced on the guy before he knew what was happening and beat him with our fists and a lead pipe, warning him that if he didn’t keep quiet about the car incident, we’d come back and kill him. The recruiter never came forward as a witness and no charges were filed against Anthony or Mike for the attempted theft.”
EXPANSION
As 1985 wore on, Andrew became less involved with the car business. He still helped Anthony Gerbino deliver stolen parts, do drop-offs, and move cars around. However, the reduction in the amount of time he devoted to car theft didn’t mean he was getting lazy or having second thoughts about being a criminal. Far from it. Andrew was using the extra hours to increase his drug activities and to add a new business to his repertoire: shylocking.
Andrew made friends with some of the guys in the Carmine Persico faction of the Colombo family and they started networking their drug businesses. He became more directly involved in the drug operations and was making lots of money. Then he got permission from Nicky to start putting some serious money out on the street.
“After Nicky was indicted in March, things got pretty tight. Even though he was out on bail, the heat was on and he knew he had to be very cautious about what he did. Business suffered and he expected everybody to keep a lower profile and tighten their belts. He gave me the okay to make the loans, but the money was tightly controlled and only went to low-risk borrowers.
“Here’s how shylocking works. Interest is based on the point system. One point equals one dollar of interest on every hundred dollars borrowed. That’s a weekly payment, not monthly or annually.
“For example, a six-thousand-dollar loan at three points meant a hundred eighty dollars a week in interest. If I got the money from Nicky at one point, he’d get sixty dollars and I’d get a hundred twenty. I charged different points depending on the size of the loan. More points on small loans because there was less money involved and they got paid off quicker. There were less points on the larger loans, because you didn’t want to choke the customer with interest. If I had a real good customer, I’d sometimes give him a deal called a knockdown loan. Under that scenario, for every four weekly payments, two went for interest and two came directly off the principal.
“There was good money in shylocking. But as careful as I was about who I loaned to, every once in a while I’d get a deadbeat I’d have to chase down and get his attention. Overall, though, it was a good business.”
SHAKEUP AT THE TOP
On the evening of December 16, Gambino family boss Paul Castellano and his bodyguard and driver Tommy Bilotti were gunned down on the street in front of Sparks Steak House in Manhattan. The killings were carried out on the orders of John Gotti, who had developed a hatred for Castellano. Gotti and his friend and confidant Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano observed from a car parked across the street as the assassinations were carried out.
Castellano’s death elevated Gotti to the throne of power in the family. The new boss’ dislike for Nicky Corozzo caused angst in the Corozzo crew. The jailed Lenny DiMaria sent a message from his prison cell: “What’s going to be waiting for me when I get out? A bullet?”
For Andrew, the year finished better than it started. The Todd Alvino matter no longer weighed on him. And the manner in which it was resolved had added to his stature. Although there was uncertainty over the direction the family would take under the leadership of John Gotti, the only problem for Andrew personally was the continuing friction with Mike Yannotti.
7
1986
For Andrew, 1986 could be called the Year of Fraud. It encompassed a fraudulent employment scheme, credit-card fraud, and a scam involving rebuildable cars. It also included a confrontation with a Russian gang over drug turf. However, the year began with romance.
Andrew had dated his share of girls as a teenager and an up-and-coming mobster. Now a streetwise 20-year-old, he entered his first serious relationship. The girl’s name was Dina and he was introduced to her by Anthony Gerbino at a club in Sheepshead Bay. Dina was with a guy and they were arguing.
“I walked up to their table and whispered in her ear. I said, ‘You can spend the night arguing with him or you can come home with me.’ She went home with me. After that night, we were together all the time. I was a year older than her and we were just alike. Too much alike, maybe. Our relationship was passionate and tumultuous.”
It began with violence the first day he went to her apartment. Dina told Andrew her ex-boyfriend Ronnie was stalking her. He followed her around and sat outside her window on the fire escape. When Andrew was there, Ronnie started ringing the doorbell. Andrew saw by the look on her face that she was scared. He opened up the door and told Ronnie to beat it. Ronnie wasn’t happy with that and they had words.
“I pulled my gun out of my pants and pistol whipped him right there in the hallway. When I hit him, he fell two or three steps down the stairs and the gun slipped out of my hand onto the landing. He started back up the stairs toward me and I kicked him in the throat. This time he fell all the way down to the next landing. These were marble stairs. Between me hitting and kicking him and the fall, he was banged up pretty good.
“In the meantime, one of the neighbors called the police. Dina’s brother Larry picked up my gun and took it back into the apartment. When the cops showed up, Dina told them Ronnie was a stalker. One of the cops said there was a report that a gun was involved and wanted to know who had it. Dina told him nobody had a gun.
“Sitting there on the couch, I was getting worried about the gun issue. I knew Larry had hidden it, but it had been in my waistband for so long I figured there was probably a mark from it on my skin. If the cops checked me over, I’d probably be in trouble. They never did, though. Ronnie refused to press charges and they all left. He never bothered her like that again.
“That episode showed Dina another side of me. She knew my reputation on the street and now she knew it was true. She knew her way around, though, and didn’t mind. Like I said, we were very much alike. She introduced me to some people in Bensonhurst she knew. They became my friends and, in some cases, my drug-business associates. That was in addition to my contacts in the Persico crew.
“After a while I took Dina to meet my mother and it didn’t go all that well. It wasn’t that my mother didn’t like her. It was just that to my mother, no girl was good enough for me. It didn’t matter who the girl was, my mother would find fault with her.”
NO-SHOW JOB
Around April, Andrew landed a job that was almost too good to be true. In fact, it wasn’t true. Thanks to the Gambino family’s influence with labor unions involved in the construction business, he was hired for a job with one basic requirement: Show up only to collect his paycheck.
At that time, major construction was underway at Battery Park City. The Gambinos controlled one of the labor unions with members working there. A deal was worked out where guys from all the crews were hired for the construction jobs. About 10 crew members rot
ated on and off the payroll at a time.
“My job title was pipe insulator. I was credited with all kinds of overtime and my take-home pay was around a thousand a week. Multiply that by ten guys and you’re talking serious money. When I got my paycheck, I took it right to Nicky and signed it over. When he cashed it, he gave me a couple hundred and split the rest with the union guy.
“That wasn’t a lot of money for me, but it was free. The best part was that after twenty-six weeks, we got laid off and went on unemployment. Then other crew members were hired to replace us. The unemployment checks were all mine. On top of that, because I was single, they taxed the shit out of me and I got almost all of it back as a tax refund. I think I got a refund of eight or nine thousand and I gave a thousand to Nicky. Not that I had to. It was a way for me to thank him for setting this deal up for me. I don’t know if all our guys had the same exact arrangement, but that’s the way it worked for me.”
PROFIT AND LOSS
Around this time, Andrew got involved in a memorable rebuildable-car episode.
He purchased two Cadillacs that an insurance company was selling as recovered stolen vehicles for about $2,000 each. Their book value was about $20,000 each. Then he stole two cars that were identical right down to the color.
Within a couple of months, he rebuilt both cars. He sold one to a crew member for $13,500, well under book. That gave him a profit of about $11,000 and left the crew member room to make some money when he did an insurance job later on. Andrew helped him strip the car again and he filed an insurance claim. They gave the adjuster a few hundred not to total the Cadillac, just to show damage of around ten thousand. The check from the insurance company was pure profit. After that, they put the car back together and he now had a $20,000 car that cost him only $3,500 out of pocket. Then he sold it at book value and realized $16,000. Between them they made $27,000 on that one car.
“On the downside, the second insurance claim within a year on that Caddy brought me to the attention of an organization I didn’t know existed until then. A couple of investigators from the National Auto Theft Bureau showed up at my house. They wanted to know about my car-restoration activities. Did I have receipts for the parts I supposedly bought to rebuild? And why did the cars I was involved with have a habit of having multiple insurance claims filed in short periods of time?”
Ironically, as they sat there talking, the second Caddy was in Andrew’s garage, all stripped down. He was doing the same thing with that car as his crewmate had done. He’d paid off the adjuster, filed a claim, and was waiting for the check.
“They finally left, but they made it clear that I was on their radar. Any future insurance claims I was connected to would get a real close going over. That forced me to change my methods. I had enough friends in the business I could work with on a percentage basis without having my name appear on any of the paperwork. So I still made money on insurance fraud, just in a little different manner.”
CREDIT-CARD BONANZA
In late 1984, VISA credit-card companies began converting their cards to a hologram format for security purposes. In 1985 and 1986, the new cards were issued to new applicants or as renewals to existing customers. Although the idea behind the new format was to cut down on fraud, for Andrew and his associates, the issuance of the cards opened the door to vast financial rewards. Andrew explained it this way.
“We’d already been making a lot of money off credit cards. But when the companies issued these hologram cards, we made a real killing. I remember that a couple of guys from a Lucchese crew we were friendly with had a meeting with Nicky. I wasn’t there, but that same day Nicky told us we had access to thousands of new credit cards with all the related account information.
“Nicky never told us how this all came down. It seemed apparent, though, that the Luccheses had stolen the envelopes containing the new cards from a post office or mail truck. The envelopes contained the cards, personal identification information, and account information that included passwords, PINS, and credit limits.
“Through Nicky’s contacts we got stacks of blank New York State driver’s licenses. This was just prior to the state issuing photo licenses. We didn’t have enough blanks to make a license for every card, but we had a lot of them. That put whoever was using the card in good shape if a merchant requested identification.
“We sold most of the cards to customers for five hundred dollars each. We kept some of them for ourselves too. I knew a lot of merchants who weren’t exactly honest. Say I had a card with a three-thousand-dollar limit. I took it to one of them, banged it for twenty-five hundred, and split it with the merchant. The remaining five hundred I used to have fun with, like doing some nightclubbing.
“This scam lasted for several months and we made a killing during that time.”
HOSTILE-TAKEOVER ATTEMPT
Late in 1986, Andrew found his lucrative marijuana operation in Utica Park under threat. Another gang evicted Andrew’s dealer and claimed the location as its own. This was a challenge that required a swift and firm response.
The new gang was a large group of young Russians who hung around the park at Avenue N and Utica Avenue where Andrew had one of his marijuana dealers. Because he was the only game in town, he was doing $500-$700 a night from there.
“These newcomers didn’t know the rules. They didn’t know it was my spot and they had to keep their hands off. They told my dealer they were taking over and he had to get out. They even tuned him up a little bit to make their point. Like all things Mafia, this was more than just something between me and them. These kinds of things became known on the streets. People watched to see how the situation was handled. I was trying to expand my operations in that part of town. If I’d have backed down, when the word got around, other people would have challenged me. And it would have reflected badly on the whole crew. Interlopers might figure if I could be pushed around, the rest of the crew was probably soft too. And if I wanted to become a made man in the future, I had to prove I could hold down my territory. For all those reasons, my response had to be fast and decisive.
“The very next day I went to the park with two friends. I had them wait at the entrance, guns in hand, while I went to look for the new drug kingpin, a guy named Ivan. Under my jacket I had a police baton that had been drilled out in the center and filled with lead. Ivan was sitting on a bench with six or seven other guys around. As I approached, they thought I was there to make a buy and asked me what I wanted. I said I wanted to see Ivan, that I heard he had some good stuff. As Ivan got up, I pulled out the baton and hit him on the crown of his head. The sound of the impact was so loud that one of my friends ran over and said, ‘Please, Andrew! Don’t hit him again. You’ll kill him.’
“With Ivan unconscious on the ground, I pulled my gun and told Ivan’s boys if I ever saw any of them in the park again, I’d kill them. The next day I flew to Jamaica and stayed for a couple of weeks to let the heat die down. Ivan and his crew never returned to the park.”
THE HORSE ROOM
In December 1986, Nicky opened yet another door for Andrew. He asked his underling to learn how to operate one of the horse rooms the crew ran. These betting parlors were the Mob’s equivalent of the Off Track Betting (OTB) sites run by the New York State government. They were not only patterned after OTB, they were set up using actual OTB technology and were an important part of the crew’s income. Nicky’s guys had bribed an OTB cleaning crew to let them into the building at night. They took the computer chip, had it duplicated, then returned it.
“I was real excited when Nicky assigned me to learn the horse room. He had me train in one of the small rooms for a week or so in late December. I liked the job and enjoyed learning it. The place I was working at was run by a girl named Margo. I remember one day that I couldn’t work my assigned shift and asked her to switch with me. When I pulled up in my car to go to work, the cops were there and they were taking Margo out in cuffs. I felt so sorry for her, because on a normal day it would have been m
e under arrest. She took it well, though, and we laughed about it later.”
Right after New Year’s Day 1987, Nicky put Andrew in one of the bigger OTB operations. It was a great opportunity, but it almost cost him his life.
For Andrew, 1986 had been another successful year financially and personally. Fraudulent automobile, employment, and credit-card deals had generated a lot of money. His drug and shylocking businesses were going strong. And he was being groomed for taking on the additional responsibility of running a horse room. His personal stature had grown over his handling of the attempted takeover of his Utica Park drug operation and he was engaged in a passionate but stormy liaison with Dina. Although his personal relationship with Mike Yannotti was still somewhat strained, professionally they were working well together.
As for the crew, their concerns over the family’s direction under John Gotti’s leadership never materialized. In fact, Andrew and his crewmates at the street level liked their new boss’ blue-collar style. John Gotti was going to be good for business. Or so it seemed.
8
Gambling and the New York Mob
Gambling accounted for a major portion of the Gambino family’s income, as it did for all the New York City crime families. The operations were run by individual crews within each organization and the take often ran into the tens of millions of dollars per year per crew. The income was so steady and reliable that Andrew referred to it as “the McDonald’s” of the various family enterprises.
Surviving the Mob Page 5
