by Gene Mustain
“They are making my client into a monster,” Cutler said. The press had created an impression that “anyone who looks at Mr. Gotti disappears and is afraid.” A “crescendo of hysteria” had spawned a notion “that my client is somehow a wild man.”
When jury selection resumed, several potential jurors admitted they could not keep an open mind about the case. One man was excused after he admitted commenting to another, “Why did we have to get hoods?”
By week’s end, the prospect of a twelve-member jury was far off and so was an early forecast the trial would last only two months. Over the weekend, the search for untainted jurors became a futile exercise and the optimistic forecast went up in smoke.
On Saturday, John Gotti spent part of the day reviewing his gambling debts with Angelo Ruggiero. He owed money to “the tall kid,” who was 6 foot 5 Joseph Corrao, the Little Italy capo; a man named “Eddie”; and men he referred to only as “Jersey,” who, like his ice cream company partners, probably belonged to the DeCavalcante Family. One debt was costing him $1,000 a week in “vig”—interest.
The two men were counting money as they talked, probably the cash receipts from a sports-betting operation that they shared with Anthony Corallo, boss of the Luchese Family, according to a state Organized Crime Task Force affidavit.
They talked about who got what. They talked in terms of thousands, not dollars.
“So I got to give you forty-five and you want to give, give what’s-his-name ten,” Angelo said. “Ah, what’s his name? Bruce Cutler?”
“That’s the man,” Gotti said.
“Yeah. Bruce Cutler.”
As Gotti’s attorney in both the Piecyk and racketeering cases, Cutler undoubtedly earned much more than that, probably in cash, the standard—and perfectly legal—way mobsters pay their bills.
Angelo suggested to his old street-gang friend that one of Gotti’s debts could be forgotten—because “we pulled this deal for everybody, you know?”
“My fuckin’ friendship is better than nothin’, eh?” Gotti laughed.
The next day, April 13, Frank DeCicco’s friendship with Gotti came to an end near his mentor James Failla’s social club on Eighty-sixth Street in Brooklyn. As DeCicco sat down in the front passenger seat of a parked car, a bomb exploded beneath him.
The blast, probably triggered by remote-control, sent a black mushroom cloud upward and a flaming DeCicco outward. Some burning debris struck Frank Bellino, a Luchese Family soldier and an official of the concrete and cement worker’s union, who was standing beside the car waiting for DeCicco to hand him business cards from the glove compartment. About 100 feet away, NYPD Officer Carmen Romeo forgot about the summons he was issuing and came to the aid of both men. Bellino, age 69, lived, but the underboss died at Victory Memorial Hospital.
The mangled car, a 1985 Buick registered to an official of the hotel workers’ union, was parked across the street from Tommaso’s Italian Restaurant, the site of the post-Sparks shuttle diplomacy among Gotti, DeCicco, and others after the December hits. DeCicco and Bellino had just left a regular Sunday meeting of Failla’s crew at the Veterans and Friends Social Club.
Within hours, the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club began to fill up with men, but their information was as scanty as the early radio bulletins. No one knew who killed DeCicco, or why.
“We don’t know,” Angelo told an early arrival. “We’ve just got to get to the bottom of it, that’s all.”
“What a shame,” the man replied, but not just because his underboss was dead. “That’s the shame of it, Angelo, we don’t know nothin’ yet.”
When Gotti arrived, someone asked, “How are ya, Bo?”
“I was doing good till a couple hours ago … the bomb was fuckin’ something … the car was bombed like they put gasoline on it … put a bomb under the car … you gotta see the fuckin’ car, you wouldn’t believe the car.”
Later that night, Kenneth McCabe and three detectives investigating the DeCicco bombing visited another Brooklyn social club where DeCicco hung out. The club on Bath Avenue had no name, but it did have ten men inside, apparently on a war-alert.
“Open the door!” shouted McCabe, who had left the NYPD for a coveted criminal investigator’s job with the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan.
Through a window, Detective William Tomasulo of the Brooklyn South Task Force saw a man hurriedly load a bullet into a handgun, which he then anxiously pointed at the door.
“Police!” McCabe shouted this time. “Open up!”
All of a sudden, guns started dropping to the floor and the door to the no-name club was opened.
Inside, the detectives arrested Robert Fapiano, age 43, on a charge of illegally possessing a handgun. They also recovered three other handguns, including a .38-caliber revolver stolen in 1973 from a shipment at John F. Kennedy Airport, which by then had supplanted the waterfront docks as the prime place of Family pilferage. Twenty-three guns were heisted that day; in 1976, one was recovered from Peter Gotti, now occasionally one of his brother’s many bodyguards.
In the 1950s, Peter had preceded younger brothers John and Gene into a street gang in which all received their criminal baptismals. But both John and Gene had preceded Peter into the Gambino Family. Peter, a former city sanitation worker and the former target of an FBI investigation into cocaine trafficking, was made after John took over.
Amid much Monday-morning speculation in the newspapers, the Gotti trial resumed in Brooklyn federal court. Hypotheses abounded; the most popular was that DeCicco was blown up as a payback by the Pope’s soldiers, who believed DeCicco had helped set up Castellano at Sparks. In time, this gave way to the idea DeCicco was targeted by revenge-minded civilian friends or relatives of short-lived underboss Thomas Bilotti, acting on their own.
Many police investigators, unable to recall a Family hit in the Crime Capital in which a remote-controlled bomb was used, came to accept this notion of DeCicco’s death.
Arriving at court, unlike other times, Gotti strode through the stampede of reporters without tossing off any disingenuous replies. He seemed grim and tense and was heard to complain to his attorney:
“It’s difficult being a gentleman around here.”
Cutler asked Judge Nickerson to delay the trial, citing “a rash of publicity this morning regarding Mr. DeCicco, his body blown to bits yesterday.” He said articles saying “some of Mr. Gotti’s friends may have had complicity or involvement” had “broken and shattered” his client’s presumption of innocence.
The judge denied Cutler’s motion. At day’s end, Gotti went home to Queens accompanied by several bodyguards. What he knew about DeCicco’s murder was what most newspaper readers knew, which was only a dense package of details in search of a conclusion. Gotti went home weary of court and wary of war.
Enter the “Zips,” a slang word for native-born Sicilians involved in crime. Ralph Mosca came back from a meeting with Gotti that night and instructed his men, including secret informer Dominick Lofaro, to contact all the friendly Zips they knew and put them on “standby.” The Zips were considered willing gunmen and some cops even considered those loyal to Castellano as suspects in the DeCicco hit.
Lofaro told the state Organized Crime Task Force that Mosca was ordered by Gotti to meet the next day with two officials of an asphalt worker’s union, which employed many muscular Zips. Lofaro also said that Gotti had issued instructions for all Gambino soldiers to attend DeCicco’s wake, held over two days at a funeral home on Eighty-sixth Street, near the two-foot hole in the pavement and single black shoe left by the April 13 bomb.
In a driving rain on April 15, about 300 men made their way to the wake. The New York Times had published a story that morning by Selwyn Raab saying Gotti may have been targeted for assassination due to internal Family strife and unhappiness over his rule and personal demeanor. Unidentified sources said some Family men did not like his “Hollywood-style” clothes.
“One thing mob bosses don’t like is scrutiny and no
toriety,” added an anonymous federal investigator. “Because of his legal problems, Gotti seems to be on television every night, strutting around the courthouse and relishing it.”
Though Gotti may have been wondering about all that as well, he was not ducking public appearances, or dressing down. Clad in another of his many hand-tailored double-breasted suits, he arrived at DeCicco’s wake in his new Mercedes, which had tinted windows and wipers for the headlights. Naturally, there was a peeping crowd of reporters and investigators, including Kenneth McCabe and Detective John Gurnee, both of whom had spied on Gotti during the post-Sparks shakeout, when he began to receive boss-like kisses and hugs.
Now, “there was a definite increase in the amount of respect shown John,” McCabe said later, “as he entered the funeral home, [as he left] the funeral home, people holding umbrellas for him, people stepping out of the way, people kissing him.”
“It appeared to me that he was accorded more respect than he was on Christmas Eve,” Detective Gurnee added.
Outside the wake, Gurnee said Gotti “had very, very hushed conversations” with several captains. At one point, he took a ride with Castellano loyalist Thomas Gambino, the owner of many Manhattan garment district trucking firms and a son of the Family patriarch Carlo Gambino. Gotti and Gambino returned 40 minutes later.
At the wake, McCabe also saw Bruce Cutler and Barry Slotnick, then law partners and an odd couple. Slotnick’s courtroom style was the opposite of Cutler’s, though historically as successful. He was cunning, too, but in a softer way. He also was a physical opposite; he was tall and slim, and sported a salt-and-pepper beard.
Slotnick’s public profile then was much higher than Cutler’s. He had represented many organized crime leaders and several major politicians, and was then defending Bernhard Goetz, the seemingly mild-mannered man whose bullet-filled meeting with four black teenagers in a subway car in December 1984 was worldwide news.
Dodging raindrops, Cutler, Slotnick, and all the other mourners departed the wake of the abruptly absent Frank DeCicco, who was buried later in the week in a cemetery on Staten Island, the same burial ground where the Pope also lay.
Extensive coverage of the wake once again hampered jury selection in Brooklyn, which resumed the next morning. Not much was accomplished, although Judge Nickerson warned Cutler and Gotti to stop laughing at the comments of potential jurors.
The warnings came after Nickerson asked one candidate whether he had read anything about a Mr. Castellano.”
“You know, I read the names,” the man replied. “They don’t stick with me. You know, it is not something I would retain in my head.”
The sounds of incredulous laughter reached Nickerson, who ordered Cutler to a sidebar.
“I get the distinct impression that you and Mr. Gotti are trying to intimidate these jurors by the way you are laughing,” the judge said.
Cutler denied it was so, but Nickerson persisted.
“You keep a poker face. You tell your client to do that.”
Cutler denied it again.
“It certainly was intimidating, and I took it as such,” said the judge.
The laughter was a tonic for the last few days. The murder of DeCicco preyed on Gotti’s mind. At night, encamped with soldiers in the fortress next to the Nice N EZ Auto School, he tried to figure it out, and what he would do if he had a clue.
For instance, a few hours after he was rebuked by the judge, the boss and his driver, Bobby Borriello, were taped discussing an article in the Staten Island Advance. Before the bombing, the newspaper received, but did not publish, a letter predicting DeCicco’s death. The anonymous letter writer said a revengeful relative was recruiting an inmate on Rikers Island, a city-run prison, to carry out a contract on the life of DeCicco.
Gotti speculated that the bombing might not have been the work of a relative, but “a crackpot”—after all, “it happens.”
“It can’t be a crackpot,” Borriello said.
“Well … so we gotta put some investigation on it right away,” Gotti said.
Borriello did not think this would be so easy. After all, Rikers Island had about 7,000 inmates confined to overcrowded cells in the middle of the East River.
“No, not that,” Gotti said impatiently, before explaining what he meant:
“We don’t take the guys who did this, we take the guys that sent them … you gotta get the guys who’re paying them. Know what I’m saying?”
Two days later, Gotti discussed the DeCicco hit with his brother Gene, five years younger. The brothers were similar, though Gene had a little less of all of John’s traits, good and bad. It was a reason they quarreled a lot, but not now.
“Isn’t it a shame that we lost him?” Gene said. “Isn’t it a shame?”
John agreed that it was and the two brothers speculated about the possible culprits.
“Them kids ain’t got the smarts for that,” Gene said about one unidentified group. John said the same about another unspecified party, before wondering:
“You know who it might be? That Irish mob.”
Gotti was referring to the Westies, a notorious gang of Irish-American thugs from the hardscrabble Hell’s Kitchen area on the West Side of Manhattan. In the past, some Westies had been employed by Paul Castellano to kill people; in the near future, Kevin Kelly, a 31-year-old Westie, would be indicted in the shooting of the carpenters’ union official Gotti had complained about. Presently, they were the target of many investigations and trials. Their number-two man had “rolled over” and become a federal witness.
In time, it became clear that only those responsible knew who blew up DeCicco; for the second time in five months, talk of war subsided. And so the Zips went back to the asphalt trucks and the Westies went into hiding or jail. The specter of jail soon surpassed DeCicco in the worry department of John Gotti’s mind.
6
WE’RE READY FOR FREDDY
EUGENE H. NICKERSON was an extremely patient judge, and determined to move forward in the Gotti trial despite all of the ex-parte distractions.
For two weeks after the DeCicco murder, he kept trying to screen candidates—more than 200—for the juror pool. At one point, he had to take nine steps backward and eliminate those who admitted talking about the case among themselves. Finally, on April 28, citing all the contaminating publicity, he threw in the gavel and delayed the trial until August, when he said he would adopt a more elaborate screening process and consider seating jurors whose identities would be kept secret.
“I’ll get banged around some more with this,” Gotti said afterward.
It was an accurate prediction. That same day, assistant U.S. attorney Diane Giacalone said she would ask the judge to revoke the bail of John and Gene Gotti and two other defendants—a move she had been contemplating for several days.
Not just the defendants were shocked by her announcement. Upstate in White Plains, where the state Organized Crime Task Force had its main office, many agents were upset—if Gotti were in jail, he wouldn’t be talking on the Nice N EZ bug, which they felt was certain to produce indictable crimes, eventually.
Giacalone was not officially aware of the bug or tap, but she and co-prosecutor John Gleeson suspected that the state agency had something cooking on Gotti because of the cautious way it had responded to her during her investigation. Still, Giacalone and her boss, Reena Raggi, then the interim U.S. attorney in Brooklyn and soon to be its first woman federal judge, believed they had to immobilize Gotti, for fear that witnesses would be located and intimidated while the trial was delayed.
Hearings on Giacalone’s bail-revocation motion were held in early May. She had to show “probable cause” to believe that Gotti violated his bail by committing any local, state, or federal crime. She attacked on three grounds: Gotti had continued to participate in the criminal affairs of the Gambino Family; he attempted to intimidate a federal witness, Dennis Quirk, of the court officers association; and he did intimidate a state witness, Romual Piecyk.
Giacalone called twelve witnesses to the stand, including local and federal organized crime experts, the detectives and cops who surveilled Gotti during his takeover or were involved in the Piecyk incident, and Dennis Quirk. The state Task Force tapes remained secret and unavailable to her.
Surprise testimony about the Piecyk matter came from Edward Magnuson, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent. Curiously, because the case did not involve drugs, the DEA, not the FBI, had been the principal federal law-enforcement agency involved in the investigation leading to Gotti’s indictment. Behind this drama lay an interesting tale of federal intrigue no one wanted to talk about, at the time.
Magnuson testified about the statement of a DEA informant who had been talking about the Gotti crew and organized crime for the past year. The informant said members of Gotti’s crew told him Piecyk “had received a kick in the ass,” a warning not to testify. Other than Piecyk’s own initial statements, which he later denied, the informant’s remark was the most damaging indication that the mechanic had been physically threatened.
Putting his spin on it, Bruce Cutler argued that Piecyk frightened himself into silence, after reading about Gotti’s “violent and impulsive” reputation. As to Giacalone’s other witnesses, he ridiculed their statements as “regurgitation of newspaper articles,” “comic-book gossip,” and multiple hearsay from unknown informants.
Nickerson issued a written opinion on May 13. He said that while the testimony showed Gotti did become boss of the Gambino Family while on bail—and “it is a bold, not to say reckless, man who will act in that way”—Giacalone’s witnesses did not show that he engaged in Family crimes. As to the Quirk incidents, while they did lend “credence to the inference that [Gotti] was and is prepared to subvert the integrity” of his trial, there wasn’t enough evidence to link them directly to Gotti or his men.
