Mob Star

by Gene Mustain

  Walking the streets of Italian Harlem with his family, little John Gotti glimpsed a world soon to be fragmented by black and Hispanic migration and by immigrant assimilation. In time, when John joined the aging Family men of this world, they would favor him—partly because he had briefly seen the way it was.

  The same forces that affected Italian Harlem caused John’s family to move away from the Bronx during the middle of his fourth year at P.S. 113. They moved into a two-story wood-frame house on East Thirteenth Street in Sheepshead Bay, a tranquil community in the far southeastern corner of Brooklyn, near the Atlantic Ocean.

  John enrolled in P.S. 209; classmates included kids whose parents had achieved more prosperity than the Gotti clan. John began to see that in some minds a kid’s status was unfairly tied to his parents’ status, which was measured by income. It wasn’t his fault he was poor; a little river of resentment began to flow through John, and occasionally it bubbled up as a cocky strut and a sharp tongue.

  The nation was at war again, in Korea, and hysterical about communism and fearful of the Doomsday Bomb. The toughest guy in fiction was Mike Hammer, a crudely violent hero created by Brooklyn writer Mickey Spillane.

  Television was becoming a consumer phenomenon; in New York City, the most-watched program in 1951 was a U.S. Senate hearing in Manhattan on organized crime. After days of testimony by bookmakers, pimps, and thieves, the Kefauver committee concluded:

  “There is a sinister criminal organization known as the Mafia operating throughout the country with ties in other nations. … The power of the Mafia is based on a ruthless enforcement of its edicts and its own law of vengeance to which have been credibly attributed literally hundreds of murders throughout the country.”

  Young Brooklyn boys like John Gotti learned about the Mafia on the streets, not in classrooms, and so they knew little about its origin. “Mafia” is a derivative blend of Sicilian and Arabic expressions for many concepts: place of refuge, the righting of wrongs, and protection from the powerful. Regarding individuals, it came to mean strength of body, mind, and spirit. In Sicily, Mafia was a way of life; a Mafioso was a man.

  Sicily was exploited by generations of conquerors. Unable to take part in the rule of their own land, subjugated by the whimsical laws of other cultures, the Sicilians developed a strong distrust of any governmental authority. They turned to their own families for protection and justice. Loyalty became owed only to the family. Sangu di me sangu. Blood of my blood.

  The ideals of family loyalty and the Mafia way of life developed together. Over time, plundering and feuding over depleted resources caused groups of families to form large Families led by powerful vomini di rispettu, men of respect, who co-opted the past and became as lawless as their former oppressors. By the time Italy was unified in the nineteenth century, so-called “Mafia bosses” ruled Sicily. Many followers or their descendants came to the United States to seek opportunity or survive a purge by Benito Mussolini.

  In this country, they had no power and little knowledge, except for the Mafia way of life. They altered their tradition further by accepting into their Families other immigrants the Old World Mafia bosses regarded as flashy, emotional, and recklessly violent: the Neapolitans.

  In 1952, the future crime boss completed the sixth grade. This was the year 12-year-old Johnny Gotti, according to Bruce Cutler’s trial portrait, went off “on his own”—and the year the Gotti clan was forced to move again after their house was sold.

  John’s parents had few housing options. They finally moved to the Brownsville-East New York area of Brooklyn, a neglected working-class community that was home to thousands of southern Italian immigrants and Eastern European Jews who had abandoned stacked Manhattan ghettos.

  The best-known people in Brownsville-East New York were criminals, and among the area’s numerous teenage street gangs they were regarded in the way other boys regarded sports heroes. One superstar of crime was Albert Anastasia, who had murdered his way to the top of the Family that included Carlo Gambino. A Brownsville alliance of Italians and Jews disposed of many men for Anastasia, who was called the Lord High Executioner by the newspapers. In ten years, they executed eighty people, many at the behest of Families now called the Mafia. They became infamous as Murder, Incorporated.

  Young John enrolled in Junior High School 178 on Dean Street. Most students in this school were poor and they came from homes in constant stress. They tended to measure status by toughness. Only the weak earned their reputations in the classroom; smart-aleck boys with cocky walks chose the street.

  In 1954, John showed how tough he was. Clowning around with friends, he had an encounter with a cement mixer, which ran over his feet. He spent the summer in Lutheran Hospital, East New York. It took him more than three months to heal, and by the time he was discharged and walked into high school, it was without benefit of the second toe on his left foot.

  Teens at Franklin K. Lane High School had many competing street gangs to choose from. John joined the Fulton-Rockaway Boys. Brother Peter already was a member; brothers Richard and Gene signed up later. Another member was Angelo Ruggiero, a pudgy-faced, pigeon-toed kid who was called “Quack Quack” and became John’s pal. As was the custom, the Fulton-Rockaway Boys, whose name came from a street intersection a few blocks from school, adopted special colors; theirs were black and purple, the color of bruises. In such gangs, poor teenagers found self-esteem and group identity. The year John joined the Fulton-Rockaway Boys, Marlon Brando starred as Johnny, the rebel hero of The Wild One, a popular film about a gang taking over a town.

  In 1956, the year a new singer, Elvis Presley, sang “Jailhouse Rock” in New York and nearly caused a riot, John quit school and became a full-time Rockaway Boy. He was 16 years old.

  School records indicate he had scored 110 on an IQ test, which was in the average-intelligence range. Much later, he told people he had taken another test in prison and scored 140—near genius. Maybe he exaggerated, but aside from two future probation officers who weren’t impressed by him, he seemed to impress most people as having more than average intelligence.

  By the year John dropped out, other sons and daughters of immigrants who came from the poor villages and farms of Sicily and southern Italy had begun moving into the mainstream of American society. Their parents or grandparents still worked with their hands, but they had been encouraged to obtain an education and enter the professional world of doctors, lawyers, and executives.

  But Johnny Boy came from a particularly large family and had been on his own since he was 12. And when he turned 16, he obtained the legal right to quit school regardless of what his parents might have said. He hit the unsavory streets of Brownsville-East New York with too little education and too much time on his hands.

  Another boy who later got in trouble with heroin, went to prison, and testified before a presidential commission said the neighborhood’s tough teenagers knew who the racketeers were. And that once they began running with a street gang like the Rockaway Boys, the next logical thing was to work their way up to the big time—the Families.

  A secret New York City probation report compiled years later stated that John, after dropping out of high school, “became involved in antisocial behavior.” This was an officially understated way of saying that he became a punk.

  As a Rockaway Boy, he cultivated a defiant image. At age 16, he was 5 foot 7 and 150 pounds; he was solid and strong and he went around with a straight back, squared shoulders, and a glare that said I dare you.

  John’s gang formed an alliance with the Fulton-Pitkin gang and together they faced off against black gangs such as the Brownsville Stompers, the Mau Mau Chaplins, and the Ozone Park Sinners. On May 15, 1957, a gang fight led to John’s first arrest. The charge was disorderly conduct. Two months later, he beat the charge. It was a good way to start a rap sheet. He didn’t even have to put up a defense; the judge dismissed the case.

  The gang rumbles over turf were a fierce New York tradition, romantically evo
ked at the time in a Broadway play, West Side Story. The Rockaway Boys also feuded with the Ridgewood Saints, a particularly violent gang, according to Matthew Traynor, an ex-Saints gang leader who went on to bank robbery and other crimes. In one fight, a Rockaway bled to death after he was stabbed and tossed through a window. Another incident involving a Rockaway landed Traynor in jail.

  “I stabbed a guy from John’s gang,” Traynor recalled. “I was fifteen, the guy was nineteen or twenty, a real jerk. He was in our neighborhood without permission. We found out he was over at some girl’s house. We rang the bell. And when he came down I stabbed the shit out of him. I was pretty violent in those days.”

  In a world in which violent death was possible, gang members were measured by their ability to control fear. In John’s mind, he became the Rockaway Boy against whom all should be measured. He feared no one. Thirty years later, he told a friend how this had benefited him:

  “I never have to lie to any man because I don’t fear anyone. The only time you lie is when you are afraid.”

  Men who manage fear become candidates for leadership. And Traynor said John exhibited command presence in another way.

  “Most of the people in the gang were crazy, nuts, but not John. He was tough, but also a politician. He could talk to people and they listened. It was the difference between him and the others. He didn’t have to be wild to impress people.”

  Eventually, the neighborhood’s older gang members, who called their gang a Family, heard about this boy who talked like a politician and wasn’t afraid. Pivotally, two of these adult-gang members were Carmine and Daniel Fatico, who, the boy-gang members knew, were connected to a large Family led by Albert Anastasia, who was so important his name was only whispered.

  The Fatico brothers operated out of a storefront they called The Club and were active in hijacking, extortion, gambling, and loan-sharking. They killed only when necessary, the boys thought. Carmine was older and cagey; he had been pinched more than a dozen times but had hardly spent any time in jail.

  Besides the Fatico brothers, plenty more of the wrong role models lived close by. Two of them, Wilfred “Willie Boy” Johnson and William Battista, would become important members of John’s crew in Ozone Park. Willie Boy was a sausage stuffer by day, a bookmaker by night, a part-time boxer, and part American Indian. He had a violent and justifiably tough reputation, having fatally stabbed his brother-in-law and survived a bullet to the head fired by the dead man’s friend.

  Battista was a gambler, too, but his early fame was based on a truck hijacking he had staged using inside information from a secretary who lived on Bergen Street, around the corner from John. Battista waited until the truck driver took his coffee break at the time and place the girl indicated, and then just hot-wired the rig and drove off with $75,000 worth of new clothes.

  The Fatico brothers were always looking for a few good men. In time, Willie Boy and Battista would be recruited. So would Angelo Ruggiero and his younger brother Salvatore. And John and Gene Gotti. And another pair of brothers who hung out in the neighborhood, John and Charles Carneglia.

  Two days before John’s seventeenth birthday, the neighborhood crooks led by the Fatico brothers got a new boss. As sometimes happened, the transfer of power was bloody and resulted in a new name for one of the five Families. The director of death, Albert Anastasia, was executed in the barbershop of the then-Park Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan.

  It was the type of murder—public, flamboyant—that Families reserved for bosses. Soldiers and associates were stuffed into car trunks, concrete or scrap-metal recyclers; bosses were dismissed in offices or restaurants. The distinction was a final sign of respect that had practical benefits: the body would be found, and people would know someone else was in charge.

  Other Family leaders didn’t trust Albert the Executioner, whom they called “The Mad Hatter.” They believed he was power-hungry and might actually be mad. In the 1930s, he proposed killing Thomas Dewey, a special prosecutor who later ran for president. The Families never killed prosecutors or cops; it caused too much heat. Besides, cops were simply doing their jobs.

  Anastasia had taken control in 1951, when Family boss Philip Mangano was killed and his brother Vincent vanished. By 1957, he had left Brooklyn and wasn’t an easy target; he lived in Fort Lee, New Jersey, in a fortified mansion overlooking the Hudson River. The plotters were led by the Genovese boss, who had taken over his own Family in a similar way. He persuaded the number-two man in Anastasia’s Family, Carlo Gambino, to join them. Gambino arranged for Anastasia’s bodyguards to exit the barbershop while the boss was given a final shave.

  Betrayal and inter-Family intrigue thus accompanied the dawn of what became known as the Gambino Family, which included a crew led by Carmine Fatico, who was about to recruit some promising boys from the neighborhood.

  One Anastasia soldier who vowed to avenge the boss’s death was a violent hood named Aniello “Neil” Dellacroce. But Dellacroce also was a realist and after another would-be avenger disappeared, he accepted Gambino’s invitation to sit down and talk about his future. To his surprise, Gambino made an offer too good to refuse: Neil became the new underboss.

  A few weeks after the hit, more than 60 Family men from around the country were arrested in an upstate New York community after a raid on a farmhouse sitdown called by Vito Genovese to review inter-Family rights and wrongs. Carlo Gambino was driven to the farm by his brother-in-law and cousin, Paul Castellano, who would later prove his mettle by doing a year in jail rather than answer a grand jury’s questions about the so-named Apalachin Conference.

  He did talk about it much later, in May of 1983, while he was being secretly taped. In a conversation with his son, Paul Jr., and his nephew, Thomas Gambino, he recalled how the conference of bosses adopted two rules: no drug dealing, no cop killing.

  The reasons were simple—both brought too much pressure. Defendants facing drug charges also had a habit of betraying Family secrets.

  What was feared in 1957 was more feared in 1983, as a conversation a month later between Castellano and consigliere Joe N. Gallo demonstrated. They were taped while discussing whether because of extenuating circumstances an unidentified drug-dealing violator should be given a pass; the usual punishment was murder.

  “The problem is,” said Gallo, “give a guy a pass, Paul, twenty years later, somebody comes in and makes a federal [conspiracy] case [against us].”

  At the time, the Apalachin Conference was considered to be evidence of a nationwide criminal conspiracy, and the extensive newspaper coverage was a handy primer to all the restless dropouts of Brooklyn, who would someday seek a pass from Paul.

  The more time he spent with the Rockaway Boys, the more John gave himself over to the notion he was not going to succeed in life on the square.

  Unlike other gangs, the Rockaways were not just a forum with which to establish tough teenager credentials. The Rockaways began to deal in “swag,” stolen merchandise fenced by neighborhood thieves and hijackers. It began to resemble a sort of farm team—for the Family league.

  En route to the majors, John made rookie mistakes. At 17, he was arrested for burglary after he and a few confederates were caught in the act of stealing copper from a construction firm. He pleaded guilty and was placed on probation.

  The terms of his probation required him to shun unsavory places and characters—a nearly impossible burden for anyone in Brownsville-East New York. Now a committed juvenile delinquent, John continued to hang out in poolrooms, bars, bookie joints, and racetracks.

  In 1959, he was arrested for the first time as an adult. The charge was unlawful assembly; he had been caught in a raid on a gambling location. Theoretically, he had violated his probation and could have been jailed immediately. Instead, he was allowed to remain free. Nearly a year later, after he had been arrested again and fined $200 for disorderly conduct, the unlawful assembly charge came up on the court calendar.

  John was given a 60-day sentence, but it was suspe
nded. He sauntered out of the courtroom a free man. Two months later, his probation expired and he was “discharged as improved.” John naturally had a hard time taking seriously a system so easy to beat.

  As in Italian Harlem, gambling was rampant in John’s neighborhood. It seemed like everyone played the Brooklyn numbers. The Faticos also made sure that anyone could also bet on a horse, the Giants, Dodgers, and Yankees, or anything else that moved. John grew to love the action.

  Gambling required money. Still a novice at crime, John needed a job and went to work operating a garment-pressing machine in a Brooklyn coat factory. He thought too highly of himself to do such mundane work, but it was pocket money and gas for his car—and it pleased his parents. In the back seat of the car, in case of emergencies, he kept a billy club; and when he was curbed by the cops in May 1961, it would be found and he would be arrested again.

  John Gotti was clinging to familiar terrain at the same time John F. Kennedy was promising a New Frontier. But John didn’t know too much about the world beyond his home turf, though he had heard about a handsome Italian kid from Belmont Avenue in the Bronx, Dion DiMucci, who as lead singer of Dion and the Belmonts had all the Italian girls drooling over such songs as “Lonely Teenager” and “A Teenager in Love.”

  One of these girls was Victoria L. DiGiorgio, a pretty, raven-haired girl with brown eyes, a petite figure, an outspoken nature, and a new boyfriend named Johnny Gotti. She was two years younger than he and had dropped out of Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall High School in her senior year. She was the daughter of a sanitation worker and his wife.

  Her parents hoped she’d find a boy who had finished school and begun a career more promising than that of a coat presser. Victoria was strongly attracted to John. She saw a rakish young man, now barely over 5 foot 8 and 170 pounds, who had a strong, memorable face and dark hair which he dashingly combed back into a duck’s tail that brushed the collar of his black leather jacket. He was a rebel and talked smart, like he knew all the angles. But around Victoria, he was surprisingly gentle and well-mannered—Marlon Brando’s Johnny and Victoria’s Dion in one tightly wound package.