Mob Star

by Gene Mustain

  Victoria didn’t see bad Johnny; all she saw was good Johnny. Soon she was pregnant.

  In 1986, as her husband was going on trial in Brooklyn, Victoria told a New York Post reporter she had been married 26 years, which would mean she got married in 1960, the year she dropped out of high school. A secret report written in 1969 by a probation officer who interviewed John, Victoria, and other family members states the couple was married on March 6, 1962.

  Whatever the case, the couple’s first child, Angela, was born in April 1961. After her father became a Gambino capo, he told an acquaintance he was so poor when the baby was born he sneaked into the hospital at night and took mother and child home without paying the bill.

  After the baby’s birth, John left the coat factory and took a job as a truck driver’s helper for the Barnes Express Company. By design or happenstance, it was an astute career move. He learned how to value goods and how shippers and warehouses operated. Concepts and words previously vague—wholesalers, bills of lading, shipping manifests—became understood. Unlike the abstract lessons he had rebelled against in school, this was worthwhile knowledge.

  He wasn’t making much money, however. Between the family and the car and the hanging out, he was always broke. And he and Victoria kept having kids: three in three years. Angela was followed by another girl, Victoria, and a son, who was named John. Money woes and his nocturnal touring of pool halls, gambling dens, and honky-tonks caused the young parents to fight; they separated several times.

  Some separations were forced. In 1963, John went behind bars for the first time—20 days in a city jail after he and Salvatore Ruggiero, Angelo’s brother, were arrested in a car reported stolen from the Avis rent-a-car company. Salvatore was a bright boy who would go far in crime, too, but not as a Family man. Sal would become a very rich drug dealer.

  John’s scrapes with the law troubled Victoria, but he was not the type to take his wife’s advice; in 1965, he demonstrated this repeatedly. In January, he was arrested for unlawful entry and possession of bookmaking records in Queens. In March, he was caught breaking into a tavern on Long Island. In October, he was accused of attempted petty larceny in Brooklyn.

  He was acquitted of the January charges, but pleaded guilty to the attempted theft and was jailed for several months in 1966. This cost him his job with the Barnes Express Company and a lot of goodwill with his wife. Struggling to support three small children whose father was a jailbird caused her to seek public relief from the New York City Department of Welfare and to file support petitions against him in Domestic Relations Court in Brooklyn.

  Any reluctance to completely embrace crime as a way of life melted away in the wake of these humiliations. In the next year, John would not find another job; he would become a professional hijacker.

  John was only 26, not too old to seek the education or training which might have opened a legitimate door of opportunity. But he was too impatient and too scornful. He had a wife, three kids, and expensive appetites. He had them now. What could he be? A store manager? An insurance salesman? Forget about it.

  When John thought of successful men, he thought of Carmine and Daniel Fatico. They wore fine clothes and drove big cars. At the track, they could lose with cheer as opposed to despair. They were respected, maybe not by the wider world, but by the young men of John’s world.

  He also knew the story of the new boss of the Faticos, Carlo Gambino, who came to America as a stowaway and through guile and cunning rose to the top of an exciting and dangerous empire—an empire known by many names: Mafia, mob, syndicate, the outfit. It was there, he didn’t create it. Some men pray, others prey. This was the way the world was. In the story of Gambino, John saw a message: Not all the doors to opportunity were closed.

  Something else pushed John toward crime. Blacks were moving into the old neighborhood. John needed money so he could follow the Italian-Americans who had fled north and east, into Queens, and even out of the city onto Long Island, where the building lots were bigger, the houses better, and the people whiter.

  Carmine Fatico, for instance, had moved to Long Island and bought a house in West Islip; he now commuted to the social club he had in Brooklyn, at the corner of Rockaway Avenue and Herkimer Street, near John’s former home on Dean Street. The club was called the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club. The “Bergin” may have been a misspelled salute to Bergen Street, two blocks away.

  Even before he lost his job as a truck driver’s helper, John, through his friendship with the well-connected Angelo Ruggiero, was occasionally at the Bergin. Now that he was to be a hijacker, the club became his office.

  The Rockaway Boy became a Bergin Man.

  8

  VELVET TOUCH

  AS JOHN GOTTI BECAME an associate of a Gambino crew, a prisoner in the Queens House of Detention became an informer on the Gambino Family.

  The prisoner decided on this dangerous occupation shortly after he was brought to Queens for sentencing on a burglary charge. He described himself as a Gambino “muscle man.”

  “He expressed disgust for the syndicate,” an FBI agent wrote in the first of many secret memos, “and feels he has been used by them and that his wife and children have not received the financial help that the syndicate should have extended to them.” Because he never “wants to be separated from his wife and children as a result of confinement,” the prisoner “wants to cooperate right away.”

  So he did, and so he would, for nearly two decades, beginning that day with the identification of photographs and information about a counterfeiting case. During nearly all of Gotti’s years in crime, this new informer—Source BQ 5558-TE, who sometimes used the code name “Wahoo”—would be there chronicling the story—first out of revenge, and then later, when he believed he was immunizing his own illegal conduct, out of self-interest, but always for cash.

  Such was the world John Gotti was entering, but it looked good to him. The man holding the door was Carmine Fatico, who exuded style and authority, though he stood only 5 foot 4. At the racetrack, Carmine entered the gate reserved for members, horsemen, and owners, though he was none of those. At the Bergin, he lectured the men on their personal behavior.

  In 1966, under the 56-year-old Fatico’s direction, the 26-year-old Gotti began to learn firsthand about the Gambino Family. He learned, for example, that for all the world knew, Aniello Dellacroce was a $200-a-week salesman for a soda distributor, but in reality he was Carlo Gambino’s second-in-command, and Fatico, as a caporegime, or crew leader, reported to him regularly in Manhattan.

  Gotti learned that just a few miles away from the Bergin was a vein of riches mined by all the New York Families—John F. Kennedy International Airport, a vast facility spread over 5,000 acres, the equivalent of Manhattan from the southern tip to Times Square.

  The former truck driver’s helper would get a chance to put his knowledge to use when Fatico moved the Bergin even closer to JFK and set up shop in a bland, three-story brick building on 101st Avenue, on the other side of the Brooklyn border, in Ozone Park, Queens. Gotti and others under Fatico’s control began to treat JFK like a giant candy jar, using as many devious means as they could contrive to take away goodies. Sometimes it was easy, but not always productive.

  At 6 A.M. on November 27, 1967, probably after an all-night card game, Gotti telephoned George Beatty, a cargo agent for United Airlines at JFK. He identified himself as a representative of a well-known freight forwarding company.

  “What have you got waitin’ there for us?” Gotti asked.

  “Just a minute,” said Beatty, who rummaged through papers and read off a list of airway bills of lading.

  “Okay, fine, I’ll be right over. So long.”

  About 15 minutes later, Gotti arrived at the United cargo area in a rented Hertz truck. He was accompanied by a younger, slimmer man later said to have looked like Gene Gotti.

  “Where’s our stuff?” John asked Beatty.

  “Right over there, we’ll help you load it.”

&nbs
p; The two hijackers, aided by two cargo agents, loaded forty-seven cartons containing $30,000 worth of women’s clothing, electrical gear, and aircraft and machine parts into the truck.

  Beatty handed John the airway bills. “Got everything?”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  “I’ll need your signature.”

  “No problem.”

  John signed the name of the man he had impersonated. He and the slim man then got into the truck and drove away, leaving behind the most valuable carton of all—a box of furs.

  Three days later, in Glen Oaks, Long Island, the truck, which had been rented by a man using phony identification, was found abandoned with most of the load still on board. Only ten cartons of women’s clothing were missing.

  The mostly intact load was evidence of a poorly conceived crime, a random stab at grabbing anything, which resulted in the most valuable item—the furs—being left behind. It showed that John Gotti had room to grow.

  Most of the load was hard to fence; among the sidewalk salesmen and flea markets of New York, no great demand exists for aircraft and machine parts. Not so with women’s clothes. What didn’t wind up adorning the frames of wives and girlfriends found their way onto the racks of neighborhood merchants eager to beat wholesale prices.

  After better scores, the hijackers gambled and partied. It was a time of great turbulence in America, the Vietnam era of protest and cultural change, but it had nothing to do with them. Gotti patronized a gambling club located above a car wash on Eastern Parkway run by a former Fulton-Pitkin ally. At night, he retired to such shot-and-beer establishments as the 101 Bar, Bullock’s Lounge, Tutti’s Bar, and the Colony Bar, according to Matthew Traynor, one of Gotti’s former gang rivals. Traynor began hanging around the Bergin in the late 1960s and told the FBI he helped in more than twenty hijackings.

  The Colony was in Brooklyn, and Traynor said that after Gotti acquired a taste for loan-sharking he acquired part ownership of the bar when the owner went arrears on a loan. That same year, Gotti threw a party and strutted around the bar charging round after round to the house.

  Gotti’s personal family now included a fourth child, a boy named Frank. He was living with Victoria and the kids in a new Brooklyn apartment. It wasn’t the home of their dreams, but it was a step forward. Gotti was recovering from near financial and personal ruin.

  Gotti’s new profession, however, was risky. On December 1, 1967, only four days after the United Airlines score, he rolled snake-eyes.

  Security at JFK was provided by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police, supplemented by the FBI, which investigated interstate thefts. Lately, the airplanes and shippers had been more upset than usual because of the rampant pillaging of cargo. A periodic crackdown was then in effect.

  From nearby surveillance posts, FBI agents saw a rented U-Haul truck pull up to a pallet of cartons in the cargo area of Northwest Airlines. They saw two people—one walked kind of funny, the other had dark hair combed back—load twenty-three cartons into the truck and drive off.

  Agents tailed the U-Haul as it drove away from the cargo area, until it stopped and a Cadillac driven by a younger, slimmer man pulled alongside. They arrested Gene Gotti, driver of the Caddy; Angelo Ruggiero, driver of the truck; and John Gotti, found hiding in the truck behind the cartons.

  Gene had acted unsuccessfully as the lookout. But after he was arrested he acted the way an accomplice was expected to. Say nothing. He even refused to say John was his brother. The car was registered to Angelo’s wife. The rental truck contained $7,691 of—once again—women’s clothes.

  All three got out on bail after an appearance at the United States Court House in Brooklyn. They knew the federal charge likely meant time in prison, which is more serious than time in a city jail. Jail is inconvenience; prison is incarceration. They didn’t know a state case was then being made against John for his impersonation act on George Beatty and United Airlines.

  The cargo agents who had helped load the truck identified John as the driver and the man who signed someone else’s name. They thought Gene was the other man, but weren’t sure. John was arrested in early February 1968—in two months he was a two-time loser. Angelo posted his bail.

  A condition of Gotti’s bail, of course, was that he obey the law. Forget about it. A man who scorned legitimate work had to make money somehow, even if it meant he had to step up to a high level of crime: kidnapping. It happened during the third hijack, on April 10, two months after his second arrest.

  The case was known as the Velvet Touch caper. The Velvet Touch was a bar in Ozone Park, another Bergin crew hangout and the focus of a police investigation into a stolen-car racket that led to a wiretap on the bar’s phone.

  On April 10, cops monitoring the wiretap heard several conversations between men at the bar and men who had grabbed two parked tractor-trailers filled with cartons of cigarettes—about a half-million dollars worth—near a restaurant on the New Jersey Turnpike. The drivers had been forced into a car and driven by Gotti to a street on the Brooklyn side of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Though no ransom was demanded, and the men were released unharmed, Gotti would be charged with kidnapping.

  The Velvet Touch wiretaps showed that the hijacking did not go smoothly. A future bookmaker for John—the veteran neighborhood hijacker William Battista—had driven one of the tractor-trailers to a drop in Queens, but Gotti’s ten confederates, including Angelo and John Carneglia, couldn’t get the second truck in gear. They called Battista, who had gone to the Velvet Touch, and others seeking tips but were never able to drive the second truck away, so they left it.

  “I remember the guys in New Jersey also were worried about what their girlfriends were doing at the Velvet Touch with their friends,” an investigator on the case recalled.

  One year later, Gotti was indicted in Newark, charged with conspiracy and interstate theft in addition to kidnapping. By that time, he had already been sent away to a federal penitentiary on the Northwest Airlines airport theft.

  Michael Coiro, a 39-year-old Queens lawyer who defended many hoodlums, had represented John, Angelo, and Gene in federal court in the Northwest Airlines case. It was the first of many assignments that he undertook for the Gotti brothers and Angelo over the years; his services would later earn him unwanted national recognition as a “mob lawyer,” as well as a serious legal jam of his own. Coiro had been recommended by Carmine Fatico, then in trouble, too: He was named in a plot to murder a businessman.

  Coiro advised his clients to plead guilty and bank on the judge’s goodwill. Gotti faced eight years, but was sentenced to four, which usually translates to about 30 months actual time. Gotti would have to come back to New York from prison to deal with the state’s hijack case and the Newark federal case.

  Before sentencing, a probation officer interviewed Gotti and prepared a confidential report for the judge. He wrote that Gotti “appeared lackadaisical and unconcerned about his present situation” and was “very vague and evasive when questioned about his personal life.” Gotti had filed no income tax returns the last three years and had “no verifiable employment” in the last four, although his father-in-law had told the officer that Gotti had a “standing offer” of employment at Century Construction, but “failed to avail himself of it.”

  The officer described Victoria Gotti as a “rather intelligent” woman “who closed her eyes to [her husband’s] criminal tendencies.” The report carried this final notation: “Leader of crew for this crime, [has] organized crime ties.”

  A few months after he was sentenced, as he had agreed to do, Gotti surrendered to federal marshals. Unbowed and unashamed—just unlucky, he probably thought—he was transported to the United States Penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

  It would be difficult to find a worse place to send a mobster-in-the-making.

  9

  CLUB LEWISBURG

  THE HIJACKER WITH ORGANIZED-CRIME connections arrived cuffed and shackled at Lewisburg federal prison o
n May 14, 1969, after a six-hour ride from New York in a mobile cage. From inside the prison bus, John Gotti saw a medieval-looking stone fortress with gun towers rising against low, dark hills.

  Once inside, he and others were ordered from the bus and led past guards with machine guns to a reception area enclosed by wire mesh and steel bars. He was given a sheet, a pillow, a blanket, a towel, a toothbrush, and a job emptying garbage cans and mopping floors.

  Gotti knew Lewisburg wasn’t going to be like a city jail. It was a long-term home for hard-core criminals. It had two sets of laws: institutional and inmate. The trick was not to offend either and do your time as peaceably as possible. At least he would have some company—his gumbah, his good friend Angelo Ruggiero, had been sent to the same prison and so had a heroin dealer named Anthony Rampino, who would become, later on, Gotti’s chauffeur, or “John’s man,” as “Tony Roach” Rampino described himself.

  At the time, 2,000 men were incarcerated at Lewisburg, including many big-time Family men from the Crime Capital. The biggest mobster was 5 foot 3 Carmine Galante, the fiery fifty-seven-year-old boss of the Bonanno Family, who was doing heroin time after deciding that the Apalachin drug ban didn’t apply to him.

  The prison had 1,200 black inmates, but the 400 Italians were more unified and thus dominated prison life. “Mafia Row” extended its umbrella of protection and influence to all prisoners of Italian descent, especially those with Family ties. It introduced them to the prison’s underground economy, its bookmaking operation, its network of friendly “hacks” who could be counted on for favors. They might even get invited to “Club Lewisburg,” a room where Galante and others played cards, ate purloined steaks, and drank liquor hidden in after-shave bottles. Another Lewisburg inmate, former International Brotherhood of Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, had designated Club Lewisburg as Teamsters 865. Outside prison, Galante was ill-tempered and ruthless, but inside he did not allow fighting; everyone was expected to keep their cells clean and the noise level down.