Mob Star

by Gene Mustain

  “Hello, yeah, who’s this?” Holder heard the voice say. “Okay, go ahead … one hundred twenty-eight for ten. Two hundred fourteen fox six …” Holder now knew: The apartment was a “wire room.”

  Further surveillance showed the apartment was occupied from noon to 2 P.M. and from 6 to 8 P.M., the standard times bettors get down with bookies for the afternoon and evening action at tracks and stadiums.

  Holder obtained a search warrant and found evidence of $5,000 in daily receipts. Tacked to a wall, he found a list of telephone numbers. Two belonged to the candy-store phones. One rang at Our Friends Social Club and another at Lolita’s across from the Bergin. The other numbers were for phones in other social clubs or businesses in Queens and Brooklyn.

  The occupant of the apartment, Peter Schiavone, was arrested on misdemeanor charges, pleaded guilty, and was fined $250. The detectives were certain that Schiavone was only a clerk, not the boss of the operation. However, they continued to watch.

  Within weeks, Schiavone was spotted going in and out of a new apartment. The candy-store pen registers now showed calls to that address. Outside the Bergin, Detective Michael Falciano overheard Billy Battista and a man they knew as Frank Guidici talking about a bet that had been recorded inaccurately.

  “That fucking ticket was for a thousand dollars. What does he mean, he put it in for five hundred?” Guidici said angrily. “As far as I am concerned, he owes five hundred yet.”

  “What the fuck you getting excited about? Call him on the fucking phone,” Battista said.

  Guidici entered the Bergin telephone room and called the new wire room occupied by Schiavone. The call and Guidici’s words led detectives to believe that Guidici was Schiavone’s boss. His actions were not those of a mere bettor. If the $500 “ticket” had been his bet, he hardly would have complained if he had lost; if he had won, he would be owed more than $500.

  Back in September, Guidici had been listed along with Gotti and Angelo as targets of the Queens investigation. Here was evidence that Guidici was running a gambling operation with ties to the Bergin, which was the field headquarters of Gotti and Angelo—two disciples of the man thought to be the king of the Gambino Family, Neil Dellacroce.

  The detectives intensified their investigation, taking time off only for Christmas.

  On Eighty-fifth Street in Howard Beach, the Gotti home was dark; it was the first time it was unlit for Christmas holidays since the family moved there in 1973.

  The still-acting boss of the Bergin, who usually went to the Yonkers or Roosevelt Raceway on Friday nights, continued to gamble and lose heavily in 1981.

  The second weekend in January was a big football weekend. Gotti lost $21,000. The next weekend, he lost $16,000. Meanwhile, Source BQ said, crew members like Tony Roach, Sal DeVita, and Billy Battista could hardly afford to play the daily number.

  When it came to gambling, there was more to Gotti than horses and games. On February 4, BQ told the FBI two days later, Gotti brought Atlantic City to Queens when he opened a gambling hall for Family men on the second floor of the Bergin. The main event was dice and the minimum bet was $500. It would be open six nights a week until 4 A.M.

  On the first night, men from other Gambino crews and other Families dropped by. Frank DeCicco came and went away without $15,000. The hosts lost, too. Willie Boy dropped $13,000, Angelo $8,000, and Gotti $3,000. Later in the week, Mark Reiter, the future heroin defendant, won $20,000.

  A month later, BQ said the game was going so well that Gotti would move it to Manhattan, to make it more accessible and to attract bigger gamblers, including “legitimate people” with Family connections. He might even admit women gamblers—an absolute taboo at the Bergin.

  Early in March 1981, the game did move to Manhattan, to a building on Mott Street in Little Italy, around the corner from the Ravenite Social Club. The game, as it had in Ozone Park, rested on Saturday, but remained a boys-only event. “Street talk indicates at this time that this particular dice game of Gotti’s is the best in the New York area,” a FBI memo noted.

  Because the dice men were up late, they slept late, and Gotti razzed those who didn’t seem to show the energy he did. A call—secretly taped—that he placed one day about 6 P.M. to a groggy Willie Boy illustrated this. Gotti wondered why Willie Boy hadn’t shown up at the Bergin yet.

  “It’s a new game now? Whoever goes to the fucking crap game can sleep all fucking day?”

  “I’m there every night, John.”

  “And where the fuck do you think I am? … There’s things to be done here. I can’t do them all by myself.”

  Source BQ said the house of dice began each night with a bank of about $40,000 put up by twelve partners, including DeCicco and the old JFK hijack squad, John, Gene, and Angelo. “According to the informant, the house has never lost,” Special Agent Colgan wrote.

  Gotti, however, continued to lose. Being an owner of the game, he could borrow against the house money. At one point, he became concerned about how much others had borrowed and ordered an accounting, which showed he was the largest debtor, for $55,000.

  Gotti’s losses endangered the game’s profits. On May 13, he lost $30,000, causing Angelo to wonder whether the only way to detoxify his gumbah was to close the game. The next day, he called Gene Gotti to complain. They used “dollar” and “balloon” as synonyms for $1,000; they also used unflattering terms to describe a man they loved, most of the time.

  “You gotta do yourself a favor and everybody else a favor, too,” Angelo began. “We gotta see how we gonna close this fucking joint in New York.”

  “Yeah, what happened now?”

  “That fucking hard-on, you know that hard-on, the guy that your mother shit out.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “He lost thirty dollars last night.”

  “We were on top sixty balloons! I left there one-thirty, we were on top sixty balloons! We didn’t need him in the fucking game!”

  “I’m by the club now.”

  “We were on top sixty balloons—what, is he kidding somebody or what, this guy? Who the fuck needed him there? So what is he looking to do now? Just take advantage of people or what?”

  “Let’s see how we got to do it, Genie.”

  “Oh fuck him, I don’t give a fuck. What is he looking to do this, this guy? Is he abusing his position, or what?”

  Angelo responded with a comment that indicated the night hadn’t been a total loss.

  “I won ninety dollars.”

  In June, Willie Boy Johnson was rewarded for lost sleep and won big, too. BQ said Willie Boy was not a good gambler, “but one of the luckiest individuals I’ve ever known.”

  Source Wahoo ran into bad luck on January 27. He left the Our Friends Social Club and was followed to his home in Brooklyn by the detectives working on the Bergin gambling case.

  After Wahoo parked his car and opened the trunk, the detectives walked toward him. He saw them and began throwing money from his pockets into the trunk. The detectives then announced who they were.

  “Oh good. I am glad it’s you guys,” Wahoo said. “I thought it was someone else. Go ahead. Take it. I don’t see anything.”

  “What are you talking about?” replied Detective Holder, who looked in the trunk and saw bundles of cash.

  “Take what is yours.”

  “What do you want me to take that for?”

  “If my parole officer saw this, I would be in a lot of trouble.”

  Holder said he would take the bribe, but would have to clear it with his boss. Wahoo nodded and Holder arrested him on the spot for attempting to bribe him with the $50,000 in the trunk.

  Wahoo was indicted by a state grand jury in Queens. The indictment was kept secret because he had decided to begin a second dangerous relationship. He did not inform the Queens district attorney that he was a Top Echelon informer for the FBI and he did not tell the FBI that he was now a confidential informant for the NYPD—a violation of the agreement he had made the previous March wi
th his new control agent, James Abbott.

  The D.A.’s detective commander, Lt. Remo Franceschini, tried to talk Wahoo into becoming more than an informant. He told Wahoo that he had a close working relationship with the FBI and the special federal Organized Crime Strike Force in Brooklyn and Wahoo would probably qualify for the federal witness-protection program; he would be able to get a new identity and be relocated in another state if he would actually testify at trials.

  “I will never testify. I would rather go to jail,” Wahoo said.

  Over the next few months, for the Queens detective squad, Source Wahoo was a kind of talk-show expert, a studio commentator, on happenings in all the Families. He paid them well for his guest shots—his $50,000 was deposited in the police pension fund.

  On a few occasions, Wahoo got specific. On May 18, 1981, he told Queens cops where to find the body of Alphonse “Sonny Red” Indelicato, a Bonanno capo who was caught on the losing side of yet another internal power dispute in that Family.

  Go look in “The Hole,” Wahoo said.

  “The Hole” was a vacant lot near an auto-salvage yard on the Brooklyn-Queens border, near the Lindenwood Diner, where John Carneglia, who owned the Fountain Auto Shop, hung out with other Family soldiers and friends. Six days later, Sonny Red’s body was found.

  Indelicato was one of the plotters who had waited at the Ravenite Social Club with Neil Dellacroce two years earlier for the killers of Bonanno boss Carmine Galante to return from their assignment. Now Indelicato and two other capos who had plotted against Galante’s successor had gone the way of Galante, which is how it goes in the Crime Capital.

  The triple hit caused a few tense moments for the Gambino Family in the summer of 1981. Indelicato’s son, Anthony, swore to take revenge and felt that his father’s murder resulted from Dellacroce’s mediating again in Bonanno Family problems. It was a logical suspicion; Anthony had helped murder Galante at the behest of Dellacroce.

  Anthony, or “Bruno” as he was known, was considered violent even by Family standards. He was a big cocaine user, always armed, and he dipped his bullets in cyanide.

  Vincent Gotti, the youngest Gotti brother, was another big coke user, according to Wahoo. Early in June, Wahoo told detectives that Vincent had gone into hiding after he was indicted in a cocaine-selling case.

  Vincent, age 28, had begun a rap sheet in 1969 when he was arrested for rape. The charge was dismissed, but in succeeding years he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor theft and felony theft; in the latter case, while employed as a construction laborer, Vincent employed a fake gun to rob a gas station of $84. Agents say his degenerate gambler brother had banished him from the Bergin because of his degenerate cocaine use.

  Dominick Polifrone, an undercover agent for the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms division of the Treasury Department, met Vincent in a Brooklyn bar. Polifrone had been asked to adopt an underworld guise by the NYPD, which was investigating illegal arms dealing.

  Vincent told Polifrone he had “connections” to both guns and drugs. “He reminded me of John,” Polifrone later recalled. “He was a typical wiseguy. He mentioned that his brother was an important wiseguy, but he was earning on the side. He didn’t want his brother to know anything.”

  When the gun-running investigation stalled, a Manhattan grand jury led by a special narcotics prosecutor indicted Vincent for selling 2.5 ounces of cocaine to Polifrone for $5,400; but when the cops later went to arrest him he could not be found.

  Vincent turned up in 1986, just as his brother was taking over the Gambino Family. After a routine traffic stop, upstate cops had discovered that his driver’s license was phony; a computer search turned up the outstanding drug warrant from Manhattan. Vincent pleaded guilty in an empty courtroom and was sent away on a six-year-to-life prison term.

  While on the lam, one alias he used was Frank Gotti. Source Wahoo also told the Queens detective squad about John Gotti’s dice game in Little Italy.

  Members of the squad, armed with 40 pairs of handcuffs and three paddy wagons, rode into Manhattan on June 24 and busted the game. Even at 1:30 A.M., the sight of 30 neighborhood celebrities being detained and questioned drew a large and mostly sympathetic crowd that razzed the raiders.

  The Bergin was informed almost immediately.

  “They just pinched the game,” a caller told Peter Gotti at 1:50 A.M.

  The cops confiscated $100,000, two loaded revolvers, a professional dice table, nine pairs of dice, and 775 poker chips. “This was not your average after-hours joint,” one detective told reporters. “This was strictly for card-carrying gangsters who are high rollers.”

  Seven men were arrested, including Frank DeCicco, Tony Rampino, and Billy Battista, on charges of promoting gambling. Tony and Billy also were charged with being “dressed up,” or possessing weapons. A 61-year-old Gambino man, Peter Tambone, also was arrested on the gambling charge, but he would face far more serious problems involving drugs in just a few months, and would feign craziness to save himself.

  The arrestees were taken to nearby Manhattan Criminal Court for arraignment. The court, which operates around the clock, is so busy the ordeal of booking, fingerprinting, and checking suspects’ records for outstanding warrants can take more than 36 hours, if all goes well. An arrestee can’t be released until he is formally charged, admitted to bail, or pleads guilty. The dice men would sleep a night in the slammer.

  Eighteen hours after the arrests, Tony Roach called the Bergin from jail to find out if Bergin lawyer Michael Coiro and his partner were on the case and if bail plans were being made. He spoke to Gene Gotti.

  “They’re there, they’re on it, the bondsmen, they’re on it,” Gene said. “[The police] are fucking you around with your prints.”

  Tony Roach complained he was hungry and Gene teased him by saying, “We’re eating now, mother fuck.”

  The next morning, with Michael Coiro by their side, all the men pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor gambling charge and were fined $500 each. The gun charges were put over for grand jury action because they were felonies. All were released.

  Detective Victor Ruggiero, a veteran of the Ravenite Social Club investigation now assigned to Queens, conducted surveillance at the court. He saw Coiro with two men he did not know; Coiro gave one of them a copy of the arraignment papers, which indicated that the cops were tipped off by an unnamed informant. The man went to a pay phone in the lobby and Ruggiero slipped in beside him.

  “Hello? Johnny Boy?” Ruggiero heard the man say. “You got a rat, a fuckin’ rat … I’ll personally take care of it … I’ll kill the motherfucker.”

  Learning about an informant in the crew’s midst was an important piece of information, but nothing over which to stop gambling. On the very next day, the game moved across Mott Street to a larger room, where the gaming tables were replaced, and the dice rolled again that night.

  According to Source BQ, however, the game never really recaptured its former popularity. He said the tension caused by the Bonanno Family murders put a damper on attendance. Indeed, Indelicato’s vengeful son waved a weapon at Angelo and Gene as they were driving on an expressway one day, but they were able to veer away before meeting up with any cyanide bullets.

  Few people have the nerve or acting ability to play the games Sources BQ and Wahoo were playing, especially Wahoo, who was committing crimes while revealing only selected others to agencies unaware of his double-agency. He was dancing on a high wire without a net and, so far, getting away with it.

  The day before the Mott Street raid, Wahoo checked in with the FBI. He said Willie Boy Johnson had become partners with Gotti in an auto-body repair shop. He said, however, that Angelo remained Gotti’s “main man, emissary, and trusted messenger.”

  Wahoo also provided extensive details about the interior of the Our Friends Social Club—which was managed by Richard Gotti—across the street and around the corner from the Bergin. Such details would be useful if the FBI sought to install a bug or telephone taps. Wahoo h
ad already supplied the layout of the Bergin itself, and now he told Agent Abbott about the telephone room adjacent to the Bergin. The sugarless-candy store was more than a telephone room. It was a fireworks depository; in a rear room, $20,000 worth of holiday explosives were stored.

  On June 30, 1981, Manhattan cops, along with the FBI, rode into Queens and raided the telephone room. The cops, members of the Manhattan South vice squad, wanted the fireworks; the FBI wanted to scout the room to size up its bug potential. The FBI, by this time, had heard enough about the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club to open a formal investigation.

  Special Agent Donald W. McCormick had been working the case since March. Inside the room, as the fireworks were being carted off, he went to one of the two pay phones to tell his boss the raid went well.

  “Be careful what you say on the phone,” Bergin associate Jackie Cavallo smiled. “Santucci’s got a tap on it.”

  Santucci was John Santucci, the elected district attorney of Queens. McCormack smiled back and dialed Bruce Mouw, his FBI supervisor, and also called a sergeant on the vice squad in Manhattan.

  Moments after Mouw was called, his boss, Ed Sharp, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s New York office, got a call from someone in the Queens District Attorney’s office congratulating the FBI on the fireworks raid. The NYPD vice sergeant also received a similar call. Cavallo wasn’t kidding; the pay phone was tapped.

  Later, Special Agent Mouw met with District Attorney Santucci and others to “discuss the conflict of interest between the FBI and the Queens D.A.’s office regarding electronic surveillance” of John Gotti and the Bergin, Mouw said later.

  The Queens D.A. told Mouw that his men had tapped both pay phones and installed a bug in the rear of the Bergin. The bug never came to life; the taps produced many gambling tapes, enough to indict 15 to 20 people, but not much else. Santucci said taps at social clubs were not as good as bugs in the Family homes.