Mob Star

by Gene Mustain

  The meeting had a “competitive air,” Mouw said, but the D.A. did agree to ease up on the Bergin surveillance and forget about trying anything similar at the Our Friends Social Club. But Santucci also indicated he would continue his investigation, hopeful of getting something more important than gambling charges.

  In September, another meeting was held. The Queens officials said someone with access to secret documents was leaking information about their not-so-secret Bergin surveillance. “They were greatly disturbed [that] they had a leak or some sort of compromise in their office,” Mouw said.

  The Queens contingent also admitted the presence of another embarrassing situation. The D.A. had issued subpoenas for the telephone records of Angelo and crew associate Michael Roccoforte, but failed to insert a “do-not-notify” clause in the subpoenas; both men were told by the telephone company their records had been subpoenaed.

  Mouw agreed to schedule a meeting between case-agent Donald McCormick and the Queens case-detective, Jack Holder, but this meeting was never held. Neither side really wanted to work with the other, a not-unusual example of a failure-to-communicate situation between rival law-enforcement agencies.

  “We didn’t feel that information would be secure by sharing it with the Queens D.A.’s office,” Mouw said. “I never contacted [them] and they never contacted me.”

  Of course, Source Wahoo contacted the FBI. He said that Bergin lawyer Michael Coiro was “friendly” with an unnamed assistant district attorney in Queens. He also said that Gotti had recently told the crew, “We’re all going to jail.”

  The candy-store taps went in on May 7, after the Queens D.A. used the surveillance by Holder and others, the pen-register information, and the arrest of Peter Schiavone to obtain the required court approval. The D.A.’s affidavit said the taps were necessary because:

  “A misguided sense of loyalty, combined with the criminal wall of silence and the fear of personal reprisal, make it extremely unlikely that even after receiving immunity any member of the conspiracy or criminal associate of the targets would testify truthfully against any other members of the community.”

  The taps lasted only until August. The targets, who knew the candy-store numbers were found in the Schiavone wire room, were cautious on the phones. For instance, near midnight on June 2, Angelo called Gotti and began to speak about someone identified only as an “asshole,” but Gotti cut him off.

  “Forget about this phone.”

  Angelo then started talking about other subjects, but later returned to the first one.

  “Please,” Gotti said. “You know, you got a car. Why don’t you drive here when you want to talk with people?” [Or] call me. I’ll drive … Just tell me you wanna talk to me. I’ll get in the fucking car, you know?”

  Gotti demonstrated similar restraint many times on the Bergin tapes, but when it was time to place a bet, he didn’t care who was listening in.

  17

  I AIN’T GOING CRAZY NO MORE

  IT IS ILLEGAL TO BE a bookmaker, but not to bet with one.

  During the three months the candy-store taps were on, they sizzled with action. A constant melody of tips, hunches, lines, odds, and bets entertained monitoring cops. John Gotti sizzled—and fizzled—most of all.

  Near the end of the first week, Gotti was heard calling the telephone room to learn how two horses he’d gotten tips on made out. One had “ran out,” bolted the track.

  “Fucking fuck bastards with their fucking tips,” Gotti screamed when he heard the news. “I bet every bookmaker [I] could find.”

  “Ah, I believe that,” the man answering the phone said.

  With his multiple contacts and interests, Gotti was always getting tips. They came from other bettors, racetrack fiends, friends of track employees, stable owners—everywhere.

  “The Pope gave me two tips,” he told a man a week later. “Two seconds [second-place finishes], on my mother’s life!”

  When Gotti bet on a horse race, he bet to win, and almost always bet $1,000, a “dime” as he called it. A man who bet thousands like dimes demanded quality service.

  “Give me a dime on him and a dime on Prospect,” he told a bookie one day.

  “Prospect is in the fifth race?”

  “What the fuck’s the difference what race? You know the horse, so you look for the race!”

  When Gotti couldn’t get through to a bookmaker when he needed him, he turned the job over to one of his Bergin minions.

  “Call around and see if you can get me in the fourth race, Sun Ray Classic,” he ordered a minion one night.

  “In the fourth?”

  “Yeah. It’s a nine-oh-eight post time, so you got about twenty minutes. See what you can fucking do.”

  “Sun Ray, what did you want on it?”

  “A dime!” Gotti was incredulous. “What do I want on it?”

  In a similar conversation a few days later, Gotti gave a possible clue about his attraction to gambling.

  “Call me in a bet on the last race, too, all right?” he told a different Bergin man.

  “How much? Dime?”

  “Yeah, what the fuck. I’ll get myself really in fucking jeopardy.”

  One of the few times Gotti was overheard betting less than $1,000 was on May 20, when he hunch-bet $500, a “nickel,” on a horse whose name he liked: John Q. Arab.

  “That’s all?” the surprised bookie replied.

  “That’s all, I ain’t going crazy no more.”

  Gotti broke the vow that very night, and was furious because he almost was not able to get a dime down in time for a late race; it was all because a bookie had left his wire room a little early that evening. Later that night, he tracked the man down and complained.

  “I don’t even remember what happened to the horse,” he added.

  What happens to the horses determines the winning numbers in the illegal Family lotteries. The Brooklyn number, for instance, is determined by the last three digits of the total pari-mutuel handle at whatever New York track is open that day

  The day after he almost failed to get his bet down, Gotti was on the phone with Billy Battista, who handled some of his sports betting. He asked Battista his running “figure” for the week—a gambler’s week begins Monday and ends Sunday; he settles with the bookie, usually, on Tuesday or Wednesday. He also asked for the baseball line. He wanted to bet on a day game, but bookies don’t like to open wire rooms in the afternoon when only one game is scheduled.

  Gotti told Battista to “make a beef” about this with such a bookie. “What have you gotta do for accommodations?” he asked.

  “He don’t come in when there’s only one afternoon game,” Battista replied.

  “What kind of bullshit is that? He’s got a beef with this cocksucker.”

  “I told him that. He says he don’t stay open.”

  “Ah, he’s full of shit.”

  Battista gave Gotti the line on several night baseball games, and Gotti bet a dime on each. In sports betting, a dime can be more than $1,000 because bookies establish the odds on a basic unit of $5. For example, if the Bergin team were a 6-7 favorite to beat the Ravenite team, a fan who bet a dime on the Bergin is “laying” 7, the higher number, 200 times. So the bet is $1,400 to win $1,000. If the underdog Ravenite wins the game, a fan who bet a dime on it wins $1,200—200 units of 6. The bookie gets $200—his vig—of the $1,400 lost by the Bergin fan.

  Gotti would have so much riding on the outcome of some games that sometimes when he was at the Bergin, crew members would turn off the television set so that he wouldn’t become upset.

  His temper was something to behold, as a few nongambling conversations on the Bergin tapes profanely illustrated.

  One outburst came after Anthony Moscatiello—the former real estate partner of Salvatore Ruggiero who had leased Gotti a car—failed to promptly return Gotti’s phone calls.

  “Hi, Buddy,” Moscatiello began cheerfully when he was able to get back to Gotti.

  “Buddy, my
fucking balls. What, I got to reach out for you three days in a-fucking advance?”

  “Paul, my wife just called me.”

  “You know, let me tell you something. I, I got, I need an example. Don’t you be the fucking example. Do you understand me?”

  “Listen, John …”

  “Listen, I called your fucking house five times yesterday, now … if you’re going to disregard my mother-fucking phone calls, I’ll blow you and that fucking house up.”

  “I never disregard anything you …”

  “This is not a fucking game … my time is valuable … if I ever hear anybody else calls you and you respond within five days, I’ll fucking kill you …”

  Jamesy Cardinali was not allowed to attend the Little Italy dice game, the one that the Bergin bigshots were operating in 1981.

  “The next thing you know, you’ll be gambling…that’s not for you,” Johnny told Jamesy.

  People might have lived if Jamesy had become addicted to gambling and not to cocaine; in March 1981, in a house in Brooklyn, he participated in another white-powder murder.

  Jamesy didn’t pull the trigger, but it was still murder. He sucked the cocaine dealer into seemingly idle conversation while an accomplice shot him in the face. The two killers wrapped the body in a painter’s tarp, took it to Howard Beach, got on a boat, and deposited another corpse in Jamaica Bay.

  Q.: Did you have to do anything to the body to make sure that it didn’t float?

  A.: He was cut open.

  Jamesy doesn’t remember exactly, but he got $9,000 to $12,000 for this murder “in dribs and drabs.” Gotti heard he was selling drugs again and talked to him about it on June 1.

  “Someone came here and said you were selling drugs.”

  “It’s not true.”

  “If I find out it is true, I will kill you.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Michael Castigliola.”

  The next day, Jamesy murdered Michael Castigliola as the victim sat in a car. Tommie LaRuffa, a 70-year-old comrade of Jamesy’s, saw his wicked young friend pull the trigger.

  Jamesy didn’t go to the Bergin for a few weeks, but one Sunday night he was tapped out and dropped in to ask Gotti for a loan.

  “Did you kill that guy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Never do anything like that again. You come and ask me …”

  “John, if I asked you, you wouldn’t let me kill the guy.”

  “You got to post everything with me. I knew it an hour after you did it.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Somebody saw you.”

  Jamesy knew it was true. Incredibly, a Bergin man was turning onto the street at the time Jamesy shot Castigliola and saw it all.

  Gotti told the now four-time killer that Castigliola was with another mobster. “But don’t worry. I can handle [him], just keep your mouth shut.”

  About this time, Special Agent Paul Hayes began calling on Jamesy, who had turned up in surveillance photographs taken outside the Bergin. Jamesy wasn’t supposed to hang out with criminals; the photos suggested that he had violated his parole. Sources BQ and Wahoo had identified the photos, for which some Bergin men had posed. One day they grew tired of seeing an FBI car outside the club and agreed to have their pictures taken if the agents would then leave.

  The FBI wanted to talk to Jamesy about John Gotti and not, except as a possible lever, a parole violation. But Jamesy wasn’t interested in talking, not then, and every time Agent Hayes came calling, Jamesy told John or Gene.

  One time, after Hayes invited Jamesy to the FBI office in Queens, Gene gave him money in case “they keep you.” John told him it was okay to go once. “But don’t take no [lie] tests. Go and talk once, that’s enough.”

  Naturally, Jamesy wasn’t telling Agent Hayes about any murders either, and in August 1981 he put number 5 in the grave.

  On cocaine, Jamesy was a greyhound chasing an elusive mechanical rabbit. He had to stay high to escape the low.

  Q.: So you have to keep doing it?

  A.: Yes.

  Q.: You have to keep doing it and you have to keep doing it. You do it until it’s all gone, right?

  A.: Then you go get some more.

  Jamesy went to the Riviera Motel near the airport to get some more, after friends told him about a coke dealer holding four kilos.

  At the motel, Jamesy flashed a badge and handcuffed the flush dealer. He policed him into his car, drove behind the motel, and fired a fatal bullet into his neck. Jamesy and three partners each got a kilo, a thousand grams; a thousand disco nights for Jamesy if he weren’t so greedy, which of course he was. He sold some, but most of the score went up his nose.

  En route to his more timid friends, Jamesy, for once, felt “bad” because the victim “looked like a college kid.”

  Two months later, the parents of a young man wearing a University of Pennsylvania ring on his finger were informed his body had been found behind the Riviera Motel, near John F. Kennedy International Airport, Queens, New York City.

  In the meantime, Jamesy was asked to appear in a police lineup for the Castigliola murder. He was not identified, but as he left the precinct, three state parole officers were waiting. At a hearing, he was found guilty of violating his parole. The charges were using drugs, failing to report for visits with his parole officer, and “consorting” with criminals. The evidence of the latter was a photograph of Jamesy with Willie Boy Johnson outside the Bergin. FBI Agent Paul Hayes angered Jamesy by giving pivotal testimony.

  Jamesy went off to do nine months in a state prison. He was one thorn out of Gotti’s crown, but others were on the vine.

  On September 1, 1981, the criminal aspirations of a young Queens armed robber, Peter Zuccaro, were put on hold when he was sentenced to 12 years in prison by Brooklyn federal judge Eugene H. Nickerson, who would make John Gotti’s acquaintance later.

  Zuccaro had been convicted of taking part in two armored-car robberies, which netted about $1.1 million. He was the nexus that bound Gotti and a former Ozone Park schoolgirl, Diane F. Giacalone, in a fierce court battle to be fought five years later.

  The Zuccaro case was prosecuted by Giacalone, who became an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York—Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and Long Island—in 1979.

  Giacalone, the daughter of a civil engineer, used to walk along 101st Avenue, past the Bergin, on her way to the Our Lady of Wisdom Academy. She used to wonder whether the men who hung out there worked only at night.

  As John Gotti climbed in the Family, Giacalone climbed in the legal profession. After being graduated from New York University Law School, she went to Washington to work in the Justice Department’s tax division. She then returned to New York, to live in Manhattan and work in Brooklyn.

  The Zuccaro case began July 29, 1980—a time when Gotti was in Florida and a day after his neighbor John Favara was kidnapped and disappeared forever.

  Zuccaro and three confederates waited in the parking lot of a Queens grocery store until an employee of IBI Security Services, an armored-car company, came out of the store with the day’s receipts.

  Two, maybe three, robbers followed the employee into the truck, waved their handguns, announced a robbery, and handcuffed him and the driver, Francis Higgins, an ex-cop. They drove the truck a short distance, gobbled up $310,000, and took off.

  On December 26, 1980, the robbers struck again. Same truck, same driver, same routine, but in Brooklyn outside a bakery and for more than twice as much money—$750,000. They left the truck outside a New York Daily News printing plant. Ex-cop Higgins had had enough; he left IBI Security to work in a grocery store.

  Zuccaro was indicted in March 1981; his accomplices remained free until one, Andrew Curro, became a suspect in the murder of his 19-year-old girlfriend, April Ernst. Investigating her death, police learned that April had threatened to reveal his role in the IBI Security Services thefts during an argument they had over another woman.


  Cops began to pressure Andrew Curro. Early in August, he was arrested on charges of possessing a weapon, a violation of his probation. Bail bondsman Irving Newman got a call from a man who wanted to help Curro make bail—Angelo Ruggiero.

  “He said that he knows the people well and not to worry about it,” Newman recalled later. “He would see that I got the collateral and everything else.”

  A few days later, Newman was asked by others to guarantee more bail for Curro, after he was arrested again and charged with his girlfriend’s murder. April Ernst had been strangled with a rope, taken to a motel, and dismembered with a machete.

  The cops were told something else during their probe of Curro: He and Zuccaro also were car thieves who had sold cars and parts to the Fountain Auto Shop, owned by John Carneglia. Some of the IBI Security loot, an informant said, was passed on to the Bergin, and thus possibly to Neil Dellacroce.

  All this was easier said than proved. But a few days after Zuccaro was sentenced, Diane Giacalone began “doing Neil and Johnny,” as one participant of an initial strategy session recalled. The victorious prosecutor began laying plans for making a racketeering and conspiracy case against them, a “RICO” case.

  RICO is an acronym for the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a legal sledgehammer conceived with the Families in mind. It had been federal law since 1970, but had only recently come into vogue at the Justice Department.

  The government had conspiracy statutes prior to 1970, but RICO was a wider net. Its focus was entities, not individuals—Families rather than soldiers. Until RICO, federal law, for the most part, saw individuals committing criminal acts; it did not see organizations whose individuals committed crimes to benefit the organization. RICO introduced two new ideas: “criminal enterprise” and “pattern of racketeering.”