by Gene Mustain
A.: Why? Because it was too profitable … and the easiest thing for them to do was to deal with drugs.
19
BABANIA MADNESS
I think this drug business will destroy us in the years to come.
—Don Corleone, 1948, in The Godfather
IN LATE FEBRUARY 1982, the FBI-Strike Force team began to strongly suspect that John and Gene Gotti, Angelo Ruggiero, and John Carneglia were dealing drugs on a major-league level.
Their suspicions were based more on physical surveillance and informant reports than wiretapped conversations. Over a few days, FBI agents spotted a known drug dealer leaving Angelo’s house and placing a package in the trunk of his car; saw Angelo and Carneglia visiting three known drug dealers in New Jersey; and spied Angelo as he entered a known drugcutting den in Queens.
Agents didn’t see a transaction between Carneglia and Crazy Sally Polisi that Polisi later said went down about the same time. Though Polisi had become a big drug dealer, this deal involved real estate. He sold two buildings to Carneglia for $150,000. The buyer assumed a mortgage and gave cash for the equity value—about $90,000, all in twenty-dollar bills, all in a shopping bag.
Though unaware of the deal, agents believed they already had enough information to justify invading Angelo’s privacy further by planting listening devices. In April, in an affidavit seeking approval to add bugs to wiretaps, the FBI, for the first time, told a judge that drug dealing was part of its investigation.
The document quoted an unidentified informant, probably Source BQ, as saying that John and Gene, Angelo, and Carneglia were partners in a major drug deal—“a fact which is kept from Gambino boss Paul Castellano due to his directive prohibiting Gambino members from [dealing drugs].” It said heroin dealer Mark Reiter had been evicted from the crew only to “appease” Castellano, but that he was dealing for the partnership. It quoted another informant saying that the partners were harboring Salvatore Ruggiero and also obtaining drugs through him.
A judge approved the bug request on April 5; within 72 hours, agents installed a bug in Angelo’s basement den. Later, two others were secreted in the kitchen and dining room. The methods used to accomplish such FBI missions are top secret. Sometimes they involve a ruse—a plumber who isn’t; other times, “surreptitious entry.”
The affidavit did not cite other details that BQ had recently provided. Though supposedly an outcast, Reiter was staying at Angelo’s mother’s house. He was driving a Mercedes, had just spent $70,000 in cash for two boats, and was buying a $200,000 house, also with cash.
Source BQ also had told the bureau that he believed Willie Boy Johnson was one of the drug partners, none of whom would actually “touch heroin, because if they are arrested or charged, they would be killed.” Babania transfers would be handled by non-Family men. BQ’s suspicion was rooted partly in the past; in a 1976 trial, while John Gotti was in state prison, Willie Boy was acquitted of heroin-trafficking charges; so was one of his codefendants, Angelo Ruggiero, then an unmade man.
Only days after the first bug was planted, Angelo began to get jittery—an encounter with FBI agents near his house made him wonder if his phone was tapped. He reached out for a private electronics expert, Jack Conroy, a former NYPD detective recommended by Michael Coiro.
Conroy’s arrival on the scene was a major plot twist. When he met Angelo, he lied and said he had been an agent for the Eastern District Strike Force. He let on that he was a big inside trader in the mob-intelligence market. He listened as Angelo described how he had been recently pulled over in his car by three men who “looked like fuckin’ junkies.”
“One guy reaches in, grabs me by the shirt. He’s pulling me, I’m pulling him. Another guy uses his head, says, ‘Hold it, hold it, we’re FBI agents.’ [I say:] You’re FBI agents, you’d better identify yourself ’cause you’re gonna have a bad problem.”
Angelo said one agent apologized that they had mistaken him for someone else, a fugitive, but to satisfy the others, would he mind showing his identification?
“They were looking for something,” Conroy wisely said.
“When the car cut me off, I had a telephone number in my hand. In a half-hour I was gonna go call this other guy.”
“Okay.”
“The telephone number, I swallowed it.”
“Oh, good.”
Conroy agreed to come back to Angelo’s house in a few days with the proper equipment to sweep it for taps and bugs.
Angelo again showed his alarm on April 13, in a call to his mother, who complained about noise on the line and asked:
“What is this, a party line?”
“FBI agents are listening in,” her son said.
Despite Angelo’s unease and despite obvious efforts to discuss matters in code, drug-dealing clues continued to pile up—mostly via the phone.
The same day that Mrs. Ruggiero talked to her son Angelo, her son Salvatore and another man met in Florida to arrange a heroin deal, an informant later told the FBI. Soon a drug courier was on his way to New Jersey with 13 kilos.
Late the next day, Angelo called his house and spoke to his 17-year-old daughter, Ann Marie, who said “Mark” had come by and left something for him.
“So long, Ann, don’t say nothing,” Angelo replied.
On April 15, a man named Arnold Squitieri called to say that someone had not yet shown up with their “bankroll.” Squitieri was one of the three New Jersey drug dealers with whom Angelo and Carneglia had been meeting.
Two days later, Squitieri called to ask Angelo, “Did you get that furniture yet?” Another man, “Charles,” also checked in: “The kid can’t make a mortgage payment yet.”
Squitieri made plans to come to Angelo’s house for dinner with the other two New Jersey dealers, Alphonse Sisca and Oreste Abbamonte. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) records show that they and Squitieri all have convictions for multi-kilo deals and are related by marriage. Angelo met Sisca and Abbamonte while incarcerated at Lewisburg.
The night of the dinner, Angelo told his New Jersey pals that he had contacted Bonanno boss-to-be Joseph Massino, who had been indicted recently and gone into hiding, and that “everything was all right.” Because so many of its soldiers were flouting the drug-dealing ban, the Bonanno family had just lost its seat on the Commission, the coalition of Family bosses, who, somewhat like a board of directors, set policy for all divisions.
On April 17, Jack Conroy lugged his phony credentials and electronic gadgets into Angelo’s house. After conducting tests, he correctly told Angelo that two phones were tapped; but, as to bugs, Conroy pronounced the house clean. Because it knew Conroy was coming, the FBI had shut down the bugs.
Conroy now said he had a source at the telephone company, which is notified when phones are to be legally tapped, and he could find out who authorized the taps. A week later, he told Angelo this would cost $1,000—$800 for his telephone-company source, $200 for him and his partner. No problem, Angelo said.
In a few days, Conroy delivered a bill of goods. He said the taps were legal because of a March 18 federal court order in the Southern District of New York, which is Manhattan and the Bronx. This invention caused Angelo to speculate that he was only peripherally involved in an investigation aimed at someone else. Just in case, however, he told Conroy, who had just suckered Angelo out of $1000, that he would get some other phone numbers for him to check. No problem, Conroy said.
“I want to get your phone checked,” Angelo told Gene, who dropped by after Conroy left. “I want to get the kid, Johnny Carneglia’s, checked.”
Angelo also decided to include John Gotti’s phone and later told Conroy to contact his source.
“Why don’t you tell him, make a package deal? I’ll give you three, four guys and we’ll have a package deal instead of charging us [$1,000 each].”
Gimme a price,” Conroy said. “Give me a price for the four.”
“Five hundred apiece.”
“He’ll do it … Yeah, abso
lutely … Fuck him.”
After the scam was sealed, Gene professed confidence he had not been indiscreet on the phone.
“If they got my phone earlier, then there’s nothing, you see, I mean, they might, but, you know who I speak to? There’s only one person I speak to on the phone.”
“Me,” Angelo said.
“That’s it. Nobody else calls my house.”
Gene wanted to be careful now. “Watch this phone, Angelo.”
“Ah, there’s nothing I can do now, Genie. What should I do now? I’ll make my kids answer the phone, my wife … Find out who it is, tell them I’ll call them back [from a pay phone].”
Angelo was impressed by Conroy’s telephone tipster.
“The guy he’s got, he’s the guy who installed [the tap]. Gene, we got some fuckin’, we got some score here. This is a helluva score.”
Gene wanted to make sure that brothers were warned. “Tell your brother,” he said to Angelo. “Tell my brother.”
That day, after Conroy left, the basement bug overheard a Bonanno Family soldier arriving at Angelo’s house to discuss “a shit load” of heroin.
“Try not to let too many people know who we are,” Angelo said. “I got to speak to my brother at one-thirty today.”
“I got thirty things of heroin,” the Bonanno man said. “That’s why I’m here.”
The next day, Angelo told John Carneglia his phone would be checked for a wiretap. He said Conroy had been highly recommended by Michael Coiro.
“That’s good,” said Carneglia, who now saw Conroy as a long-term source of inside information. “You want to know the truth? This guy will become a hook.”
“Oh yeah. I’m fattenin’ him up already.”
“This guy’ll become a hook.”
“I asked Mike Coiro today. He said ‘Listen … go to sleep with him.’”
After playing charades with his gadgets, Conroy delivered a report on the other phones: only John Gotti’s was tapped. It was another fictional story, but very believable.
Angelo was ecstatic about going to sleep with Conroy. Source BQ told Agent Colgan that Angelo was “bragging” that Conroy had “direct access to court records and telephone company information.” He said Angelo, Gene, and Carneglia told him they had “an ex-FBI agent in their pocket.”
BQ was worried the ex-agent might know about BQ’s secret role, but Colgan told him to forget about it.
Source Wahoo also tipped his control agent, James Abbott, who wrote: “There is a leak somewhere in the federal system and this leak is through [Michael] Coiro. This source does not know where the leak is, but Gotti and his associates get advance information on federal probes.”
At the time, the FBI was not certain all of Conroy’s claims were false. And though in fact there was no leak—not yet anyway—the bureau decided to pull its two property-crimes agents out of Diane Giacalone’s Dellacroce-Gotti investigation.
From the FBI perspective, her investigation had been a bother from the start; it would undoubtedly tread on areas the Angelo team was working, posing possible prosecution problems down the road. Lately, there also had been a cantankerous dispute over whether the FBI or the DEA would take responsibility for managing Kenneth O’Donnell, the informer who told Giacalone that John Gotti gave an armored-car robber money for drugs.
It was suggested that the two agencies share the job, as well as the expenses of O’Donnell. The FBI said an informer as difficult as O’Donnell could not have two masters, and if it paid the bills, it would have to manage him alone. The DEA said no way, because O’Donnell was setting up drug targets in New Jersey. Some members of Giacalone’s team felt the FBI just wanted to dominate the case.
The stalemate broke after the bug went in and the FBI investigation turned toward heavy-duty trafficking. The agents assigned to Giacalone were in an untenable spot: They were part of her team, but were not permitted to share the intelligence the surveillance was producing.
Why? In the wake of events at Angelo’s house, the FBI was paranoid about “a leak somewhere in the federal system.” An FBI participant in the drama recalled: “There was no certainty the information wouldn’t be compromised.”
Giacalone was insulted and perturbed, and got permission from her boss, Raymond J. Dearie, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District, to carry on against Dellacroce and Gotti without the FBI. Giacalone, age 32, a former tax attorney, was now boss of the first major organized-crime investigation in the country not involving the FBI.
Eventually, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office gave money to help support Kenneth O’Donnell. But when the money dried up, he became useless; on May 7, 1983, he held up a bank and later was sent to prison.
Afraid of telephone taps, but not bugs, Angelo carried on, too. Late in April 1982, he invited into his house one Edward Lino, a Bonanno Family associate and former client of Marty Light.
Lino said Angelo would get “first shot” at an unspecified shipment that was due soon. Angelo said he would take a shot “if it’s a very good price [because] I’d just like to [deal in kilos].”
The two men discussed the perils of modern-day heroin dealing. Angelo said the raw product couldn’t be imported on planes any longer because the government was using an AWACs plane to identify low-flying aircraft. Even dropping bags of drugs into fields for later pickup had become hazardous.
“Forget about it! They got a helicopter that goes over the fields that picks up human bodies. They’re very fucking … they’re up to date on us.”
Throughout April, the bugs in Angelo’s house produced a record that told the story of a murder plot that perfectly illustrated the death-defying game Ruggiero was playing with heroin.
The story began when two members of another crew “ratted out” Gambino soldier Peter Tambone. They told Neil Dellacroce that “Little Pete”—one of those arrested the year before in the Little Italy dice-game raid—was dealing heroin supplied, off the record, by Salvatore Ruggiero. It’s not clear who told Castellano.
A hearing on the charge was not possible—if a “friend of ours” accuses another “good fellow,” there is a presumption of guilt. The news upset the Pope, still agitated by the recent presence of agents outside the White House and more concerned than ever he might become the victim of some turncoat caught in a drug vise. He decided it was time to put bite in his bark and proposed to the other three bosses sitting on the Families’ ruling council, the Commission, that they murder Little Pete, a 62-year-old grandfather.
Castellano summoned John Gotti to discuss his proposal, according to what Angelo told Edward Lino during one of their heroin sales conferences.
“Johnny, we got a bad problem with Little Pete,” Angelo quoted the Pope. “You know that anybody that’s straightened out that moves babania [gets killed].”
Angelo summoned Little Pete and told him the Commission was meeting to decide whether to kill him.
“How’s the weather so far?” Little Pete asked.
“Half and half, Pete.”
Angelo was telling Tambone that the commission was deadlocked on Castellano’s proposal: two bosses for, two against.
The boss on Castellano’s side was Vincent Gigante of the Genovese Family. Like the Castellano branch of the Gambino tree, Gigante’s Family was making big money from labor rackets and wasn’t as vulnerable to the drug virus.
Two years after the Little Pete episode was played out, John and Gene would tell Source BQ that during the 1970s “Chin” Gigante—a former boxer who used a punch-drunk act to beat a few cases—was used by the Commission to eliminate members who were caught hustling heroin. Those who dealt drugs—but got away with it—were not harmed. In the only attempt at humor found in the FBI memos, Agent Colgan summed up BQ’s talk with the Gotti brothers this way: “However, those apprehended and/or convicted … normally met with individuals associated with Gigante, and these meetings normally were their last.”
Vincent Gigante himself had been convicted of dealing heroin in 1959,
which was within the grace period for getting out that was established during the Commission meeting at the Apalachin Conference two years earlier. John and Gene told BQ that one of Gigante’s first victims was a man named “Consalvo” who was pushed off the roof of a twenty-four-story apartment building in New Jersey. Indeed, police in Fort Lee say this is what happened to one Carmine Consalvo in 1975, while he faced trial on heroin charges. One Edward Lino was the victim’s wife’s uncle. Three months later, Carmine’s brother Francis was found dead in Little Italy; the police said he had been pushed off a five-story building.
At Angelo’s house, Little Pete was given some advice.
“Pete, listen to me like a brother,” Angelo said. “I’m telling ya, worse comes to worse, get your wife and take off.”
Angelo wanted Tambone to get in the wind because he suspected a murder contract would be handed to the Gotti crew—and possibly to him because he was a longtime acquaintance whom Little Pete might trust.
Considering his own activities and Tambone’s connection to Salvatore, it was easy to see why Angelo was sympathetic and why he also told Tambone that he was worried about defending him too openly because people might think he was in with him. Even with Edward Lino, who was well aware of the grim incongruity of it all, he cited other reasons for opposing a Little Pete hit.
As it happened, these seemed noble enough. Tambone had claimed that one of the men who ratted him out was dealing drugs, too, and both had actually introduced him to the business. Although there is no evidence it ever happened, Angelo told Lino what would be done to punish this duplicity:
“Me and Johnny are going to whack ’em,” Angelo said. “We have to wait a year. We can’t do it right now.”
The state of Family harmony and justice was enough to make Lino disinterested in being a made man—“What do I even need it for? I’m gonna get myself killed.” He added, however, he would feel differently if “Johnny becomes the boss.”
