Mob Star

by Gene Mustain

  “Ya gotta bring it to a head,” Gambino added, “because [the Mercury owners are] borrowing from Gotti.”

  Castellano said the situation would have to be approached delicately because “you know, [we could be] opening up a can of worms and you want to make sure you don’t open it too much.” He didn’t want to stir the union pot, so he decreed that the Mercury Pattern owners take on the first shylock as a “partner” and take less out of the business. However, the Luchese man must understand that Mercury would have to keep paying Angelo and Gotti, too.

  The competing loan sharks, Uncle Paul added, should be told: “You get some of yours; they get some of theirs.”

  Castellano told Gambino to spread the word, and if the terms were not satisfactory, to be sure to tell the participants to “talk to Paul” before taking any action. “Get to Paul some way, anyway you can,” he told his nephew to say.

  Just then, future underboss and murder victim Thomas Bilotti came into the dining room—just off the kitchen, where the bug was—and helped to demonstrate why Paul, despite his misgivings, went to sleep with the Gotti crew. It was more than its leader’s skill in intimidating balky union officials; it was the money the crew seemed to attract.

  As the White House bug recorded the sound of rubber bands popping off bundles, Bilotti began counting cash—its history and purpose were not made clear.

  “There’s only twenty-seven [thousand] there. So I got to pick up three more tomorrow morning. John gave us twelve because he’s dealing with it. Genie gave us ten and this is your four thousand.

  “I better hold on to it,” Castellano said.

  “You want me to do it, Paul?” asked Bilotti, a papal favorite, but not in the same way as Gambino, who was blood. “Here, I’ll do it.”

  A different FBI-Strike Force team out of the Eastern District had installed the White House bug as part of a conspiracy case against the entire Gambino hierarchy—bosses and capos. In fact, all over the Crime Capital, similar teams were investigating each Family.

  While carrying out his duties for Neil, John Gotti kept looking over his shoulder, expecting an indictment, according to Source Wahoo. His worry was shared by Michael Coiro, who knew the Angelo tapes were dynamite. “Mike is drinking a lot,” Wahoo said.

  Angelo, however, was spending $40,000 on remodeling his home and saying “the bugs in his house were a bunch of bullshit and nothing is coming.” His confidence would later seem ridiculous, even to his confederates. In court one day, John Carneglia would toss off this line: Dial any seven numbers and there’s a fifty-fifty chance Angelo will answer the phone.

  Early in 1983, Angelo was overheard on another bug, in a Brooklyn restaurant, where he was having lunch and spreading poison, by trashing Castellano and talking about murder.

  “To me, he bad-mouths you,” Angelo told Gennaro Langella, acting boss of the Colombo Family. “He bad-mouths everybody … he bad-mouths his own Family.”

  Langella, who thought Castellano had cheated his Family out of a $50,000 construction-industry payoff, said that he had predicted that “Neil and Johnny will die” in a Gambino war.

  This was another opening for the Brutus in Angelo. He said he had spoken to Neil, who had sided with Langella on the payoff dispute and was angry at Castellano. He said Neil regretted ignoring the advice of Langella’s boss to kill Castellano back in 1976.

  “It’s a fucking shame,” Angelo said.

  “Most of [Castellano’s] guys got guns, and you know he ain’t going easy.” Langella replied.

  “No. I know, and Neil knows it and Johnny knows it. If anything happens to Johnny and Neil, I’ll come see you. I don’t trust nobody else.”

  “I don’t blame you. It’s not a nice way to live today.”

  Langella was currently keeping the chair warm for Carmine Persico, the boss whose advice Neil didn’t take. An incident involving Carmine’s son soon showed how seriously some took advice on the no-drugs issue.

  Alphonse Persico, age 29, was arrested on heroin-conspiracy charges along with Colombo soldier Anthony Augello. The Family felt Persico was dragged into the case by Augello, who was told to do the right thing. Augello, age 59, said good-bye to his family from a pay phone and then fatally shot himself in the head.

  In August, the Angelo bugs finally came home to roost. Angelo, Gene Gotti, John Carneglia, and Mike Coiro were arrested pending return of an indictment. Five others—the Gurino brothers of Arc Plumbing, Edward Lino, Anthony Moscatiello, and Mark Reiter—were arrested, too. A day earlier, Reiter, once identified with Carneglia as a member of an auto-theft gang, also had been acquitted of heroin charges in a separate federal case in the Southern District.

  Four other defendants could not be found. They included Salvatore Greco and William Cestaro, whose brother Philip would later plead guilty to helping hard-headed Edward Maloney buy drugs. Most of the group had direct links to the Bergin crew, whose boss, despite his worry, was not charged. Nothing on the tapes implicated him; Source BQ’s observations were not evidence.

  Unknown to most until later, two more Bergin associates, the brothers Michael and Louis Roccoforte, who would plead guilty, were arrested in Manhattan that same day as they tried to sell about two kilos of cocaine to an undercover cop.

  “John Gotti is on the carpet with Big Paul Castellano over the drug bust,” Agent Abbott wrote after Wahoo reported in, “as Paul feels John was either involved himself and if he was not, then he should have known his crew was involved and therefore he cannot control his crew.”

  Source Wahoo, on the other hand, said Dellacroce “is backing up Angelo’s version of the drug bust as cleaning up his brother’s operation.” Even retiree Carmine Fatico was letting Angelo know he supported him; but the Pope was so angry that Wahoo said Carmine might be unretired “if Gotti cannot convince Big Paul he was not involved in the drug operation.”

  Because the men were arrested on a sealed complaint, not many details were immediately available to either side.

  A few days later, FBI agents picked up rumors that murder contracts had been let on the lives of Special Agents Edward Woods and Donald W. McCormick of the Gambino squad. The rumor ran contrary to Family practice, but had to be checked.

  “We spoke to the appropriate people,” an agent recalled, “including Gotti, who apparently did not know about it. He was really annoyed.” Gotti, he added, said: “That’s just Angelo, shootin’ off his mouth, blowin’ off steam.”

  Another appropriate contact, Wahoo, “advised that no personal recriminations will be made on any FBI agent as they would have to be approved by Big Paul and at this time Gotti and Ruggiero are lucky they have not been clipped themselves.”

  The FBI had acted on the case as cautiously as possible for fear the targets might learn in advance of the impending arrests. A week before, Source BQ had stated “that most of the crew will disappear if they know there are [arrest] warrants [out] for them. Only Mike Coiro will not flee.”

  Once arrested, defendants who secure bail with a deed to a house or cash are more likely to stay around for their trial. This is what happened with the main players, who were released after posting property. Angelo’s bail was the highest—$1 million. After making his $125,000 bail, Coiro told a judge: “You can rest assured, Your Honor, I’m a fighter and will be here.”

  Soon after this, agents visited Coiro to test his state of mind: Would he want to deal? But Coiro stood on ceremony and did not go bad; he “went straight to John,” Source Wahoo said.

  Amid all the turmoil, before the indictment, John and Victoria Gotti’s eldest daughter, Angela, was married. Among the guests was Wahoo, who told Agent Abbott: “When the indictments come out and Castellano [is] made aware of the particulars, then it is quite possible [those arrested] will be in serious trouble and Ruggiero may yet be killed.”

  Weeks later, the indictment arrived. Angelo, Gene, and John Carneglia were hit hard: racketeering, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and harboring a fugitive. As far as Family mat
ters were concerned, Count 2 was the most serious: It stated that the three men were the “organizers, supervisors and managers” of a heroin ring.

  Knowing the case was based on tapes, Castellano sent word he wanted copies of the transcripts as soon as prosecutors turned them over, as required, to Angelo’s lawyers.

  Near the end of 1983, he got a taste of the trouble the tapes might cost his papacy; a grand jury at that time tried to force Little Pete Tambone to talk about Uncle Paul’s proposal to the Commission that Tambone be killed. Little Pete would hang tough—he went to court in his pajamas to support a Polisi-type gambit, and when that failed, he kept silent and went to jail for contempt—but, nonetheless, for Castellano the episode was a disturbing harbinger. Just a little while later, when he found out he had been bugged, the Pope knew the swallows had come back to Castellano.

  The Pope pressed Angelo again for the transcripts of the tapes, but Angelo kept making up stories and excuses, which was good for Thomas Gambino and Thomas Bilotti, but bad for John Gotti.

  That summer, before the Angelo, et al. indictment, a cash-heavy cocaine dealer anchored his yacht in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Willie Boy Johnson figured the man was a perfect mark for James Cardinali. As with the bodega-owner hammering, John Gotti’s pal hid in the background. Since Willie Boy’s lecture that Jamesy should not indiscreetly litter streets with bodies, Jamesy had gone to Florida several times to rob drug dealers. He refrained from killing any, he later said.

  In the middle of the night, Willie Boy called Jamesy and scripted the score. He told him to meet some accomplices in an after-hours bar. One of these told Jamesy:

  “The boat is leaving in a few hours. Go by my house, wake my wife, get the bag with the guns and badges, and come here.”

  At 4:30 A.M., many fishermen clogged the way to the Lucky Lady. The others wanted to call it off, but Jamesy strolled past the unknowing anglers and onto the unguarded yacht, opened an unlocked door and began handcuffing the surprised occupants, except for one.

  “The captain of the boat was giving me a hard time. When I woke him and said, ‘Police,’ he was trying to get up. I kept pistol-whipping him with the gun.

  The Lucky Lady gang got about $10,000 in jewelry and cash. But Jamesy’s luck had just run out. He was arrested for the murder of Michael Castigliola, who was killed for ratting Jamesy out to Gotti. Jamesy was looking at 25-to-life, and he spent the night in a Brooklyn jail, alone with his thoughts.

  Some of these arrived later in a letter to a Daily News reporter. “I would be willing to sell a story … or possibly doing a book. I have a lot of interesting stories about Johnny and our crew. Johnny and I were exceptionally close.”

  At the jail, for cops the next morning, Cardinali summed up his thoughts this way: “I would be willing to talk.”

  Late in August, he was taken to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office and began talking about one of his other murders—the one he felt bad about, the collegiate-looking kid at the Riviera Motel at JFK Airport—but he told Mark Feldman, deputy chief of the homicide bureau, that he wasn’t the shooter. It wasn’t a candid start for someone seeking to deal down a big charge. Feldman, however, told Jamesy to continue talking and so long as he told the truth, nothing he said would be used against him.

  Blessed with this absolution, Jamesy admitted he was the Riviera Motel triggerman, but offered nothing about the three victims whom nobody with a badge knew anything about: the two coke dealers in Florida and the Brooklyn dealer anchored in Jamaica Bay. He did offer another body, however, and when he connected the murder of court officer Albert Gelb to John and Charles Carneglia and the Gambino Family, he was on his way to protected status.

  Jamesy told Feldman he knew little about Paul Castellano, but he knew a lot about John Gotti.

  “Who?”

  “He’ll be the boss after Paul and Neil are gone.”

  Feldman worked homicide in Brooklyn, so it isn’t surprising he hadn’t heard about the capo from Queens. He called then-NYPD Detective Kenneth McCabe, who verified Jamesy’s Family observations and called in Detective Billy Burns, who was still working with FBI-less Diane Giacalone.

  Giacalone was ready for good news. She had recently lost an extortion case against Castellano’s cousin, the case that had caused tension between her and some FBI agents even before the FBI pulled out of her RICO case. Her lost case was based on tapes, but the most memorable line of dialogue came from a witness who quoted an enforcer as saying: “This is La Cosa Nostra—what’s yours is ours and what’s ours is ours.”

  Now, Diane told Jamesy: “Tell me everything you know.”

  Though Jamesy kept his three other murders a secret, he talked all day. It was the first of many marathon sessions and the beginning of a tortuous, fateful relationship between him and Diane, kids from Queens born a year apart who grew up as polar opposites. They fought constantly. To him, she was a deceitful bully. To her, he was a remorseless punk. But as much as they hated it, they needed each other.

  After that first day, Giacalone felt her investigation was taking off. Jamesy’s stories would have to be tested against others before any deals were made, but they sounded true. In the meantime, Jamesy was transferred to federal custody and lodged in a special dormitory, a prized murderer.

  Multiple murderers were part of Paul Castellano’s camp, too, and now he began to pay the price as the first shot in the federal Family assault was fired. Early in 1984, the Pope was indicted as a beneficiary of a conspiracy to steal luxury cars and sell them overseas.

  The announcement was made by the new U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, Rudy Giuliani. Paul and 21 others were indicted, making it one of the largest RICO cases ever. The charges were a bloody lesson on how quickly the Family kills, and not just its own. The defendants were accused of varying roles in 30 murders tied to the ring’s car-theft enterprise. Most of the victims were hoodlums, but one was a twenty-year-old man who happened to witness a double homicide; a second was the nineteen-year-old girlfriend of a suspected informer.

  Besides Paul, the key figures in the case were Anthony Gaggi, in whose house Paul had been crowned, and a dead man, Roy DeMeo, whose name had popped up in the death of the Howard Beach service manager, John Favara. The indictment stated that Paul ordered Gaggi to kill DeMeo, a maverick Gambino hit man who fell into disfavor when one of his victims was found in a barrel and the Family got some bad publicity. DeMeo then sealed his fate by refusing to show up for a sitdown.

  DeMeo’s name had also popped up in an FBI affidavit in support of the White House bug. The affidavit said Paul had “put out feelers” to the Gotti crew about killing DeMeo. It paraphrased one of the last conversations secretly recorded at Angelo’s house in 1982—a lengthy Angelo-Gene chat in which Gene seemed wary of accepting a contract on DeMeo because DeMeo had a “small army” around him.

  Gene said he and his brother John had “done” only seven or eight “guys” while DeMeo had “done” 37.

  DeMeo’s army apparently deserted him early in 1983, when he was found dead, shot five times, in the trunk of his car. While DeMeo was alive, the indictment in the stolen-car ring case now charged, Paul had ordered him, Gaggi, and a third man to kill a father-and-son Gambino team who helped stage a phony charity event attended in 1979 by First Lady Rosalynn Carter. The scheme was said to have embarrassed Paul, the upright businessman.

  Like Carlo Gambino had been, the Pope was only vaguely acquainted with courtrooms. But now, at age 68, he realized his retirement years might be spent behind bars.

  John Gotti realized it, too, and was pleased, according to Source BQ, an associate of the crew, but not as active as Wahoo—and also not as big a Gotti fan. Days after the indictment, Gotti and friends were “already contemplating their rise to power.” Gotti knew Paul’s problems “will only mean better times for himself.” Gotti had been at a restaurant in Little Italy and “was quietly gloating in the troubles that have recently befallen” Paul, who was pressing for details on the Angelo heroin-
trafficking indictment, but was still being denied “the whole truth.”

  Wahoo didn’t comment on Gotti’s state of mind, but he did express surprise that Angelo and the others hadn’t met up with no-drugs-enforcer Chin Gigante on some rooftop; he offered this explanation, as rendered by Agent Abbott:

  “Angelo, et al. may have drafted a phony indictment to display to Big Paul and Neil to tailor their excuses and get them off the hook.”

  Wahoo also added a bulletin from another front: “James Cardinali has become a rat because he is jammed up with a murder charge.” Jamesy had “given up” Willie Boy and was talking about assaults on a cocaine yacht and a bodega owner.

  Another rat was about to crawl into a trap laid by cops in Queens. Crazy Sally Polisi was arrested in Ozone Park as he handed over serious cocaine to an undercover detective. Polisi was dealing again because he was broke. He had moved upstate and sunk all his money, including the $90,000 shopping bag of 20-dollar bills from John Carneglia, into a 50-acre weekend retreat for go-cart fans. The property had two tracks, a house, a restaurant, and few go-cart fans. Polisi lost $600,000.

  Like Cardinali, Polisi was facing 25-to-life. Lt. Remo Franceschini, who convinced Wahoo to become a Queens informer, knew Polisi had mob ties. He invited him into his office and pointed to a photo gallery of Family men, Queens branch.

  “Would you be interested in helping us?”

  “Never, never, never.”

  Polisi was unable to make bail and was jailed. Over the next two months, “never” became “maybe.” But what he was maybe ready to give had too much to do with Queens. He was afraid to trust anyone from Queens and so he called the federal probation officer he met on his bank robbery case in 1975 and asked him to take him to Edward McDonald, boss of the Eastern District Organized Crime Strike Force.