Mob Star

by Gene Mustain

  United States of America v. Aniello Dellacroce, et al. was called for arraignment and bail applications later that day in Brooklyn, with Judge Eugene H. Nickerson presiding.

  Michael Coiro, then under indictment, too, appeared for John and Gene and pleaded them not guilty. John was released on $1 million bail secured by his brother Richard’s home and his own home, which was in Victoria’s name and said to be worth $230,000. Gene was released on the same bail he posted in the drug case, $250,000 secured by his home.

  Anthony Rampino was released to the facility at which he had been arrested—a heroin detoxification center in the Bronx. Neil was not able to appear; he was hospitalized for a chemotherapy treatment and would have to plead not guilty by telephone.

  “Your Honor, unfortunately, I think Mr. Dellacroce’s stay with us is somewhat limited,” said his lawyer, Barry Slotnick.

  After bail for the others was decided upon—two defendants, Buddy Dellacroce and Charles Carneglia, had not been found—Giacalone told Judge Nickerson that Willie Boy Johnson, now the only defendant in the courtroom, should be jailed immediately because “no conditions of bail would secure his appearance.”

  The judge’s eyes requested an explanation.

  “The reason is that Mr. Johnson has been an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation for a period of over fifteen years, including a period up through the present time.”

  Willie Boy remained as still as a courthouse statue, although his fists were clenched so tightly the words “True” and “Love” tattooed across his knuckles stood out clearly. His close friend John Gotti was headed home to Howard Beach, but he had been told earlier that day about Willie Boy—by Willie Boy—as they and others were brought to the courthouse in handcuffs.

  “They’re accusing me of being an informant,” Willie Boy told Johnny Boy. “It ain’t true.”

  Gotti was stunned, not by truth but by untruth. Giacalone had to be lying. The idea of Willie Boy as a rat was crazy. Willie Boy had been around too long. He knew too much. Calling him an informer was a devious effort to make him go bad.

  “I don’t believe it,” Gotti said.

  By denying it, Willie Boy was keeping a vow he had made in 1966 when he said that’s what he would do if it surfaced. That was when he was “very bitter with La Cosa Nostra members who never helped his family while he was in prison” and was described by the FBI as a “tough, standup guy” and “muscle man for Gambino” who “moves with fluidity through the underworld,” but would never be made because he wasn’t Italian.

  Willie Boy, a rock-solid 51-year-old former boxer, listened as Giacalone urged that he be jailed without bail.

  While informing on his codefendants, he had been “simultaneously participating in serious criminal activity,” and it would be legally impossible to keep his informer status a secret. She recounted how in December, when first warned by the FBI, he said he would be killed if he was revealed.

  “It is an assessment with which I cannot disagree. We have indicated to Mr. Johnson that we are prepared to protect him as a result.”

  “Not true, Your Honor,” Willie Boy protested.

  It was true, but Willie Boy was trying desperately to avoid going off to jail as a protected inmate. He feared his codefendants would regard it as proof that he was an informer. He wanted to make bail and take his chances on the streets, but Giacalone held all the cards. Earlier in the day, she and her supervisor, Susan Shepard, had informed him he would be compromised, but they were prepared to offer him protection.

  “I will be killed,” he had said. “My family will be slaughtered.”

  Giacalone now told the judge about the earlier meeting. “He also said … that he would at some point tell them himself in some way, his codefendants, that he had been an informant.”

  The judge asked Willie Boy to tell his story under oath; Johnson denied being an informer, though he did admit: “I spoke to the FBI many times.”

  “Did you give information to the FBI about Messrs. Gotti and those?” the judge asked.

  “No sir.”

  You never mentioned Mr. Gotti?”

  “No, sir.”

  Willie Boy, who, in addition to many other crucial tips, had fingered Gotti in the McBratney case and set him up for apprehension, hesitated briefly before continuing.

  “I might have mentioned the name. Yeah. Mr. Gotti. They mentioned it to me.”

  “What did you say about him?”

  “They said he’s the boss. I said, ‘He’s always the boss.’ Things like that.”

  After a few minutes more, Nickerson decided Willie Boy was a serious no-show risk for trial. He said the FBI files showed Willie Boy had been an informer about his codefendants and about the specific crimes they had committed.

  “It would be irresponsible of me, it seems to me, to release him on bail … and so I order his detention.”

  Willie Boy was led away to the Metropolitan Correctional Center. Because of a report filed the next day by Source BQ, he was locked in a special pen—sealed off from the other inmates like a man with a deadly disease.

  Source BQ reported that three Bergin men—whom he would not name—had discussed killing Willie Boy without Gotti’s permission—to protect him “from embarrassment.” As a ruling member of the Gambino Family, “John would immediately fall into disfavor if it became known on the street he was so closely aligned with an FBI informant.” BQ said crew members were surprised that Willie Boy’s status as an informer had been disclosed in court. “Because this fact is known, Johnson’s life will forever be in jeopardy.”

  Willie Boy was confined in his cell 23½ hours a day. His access to showers and recreation was restricted. A glass door to the pen enabled other inmates to taunt him. In a few days, he complained he had found blood in his urine and needed medication. On Easter Sunday, his wife, who had sent messages from Wahoo to the FBI many times, was denied visitation. When his lawyers visited, he was led to them in leg shackles.

  The lawyers demanded a hearing to protest this “cruel and inhumane” treatment, which they said was Giacalone’s attempt to force Willie Boy to become a witness, and to reapply for bail because “his life is not in danger.”

  On April 9, the hearing was held and now Gotti would learn that two more informers were talking to the FBI about the Bergin crew. Without identifying him, Special Agent Storey described BQ’s report. He also disclosed the FBI had received a tip from a recently developed source who said the crew wanted Willie Boy freed “so they could talk to him and find out more about” the extent of the damage.

  The hearing was adjourned without change in Willie Boy’s habitat. He would spend the next 16 months in the special pen while the pretrial moves in the case were played out. His had been a most unusual saga, soon to be reprised by a second mystery man, Source BQ—who, like Wahoo during the past decade, had received about $35,000 in small, periodic payments from the FBI.

  Peter Mosca and Dominick Lofaro’s visit to Ozone Park to discuss the Maspeth card-game situation was the probable cause that the state Task Force needed to go up on John Gotti, and plant bugs in the Nice N EZ Auto School, next to the Bergin annex. The state bugs went in 13 days after Gotti’s indictment, so no conversations taped by them could be used in Diane Giacalone’s case.

  Gotti was overheard only once—complaining about “severe” gambling losses—before he motored to Florida and rented two rooms on separate floors of the Fort Lauderdale Hilton under the name Dom Pizzonia. His bail required Nickerson’s approval for trips outside New York; Gotti thought that Bruce Cutler, who was handling pretrial matters, had arranged this. In fact, Cutler hadn’t, and on April 24, Gotti was arrested for violating bail as he and three other men clad in bathing suits sat by the pool. As they took Gotti to his room so he could dress, FBI agents noticed what appeared to be a tattoo of a serpent on his right shoulder.

  Working the phone, a frantic Cutler got Gotti out of jail by 9 P.M. The next day, in court, Cutler apologized for a “misu
nderstanding.” He said he thought when he arranged for Gotti to be excused from a routine court appearance he had also “indicated to Miss Giacalone that John Gotti was going with his family down to Florida.” In the future, Cutler said he would notify Judge Nickerson when Gotti would be away.

  “You are going to notify us?” Nickerson said icily. “You are going to notify us he is going to break the bail limits?”

  Cutler said no, he meant to say he would ask the court’s permission and, meantime, his client was still in Florida and wouldn’t be able to be in court to be admonished until April 30. “He is emotionally … he doesn’t fly, Your Honor.”

  Early in May, to help identify people overheard on the bugs, the state Task Force put a video camera atop a Long Island Railroad trestle over 101st Avenue a few hundred feet from the Bergin annex. On May 8, the Task Force learned how paranoid—and vigilant—that part of Ozone Park is: The camera was stolen.

  “Right this instant we’re going on tape,” Gotti crowed that night in the annex, “and we know their [listening post] is [at] Ninety-fifth Street and Ninety-ninth Avenue. And I want them to know and that’s why I’m talking the way I’m talking right now here.”

  Within hours, the Task Force moved out of its post, which hindered timely “observations necessary in identifying those … in intercepted conversations,” according to an affidavit.

  Though certain he was being overheard, Gotti continued to create a record of his verbal ferocity and gambling. On May 11, he complained about a man who owed him money and hadn’t made a payment despite a pocket full of cash. “I’ll kick his fucking brains in. Six thousand in his pocket Tuesday and he don’t tell me nothing. I ought to whack him.” On May 12, he bet 15 dimes on a pro basketball game. “I got on the [Philadelphia] 76ers, taking two [points]. That’s a $30,000 decision.”

  Now and then, officers monitoring the bugs tried to count the profanities in Gotti’s tirades, a difficult pastime. On May 19, they heard him describe sitting in a restaurant the night before near “Val,” a jeweler who belonged to another crew and owed him money. “Right behind me is that fuckin’ dick sucker Val, that asshole jeweler with the big mouth family, big mouth, fuckin … [I] told him you better come and check in every week. You miss one week and I’ll kill you, you cocksucker, fuckin’ creep.” The next day, Gotti said Val “might be tough in that crew, but that crew ain’t got nobody tough anyway.”

  On the day Gotti derided Val’s toughness, Source BQ filed a blockbuster report; it suggested a reason why Gotti, even by his standards, was talking tough in May.

  After saying Gotti still didn’t believe that Willie Boy was a rat because he had been “involved in too much criminality” to be working for the FBI, BQ said he had been at the Our Friends Social Club in Ozone Park and seen the future. Although he didn’t say so, his report indicated Gotti may have had his own Wahoo in Castellano’s camp, because he seemed well informed.

  BQ said John, Angelo, Gene, and John Carneglia had received “sensitive street information” that the Pope was “contemplating contract murders” on them “because of internal strife within the Gambino Family and, in part, because John is being touted” as his replacement. He said Castellano “wants to make Tommy Bilotti the new head of the Gambino Family and is therefore considering wiping out a strong portion of the Gotti faction. Gotti is contemplating striking first before Castellano can formulate his own plan.”

  Special Agent Colgan summarized BQ’s assessment of the situation this way: “Source believes John Gotti would definitely consider a hit on Castellano and others, including Bilotti, and if he was successful, Gotti would surely be one of the most formidable and youngest heads of an organized crime Family.”

  BQ’s most dramatic report for the FBI was his last. Diane Giacalone had decided to reveal him, too.

  BQ, whose trade in later years was bookmaking, was an unindicted co-conspirator in Giacalone’s case; he had turned up on gambling tapes that she intended to play at the trial. Once again, the FBI argued it was unnecessary because BQ turned up innocuously on only a few of the hundreds of gambling tapes at her disposal. Once again, the FBI accused her of trying to force an informer to testify and thus jeopardize his life. And once again, the FBI lost, and Agent Colgan warned BQ.

  For nine years, BQ had told Colgan he would get in the wind if exposed. And later that summer he did, leaving his wife and child behind. Until January 1986, when Giacalone got a warrant for BQ’s arrest, only Colgan and Mrs. BQ knew where BQ was, but then all contact had to end.

  Later, Colgan said BQ was not a “top-echelon” informant—“he never made the big-time” of FBI informant ranks, but he was highly valued. Colgan, who had welcomed BQ into his home during their odd-couple relationship, also said he was “personally and professionally devastated by the actions of the government in this matter.”

  William Battista, age 53, the old Brownsville-East New York hijacker-bookmaker who never appreciated Gotti’s bully ways, hasn’t been seen since.

  23

  THE LAST STAGE

  Tommy and the other guy will get popped.

  —John Gotti, June 13, 1985

  IN JUNE, THE FEDERAL FEVER infected Aniello Dellacroce’s home in Staten Island. A bug stayed only for that month, but long enough to capture some remarkable talk by the other mob about a sharp upturn in Family tensions and an insinuation that Neil had lost his marbles.

  Neil was furious at the man who suggested he was senile—Buddy LaForte, son of Joseph, the Staten Island capo. Neil also was angry at Michael Caiazzo, another captain and Neil’s former driver who had appointed Buddy acting capo of his crew without asking his underboss, a friend for 50 years. Caiazzo, before checking into a hospital for an operation, had gone over Neil’s head and told the Pope, which infuriated Neil even more.

  On June 8, Castellano and Thomas Bilotti stopped at Neil’s house to discuss the Caiazzo-LaForte affair.

  “You know what I heard [about LaForte]?” Neil began. “That this fuckin’ punk called me senile … I think I’d kill him … Paul, if it wasn’t for you, I would kill him.”

  “Watch out for people telling you stories,” replied Castellano, who was experienced on the subject. “Sometimes people tell us stories.”

  Castellano said that Buddy LaForte had denied being disrespectful to Neil, and suggested, gently, that Neil was his own worst evidence. “You know what it is, Neil. You have some good days and you have bad days.”

  The next day, Gotti and Angelo went to Neil’s to review Castellano’s newly persistent demands for the heroin tapes; Angelo had been holding on to them since the government, as required, had turned them over to help him prepare for trial. But the Pope was saying he needed them now for his own trials. Both were set to start before Angelo’s, which was delayed partly because of a change in prosecution teams; U.S. Attorney Raymond Dearie had taken the case away from the Eastern District Strike Force and turned it over to a special drug unit in his office.

  The heroin-tapes talk between Neil and his disciples may be the most evocative Family tape of all. A dying man is heard extolling La Cosa Nostra and seeking a way to avoid bloodshed, but acknowledging that—to save Angelo—it may be necessary to go to “the last stage.”

  It began with Gotti and Angelo learning what Neil had decided to do about Caiazzo and LaForte. Little Pete Tambone had been “chased” for six months for dealing drugs, but now Caiazzo was booted out forever for naming LaForte acting capo without Neil’s approval. Buddy’s penalty was a demotion to soldier in James Failla’s crew; in a bow to Neil’s anger, the Pope had blessed both moves.

  As he would throughout the heroin-tapes talk, Gotti was quick to agree with Neil. He said that since Caiazzo “was the brains” of the Caiazzo crew, he should be dumped.

  “I don’t think he was the brains,” Neil said, “But he was the boss. He’s responsible for all the mistakes.”

  In this, Gotti saw a corollary: “You don’t kill a guy just because the guy’s a tough guy. It ain�
�t right. You kill the guy that gives the order.”

  Now, the monitors of the Neil bug got to overhear Angelo make up a story to explain his refusal to turn over transcripts of tapes made by the bugs in his house in 1982.

  “If you two never bother with me again … I ain’t givin’ them tapes up. I can’t. There’s good friends of mine on them fuckin’ tapes. If it was some fuckin’ asshole like Buddy, or somebody like that, I’d give it to [Paul] in three seconds flat. There’s good guys on them fuckin’ tapes.”

  “Don’t call them good guys whatever you do,” said Gotti. “Don’t look for them when you’re in trouble, the good guys.”

  “That’s right,” said Neil.

  Angelo announced he intended to meet Castellano and a papal lawyer because “I want them to tell me how these tapes could help them.”

  “If he shows you how, he’s the boss,” Gotti said. “While he’s the boss, you have to do what he tells you.”

  Gotti was expressing loyalty to a boss who, according to William Battista, was “considering wiping out a strong portion” of the Gotti crew. But he also was speaking in the presence of the terminally ill underboss, his mentor.

  “You don’t understand La Cosa Nostra,” Neil said.

  “Angelo, what does Cosa Nostra mean?” Gotti chimed.

  Neil answered first. “Cosa Nostra means that the boss is your boss.”

  Angelo said he wasn’t going to give up the tapes so that his boss could turn Cosa Nostra against him and his friends. “I won’t do that,” he said.

  “Forget about it,” Neil said.

  “I won’t do that.”

  “Forget about it. La Cosa Nostra. Boss is the boss is the boss.”

  Neil then accused Angelo of “making up stories” so that he wouldn’t have to cough up the tapes, but Angelo denied it.

  “What I’m trying to say,” Neil said again, “is a boss is a boss is a boss. What does a boss mean in this fuckin’ thing? You might as well make anybody off the street.”