Mob Star

by Gene Mustain

  Angelo protested that Neil was singing “a different tune” from the last time they talked about the tapes.

  “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talkin’ about,” Gotti interposed. “Why don’t you keep quiet, and shut the fuck up?”

  During the Tambone crisis, Neil had warned Angelo that he would kill even his own son if he dealt drugs, but his frame of mind was different now. He was going to bat for Angelo. He said he had told Paul he would try to talk sense to Angelo because he “didn’t want anybody to get hurt”—but Angelo was making it rough on all of them.

  “Now, what do you want me to tell him? ‘The guy says, “Fuck you,” he don’t wanna give you these fuckin’ tapes.’”

  Neil recalled trying to take Angelo’s side at the start. “I’ve been tellin’ [Paul], ‘The guy can’t give you the tapes because his family is on there.’ I’ve been trying to make you get away with these tapes, but Jesus Christ Almighty, I can’t stop the guy from always bringin’ it up. Unless I tell the guy, ‘Why don’t you go fuck yourself?’ … Then we know what we gotta do then, we, we go and roll it up and go to war.”

  In what was a reference to an earlier, untapped comment by Angelo that Paul would order him killed if he knew what was on the tapes, Neil said, “I told you, that’s in the last stage. Let’s wait. Let’s take it easy. That’s the last stage. If it has to come to that, it’ll come to that.”

  The boss was a boss was a boss—up to the last stage. Neil was saying, in the end, he would support a strike against Castellano if it meant saving Angelo, who had been very loyal to Neil. “For Christ’s sake, I ain’t saying you’re wrong, [but] don’t forget, don’t only consider yourself … a lot of fellows’ll get hurt, too. You could get hurt. I could get hurt. [Gotti] could get hurt.”

  As Neil finished, Gotti gave his own lecture, lambasting Angelo for speaking out of school about the Commission to an unmade man like Edward Lino. “You’re not supposed to speak to every fuckin’ guy [who is] not a friend. About a Commission meeting! You ain’t the only guy that done it, but you ain’t supposed to do it. Right is right.”

  Joseph LaForte, father of the offending soldier, and James Failla, the soldier’s new captain, also dropped by Neil’s house that same day, June 9. At the time, Gotti was not there, but Angelo was.

  Angelo reminded LaForte of “three” killings “we did” for “you, you know, for the thing.” He reminded him of the time “Willie Boy and the kid [Cardinali] put the guy [the Staten Island bodega owner] in the hospital.” The remembrances were for the purpose of asking LaForte what his son Buddy had done for the thing lately.

  “Nothing,” the father said before making a comment about the beating Cardinali and others gave Antonio Collado, who was suspected of intruding on a LaForte numbers operation.

  “No, forget about that one,” Angelo said, “I’m talking about McBratney [the man Gotti and Angelo killed].”

  “[Buddy] had nothing to do with it,” LaForte said.

  “Definitely not, I was there. It was a suicide mission.”

  “I didn’t even know the guy.”

  “I didn’t know the guy either. When I walked in the bar, I met him.”

  When Failla entered Neil’s parlor, he expressed surprise that Caiazzo had been thrown out of the Family completely.

  “Jimmy, I’ve been carrying him for fifty years,” said Neil. “Mother-fuckin’ lice cocksucker that he is.”

  “Your mind is good. You seen it straight.”

  Back by the Nice N EZ Auto School, Gotti was overheard talking about mail he had received from Italy. He paraphrased an apparent fan letter this way: “[It’s] good to see a young guy, a young healthy guy there now, instead of those old fucks.”

  The seventy-year-old Paul Castellano and John Gotti sat down together on June 12—three weeks after William Battista said Gotti and others learned Castellano was contemplating killing them. The fact of this meeting indicated Castellano had assured everyone it wasn’t true, or that the “sensitive street information” reported by Battista had originated on 101st Avenue.

  Castellano now assumed he was headed to jail, not because of the stolen-car case or even the Commission case. He thought he had a chance to beat both; but he thought he was a loser on a case that hadn’t even been filed yet—the Gambino hierarchy case. As required after the fact, the government had recently notified him that his home was bugged in 1983.

  “I musta said so many things,” he told Gotti. “That’s the way it goes.”

  Certain of going to prison and Neil’s death, Castellano met with Gotti to discuss a “peaceful transition.” Despite a streak of independence, Neil, as long as the Family within a Family got its share of the bounty, had been a loyal underboss, the kind Thomas Bilotti could be for Thomas Gambino. Castellano was less sure of Gotti, but knew he must be appeased, and so he proposed that Gambino, Bilotti, and Gotti have operating control of the Family while he remained the behind-the-bars boss.

  With Paul still the boss, and with two Thomases in the frame, Gotti thought the picture at the top was looking too busy. Consigliere Joe N. Gallo, age 73, another “old fuck” who was, Gotti had said, an “asshole weak cocksucker,” would not have any real influence, no matter what happened.

  A day after his sitdown with the Pope, Gotti reviewed it for a crony. He suspected Castellano was patronizing him and was angry that Paul had “disregarded Neil” in formulating his plans. Gotti saw the demise of the other mob.

  “He told me again last night, he said, ‘Well, I’m gonna try to make a peaceful transition [and] switch the Family over to two [or] three guys.’ [But] we ain’t gonna get nothin’.”

  According to Gotti, Castellano said, “You come with me, Tommy, and the other guy.” Gotti said he replied that Gambino and Bilotti didn’t want to share power. And then Gotti told the crony what would happen if Paul was patronizing him and he was cut out of the picture when Paul went to jail:

  “You know what we’re gonna do then. Tommy and the other guy will get popped.”

  The former Rockaway Boy was supremely confident during these pivotal times in Family history. At the Bergin annex, he told a soldier: “I know what’s goin’ on. See, you don’t … you’re oblivious … guys like you, your brother, and other soldiers, God bless ya, [but] you’re oblivious to what’s goin’ on, but I ain’t … Me, I’ll always be all right.”

  Gotti also was supremely active, as he complained: “I got appointments and favors coming out of the asshole. I can’t keep up with them.”

  One appointment he couldn’t keep up with was an unusual pretrial hearing held at Neil’s house—because Neil was too ill to travel. Judge Nickerson brought his court to him on June 25, so two legal issues—involving potential conflicts of interest among lawyers in the case—could be resolved by having Neil waive any later objections.

  The first issue did not involve Gotti, so it did not matter that he and Bruce Cutler were late. Court was convened—the FBI had silenced the bug in Neil’s house for the day—in Neil’s bedroom. The underboss, clad in white embroidered pajamas, sat propped up on a king-size bed.

  Nickerson explained how the potential conflict might affect Neil, and did he still wish to waive an objection?

  “Your Honor, I have been sick and I have had three angina attacks and whatever my lawyer, whatever my lawyer does, is okay with me. I don’t understand the law … I don’t understand the points of it.”

  The participants recessed to Neil’s living room to await Gotti and Cutler; they chatted while a Viennese waltz played softly in the background, according to the only reporter present, Philip Russo of the Staten Island Advance.

  “Have you seen Prizzi’s Honor?” Nickerson asked Diane Giacalone. “… [T]hat had some funny scenes.”

  Giacalone, surprised by the judge’s mention of a sardonic movie about mob assassins, merely nodded.

  “Gotti,” Russo later wrote, “a big man clad in a dark brown suit with matching brown shirt open down the first three but
tons, arrived after a short delay.” Then, Gotti, Cutler, and the others all filed back into Neil’s bedroom.

  Once again, they heard a dying man wish them whatever they wanted.

  Twenty years after entering Neil Dellacroce’s world, Gotti was in command of it. Neil would survive another five months, time enough for the man acting in his stead to grow accustomed to his place.

  One of Gotti’s first challenges was solving a problem between a dead loan shark and a blind bookmaker. The family of the loan shark, who died of natural causes, felt it was entitled to a share of the gambling operations he had built up. Gotti called in the blind bookmaker, who worked for the loan shark, and said he should “do the right thing” and pay the man’s family $1,000 a week, to be divided equally among his former wives and children.

  “[He’s] the best [bookie] in the country,” Gotti said after the blind man left. “He takes $250,000 [in bets] a night.”

  As always, Gotti seemed as prone to violence as to diplomacy on some problems. Late in July, the state Task Force bug overheard him urging ill will on a pizza shop operator.

  “Why didn’t you give him a beatin’ then?” Gotti asked a crew member.

  “Well, ’cause uh … ”

  “I told ya. Forget this other shit. Give him a fuckin’ beatin’.”

  “Well the, uh, I was waiting to hear from you.”

  “I told you yesterday … what are you, Chinese? Hit ’im. This guy’s nobody, and if he’s somebody, I don’t give a fuck.”

  And so it went that summer and early fall. Gotti farmed out a $20,000 shylock collection to a New Jersey soldier who needed a payday; he assured a contractor he would help him collect a job payment; he told a garment-district trucker: “If they’re embarrassing you now, I promise you they’ll apologize tomorrow and you’ll get the matter settled.”

  Gotti was riding high—at one point, he was even winning at the track. And when he won, he didn’t appreciate it when his winnings were miscalculated, as he demonstrated when he called a runner for a Manhattan bookmaker and asked about his “figure” for the week.

  “Twenty-five [hundred],” the runner said.

  “Your ass, twenty-five.”

  “Why, why my ass?”

  “Because it’s thirty-five fifty, tell him.”

  “All right.”

  “Six winners and two losers, the asshole, tell him.”

  “Six winners and two losers.”

  “Yeah, that fuckin’ idiot mother fucker that he is.”

  When he started losing again, Gotti went into a rage about bookmakers. “I can’t wish them cancer ’cause I’m half a bookmaker myself. I got three guys hanging around me. Otherwise, I wish ’em all cancer.”

  In September, Gotti was notified he had been overheard on the Neil bug. “The FBI is all over the place,” he said at the Bergin annex, which was about the only Family place the FBI wasn’t all over.

  State Task Force cops, however, were watching as a parade of Gambinos and other Family men were calling on Gotti, who was heard to complain that Angelo and others should be helping him out more as he tried to deal with “good fellows from all over the country.”

  “They all come to me,” Gotti said. “I ain’t got nobody here. I got to listen to everybody. I forget what things there are. I write notes to myself.”

  That month, Willie Boy Johnson, still in segregated confinement, forgot two important things: that the authorities at the Metropolitan Correctional Center sometimes tape phone calls; and that the people he was locked up with were professional informers. And so Willie Boy was taped while calling his son and arranging a heroin deal. The DEA set up the son and arrested him as he turned over $25,000 to an undercover agent. Father and son were indicted.

  Willie Boy, as Wahoo, always told the FBI that he and John Gotti were not part of any drug deals. Billy Battista, as BQ, always said Willie Boy and Johnny Boy were part of the Angelo crowd.

  In October, Barry Slotnick told Judge Nickerson that Neil would most likely be dead by December 2, when the Dellacroce-Gotti trial was scheduled to start.

  If Neil died, Gotti would become the lead defendant in the case; his name would be at the top of all court papers. Some assumed that Slotnick, who had defended many RICO cases, would then begin representing Gotti and become the lead attorney while Cutler dropped down to one of the lesser defendants. But they didn’t know of the friendship developing between the two dynamos out of Brooklyn, John Gotti and Bruce Cutler; they didn’t know Gotti didn’t care that Cutler had never defended a RICO case, and had lost his only federal trial.

  Around Thanksgiving, in the aftermath of a murder, Cutler dispelled any doubt about who would be lead attorney, and thus get his name in the newspapers hundreds more times.

  The year before, in Howard Beach, a young man named John Vulcano Jr. had been shot in front of his girlfriend’s house as he changed a slashed tire. En route to the hospital, Vulcano was told he would not live and he told Detective John Daly that the man who shot him was John Gurino Jr., whose uncles ran the Arc Plumbing Company. Vulcano and Gurino had been arrested together in a truck filled with illegal fireworks in 1982, but had since fallen out.

  The day of the incident, Detective Daly took Gurino into custody and then to the hospital, where Vulcano identified him as the man who had shot him. Gurino was charged with murder not long after Vulcano died.

  Days later, Willie Boy told the FBI that Angelo and Gene “were trying to help [Gurino] out,” and soon Slotnick’s partner, Cutler, former deputy chief of homicide in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, was defending Gurino. Slotnick had a big mob practice and had recruited Cutler after beating him in a case in which several Hasidim—member of a Jewish sect—were charged with beating a black man to near death.

  Now, in November 1985, as the trial got underway, Vic Juliano, an investigator for Slotnick and Cutler, visited Vulcano’s girlfriend to question her about the case. The next morning, she told assistant D.A. James Quinn that her boyfriend, Vulcano, told her before he died that he had lied about Gurino. Until this time, she had refused to discuss Vulcano with the A.D.A., but now she became a witness for Gurino. A group from Bergin attended the trial every day—to see and be seen.

  “They had thirty or forty people in court staring at the jury for days,” said Quinn. “I never saw a jury that frightened when they came in to give their verdict, and they acquitted.”

  In one of the many curtain-raising articles preceding the Gotti trial, Cutler would cite his performance in the Gurino trial as the reason why he became Gotti’s trial attorney. He said the interested Bergin observers were “amazed at how great the performance was. They joked, ‘No wonder you’re Barry Slotnick’s partner. With you around, who needs Barry Slotnick?’”

  On December 2, 1985, the day the Dellacroce-Gotti trial had been scheduled to start, Neil beat the case. The 71-year-old underboss, the Family peacekeeper, passed away at Mary Immaculate Hospital in Jamaica, Queens.

  The former Albert Anastasia gunman whose ambition was blocked by the blood bond between Carlo Gambino and Paul Castellano had entered the hospital two weeks earlier using the name Timothy O’Neil; he liked that alias more than the name E. Grillo, in which his home telephone was listed. Obituary writers noted that his name, Aniello Dellacroce, meant “Little Lamb of the Cross.”

  Neil’s death was the beginning of “the last stage”—his term for the penultimate chapter in the Angelo tapes story.

  On December 3, John Gotti was spotted by detectives walking up and down Mulberry Street in Manhattan with Frank DeCicco and other capos, to be sure to avoid bugs. On December 4, at Neil’s wake, Neil’s protégé was treated like a grieving son, according to the surveillants.

  The Pope did not attend the wake. He might have felt he wasn’t wanted; he might have felt the certain publicity would hurt him in his stolen-car trial, which had gotten underway; he might have simply wished to defer to Gotti. Whatever he felt, his judgment was not good. The other mob was astou
nded he did not pay his respects—wakes were a serious ritual. Gotti, who regarded Thomas Bilotti as a “fuckin’ lugheaded scumbag,” had, even so, recently gone to a wake for Bilotti’s mother.

  In a few days, Castellano’s error was compounded—at least in the view from Queens—by naming Thomas Bilotti as underboss. And in a few more days, of course, Paul Castellano and the other guy, Bilotti, would be popped and their families would be planning wakes.

  Thomas Gambino, who had gone to an exclusive prep school with future congressmen and rulers of countries, mourned the loss of his uncle, but he wasn’t about to challenge anybody from Queens. He would be happy with all the companies he owned in the Manhattan garment district.

  The murders set off a torrent of publicity, but readers never learned that a few days after the executions, Gotti was overheard on the Nice N EZ bug saying that whoever was with the Pope that day was to be killed, too. But Gotti and Angelo also were in the dark; they did not know that—at least for the past year—Castellano had been occasionally sitting up late at night—reading transcripts of Angelo’s heroin tapes.

  Paul, who had told Neil to watch out for people telling stories, obtained the transcripts legally; they had surfaced in pretrial motions connected to Angelo’s case. Under his rules, he had all the evidence he needed, but beset by his own burdens, he did not summon the will to act against the Bergin crew; he had a final test of loyalty, though, and its failing grade figured in Bilotti’s promotion.

  On December 16, as he and Bilotti got out of the Lincoln at Sparks Steak House—to have dinner with DeCicco, Failla, and two other men, one of whom didn’t show—Castellano was well aware of the anxiety in Queens. Still, he wasn’t afraid. It was just another business meeting with Family at a crowded restaurant in the middle of Manhattan during the season of goodwill.