Mob Star

by Gene Mustain

  At the end of his reign, the Pope had forgotten the nature of his realm.

  24

  LET THE PLAY BEGIN

  BY AUGUST 18, 1986, JOHN GOTTI was the boss behind bars, thanks to a double-parking dispute with a refrigerator mechanic.

  He rose early from his bed in the federal prison in Manhattan, the Metropolitan Correctional Center. He had unfinished business in Brooklyn—his RICO trial. It had been adjourned in April after Judge Nickerson, in the wake of the bomb-murder of new underboss Frank DeCicco, had trouble finding jurors willing and able to serve.

  As Gotti showered, federal marshals were arriving to take him to court. In an hour, he would get into a van and enter the world outside for the first time since May, when his bail was revoked because Romual Piecyk was intimidated into forgetting who had assaulted him outside the Cozy Corner Bar.

  In the meantime, more big headlines had appeared in the papers. At a hearing to decide whether Angelo Ruggiero’s bail should be revoked, an FBI agent testified that an informant said that Gotti and Angelo choreographed the Sparks murders. His freedom on the line, Angelo complained, “This is like Russia.” Later, when a judge ordered him to jail, Angelo lost his temper and appeared to threaten a prosecutor when he pointed his finger and said, “Go home and celebrate with your family! Go ahead and laugh!”

  Other news hadn’t been so good either. As the Colombo Family hierarchy case ended in guilty verdicts for all, the Gambino hierarchy case had been indicted. With Paul and Neil dead, and with Gotti eliminated from the Gambino case because of Giacalone, the lead defendants were consigliere Joe N. Gallo and DeCicco’s replacement, Joseph Armone. Family capos Joseph Corrao and James Failla—as well as Angelo—also were indicted. As “John Doe,” Gotti was merely an unindicted co-conspirator.

  Gotti had tried to focus on the matter at hand: his date with Diane Giacalone. Over the summer, at the MCC, long strategy sessions with Bruce Cutler and attorneys for the other defendants were held. One burden was the guilty plea by Armond Dellacroce after his father died. He had disappeared a few months later, prior to sentencing, but his plea would be introduced as evidence. He had also admitted that the Gambino Family existed, that it was an illegal RICO enterprise, and that he had conspired with John Gotti and the others to commit enterprise crimes.

  “I conspired with others known to me for gambling, loan-sharking,” Armond had told Judge Nickerson.

  After Armond failed to appear for sentencing, another defendant came to court to plead guilty, but Leonard DiMaria backed out at the last moment. DiMaria and Nicholas Corozzo were two other guys thrown into the case against the other mob to show a conspiracy of crews—both reporting to Dellacroce.

  DiMaria bolted when he realized what his plea meant. His attorney, Frank Lopez, explained to Nickerson: “He is willing to say that he did these acts [but] he doesn’t want to be placed in a position that he has admitted to being a member of the Gambino Crime Family.”

  DiMaria’s decision to stay in the fold was part of the strategy—it would be a joint defense—that was emerging at Gotti’s behest. A lawyer’s instinct is to pursue a client’s best interest, but in this case the interests were diverse. Though each defendant was accused of conspiracy and racketeering, individual “predicate acts” were very different. For instance, the other guys, DiMaria and Corrozo, were not accused of any violent crimes, unlike Gotti and the rest, who were named in three murders—McBratney, Gelb, and Plate. Still, Gotti would have his joint defense.

  After his shower at the MCC, Gotti donned a blue, tailored, $1,800 double-breasted suit, similar to the gray one he was wearing in a photograph accompanying a recent New York magazine cover story on “The New Godfather.” In July, Cutler had asked Nickerson to let Gotti come to Cutler’s office for two hours every morning so they could prepare for trial, strategically and sartorially.

  “My client takes great pride in his appearance,” Cutler had said. “Physically coming into court haggard and worn and not impeccably attired does him a disservice when he is fighting for his life.”

  The judge had said no, but somehow Gotti would manage to come into court every day dressed for success in a series of chief-executive-officer ensembles that turned reporters into fashion writers. In fact, as the trial progressed, Cutler would begin to resemble his client, from his crisp white collars down to his see-through hose, which always matched his shoes.

  As Gotti checked himself in the prison mirror on August 18, two codefendants in the MCC also were getting ready. One was DiMaria, already serving time for one of the predicate acts he was accused of in Giacalone’s RICO case: smuggling contraband cigarettes. The other was Willie Boy Johnson, serving time for denying he was Wahoo and not becoming a witness.

  Around 8:30 A.M., after breakfast, all three men were led to the van for the trip to the United States Court House in Brooklyn. For the next seven months, Wahoo and the man he ratted out rode to court together. Willie Boy acted as if nothing was wrong, and so did Gotti.

  In Courtroom No. 11, a modern arena of polished mahogany and marble, the trial was about to begin. The lead defendant, after coming into the courthouse in handcuffs and riding up a back elevator, entered with a smile, and defendants out on bail greeted him with kisses and hugs, the start of a daily ritual.

  After some debate, the defense table was realigned into a backward “L”; Willie Boy ended up a seat away from Johnny Boy, along the tall line of the reverse “L,” facing the jury box across the room. Willie Boy was not ostracized; in fact, he was welcomed home because, when it counted most, he stood up to the pressure and did not become a witness. He and Gotti ate lunch together each day.

  Diane Giacalone and co-prosecutor John Gleeson occupied a table directly in front of the jury box; Cutler objected, to no avail. Once the trial began, defense lawyers would often accuse the prosecutors of playing to the jury, as if they wouldn’t think of it.

  Playing to the jury was what the trial would be about. It would not be a search for truth, but a search for freedom, and for reputation. The jury would hear a million facts—the trial transcript would run 18,250 pages—and it would be impossible to keep a line on them. The facts would arrive out of sequence because of delays brought on by illness, bad weather, and even a railroad strike. And at the end of many days, after some turns in the defense blender, the facts would make hardly any sense.

  Even so, it was a mob case, and the government wasn’t losing any lately. Now that the boss of the biggest Family was taking his turn in the dock, the media was playing it big; Gotti had more charisma than the usual “old fucks.” The hoopla was on the minds of the defense attorneys, seven wise men and a very wise woman in the service of seven wiseguys, as jury selection began.

  “The government and press have made John Gotti the most feared man in America today,” one lawyer told the judge during a salvo of last-minute pretrial motions. “This case against Gotti is the biggest media event since World War II,” said another.

  The press ignored most of the lawyers’ agonizing and concentrated on Gotti: Would he say anything?

  Around noon, after a squabble over where the defendants could eat lunch, pens scurried across pads when Gotti grumbled sarcastically, “Judge, why don’t we just not eat? Why should we eat? We don’t deserve to eat.”

  It was his only public remark of the day, and it was reported like a pronouncement. No matter how innocuous his words were, Gotti’s flash and dash, combined with his presumed treachery and violence, was regarded as good for circulation and ratings. In a few weeks, in fact, the “Dapper Don,” an unknown Queens capo the year before, would appear on the cover of Time, in one of Andy Warhol’s last drawings.

  The chief correspondent of Soviet television and radio even came by to see the man about whom so many were saying so much.

  “If I were the director of a Godfather movie, I would be happy to find someone who looks just like him,” said Vladimir P. Dounaev, who had interviewed Henry Kissinger the day before. In a sly punch at t
he American way, Dounaev added: “I am a bit puzzled, however, why men like him in your country always seem to have the best lawyers.”

  Romual Piecyk, the refrigerator man, was another surprise visitor. He knew that—despite his retractions—he was the reason why Gotti was in jail. He tried to see Nickerson, to urge him to be nice to Mr. Gotti, but Nickerson told him to put whatever he had to say in writing. Piecyk, however, held a press conference outside the courthouse and twisted in the wind.

  “I honestly feel Mr. Gotti should be out on bail. I was never threatened or harassed or intimidated by Mr. Gotti.”

  In such a climate, Nickerson had to pick a jury. He had decided, in the aftermath of DeCicco’s death, to seat an anonymous jury, a phenomenon in many Family cases. He began by having potential jurors complete a questionnaire to detect bias and knowledge of the case. Then he called them into the courtroom one by one to introduce the cast and ask more questions. Anyone aware of the case wasn’t automatically rejected; the test was having an open mind, a willingness to base a verdict on a million facts.

  The routine took a month, mainly because many potential jurors plainly wanted to be elsewhere and gave disingenuous answers. The seven wise men ranted and raved throughout the ordeal, saying, on the one hand, the press made it impossible to find an impartial jury and, on the other, anybody who hadn’t heard about the case was too dumb to be on a jury.

  “Anyone with half a brain has to have read about my client even if they read the paper only once a month,” said Cutler.

  Finally, on September 16, a jury of 6 men and 6 women was picked from a pool of 28 approved by Nickerson. The defense had 10 automatic challenges, the government 6. All the defense selections were subject to a veto by Gotti, the team’s quarterback. Because the choices were so limited, Cutler complained that a nurse’s aide—who made it onto the jury—was so “uninformed” she wasn’t “from the planet we’re from.”

  A pretty Italian-American woman, age 24, was one of Gotti’s personal choices. She was Brooklyn born and bred, and single. She was “The Girl.” The defense gave others nicknames, too, based on who or what they looked like. A black man was “Willie Mays.” An ex-marine was “Larry King,” after the talk show host. Another Italian-American woman was “The Heavy Lady.” A man who the defense thought was against it from the start was “Death.”

  The jury also included another black, another ex-marine and another Italian-American. By and large, the jurors were middle age, middle class, and middle brow and they were about to embark on a raucous, memorable half-year journey through the world of John Gotti, hardly one of their peers.

  Opening statements, the time to color the case, were held on September 25. Giacalone showed up in a power red suit, and thus the “real Italian lady” became “The Lady in Red.”

  “Good morning,” she told the jury. “Jimmy McBratney was a big man.” She had chosen to begin her effort to put Gotti away for the rest of his life by recreating a scene in Snoope’s Bar on Staten Island 13 years ago:

  “This was no simple barroom brawl. It was part of a pattern of criminal activity … John Gotti killed Jimmy McBratney out of ambition—ambition to have himself in an organization known as the Gambino Crime Family.”

  Giacalone went to a blackboard to draw a Family tree. She explained the two counts in the indictment: the first charged a conspiracy, an agreement, to commit crimes; the second charged racketeering through commission of specific crimes. She warned that the witnesses she would call as to both counts were “just horrible people.”

  After 90 minutes of earnest argument, Giacalone sat down and Bruce Cutler got up with a fury. Settling back to watch the performance from the other end of the defense table was Barry Slotnick, who was representing John Carneglia. Cutler—“Who needs Barry Slotnick?”—had recently left the law firm of Slotnick and Cutler.

  Cutler, prowling like the champion wrestler he formerly was, said Giacalone’s statements were “half-truths and lies.” Her case was a “fantasy.” He went over to her blackboard and erased the Family tree because “it tells you about a secret underworld that doesn’t exist.”

  Erasing the blackboard was a two-point reversal, and now Cutler came in low for a takedown. His client wasn’t hooked up to any enterprise! The government just didn’t like him because of his lifestyle! But Gotti grew up poor, was “denied Harvard,” and so he ran with old friends, people like—here came a name that didn’t mean anything to the jury—Angelo Ruggiero.

  “What’s wrong about that?”

  The Bergin Hunt and Fish Club was not a “nefarious place” but a social club where nuns, women, and children came! The government would use a gang of murderers and drug dealers—perish the thought that John Gotti would even know drug dealers!—to lie about a man whose only family was his wife and kids! The government didn’t like Gotti because he cursed and placed bets and took pride in his appearance!

  “So when he sits there resplendent in his suit, it’s not out of being bold! It is out of pride; that’s what made this country great!”

  Time for a big finish. The indictment “stinks” and a “fancy wine dressing” called RICO doesn’t make it taste better! “It still is rancid! It’s still rotten! It still makes you retch and vomit!” Cutler grabbed a copy of the indictment and—shouting “This is where it belongs!”—slam-dunked it into a waste can.

  Veins still bulging, Cutler walked back to the defense table and sat down next to his client, who shook his hand.

  The stage was set. Let the play begin.

  25

  BRUCIFICATION

  IN ACT I, IT BECAME CLEAR: If John Gotti were a lawyer, he would be a Bruce Cutler.

  “Hit ’im … hit him with a baseball bat. I want that as soon as you find this guy on the floor, you give ’im a beatin’.”

  That was Gotti, in 1985 on the Nice N EZ bug, telling a minion how to handle a pizza-shop owner, and apart from the bat, it was the way Cutler handled witnesses at Gotti’s trial; anyone with anything bad to say, one defendant later said, was “Brucified.”

  All lawyers in the case were adroit cross-examiners, but none insulted and rattled witnesses, and then pounded them to a pulp, the way Cutler did. Throughout, he had an air, a swagger, a look that said, “I’m great and you’re a piece of shit.”

  Judge Nickerson, reluctant to use his authority, let Cutler get away with courtroom murder. Cutler punched after the bell and below the belt; he called Giacalone a tramp and got a witness to call her “a slut and a blow job.” When it seemed the judge might slap him down, Cutler drew back, apologized, and promised to be good, usually after accomplishing what he wanted, an unfair question, an insulting remark, a sly inference, a gambit for the jury—which ultimately elected “Larry King” its foreman.

  On the first day of testimony, Cutler let Nickerson know that John Gotti wanted to know and hear everything that was to go on. He didn’t want the judge and lawyers to hold many sidebar conferences. “It’s our position we’d like to keep sidebars to an absolute minimum,” Cutler said, except for “an emergency situation.”

  The Gotti trial would have many emergencies—every day.

  Cutler was only one of the able lawyers on the defense team. Their strategy was simple—show the case is a lie. It was unveiled early in the trial by the brothers Santangelo, Michael and George, and Susan Kellman, who represented the other guys, Leonard DiMaria and Nicholas Corozzo.

  As the prosecution set the scene with several police witnesses, the Santangelo brothers chopped away. At the outset of their careers, they were Legal Aid Society lawyers—working for the poor—but now they were well-to-do gunslingers, and every time they stood to cross-examine a witness, they dripped contempt for the case, implying that every cop and agent was lying or merely mouthing facts from the ambitious table of Diane Giacalone, “that lady in red.”

  Her case did have problems. One was hardheaded Edward Maloney, once part of a kidnapping gang with James McBratney, the man Gotti helped kill. He was the first m
ajor witness to be Brucified.

  Maloney was an easy target—it was hard to figure out why he was testifying. Having failed to get Willie Boy Johnson or Billy Battista as witnesses, and anticipating the defense would clobber Polisi and Cardinali, Giacalone put witnesses on the stand who didn’t have much to offer, except their own terrible résumés.

  In his questioning of Maloney, Cutler established with a rapid volley of questions that Maloney had spent half his life in prison for kidnapping, armed robbery, and other violent crimes. Then he raised his eyes from a rap sheet he was reading and, granting Maloney a look for the first time, shouted:

  “You’d agree with me, sir, you are a menace and have always been, haven’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Were you a menace to society when you went into jewelry stores and held people up with a loaded gun?”

  “Yes.”

  Through more questions—accompanied by smirks, sneers, and mocking chuckles—Cutler set up how “a bum” like Maloney was given immunity, wired up, and sent out to catch a small-timer like Philip Cestaro, the bookmaker at the Cozy Corner Bar.

  “Did you ever meet John Gotti in your life, sir?”

  Cutler turned toward the jury. A look of disgust. Then of wonder. And now triumph.

  “No,” Maloney said.

  Giacalone had wanted Maloney to testify that he was targeted for murder because he and McBratney had kidnapped mobsters. But before Brucification began, Nickerson accepted a defense motion that the recording in which Maloney said Gotti “got his wings by whacking” out McBratney should not be played, because FBI agent Edward Woods had spoon-fed the idea to Maloney. There was no doubt that Gotti had helped to kill McBratney, but the jury had to wonder: What was the motive? Was it for the enterprise? Or a bar fight?

  The jurors got to hear only harmless conversations between Maloney and Cestaro.