Mob Star

by Gene Mustain

  Gotti, however, felt that what Traynor wanted to say about Giacalone was more important and of course, he prevailed.

  Traynor, age 40, took the stand on February 2, wearing a smirk and a pullover sweater. He promptly said that the prosecution had plied him with drugs to induce him to invent stories about the defendants. He said he was frequently “zonked out” when he appeared at Giacalone’s office for a preparation session.

  “I was so stoned I didn’t want to go home,” he said.

  It only got worse, as the defense “sucked the hate”—as the process was known—out of Matthew Traynor, who referred to Giacalone as “the woman with the stringy hair.” Finally, he cocked his fingers like a gun and pointed at her; he said when he told her he wanted to “get laid,” she “gave me her panties out of her bottom drawer and told me to facilitate myself.”

  The defense had put Giacalone on trial during the cross of Cardinali. Traynor was used to keep her there.

  “She said, ‘Make do with these,’” Traynor said.

  “She really wanted me to frame Mr. Gotti and the others,” he continued. “She didn’t like them … because many years earlier they had ridiculed her for being skinny when she used to walk through the neighborhood where they hung out.”

  But wait. At sidebar months earlier, a defense lawyer had accused Giacalone of “floating” an “absurd” story about walking past the Bergin as a schoolgirl. The Bergin wasn’t even in Ozone Park then!

  One fact for the judge, one fact for the jury.

  Traynor slugged on. He said that DEA agent Edward Magnuson had given him drugs and when he begged for more, he was sent to a doctor with a fat pad of Rx prescriptions and got Valium and codeine. He said he was so “zonked” that once he vomited all over Giacalone’s desk, and she screamed, “Get him out of here!” He said agents drove him around to sober him up.

  Over three days, Traynor was crossed, redirected, and recrossed. It added up to a numbing record of confusion and conflict, all for the get-Giacalone defense.

  After it was mercifully over, Nickerson, whose patience had ceased being a virtue, made his strongest statement about the defense—on a day when the trial was in recess, to a virtually empty courtroom. Nickerson finally spoke his mind after coprosecutor John Gleeson spoke his; Gleeson came into court to complain that the defense had gotten too personal.

  It had served a subpoena on a hospital for job records of Gleeson’s wife, a nurse. The doctor who prescribed the drugs for Traynor was on the staff of the same hospital. Gleeson, age 33, who left a big-time Manhattan law firm to become a federal prosecutor, told Nickerson the subpoena was “harassment,” pure and simple.

  Gleeson was speaking up and asking Nickerson to control the defense because the harassment had “reached outside the courtroom” to “someone very close to me for a reason that I think is patently pre-textural.” He said David DePetris had apologized for the defense, which was “appropriate” but not sufficient. He asked Nickerson “to exert some control” over a defense effort “to create issues of impropriety where none exist” in order “to take this jury’s eye off the ball.”

  DePetris showed up to take the heat for the defense, which had wanted to establish a link between the prosecution and Dr. Harold Schwartz, the doctor Traynor was sent to. DePetris told Nickerson he was unaware until late the day before that other defense attorneys had decided to try and make the link by causing a subpoena to be issued.

  “How is it conceivably relevant?” said Nickerson.

  “How the government got to Dr. Schwartz,” said DePetris. “Because the government got to Dr. Schwartz presumably through Mr. Gleeson’s wife.”

  “It is just so off the wall, completely off the wall,” Nickerson said about the notion that the United States government had to use Gleeson’s wife to get a doctor to write prescriptions for Traynor.

  Nickerson quashed the subpoena with words that showed how he felt, but not how he ever acted: “This case is not going to turn into any more of a circus than the defendants’ attorneys have already made it.”

  After calling 11 witnesses, the defense rested on February 11. Giacalone then announced she would call 17 witnesses for a rebuttal case.

  “Seventeen?” Nickerson wearily asked.

  At the six-month mark, everyone was weary, especially Larry King, Willie Mays, The Girl, and all the rest, who wanted to go back to being people again, not numbers. They had been told it would be a two-month trial.

  The defense, however, had succeeded in putting Giacalone on the defensive. She felt Traynor’s statements could not go unrebutted. She felt the jury had to see how reputations—hers, Dr. Schwartz’s, DEA agent Magnuson’s—had been besmirched on behalf of John Gotti.

  Over three more weeks, the 17 testified. Agents, prison officials, detectives, and Dr. Harold Schwartz, who did not know what lay ahead when he was asked a year earlier to examine a federal prisoner apparently suffering a loss of nerve.

  When he saw him, Schwartz said that Matthew Traynor was “suffering from a massive anxiety reaction” about testifying against Gotti. “He was pacing back and forth. He was sweating profusely. He was flushed. Very, very agitated.” The patient, the doctor added, was “very anxious” and “afraid for his life.” He feared he would say something that would help the defendants find him, and kill him, even if he were in the witness-protection program.

  Schwartz said Traynor was “embarrassed and humiliated” that he didn’t have the strength to be a stand-up guy, like Willie Boy Johnson was in the end. “He mentioned the phrase, ‘If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.’” Schwartz said he prescribed Valium and Tylenol with codeine for the pain Traynor felt from a separated shoulder. The drugs were given to prison officials, who dispensed them as indicated.

  That was direct and now Cutler got up, to indirect.

  As Schwartz tried to answer his questions, Cutler kept cutting him off to twist, shape, bend, and contort, which finally caused Gleeson to get personal, too.

  “I object to cutting off the witness,” Gleeson protested.

  “Yes,” said Nickerson.

  Cutler started Brucifying again.

  “Let him finish his answer, Mr. Cutler.”

  Cutler started up again, the same way.

  “I object to Mr. Cutler’s manner, which is peculiarly offensive,” said Gleeson.

  “[It] really isn’t helpful,” said Nickerson.

  “I am doing the best I can, Your Honor, I am not a doctor.”

  “You are a lawyer,” reminded Nickerson.

  “He is not a lawyer, either,” said Gleeson. His Cravath Swaine & Moore decorum had departed.

  Nickerson excused the jury to hear Willie Boy’s attorney, Richard Rehbock, sail away on a long discourse that ended this way: “This whole trial is not a search for the truth. It’s become a massive cover-up where they can do whatever they want and we are restricted from bringing out the truth for the jury.”

  It was a little too much, even for Nickerson, who didn’t even respond. He turned to Gleeson and Cutler and told them to cut the crap. Please. He wanted to bring the jury back in and get the damn case over with.

  “Please don’t make comments,” he said. “Hopefully, we are coming to the end of this trial—someday.”

  The jurors filed back. A few lawyers were sure they had recently seen signs of Life in Death. One was sure The Heavy Lady had been saying with her eyes, I know what you are doing, and it is working.

  Cutler started in on Schwartz again and kept on going even after Nickerson called for a sidebar.

  “I am going to ask you not to talk over me,” said Nickerson when he finally got Cutler’s attention.

  “I have not heard you.”

  “You have talked over my voice throughout the trial. I think it is most discourteous. I will not stand it anymore from you.”

  “I have not done it on purpose.”

  “You have done it constantly.”

  “Judge, I really don’t need this
in front of the jury. I don’t think that’s right. If I am talking over you in the heat of battle, so to speak, I apologize. But I didn’t hear you ask me to come up until you asked me to come up.”

  A few more exchanges and Nickerson said, “Let’s finish this. Please. Please. Let’s finish.”

  Then to the jury: “If you heard any comments made by anyone at the sidebar, please disregard them.”

  Later in the day, Cutler asked if Gotti could be excused from court on the same day that Nickerson was to meet the attorneys to decide what to tell the jury about the applicable law before it began deliberations.

  “I don’t mind,” Nickerson said. “All I want to emphasize to you, Mr. Gotti, I think it’s important to you …”

  “If I’m here I can say something?” said the boss who always had a lot to say.

  “No.”

  Well, then, forget about it.

  At the end of the rebuttal case, Gleeson came close to accusing Cutler of suborning perjury, so close the defense thought he had. Afterward, for the first time in 18,250 pages of trial transcript, Cutler remained quiet and asked another lawyer to respond to Gleeson’s comments.

  This revealing moment came during a discussion about the Cardinali-Cutler interview that was tape-recorded. The story that Traynor, who was in the MCC at the same time as Cardinali, told about that interview—that Cardinali told Cutler he lied to the grand jury—was why Giacalone dumped Traynor as a witness; she felt he was lying and that Cardinali had said no such thing. A tape would prove it and could be used to prosecute Traynor—and maybe Cutler.

  When Cutler spoke to Traynor, Gleeson charged, he “found a person” willing “to tell a lie to hurt the prosecution.” At the time, however, “Mr. Cutler had in his possession … proof that the lie he had at that point, that Traynor was telling at that point, wouldn’t work, wouldn’t fly.”

  Gleeson continued: “It turned out later on … Mr. Traynor came up with some more allegations against the government, some more and different ones, that wouldn’t be refuted by the tape that we believe exists.”

  “All right,” said Nickerson. “Who would like to be heard on the other side?”

  “Mr. Hoffman,” said Cutler.

  “Mr. Gleeson,” Jeffrey Hoffman began, “has indicated that he believed that Mr. Cutler had a witness who he knew would lie and that he suborned that witness’s perjury by calling the witness in that case,” said Hoffman.

  “That’s not what I understood him to say,” said Nickerson.

  “I didn’t say that,” said Gleeson.

  Gleeson didn’t say it, but he had inferred it, and after the trial, a grand jury would begin a perjury investigation.

  Nickerson ended the discussion by telling the lawyers not to destroy any tapes or notes.

  On March 2, for almost five hours, Diane Giacalone summed up her case. She was tired and even thinner than she was at the start of trial seven months earlier. Her voice was raspy and weak and several times she identified people using the wrong name.

  She played portions of tapes made at Neil’s house, when Neil booted a capo out of the family. But she was not allowed to play the parts featuring Gotti asking Angelo about La Cosa Nostra because the tapes were made after Gotti was indicted. Nonetheless, she said, the evidence showed the Gambino Family was a “frightening reality” whose members “exercised their power without regard to the law or human life.”

  Over at the defense table, two men dressed almost exactly alike, John Gotti and Bruce Cutler, sat stoically as Giacalone dealt with the million-facts problem. She said the jury’s job was “not to look at the pieces of the puzzle one at a time.” Rather, “each piece of evidence is to be considered in the context of the other pieces of evidence.”

  Now, it was Cutler’s turn. Like Gotti, he wore a gray double-breasted suit, white shirt, red tie, and matching pocket hanky. Only the shade of the suit was different as he rose to make a last pitch for his client. And now, for the first time in the trial, he turned down his volume and sounded like a discussion leader in a book circle.

  He pointed out that no witnesses had testified they saw Gotti commit a crime, or shared the proceeds of a crime with him, or were ordered by him to commit a crime.

  “You want to get John Gotti? Get some evidence on him. You want to bring him to trial some other place, go ahead and do so. Find that he did something wrong. Find a witness. Do it the right way. The ends do not justify the means.”

  The jury couldn’t convict John Gotti, Cutler said, merely because the government didn’t like his lifestyle.

  “The government is people. It’s my government, it’s John Gotti’s government. It’s your government. But it’s people. People do things wrong. You are the only shield we have against abuse of power, against tyranny.”

  The jurors deliberated for a week. They asked that parts of Cardinali’s testimony be read back, but not Traynor’s. That was considered good for the government. The day before they came in with a verdict, they asked for a chart prepared by the defense showing all the crimes committed by the witnesses. That was considered good for the defense. But it was all guesswork, as it always is.

  On Friday the 13th of March, juror No. 10, Larry King, the foreperson, sent a note to Judge Nickerson shortly after the lunch recess: “We have reached a unanimous verdict.” The agonizing wait for the only judgments that mattered was over.

  “We’re walking out of here,” John Gotti said with the surety of a man betting on a fixed race, as he and the others took their places one final time.

  The news that a verdict was in swept the courthouse and now the courtroom filled up as it did on the trial’s opening day. After so much farce, the play was ending on a moment of pure drama.

  All rise, please. Jury entering.

  In walked the keys to freedom, anonymous but so familiar by now. Eyes cast downward, they showed no emotion. They were a solemn file staying their secret to the end.

  Suddenly it was overwhelmingly quiet.

  “Would you take the verdict from the foreperson?” Nickerson asked his clerk, William Walsh.

  Walsh read from a form: “Count one, the conspiracy count, how do you find John Gotti, guilty or not guilty?”

  Larry King’s voice was diplomatically even: “Not guilty.”

  A collective gasp seemed to suck all the air out of the room. Gotti clenched his fist and suppressed a smile. What would the jury do with the others?

  “Count one, John Carneglia, how do you find?”

  “Not guilty.”

  Another gasp. And now whispers and murmuring. And an electric momentum as the clerk kept calling for the fates of the five others. And five more times, “Not guilty,” the words crackling like sparks from a downed power line.

  Gotti punched Cutler in the shoulder, but it wasn’t over yet. The jurors had said no as to a conspiracy, but what about the racketeering count? Would they even the score?

  “Count two. How do you find John Gotti?”

  “Not guilty.”

  Exultation at the defense table. Raised fists and cheers from the Family section. Disbelief on the press row. In front of the jury, sunken prosecutors. On the bench, a crumpled judge.

  Once again, around the table, the clerk kept calling, and the foreperson kept answering: “Not guilty.”

  “Justice!” someone screamed.

  Pandemonium now in the well of the court, on one side. Hugs, slaps and, suddenly a standing ovation by the defense for Larry King and the others.

  “Please don’t do that,” Nickerson said.

  Nickerson then ordered the release of John Gotti, and the release of the keys to his freedom—the jury—which had heard the facts and found reasonable doubt that Gotti and the others conspired to commit crimes for something called the Gambino Family.

  “Does the court exonerate all bail conditions for all defendants?” Jeffrey Hoffman asked.

  “Yes, of course.”

  Those three words brought the curtain down. And as the press rushe
d Gotti for reaction, Diane Giacalone and John Gleeson slipped away, silently.

  “Shame on them!” Gotti said, wagging his finger. “I’d like to see the verdict on them!”

  Gotti put off the press by saying he might talk later, but he had no intention of doing so. He might make pithy remarks, but he didn’t hold press conferences. Cutler would do that. Gotti was led out of the courtroom by the back way and taken down an elevator to clear up some paperwork at the federal marshal’s office, which Philip Messing of the Post had staked out.

  “I told you so,” Gotti told Messing.

  Gotti wanted to avoid the melee going on outside the main courthouse exit; surrounded by marshals, he headed toward a basement garage. Messing tagged along.

  “They’ll be ready to frame us again in two weeks,” Gotti said.

  Messing tried another question, but Gotti didn’t want to say much, so Messing asked the man with a penchant for sports betting which baseball teams would be the best in 1986.

  “Come on, you know how I do on those things. You don’t really want me to answer that.”

  For a few minutes, Gotti waited by the garage door for his driver to pull up. He fidgeted and paced; everything had happened so fast. One minute he was facing the rest of his life in prison, the next he was free, and now he was going home. So much had happened in his life, so fuckin’ much.

  Finally, his car pulled up and Gotti dashed out the door toward it; Post photographer Don Halasy captured him hopping over a curb, aided by a bodyguard.

  In the lobby of the courthouse, federal Strike Force prosecutor Laura Brevetti called her boss, Edward McDonald.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. “They beat the whole case.”

  McDonald looked out onto the street from his office, three floors up. He saw more cars pulling up to pick up the defense lawyers and other defendants who were shouting and punching air. He rummaged through his desk and found a copy of his memo predicting Gotti’s acquittal, glanced through it, and flung it across the room.