Mob Star

by Gene Mustain

  In the same conversation in which he grandly talked about building a legacy that could never be broken, Gotti told George Remini, one of Tommy’s men, that he would appoint only quality men to Tommy’s crew—not “hotheads” or “scumbags.” He also ordered Remini to act as the crew’s capo in sitdowns requiring a menacing nature.

  “Tommy don’t know how to handle that. He’s a sweetheart for everything else, but you would know how to handle it, Georgie.”

  Putting Tommy into a deeper hole, Gotti also said that since Tommy had been so supportive after Sparks, he would treat him as an insider. “I told Tommy, ‘Whatever we do, I want you to know, even if it’s bad, off-color. I want you to know it from us. This way here, you’re part of it.’”

  In the end, Tommy was called before the grand jury four times, the last just before Gotti was indicted in the O’Connor case. He seemed relaxed when prosecutor Leonard Michaels asked about his boyhood, his education, and his business empire in Manhattan’s Garment Center. Tommy and his even more low-key brothers Joseph and Carlo Jr. controlled several trucking, leasing, and manufacturing firms that employed 700 people and grossed more than $30 million annually.

  Tommy began to prevaricate when he said he had no idea why his companies—which were almost all non-union—were never victimized by union or Mafia shakedown artists, when such was part of the history of the Garment Center. He began stirring in his seat and blinking rapidly when prosecutor Michaels turned to the taped conversation between Gotti and Remini.

  “I don’t know what is in Mr. Gotti’s head,” Tommy said.

  When Michaels asked about the Sparks shootings, Tommy even refused to refer to them as murders. “I know my uncle was found dead on the street. As far as I am concerned, it was an uncomfortable time in my life. I lost my uncle and that’s it.”

  Michaels pressed on; Tommy’s answers began sounding even more evasive and nonsensical. He recalled events from more than four decades before, but not a meeting with Gotti the night before his first grand jury appearance. He admitted he visited Gotti regularly at some social club, but couldn’t recall its name, what it looked like, where it was, or the names of many men he saw there.

  Tommy’s bobbing and weaving and outright lies provided plenty for a perjury charge, or so Maloney and McDonald decided. Tommy was indicted—and, after his arrest by Gambino agents, handcuffed for the first time in his life.

  Tommy’s lawyers crafted a trial defense relying on an appeal to jurors that the polite gentleman before them was singled out only because of his infamous father and that he happened to know John Gotti, the real target of the case. They thought the case a sure winner, with only slight damage to Gotti, but Gotti was worried; the Teflon Don was starting to feel besieged. The O’Connor case, with its virtual life penalty, was before him; and now he knew that two federal grand juries were behind him, no doubt in league with the FBI, coming at him with who-knew-what kind of cases.

  “They’re gonna keep comin’ until they get something, get a motherfuckin’ scumbag rat to say what they want,” he ranted to Sammy one day. “It’s gonna cost me a fuckin’ fortune to fight these motherfuckers off.”

  The mounting pressure made Gotti more wary than ever about surveillance. But it was impossible for him to be like Chin Gigante, hiding out and faking craziness in public. Gotti enjoyed meeting his men and holding forth in public. It was how he showed power, and reveled in it. As law-enforcement recordings already showed, it also was difficult for him to control his speech. He spoke in big waves, leaping from one subject to the next, quoting himself and others, imagining conversations he intended to have or would have had. This made it sometimes hard to understand him, but also hard for him to edit remarks that might cause trouble if cops and agents were listening.

  His verbal exuberance and his constant worry about surveillance led to walk-talks. But Gotti feared that technology rendered walk-talks less than foolproof. The weather also made them impractical at times. More than almost anyone, Gotti needed a place where he felt safe to talk. Starting earlier, but more frequently beginning in 1989, he began feeling safe in two.

  The first was a hallway leading to private apartments above the Ravenite. A door in the club opened onto a rear landing of the hallway, and Gotti could loiter there without anyone outside the club seeing him. He still spoke in low whispers, but about things he never would have spoken about in the club itself.

  The second, and more important, place was a small apartment two floors above the club. It was the home of 74-year-old Nettie Cirelli, widow of a Gambino soldier who was Neil’s driver and the Ravenite’s caretaker. Whenever Gotti wanted to use her home for some secret talk, he would give Nettie’s nephew and the club’s new caretaker a few dollars and he would tell Nettie to go shopping.

  This occurred first in 1986. Gotti had used it sparingly since, and only for meetings with men such as Sammy, Tommy Gambino, and Frank LoCascio. Sammy told Gotti the apartment violated conventional wisdom against speaking in confined places, but Gotti said if Nettie’s was bugged, he would already be in jail. Even so, Gotti and his guests usually turned on her stereo to try and muffle their voices.

  Gotti’s secret places were why Gambino squad agents housed in separate video and audio “plants” frequently argued with each other. The audio plant agents would tell their video counterparts that Gotti could not be in the club during some of the times the video team reported him to be there. Even amid the jumble of voices, they would have overheard some sound from his, so the video agents must have been dozing on the job and failed to notice Gotti had left the club.

  Sometimes, the video agents would see with their own eyes the proof that Gotti was inside, which was him walking out the door of the Ravenite. Then it would be their turn to question the alertness of audio plant colleagues.

  The video agents were certain they were capturing and helping to identify all the important people in Gotti’s life. On occasion, they also were treated to the sight of many older men falling over themselves to greet a much younger man who frequently came to the Ravenite wearing a Walkman.

  The younger man was the boss’s son, John A. Gotti, and now maybe the youngest “made man” in New York. His father, as a Christmas present in 1988, inducted “Junior” into the Family amid the cronyism whispers one might expect. Junior now had his own crew active in car theft, construction, and extortion. He co-owned or owned expensive properties in two states, including a prosperous trucking company.

  At the time, Sammy was among those who whispered. But after the O’Connor case was indicted, and federal grand jury pressure began to mount, he began to believe that by inducting his son, Gotti was being shrewd—cementing his control through his son, in case he had to go to prison.

  Junior was still prone to juvenile behavior, however. In June of 1989, he and some body-building pals attacked three men in a disco after one objected to one of the pals ogling his wife. It was Junior’s third barroom arrest in six years. The media yukked the story up for a few days; but the wife was actually hurt when someone slugged her, too. Richard Rehbock—the lawyer who moved so quickly from the Willie Boy corner to the Gotti—was called in to try and make the case go away.

  Rehbock did not have to do much. In an echo of cases involving Junior and his dad, the victims forgot who attacked them. Though they had identified the assailants for police that night, they were unable to identify them in later meetings with prosecutors.

  The outcome was about the only good news for Gotti that summer. He was named lead defendant in a federal civil racketeering lawsuit aimed at breaking the Mafia’s hold on the private-sanitation industry. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office began an investigation preparatory to a similar suit against Gotti and Mafia control in the Garment Center. Even his Fourth of July party was a bust: So many cops were sent to Ozone Park that Gotti’s men managed to fire off only a few rockets from a nearby railroad trestle.

  The worst news, by far, came late in June. Gotti learned that the underboss of
the Philadelphia Family, Philip Leonetti, had “rolled over” and started talking to the FBI. It was shocking on many levels—Leonetti was the first underboss of a major Family to turn informer—but the level that mattered most was that in 1986, shortly after Sparks, Gotti had met with Leonetti and in vague terms acknowledged he was involved.

  He could not recall his exact words, but remembered leaving a strong impression that it was a shoot-or-be-shot situation. But who knew what words Leonetti would recall?

  “Can you believe this?” Gotti railed at Sammy. “A fuckin’ underboss goes and rats.”

  “Whatever he says, he’ll be wingin’ it.”

  “Mother-fucking rats. We’re surrounded by mother-fucking rats.”

  Gotti was overstating the matter—but not by much. In addition to its video and audio plants, the Gambino squad had launched another operation against him—and that was to increase its stable of informants. By 1989, at least nine men were meeting secretly with agents about Gotti. It was an unusually large informant pool that showed Gotti was resented and disliked more than he could conceive.

  The information Bruce Mouw and George Gabriel wanted most was where Gotti felt safe to talk. At first, they suspected a Tommy Gambino-owned office in the Garment Center, then one in Gotti friend Lewis Kasman’s building in the same area, but he never used either enough to indicate either was the place. Inevitably, all suspicions led back to the Ravenite, but where and how? In 1986, an early informant had insisted Gotti used an apartment above the Ravenite for an important meeting.

  But only a little old lady, the widow Nettie Cirelli, lived there. The federal rules governing surveillance applications are expansive, but a judge needed more than this to allow the FBI to send a black-bag squad sneaking into the home of a 74-year-old widow not suspected of any crime.

  The information gathered dust in FBI files. The informants did not mention the apartment again—not until three years later, after Tommy Gambino was arrested and accused of lying to a grand jury, and an informant simply code-named “Source C” told his control agent that Tommy, after making bail, had run right to the Ravenite to meet with Gotti in Nettie’s place.

  Suddenly, the decision to pressure Gotti by pressuring Tommy seemed a better ploy than anyone had imagined. Agents quickly checked the informant’s claim against video-plant logs on the day in question, and there it was: a notation for the time Gotti and Tommy were spotted entering the club, but nothing for when they left, meaning they must have used an exit not covered by the video camera.

  Only two possibilities existed—a rear fire escape for tenants of apartments above the first floor, which was highly unlikely, and the Mulberry Street doorway that tenants used, which strongly suggested that Gotti and Tommy had indeed used Nettie’s place.

  The FBI pressed “Source C” and the others for details just when Gotti was feeling more in need of secret places to talk. The need for secrecy was already the one unbroken thread of his life—from the time he turned to a life of crime and had to keep secrets from the police, from agents, from his crew, from lawyers and jurors, from Paul, from Neil, and, not least, from wife Vicky, about a longtime affair he had with Neil’s out-of-wedlock daughter Shannon.

  The need for secrecy was a yoke, and it was tiring carrying it around, especially when some matters, such as Tommy’s arrest, demanded urgent focus. He knew the case against Tommy, coming in the wake of the O’Connor case and the reborn investigation of Sparks, was aimed at him. Events were piling up; the need for secrecy was great, but so was the need to talk.

  As he told Sammy, Gotti had used the apartment before, with no ill result; so he started using it again. Soon, its existence and use became an open secret among the 50 or so men who shaped up at the club three and sometimes four nights a week, and soon more informants were corroborating Source C. They also reported that Gotti sometimes stepped into the Ravenite hallway when he wanted to talk privately. The informants said they had seen it before, but more often now.

  “Now we know why the audio-plant guys couldn’t pick ’im up sometimes,” Mouw told Maloney, as they decided it was time to ask a federal judge to let the black-bag squad loose. The informants, backed up by evidence from the video logs, pushed gossipy information into solid probable cause justifying more electronic surveillance.

  The pessimism brought on by the unproductive bug inside the club now turned to optimism. “Sooner or later, you just know the big mouth’s gonna talk himself into a hole,” Maloney jubilantly predicted.

  By October of 1989, as the Gambino squad won approval to bug the hallway and the apartment, Gotti was using both regularly. The same “Special Operations” team that infiltrated the Ravenite itself almost two years before had no problem with the hallway; the bug was functional on October 15. For many reasons, Nettie’s place was not going to be so easy.

  “It’s obvious we can’t go in there at night, even if she’s a sound sleeper,” Mouw said as he, Gabriel, and team members mulled sneaky scenarios. “She might have a heart attack.”

  They agreed to wait and hope Nettie took a trip. They knew little about her, except that she was a widow who seemed to stay close to home, so they feared a long wait. Still, her home was such a potential asset it was best to be patient and devise a careful plan. If someone saw them going in, the target would be alerted and stop using the apartment.

  Agents began periodic surveillance—to learn where Nettie went on errands, and for how long. She never went far, nor for long. They monitored a pen register—a device that can be placed on a telephone without a court order because it merely lists incoming and outgoing calls—on her telephone, to find out when she stopped making and receiving calls at night and presumably fell asleep.

  Usually, she was on the phone every night, but usually no later than ten. Testing this, Gabriel once dialed her number at midnight, and quickly hung up when she wearily answered. Still, a post-midnight break-in was deemed too dangerous, for the effect the sudden sight of figures clad in black would have on her if she woke up.

  On November 19, the pen register showed that Nettie didn’t use the telephone all day. Knowing nothing, but feeling a hunch, Gabriel grew convinced she had taken a trip, perhaps to visit relatives for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. He waited one more day, and again the phone was silent. It was time to go.

  That night, after entering Nettie’s home and making sure she wasn’t there, the FBI’s break-in squad scouted it for where they thought visitors would sit and talk. They decided on the living room, which contained a couch and two chairs around a coffee table. The bug went into the ceiling, directly above the table. It was the right location.

  33

  TICKLING THE WIRE

  WITH HIS SECRET PLACES secretly bugged, it didn’t take Gotti long to begin talking himself into more trouble. Even before Nettie’s apartment was bugged, he was overheard on the Ravenite hallway bug in what amounted to obstruction of justice, a “predicate act” that could be used in a racketeering case. But over the next few months, in the hallway and then in Nettie’s, he opened a much more damning window on his world.

  He had help. Hoping to make him feel a need to talk, the Maloney-Mouw team contrived a legal squeeze play. The perjury case they had filed against Tommy Gambino after his grand jury lies gave them a perfect setup. The trial on those charges was set to start soon, and so George Gabriel served Gotti a subpoena requiring him to testify.

  The subpoena was part of a ploy known as “tickling the wire.” Its purpose was to make Gotti believe the Eastern District intended to ask Tommy’s trial judge to give Gotti immunity, forcing Gotti to either testify or go to jail—and to talk about this dilemma on tape. In any event, the subpoena would be withdrawn shortly before trial. For legal and strategic reasons, no one wanted to muddy the waters of a future case against Gotti by immunizing him in a comparatively minor perjury case.

  The subpoena had its desired effect. A few days later, an agitated Gotti huddled with acting underboss Frank LoCascio and key aid
es Jackie D’Amico and Joe Watts in the hallway. He said he had just learned that his lawyers Bruce Cutler and Jerry Shargel had met with Tommy’s lawyers and devised a plan calling on Tommy to plead guilty in the perjury case. This would moot the Gotti subpoena.

  Many clients might appreciate the sacrifice and ingenuity, but Gotti said the plan showed the lawyers did not understand for whom they toiled. He never permitted his men to plead guilty in an important case, even if it meant less worry for him and probably only six months behind bars for Tommy. “Now you tell Tommy to fight it,” Gotti said, quoting himself talking to Shargel. “Break their fuckin’ holes! And don’t worry about us going to jail. Me number one! I like jail better than I like the streets. And do what I’m tellin’ ya. And don’t ever have these kind of meetings again.”

  As agents monitoring the bug happily listened in, Gotti added more obstruction. Two other men who also had received “tickle-the-wire” subpoenas would not be allowed to testify either: “Nobody is taking the stand! Tell them to go fight! You go in there and break their fuckin’ heads. Don’t worry about us. Go in there and fight. Get my cell ready. … Nobody is taking the stand!” In a few weeks more, per the script, the subpoena against Gotti was withdrawn. On the other hand, Tommy Gambino went to trial—and won. His jurors agreed with his lawyer’s argument that Tommy was improperly targeted by a grand jury that really had John Gotti in mind. No one in the Eastern District was too upset. They had a bigger fish on the line. And on November 30, 1989, he hooked himself deeper when—for the first time since the men in black visited nine days before—he visited Nettie’s.

  He went there just after learning more bad news. In Brooklyn federal court earlier that day, Michael Coiro, the lawyer who defended him during his hijacking days, was found guilty of helping two other clients, Angelo and Gene, hide their heroin money.