by Gene Mustain
Coiro had been arrested in the case with Angelo, Gene, and the rest in 1983, but his trial proceeded separately, and the Angelo tapes hurt him as much as everyone else.
“You’re not our lawyer, you’re one of us as far as we’re concerned,” Gene had said to Coiro.
“I know it, Gene, and I feel that way.”
Over the long pretrial, Coiro was defended gratis by Shargel. When it was time for trial, Shargel was busy elsewhere, and Cutler took over, setting up a duel with echoes of the Giacalone case. Cutler’s opponent was John Gleeson, her former assistant; much ill will remained between them, ever since Cutler called Giacalone a “slut” and Gleeson, in court, ridiculed Cutler—“he’s not a lawyer.”
Gleeson was starting to share Maloney’s belief—based on what they now knew about the attempted fixes in the heroin trials—that the case that shot Cutler to almost as much fame as Gotti was fixed. He thought Cutler should be in prison, not in magazine spreads. He believed Cutler suborned perjury in the Giacalone case by urging a defense witness to invent stories about Giacalone offering him drugs and her panties.
Gleeson now headed Maloney’s special-prosecutions unit. He was legally acute and relentless, and in the rematch with Cutler, substance overwhelmed style. Coiro was convicted.
Right after the verdict, Gleeson asked the judge to jail Coiro pending sentencing. The judge refused, ruling Coiro was unlikely to flee. Gleeson then said that Coiro should be barred from visiting places like the Ravenite, but the judge asked for a written motion the next day. After everyone left, Cutler visited the judge’s chambers to make a special, fateful request: Could he escort his beaten client to the Ravenite to seek solace from a man who meant the world to him, John Gotti?
The judge, as much in the dark about the Ravenite bugs as Cutler, said yes—and Cutler took Coiro straight to the Ravenite and more trouble.
While Cutler stayed downstairs, Coiro entered Nettie’s with Gotti, Sammy, and LoCascio. Audio-plant agents were on high alert because the video agents had reported the arrival of the Gambino troika, and now Cutler and Coiro, suggesting this might be one of those times Gotti felt a need for secrecy.
The audio agents fought their excitement when the voices of Gotti and Sammy gossiping about nonsense arrived clearly into their headsets. One of the agents, Mark Roberts, whispered to another: “This is incredible, they’re up there, completely relaxed, talking freely! Tremendous!”
Over the years, Coiro’s value to Gotti was based partly on his ability to learn law enforcement secrets from a source he never revealed. Now, as the agents listened in and after a few words of sympathy mixed with a wondrous display of Gotti’s endless need to affirm his wisdom, Gotti asked Coiro to tap his source again. This was more obstruction of justice.
“First, you know, we’re sorry,” he said to Coiro.
“Thank you.”
“I don’t have to tell you how sorry we are.”
“Oh, John.”
“I knew you was guilty there. I didn’t guess it. I knew it. And I don’t think you’re gonna go away [to prison] before the [obligatory legal] appeal. So, you got a fuckin’ another year on the street, maybe. I think [the judge is] gonna give you ten years. Maybe look for you to do about three or four.”
“I’ll do it, John.”
“Didn’t I tell ya? I called the whole shot right down the line.”
Gotti then turned to his own problems. Recently, these had flowed from so many directions he believed that both the state and federal governments were preparing cases against him—with both involving Sparks.
“Feds, they got a new statute. Enhancing your position, to commit murder to enhance your position. They’re going at it tooth and nail, [to see] who’s gonna try me first. I think it’s easier to beat a murder ‘beef’ by the state.”
“No doubt about it,” Coiro replied. “Federal court, you get the kitchen sink.”
While sure his information was accurate, Gotti asked Coiro to corroborate it with his source and learn exactly when the cases would be filed.
“But what you gotta do is you gotta grab this guy. Mike, we’ve been good to him in the past, we’ll be good to him in the future. I never once asked you who he is. Did I ever ask you?”
“Never!”
“You know, Mike, again I’m, I feel lousy for pushing your sins aside, your heartaches aside.”
“Forget about it. It’s over.”
“Now let me ask ya a question, Mike. Can you see this guy pronto?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Believe me, it’s done tomorrow.”
Gotti and Coiro then discussed Coiro’s conviction—and how the case was a loser from the start because of Angelo Ruggiero, now dying in a hospital a couple miles away. Angelo jeopardized so many by being so indiscreet in his home, Coiro said.
“You never heard me fuckin’ jeopardize,” Gotti said.
“You never did!”
“As close as Angelo was, he was never in my fuckin’ house talking. Nothin’ to put us in fuckin’ jail.”
“That’s the right way,” interjected Sammy.
“Because you know why, Sammy?” asked Gotti, about to provide audio agents a particularly sweet moment of irony: “You gotta relax in your fuckin’ house. The way we’re relaxing right here.”
Relaxed, Gotti fixated on Angelo. “That cocksucker, and I hate to talk about people that are dying. He ain’t a rat. He ain’t a mutt. But I gotta call him a cocksucker. A guy was telling me this morning, ‘All your troubles came from two places, ‘Willie Boy Johnson and Angelo’s house.’ Willie Boy Johnson and Angelo Ruggiero decided they wanted to be a big-shot operation. That’s all our troubles.”
The visit concluded with Coiro repeating his promise to contact his source and report to Gotti the next day; he said he would ask his neighbor and their mutual friend, Lewis Kasman, to telephone Gotti and schedule a meeting somewhere.
With no time to place additional bugs and wiretaps in homes and offices, Coiro’s source stayed secret. In any case, Coiro and Gotti got a chance to talk privately only six days later, when Angelo died and they attended the wake.
Angelo had left the hospital to die at home. Gotti still refused to visit, or send a message, and considered boycotting the wake.
“He had to go and be a big shot and get us all in trouble,” he complained to Sammy. “Oughta had his tongue cut out.”
“Look, everybody knows how you feel,” Sammy said, “but it’s not gonna look right if you don’t go to the wake.”
So, Gotti went to the wake, having turned over the first few shovels of dirt from his own legal grave—by being as indiscreet as his old and dead Fulton-Rockaway pal.
Maloney and Mouw were under no obligation to inform other law-enforcement agencies about the breakthrough conversations or the existence of bugs at the Ravenite, and they did not, especially now that it seemed—based on Gotti’s exchange with Coiro and another one in the hallway with an underling—that Gotti had access to two corrupt sources in law enforcement.
While elated with the new tapes, the pursuers wanted more than an obstruction of justice case. Gotti’s carelessness in the hallway—and his remark about feeling “relaxed” in Nettie’s—portended greater things.
For nearly two anxious weeks, however, the bugs picked up little more than Gotti commenting in the hallway that a man who does not gamble “has no compassion.” Then, at half past seven in the evening of December 12, 1990, a week after Angelo’s death, Gotti made a second visit to Nettie’s and turned over darker, deeper dirt.
This time, it was just him and Frank LoCascio—or, as Gotti said as tape rolled, “my acting underboss Frankie.” By itself, the remark was a problem, because it tended to establish LoCascio’s role in an illegal “criminal enterprise.” Similarly, Gotti did himself no favors by calling himself “the boss”—nor Sammy, by calling him “my consigliere. ”
Gotti, alternately somber and angry, gave his eavesdroppers many more reasons for joy. In an angr
y moment, talking about a boss’s duty to make the tough decisions, he came close to admitting that he killed Paul.
“Who’s gonna challenge me? Who’s gonna defy me? What are they gonna do? Take a shot? Like I did to the other guy? I’d welcome that. I’ll kill their fuckin’ mothers, their fathers.”
Recalling how Paul’s business deals with the Genovese Family hurt Gambino men, Gotti even supplied a partial motive: “That’s what made me hate, really, fuckin’ Paul. He sold the borgata out for a construction company.”
Deeper into his monologue, Gotti became, for him, unusually introspective and self-deprecating. At times, he seemed genuinely melancholy. He had genuinely serious problems, but also sounded like a man gradually coming under the liberating influence of a cocktail—in the background, agents did hear the sound of ice falling into a glass.
For instance, one reason Sammy now had such an active role in the Family, Gotti said, was that he filled a vacuum created by the boss’s lesser experience in certain areas.
“I don’t know nothin’ about building. I don’t know anything … best I ever did was go on a few hijackings.”
Gotti also said he found his newfound wealth remarkable, given that he started with nothing. “A fuckin’ jerk like me. Never had nothing in my life.”
Still, wealth had not made him greedy: “That’s not John Gotti. At least I hope that’s not me. Maybe I see myself in a light that I’m not in, I don’t know. But that’s what I feel I am.”
At the end of a passage in which he referred to many capos and various grubby issues in the crews, he said about his problems: “[They] break my fuckin’ heart. Who the fuck wants to be here? We got nothin’ but troubles. I got cases coming up. I got nothing but fuckin’ trouble. I don’t feel good.”
Someone turned on Nettie’s radio when they entered, but not so loudly that words spoken directly beneath the bug in the ceiling were lost. But the music coming from it, mainly Italian love songs, contributed to the melancholy aura.
“I’m sick, Frankie, and I ain’t got no right to be sick. I’m not goin’ partying. I’m not going to race[tracks], [or] popping girls. I’m not doing nothin’ fuckin’ selfish here.”
No, of course not, LoCascio would interject, when it seemed appropriate and when Gotti’s mood resulted in paranoid thoughts about the capos’ loyalty.
“What the fuck, am I nuts here? If I go to jail, they’d be happy. ‘… We finally got rid of ’im.’ Hah! I’m getting myself sick, Frank, sick.”
“You gotta get it out,” LoCascio soothed.
“I don’t wanna get myself sick.”
“You can’t hold it in.”
“But one thing I ain’t gonna be is two-faced. I’m gonna call ’em like I see ’em. That I gotta do ’til the day I die.”
LoCascio’s support frequently moved Gotti out of self-deprecation and into more familiar self-justifying terrain, and so Gotti again reminded LoCascio of how wealthy he could be, if only he wanted, and what a trusting boss he was because he did not make his men prove with “paper” what they made and, therefore, reveal the level of their tributes. Its legal peril was the reason for Gotti’s hatred of paper, a reason a careful old loan shark like LoCascio plainly knew, even as he indulged it.
“I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss,” Gotti said. “That’s not me. You know I’m taking care of the people. We don’t need none of these papers. We’re too close for that shit. Ya see, I got that kind of fuckin’ trust in Cosa Nostra. We’re where we belong. We’re in the positions we belong in, Frankie, and nobody could change that.”
From a law-enforcement view, Gotti’s mention, in a single taped statement, of “boss” and “Cosa Nostra,” was a prosecutorial home run. Still, it got better. Winding down, he gave his opponents a few comparatively easy grounders. The man reporters loved to call the biggest gangster since Al Capone—who went to jail, and died there, only because of tax charges—began talking about what he did to keep the IRS at bay, which included recently taking a fake vice president’s job in the Garment Center.
“I just got on the fuckin’ payroll. I’m trying to keep my ass out of fuckin’ jail, no other fuckin’ reason,” he said.
Between the Garment Center fakery and his long-time ghost job with a childhood friend’s plumbing company, Gotti said he was “showing” for “tax purposes” about $85,000 in annual income.
“Eighty-five thousand, it’s good for me, Frank.”
“You don’t want to spend more than that.”
“My wife gets like $33,000. So, now it reads another 33 on top of it.”
The December 12 tape contained ample evidence to arrest Gotti. But his pursuers bided time. Gotti was relaxed in Nettie’s. He might go again and say more.
Besides, the tape needed analyzing; obscure remarks needed deconstructing; the problems Gotti cited with capos and crews needed checking with informants; the tax trail needed following; much work was ahead, and Gotti wasn’t going anywhere. For him, the immediate threat was the O’Connor case, due to go to trial January 8, 1990.
Still, he had other business to attend to, and four days before the trial, he made another visit to Nettie’s and gave the world, for the first time ever, an eavesdropper’s perch as a Cosa Nostra Family discussed one of its sustaining rituals—the making of new members.
Gotti began by announcing he wanted to circulate the names of potential new soldiers to the other Families—and, observing tradition, allow them to raise objections.
“I wanna throw a few names out, five or six,” he said to Sammy and LoCascio, adding this qualifying condition: “I want guys that done more than killing.”
It became clear the trio had discussed the topic recently, and seriously, because Sammy produced a list of names and began calling out the nominee’s first name and sometimes which capo they were “with.”
“The kid Richie.”
“Right,” Gotti replied.
“Tommy. With Frankie.”
“Right.”
“Tony from New Jersey.”
“Right. Fat Tony.”
“Johnny Rizzo. With Good-looking Jack.”
“Yeah.”
“Fat Dom. With Jackie Nose.”
“Yeah.”
“And Mario, with, ah, Louie Ricco.”
Because the video plant had been operating more than two years now, and agents had identified almost every habitue of the Ravenite, the first names of these men about to join the so-called secret society were enough to identify them, especially so when Sammy added their affiliation.
For another half-hour, the Gambino hierarchy discussed the nominees’ merits, and the handicaps preventing others from making the list—which, in the case of a “Poncho,” was age.
“I like the Richies, the Tommies,” Gotti said, “they’re young, 20-30 something, [but] these guys like Poncho. [He’s] 61, 62! Where the fuck are we going?”
The list contained more men than Gotti wanted to make—some he did not know well, and thus did not trust—and so the “fuckin’ hearts” of some “good guys” would be broken.
“This is not the time to make 20 guys,” he said, adding that so far as he knew some nominees had never even been “used” in a murder, and capos ought never nominate a man who had not, as the expression went, “made his bones.”
Near the discussion’s end, Gotti told Sammy to show the list to bosses in the other Families and to explain it was “something that’s been on the shelf” in the Gambino Family lately “only because we’re caught up pretty good” with other problems.
“Tell them they can go to the bank on these people,” he added.
Aside from their evidence value, Gotti’s words showed that, for all his faults and defiance of supposed Cosa Nostra rules, he adhered to tradition frequently enough that, in his mind, he could present himself as an old-guard, Neil-variety Cosa Nostra boss.
His pursuers were almost as happy about the January 4 tape as the December 12. No Cosa Nostra boss ha
d ever been captured talking so openly. But there was Gotti, his unmistakable voice unmistakably on tape, talking himself into a grave.
The tape contained one more highlight. After LoCascio left, Gotti told Sammy he planned to announce how the Family would be run if he lost the O’Connor case and was jailed again without bail pending sentencing.
“I’m gonna tell them, ‘I’m the [boss] ’til I say different,’” Gotti said, “[but], soon as anything happens to me, I’m off the streets, Sammy is the acting boss.’”
Gotti said he would give Sammy any title he wanted, but whatever, it would mean “acting boss.”
“So, I’m asking you, how do you feel? You wanna stay as consigliere? Or you want me to make you official underboss? Or acting boss? How do you feel? What makes you feel better? Think about it.”
Sammy said he would, but did not think a title “made any difference.”
Gotti said it did, because if Sammy remained consigliere, LoCascio, as acting underboss, would technically outrank him. “I love Frankie, but I don’t wanna [leave him in charge],” Gotti added. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for the guy. But I don’t want [that].”
In the face of Sammy’s seeming indifference about a title, Gotti decided to pick one for him that would require some maneuvering. He said he would send a message to the imprisoned Joseph Armone and tell him that, nothing personal, but because he was never going to leave prison, he would have to resign as underboss.
Gotti would then make Armone consigliere and LoCascio acting consigliere. These moves cleared the way for Sammy becoming underboss, he explained.
Finally, Sammy spoke. “It would be my pleasure,” he said.
34
INVINCIBILITY LEGEND
THE O’CONNOR CASE JUDGE told a big fib on the trial’s first day. He told prospective jurors that because he feared media hounding, they would have to stay in a hotel if they were selected. In truth, he was sequestering them for the trial’s duration because prosecutor Michael Cherkasky, fearing Gotti would hound jurors, had filed motions citing the Gambino Family’s “notorious record” in that regard.
