Mob Star

by Gene Mustain

  The judge had no choice. He could not give the real reason without poisoning jurors against Gotti and risking reversal by an appeals court in the event of conviction. It was the first time in history that a state court jury in Manhattan would be sequestered, and to protect jurors further, the judge would give the defense only their last names—making it hard, but hardly impossible, for someone to learn where they and their loved ones lived.

  It took several days to pick a jury, and during that time Gotti made another visit to Nettie’s that proved the wisdom of trying to safeguard a Gotti jury. On January 17, after receiving updates on the legal troubles of others that appeared to come from a crooked cop, Gotti turned to his own in a meeting with Sammy.

  He told Sammy that jury selection in the O’Connor trial was almost complete, and that the last name of one chosen juror was “Hoyle” or “Boyle” and “Irish, I guess.” His next remark seemed to imply that because “Hoyle” or “Boyle” was a utility-company lineman, someone in the Irish-dominated Westies gang, which had good contacts in the utility unions, might know him.

  “Maybe we can’t reach him,” Gotti said, “[but] we’ll send word out to anybody who knows him.”

  Gotti’s remarks gave the Maloney-Mouw team a dilemma: Was a plot to tamper with the jury afoot, or was it wishful thinking? If a plot, should they tell Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and prosecutor Cherkasky? If they did, and Cherkasky asked the trial judge to question the Irish juror, would Gotti get suspicious and stop using the apartment, hurting the increasingly promising case?

  Maloney met with John Gleeson, who had learned about the Ravenite bugs a month earlier. Gleeson had suspected something big was up. A day after his win over Cutler in the Coiro trial, Gleeson received an unusual request from the FBI: Would he forget about filing a motion asking the judge in Coiro’s case to bar Coiro from the Ravenite?

  Now Gleeson argued that even if Gotti’s words in Nettie’s suggested a plot, they were vague and half-hearted—not serious enough to warrant the potential harm to the Eastern District of disclosing them to the Manhattan District Attorney.

  He noted that elsewhere on the same tape, a Gambino soldier gave Gotti secrets apparently provided by a crooked cop—and many cops work for the Manhattan D.A. “Maybe [Gotti’s source] is in the Manhattan D.A.’s office, who knows?” Gleeson said. “Unless more turns up, I wouldn’t tell anybody. Why, for this, risk our bugs?”

  Maloney accepted Gleeson’s advice, setting the table for very sour grapes some day. The District Attorney’s office stayed in the dark about Gotti’s whispers—as much as the Eastern District stayed in the dark about the crooked cop’s identity. Only later was Detective William Peist flushed out. He believed the NYPD cheated him out of a full disability pension, and so while in the intelligence division, he took to giving secrets away. In January of 1990, he got a new, temporary, and completely coincidental job: guarding sequestered jurors in the O’Connor case. There’s no evidence he tried to influence the third group of New Yorkers who began sitting in judgment of Gotti on January 20.

  En route from Queens that morning, Gotti had driven past a large banner that Lewis Kasman had hung from a highway overpass: “Good Luck, John; Love, People of Ozone Park.”

  In his opening statement, Cherkasky laid out the simple case facts: O’Connor ordered the trashing of a Gambino-backed restaurant built with non-union labor. Gotti ordered the trashing of O’Connor. Cherkasky ended by pointing a finger toward Gotti: “Like all bullies, he could not allow a challenge to go unpunished.”

  When it came his turn, Cutler did not disappoint those who recalled how he once slam-dunked Giacalone’s indictment into a waste can. Ridiculing Cherkasky’s remark that the case was brought in the name of the “people” of New York, Cutler stooped beside the prosecution table like he was peeking up a skirt and screamed: “Where are the ‘people?’ I don’t see any ‘people.’”

  The trial lasted only three weeks. At the defense table, Gotti exuded his usual public calm in the face of trouble. But then, on January 24, Cherkasky began unreeling the Bergin tapes. Gotti had read transcripts, but this was the first he’d heard them in a courtroom. The experience was upsetting.

  After the trial that day, he went to Nettie’s and unburdened himself to Sammy and LoCascio. He said the only thing that made him feel better was knowing that most of the Bergin tapes were recorded before he succeeded Paul. The crudity on one particular tape—in which he threatened to shove someone’s head “up his mother’s cunt”—seemed beneath a boss: “Only thing I can comfort myself with [is] … thank God, this was 1985. If this tape [was] 1988, ’89, I would’ve thrown myself off a fuckin’ bridge for embarrassment.”

  Departing from his usual stroking, LoCascio said he could see why Gotti was upset because he was the one always lecturing about talking in enclosed places: “You’ve been preaching, preaching, and you’re doing the same thing that you’re preaching.”

  Sammy remained silent, but Gotti—to the incredulous delight of audio agents—began sermonizing about the need to watch what is said, and where, in “La Cosa Nostra.”

  “From now on, I’m telling you that if a guy just so mentions ‘La,’ I’m gonna strangle the cocksucker. You know what I mean? He don’t have to say ‘Cosa Nostra,’ just ‘La,’ and he goes. I heard nine months of tapes of my life. I was actually sick, and I don’t wanna get sick. Not sick for me, sick for ‘this thing of ours,’ sick for how naive we were five years ago. I’m sick that we were so fucking naive. Me, number one!”

  He recalled the special irony of one tape, in which he was overheard admonishing Angelo Ruggiero for indiscreet talking in enclosed settings. “‘Hey, you gotta do me a favor,’ I tell him. ‘Don’t make nobody talk. This is how we get in trouble, we talk.’”

  On this doubly ironic note, Gotti’s visits to Nettie’s ended. He never returned after January 24. The reason emerged later, and it demonstrated how law enforcement agencies conducting separate investigations of the same man at the same time are bound to stumble into each other’s path.

  One week before, during a Manhattan federal grand jury session probing Sparks, a prosecutor asked a Gambino capo if he ever met Gotti in “an apartment somewhere.” The question showed that the Manhattan team had informers, too—and it strongly suggested to Gotti, when the capo belatedly told him about it, that he ought to avoid Nettie’s.

  His manner at the defense table in the O’Connor trial did not betray the alarm he must have felt. He exuded confidence until the end, when his lawyers called John O’Connor, a Jerry Vale lookalike, to the stand. O’Connor said he had no idea who shot him, or who ordered it. He wasn’t much of a victim—he was facing criminal charges of his own—and he pleaded the Fifth Amendment several times.

  In his final argument, Cutler hollered about what a “snake,” “rat,” “psychopathic killer,” “lying bum,” and general all-around “swill” James McElroy, the government’s key witness, was—and then, on February 5, 1990, jurors got the case.

  “The people like me,” Gotti replied, when a reporter asked how he assessed his chances.

  On their first vote, six jurors liked Gotti, one did not and five were unsure. On the second day, the five unsures made up their minds and voted to convict, deadlocking the jury at six-six. On the next day, the same five changed their minds again and voted to acquit, after listening to a key tape again.

  That made it eleven-one for acquittal; the holdout caved a day later, February 9, 1990. Hundreds of people, drawn by radio bulletins that a verdict was in, waited outside the courthouse for Gotti to emerge, then formed a cheering gauntlet as Gotti, escorted by Jack D’Amico, sauntered into a waiting Cadillac.

  As after the Giacalone case, yellow ribbons appeared on 101st Avenue in Ozone Park, outside the Bergin, and in Howard Beach, in the yards of the Gotti home and others.

  But Gotti did not go home first. He went to the Ravenite, and after a few minutes, fireworks exploded along Mulberry Street. Gotti st
epped out for a bow, then invited a few reporters inside.

  That day and the next, in the media, the Gotti legend reached its highest elevation; the thin air caused much woozy analysis. One writer said Gotti should be superintendent of schools because he’d “crack a few heads” and drugs would be gone from playgrounds. Another writer loftily described Gotti as the “typical American frontier risk-taker.”

  The media’s problem was that so much had already been written about Gotti, fresh angles were elusive. The legend had already been explained: Gotti had tapped a civic vein of animosity for authority; he dwelled outside the law with style and bravado. But in the excitement of the moment, the media ignored an inevitable truth about the public attention span: As long as Gotti got away with dwelling outside the law, fine; as soon as he tripped up, forget about it. Next legend, please.

  Few noticed the most meaningful quote in the coverage. It was spoken by Mouw’s boss, Jules Bonavolonta, head of the FBI’s organized-crime section in New York. Asked his reaction, Bonavolonta ignored the question and seemed to speak directly to Gotti: “He knows we haven’t brought a case against him. And he also knows that when we do, he’s finished. He can take all the bets he wants, but he’s going to prison.”

  For an FBI official, it was a rare public display of verbal style and bravado—and there was an exceptionally strong reason for it. Back on December 12, in Gotti’s second visit to Nettie’s, the one in which he droned on about his troubles, Gotti also admitted he was a murderer. Not once, but twice—according to many reviews of the tape by agents who specialized in decoding Gotti’s words, Michael Balen and Carmine Russo.

  The first victim he mentioned was Robert “Deebee” DiBernardo, a union fixer and one of those who plotted with Gotti to kill Paul. DiBernardo was murdered in 1986, while Gotti was at the MCC awaiting trial in the Giacalone case. Angelo Ruggiero—lusting to be underboss and considering Deebee a rival—told Gotti that Deebee talked “subversive” behind his back.

  Four years later, Gotti said to LoCascio: “When Deebee got ‘whacked,’ they told me a story. I was in jail when I ‘whacked’ him. I knew why it was being done. I done it anyway. I allowed it to be done, anyway.”

  On the same tape, Gotti admitted approving the murder of Louis Milito, a soldier, after Sammy said Milito was complaining about Gotti’s leadership.

  Gotti could have recalled many murders for LoCascio. That he chose these two did not matter to Bonavolonta or Mouw or Maloney. On top of his other indiscretions at the Ravenite—all his chatter about La Cosa Nostra, obstruction of justice, tax-evasion, bribery, and so on—the murder admissions cooked Gotti’s goose. He had talked his way into a clean, easy case.

  In fact, the case was even better than the FBI knew. On the same December 12 tape, in a passage yet to be understood, Gotti left evidence of one more murder. At the height of his invincibility legend, Gotti already was—legally speaking—a dead man.

  It would take a while for Gotti to find out how clean the case was. It would take that long for the Maloney-Mouw team to analyze the tapes, decide what charges to bring, and fight a turf battle with state and federal counterparts in Manhattan that for anxious months appeared certain to deny Maloney the chance to see Gotti on trial again in the courthouse where the legend-making began in 1985.

  Stung by his office’s defeat in the O’Connor case, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, the most influential D.A. in the country, also wanted another shot at Gotti. He lobbied hard for a joint state-federal prosecution based mainly on Sparks and featuring his office and the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan. The case should be tried in Manhattan, where the murders occurred, he argued.

  In one of many meetings on the dispute, Morgenthau also argued that the jury pool in Manhattan was “better”—a dig at all the jury-tampering that had gone on in Brooklyn during the heroin trials and others involving the Gambino Family.

  “The Manhattan courthouse is one subway stop from the one in Brooklyn!” Maloney barked. “Do you think the Gambino Family could find its way there too!”

  “All I’m saying is, look at the record.”

  The rivals exchanged reviews of each other’s evidence. The Brooklyn case was based on tapes, Gotti’s own words. The Manhattan case was based on turncoat informers, including the former Philadelphia underboss, set to testify that Gotti told him he killed Paul. But defense lawyers fear tapes a lot more than turncoats. In an ideal world, the ideal case would join the proof of both federal offices. And because Brooklyn would bring more to the table than Manhattan, the latter should have conceded the lead role and the District Attorney should have had nothing to say about it.

  But Morgenthau did have much to say, and until a final meeting in Washington, where top Justice Department officials controlled the decision, it appeared Gotti would stand trial in Manhattan, in a courthouse just south of the Ravenite. In that meeting, however, momentum shifted back to Brooklyn, mainly because—in one more irony—Brooklyn presented a better plan for guarding against jury tampering.

  The plan was devised by John Gleeson. Maloney had put him in charge of the grand jury working with the FBI to prepare the case for indictment. Having led the investigations into jury tampering in the heroin trials, Gleeson was an expert. He told his superiors the problem wasn’t the jury pool in Brooklyn, but the defendants. “It doesn’t matter where they are on trial,” he said, “so how do you attack that problem?”

  Gleeson’s plan was to ask the judge who got the case to not only impanel jurors anonymously, but to sequester them as well—a highly unusual request. But Gleeson said that with the informants the FBI now had, plus the known Gambino Family track record, a strong legal argument for it could be made. “I think our district’s judges, because of recent history, are likely to agree with us,” Gleeson said.

  Gleeson offered other ideas as well, for screening out predisposed sympathizers, and in the end they saved the day for Brooklyn. A key Justice Department official later said that, in contrast to Brooklyn, Manhattan had not given enough thought to how it would guard against tampering.

  At the time, however, no reason was given. Instead, a few days later, the official telephoned Andy Maloney. “It’s yours, Andy,” he said.

  Though unaware of the damage he had caused himself, Gotti assumed a federal case was coming because of all the subpoenas floating around Brooklyn and Manhattan. As the jurisdiction issue played out, he tried to learn when he would be arrested—when, as he put it, “the big pinch” would come. But his sources, including Detective William Peist, did not have the federal hooks they needed.

  Still, Gotti continued to relish the benefits of office and mold the Family in his image. One benefit was having people shower him with money, directly or indirectly. In the spring of 1990, each Family capo gave at least $5,000 as a wedding gift to Gotti’s son Junior; super-loyal capo Jack D’Amico gave $10,000 and Sammy chipped in $7,500. All the bosses of the other families gave nearly the same amounts as D’Amico and Sammy—even Chin Gigante. Some 150 other connected guests gave mostly “nickels and dimes”—meaning, $500 or $1,000. At the end of a day of gift-giving and apple-polishing at a banquet for Junior and his bride at an elegant Manhattan hotel, Junior had $348,700.

  A couple months later, Gotti promoted the newly wealthy, 26-year-old Junior to capo. Once again, Sammy among many believed Junior was too young for the job and that Gotti was looking out for his interests as much as Junior’s by solidifying his control in advance of his arrest.

  Once more, the situation induced speech paralysis. Sammy was now underboss and designated “street boss” if Gotti went to jail. If Sammy objected, how would it look? What was Sammy afraid of? Or planning? Silence was further assured by the manner in which Gotti implemented Junior’s promotion to caporegime, meaning crew leader.

  “I’ve been thinkin’ somethin’,” he told Sammy and LoCascio at the Ravenite, “and I want you to tell me if you’d recommend we put Junior up to caporegime, and give ’im a crew.”

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sp; “Yeah, he’s ready, be a good thing,” Sammy said.

  The Gambino squad learned about Junior later, from informers, because all the Ravenite bugs were silent. Because Gotti had stopped using the apartment, and because enough evidence already existed, the FBI had shut down even the hallway bug and was concentrating on marshaling indictment details for Gleeson.

  Crucially for one man, the significance of one of the last conversations on the hallway bug was overlooked. Agents failed to link the name of a man mentioned in the conversation to threats Gotti made earlier on the apartment tapes. Consequently, the FBI did not give the man a warning that his life was in danger, and he would be murdered.

  In Nettie’s on the watershed day of December 12, 1989, the day Gotti talked about killing Robert DiBernardo and Louis Milito, he also referred to another man whose first name was Louis—but agents thought he was still speaking about Louis Milito.

  In later reviews of the tape, it became clear he was not—but not in time for Louis DiBono, a soldier in the construction business. By 1989, after he began using cocaine and his business fell apart, DiBono was on shaky ground—particularly after he ducked Gotti’s demands for meetings to discuss his delinquent business-tax payments. These threatened Gotti because Gotti, as a secret partner in the firm, was vulnerable too.

  “Louie DiBono,” Gotti said to LoCascio on December 12, “you know why he’s dying? He’s gonna die because he refused to come in when I called.”

  It was easier to see how the agents missed a second threat against DiBono on the apartment tapes. That time, on January 24, speaking to Sammy about someone suspected of bringing an informer around, Gotti referred to the overweight DiBono by a nickname.

  “He’s gotta get whacked … for the same reason that Jelly Belly’s getting it. You wanna challenge [us], we’ll meet the challenge! And you’re going, motherfucker!”