Mob Star

by Gene Mustain

  When FBI agent Lewis Schilero took the stand to interpret Cosa Nostra-speak on the tapes, Gotti muttered that Schilero was a “fuckin’ scumbag;” and when Gleeson put relatives of Robert DiBernardo, Louis Milito, and Louis DiBono on the stand to humanize the dead, Gotti blew sarcastic kisses at the prosecution table.

  On many days, an aura of danger and imminent violence hung in the air. The menace in the words and gestures of the lead defendant was a major reason why, but so were the abundant federal marshals positioned around the courtroom. Three times, bomb threats forced evacuation of the courthouse. In a sidebar, Judge Glasser revealed that he had received several death threats, and that he was under heavy guard.

  Still, on other days, the trial had a light, day-at-the-circus kind of mood, thanks to an odd combination of minor and major celebrities who dropped by to sit with the Gotti lobbyists and sing Gotti songs to the media. The celebrity cheerleaders were procured by Carlo Vaccarezza and included heavyweight boxer Renaldo Snipes, civil rights leader Roy Innis, singer Jay Black, and actors John Amos, Al Lewis, Mickey Rourke, and Anthony Quinn. The testimonials did not always go as Vaccarezza hoped.

  For instance, while speaking with print reporters, Mickey Rourke—who met with Gotti while researching a film role—said what Vaccarezza wanted him to say about what a gentleman Gotti was and how he worried about whether Gotti was getting a fair trial.

  However, outside the courthouse with television reporters, Rourke grew taciturn. Walking to a car that sped quickly away, he ducked most questions about why he was there and what he felt about Gotti.

  Rourke’s sudden shyness irked Vaccarezza, who told hallway lobbyists what happened: “What a jerk. He didn’t say anything nice. He froze. Despite all the time John spent with him. He’s not a man.”

  Anthony Quinn caused the biggest stir, inside and outside court. At the lunch break, he walked toward the well of the courtroom to shake Gotti’s hand, but federal marshals stopped him. Gotti was in custody; even a handshake was against rules.

  “Hello, John,” Quinn said, with a what-else-can-I-do? expression. “Sorry, John.”

  “See,” Gotti replied, holding his right thumb and forefinger close together, “we’re this close to Russia here. But thanks for comin’.”

  Outside court, Quinn said the trial was “the best drama going on in America right now. This is the greatest theater you can possibly see.” The heart of the drama was “the friend who betrays a friend. I’m not here to sit in judgment of Mr. Gotti but in judgment of a friend who betrays a friend. Friendship is a sacred thing. When I was growing up in East Los Angeles, the worst thing was to be a snitch.”

  Quinn mentioned that he had appeared in 30 “gangster pictures” and that “the boys” liked him because he knew how to portray them. He neglected to say that he was then up for another film project, a starring role in which he would portray a real-life gangster, Gotti’s mentor Aniello Dellacroce.

  Back in court, Maloney joshed Gotti’s new lawyer, Albert Krieger: “Albert, tomorrow the good guys are going to bring in Clint Eastwood.”

  On the afternoon of March 2, 1992, six weeks into the trial, the high point of the drama, the moment everyone anticipated most, finally came.

  “The government calls Salvatore Gravano,” Gleeson said.

  In short, blunt answers, Sammy described his life’s journey—and how, along the way, he was part of 19 murders, because murder was a way of life in La Cosa Nostra.

  On the third day of his testimony, he finally engaged Gotti in a long staredown.

  Sammy’s face showed more indifference than anger. Gotti’s had a thin, smirking smile. Neither blinked, and Sammy did not turn away until Gleeson began asking questions.

  He grew increasingly confident on the stand. “Sometimes I was a shooter,” he summarized at one point. “Sometimes I was a backup shooter; sometimes I set the guy up; sometimes I just talked about it. When you go on a piece of work it doesn’t matter what position you’re in. You’re all out there. You’re all liable to get charged the same. It doesn’t make any difference.”

  At the end of his ninth and final day on the stand, Sammy drove a last dagger into his former boss that memorably described their relationship: “I was a good, loyal soldier. John barked and I bit.”

  The case was nearly over, and Gotti didn’t put up much of a defense. A day after the prosecution rested its case, the defense rested, after calling one witness—a tax lawyer who testified somewhat confusingly that it was he who advised Gotti that he did not have to file income tax returns.

  Except in cross-examination, the defense did not address all the other mayhem in the indictment. Coming on top of the tapes, Sammy had made the case indefensible. The only defense, as Gleeson predicted, was the “I’m-guilty-so-what?” defense.

  In his final argument, Gleeson stayed between quiet outrage and gentle sarcasm. He called the evidence “suffocating.” He noted that the government did not make a sick, serial killer an underboss; John Gotti did. “We’d love to bring you witnesses with absolutely impeccable credentials, of unquestionable honesty and integrity,” he added, pointing at the defense table. “The problem is, they don’t know any such people.”

  He reminded jurors that the tapes featured only six hours of conversation. “It probably seems like more because the conversations are so dense with criminal activity. We caught six hours and it’s absolute mayhem. Who they’ve murdered, who they’re going to murder, why they have to murder.”

  For a big federal case, the jury did not deliberate long—only fourteen hours over one and a half days. At one o’clock in the afternoon of April 2, 1992, the forewoman sent a note that a verdict was in, and only 19 minutes later, the judge’s clerk stood and asked the forewoman the first of several questions: On the first charge in the indictment, the murder of Paul Castellano, had the jury found whether the government had “proven” or “not proven” the charge?

  “Proven,” the forewoman replied.

  Gotti winced, then smiled and winked at his retinue in the spectator section, as the forewoman kept answering “proven” to every count.

  At the prosecution table, Maloney leaned into Gleeson’s ear, “Magnificent, John, magnificent.”

  Moving right along, Glasser thanked the jurors, dismissed them and said he would sentence Gotti in two months. Guards then took Gotti away. Downstairs in the lobby, the lobbyists were still glumly working. Jack D’Amico said Gotti was a “class act” to the end. “When you’re born round, you don’t come out square.”

  Meanwhile, 20 feet away, New York FBI boss Jim Fox was in a media scrum. “The Teflon is gone,” he said, tossing a line his spokesman Joseph Valiquette had suggested during their hurried ride to the courthouse. “The Don is covered with Velcro.”

  On June 23, except for Sammy, the trial’s main participants returned to court for sentencing. Federal guidelines required the judge to give Gotti and LoCascio multiple life terms in prison without chance of parole. The hearing’s only potential drama was what Gotti would say when Glasser gave him an obligatory chance to speak.

  But Gotti said nothing. LoCascio spoke for him: “I am guilty of being a good friend of John Gotti. If there were more men like John Gotti on this earth, we would have a better country.”

  Outside the courthouse, about one thousand people, mainly from Ozone Park and Howard Beach, arrived in chartered buses just as the brief hearing ended and Gotti left the courtroom without even a nod to anyone in the fully assembled press corps. In the end, the media had done him no good.

  Chanting “Free John Gotti!” the crowd marched toward the courthouse entrance. Several hotheads, egged on by members of Junior Gotti’s crew shouting into bullhorns, began rocking a police car and, before long, three cars lay on their roofs and a riot was on. Just outside the entrance, out-manned cops and Gotti sympathizers slugged it out.

  Just inside the entrance, guards barred the doors and stood back from a floor-to-ceiling wall of glass. Standing back, watching the riot u
nfold with Mouw, Gabriel said, sarcastically, “John always told me he would go quietly if we ever got him. That John, he’s a man, a man’s man.”

  By this time, Gotti was back at the federal holding pen in Manhattan. Officials begin implementing his sentence immediately. In a few hours, they shackled him and drove him to an airport. He was put on a plane bound for Marion, Illinois—home of the most punitive prison in the federal system; Amnesty International calls it inhumane. Before the sun rose again, he was in solitary confinement. He would be held that way 23 hours a day, every day—until at some future point in time, prison officials decided that he was a beaten man and could live by prison rules.

  A day later, back in Howard Beach, his father, John Joseph Gotti Sr., died of old age—but four months later, Junior Gotti’s wife gave birth to a boy, who was named John.

  “What’s my reaction to the birth?” Bruce Cutler said when a reporter called. “My reaction is that the world is a better place with another John Gotti.”

  EPILOGUE

  SIX YEARS AFTER HE went to prison in chains, John Gotti told daughter Victoria he became a gangster because his early life on the rougher streets of 1950s Brooklyn “dictated” it. Many people, including all those New Yorkers who overcame similar streets to achieve great things, sneer at such rationalization. But Gotti was a great rationalizer; ordering murders requires a gift for it. “My time, all the doors were closed,” he said.

  In her life, Victoria is achieving the legitimacy her father says fate denied him. She’s doing it by becoming part of the same unruly force that made him a household name for gangster—the media. First as an author and now as a columnist for the New York Post and correspondent for a syndicated television show, she’s become part of the whirl of New York. You have to give her credit; you also have to take some away. She succeeded despite her father’s notoriety, but also because of it.

  She began creating a public identity in 1995, at age 32, when she wrote a book about a heart ailment she suffers (it would lead to open-heart surgery in April of 2002). A year after that book, she wrote a novel—“It was so bad,” she wrote in one of her columns, “that I considered pulling back the book.” The novel required her to submit to the publicity rituals publishers employ to sell their products. These “scared her to death,” because “the press had their own agenda. This was the chance to finally catch a glimpse of the myth, the man, the enigma. My father.”

  Fat chance. She was smart enough never to say anything stupid. She danced sweetly around the questions. “The man I knew was a great, loving father,” she told New York Newsday in 1997, in an interview about her first novel, a legal thriller. Other media jumped on her story—it was and is irresistible. New York magazine described her as a “nice person, not a bad novelist, a good mother, and a dedicated volunteer for charity.” Esquire magazine put her on its “Women We Love” list, along with actress Sharon Stone.

  By July of 1998, when Victoria published her second novel, a story about a stalker, media interviews were old hat. She told a writer for her future employer, The Post, that her father was the inspiration for one of the book’s characters, Dimitri Constantinos. “What I see is that physically, my father had this overwhelming presence. And I just found that when I created Dimitri, it was a great attribute to infuse into that character—that he could have this presence when he walked into a room.”

  With press clippings like that, Victoria discovered how fawning the popular press can be, how it covets notable names, famous or infamous. She began speaking to gossip columnists and getting her little dramas written up—including one about her three sons announcing that they do not believe in Santa Claus anymore as she ran off to FAO Schwarz to meet her personal shopper. The items were usually decorated with her photograph. Nice face, big hair, long nails, expensive jewelry. Fancy and flamboyant; like father, like daughter.

  By August of 2000, when she published her third novel, her name was almost as well known as her father’s. The book party celebrating the event was covered by the New York Times, whose reporter informed readers that Victoria’s husband Carmine was not there because he had just been arrested and jailed on arson and racketeering charges. This fulfilled a prediction made by her father some 20 months earlier. In his absence, Carmine sent five dozen roses and a card declaring how proud he was. After someone read the note aloud to partygoers, Victoria excused herself to a bathroom, reportedly to cry. “I’m very emotional, and they always say a lady never cries in public,” Victoria told a scribe for The Times’ Public Lives column. Now at ease with most reporters, she said she was working on yet another book about someone dealing with terminal illness and, yes, it was prompted by her father’s cancer, which had become well known.

  “Even though I create fiction, you want a sense of realness,” she explained.

  The next day, a story in The Daily News quoted the congratulatory note from Carmine. He said he was proud of her “as a mother, a wife and a friend. I love you and miss you and the kids.”

  One thing Victoria seemed to learn on her way to a public life is that it helps to be shameless. One month after bathing in these items, Victoria filed for divorce. Her marriage had been heading south for some time, and Carmine had been overheard on government recordings talking about other women. He would eventually get out on bail, only to be charged and jailed again. The following year, he would plead guilty and take a nine-year prison sentence.

  What was now spectacle continued. On December 22, 2000, George Rush and Joanna Molloy of The News devoted 23 paragraphs to Victoria’s preparations for Christmas (“I have four little trees in the house and one gigantic one”) and her recent visit to her now bed-ridden father (“he’s doing well, he sounds strong”). Two days later, The Post went one better. It crafted a page one screamer out of an emotional letter she wrote her father. It was headlined, “Daddy’s Little Girl … Bares Her Soul,” and in it, Victoria expressed her abiding love. No surprise there—he had just finished a third round of chemotherapy. What was more remarkable were her assertions, in a Post column by new friend Linda Stasi on the same Christmas Eve day, that she was really upset about the story and that officials at a Missouri prison hospital must have leaked the letter.

  Ho, ho, ho. Prison mailroom clerks don’t commit federal crimes to cloak mob bosses in sympathy. Victoria, or someone close, leaked it.

  A half-year later, Victoria went to work for the newspaper she was so mad at. She said yes when The Post asked her to become a gossip columnist. Now, she was not just a media object like her father, but a media player. At the The Post office, she has the telephone number the well-known writer Jack Newfield once had, before he was canned by the new regime that hired her.

  Being a media player had immediate benefits: one week after she took the job, one of her new colleagues at The Post shamelessly wrote—in the middle of June, 2001—yet another Gotti Christmas story. The dying don, the article said, had promised to play Santa Claus after he died by donating toys to a children’s hospital. Meanwhile, he had “secretly sent” Thanksgiving turkeys and toys to other distressed children. The article then paused for some background: Two years before, chip-off-the-block Junior had spent $8,000 at Toys я Us, buying all the Tickle Me Elmo dolls he could for his father’s favorite charity.

  As a columnist, Victoria can write virtually what she wants, and one of the first items on her agenda was another salute to her ailing father. It came as she recalled a chat with a public relations woman named Lizzie Grubman: “We kicked around the pros of having traditional patriarchs. Of how our fathers laid the foundation for us early on—rules and regulations and never forget about building character.”

  The item makes it clear how she intends to have both a public life and deal with her father’s criminal life. It is the same way he would have—make no admissions, no concessions, no nothing. The Marion prison tapes, however, show she knows a lot about his Mafia career—at one point, they discuss a list of “made” men—but that column you will never read.

>   In the Grubman column, Victoria displayed defense-lawyer instincts her father would have cheered, if he had been still well enough to read it. Readers were never told why she and Grubman were chatting or what had happened two weeks before—when Grubman was behind the wheel of a car that veered wildly out of control outside a nightclub and injured 16 people. Without any context, Victoria rose to defend Grubman against the media whipping that ensued: “… [her] dedication is still there … Amid all the tasteless jokes and unwelcome whispers, she enters her office each morning.”

  It’s easy to understand why the playful Post hired Victoria—the name, the glam look, the growing affinity for Manhattan life (she keeps an apartment there now, although she still has her Long Island mansion). It’s harder to say if her novels would have been published but for her last name. Her father had his doubts.

  This began coming out on the videotapes made in prison in January of 1998, when Gotti recalled for his daughter a talk show he had recently watched on his little prison black-and-white. On the show, a woman said her child was mercilessly teased about a skin condition by classmates, until a cousin came along and straightened the matter out. “He dusted a few of them up and now when they see the kid they treat the kid special,” Gotti summarized. “They don’t want an ass-kicking. You read Machiavelli, fear is a stronger emotion over love.”

  Victoria protested that this is what her soon-to-be ex-husband would have done, and had done, after a similar incident years before. “[He] showed them to be the animal they think he is. Proved to them that he was the animal that people said he was … we’re not like that, we’re not animals.”

  “Yeah, but, either you gotta be proud of who you are, and fight for it, or you gotta be ashamed of it and do like some other lowlifes do, and change their names.” Gotti then said Victoria’s son would not have been teased if Victoria had used her married name, Agnello, instead of Gotti. “I mean, if you ask a guy next door, ‘Hey, what do you think about the Agnellos?’ He’d say, ‘Who are the Agnellos?’ … You should stay off television. You should stay off the book covers. You should use Victoria Agnello, and they won’t know who the kids are, and they won’t be faced with this problem. Am I correct or incorrect?”