Mob Star (15 page)

Gotti’s personal family now included a fourth child, a boy named Frank. He was living with Victoria and the kids in a new Brooklyn apartment. It wasn’t the home of their dreams, but it was a step forward. Gotti was recovering from near financial and personal ruin.

Gotti’s new profession, however, was risky. On December 1, 1967, only four days after the United Airlines score, he rolled snake-eyes.

Security at JFK was provided by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police, supplemented by the FBI, which investigated interstate thefts. Lately, the airplanes and shippers had been more upset than usual because of the rampant pillaging of cargo. A periodic crackdown was then in effect.

From nearby surveillance posts, FBI agents saw a rented U-Haul truck pull up to a pallet of cartons in the cargo area of Northwest Airlines. They saw two people—one walked kind of funny, the other had dark hair combed back—load twenty-three cartons into the truck and drive off.

Agents tailed the U-Haul as it drove away from the cargo area, until it stopped and a Cadillac driven by a younger, slimmer man pulled alongside. They arrested Gene Gotti, driver of the Caddy; Angelo Ruggiero, driver of the truck; and John Gotti, found hiding in the truck behind the cartons.

Gene had acted unsuccessfully as the lookout. But after he was arrested he acted the way an accomplice was expected to. Say nothing. He even refused to say John was his brother. The car was registered to Angelo’s wife. The rental truck contained $7,691 of—once again—women’s clothes.

All three got out on bail after an appearance at the United States Court House in Brooklyn. They knew the federal charge likely meant time in prison, which is more serious than time in a city jail. Jail is inconvenience; prison is incarceration. They didn’t know a state case was then being made against John for his impersonation act on George Beatty and United Airlines.

The cargo agents who had helped load the truck identified John as the driver and the man who signed someone else’s name. They thought Gene was the other man, but weren’t sure. John was arrested in early February 1968—in two months he was a two-time loser. Angelo posted his bail.

A condition of Gotti’s bail, of course, was that he obey the law.
Forget about it.
A man who scorned legitimate work had to make money somehow, even if it meant he had to step up to a high level of crime: kidnapping. It happened during the third hijack, on April 10, two months after his second arrest.

The case was known as the Velvet Touch caper. The Velvet Touch was a bar in Ozone Park, another Bergin crew hangout and the focus of a police investigation into a stolen-car racket that led to a wiretap on the bar’s phone.

On April 10, cops monitoring the wiretap heard several conversations between men at the bar and men who had grabbed two parked tractor-trailers filled with cartons of cigarettes—about a half-million dollars worth—near a restaurant on the New Jersey Turnpike. The drivers had been forced into a car and driven by Gotti to a street on the Brooklyn side of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Though no ransom was demanded, and the men were released unharmed, Gotti would be charged with kidnapping.

The Velvet Touch wiretaps showed that the hijacking did not go smoothly. A future bookmaker for John—the veteran neighborhood hijacker William Battista—had driven one of the tractor-trailers to a drop in Queens, but Gotti’s ten confederates, including Angelo and John Carneglia, couldn’t get the second truck in gear. They called Battista, who had gone to the Velvet Touch, and others seeking tips but were never able to drive the second truck away, so they left it.

“I remember the guys in New Jersey also were worried about what their girlfriends were doing at the Velvet Touch with their friends,” an investigator on the case recalled.

One year later, Gotti was indicted in Newark, charged with conspiracy and interstate theft in addition to kidnapping. By that time, he had already been sent away to a federal penitentiary on the Northwest Airlines airport theft.

 

 

Michael Coiro, a 39-year-old Queens lawyer who defended many hoodlums, had represented John, Angelo, and Gene in federal court in the Northwest Airlines case. It was the first of many assignments that he undertook for the Gotti brothers and Angelo over the years; his services would later earn him unwanted national recognition as a “mob lawyer,” as well as a serious legal jam of his own. Coiro had been recommended by Carmine Fatico, then in trouble, too: He was named in a plot to murder a businessman.

Coiro advised his clients to plead guilty and bank on the judge’s goodwill. Gotti faced eight years, but was sentenced to four, which usually translates to about 30 months actual time. Gotti would have to come back to New York from prison to deal with the state’s hijack case and the Newark federal case.

Before sentencing, a probation officer interviewed Gotti and prepared a confidential report for the judge. He wrote that Gotti “appeared lackadaisical and unconcerned about his present situation” and was “very vague and evasive when questioned about his personal life.” Gotti had filed no income tax returns the last three years and had “no verifiable employment” in the last four, although his father-in-law had told the officer that Gotti had a “standing offer” of employment at Century Construction, but “failed to avail himself of it.”

The officer described Victoria Gotti as a “rather intelligent” woman “who closed her eyes to [her husband’s] criminal tendencies.” The report carried this final notation: “Leader of crew for this crime, [has] organized crime ties.”

A few months after he was sentenced, as he had agreed to do, Gotti surrendered to federal marshals. Unbowed and unashamed—just unlucky, he probably thought—he was transported to the United States Penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

It would be difficult to find a worse place to send a mobster-in-the-making.

T
HE HIJACKER WITH ORGANIZED-CRIME connections arrived cuffed and shackled at Lewisburg federal prison on May 14, 1969, after a six-hour ride from New York in a mobile cage. From inside the prison bus, John Gotti saw a medieval-looking stone fortress with gun towers rising against low, dark hills.

Once inside, he and others were ordered from the bus and led past guards with machine guns to a reception area enclosed by wire mesh and steel bars. He was given a sheet, a pillow, a blanket, a towel, a toothbrush, and a job emptying garbage cans and mopping floors.

Gotti knew Lewisburg wasn’t going to be like a city jail. It was a long-term home for hard-core criminals. It had two sets of laws: institutional and inmate. The trick was not to offend either and do your time as peaceably as possible. At least he would have some company—his
gumbah,
his good friend Angelo Ruggiero, had been sent to the same prison and so had a heroin dealer named Anthony Rampino, who would become, later on, Gotti’s chauffeur, or “John’s man,” as “Tony Roach” Rampino described himself.

At the time, 2,000 men were incarcerated at Lewisburg, including many big-time Family men from the Crime Capital. The biggest mobster was 5 foot 3 Carmine Galante, the fiery fifty-seven-year-old boss of the Bonanno Family, who was doing heroin time after deciding that the Apalachin drug ban didn’t apply to him.

The prison had 1,200 black inmates, but the 400 Italians were more unified and thus dominated prison life. “Mafia Row” extended its umbrella of protection and influence to all prisoners of Italian descent, especially those with Family ties. It introduced them to the prison’s underground economy, its bookmaking operation, its network of friendly “hacks” who could be counted on for favors. They might even get invited to “Club Lewisburg,” a room where Galante and others played cards, ate purloined steaks, and drank liquor hidden in after-shave bottles. Another Lewisburg inmate, former International Brotherhood of Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, had designated Club Lewisburg as Teamsters 865. Outside prison, Galante was ill-tempered and ruthless, but inside he did not allow fighting; everyone was expected to keep their cells clean and the noise level down.

Gotti spent the summer on the sanitation crew, but in September he was transferred to the yard detail, a sign he was moving up fast in prison prestige. He began putting on extra muscles by pumping Lewisburg iron.

In October, Gotti was driven back to New York to stand trial in the state’s hijacking case pending against him in Queens. If convicted, he might have to go directly to state prison once his expected 30-month Lewisburg tour was over. The federal Velvet Touch caper was still hanging over him, too.

Gotti was kept in the Queens House of Detention as jury selection began. Once again, Michael Coiro was his attorney and after the jury was seated, Coiro once again came up with a deal Gotti couldn’t pass up. Gotti would plead guilty and would get no additional jail time.

For several more years, Michael Coiro would often demonstrate an amazing touch with the officials in Queens.

 

 

Feeling fine, considering, Gotti rode back to Lewisburg and Mafia Row and settled once more into the abnormal routine of prison life. He had more than two years to go, two more years with some of the most incorrigible criminals in America. In Washington, D.C., people were trying to figure out what to do about such men.

Six years earlier, another descendant of immigrants from Naples, Joseph M. Valachi, had started a national debate on how to fight organized crime by revealing the secret ways of the Families. Valachi, a Genovese Family soldier, told his story to a U.S. Senate committee after killing a man—at the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta—who he mistakenly believed intended to kill him. Valachi thought that his boss, Vito Genovese, had ordered him killed because Genovese believed he had cheated him out of money.

Facing the death penalty in Georgia, Valachi contacted the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Robert Morgenthau, and agreed to cooperate with the federal government. Soon he was a star witness before a Senate rackets committee and on the front page of newspapers across the country.

Valachi gave a new name to the Families—
La Cosa Nostra,
our thing. He named bosses and described their schemes and methods; he discussed his own 30 violent years in crime. His testimony pushed the Republicans to a law-and-order campaign in 1964 and prompted the victorious Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, to announce “a war on crime” that would include a Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, which would appoint a special task force on organized crime.

The task force issued its report in 1967. It urged Congress to adopt many anti-organized-crime weapons; over the next three years, many were. Special federal Organized Crime Strike Forces of specially recruited prosecutors were created in cities with a Cosa Nostra Family. Under certain conditions, wiretapping and other electronic-surveillance methods were legalized. The power to empanel grand juries was taken away from judges and given to prosecutors, who also received greater power to immunize witnesses and a program to protect and relocate those who jeopardized their lives by testifying. Finally, a sweeping new law, the Racketeering-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, was passed. “RICO” made it a separate crime, punishable by long imprisonment, to belong to a criminal organization.

Many Italian-American groups were upset by the publicity given Valachi’s disclosures. They protested that the feverish coverage of a 4,700-member secret network of criminals was a libel on 15 million law-abiding citizens of Italian heritage.

Protest was then at its peak in America. For every cause there was a movement, and in 1970 a most surprising protest leader came forward—Joseph Colombo, boss of the Colombo Family in New York. In April, his son was arrested for defacing U.S. currency; Colombo picketed the offices of the FBI in Manhattan, claiming harassment. Over the next few months, the size of his demonstrations swelled and he founded the Italian-American Civil Rights League. It had an amazing but brief history, and so would Colombo.

In its first year, the league sponsored a Unity Day, which drew 50,000 people and most major city and state politicians to Columbus Circle. It was a protest against discrimination and offensive stereotyping of Italians in television commercials and the media. The league became a forum for airing legitimate grievances, but Colombo was a cynical leader with a hidden agenda. He wanted the government to cease its Family investigations so that he could operate as freely as he wanted.

Colombo’s gambit backfired. The government retaliated with stepped-up investigations of all the Families. Gambino Family underboss Aniello Dellacroce, for instance, was hauled before grand juries in Manhattan and Brooklyn. He refused to talk to either—even after offers of immunity—and was later jailed for a year. The Internal Revenue Service also opened a separate tax case that would result in another jail term.

After only one year, Carlo Gambino had seen enough. His wife had just died and the government was trying to deport him. Colombo’s high-profile activities had jeopardized Gambino’s goal of living out his final years quietly. He and other bosses spread the word among unions and along the docks—where Gambino’s support was the greatest—that attendance at the second annual Unity Day would not be appreciated.

On June 28, 1971, only 10,000 people showed up, one-fifth of the previous year’s crowd. Even so, Colombo was besieged by reporters and photographers in Columbus Circle. One lensman was only acting. He was really a hit man and he shot Colombo in the head and neck. A few seconds later, the hit man was hit, by a man who fired three fatal bullets and melted into the crowd.

Colombo survived, but was paralyzed and incapacitated; he died in 1978. By his side that day was a young Brooklyn lawyer admitted to the bar at age 21. Barry Ivan Slotnick, who would wind up representing Aniello Dellacroce, had helped Colombo start the Italian-American Civil Rights League.