Mob Star (38 page)

The press ignored most of the lawyers’ agonizing and concentrated on Gotti: Would he say anything?

Around noon, after a squabble over where the defendants could eat lunch, pens scurried across pads when Gotti grumbled sarcastically, “Judge, why don’t we just not eat? Why should we eat? We don’t deserve to eat.”

It was his only public remark of the day, and it was reported like a pronouncement. No matter how innocuous his words were, Gotti’s flash and dash, combined with his presumed treachery and violence, was regarded as good for circulation and ratings. In a few weeks, in fact, the “Dapper Don,” an unknown Queens capo the year before, would appear on the cover of
Time
, in one of Andy Warhol’s last drawings.

The chief correspondent of Soviet television and radio even came by to see the man about whom so many were saying so much.

“If I were the director of a
Godfather
movie, I would be happy to find someone who looks just like him,” said Vladimir P. Dounaev, who had interviewed Henry Kissinger the day before. In a sly punch at the American way, Dounaev added: “I am a bit puzzled, however, why men like him in your country always seem to have the best lawyers.”

Romual Piecyk, the refrigerator man, was another surprise visitor. He knew that—despite his retractions—he was the reason why Gotti was in jail. He tried to see Nickerson, to urge him to be nice to Mr. Gotti, but Nickerson told him to put whatever he had to say in writing. Piecyk, however, held a press conference outside the courthouse and twisted in the wind.

“I honestly feel Mr. Gotti should be out on bail. I was never threatened or harassed or intimidated by Mr. Gotti.”

In such a climate, Nickerson had to pick a jury. He had decided, in the aftermath of DeCicco’s death, to seat an anonymous jury, a phenomenon in many Family cases. He began by having potential jurors complete a questionnaire to detect bias and knowledge of the case. Then he called them into the courtroom one by one to introduce the cast and ask more questions. Anyone aware of the case wasn’t automatically rejected; the test was having an open mind, a willingness to base a verdict on a million facts.

The routine took a month, mainly because many potential jurors plainly wanted to be elsewhere and gave disingenuous answers. The seven wise men ranted and raved throughout the ordeal, saying, on the one hand, the press made it impossible to find an impartial jury and, on the other, anybody who hadn’t heard about the case was too dumb to be on a jury.

“Anyone with half a brain has to have read about my client even if they read the paper only once a month,” said Cutler.

Finally, on September 16, a jury of 6 men and 6 women was picked from a pool of 28 approved by Nickerson. The defense had 10 automatic challenges, the government 6. All the defense selections were subject to a veto by Gotti, the team’s quarterback. Because the choices were so limited, Cutler complained that a nurse’s aide—who made it onto the jury—was so “uninformed” she wasn’t “from the planet we’re from.”

A pretty Italian-American woman, age 24, was one of Gotti’s personal choices. She was Brooklyn born and bred, and single. She was “The Girl.” The defense gave others nicknames, too, based on who or what they looked like. A black man was “Willie Mays.” An ex-marine was “Larry King,” after the talk show host. Another Italian-American woman was “The Heavy Lady.” A man who the defense thought was against it from the start was “Death.”

The jury also included another black, another ex-marine and another Italian-American. By and large, the jurors were middle age, middle class, and middle brow and they were about to embark on a raucous, memorable half-year journey through the world of John Gotti, hardly one of their peers.

Opening statements, the time to color the case, were held on September 25. Giacalone showed up in a power red suit, and thus the “real Italian lady” became “The Lady in Red.”

“Good morning,” she told the jury. “Jimmy McBratney was a big man.” She had chosen to begin her effort to put Gotti away for the rest of his life by recreating a scene in Snoope’s Bar on Staten Island 13 years ago:

“This was no simple barroom brawl. It was part of a pattern of criminal activity … John Gotti killed Jimmy McBratney out of ambition—ambition to have himself in an organization known as the Gambino Crime Family.”

Giacalone went to a blackboard to draw a Family tree. She explained the two counts in the indictment: the first charged a conspiracy, an agreement, to commit crimes; the second charged racketeering through commission of specific crimes. She warned that the witnesses she would call as to both counts were “just horrible people.”

After 90 minutes of earnest argument, Giacalone sat down and Bruce Cutler got up with a fury. Settling back to watch the performance from the other end of the defense table was Barry Slotnick, who was representing John Carneglia. Cutler—“Who needs Barry Slotnick?”—had recently left the law firm of Slotnick and Cutler.

Cutler, prowling like the champion wrestler he formerly was, said Giacalone’s statements were “half-truths and lies.” Her case was a “fantasy.” He went over to her blackboard and erased the Family tree because “it tells you about a secret underworld that doesn’t exist.”

Erasing the blackboard was a two-point reversal, and now Cutler came in low for a takedown. His client wasn’t hooked up to any enterprise! The government just didn’t like him because of his lifestyle! But Gotti grew up poor, was “denied Harvard,” and so he ran with old friends, people like—here came a name that didn’t mean anything to the jury—Angelo Ruggiero.

“What’s wrong about that?”

The Bergin Hunt and Fish Club was not a “nefarious place” but a social club where nuns, women, and children came! The government would use a gang of murderers and drug dealers—perish the thought that John Gotti would even know drug dealers!—to lie about a man whose only family was his wife and kids! The government didn’t like Gotti because he cursed and placed bets and took pride in his appearance!

“So when he sits there resplendent in his suit, it’s not out of being bold! It is out of pride; that’s what made this country great!”

Time for a big finish. The indictment “stinks” and a “fancy wine dressing” called RICO doesn’t make it taste better! “It still is rancid! It’s still rotten! It still makes you retch and vomit!” Cutler grabbed a copy of the indictment and—shouting “This is where it belongs!”—slam-dunked it into a waste can.

Veins still bulging, Cutler walked back to the defense table and sat down next to his client, who shook his hand.

The stage was set. Let the play begin.

I
N ACT I, IT BECAME CLEAR: If John Gotti were a lawyer, he would be a Bruce Cutler.

“Hit ’im … hit him with a baseball bat. I want that as soon as you find this guy on the floor, you give ’im a beatin’.”

That was Gotti, in 1985 on the Nice N EZ bug, telling a minion how to handle a pizza-shop owner, and apart from the bat, it was the way Cutler handled witnesses at Gotti’s trial; anyone with anything bad to say, one defendant later said, was “Brucified.”

All lawyers in the case were adroit cross-examiners, but none insulted and rattled witnesses, and then pounded them to a pulp, the way Cutler did. Throughout, he had an air, a swagger, a look that said, “I’m great and you’re a piece of shit.”

Judge Nickerson, reluctant to use his authority, let Cutler get away with courtroom murder. Cutler punched after the bell and below the belt; he called Giacalone a tramp and got a witness to call her “a slut and a blow job.” When it seemed the judge might slap him down, Cutler drew back, apologized, and promised to be good, usually after accomplishing what he wanted, an unfair question, an insulting remark, a sly inference, a gambit for the jury—which ultimately elected “Larry King” its foreman.

On the first day of testimony, Cutler let Nickerson know that John Gotti wanted to know and hear everything that was to go on. He didn’t want the judge and lawyers to hold many sidebar conferences. “It’s our position we’d like to keep sidebars to an absolute minimum,” Cutler said, except for “an emergency situation.”

The Gotti trial would have many emergencies—every day.

Cutler was only one of the able lawyers on the defense team. Their strategy was simple—show the case is a lie. It was unveiled early in the trial by the brothers Santangelo, Michael and George, and Susan Kellman, who represented the other guys, Leonard DiMaria and Nicholas Corozzo.

As the prosecution set the scene with several police witnesses, the Santangelo brothers chopped away. At the outset of their careers, they were Legal Aid Society lawyers—working for the poor—but now they were well-to-do gunslingers, and every time they stood to cross-examine a witness, they dripped contempt for the case, implying that every cop and agent was lying or merely mouthing facts from the ambitious table of Diane Giacalone, “that lady in red.”

Her case did have problems. One was hardheaded Edward Maloney, once part of a kidnapping gang with James McBratney, the man Gotti helped kill. He was the first major witness to be Brucified.

Maloney was an easy target—it was hard to figure out why he was testifying. Having failed to get Willie Boy Johnson or Billy Battista as witnesses, and anticipating the defense would clobber Polisi and Cardinali, Giacalone put witnesses on the stand who didn’t have much to offer, except their own terrible résumés.

In his questioning of Maloney, Cutler established with a rapid volley of questions that Maloney had spent half his life in prison for kidnapping, armed robbery, and other violent crimes. Then he raised his eyes from a rap sheet he was reading and, granting Maloney a look for the first time, shouted:

“You’d agree with me, sir, you are a menace and have always been, haven’t you?”

“No.”

“Were you a menace to society when you went into jewelry stores and held people up with a loaded gun?”

“Yes.”

Through more questions—accompanied by smirks, sneers, and mocking chuckles—Cutler set up how “a bum” like Maloney was given immunity, wired up, and sent out to catch a small-timer like Philip Cestaro, the bookmaker at the Cozy Corner Bar.

“Did you ever meet John Gotti in your life, sir?”

Cutler turned toward the jury. A look of disgust. Then of wonder. And now triumph.

“No,” Maloney said.

Giacalone had wanted Maloney to testify that he was targeted for murder because he and McBratney had kidnapped mobsters. But before Brucification began, Nickerson accepted a defense motion that the recording in which Maloney said Gotti “got his wings by whacking” out McBratney should not be played, because FBI agent Edward Woods had spoon-fed the idea to Maloney. There was no doubt that Gotti had helped to kill McBratney, but the jury had to wonder: What was the motive? Was it for the enterprise? Or a bar fight?

The jurors got to hear only harmless conversations between Maloney and Cestaro.

“And you know quite honestly,” Cutler continued, “that as far as Phil Cestaro was concerned, he was afraid of you, wasn’t he, sir?”

“Yes.”

“As a matter of fact, Mr. Maloney, isn’t that why you maintained a relationship with him? Because monopolizing the weak, and the sick, and the infirm is something that you know about, isn’t that true?”

“No.”

“Didn’t Phil Cestaro tell you throughout these tapes that his friendship or relationship with you was not known to John Gotti?”

“No.”

“Didn’t he tell you that the reason it was not known to John Gotti was because he wouldn’t want Cestaro associated with a menace, a lowlife, and a drug dealer like yourself? Isn’t that what he told you, sir?”

“No.”

Nickerson would remind jurors many times that questions are not evidence; only answers matter. But when questions are repeated often enough, sometimes they do matter, subliminally if not consciously, especially if a witness repeatedly answers “no.”

If Maloney had replied “yes,” Cutler would have moved on, but now he paused and found a transcript in which Cestaro told Maloney that they would have to meet a drug dealer in secret.

“Why?” Cutler asked. “Tell the jury the truth.”

“Because he [the dealer] was involved in narcotics.”

“And Phil Cestaro knew the only way to meet an individual like that would be unbeknownst to John Gotti, isn’t that right, sir?”

“That’s the way I understood it.”

Cutler turned to look into the jurors’ eyes again. An I-told-you-so look this time.
Like I said in my opening, John Gotti doesn’t have anything to do with drug dealers.

Later, when Maloney refused to confirm that the government had spent $52,000 taking care of him, Cutler waved a document and said, “Do you see a figure for the fiscal year nineteen eighty-three, eighty-four, eighty-five?”

Nickerson said the question was improperly framed, so Cutler put it another way: “Does it refresh your recollections that you received from the government in toto some fifty-two thousand dollars—well, let’s see, put it this way, Mr. Maloney, that it cost the United States of America some fifty-two thousand dollars to give you a new identity, to give you a new home, to give you a new job, to cut your hair, and give you a suit, a menace and a bum like you?”

“Objection!”

“Sustained.”

Cutler wasn’t through. He demonstrated how the trial would at times sound like a Gotti tape recording when he asked Maloney if he were a “fucking cocksucker.” He began by paraphrasing an earlier remark by Maloney that someone “gave him up,” and asked, “Is that what you are, a giver upper?”

“I would say that right now.”

“You used expletives like fucking cocksucker and bum on the tapes quite often, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Is that what you are?”

“Objection!”

“Sustained.”

Cutler’s questioning of Maloney was enhanced by a prosecution decision to play hardball. Though not required to turn over information the government has about its own witnesses until after they testify, prosecutors usually do so beforehand, so that the defense is ready to cross-examine and the trial moves smoothly.