Mob Star (5 page)

Gotti had a reputation for ruthlessness. He cultivated it by speaking to subordinates and enemies in a ferocious manner. His image was not based on words alone, as some tragically knew, but he did use words like knives. Hundreds of times, Gotti’s voice had been secretly preserved on government tape recordings; it was an occupational hazard for all Family men, especially during the 1970s and 1980s.

“I like to go and crack fucking heads,” he had recently said about someone who offended him,” and I’ll put them in the dumpster. I’d take a few guys and have a little fun. I love batting practice. I go regular, ya know?”

Gotti, who began with nothing, had an ego as expansive as any in Yankee Stadium, Trump Tower, or City Hall. He sometimes became giddy when he realized how far he had come, as when he recalled what had happened at the recent wedding of the son of Frank DeCicco, a Castellano man whom Gotti had befriended:

“Hey, Bobby, whose wedding was that this weekend we went to?”

“Ahh, Frankie DeCicco’s son.”

“Whose wedding did it look like it was?”

“Yours.”

“How many people come and bother me until what time in the morning? They put a chair next to me.”

Three o’clock. Three-fifteen.”

“Every good fellow [Family member] and every non-good fellow came and bothered me. My brother Pete said he clocked seventy-five guys. I say he undersold me. I’d say there was more than seventy-five guys came and talked to me.”

Gotti was listed as an employee of a plumbing company, but detectives who followed him hundreds of times never saw him fixing faucets or laying pipe. Since 1982, they had spotted him meeting with Failla, DeCicco, and other captains in what was seen as an effort to foster relationships with the Family around the Family, which the men themselves sometimes called “the other mob.”

 

 

Thomas Bilotti lived only two miles from the Pope. He arrived at the house on the hill just before noon. Castellano walked out through the big double doors, past a large Christmas wreath, and got into Bilotti’s black Lincoln for the short drive to the day’s first “sitdown,” which is how Family meetings are described.

At a nearby diner, they met Failla and John Riggi, boss of the small but prosperous DeCavalcante Family in New Jersey. It was important for the two bosses to maintain contact because Gambino crews operate in New Jersey. In addition, Riggi was the business agent of a laborers’ union and often sought the counsel of Uncle Paul, who manipulated many unions and their members.

About 2:00 P.M., Bilotti and Castellano left for Manhattan to drop off the envelopes, visit with Castellano’s lawyer, and have dinner at Sparks. A table for six had been reserved. They drove toward the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, a silvery span named after the Italian explorer who discovered Staten Island in 1524 and the Narrows, the mile-wide Atlantic Ocean gateway to the deep water of New York Harbor.

The Lincoln glided across the bridge to Brooklyn, the “Broken Land” of the early Dutch settlers. Then it veered onto the Gowanus Expressway and headed northeast, parallel to the waterfront docks of South Brooklyn, which the Gambino Family had corrupted long ago.

In Red Hook, the Lincoln left the highway and went underground, entering an opening in the East River bedrock known as the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. It emerged a few minutes later onto the southern tip of Manhattan, where tourists gather for excursion rides to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, where many sons of Sicily landed in America. The Lincoln veered left through an underpass and then onto the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, locally known as the East River Drive, which was the road to midtown sitdowns.

Around 2:30 P.M., Castellano and Bilotti arrived at the office of attorney James LaRossa, on Madison Avenue near Twenty-fifth Street.

Recently, the news in Castellano’s stolen-car case was good. Originally, the indictment charged the ring with some two dozen murders, including that of the Pope’s former son-in-law, who was said to have cheated on his pregnant wife, which was said to have caused a miscarriage. In a setback for prosecutors, a judge had since broken the indictment down into several smaller, more defendable cases.

In the first of these, the only evidence directly linking Castellano to the stolen-car ring had been the testimony of the nephew of Gambino captain Anthony Gaggi. The nephew had testified he took stacks of money to Castellano and heard him discuss with Uncle Anthony one of the brutal murders attributed to Uncle Paul’s henchmen.

Under cross-examination, however, the nephew admitted first linking Castellano to the ring on the eve of the trial even though he had previously undergone two hundred hours of interrogation. The implication was that the nephew had embroidered his story to help prosecutors out of a last-minute jam. Castellano felt the man came across as a liar when he denied it; he hoped the jury did, too. Many prosecutors consider New York juries the most skeptical around, but one never knows about juries, not until they free you or jail you.

“We talked very little about the car case, we thought we had it locked up,” LaRossa would say later. “We were in a vacation mode, a holiday mood.”

Bilotti and Castellano left LaRossa’s office about 4:00 P.M., an hour before their sitdown with Failla, DeCicco, and two other people at Sparks.

“See you in court tomorrow,” Castellano told LaRossa.

With an hour to kill before going to Sparks, Castellano decided to pick up a special Christmas gift, a bottle of perfume, for a LaRossa secretary who had been especially courteous to him. He directed Bilotti to a store on West Forty-third Street, where they parked the Lincoln in a no parking zone. They could have afforded a garage; Castellano had $3,300 on him, Bilotti $6,300.

Bilotti opened the glove compartment and removed a card issued by the New York City Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association; it had originally been given to a newly promoted police sergeant. Bilotti placed it on the dashboard but it didn’t do any good; the Lincoln was ticketed.

 

 

The middle part of Manhattan is a tiny grid: avenues run north and south; streets go east and west. Now, at 5:00 P.M., the grid was locked with people and cars—it’s always a honking zone of despair during the Christmas season—and the boss and his new underboss were caught in a crosstown snarl.

They would be late for their executions.

In the vicinity of Sparks, in the fading light of day, about a dozen men empty of goodwill waited anxiously for the Pope’s arrival. Several sat in parked cars on Second and Third Avenues. At least three waited on benches located in a small street-level plaza at Forty-sixth Street and Third Avenue or paced the side street, pausing in apartment doorways to light cigarettes.

Diplomatic bodyguards, a passerby decided.

One of the three men on the street was gangly, pockmarked, and had eyes as dark as tombs. Another was short and tense like a cobra. They wore trench coats and dark, cossacklike fur hats.

“Where the hell are they?” one grumbled to another, loud enough for someone to recall later. “They were supposed to be here by now.”

At 5:25 P.M., Bilotti turned the Lincoln onto East Forty-sixth Street. It was dark now, and the car reflected a rainbow of seasonal colors. Both men were unarmed. The Pope had a rule about wearing weapons to Family sitdowns: Don’t do it. But there was no need for weapons—they were meeting members of the Family, in the middle of midtown, at a crowded restaurant. All of which made it a perfect setup for the hit men in fur hats.

At 5:26, the Lincoln stopped in a no standing area in front of Sparks. Weapons drawn, two assassins moved directly in front of Castellano as he began to get out on the curbside; one confronted Bilotti as he emerged from behind the wheel.

There was a flash of recognition; the Pope knew at least one of the men who were about to kill him.

And now with a flash of blue-orange and a rapid crackling sound bouncing off the buildings, the bullets flew in from .32- and .38-caliber semiautomatic handguns and blood and bone flew out. The Pope and Bilotti were hit six times each, in the head and the upper body. A bystander recalled watching one of the gunmen leaning over and firing a be-sure shot into the Pope’s head.

Castellano sank to the ground, his body wedged between the open car door and the passenger seat. His left hand clung to the bottom of the car door, a death grip; a half-smoked cigar glowed a few inches away, near his shattered glasses. Bilotti fell face up on the street, the car keys near his outstretched right arm.

Murder still gets a rise out of New Yorkers. Many screamed and darted into doorways or ducked down behind two large stone lions guarding Chez Vong Restaurant of Paris and New York, adjacent to Sparks. The killers tucked away their weapons—one was equipped with a silencer—and walked east on Forty-sixth Street to Second Avenue; the tense cobralike one whispered into a walkie-talkie, no doubt to a man in one of the cars.

At the corner, in front of the Dag Hammarskjöld Tower Condominium, another Lincoln pulled up and the assassins climbed in; the car slipped into the southbound traffic and disappeared. They and the men in the other cars, who were on standby in case anything went wrong, now relaxed and pounded the dashboards in exhilarated relief. Nothing had gone wrong.

A witness saw three men leave Sparks shortly after the gunfire ended. Two of them resembled police mug shots of James Failla and Frank DeCicco. Whoever the men were, they ignored the hysteria, and the little red rivers on Forty-sixth Street—and faded away as anonymously as the car full of happy hit men.

 

 

A Sparks bartender called 911 and the street soon filled with flashing lights. As word of the victims’ identities was beeped around the city, a rowdy convention of homicide detectives, police brass, and reporters was convened. FBI agents arrived from New York University Law School; a University of Notre Dame professor, an architect of the controversial racketeering law used to indict Castellano in both his pending cases, had been holding a seminar there.

The excitement outside Sparks was palpable. The adrenaline rush the investigators and chroniclers of murder get when they come upon the smell of a big case and a big story always produces moments of thrilling confusion. A Family boss murdered in midtown the week before Christmas was big. Bosses had been slain in other boroughs, but one hadn’t been executed in Manhattan since 1957, when Carlo Gambino’s predecessor was assassinated in a hotel barbershop.

Reporters crowded cops for tidbits. Chief of Detectives Richard Nicastro, asked what effect the slaying might have on the other defendants in the car-case trial, said he wouldn’t speculate. As for the Pope, however: “They don’t have to prove guilt or innocence anymore. That’s over.”

Later, a detective—an expert on the Family—was astonished when told that the victims did not have bodyguards, considering the uncertain climate Neil Dellacroce’s death was known to have caused. It was like the president and the vice president walking around without the Secret Service.

“They were always together. They made it easy.”

The double hit provoked the usual expressions of outrage.

“The decent citizens of this country are demeaned in the eyes of the world if brazen cold-blooded murders can be perpetrated on a street in New York,” said federal Court of Appeals Judge Irving J. Kaufman, chairman of the President’s Commission on Organized Crime.

“The waste of a human life is shocking, no matter who it is,” commented federal District Court Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy, who was presiding over Castellano’s car case, as he adjourned the trial for three weeks to weigh motions from codefendants for a mistrial that was eventually denied.

 

 

The Pope’s table at Sparks had been set for six. Failla, DeCicco, and an unidentified man were seen leaving as two other would-be diners lay in the street. Someone hadn’t come to dinner.

The prime suspect in the drama, not the cameraman but the director, was at home that night in Queens. He was watching television with his longtime wife in their suburban Cape Cod-style home in the un-New York City-like neighborhood known as Howard Beach. The home had a rotating satellite dish on the roof; John Gotti had learned how to tune different worlds in or out.

“Gotti will emerge as the head of the other captains,” predicted Lieutenant Remo Franceschini of the Queens District Attorney’s detective squad the next day. “That’s what this struggle is all about.”

Over the next few days, the little that was known about Gotti was published and broadcast many times. He was said to have many double-breasted suits, his own barber’s chair, and a fear of flying. New Yorkers with a sense of history raised their eyebrows at one unnamed cop’s claim: “Gotti is the most vicious, meanest mobster I’ve ever encountered.”

With justification, the cop might also have added “most reckless” or “boldest.” A few months before, even though aware that his words were being taped by government agents, Gotti had threatened to kill a nightclub owner if the man didn’t make a payment on a $100,000 loan.

“Your partner was here the other day asking me to shoot him in the head, and I would have if he didn’t tell me in a taped joint,” Gotti began. “You deserve to get hit, but the reason why you ain’t … is because I gave my word [that] if you come up here to straighten it out [you wouldn’t be killed] but that is gonna be off, if you don’t come up with it.”

“Johnny, you’re the best,” the man replied.

The months before the murders had been especially tense. Dellacroce’s health had faded as the long-simmering conflict over drug dealing had heated up. Members of both Family branches had become jittery.

“Everybody’s running scared, John,” one of Gotti’s crew members had said to him.

“Well, fuck them, we ain’t.”

“I’m telling you what it is.”

“I ain’t running scared. I run scared … when I bet three games and lose the three games. Then I run scared.”