Mob Star (52 page)

Now everyone heard “DiBono,” not “Deebee.”

“Holy fuckin’ shit,” Gabriel said. “Another murder, it sounds like to me.” He played the tape two more times, with the same results.

Carmine Russo sank into his chair. “I haven’t been back to this tape in a while, but it’s there, I missed it, I fucked up.”

The agents informed Gleeson, who said, “I listened to that tape myself, maybe a dozen times. I didn’t hear ‘DiBono’ before.”

DiBono chose the life he lived. Still, everyone felt an odd mixture of guilt and embarrassment. But it soon gave away to another emotion—excitement. With another murder for the indictment, the nice and clean case had just gotten stronger.

Once the hearing began, it was time for Gotti to realize mistakes. As prosecutors began playing excerpts, the cost of once relaxing in Nettie’s place became devastatingly clear. Each excerpt supported a charge in the case; for the suspects, it was like seeing bullets aimed at their heads leave the gun.

Words from the December 12, 1989 tape—the most damning one—resonated with particular impact on Sammy Gravano. He was not in the apartment that day, and so he was hearing the words for the first time—and hearing Gotti lie about the murders of Robert “Deebee” DiBernardo, Louis Milito, and Louis DiBono.

The truth was that Deebee was murdered, over Sammy’s objections, after Angelo told Gotti, in jail awaiting trial in the Giacalone case, that Deebee had made “subversive” comments behind his back. At the time, Angelo owed Deebee money and considered him a rival for underboss.

“Deebee,” Gotti said on tape to LoCascio. “Did he ever talk subversive to you?”

“Never.”

“Never talked it to Angelo, and he never talked it to [Joseph Armone] either. I took Sammy’s word that he talked about me behind my back … 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 excerpt, Gotti next turned to Milito and DiBono. Milito had been killed because he noisily questioned the judgment of the new boss. DiBono was killed because he failed to answer a Gotti summons. But now Gotti said the only reason they were killed was that Sammy asked permission to get rid of business partners.

“Every time we got a partner that don’t agree with us, we kill him. … [the] boss kills him. He kills him. He okays it. Says it’s all right, good.”

In one brief diatribe, Gotti made three murders seem solely Sammy’s doing. There would be a price for rewriting history this way, and soon the bill would come due.

Back in solitary confinement, Sammy began spending time with transcripts of the tapes turned over to the defense. The December 12 transcript contained much more Gotti monomania than was excerpted in the bail hearing, and Sammy studied it intently. Time and again, Gotti accused Sammy of having “green eyes”—hoarding money and opportunity for himself.

“That’s Sammy … every fucking time I turn around there’s a new company poppin’ up. Building. Consulting. Concrete … where the hell did all these new companies come from? Where did five new companies come from?”

Sammy read on, until on page 30 of the transcript, history seemed to be repeating itself: Gotti compared Sammy to Paul.

“[Paul] sold the [Family] out for a fuckin’ construction company. And that’s what [Sammy’s] doing. I don’t know if you could see it, but that’s what [Sammy’s] doing now. Three, four guys will wind up with every fuckin’ thing. And the rest of the [Family] looks like waste.”

Unless Sammy was brought into line, Gotti added, the Family was headed down the same path as under Paul—a Family of factions, “a fuckin’ army inside an army:”

“You know what I’m saying, Frankie? I saw that shit and I don’t need that shit!”

Gotti’s words sat in Sammy’s craw for months. At one point, when he and Gotti were briefly housed in the same cell, he made his feelings known. Gotti said he was just ranting and that if he believed what he said, he would not have made Sammy underboss.

He also told Sammy that he never believed it when someone came to him and said Sammy was an informer. This enraged Sammy more because, as he told Gotti, he should have been given the right to challenge his accuser, prove him wrong and then kill him.

“As underboss, you owed me. That’s
Cosa Nostra,
the life. We do a sitdown. Put me in the basement with pistols. If they prove it, kill me. If they don’t, I kill them. It’s my right. You took that away. Not telling me, you give credence to a fuckin’ lie.”

“Sammy, I am your friend, you’re my friend. I never doubted ya. I can’t remember every little thing I don’t think counts.”

“I was your underboss!”

“Sammy, this here happened, but it don’t mean nothing. Now, we gotta fight hard to get outta here.”

As the pretrial stage in Judge Leo Glasser’s courtroom moved into 1991, the fight got harder. At the end of a bitter battle fought in legal papers, the judge—at Gleeson’s urging—disqualified Cutler and Shargel from representing Gotti and Sammy at the trial because they were too involved in the taped evidence to properly defend their clients.

The legal basis for disqualification was overwhelming. Still, it was controversial. Denying Gotti and Sammy a basic liberty, the right to counsel of their choice, might look unfair. Kicking Bruce Cutler out might look like revenge for the Giacalone case.

Gleeson and his assistants mulled it over a long time. The more time they spent with the transcripts, however, the more they felt the evidence justified it. “The lawyers made themselves part of the evidence, part of what happened,” Gleeson argued. “If you don’t want to be a fact witness, stay the hell out of the Ravenite.”

At the first hearing held after the disqualification, a large media contingent showed up. Gotti noticed and took advantage.

“Why can’t I have my counsel, Bruce Cutler?” he demanded of Judge Glasser.

“I made that clear in a decision, Mr. Gotti. I’m sure Mr. Cutler has explained it to you.”

Gotti turned toward the prosecution table and shouted: “I think they should be disqualified! I’m not worried about their phony tapes or their phony transcripts!”

He raised his right arm and cocked his thumb and forefinger like a pistol, then aimed at Gleeson—that “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” he said, adding: “He says he welcomes a good fight! He says he wants a fair trial! But he can’t handle a good fight, and he can’t win a fair trial!”

The judge said he would give the defendants two weeks to hire new lawyers, and if they didn’t, they would get court-appointed lawyers.

“You can do whatever you want to do,” Gotti barked. “It’s your courtroom.”

Gotti sat down, satisfied with his message of defiance in the face of persecution.

The performance did not impress an increasingly self-interested Sammy Gravano. In the next hearing two weeks later, he startled people at the prosecution table when he smiled and said, “Good morning, Mr. Maloney.”

In a few days more, he sent a secret message to the FBI. The message was that he was not going to remain loyal to a man who pinned murders on him and talked behind his back. He was willing to talk about a deal. He had calculated his options carefully. He was facing life in prison if convicted. If he pleaded guilty and helped the government by testifying against Gotti, he might get ten or even five years in prison.

Negotiations took weeks. At the end, Sammy agreed to become the first Mafia underboss to testify against his boss. He also agreed to confess to all his crimes, and in so doing, filled in all the missing details of the Sparks murders.

He identified the 10-member hit team, and where each was placed. It included John Gotti, sitting in a parked car with Sammy, ready to jump out and open fire if the four main shooters had trouble with their targets, which they did not

“Wasn’t that kind of reckless?” Gleeson asked Sammy during one of dozens of debriefings. “What if somebody saw you?”

“Nobody knew John then. Nobody knew me, not until John made me and everybody known to you. I always thought Cosa Nostra meant being undercover.”

Some wondered about the wisdom of dealing with Sammy. But after debriefing Sammy, Gleeson argued for it. “There’s no way we can’t use Sammy,” he told Maloney. “He gives the case depth. He makes Sparks. At the end of this case, all we will have to do is tell the jury: ‘You can convict on the tapes, you can convict on Gravano’s testimony—but together, the conclusion to this case is inescapable.’”

In another debriefing with Mouw, Sammy filled in one more puzzle—the 1987 Giacalone case. Mouw asked: “After John’s trial in ’87, we got some surveillance that seemed to show people congratulating you for something. Did you have anything to do with that jury?”

“Sure I did!” Sammy replied. “I fixed it! I was in charge of a guy on the jury. Did a good job, didn’t I?”

To increase his worth to the prosecution, Sammy agreed to testify against anyone else the government wanted. He would help it dismantle the mob. In return, he would be sentenced to five years in prison. It was the best deal a gangster ever made, and it sealed John Gotti’s fate.

Gotti’s fourth trial in six years began January 21, 1992. The prosecution severed Tommy Gambino from the case for a separate trial—no use letting any juror sympathy for the gentlemanly Gambino rub off on Gotti.

 

 

At the trial’s outset, Glasser ruled the jury would be sequestered. This was a first in Brooklyn federal court history, as sequestration in the O’Connor case was a first in Manhattan state court history. Gotti’s main hope now was that when deliberations began, jurors would either be too afraid to convict, or too affected by some combination of old and new favorable publicity.

Outside the courtroom, during breaks, Gotti stalwarts lobbied the press. They got reporters to run stories about Gotti buying puppies for sick children and urging thieves to return a religious urn stolen from a church. Jack D’Amico and Carlo Vaccarezza, owner of a favored Gotti restaurant, were the most effective lobbyists. They were charming and always quote-ready—as long as the instigating question was not overtly invasive.

“John’s a man’s man,” Vaccarezza said in his languid maitre d’ style. “Loyal, true. He’s only on trial because the government hates it that people love him.”

“A John only comes along once in a life,” added D’Amico. “They broke the mold with John; he’s original.”

A writer interrupted to ask D’Amico what made Gotti such an original.

“John had two things going for him. He was loved and feared. He’s the only person I’ve seen with both. You call it charisma. He has that, but love and fear was what counted. People don’t cross a man they love and fear.”

“Sammy apparently has,” the writer pointed out.

“Well, because of the situation that happened. But Sammy only ever had one thing going for him. Fear. People were afraid to warn John about Sammy.”

At the defense table, Gotti seemed sanguine. But this faded midway through jury-screening, after the
Daily News
broke two big stories. The first disclosed the Giacalone-case fix. The second previewed highlights from Sammy’s expected Sparks testimony.

The jury story laid the Teflon Don myth bare just when Gotti needed myth most; the Sparks story showed how much damage Sammy was going to cause. Both stories, widely reported by other media, negated the publicity operation.

As jury screening continued, many obviously frightened people made it plain they did not want to serve on a Gotti jury. One day, Glasser summoned the lead lawyers into chambers to discuss the potential jurors’ fears, and Gotti wound up alone with a pool reporter, Gabriel, and some federal guards. The reporter asked Gotti what he thought about Cutler’s disqualification on conflict-of-interest grounds.

“Conflict?” Gotti began, pointing to Gleeson’s empty chair. “He’s the one with a conflict! He’s had one for eight years! You know how they say I’m Bruce’s only client the last eight years? Well, I’m Gleeson’s only case. This guy, you know what he says when he wakes up in the morning, rolls over and looks at his wife? He says, ‘Hiya, John.’ This guy learned to talk listening to my voice! I’d like to have a bug on him for three hours!”

After an anonymous jury was finally chosen, and Gleeson began introducing the government’s evidence, Gotti’s behavior grew worse. At the defense table, he smirked, snarled, and swore. He gestured profanely at witnesses and government lawyers.

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.