Mob Star (7 page)

Mosca also said that once Gotti approved Lofaro to run the Queens operation, Lofaro would not need the okay of other captains to operate within their areas—whatever a boss wants, he gets.

Gotti stated this principle to a soldier who expressed concern about stepping on a captain’s toes.

“No big deal,” John said.

“But he’s a captain.”

“I’m your boss!”

Gotti was thinking a lot about how a boss should conduct himself as the day of his coronation approached. For instance, Angelo brought him a problem about a loan-sharking customer, but Gotti replied, “I don’t deal with this anymore.”

Gotti elaborated while discussing what he would say to a soldier who wanted to propose a business deal directly to him. “I’ll tell him, ‘Listen, your skipper will keep me up to date, you keep your skipper up to date.’ I can’t socialize with these guys. I can’t bring myself down. I’m a boss, you know what I mean? I gotta isolate myself a little bit.”

On January 10, Gotti held a similar discussion with Angelo in which he revealed—no surprise here—that he had chosen Frank DeCicco as his underboss.

“What we’re gonna suggest to you is, everybody comes and sees us [captains],” Angelo said. “We’ll see Frankie [DeCicco], we’ll decide if we think it’s important, then we’ll bring it to you.”

“Frankie’s an underboss at least,” Gotti replied.

“All right, so …”

“They have to go through a skipper, then go to [the] underboss.”

The bug in the room next to the Nice N EZ Auto School captured many conversations that demonstrated Gotti was fully ready to exercise his power. He told Angelo that no new men would be made for six months to a year. He discussed which soldiers he would move to which crews—“We got to clip these guys’ wings a little bit.” He also boasted: “I could break every one of the captains now … a new boss does that as soon as [he’s elected]; [then] he gets up and makes a speech.”

He didn’t intend to demote the captains, but felt he was entitled to their resignations. He was the new president and they were the old cabinet. Gotti told an associate he had threatened to strip the skippers in a meeting with the aging Joe N. Gallo, the counselor, or
consigliere,
of the Gambino Family since the Carlo Gambino era. Gotti considered Gallo a yes-man.

Gotti’s description of this meeting, also attended by several captains, or
capos,
indicated how thoroughly he enjoyed Family politics.

He recalled Gallo giving a speech in which he agreed the new boss had the power to break up the cabinet. Gotti believed that Gallo was merely granting the point, to stop him from demoting Gallo as the Family counselor. The boss let Gallo know he couldn’t be fooled.

As Gotti explained:

“I said, ‘Joe, don’t flatter yourself.’ I said, ‘You ain’t no Paulie. You think you’re dealing with a fool? I break twenty-three captains [and] I put ten in. They vote you down. I break them, put my original captains back and you ain’t no
consigliere!
’”

Gotti, as many other recorded conversations had and would demonstrate, regularly regaled friends, soldiers, and associates with tales of his Family prowess. “[Gallo] told Angelo,” he said, summing up the meeting, “‘Where the fuck has he been? How did he figure this out?’”

 

 

On January 13, 1986, Gotti appeared publicly for the first time since the Castellano-Bilotti murders. He attended a pretrial hearing on his racketeering case at the U.S. District Court House in Brooklyn. The borough president of Queens had just attempted suicide, after a friend agreed to spill his political-corruption guts to a grand jury. A huge scandal involving organized crime of an above-world sort was on, but even so, the press showed up to take a look at the new underworld boss and fire a few hallway questions.

Gotti was jovial and coy when asked if he was boss of the Gambino Family: “I’m the boss of my family—my wife and kids at home.”

It was unusual for a Family man, let alone a boss, to answer any questions, even the most innocuous, but Gotti—a
GQ
model of good grooming and style with his double-breasted gray suit and camel’s hair overcoat—acted like a politician too dignified to respond to his opponents’ gutter charges:

“We don’t know nothing ourselves. We hear [the boss talk] the same place you [reporters] get it. We get it from the FBI.”

Gotti and WCBS radio reporter Mary Gay Taylor arrived at the courtroom door at the same time.

“I was brought up to hold the door open for ladies,” he smiled, a twinkle in his eye, as he grasped the door with his right hand and waved her in with his left arm.

After the brief session, he climbed into his lawyer’s black Cadillac and rode off—having left a fairly positive impression, considering that the case against him and six codefendants involved three murders.

A
T AN UNGODLY HOUR at some unbugged location on January 16, 1986, John Joseph Gotti Jr., at the comparatively young age of 45, was officially selected as boss of the Gambino Family, the largest, most powerful organized crime group in America.

As expected, Frank DeCicco was confirmed as underboss and “for now” Joe N. Gallo remained counselor, according to Ralph Mosca, who attended the swearing-in ceremony and immediately informed Dominick Lofaro and other Mosca crew members.

DeCicco, who held a no-show International Brotherhood of Teamsters job, was given his own squad, the crew of the late Thomas Bilotti, and Angelo Ruggiero took over Gotti’s Bergin Hunt and Fish crew, which, besides Gene Gotti, included Peter and Richard Gotti. Peter was a year older than John, Richard two years younger. They had minor criminal records, but Gene—in addition to the heroin case with Angelo—was a defendant with John in the Brooklyn racketeering case.

After a meeting, Angelo accompanied Gotti back to the club. Angelo had come down a long dirty road with Gotti, a road with many bodies alongside it. They had suffered similar personal tragedies. Angelo relished this triumphant moment and felt partly responsible—he had served Gotti dishonorably well.

“Meet your new boss,” Angelo beamed to crew members as he and John walked into the Bergin.

“It’s gonna be nice, you watch,” Gotti told the men.

His election had as much suspense as a meeting of the electoral college an hour after the polls close. The fact that Gotti was under indictment made no difference. The fact that he could be sent away for the rest of his life made no difference. The only thing that made a difference was him, John Gotti—he had measured the odds, put all his chips on the table, and busted the house.

Almost everyone had already forgotten about another legal detail nagging the boss, whose victory was celebrated by the purchase of a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz SEL.

He also was under indictment in a state case, accused of assault and theft—the embarrassing result of a temperamental scuffle with a refrigerator mechanic over a double-parked car in Queens in 1984. Gotti was accused of slapping the man; an associate of Gotti’s was accused of taking $325 from the man’s shirt pocket—out of spite, not larceny, but it read like theft by both in the newspapers, which made it acutely embarrassing.

“The crime is beneath him,” his attorney would point out.

Except for the unseemliness of the idea that he had mugged a mechanic, the case was a nuisance to Gotti, compared to the federal case. The state trial was set for March, but he believed it could be handled. Somehow.

 

 

The day after his inauguration, Gotti griped about the miserliness of the old boss. Theoretically, a boss gets a cut of the operations of each captain, who get a slice of each soldier’s. But Gotti learned that Castellano had been taking $5,000 every Christmas from the life savings of the wife of an elderly captain who had only $2,000 coming in from an untypically moribund crew.

Castellano was a “fuck” for doing this. “Well, listen to me, that’s ended,” Gotti told an associate. “[It] don’t mean [however] that you don’t have to try to hustle and put something together for us.”

Other aspects of the Family’s far-flung money-making ventures crossed Gotti’s desk his first day on the job. He revised the payments that an unspecified industry was making to Castellano and Bilotti so that a soldier in the scheme got a bigger share. He discussed a plan to stop a threatened labor action against concrete plants if they would “sweeten the pie.”

Many conversations over the next several weeks showed the graduate of the blue-collar Family within a Family becoming a white-color boss, or trying to. On January 18, Gotti told Angelo about a deal headed his way with a representative of an unknown group: “He won a deal, supposed to get a job. Three and a half million in [contracts], a hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars in kickbacks or more than that. He says it all goes to Johnny Gotti.”

On January 23, the new Gambino troika—Gotti, DeCicco, and Gallo—traveled to the Helmsley Palace Hotel in Manhattan to meet with recording industry executives seeking venture capital for an album by a new artist. The introductions were made by a longtime captain, Joseph Armone.

Someone tipped off the police as well as a network television crew working on an industry payola story; they arrived as Gotti and the others stepped off an elevator into the lobby. The ambushed mobsters declined interviews, but sinister footage of a handsome, well-dressed man described as an unknown gangster with record-industry contacts was telecast nationwide.

A few days later, back at the Bergin annex, after someone brought a copy of the singer’s sample tape, Gotti was uncertain about the idea. It was risky to invest in a new singer—and the recording industry was too dishonest.

“They change two or three sounds and they make their own [record] and you get fucked.”

The duties of a boss were many, and one was punishing miscreant subordinates. He grumbled about one offender this way: “This kid is as high as he’s ever gonna get in life. This kid, I’m just trying to think of the way to punish him now. Enough to know how I didn’t like that. Teach him what bitterness is. Give him something fuckin’ [to] really feel sorry about. This ain’t a ball game here. This ain’t no ball game. This ain’t no game.”

Gotti was amazed after his ascension that at least one captain—Anthony Gaggi, uncle of the car-case witness against Castellano—had not adapted to the new game. He learned this during a telephone call from a soldier reporting about a dispute involving a Brooklyn restaurant. Family members had just bought into it and the landlord wanted to check them out.

The soldier said Gaggi had told him to “bring” Gotti to a sitdown with the landlord and the new partners.

“He’s under me!” Gotti shouted. “You tell him, [to] get his ass up here to see me!”

In the meantime, concerning the inquisitive landlord, Gotti told the soldier to tell Gaggi and the others not to engage in any more “warning shit” until a sitdown. After all, people could be reasoned with.

“People ain’t stupid, they know what we are,” Gotti said. “So what are we gonna do? What, are we gonna worry about cops now?

Three days after these comments, Angelo complained of having to visit someone about the same problem, which was “still up in the air.” Forty-eight hours passed, and then a fire damaged the restaurant; authorities proclaimed it arson.

As this restaurant problem was being solved, another was beginning. Some men, believed to be members of a carpenters’ local union, were vandalizing Manhattan construction sites using non-union labor. More than $30,000 damage was inflicted on the Bankers and Brokers Restaurant near Wall Street. It was owned by a Gambino soldier and previously owned by Castellano’s four children.

The business agent of the carpenters’ local, the largest in the country, was John F. O’Connor, 51. Gotti instructed two men to find out who O’Connor was “with”—not whether he was connected to a Family, but which one. In the Crime Capital, when it came to the construction industry, Gotti’s assumption was historically justified.

At the time, O’Connor was the target of an investigation into whether he accepted bribes from the contractors to allow them to use non-union carpenters. When Gotti learned that O’Connor might have ordered the restaurant sacked, he said the union official was “becoming overconfident” and wondered whether he ought to “bust him up.”

Over the next few weeks, inquiries went out to members of the Genovese Family, who reported that they had only partial control of the carpenters’ union and were “embarrassed” because a Gambino Family place had been trashed by a renegade element.

Weeks later, O’Connor was shot several times in the lobby of his union’s office building; the gunman, who fired four times, escaped. The victim crawled into an elevator, called for help, and survived. A few months later, O’Connor was indicted for taking thousands of dollars in bribes.

Sometimes the men in the Bergin annex were more paranoid about bugs than at other times. Years earlier, the pay phones in an empty storefront on the other side of the Bergin, which crew members used to place bets, had been tapped. So now and then they would whisper or turn up the volume on a television or radio, or run tap water while they talked.

This made it difficult to decipher some conversations, but usually at least a revealing sentence or two was picked up—such as when Gotti discussed a gambling operation using illegal slot machines: “He’s with me, the stops are mine, the machines are mine.”

Good “overheards” showed that while Gotti may have been a little uncertain about some aspects of his new position, he was not uncertain about himself. Late in February, he told Angelo: “You present the case, paint it up a little bit … This has got to earn some [money] here. For us, not for other Families, but for us first … I don’t know about concrete, steel, and construction, but I got a lot of spies in the street and I know everything.”

Again, early in March, underboss Frank DeCicco expressed concern about a “bad situation,” most likely a jurisdictional conflict between the Gambino and Genovese Families, possibly over a construction project just north of the city that involved Family-connected unions.