Surviving the Mob (13 page)

“What he didn’t consider was that the reason I shot Burzo was because I had to prove myself. What the hell good would I be to the Gambino family if I couldn’t handle a problem in my own household? And how would me letting Burzo slide have reflected on Nicky and the crew? It was because of the life that I had to deal with Burzo decisively. I thought then I had no choice but to shoot him. Looking back at it now, I know better. Ralph Burzo didn’t deserve what I did to him. But that’s water over the dam.

“As I walked away from Nicky that day, I’d learned a couple of things. In that life, you never let anyone know what you’re thinking or feeling. And it’s okay to walk away and live to fight another day. But don’t forget. Don’t ever forget.”

Andrew was unable to meet Rappaport’s financial demands within the allotted seven days. When his trial started after Labor Day, he and his court-appointed lawyer shared the defense table with his co-defendant Sammy Karkis and his counsel. Andrew’s father, Dina, Anthony Gerbino, Mike Yannotti, and a few more of his friends were also in the courtroom.

However, although they were still living together, by this time Andrew and Dina’s marriage was damaged beyond repair. Andrew blames the deterioration in their relationship on two things: Ralph Burzo and youth.

“I found out over the summer there was a lot more to the thing between Burzo and Dina than the car. I blamed her for not letting me know earlier that he was harassing her. And
during the trial I found out a lot more. He’d actually been stalking her—calling on the phone and sending candy and flowers. Her mother knew about it. Her brother knew about it. Everybody knew about it but me. I felt like a real sucker. So I had an attitude toward her and my friends hated her.

“The other thing is that we were so young. We really weren’t much more than kids ourselves and there we were with a baby and all kinds of financial and legal problems. I don’t think we were mature enough to handle it all.

“In the days leading up to the trial, my new lawyer had told me that the prosecution had a very weak case. They had no eyewitnesses and no gun. He couldn’t understand why the case was even going to trial. According to him, the only thing I had to fear was Sammy Karkis. He said if Sammy turned, we’d have to discredit him somehow. But that would be hard to do. Any illegal activity he was involved in that I knew about I was in on too. I couldn’t point the finger at him without admitting my own guilt. My lawyer was right. If Sammy went to the other side, I was in trouble.

“Something else bothered me. If the prosecution case was that weak, why hadn’t they made me an offer? They sometimes made deals even when they had solid evidence just to get a quick and inexpensive conviction. But they hadn’t reached out to me at all.

“And then Sammy’s name showed up on the witness list. Not as a prosecution witness, but as a potential witness to testify on his own behalf. I wasn’t real comfortable with that. On the opening day of the trial, though, Sammy was right there sitting at the defense table with me. I thought that maybe I was just being paranoid.”

The trial started off well for Andrew. As expected, Ralph Burzo testified that his last memory on the day of the shooting was that he was talking with Andrew. But he couldn’t swear that Andrew shot him. The prosecution called no witnesses who could identify Andrew as the gunman.

However, by a couple of days into the trial, Andrew was sure that his concerns about Sammy were well-founded. His co-defendant acted very uncomfortable around him. He was evasive and wouldn’t make eye contact. And then Andrew and his lawyer’s worst fears came true. Sammy took the stand and his testimony was far from strictly “on his own behalf.” The prosecution had its eyewitness.

“As soon as Sammy started talking, it was obvious he was the prosecution’s secret weapon,” Andrew recalls. “Anthony Gerbino and Mike Yannotti were sitting in the back of the courtroom. Anthony started hollering out things about rats and was evicted. Mike moved up to the front row, leaned forward in his chair, and stared at Sammy. You could tell Sammy was getting the message that he was a dead man. He looked at the ceiling, the floor, and the side walls. His eyes went everywhere but forward where he’d have to see Mike and me.

“Sammy was feeling the heat, but he talked anyway. He took the jury through the events of April eighth: my call to him, seeing Burzo on the street, the shooting, ditching the gun, all of it. As I listened to him, I was upset with myself that I hadn’t taken care of Sammy personally. My lawyer wrote a note on his legal pad and passed it to me. It said, ‘The fat lady just sang.’ I wrote, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ and handed the pad back to him.

“Right after Sammy finished his testimony, the judge sent the jury out of the room. She then told me that so much incriminating evidence had been presented that she now considered me to be a flight risk and revoked my bail. I motherfuckered her under my breath. She asked me what I’d said. I told her I’d asked somebody to send me a sweat suit to wear in jail. As I walked past the guard in the back of the room, he said, ‘I’ve been watching this case since day one. You’d have beat this case without that guy [Karkis]. You know that, don’t you?’ Yeah, I knew it.

“During the recess my lawyer said I had two choices. I
could let things stand, get convicted, and go to jail. Or I could take the stand myself and claim the shooting was an accident. He said that with all the testimony about Burzo being a stalker, I could say that when I confronted him he pulled a gun. We wrestled around and the gun went off. It was a long shot, but it was the only chance I had.

“I thought about it. Guys in the life aren’t supposed to take the stand. My situation was different; the shooting wasn’t business related. Cross examination would be limited to my case and not get into anything about the crew. I wasn’t excited about it. But I figured what the hell. Why not take the chance?

“I took the stand and committed perjury. I testified that Burzo had pulled a gun on me and I thought he was going to shoot me. In self-defense I tried to get the gun away from him and during the struggle it went off. The jury didn’t buy my lies in the least. They returned in what must have been almost record time, probably a little less than an hour, and found me guilty on all counts. I was facing a prison sentence of five to fifteen years.

“Sammy wound up getting convicted of hindering prosecution and got sentenced to thirty days on Riker’s Island. Even so, I felt good knowing he was under a death sentence from Anthony and Mike. With that thought, and a smirk on my face, I was taken away to the Brooklyn House of Detention to await sentencing.”

Andrew’s first 24 hours in the House of Detention were memorable. He found himself to be the only white man on his tier.

Just a few weeks earlier on August 23, a 16-year-old black male named Yusef Hawkins had been killed by a gang of white youths in Bensonhurst. Hawkins and three friends had
gone to the area to inquire about a used car. Unfortunately for them, the gang was prowling the neighborhood looking for blacks or Hispanics who were believed to be dating white girls living there. When they saw Yusef and his friends, the whites attacked and Yusef was shot dead. Racial tensions were running high both on the streets and behind bars.

“I’d never been a prejudiced guy,” Andrew explains. “I always judged men individually by their merits. But you can go into prison that way and very easily come out a racist because of what goes on inside the walls. The House of Detention was my first real taste of it.

“I was in a pretty rotten mood to begin with. I was sitting on the bunk in my cell thinking about a lot of things when the welcome wagon showed up. The black inmates on the tier were there with their greeting. They started in on me, busting my balls. They even said I looked like one of the white boys that murdered Yusef Hawkins. I told them I wasn’t part of their problems and to leave me the fuck alone.

“That night I had to make a phone call to my house. For prisoners, the phone is a lifeline. They’ll fight for the phone and even kill over it. I was on the phone and this black inmate told me it was his phone time and I had to hang up. I answered him that I wasn’t giving up the phone. I said I’d just been convicted of a major crime and I needed five minutes on the phone to take care of some important stuff. After that, it was all his. That didn’t satisfy him and we started fighting right then.

“A white guard came in and broke us up. There were thirty of us on the tier and he locked us all in our cells. I sat on my bed listening to all the chatter from the blacks. ‘You’re dead, white boy,’ and shit like that. Somebody called me a racist motherfucker and that he was gonna get me for killing Hawkins. I said, ‘I didn’t kill Hawkins, but I’m gonna kill you when they open this fuckin’ door.’

“The white correction officer came over to my cell and
said, ‘A white guy with heart. I love that.’ Then he said, ‘By the way, thanks for loaning me that pen,’ and he handed me a ballpoint pen. He asked me if I knew what to do with it. I said, ‘Just open this cell and you’ll see what I do with it.’

“About a half-hour later, they cracked open all the cells. As soon as I got outside the same black kid and I got into it again. This time when they broke us up, they took me over to another tier. I could hear the black guy hollering to his buddies over there, ‘Kill that white motherfucker.’

“In the cell next to me was a Hispanic guy. He couldn’t speak English and didn’t have a tooth in his head. Through sign language and a word here and there that he understood, we made friends and started hanging around together. He was a barber and cut inmate’s hair. I found out he was a triple murderer waiting to be sentenced. We hit it off good. He was a tough guy and he watched my back.

“Other white guys came in from time to time. But they were mostly there for drug stuff. Some of them had mental issues and would go to the psych unit and you wouldn’t see them again. It was tough to develop any solid relationships with those guys, because they tended not to be around that long. Because of that I hung around mostly with the Hispanics.”

At the end of September, Andrew was sentenced to five to fifteen years in state prison. He was expecting it, so it came as no surprise. He even thought it wasn’t really that bad. Because of overcrowding, New York corrections tried to get inmates out as quickly as possible, so there was a good chance he’d only have to do the short end.

As Andrew accepted his situation, it didn’t seem as bleak as it did on the day he was convicted. He felt serving five years wasn’t the end of the world. Friends on the street would keep an eye on Dina and his son and make sure they were taken care of.

And he had the promise of Gerbino and Yannotti that
Sammy Karkis would be dealt with. He knew it would be awhile before that happened, because an immediate hit would draw a lot of suspicion and heat. But it was something to look forward to.

On October 13, Andrew was shipped out of Brooklyn to Riker’s Island for one night, then on to the state prison system and a whole new world.

12

To the average person, the thought of the clanking noise as the steel bars of a prison gate closes behind them is terrifying. The uncertainty of what awaits him and not knowing exactly how long he’ll be locked up can drive some first-time prisoners to the point of suicide.

But Andrew wasn’t the average person when he entered the New York State penal system on October 13, 1989. He was a tough young man and his experiences had made him better suited to handle whatever was thrown at him behind bars than those who were less streetwise. He walked through the barred gate with a swagger in his step and the smirk still on his face.

“On the outside, I was acquainted with plenty of guys who had done time, so I had a basic understanding of what I was in for,” Andrew says. “Unlike a lot of first-timers, I went into the state system knowing how quickly my back could be up against the wall. I knew that when I got inside, who I’d been on the street meant nothing. Prison inmates only respect toughness and your willingness to commit violence and inflict harm. I knew I might have to kill in order to protect myself. And I was mentally and physically prepared to do whatever I had to do to stay alive.”

Andrew’s first stop was at the Downstate Correctional
Facility, a maximum-security prison located in the village of Fishkill, New York, about 70 miles north of New York City. Downstate serves primarily as a classification center for new inmates entering the New York State prison system. New inmates typically remain at Downstate for a few weeks before being assigned to a permanent facility. He wasn’t impressed with his temporary home.

“This place was totally designed to break the inmate from his street mentality. It reminded me of what I’d heard about military boot camps, that they play with your head. The first thing they did when I got there was delouse me. Then they shaved my head. They try to strip the new arrivals of their identity.

“After that come the interviews to gather information that will determine what facility you’re assigned to next. Your criminal history and current charges are considered too. I was classified as a maximum-security inmate and told I’d be going to a place where there were other guys like me—guys prone to violence with lengthy maximum sentences. It was funny to see some of the guys I’d been in the House of Detention with, guys who had been actin’ pretty tough suddenly playin’ like altar boys because they were so fuckin’ afraid of ending up in places like Attica, Dannemora [Clinton Correctional Facility], or Comstock [Great Meadow Correctional Facility].”

After about three weeks, Andrew was told that he was being moved to Sing Sing. Other than Alcatraz, Sing Sing is probably the most iconic prison in the United States. It’s located 30 miles or so north of the Big Apple in the village of Ossining, New York, on the banks of the Hudson River and for years it was the home of New York’s electric chair. Believing he’d arrived at his final destination, Andrew was somewhat concerned about what he saw shortly after arriving.

“I’d only been there a little while and was in the holding area. All of a sudden I saw this inmate coming toward
me. He was a white guy with a full Santa Claus-like beard. He was wearing a dress and had fake boobs. I started laughing, thinking they’d sent me to an insane asylum.”