Surviving the Mob (19 page)

“Although Nicky and me were no longer friends, he was still my boss. I met with him and Mike Yannotti and told them about Danny and what he had planned. It was clear to all of us that unless something changed, it was only a matter of time before our two crews would have an old-fashioned war with guns blazing in the streets. It was at this meeting that Nicky forbid me to do business or hang around with Robert ever again. That was a joke, because Robert was more of a friend to me than my own crew. He could have set me up to be murdered. Instead, he told me what Danny had planned. If that word got back to Danny, Robert would be a dead man himself. He put his life on the line for me.”

Several days went by without any excitement. But on a Friday in late January, Andrew got called to Mike Yannotti’s house. He’d been summoned by Nicky to commit a murder and Mike needed Andrew. He told Andrew to make himself available for the next twenty-four hours, to respond on a moment’s notice. They exchanged beeper and phone numbers and then he left.

Andrew next met up with two other Gambino associates, Tommy Dono and Benny Geritano of the 17
^th
Avenue faction. They planned to intercept a money drop from a local high-end store on 18
^th
Avenue at 86
^th
Street that night.

“The night started off well. Another friend of ours provided us with a minivan he’d stolen from Long Island the night before. The plan called for Tommy and Benny to stay in the van. I was going to be the guy in the street. My job was to wait for the money courier to pass by and push him into the open side door of the van. But as fate would have it, things turned to shit pretty quick.

“Just before we expected the courier to leave the store and walk to the bank in the next block, a cop car pulled a traffic stop on the opposite corner. Then a second car joined him. I was still willing to tackle the courier. But it was a very cold night and when he left the store, he ran to the bank rather
than walk. To get him, I’d have had to chase and tackle him in the middle of the street and drag him back to the van. With the cops that close, there was no way. We aborted the robbery. It wasn’t that bad, though, because we knew the money run took place every Friday night. So we’d get him the following week or the week after.

“As I look back, it’s hard to believe that agreeing to participate in a murder and then attempting a robbery a few hours later were more or less normal for me at that time. Now I realize that kind of thinking and conduct are anything but normal.

“Anyway, after we called off the robbery, we went to get some Japanese food. I called my girlfriend and she met us at this joint on Fourth Avenue. The dinner was great. We had a few drinks and laughs. I checked my beeper every couple of minutes to see if Mike tried to reach me, but there was no word from him. I was ready to head home and as I went out the door, I bumped into Nicky’s daughters Bernadette and Donna Marie coming in. I bought them some drinks and made my way out a few minutes later. When I got home, there was still no word from Mike. So I went to sleep with beeper in hand. The next set of events will never leave my memory.

“At approximately five o’clock the next morning, January twenty-seventh, my telephone rang. It wasn’t Mike calling me to go to work. It was a childhood friend telling me that Robert Arena and a neighborhood kid named Thomas Maranga had both been shot and killed. They were murdered in Robert’s car as he pulled out from a parking space in front of his apartment. The way he described it to me sounded like a massacre. Robert was in the life, but Thomas wasn’t. He’d apparently just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“I was a tough guy—a gangster. But after I hung up the phone, I cried. I was sad, depressed, and angry all at once. Robert’s loss was overwhelming. It left me with a feeling of helplessness. Why did this happen? Why wasn’t I there to
help my friend like he would have helped me? I asked myself those questions over and over.

“And then it hit me like a bolt of lightning. Mike Yannotti. He and Robert only lived about a block apart. Was Robert the work Mike needed help with? If it was, why hadn’t he called me to help like he said? One possibility was that if he included me on the hit, I might have found a way to warn Robert. On the other hand, they could have brought me along and got rid of Robert and me both at the same time. After all, there was no love lost between Nicky and me. He suspected I was holding back money from my scores. To him, I’d become a real pain in the ass.

“At this point, I didn’t know who to trust or what to think. I definitely knew that Danny Cutaia wanted me dead. Wild Bill Cutolo was near that point, if he wasn’t already there. And maybe Nicky Corozzo had come to the conclusion that his life would be better without me in it. So it was me against the life from that moment on. I’d have to play dumb until I could figure out who was who and what was what.

“I waited an hour, then called Mike Yannotti. I gave him the news about Robert and Thomas as though I didn’t connect him to it. I asked him how he thought I should play it. He didn’t seem very surprised. I asked if he thought the killings had anything to do with the drug thing Robert and I had been involved in. He wanted to know if Thomas looked like me. I said no. He said he didn’t think I had anything to worry about. We arranged a meeting for a few hours later. When I arrived in Brooklyn I called Mike to confirm our meet. He said he couldn’t see me then, because the cops were all over the place.

“I drove over anyway to check things out. Sure enough, when I tried to turn the corner to Mike’s house, I couldn’t. The block was closed off because the cops were still investigating the murders. A radio news report said that Robert was armed at the time, but he didn’t fire a shot. The police said
Robert was a known shooter and his failure to use his gun indicated he knew his assailant and was caught by surprise. All things considered, I was becoming convinced that Mike was involved in the killings. He may have acted alone or with help. But there was no doubt in my mind that he was in on it.”

Andrew’s suspicions about Mike were confirmed the next day when the two men met at Yannotti’s apartment. Also present was Nicky Corozzo’s son-in-law Vincent Dragonetti and another crew member.

“We talked about the murders and Robert’s funeral. Then Mike said to me, ‘Listen, Vinny came over to deliver a message from Nicky. We’re not goin’ to Robert’s funeral. He wasn’t at Tough Tony’s, so we’re not goin’ to his. But you’re gonna go. You and Robert were friends and it would look funny if you didn’t show up. So you go and take the temperature. See if anybody asks you anything. And remember, we’re denying having anything to do with this to the fullest extent.’

“I said, ‘Well, we didn’t. Did we?’ I knew the only reason we were having this meeting was because we were guilty as hell. I had to keep up my act, though. I didn’t expect an answer and I didn’t get one.

“After that we talked about how to handle Robert’s crew. My relationship had been with Robert; I wasn’t that friendly with the rest of them. And of course Danny Cutaia hated me. Mike said that he and I would meet with Nicky in the future to discuss it. For now, Nicky said to sit tight and some plans would be put together in case the situation escalated.

“I walked out of there knowing that my crew had killed Robert. I’d had a hard time controlling my emotions while Mike was feeding me his line of shit. I wanted to shoot him where he stood. But I couldn’t. If I tipped my mitt, I was a dead man. So I had to keep myself in check.

“I knew that with nobody else from the crew going to the funeral, word must already be out on the street that we were
being blamed for Robert and Thomas.

“They didn’t have an actual funeral for Robert. They had a memorial service at Saint Bernard’s Church in Bergen Beach. Regina [Dina’s cousin], the girl I was dating at the time, had attended school with Robert and they’d been good friends. So the two of us went to the memorial service. We sat down in a pew and I saw the guys from Robert’s crew looking at us. We exchanged nods, but their expressions and body language told me what they were thinking. They thought I had a lot of balls showing up at a memorial for a guy that me or my crew had killed.

“After the service, Robert’s mother was swarmed by the mourners and I wasn’t able to speak with her. I said hello to a couple of the Lucchese guys. They spoke, but barely. Mike had told me to take the temperature. I did and it was ice cold.”

Over the next several weeks, more information came to light about Robert’s murder. Regina learned from the families of Robert and Thomas that Mike Yannotti’s beeper had been found at the scene of the killings. And Andrew learned that Yannotti had been brought in by the police for a voice analysis and to give hair samples for DNA testing. He spoke to Yannotti a couple of times during that period and Yannotti failed to mention that he was a suspect in the case or that his beeper had been recovered at the crime scene.

The more Andrew thought about it, the more he believed Yannotti not calling him to go along on the hit was a clear sign that Nicky Corozzo and Yannotti didn’t trust him. But he could only guess at what they were thinking then or now. Then he got more disturbing news.

“The word coming out of the Luccheses and on the street in general was that Mike and I had killed Robert. We were the
two shooters. I had an alibi for that night, though. I’d been with Tommy Dono and Benny Geritano on the botched robbery. Then Regina joined us at the Japanese restaurant. After that she went home with me and spent the night. So if I had to, I could have Regina vouch for me that I had nothing to do with Robert’s death.”

But then things calmed down temporarily when Yannotti left for Florida to let the heat die down.

Andrew returned to his apartment one evening in late February to find a business card under his door. It was from a Secret Service agent. A handwritten note advised Andrew that he was to report to their office at the World Trade Center for a handwriting analysis in the Marriott scam. He wasn’t overly concerned about that, because he’d only endorsed the checks, not forged any of the signatures. He contacted Nicky’s nephew, attorney Joseph Corozzo Jr., to accompany him.

“The analysis was a piece of cake. Afterward, I took Jo Jo to lunch. I gave him five hundred dollars for his hour of work. He said, ‘You can drop the other twenty-five hundred off at my office next week when you get a chance.’

“I almost fell out of my chair. This guy and I had been friends since childhood. And now the bastard wanted to charge me three grand for sitting there while I gave a handwriting sample. I told him, ‘Sure. But I might have to be away for a while. If I don’t make it into your office before I leave, go see Nicky. Tell him to give you the money for me.’

“I’d told my parole officer about the handwriting thing. He didn’t say two words about it at the time. I had to see him again a couple of weeks later. It was on a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of March and everything seemed fine.

“It happened that the same week, I was planning a bank
burglary in Queens with Tommy Dono, Benny Geritano, and some other guys for that Sunday night. We were getting our equipment together and I secured a rental car to use for the job. When I got back to my place Friday afternoon, there was another business card under my door. This one was from my parole officer. He wrote on it that I was to call him as soon as possible. I was surprised, because I’d just seen him two days earlier and everything had been okay. The only thing I could figure was that it had something to do with the Marriott thing.

“I called and he told me that their computer system had crashed and a lot of information was lost. He was updating his files and needed me to come in on Monday. I said sure. But I smelled a rat. I’d been on parole awhile and I’d hung around with parolees all my life. I’d never heard of this happening before. Alarm bells were going off in my head.

“After I hung up, I spent some time trying to figure out what this was all about. The Marriott seemed less likely the more I thought about it. Also, a couple of weeks earlier, I’d been part of a crew that tried to pull a bank burglary in the Bronx. Two of the guys had stolen a piece of heavy equipment to break through the bank’s wall. But after we got inside, we weren’t able to rip the night-deposit drop out. We had to abort the mission, so it ended up as just some serious vandalism. But I doubted that deal had anything to do with the parole officer wanting to see me. I couldn’t think of anything else that would have triggered that phone call. But something wasn’t right. I could feel it.