by Pete Hamill
Nelson Perry, who was president of the Police Benevolent Association (which began representing Hialeah cops in September 1985), says he started smelling the rot in Hialeah when he was approached by a 350-pound political press agent and community newspaperman named Don Dugan (later indicted in a separate case for being the bagman in a bribery case in Opa Locka). Dugan told Perry that he could earn “a personal profit” if he stayed out of Hialeah police affairs. This shocked Perry, who told his superiors of this; they assigned him to pose as a corrupt cop. He soon met San Pedro for the first time at the Treetop Restaurant in the Miami Springs Holiday Inn. They continued to meet for weeks. At two of Perry’s meetings with San Pedro, a Hialeah cop was also present. It was Sergeant Thalassites.
When police overheard San Pedro in February talking about killing two men who owed him a total of $4000, and conspiring to sell a kilo of cocaine, they decided to move. On February 13, San Pedro was arrested on bribery charges, and rearrested March 2 for murder, conspiracy, and cocaine trafficking. Hialeah erupted. Within weeks, Chief Seay resigned. Thalassites went on paid leave. Some of the tapes were released, littered with the names of various politicians who were claimed by San Pedro as friends or property. TV reporter Rick Sanchez was heard discussing an exchange of favors with San Pedro; good old Alberto had found a job in Panama for Sanchez’s uncle; Sanchez, who served as a non-voting adviser to the board of the First American Bank & Trust, got a share of San Pedro’s business for the bank. (What a reporter was doing serving on the board of a bank — and sucking after customers on behalf of that bank — nobody could answer; Sanchez also was granted a paid leave but his superiors at the TV station said they saw nothing wrong with his connection to the bank. The ethics of Miami strike again.) It was then remembered that Sanchez had emceed the 1984 San Lazarus party and had led the group in prayer. Someone else noticed that Hialeah had a 29.6 per cent increase in crime during 1985 and the joke was that this was “not including cops.”
Then in mid-March, the Herald tossed a few more bombs into the discussion.
Reporters Leen and Sydney P. Freedberg discovered that in 1979, Florida’s former attorney general, Robert Shevin, and the state’s esteemed Congressman Claude Pepper had written letters to the Florida parole board extolling San Pedro’s character. They now claimed that they didn’t really know San Pedro, couldn’t remember him; since their letters claimed that they did in fact know San Pedro either the letters or the statements were lies. The former attorney general certainly should have known something about San Pedro. His law partner, a Democratic fund-raiser and adviser to Governor Bob Graham named Ronald Book, represented San Pedro during his 1983 application for a full pardon. Pepper and Shevin spluttered, suffered from amnesia, hung up the phones.
Even more bizarre was the story of San Pedro’s access to Governor Graham himself. Last December, when there were cops all over Hialeah investigating San Pedro, a woman named Marcia Ludwig emerged to support San Pedro’s application for a full pardon. Marcia Ludwig was once Marcia Valibus and in 1957 she was queen of the Orange Bowl; in Miami there is always an element of the surreal. Later Marcia Valibus was a runner-up in the Miss Universe contest and had a screen test at Paramount Studios. She was also a classmate of Adele Graham, the governor’s wife, and over the years they had remained friends. For more than a decade, the Herald said, Marcia Ludwig has been an intimate friend of one Robert (Bobby) Erra, son of the late Pasquale (Patsy) Erra, who once worked for Vito Genovese. Marcia and Erra are often seen together, friends told the Herald, at the La Gorce Country Club. More important, there are pages of conversations between Erra and San Pedro on the various tapes. On December 11, Ludwig sent a hand-written note to her friend, the governor’s wife:
“Dear Adele, This is a note for Bob’s mirror. A good friend of mine — Alberto San Pedro — has a case coming before Bob and his Cabinet on Dec. 18 … I appreciate you calling my words to Bob’s attention.”
On December 19, Adele wrote back to Marcia: “I placed the note on Bob’s mirror — so he’s aware.” This was the day after Graham presided over the hearing. During that session, he said: “Unfortunately, there continues to be this lingering question as to what might be in his background. I’m concerned that Mister San Pedro is sort of being cast under a shadow that he seems to be unable to extricate himself from and which shadow hasn’t yet, or after four or five years, moved to the substance of some action. It has been a long time since the criminal offense for which he’s requesting pardon was committed and he has an impressive statement of his community record.” Graham “reluctantly” moved to continue the case, stating that the next time San Pedro’s pardon was discussed, he would come to a decision. There is no indication that he checked with any of the cops; he certainly didn’t give San Pedro a flat rejection. What the hell: when you’re a kid in Hialeah it’s only natural to fool around with machine guns. Still, Graham didn’t say yes either. And his need to decide was made academic by San Pedro’s February 13 arrest.
The honest cops in Hialeah had long despised San Pedro and to some extent feared him. He was the shadowy man, the fixer, called upon for help by arsonist, hoodlum, dealer. On the day he was arrested, someone placed a note on the police department’s bulletin board. It said very simply: “The untouchable has been touched.”
IV. OUT OF THE SWAMP
Obviously, every cop in southern Florida is not a crook. Most of the arrests have been made as a result of good tough police investigations along with continuing pressure from the Miami Herald. But it’s unlikely that corruption will soon vanish, the drug dealers joining the dinosaurs in the rot of the swamp. They won’t go away, and cops will continue to be corrupted because there is simply too much dirty money lying around. Cocaine will not soon be legalized: Americans won’t soon surrender their national lust for some form of chemical nirvana.
But if you wonder what happens to some of these men who briefly and luridly occupy page-one headlines, consider recent events in North Bay Village, another suburb of Miami. In 1971, a cop named George Staphylaris was fired from the Miami force for allegedly encouraging a police informant to rob a department store. He appealed the firing, was reinstated with a six-month suspension, then resigned. Six years ago he joined the North Bay Village force. He was soon known to many kids as Officer George, ran the drug education program at Treasure Island Elementary School, often took kids on trips to the Everglades, and had prepared a children’s seminar called “Just Say No To Drugs.”
On the North Bay force, he met another former Miami cop named William David Risk. He too was once fired, for battering a prisoner with a nightstick. He too fought his firing, was reinstated, and resigned in 1979. Last year, he was North Bay Village’s officer of the year, cited for his “superlative performance and dedication.” He was also a weight lifter.
A third former Miami cop was on the North Bay force. This was Sergeant Fernando Gandon. He quit the Miami force in 1977 after being charged with aggravated battery. While interrogating a man on the street, the charges against him said, he shoved his pistol in the man’s mouth, rattled it around and broke some teeth. Five years ago, he arrived at North Bay and was again given a badge and gun.
On February 27, all three men were arrested by the FBI for selling protection to men they believed to be drug dealers. A Mob guy named Stephen Nahay told FBI agents (posing as drug dealers) in a recorded conversation that if they were moving drugs they should see the three North Bay cops. “They’ll help you out/’ Nahay said. “In other words, if you want to kill a guy there …you just tell them the guy and they’ll kick him on to the coroner. …”
Clearly, redemption does not flourish under the southern sun. There are no second chances for such people, only the main chance. A good number of Miami cops have the integrity to resist the lure of narcodollars. But just as surely, others will plunge into the swamp and rise covered with the kind of slime that will never wash off. They are there now, driving Chevvies and longing for Porsches, dressed in baggy suits and
lusting for Giorgio Armaní, hearing preachments of denial, while drug dealers leave with the women, and the country at large throws roses to the greedy. They are men of the law but nobody in Miami would ever be surprised to see them leaving the sunshine in handcuffs. Their sweet decaying odor will not go away.
VILLAGE VOICE,
August 26, 1986
THE LAST MOB GUY
Late one night a few months ago, a man named John Gotti walked into a jammed Manhattan restaurant called Columbus. This is a New York hangout favored by actors, models, ballplayers, agents, reporters, and second-string hoodlums. On this night, the big corner table was filled by Steve van Zandt, most of the E Street Band, and some beautiful women. As usual, nobody paid any attention. Then Gotti walked in with two very large associates. The room hushed.
Impeccably dressed, his body thick and powerful, a diamond ring glittering on the pinkie of his left hand, his small eyes searching the room for friends or danger while a thin smile played on his face, Gotti was pure Mob. Not just a soldier. Not just some strong-arm boy who muscles people tardy with payments to the loan sharks. John Gotti was bigger than all of that. In fact, at this moment in the long, dark history of American organized crime, he was the Boss.
There was only one empty table, and Gotti and his friends were led there by the maitre d As the gangsters sat down, the hum of conversation resumed. Gotti’s eyes drifted to the corner table. The musicians were dressed with the calculated raffishness of rock ’n’ rollers: headbands, bandannas, leather vests over bare skin, earrings, beards. Gotti called the maitre d’ over.
“Tell me something,” he said, looking down at the corner table. “Who are these guys dressed like fuckin’ pirates?” He was told about the E Street Band and how they were the musicians for the great Bruce Springsteen.
Gotti smiled.
“You see,” he growled, “everybody wants to work for the Boss.”
That was pure John Gotti: hip enough to know that Springsteen is called the Boss, sardonic enough to suggest that he considered the show-business title an act of hubris. Gotti, at forty-eight, was the first major Mob leader to have grown up with rock ’n’ roll. But in the world he inhabited there was only one boss at a time, and on that evening in the big city, the time belonged to John Gotti. He was certainly making the most of it. Nobody since Al Capone had taken such sheer pleasure in the role and been embraced so ecstatically by the media and the public.
One night last spring, I came out of a restaurant in New York’s Little Italy and saw a crowd gathered down the block. I went to see what was happening and found myself among a group of tourists, late-night diners, and neighborhood regulars. They started to cheer John Gotti, who had just left the Ravenite Social Club, as if he were a hero. In a demented way, he was. Gotti smiled, climbed into a Lincoln, and was driven away. It is impossible to imagine Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, or Carlo Gambino having that effect on people or appearing to welcome it so grandly.
Gotti clearly cherished the myth of the Mob, even in the years of its precipitous decline, and seemed to have shaped his public image to fit that myth. This is not surprising. John Gotti, after all, is an American — profoundly shaped by movies and television over the past thirty-five years. To his generation of hoodlums, The Godfather was a training film. In the way that Ronald Reagan drew on our nostalgia for the simple patriotic myths of old movies, Gotti had begun to draw upon a similar nostalgia for the clarity and romanticism of the gangster film. Even in the 1980s, nothing excites Americans more than the glamour of the outlaw, his existential drama, his willingness to risk all, even his life, to obtain power and riches. Image is everything these days, and when it can be reduced to a ten-second bite, the media embrace it and so does the public. Reagan derived much of his personal power from the fact that he looked the way Americans wanted a President to look. When Gotti appeared on the public stage, he looked like the Boss.
Here, at last, was a gangster who dressed like a gangster, down to the pinkie ring; the clothes were cut a little too sharply, the shoes almost too highly polished. His hands were carefully manicured, and when he was seen in public, his skin was so closely shaved it seemed glossy. The perfectly waved gray hair added a touch of Old World dignity. And more important, he had mastered the Walk. All stars have a great walk; think of the way John Wayne walked, or Cary Grant. I saw Gotti stroll into a courthouse one morning, dressed in a white raincoat, engulfed by lawyers, while the cameras recorded every detail. Still photos caught the amused, almost ironic smile, and the chilly foreboding in his eyes, acknowledging that Gotti might lose a Mob primary some bloody evening while reaching for the pepper. But only the video cameras captured the Walk: the back straight, the hips rolling, the feet moving in a rhythm that was at once swaggering and delicate, defying the dark knowledge that lived in his eyes. When other kids in Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn were trying to master algebra, Gotti must have been working on the Walk.
“I don’t know what he did bad,” a black woman said of Gotti in another courthouse last year, “but he sure looks good to me.”
Until December 16, 1985, not many Americans had ever heard of John Joseph Gotti. At 5:26 that evening, a neatly dressed seventy-year-old man named Paul Castellano arrived with a friend for an early dinner at Sparks Steak House on East Forty-sixth Street. Castellano looked like a businessman; he was in fact the boss of the Gambino family, and his companion, Thomas Bilotti, was an underboss. Neither man made it to the bar. Three gunmen suddenly appeared and blasted them into eternity. By midnight, those police scholars who major in the Mob were predicting that an obscure younger hoodlum from Howard Beach, Queens, would emerge as the new boss. A “good fella” named John Gotti. They were right.
The next day, Gotti’s name and face were all over the newspapers and local television news shows. The rough sketch of his personal story was burnished into the thrilling shape of tabloid legend. For Gotti was a throwback, as elemental as an ax.
The most frequently related tale was about the death of Gotti’s son Frank and what happened later. One day in March 1980, twelve-year-old Frank was riding a minibike on the quiet bourgeois streets of Howard Beach. He was the middle child of two girls and three boys born to John and Victoria Gotti. As Frank darted out from behind a Dumpster, he was struck and killed by a car driven by a man named John Favara. On July 28, while John and Victoria Gotti vacationed in Florida, Favara walked out of the Castro Convertible plant where he worked and went to his car, parked in front of the Capitol Diner. Suddenly, a heavyset man walked over and clubbed him. Favara was thrown into a blue van and driven away, never to be seen again. His car also vanished. When Gotti returned from Florida and was visited by police, he said, “I don’t know what happened. I am not sorry if something did happen. He killed my kid.”
That story became central to the Gotti myth, because it was so direct, personal, dramatic, unforgiving; that is, it resembled a scene in a movie. In the years since then, witnesses against Gotti in other cases forgot what they once saw; others disappeared; prospective jurors declined the privilege of judging him; he has developed an aura. He did what gangsters were supposed to do: he inspired fear — simple, runny fear. Nobody wanted him as an enemy. The Feds and the police watched his movements; they developed stool pigeons to report on his activities; they placed bugs in and around the Bergin Hunt 8c Fish Club in Ozone Park, a storefront private club that Gotti used as his personal Sierra Maestra. They could not nail him.
And a peculiar thing seemed to be happening. When Gotti took power, the Mob was in terrible shape, as bad off as Chrysler was before the advent of Lee Iacocca. Cubans and Colombians totally dominated the multibillion-dollar cocaine business. The old days, when such as Lansky and Costello owned county leaders, judges, and politicians, were long gone.
By the early ’70s it was becoming clear that the Mob had no bench. The hoodlums who remained in the rackets were generally dim-brained gavones, reduced to hijacking, loan-sharking, stealing cars, or peddling heroin. S
ome were even using the drugs they were supposed to be peddling, something the older generation never permitted, because a junkie would rat on his own mother. At the same time, the federal government was attacking the Mob with a variety of sophisticated electronic techniques, and with the RICO statutes.
Then along came Gotti, with a message of inspiration and hope. It was morning in Mob America. In private, Gotti was apparently a shrewd and persuasive politician. In the first months after accepting what Adlai Stevenson called the “bitter cup,” he moved among the various Mob families, offering conciliation, peace, and revival. The tattered legions of the Mob knew he was willing and able to use lethal force to exert discipline; he wanted to show them that he could also think (he claimed to have scored 140 on an IQ test in prison) and that he had a vision of the future.
At one point, the Feds managed to place a bug in the doorway of the Nice ’n’ EZ Auto School, down the block from the Bergin Hunt & c Fish Club. And in January 1986, while Gotti was consolidating his power, they heard him tell another wise guy:
“The law’s gonna be tough with us, okay, if they don’t put us away. If they don’t put us away, for one year or two — that’s all we need. But if I can get a year run without being interrupted: get a year — gonna put this thing together where they could never break it, never destroy it. Even if we die, be a good thing.”
The other wise guy said: “It’s a hell of a legacy to leave.”