The visual images are cinematic—stark and horrifying: pristine rain forest jungle marred with open pits of black sludge; rivers and streams covered with oily film; fish and other wildlife with obvious tumors; young women in treatment for ovarian cancers. By any standards, the contamination of the Amazonian rain forest in Ecuador is one of the worst oil-related environmental disasters on the planet, dwarfing the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and on a par with the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown.
In the United States and other developed countries where oil is extracted, the by-products from drilling are re-injected deep below the ground surface to keep them from contaminating the water supply. In Ecuador, because the oil company executives knew they could get away with it, they simply dumped it in open pits throughout the remote, rain forest jungle instead of spending the extra money to dispose of the toxic waste. And yet Chevron refuses to take responsibility and to pay to clean up the malignant mess left behind by Texaco. Donziger’s case has resulted in a major human rights campaign.
The trip is an unforgettable bonding experience for father and son. Max and I are both deeply moved by the plight of the indigenous tribes, whose water supply and food chain have been polluted. We sleep in tents in tribal villages reached by canoe and days away from the nearest vestiges of twentieth-century civilization and technology. Max observes as I partake in a ritual ayahuasca ceremony around a campfire at midnight with tribal elders and medicine men. One morning I wake up and step on a scorpion that has taken up residence in my boot. I hobble around with a swollen foot for the next couple of days.
Max makes a short film he calls Oro Negro (Black Gold) that Antoinette arranges to have screened at the Queens Film Festival. When Berlinger sees Max’s short, he asks if I would be willing to introduce him to Steven Donziger and possibly work with him on a feature-length documentary entitled Crude about the Ecuador case. I introduce Berlinger to Donziger. We get independent funding for the film and shoot in Ecuador over several months as the case comes to a head. Donziger eventually wins a $9.5 billion judgment on behalf of the local residents against the oil company to pay to clean up the contamination. Chevron appeals but loses all the way up through Ecuador’s highest court.
Originally, I signed on to co-direct the documentary with Berlinger. Early in the production phase, it becomes apparent that Berlinger is doing his utmost to exclude me from the process and take over the production. I acquiesce; my goal is to get the film made, and if Berlinger needs “A Film by Joe Berlinger” credit to assuage his ego, so be it. My role is redefined as a producer, but even as producer I am marginalized, as Berlinger makes it clear he wants no input, no collaboration; this is to be his film. When I see the finished film, I’m disappointed. It is obvious that Berlinger has issues with Donziger, issues that have nothing to do with the case, and he goes out of his way to curry favor with Chevron while disparaging Donziger. Crude wins several awards, including the prestigious Berlin Peace Prize, but does little to help the cause. Chevron continues to refuse to pay for the cleanup in Ecuador. The oil company executives instead retaliate by bringing a civil racketeering case against Donziger and his clients, the indigenous people of the Amazon, filed in the Southern District of New York. The beleaguered lawyer is charged with having obtained the judgment in Ecuador through bribery and fraud.
As of this writing, litigation in the Chevron Ecuador contamination case has been going on for more than twenty-five years. After Donziger’s work in the public defender’s office in Washington, DC, his life work as an attorney became trying to get Chevron to clean up the environmental disaster in Ecuador. Donziger and his clients refuse to give up. He’s like a general commanding a ramshackle army of local tribesmen and human rights attorneys against a superpower. The civil suit against Chevron was originally filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York. Upon motions brought by the oil company, the court in New York ruled that the proper venue for the litigation was Ecuador. But after losing in Ecuador’s courts, Chevron changed tactics and filed the New York civil racketeering case against Donziger with demands against the attorney for $60 billion in monetary damages. Donziger asked for a jury trial. The oil company eventually dropped its demand for monetary damages, which would have necessitated a jury trial. The case was assigned to a decidedly probusiness, pro-Chevron senior judge, Lewis A. Kaplan. Donziger was found guilty of supposedly bribing officials in Ecuador to win the judgment. Chevron, with more than sixty lawyers and tens of millions of dollars expended on legal fees, still manages to avoid paying to clean up the contamination left behind in the Amazon rain forest.
During the lead-up to the civil racketeering case in New York, Judge Kaplan orders Berlinger to turn over all the outtakes from the filming of Crude. Berliner at first makes a show of asserting his privilege as a journalist to protect his sources and his work product. He initiates a campaign to raise money for his defense. But, to the dismay of documentarians and journalists around the world, Berlinger caves when he begins to contemplate the remote possibly that he will actually be jailed if he continues to refuse to give up the outtakes. No doubt, the prospect of having to go to jail can be daunting and inspire fear. But it’s doubtful that, even had Kaplan found Berlinger in contempt and ordered him to jail, the judge’s order would have withstood appeal, and Joe would have been seen as a hero.
Steven Donziger continues to fight the case. He and his clients take Chevron to court in Canada where the oil company has significant assets. Again, he wins judgments up through Canada’s highest courts. Chevron still refuses to pay to clean up the mess they left behind, and they choose instead to continue to attack Donziger, aided by their ally, Judge Kaplan. The bar association in New York suspends Donziger’s license to practice law based on Kaplan’s specious finding of fraud. Numerous celebrities rally behind the people of the Amazon. Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler, make a trip to Ecuador and donate money to provide a system for the locals to gather rainwater so they won’t have to depend on the polluted waters of their rivers and streams. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd and The Wall takes up the cause; he travels with Donziger to the rain forest and brings attention to the plight of the local inhabitants with a video he posts on social media.
THROUGH ALL OF this—the successes and failures, the hits and near misses, the paychecks and paybacks—at least I have realized my abiding ambition of becoming a professional writer. I manage to make a living from what I love doing: putting in the long and demanding hours at my desk; working at the solitary, sedentary craft of the writer. It never gets any easier, even when I pull together a collection of my magazine journalism, Altered States of America: Outlaws and Icons, Hitmakers and Hitmen, published by Nation Books in 2005. The successes I achieve in the film and TV business with Slam and Street Time continue to bring new opportunities, as well as new frustrations.
But through it all my marriage to Kim continues to suffer. The relationship deteriorates and ultimately ends in divorce. My dream of having a family and of becoming a father is never nearer, never further away.
PART THREE
FATHERHOOD:
THE BEGINNING OF A GREAT ADVENTURE
Chapter Seventeen
GODFATHER AND SON
I know my father loved me, but I got to wonder how much, to put me with all these wolves. This is the world you put your son in: so much treachery. My father couldn’t have loved me to push me into this life.
—John Gotti Jr. in a taped conversation with a government informant
MY EDITOR AT Playboy, A. J. Baime, calls to ask if I would be interested in writing a feature story on the trials of John Gotti Junior; and, if given the assignment, do I think that I could get John Junior to agree to do an interview. Good question.
John Gotti Senior, known in the media as the “Dapper Don” for his sartorial flair, or “Teflon Don” for his apparent invincibility to government prosecution, is the most notorious Mafia godfather since Al Capone. After several courtroom victories, Gotti Senior was finally convicted in 1990 of
racketeering and ordering a number of murders in furtherance of a racketeering enterprise. He was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. As the heir apparent to the leadership of the Gambino Crime Family, Gotti’s first-born son and namesake, John A. Gotti, known as Junior, has the dubious distinction of having endured three previous trials in 2005, 2006, and 2007 in New York federal courts. All three trials ended in mistrials when jurors were unable to reach a unanimous verdict as to guilt or innocence. It appears some of Gotti Senior’s Teflon rubbed off on his son.
But the federal government does not give up easily, particularly when your last name is Gotti. John Junior is to be tried again in yet another, a fourth racketeering case set to go to before a jury in the Southern District of New York. This time the government claims that they have damning new evidence.
I tell my editor that I can certainly cover the trial and write about it, but it is going to be difficult, perhaps even impossible, to get an interview with Gotti Junior while he is in custody. The feds are notorious for keeping their prisoners from meeting with the press, particularly someone as high profile as he. And in any case, there is a story here with or without an interview. Three mistrials in federal courts in New York City: that is unheard of; it must constitute some sort of record. The feds don’t often lose or fail to get a conviction at trial, and certainly not in New York City’s two federal district courts—the Southern District in Manhattan and the Eastern District in Brooklyn. They have a 95 percent conviction rate, with 98 percent of those who choose to go to trial ending with a guilty verdict. Mistrials due to hung juries are also rare in federal criminal cases, and even more so in the Southern or Eastern Districts of New York, where many of the major criminal cases brought by the government are tried. Judges will ordinarily order jurors to continue deliberating until they reach a verdict.
In 2009, when John Gotti Junior stands trial a fourth time in federal court in Manhattan, charged with being the boss of the Gambino Crime Family, the specter of his dead father haunts the courtroom. Gotti Senior died a lonely, inglorious death in 2002, wasting away of throat and neck cancer at the federal prison medical facility in Springfield, Missouri, while serving the tenth year of a life sentence. Now his son faces a similar fate. If convicted of the racketeering, cocaine trafficking, murder, and murder conspiracy charges brought by the government, John Gotti Junior will be sentenced to a mandatory term of life in prison with no possibility of parole, like his father.
But what kind of a life was it? I wonder going into the trial in the magisterial new Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse just a twenty-minute walk from my home. Is Gotti Junior like his father—as the government seeks to prove—a merciless killer, a mob boss who made tens of millions of dollars moving a mountain of cocaine through the streets of Queens, New York, and Tampa, Florida? Is he a street thug who matured into a made Mafia member and took up the mantle of his imprisoned father to become boss of the largest and richest crime family in America?
Or, as Gotti’s lawyers contend, did John Junior come to see the horror and treachery of his father’s and his own criminal life, recoil from it, and quit the mob over a decade ago after having admitted his guilt in 1999, been sentenced to seventy-seven months in prison, served his time, and come out to dedicate his life to his wife and children? The government, the Gotti defense maintains, is going after John Junior yet again and seeking to lock him up for the rest of his life not based on anything he may have done, for which he has already been punished, but because of who his father was, and because they can’t stand losing in court—particularly to someone named John Gotti. The Gotti name alone, many in law enforcement seem to believe, is a crime in and of itself.
“GOOD MORNING, I am John Gotti,” John Junior introduces himself to the jury pool on the first day of voir dire, the process by which a jury is selected. “Here I am again,” he says, to remind potential jurors that this is the fourth time the government has attempted to convict him and lock him up for the rest of his natural life.
He was arrested early on the morning of August 5, 2008, when a dozen FBI agents, some arriving in helicopters, swooped in on Gotti’s Oyster Bay, Long Island home, where he lived with his wife and five children, and took him into custody on charges that originated out of a Tampa, Florida, indictment. Gotti was held without bail, transported to the Pinellas County jail in Clearwater, Florida, where he was brought before a federal judge who ruled that the government had to take him back to New York to stand trial. In a pretrial victory for the defense, the judge wrote a nineteen-page ruling that held there was no basis for moving the case to Florida and that the Tampa indictment gave the “disquieting impression of forum shopping” by federal prosecutors who had been unable to convict Gotti in New York courts.
Junior, as he is known on the street, appears smaller, diminished by the year plus he has been locked up in solitary confinement while awaiting trial. A burly man, a weight lifter and reputed tough guy when climbing the ranks of the mob on the streets of Queens, Gotti has shrunk and gone gray—not just his hair, his flesh too has taken on the dull ashen patina of jail cell walls. His perennially tanned dad had swaggered into spectator-packed courtrooms in his three-thousand-dollar suits, looking like a movie star with his silver-gray hair impeccably coiffed, flanked by his flamboyant, A-list attorneys, Bruce Cutler and Gerald Shargel. Junior shambles into a near empty courtroom, squinting from behind a pair of tinted, oval-shaped glasses, dressed in what appears to be prison-issue-clothes, and escorted by deputy US marshals. He takes his seat at the defense table with lead counsel Charles Carnesi, a balding, jovial sparkplug of a man with shoulders nearly as wide as he is tall, and a corrosive voice that could melt the grease off an engine block. Carnesi is second-chaired by co-counsel John Meringolo, an affable regular in New York mob trials.
The prosecution has assembled an equally disparate team. The young, hyper Manhattan assistant United States attorney Elie Honig reminds me of Ben Stiller in Along Came Polly as he scurries around the courtroom trying to clean up the government’s mess. He seems somehow chagrined by the awesome responsibility of trying to accomplish what more experienced prosecutors failed to do in the past. Next to Honig is James Trezevant out of the Tampa, Florida, US attorney’s office. Trezevant is confined to an electrically powered Rolls Royce of a wheelchair. He drives in and out of the courtroom like Ironside accompanied by his Playboy Playmate–worthy paralegal, Ms. Rodriguez. To Honig’s left sits assistant US attorney Chi T. Steve Kwok, a buttoned-down rookie apparently drafted from the government’s farm team. Rounding out the prosecution’s squad is FBI case agent Ted Otto, who looks like a slightly shorter version of Lyle Lovett, with a pile of curly light-brown hair on his long, angular head.
Word around the federal courthouse in downtown Manhattan, where superswindler Bernie Madoff recently pled guilty to a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, is that the seasoned, top-tier government prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys don’t want to try these organized crime cases anymore. There is no glory in it, not since then United States Attorney Rudy Giuliani took down the bosses of all five New York Mafia families in the Commission Case, and not since John Gotti Senior’s final, precipitous fall from grace and disappearance from the front pages of New York City’s newspapers. Lawyers and prosecutors prefer the high-profile, white-collar securities and fraud cases where defendants are charged with stealing millions and even billions with a pen and a briefcase instead of a machine gun. Then, the prosecutors reason, they can leave government service and take jobs that start at $200,000 a year at New York’s top corporate law firms.
Prosecutor Elie Honig, stopping by the press section, laments, “What, The New York Times doesn’t even send one of its people to cover the trial?”
The Mafia is so eighties.
As the trial progresses, however, the room gradually fills with courthouse buffs, lawyers and detectives, FBI special agents, internal affairs cops seeking to gather intelligence about corrupt officers who may have worke
d for the Gotti clan, members of the press, and Gotti groupies. Even Jerry Capeci, who bills himself as “the nation’s foremost EXPERT on the American Mafia” on his Gang Land News website, shows up. Federal Judge Kevin Castel, an avuncular, solicitous jurist with seemingly inexhaustible patience, moves the trial to a larger courtroom to accommodate the growing crowd of spectators. Victoria Gotti, the defendant’s sister and a celebrity Mafia princess in her own right, the former star of the reality TV series Growing Up Gotti and an author with a new book to promote, makes periodic appearances. With her mane of waist-length bleach-blond hair and model slim figure, Victoria will scowl and sit beside the other Gotti women, dressed in somber dark clothing, looking like a flock of grieving Sicilian widows at a funeral as they cluck and hiss at the government’s witnesses.
John Junior’s life, as depicted by Charles Carnesi in his opening statement to the jury, is a sadly foregone outcome of his father’s doomed existence. John Gotti Senior was, in Carnesi’s words, “a gangster through and through. You could cut John Gotti in half and all you would find is gangster.”
“Cosa Nostra forever,” that was Senior’s mantra. Never plead guilty, never appear before a grand jury, never admit anything: that is the code John Gotti Senior lived by—and died by. Not so John Junior, Carnesi avers. By the early 1980s, when Gotti Junior began hanging around the social club with his father, Gotti Senior had risen to the position of capo or skipper with a powerful crew of made Mafia members and associates operating out of the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club on 101st Avenue in Ozone Park, Queens. Soon John Junior began to assemble his own crew, headquartered at the Our Friends social club just blocks away from the Bergin. In every way except his choice of wardrobe, the younger Gotti emulated his father. Junior preferred expensive warm-up suits and sneakers to his dad’s elegant DeLisi and Armani suits and Bruno Magli shoes.
In the World Page 25