Donnie Brasco: Unfinished Business

by Joe Pistone

  Big Paul’s White House had been bugged thanks to probable cause gathered from a tap on a phone of a talkative soldier, Angelo Ruggiero. Conversations from that tap were put together with what I had learned as Donnie Brasco, especially from Sonny Black telling me he had gone to Big Paul for approval to kill the three capos on May 5, 1981. Big Paul conducted his business largely from the White House, rarely going to the family’s Ravenite social club on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. The White House bug and Big Paul’s big mouth produced a ton of incriminating evidence against the Mafia Commission as a criminal organization and against Big Paul and the rest of the Mafia Commission bosses regarding the predicate crimes. But in a strange Mafia way, the thing that made Big Paul even more vulnerable to a capo coup was what the bug revealed about his decadent personal life. With his wife living in the house as his wife, Big Paul kept a live-in maid named Gloria Olarte as his live-in lover and confidante.

  While the bosses professed morality and the need to respect wives, they had another motive that went beyond morality. Clearly, wiseguys had girlfriends and mistresses—cumares—and Mafia wives accepted that their husbands lived secret lives. But openly flaunting your mistress in front of your wife was forbidden. An irate wife could do a lot of damage, taking revenge by feeding information to the government.

  Nevertheless, whatever flaws Big Paul had, they were not obviously selfdestructive. On the other hand, the character flaws of John Gotti jumped out at you like one of those surprise snakes in a can that you let your children trick you with. Gotti’s character was unchecked by self-control. John Gotti spelled disaster for John Gotti. Gotti was notorious for his tirades, threatening to kill soldiers who were late returning a call. Gotti, the boss of a family in a secret society, was a shameless publicity hound, always ready to flirt with the press and happy to make the covers of Time, People, New York and the New York Times Magazine. Gotti was a control freak, demanding that every capo and important soldier show up at the Ravenite Social Club once a week to report directly to him. Gotti was a degenerate gambler who lost tens of thousands every week on sports betting. Gotti badmouthed people to their face and behind their back—his own people, the feds, and the lawyers who got him off. Gotti’s biggest flaw was the giant ego that drove him, and eventually ran over him.

  At the time of the Big Paul hit on December 16, 1985, Gotti was not really known to the public. Of course, we knew him and we knew he was ambitious. From taps and bugs, Bruce Mouw’s squad knew that Gotti was in trouble with Big Paul. And it was because of a tap on one of Gotti’s crewmember’s phones that the Bureau gained probable cause to bug Big Paul. Worse, that crewmember, Angelo Ruggiero, was a heroin trafficker. We figured Gotti struck first. Immediately after Big Paul got whacked, Gotti became front page.

  Like O.J. Simpson, Gotti insulted the intelligence of the rest of the Mafia by claiming he had no idea who whacked Big Paul, and claimed that he would hunt for the hit men.

  Three months after the Big Paul hit, Gotti went on trial for assault and robbery from an incident that took place while he was planning to hit Big Paul and take over as boss. Gotti had double-parked in front of a bar in Queens. A man on his way home from work beeped. Gotti came out of the bar with another wiseguy. They beat up the car beeper and, while he was down, took $350 from the guy’s wallet. In Sonny Black’s crew, a soldier who did that would have been punished. The only one I could see doing that in my time with the Mafia was Tony Mirra, but even he would have been smart enough not to take the guy’s money and turn a simple assault into a strong-arm robbery. Certainly, no capo I knew—Sonny, Mike Sabella, Big Joey Massino—much less a future boss planning a coup, would do something that stupid.

  The man pressed charges and trial was scheduled for March 24,1986.The victim obviously had read the newspaper after the Big Paul hit. On the stand, he said, “To be perfectly honest, it was so long ago I don’t remember.”The New York Post headline nailed it: “I FORGOTTI.”

  Three weeks later, the new underboss that Gotti appointed, Frank DeCicco, was blown to bits in his car in Brooklyn by a remote-control-activated bomb. Gotti was supposed to have been with his underboss at the time. Clearly this was a sign that Gotti did not have the Mafia Commission’s approval when he hit Big Paul.

  While we were heading into the Mafia Commission trial that September in the federal Southern District in Manhattan under Rudy Giuliani, Gotti was becoming bigger and bigger news. At the same time, the federal Eastern District in Brooklyn decided to prosecute Gotti on RICO charges. Actually, they had revised the original indictment against suddenly deceased underboss, Neil Dellacroce, to target media star Gotti as the primary RICO defendant instead. Like the Mafia Commission trial, this new creation also went to trial in September 1986. But while our trial was over in nine weeks, the Gotti trial took seven months. When our 151 guilty verdicts came down on November 19, 1986, Gotti wisecracked to the press, “That’s got nothing to do with me. I’ll be home soon.”

  Diane Giaccolone was the prosecutor on the Eastern District’s charges. She was about 30 years old and had had only one jury trial, which she lost. Ron Goldstock, the head of the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, heard that Giaccolone was going to move to revoke Gotti’s bail and send him to jail in the months before the trial. Goldstock went to her and asked her not to do that. His outfit had very productive taps and bugs up and running against Gotti at the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, but the second Gotti went to jail, the law required that the taps and bugs be stopped and pulled down. Let Gotti remain free on bail pending the trial, Goldstock reasoned; he won’t flee, and if he decides to flee the taps and bugs will pick that up. Giaccolone denied Goldstock’s request, Gotti was jailed pending trial, and our side lost a great opportunity to get quality evidence out of Gotti’s own mouth. No prosecutor I ever had the good fortune to work with would have made the decision Giaccolone made.

  The next bad decision that Giaccolone was considering, was to publicly expose a Bureau snitch. FBI agents working organized crime are encouraged to develop relationships with Mafia men and to turn these men into informants. To lure the man into becoming an informant, the man might be offered a pass on an arrest for a crime he committed, or he might be paid a regular salary, or be paid for specific information. The idea is to make the wiseguy think you are his friend. You pass along hopefully harmless information to him; you promise never to tell anyone about the wiseguy’s cozy relationship with the government; and you promise that he will never be called on to testify. The Bureau had two such invaluable moles inside Gotti’s Bergin Hunt and Fish Club.

  One of these was Wilfred “Willie Boy” Johnson, a minor defendant in Giaccolone’s case. Willie Boy’s mother was Italian, but his father was a Mohawk Indian—one of those famous Mohawk ironworkers who have incredible balance and balls. They work on the building of skyscrapers by standing on the top beams and installing new ones. They are proud. They have their own community in Brooklyn with their own bars, and the only competition they have for that dangerous work are the men who come down from Newfoundland in Canada. Because his mother (and not his father) was Italian, Willie Boy could never become a made man. Among other things that Willie Boy didn’t like about John Gotti, Willie Boy resented being called a “half-breed” by Gotti. But Willie Boy feared John Gotti and the power of life and death that Gotti wielded in his Bergin crew.

  Diane Giaccolone believed that by exposing Willie Boy Johnson as a fifteen-year informant for the FBI it would frighten Willie Boy into leaving the defendants’ table and becoming a witness for her in the upcoming trial. The Bureau got on their collective knees begging her not to expose Willie Boy. First, it could get him killed. Second, it would break the promises the Bureau made to Willie Boy. Third, it would send the message to other current and potential informants that the FBI could not be trusted. Fourth, it would end Willie Boy’s usefulness as an informant. Fifth, it was no way to show gratitude to a man whose information helped establish probable cause to tap the Bergin crewmember
, Angelo Ruggiero, whose conversations helped establish probable cause to bug Big Paul’s White House.

  Giaccolone denied the Bureau’s request and exposed Willie Boy in open court with the press in attendance. But Willie Boy was more afraid of John Gotti than he was of Diane Giaccolone. How could he ever trust that he’d be treated right in this new Witness Protection Program if the government, as it had so often done in the past, broke another treaty with an Indian? Willie Boy stayed at the defense table, doing his best to deny that he had ever been a snitch.

  Unfazed, Giaccolone decided to expose the other FBI informant in the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club to try to scare him into turning. His name was Billy Batista, a hijacker and bookmaker. Billy left a good-bye note for his FBI handler, whom he did not blame, and went on the lam. Hopefully, Billy learned his lesson and gave up a life of crime wherever he moved to. If I’d been Billy’s FBI handler I’d have given him the money to disappear and get started on a new life. Let the Brooklyn DA prosecute me for obstruction of justice. Giaccolone cost the Bureau another valuable ally in its crusade against the Mafia.

  The FBI pulled out of her case altogether, citing “administrative and procedural differences” with Giaccolone. I did not testify. I don’t recommend bringing any of this up to Jules unless you want an earful.

  The seven-month John Gotti RICO trial involved three murders and depended on the testimony of seven low-level turncoats loaded with the “negative baggage” such witnesses have.

  On Friday the Thirteenth of March 1987, the jury after a week of deliberation returned a Not Guilty verdict. It was the first and only RICO victory for a Mafia boss. Gotti, who had been called the “Dapper Don” by the press because of his expensive Italian suits, got a new nickname, the “Teflon Don”—nothing stuck to him. March 1986, not guilty. March 1987, not guilty.

  As had become the trend, this jury had been anonymous, its identity kept secret, the way Willie Boy’s and Billy’s identities were supposed to have been kept secret. But it was later revealed that a juror, George Pape, managed to get word to the wiseguys that he could be bought. He was paid $60,000 to guarantee that he would hold out for a hung jury. Gotti could have saved his $60,000 as the other eleven were unanimous for not guilty, anyway. Pape, meanwhile, would later pay for his sins.

  Seventeen months after Gotti’s acquittal, Willie Boy Johnson caught nine bullets on his way home from work in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and was left dead on the sidewalk as a warning to all informants everywhere. Always ready with a wisecrack, Gotti told the press, “Well, we all gotta go sometime.”

  Gotti, in his delusions of grandeur, actually believed that by winning cases and rubbing the government’s nose in the dirt afterward, the government would eventually give up against the Mafia. Maybe Gotti listened more to the collaborator statements of Mario Cuomo than to the warrior statements of Rudy Giuliani. Gotti was the one, not the Chin, whom the psychiatrists should have evaluated. By his continued course of conduct, Gotti might as well have said to law enforcement, “Please work night and day to shut me down and shut me up.”

  A very realistic appraisal of how the rest of the Mafia viewed what was going in their world at that time appears in Peter Maas’s book, written with the book’s subject, and titled, Underboss: Sammy the Bull Gravano’s Story of Life in the Mafia. In the words of Gravano, John Gotti’s former underboss, “. . . here in New York there was the commission case, the pizza connection, on and on. All the old bosses have been put away for a hundred years. . . . A lot of people are saying the whole thing is falling apart. It was unbelievable. Unbelievable what that law professor Blakey did coming up with RICO. And you got to give Rudy Giuliani credit. . . . He showed them how to work this fucking RICO.”

  The next trial against Gotti took place in 1990, based on events that had happened a few years earlier. A carpenter’s union boss named John O’Connor had busted up a new restaurant owned by a Gambino soldier. During construction, John O’Connor had his hand out for a bribe, but the restaurant owner slapped it down without putting any money in his palm. As it turns out, John O’Connor was connected to the Genovese family but Gotti didn’t know it, and John O’Connor didn’t know the restaurant was connected to Gotti’s Gambino family. And they call this organized crime.

  This was one of Gotti’s first matters as the new boss in January 1986. Ronald Goldstock had a bug in Gotti’s Bergin club, the bug that was soon to be shut down prematurely by Diane Giaccolone’s decision to have Gotti’s bail revoked. On a tape from that bug, Gotti seemed to be giving the order to assault John O’Connor. Gotti said, “We’re going to bust him up.” In short order, rather than beat him up, thugs shot John O’Connor in the legs, presumably as punishment and as a message from Gotti.

  Simple case, except for one thing—John O’Connor, the shooting victim, refused to identify anyone and planned to testify for the defense. Twice the case was turned down for prosecution by the federal Eastern District in Brooklyn. Finally, the Manhattan DA’s office decided to go with it. The tapes clearly included Gotti’s voice seeming to order the assault, but Gotti used words that were subject to interpretation. In addition, there was just one turncoat witness with tons of “negative baggage.” He was serving 60 years for RICO, and cooperating was the only prayer he had of ever getting out of jail.

  When you consider some of the “negative baggage” some of these Witness Protection guys have, you have to wonder who on the jury would want them to get out in 60 years, much less get out way sooner because of their cooperation. The turncoat witness in this case, a hit man and drug addict with the Irish Westies gang from Manhattan, admitted to the jury, “I killed a guy in a pet store once. I walked into the store and asked the guy if he had any flea collars. He didn’t pay me no attention so I shot him in the head. He bounced off the wall so I shot him in the neck.”

  John O’Connor, Gotti’s wounded victim, testified for the defense on Gotti’s behalf that Gotti had no reason to have him shot, and that he had many other dangerous enemies who had more of a motive to have him shot. John O’Connor also testified that the police never warned him that they had heard on tape that he was about to take a beating. All law enforcement agencies have a strict policy that any time a tape reveals the threat of violence or death to anyone, detectives or agents will visit that person and the threat will be completely explained to him. If Gotti’s words on the tape meant that Gotti was ordering O’Connor’s assault, then why wasn’t O’Connor warned by the law? Well, the only answer there could be is that Gotti’s words did not convey an order to harm John O’Connor, or the police would have warned him.

  In his summation, Gotti’s lawyer Bruce Cutler held fast to the 50-year-old party line of the Mafia: “All we ever hear from the government is Mafia! Cosa Nostra! . . . Organized crime! . . . But these are pure fantasies. They are constructs of the government. They are imaginary entities they use to categorize people. I say they don’t exist. I have never seen one. No one on this jury has ever seen one. . . .”

  On February 9, 1990 John Gotti was found not guilty for the third consecutive time in four years.

  Jules, knowing something the outside world didn’t know yet, gave a quote to the New York Times when that Not Guilty verdict came in. “Listen, the FBI hasn’t brought a case against Gotti yet. When we do, he can take all the bets he wants, because he’s going away to prison for a long time.”

  The thing that Jules knew when he made that human remark—a remark for which he would have yelled at me if I had made it—was that just two months before that verdict, Special Agent Bruce Mouw’s Gambino squad had hit a mother load. They discovered that when Gotti went into the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street in Little Italy, he sometimes took a shortcut to an apartment above the ground-floor hangout. This upstairs apartment belonged to Nettie Cirelli, a 72-year-old widow of a deceased Gambino soldier. When Gotti wanted to talk business, they would arrange for Nettie to leave her apartment. On November 19, 1989, three years to the day after the jury returned 15
1 guilty verdicts in the Mafia Commission Case, Bruce Mouw had the Ravenite warrant amended to include Nettie’s apartment. Jimmy Kallstrom’s electronic wizards went right to work and planted bugs in the apartment.

  On tape on December 12, 1989 in Nettie’s apartment, John Gotti clearly admitted to having three men killed. Gotti bragged that he’d had one of them whacked “because he refused to come in when I called. He didn’t do nothing else wrong.”

  Soon RICO struck again in John Gotti’s life. He was indicted, along with his underboss, Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, and his consigliere, Frankie Loc Locasio. This was an indictment crafted with the goal of destroying the entire leadership of the Gambino family all at once, just as the Mafia Commission Case had done to the Lucchese family (leading to a “killing frenzy”) and to the Colombo family (leading to a “civil war”).

  During a hearing on a motion to deny bail to the three Gambino leaders, the Assistant U.S. Attorney in charge of the case, John Gleeson, played the December 12, 1989 tape. The defendants were in the courtroom with their lawyers. Because they had lawyers, neither the prosecutor nor the FBI were permitted to speak any words directly to any of the accused. The only way the government could speak to one of them is if the prosecutor received word from one of them that he wanted to cooperate and waived his lawyer’s presence at a meeting. Now I’m not going to say that Gleeson played this tape for Judge Glasser in the presence of Sammy the Bull Gravano as a means of directly communicating certain information to Gravano, but it worked.

  Sammy listened to the tape and heard Gotti bad-mouthing Sammy behind his back, making it sound as if Gotti had ordered the three hits because a bloodthirsty Sammy had insisted on the hits. To make the point that Sammy was greedy, Gotti criticized Sammy for having too many construction projects going on. Gotti accused Sammy of working to create “his own family within the family.” An underboss who works to build his own power base of men loyal only to him is an underboss intent on whacking his boss and taking over. Gotti had already established such a precedent in the Gambino family of whacking the boss without Mafia Commission approval, but even Gotti had to believe that it wouldn’t be real hard to get Mafia Commission approval to whack him.