by Joe Pistone
Shortly after hearing the tapes for the first time ever, Sammy the Bull made the unprecedented decision to turn and testify. The Bull got his wife to contact the two agents that had investigated him, SA Frank Spero and SA Matthew Tricorico. At a confidential meeting with prosecutor John Gleeson and SA Bruce Mouw, Sammy the Bull said, “I want to switch governments.”
Jury selection began in January 1992. Judge I. Leo Glasser, the former Dean of the Brooklyn Law School, took Gotti’s past jury tampering very seriously. Despite the expense, Judge Glasser sequestered the jurors in separate hotels for the duration of the trial. An anonymous jury did not prevent a crooked juror from reaching out to the Mafia, but sequestration did. The jurors were allowed no visitors, and all their telephone calls were monitored. It was a necessary and bold move. But what a system. You can’t direct a single question to a suspect who relies on Miranda when you arrest him, but you can lock up jurors—innocent citizens—for months and deprive them of their loved ones and their privacy on the phone. Maybe because of my years under I’m a little sensitive to what that means to a family. Anyway, later on in the trial, Judge Glasser relented a bit and allowed conjugal visits.
Judge Glasser personally had around-the-clock police protection following numerous death threats.At recess Gotti referred to both Judge Glasser and the federal prosecutor John Gleeson as “faggots.” He referred to the Jewish prosecutor James Orenstein as “the Christ killer.”
The actors Anthony Quinn and Mickey Rourke attended the trial, waving and giving words of encouragement to Gotti in front of the jury. I wonder what these two celebrities who wished the Don luck against their government thought of the wife and children of John Favara, a supervisor at a Castro convertible sofa factory on Long Island. Favara had accidentally killed John Gotti’s 12-year-old son when the boy, driving a mini-bike, darted into Favara’s path from behind a dumpster and Favara couldn’t stop his car in time. Of course, traffic charges weren’t even brought against Favara because he did nothing wrong. Dart-outs happen.
Out of fear of Gotti, and despite the fact that the Favara children played with the Gotti children, the Favaras sold their home to dart out of the neighborhood. But that wasn’t good enough for the ego of John Gotti. The last time anyone saw John Favara alive was when an unidentified man sapped him in the Castro factory parking lot, stuffed him into a van, and drove off with him. While it was obvious to everyone, including John Favara’s family, that this cruelty was the work of Gotti, no leads ever turned up on that 1980 hit. But today, the 12-year-old deceased mini-biker’s sister,Victoria, now has her own hit TV show, all about her own children, on the A&E channel. What a system.
Due to Gotti’s whacko and inflexible order that the capos and important soldiers show up at the Ravenite once a week to pay homage, physical surveillance revealed a lot that no one had known about the Gambino family, including the identification of a few capos who had previously remained under the radar. I would have liked to be in the courtroom sitting next to Gotti so I could have gotten a close-up of his face when the surveillance photos and videos—evidence enabled by his own ego—were shown to the jury.
The celebrities in the audience like Anthony Quinn and Mickey Rourke—and earlier James Caan and Robert Duvall attending the Mafia Commission Case—were there as informal character witnesses. By waving to Gotti and wishing him luck, they were telling the jury that they vouched for Gotti without having to take the witness stand and be cross-examined like ordinary character witnesses. It was a form of cheating. They could say he had such good character that they put their reputations on the line for him, and the prosecution could not challenge that. There isn’t a wiseguy alive who could afford to call a legitimate character witness and have the witness cross-examined about the wiseguy’s bad character, especially not John Gotti. Besides the celebrities in the audience, the defense called one witness, a tax lawyer, and he bombed when he got all the tax law wrong.
On April 7, 1992, the jury found John Gotti and Frankie Loc Locasio guilty on all thirteen counts. On June 23, 1992, Judge I. Leo Glasser sentenced Gotti to life without eligibility for parole. Gotti was sent to the federal prison in Marion, Illinois—the jail that was built to take the place of Alcatraz. Gotti was confined at Marion to lockdown, which meant he stayed alone in a 6 x 8 cell for 21 to 23 hours a day. Gotti died in the can at age 61 on June 10, 2002.
As Special Agent Bruce Mouw said in 1998, “They are in a sad state. They have no real boss, no underboss, and no consigliere.” And it went downhill from there.
The New York tabloids report that Gotti’s young and extremely inexperienced son Junior is the boss of whatever is left. But Junior now claims that he quit the Mafia. When Junior got married and his father was still alive, they had Junior’s reception at the Versailles Room of the Helmsley Palace. The hotel flew the Italian flag over the entrance. They should have flown the white flag of surrender. After a couple of mistrials, Junior is still pending trial for ordering a hit on a radio personality, Curtis Sliwa, because Sliwa bad-mouthed Junior’s father and sister on the radio. Sliwa was ambushed by gunfire and was wounded, but survived. Every time I hear about a Mafia revenge hit on a person who is outside the Mafia and in an unrelated business, like Curtis Sliwa, I tend to watch my surroundings a little more carefully for a few days.
During Gotti’s trial, Sammy the Bull testified for nine days. His reward was a five-year sentence. In addition to testifying against Gotti, Sammy testified against the crooked juror, George Pape, whom Gravano had given $60,000 to ensure a hung jury. Gravano testified at the Chin’s competency hearing, and at several other Mafia RICO trials. Sammy also revealed the existence of a crooked cop in the Intelligence section of the NYPD who sold information to the Gambinos. His name was Detective William Piest, and he got seven and a half years in the can.
Eight years after his testimony against Gotti, Sammy the Bull, along with his son Gerard (a/k/a Baby Bull), his daughter and her boyfriend, and his wife, were arrested in Arizona for heavily trafficking in the drug Ecstasy. The Bull got 20 years. He already has Graves’ disease, a thyroid disorder, so Sammy will die in the can. The Baby Bull got nine and a half years.
Some critics have written that Sammy the Bull’s testimony was not really needed to get Gotti, that the tapes from Nettie’s apartment were good enough and that Gravano should not have been given a deal for his testimony. But a lot of second-guessers today fail to understand that wars are often fought on the level of morale. Destroying the entire Mafia remains the goal, one battle at a time. By the very act of Sammy the Bull turning on his boss, our side inflicted incalculable losses on the Mafia, its supposedly sacred rules, and its structure—not to mention recruitment. Who but the very dumbest among the city’s dumb thugs would want the Mafia life as it was now revealed to be?
As Chin Gigante said to John Gotti when Gotti told the Chin that he had “made” his son Junior Gotti, “Jeez, I’m sorry to hear that.”
CHAPTER 14
FALLOUT IN PHILLY
“THE COMMISSION WANTS IT STRAIGHTENED OUT. . . . Let the Commission decide. . . . Tell him it’s the Commission from New York. Tell him he’s dealing with the big boys now.”
Those were the words of one of the “big boys,” Fat Tony Salerno, boss of the Genovese, spoken in the twilight hours leading up to the nighttime that would descend following the Mafia Commission Case indictment. Fat Tony Salerno, whose words were being secretly bugged, was throwing the weight of a fully functioning Commission around the State of New York. The Buffalo family had a problem over who should lead, and Fat Tony sent the message back to Buffalo that the Commission would “decide” it. The Buffalo boss’s men, who were armed with machine guns, were told by Fat Tony to put them away. “The Commission wants it straightened out. . . .” The Commission backed the boss, and there was to be no bloodshed, and there was none.
After the Mafia Commission Case, the “Commission from New York,” like an aging wide receiver going out for a pass, began to hear the foot
steps of the defensive back. There would still be a Mafia Commission of sorts after Judge Owen got done with them, but there would never be a fully functioning omnipotent Mafia Commission again. This was a huge blow to New York and to the nearby families most associated with the New York families.
The Philly family is a case in point. In 1980, there was an unauthorized coup when boss Angelo Bruno was whacked. Bruno, called the “Docile Don” in the press, had been boss for 21 years. The men who hit the Docile Don with shotguns as he was about to get out of his car, sat down with the Commission after the hit to explain. In fact, they thought they had pre-approval from the Commission.They were wrong. The ringleader was tortured and killed. His co-conspirators were killed. The Commission put in a new boss, an old friend of the murdered Docile Don, Chicken Man Testa. Chicken Man had once owned a fresh chicken store where Italian housewives selected their live chicken for the evening’s meal and had Chicken Man wring its neck and prepare it for pick-up later in the day. In 1981, a year after he became boss, two Philly men decided the “big boys” on the “Commission from New York” had made a mistake in selecting Chicken Man. So they blew Chicken Man up with a bomb planted under his front porch.
Can you imagine the jaws that dropped on “the big boys”—Big Paul, Tony Ducks, Fat Tony, and Carmine Persico—“the Commission from New York?” There were no wires up in 1982, but I can imagine what “the big boys” were saying. Don’t these people down the Jersey Turnpike get it?
One of the bombers lammed to Florida where he died on his own before he could be whacked. They whacked the other bomber in 1982, a year after Chicken Man got blown up. The Commission made Little Nicky Scarfo boss. Little Nicky was nuts and would kill you as soon as look at you. No doubt the Commission selected him for this trait. The “big boys” on the Commission did not want any more unruliness out of Philly, unless the boss perpetrated it.
That’s how a fully functioning Commission is supposed to work in the face of rebellion and the unauthorized killing of a boss.
Despite being nuts, Little Nicky remained boss until a couple of years after the Mafia Commission Case. In 1989 a RICO conviction slammed Little Nicky in the can for the rest of his life. Little Nicky’s nephew and underboss, the tall and handsome Phil Leonetti, got 45 years in the same trial.
But by 1989, a lot had changed; night had descended on the Commission.The majority of “the big boys” on the “Commission from New York” were doing 100-year bits in tough prisons. Feeling the weight of a pending 45-year sentence, Phil Leonetti became the first underboss to flip and join the Witness Protection Program. Underboss Phil must not have been impressed with the Lucchese underboss’s old-school Mafia attitude when he was handed a hundred years in the Mafia Commission Case. “Ah, give me the hundred. I’ll go in now.”
The Philly underboss ended up testifying all over the New York vicinity and did five years instead of the 45 he had been given. The Philly underboss was a man who had been at his Uncle Nicky’s side since his teenage years and who knew a hell of a lot and spilled it all. The Philly underboss even admitted being guilty of a murder he had been found not guilty of.
Would the Philly underboss have turned if Rudy Giuliani had never made a Mafia Commission Case? If there had been a fully functioning Commission in place in 1989? I don’t think so. Would he have been scared that the supremely powerful and politically well-connected Commission would eventually catch up to him, penetrate the Witness Protection Program and kill him? I think so.
In the Mafia Commission Case we were able to come up with only two turncoats, a 78-year-old from Cleveland who could merely testify about the general history of the Mafia, and a low-level Colombo associate who, because he was not a made man, knew relatively little. In two years, a bumper crop of high-level turncoats had begun to sprout with the turning of the Philly underboss, followed by the turning of Gambino underboss Sammy the Bull Gravano.
In Philly, with Little Nicky in the can and his underboss and nephew gone bad, the family needed a boss. But by 1990 the replacement bosses on the Mafia Commission were either on the run or hearing footsteps.
While the entire Lucchese administration was in jail for 100 years, the new Lucchese boss and underboss were on the lam from a big RICO case, scared to death of getting 100 themselves. The Colombo boss, Carmine Persico, and his underboss Gerry Lang Langella, were in jail for 100-plus years each. But Persico was refusing to surrender leadership and was attempting to rule in New York from a prison in California. The Genovese boss, Chin Gigante, was wandering around Greenwich Village in his bathrobe, trying to avoid the wrath of RICO, not wanting to end up in jail for 100 years like Fat Tony Salerno. The Gambino boss, John Gotti, when he wasn’t pandering to the press, was constantly sitting in a courtroom. The Bonanno boss, Rusty Rastelli, was still in jail, but he had been booted off the Commission when I surfaced.
The Mafia Commission was now like a substitute teacher. The class had a license to misbehave.
John Stanfa, a low-echelon figure in the Philly family, in the absence of a fully functioning “Commission from New York,” ended up as Philly boss. Sources in the Bureau tell me that Stanfa was appointed Philly boss by John Gotti. Gotti had no real power to do that. Gotti was merely assuming to speak for whatever semblance of the Mafia Commission remained in name only. Stanfa had been the Docile Don’s driver and bodyguard in 1980 the night the Docile Don was shotgunned in front of his house. Shooters rushed the car and wounded Stanfa in the shoulder. It looked like Stanfa was part of the plot. But the word around Philly from informants was that Stanfa was so poorly regarded as a soldier that all it took was a shot to the shoulder to neutralize him when his boss was whacked. As soon as Stanfa was named boss—a decade after his boss had been hit on his watch—a revolt broke out in Philly.
Only this time there was no “Commission from New York” to step in; no “big boys now.” The Philly family war that followed in the early nineties was not as bloody as it could have been because of the incompetence of the factions, but it was bloody enough. It ended prematurely when the big boys in the U.S. Government stepped in. John Stanfa was hit with a RICO indictment. Bugging, and a number of turncoats diving into the Witness Protection Program like rats from a sinking ship, provided enough evidence against Stanfa for a few consecutive life sentences handed to him in 1994. Stanfa will age and die in Leavenworth, Kansas—a long way from his grandchildren in Philly.
Needing a boss in 1994, what was left of the Philly Mafia had no Mafia Commission to consult, nor “big boys” to fear. A young man whose family went way back in the Philly Mafia, Skinny Joey Merlino, got a brainstorm. Skinny Joey, acting on his own authority, inducted into the Mafia an older man, Ralph Natale, a drug dealer, who had just gotten out of jail in 1994. After giving him his button, Skinny Joey appointed this older man as boss and appointed himself underboss. Skinny Joey now had a figurehead for a boss and the illusion of a fully functioning Philly Mafia family to back up his criminal enterprise. This made his criminal rackets appear more menacing and threatening, and made it easier for Skinny Joey to extort honest businesses and collect gambling and loan-sharking debts.
As soon as the figurehead got himself caught in a crystal meth ring, he did what drug traffickers do. The figurehead, although a boss in name only, became the first boss to turn and testify against his own family. Unfortunately for the prosecutors, the figurehead had very little inside information to offer to a jury. Skinny Joey Merlino, underboss and boss-maker, was acquitted on the most serious charges in July 2001, despite the testimony against him by his own made boss. Skinny Joey Merlino was convicted on gambling and extortion, and did get fourteen years. He will be out in 2011 at the age of 49. Some informants tell us that so-and-so is the new boss; other informants tell us no one wants to be the Mafia boss in Philly in the new century. They call it “the city of rats.”
I’ll say this for Skinny Joey; he’s got good taste in movies. When Donnie Brasco came out, some Philly agent friends of mine spotted him and hi
s crew on line to see the flick. From what I hear, the whole Merlino crew gave it thumbs up.
Across the Delaware River from Philly lies New Jersey, the home of the small Sam “the Plumber” DeCavalcante crime family, the model for the Soprano family. When a territorial dispute over Trenton arose in the 1960s between Sam the Plumber’s New Jersey family and the Philly family, it was “the big boys” on the “Commission from New York” who sat them down and straightened it out.
Shortly after I came out and the RICO engines began to rev up with the Bonanno family convictions, the other family RICO indictments, the Pizza Connection indictments, and the Mafia Commission indictments, Sam the Plumber DeCavalcante heard the RICO engines roaring and, by 1984, had retired to Florida. He turned the reins over to a new boss. In 1990 the new boss got convicted for simply doing all the things that Sam the Plumber would have been doing if he had not had the sense of self-preservation to retire. No sooner had the new boss been sentenced than his selection as acting boss disappeared. Then an old time capo and former underboss was also whacked. Not only were there no “big boys” on the “Commission from New York” across the Hudson River to straighten out whatever was going on in New Jersey as Fat Tony Salerno had done in Buffalo, but Sam the Plumber DeCavalcante, who was still alive in Florida, had enough good sense not to get involved in trying to mediate any of it. The wise old plumber died peacefully in Florida at age 84 in 1997.