See No Evil

by Ron Felber

  It was there that Elliot first met Cohn, sitting on one of the contiguous couches that snaked through the VIP Room, wearing his trademark leopard-spotted bow tie, a sequined blazer, and jeans, nuzzling with Steve Rubell, as he expostulated on the fate of the then-unknown hijacker-murderer, John Gotti. Elliot was with Frank Silvio, who the notorious attorney seemed to know quite well, and also, by happenstance, Dominick Montiglio. Cohn, who’d cut his teeth on alleged American Communists as chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy during the senator’s infamous hearings, was a gun for hire and by the lights of many, a truly evil man. He’d earned his archconservative bona fides during those Senate hearing witch hunts, but cemented them with deep friendships, and some say love affairs, with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and New York’s Cardinal Francis Spellman. During those days, however, Cohn was earning his daily bread defending prominent mob figures including Genovese boss “Fat Tony” Salerno, Bonanno boss Carmine “Nino” Galante, and Gambino Family members Carmine Fatico, Aniello Dellacroce, and more recently, Gotti.

  It was that night, through Cohn, that Elliot first heard about John Gotti. More, he came to understand Gotti’s cunning in parlaying his modest credentials as “acting captain” of Fatico’s crew working out of the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park, Queens, to a genuine player held in high regard by the big boss Carlo Gambino, still alive at the time.

  “In May 1972 while Gotti was still in Lewisburg on a hijacking charge, Carlo’s twenty-nine-year-old nephew, Emmanuel, was grabbed off a Manhattan street and kidnapped,” Cohn, confided to a covey of them in hushed tones. “The kidnappers contacted Emanuel’s wife demanding $350,000 ransom of which she delivered $100,000, only to find his body excavated from the grounds of a New Jersey dump eight months later. The guy responsible, the Gambinos believed, was Jimmy McBratney, a member of the Westies, an Irish street gang, who’d kidnapped one of their Staten Island loan sharks a month before. So, reacting to the affront to his family’s honor, the old man puts out a goddamned contract on McBratney that Gotti, now released from Lewisburg, jumps all over along with his two buddies, Angelo Ruggiero and Ralph Galione.”

  Cohn went on to say that Gotti’s plan was to kidnap McBratney, then take him to a Brooklyn Navy Yard warehouse that would serve as both a torture and execution chamber because to him an insult to Gambino’s power of that magnitude deserved more than just dying.

  “I mean,” Cohn said, “John wanted to get medieval on him, but instead what happened was that family members spotted McBratney at a Staten Island bar and tipped off Gotti. John and his two accomplices then entered the bar in plain sight of something like a dozen customers and pretending to be plainclothes detectives, tell McBratney he’s under arrest. When they try to handcuff him, all hell breaks loose until Gotti and Ruggiero pin him against a wall while Galione fires three shots into McBratney’s head, killing him instantly in plain sight of the barmaid and a roomful of others.

  “From there, Gotti went ‘into the wind,’ until June 1974 when he was arrested by FBI agents who turned him over to the NYPD. Out of gratitude, Carlo Gambino, himself, demanded that family capos chip in to retain me,” Cohn bragged, “because they knew I had friends in high places including state judges and higher-ups at the FBI through my deep friendship with Mr. Hoover. Leaning heavy on every goddamned one of those, I had Johnny plea bargain what could have been seen by some as an open-and-shut organized crime hit down to attempted manslaughter.”

  “True,” Cohn concluded, “John was sentenced to four years, but that really meant only two years with good behavior served at Green Haven Correctional Facility, practically his backyard. A good move, all of this, on Gotti’s part. I tell you, this guy’s got a future.” Cohn understood what Gotti clearly knew, that the family was now indebted to him, and his standing within La Cosa Nostra had been cemented with the boss of bosses.

  Beyond the scuttlebutt about Gotti, another interesting thing happened later that night. A bleach blonde, who looked to be in her late forties, approached Rubell and chastised him for being in the arms of Cohn. “Do you know what he is?” she loudly upbraided. “He’s a killer! He killed Abe Feller and Stan Kaplan, him and those Nazi bastards on the McCarthy committee!” Studio 54 was not famous for violence, but there was no shortage of security. A bodyguard quickly whisked her away, still screaming, “He’s a killer, that bastard! A killer!” Then, Rubell turned to Cohn, kissed him on the mouth, and said to the group, “Yes, but he’s my killer.”

  That was the kind of hypocrisy that had already made Elliot realize what bullshit society really was. Here was the elite of the fashion world, America’s most prestigious attorneys, lawmakers, models, stockbrokers, entrepreneurs, Mafia chieftains, and at the end of it, they were all complicit, part and parcel of the same hypocrisy. Hoover and Cohn were thick as thieves, Cohn and Rubell were lovers, along with New York’s powerful Catholic Cardinal Spellman. Carlo Gambino pays big bucks to Cohn who after touting the American dream and prosecuting innocent men before the Senate as Communists, cajoles, bribes, or threatens who knows whom so that John Gotti gets away with murder, all of which makes two Manhattan heart surgeons look on in dumb amazement. What a world! What a society! How could anyone take any of it seriously?

  9

  BABANIA

  “It’s true what they say about you, Dottore. Inside, you are one of us.”

  Despite the craziness that kept Frank Silvio and Elliot occupied, often until the early hours of the morning, they remained conscientious about their work. How did they stay alert and on top of their game physically—they were surgeons—and mentally? Silvio had his methamphetamines. Elliot had his basic metabolism and diet cola, which for him was at least as effective. In those days, it would not be uncommon for them to take a limo to Atlantic City after ten at night, only to return the next morning at six, shower, brush teeth, and be prepping for surgery by eight. That was simply the way they lived. Silvio and Elliot understood that and everything else about each other, though they rarely discussed Mafia family connections. Sometimes, Elliot would work emergency. Other times, if Elliot had prescheduled procedures, he’d be called on by Frank to handle situations that were other than standard.

  One situation happened early along in his residency at Mount Sinai when he was called to emergency over the hospital PA system. When he got there, the room was in chaos with two nurses and an intern struggling with a hysterical teenager with long black hair who looked to be seventeen or eighteen. The kid was bleeding badly from the right shoulder, and the stress he was putting on the arm was doing him no good at all.

  “Let me go!” he was screaming. “Let me the fuck outta here!”

  Understanding the situation, Elliot grabbed the boy’s arm, trying to calm him, while applying pressure with his fingers against the wound. “Get me Demerol,” he shouted to the nurse. “Stat!”

  “I gotta get outta here,” the kid kept insisting. “You don’t understand? I gotta get out now!”

  “You’ll get out all right, in a hearse, unless you let us treat that arm.”

  But before the boy could respond, a second kid was wheeled into the room on a gurney, groggy and muttering incoherently from what appeared to be a head injury.

  The gurney was wheeled next to Elliot as he continued working on the first boy, when the eyes of the two teenagers met, then locked in lethal recognition.

  “You fucking cocksucker!” the second boy screamed at the patient they were working on. Then he sat up on the gurney and pulled a gun from out of the crotch of his jeans.

  Pandemonium broke out. Nurses screamed. One orderly who’d been called to help dove to the floor while everyone else backed away toward the door. Except Elliot. He was still holding the wounded boy’s bicep, trying to stop the jets of blood pulsing from out of his slashed artery.

  “Put the gun down!” Elliot demanded in a voice that he’d never heard come from out of his mouth before.

  “Fuck you!” the young hood screamed back at him. “I’m going to kill y
ou, Tommy, you motherfucker!”

  Then, as he took aim, Elliot let go of his patient’s arm. Immediately, by luck, the blood that had been suppressed for the past several minutes shot like a crimson geyser into the gunman’s face, flustering him for the split second. By reflex, Elliot swung his right hand with all of the force he could muster at the gun, knocking it from the kid’s hand.

  The .38 revolver skidded across the linoleum and was retrieved by an intern as an armed security guard grabbed the would-be killer in a bear hug, finally restraining him.

  In a matter of seconds, the assailant was removed and placed in a secured room with guards and a physician while Elliot returned to the problem at hand, the sliced artery in his patient’s right arm.

  “Let’s sew this kid up,” he said tearing loose what remained of the teenager’s shirt and applying a surgical clamp to the wound.

  As the nurse turned to prepare a local anesthetic and sutures, he felt the boy slip an envelope into the oversized side pocket of his lab coat.

  “Please take this, Doc,” the kid whispered. “It can’t be found on me, Dottore! I’m trusting you.”

  Elliot didn’t say a word as he applied the anesthetic and sutures in what for him was a routine procedure. The boy, Tommy Ruggiero, would be all right. He would regain the use of his arm, perhaps with some physical therapy, but nothing worse than that.

  Elliot left the emergency room and found Silvio talking with two men, one of whom he recognized as John Gotti’s pal, Angelo Ruggiero, a heavyset man out of the blue-collar crew under Neil Dellacroce.

  They looked up, then Frank came to him. “Hey, this situation with the kid. Everyone would rather if it never happened.”

  “Never happened? Christ, Frank, half of the 103rd Precinct is here right now.”

  “I understand, and we’ve already arranged for both to leave without a lot of commotion. If you could see to it that the medical chart disappears, I know that Angelo, the boy’s uncle, would be extremely grateful.”

  Elliot looked at his new friend and nodded. “Consider it done.”

  Later, when the police came to take their report, Elliot told them nothing. “Two boys had come in with minor injuries sustained perhaps in a fistfight, then disappeared in all of the excitement.”

  “Where to?”

  “I couldn’t imagine, busy as emergency had been at the time.”

  They seemed satisfied.

  That night Elliot took the medical charts and put them in the top drawer of his desk, not giving a second thought to the envelope in the pocket of his lab coat until the next morning when Tommy’s uncle appeared standing in the doorway to his office. He closed the door behind him.

  “Mr. Ruggiero …”

  He nodded.

  Without a word, Elliot placed the envelope and medical charts on his desktop.

  “Did you look inside the envelope?” Ruggiero asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Open it.”

  Elliot did. It contained a stack of cash and a large plastic baggy filled with several ounces of fine white powder.

  “Babania‚” Ruggiero said, using the slang for heroin. “You understand, Dottore? For me, this could have been trouble. My nephew was involved in a drug deal went bad.” Ruggiero took the heroin from the desktop and left the money. “But believe me, he’ll be punished, but he won’t go to jail, and he will not cause me embarrassment. For that, I thank you, Dottore. It’s true what they say about you. Inside you are one of us.”

  “Quack-Quack” Ruggiero shook Elliot’s hand, turned, and left the office, leaving him sitting there behind his desk staring at more than $5,000 in crisp, new $100 bills. Unfortunately for Angelo, this was not his first nor would it be his last involvement with babania and distribution of hard-core drugs outside the family.

  10

  GIULIANI AT THE WALDORF

  “True, some of his pals respected no law outside the underworld. Men like Rudy‚ they just couldn’t be trusted.”

  Maybe we’re all molded by our backgrounds and early life experiences, or maybe each of us is just a little crazy, Elliot speculated, recalling how he and his first wife, Hanna, had met. His family didn’t put much stock in appearances and society standing. It was what you were inside that counted. So the prospect of rubbing elbows with Manhattan’s elite never interested him nearly so much as continuing to innovate in his chosen field of thoracic surgery. In a broad field that concentrates on heart, lung, and circulatory system disorders, there was a lot of room to innovate. In fact, it was his work in the area of cardioplegia, a procedure that slows the heart by decreasing the blood’s temperature during aortocoronary bypass surgery, and intraoperative echocardiography, a way of using ultrasound to study the heart, that inspired Dr. Dak to name him associate director of cardiac surgery.

  Of course, along with the promotion came social responsibilities on behalf of the hospital that had him attending award dinners and fundraisers for dozens of professional societies, which is why he was at one such function held by the American Medical Association at the Waldorf-Astoria. And that’s where he met Hanna Shapiro, daughter of Manhattan obstetrician-to-socialites Mort Shapiro. It was also the first time Elliot laid eyes on a young up-and-coming prosecutor named Rudy Giuliani.

  From Elliot’s side, the evening was unsurprisingly banal: hors d’oeuvres and martinis laced with self-aggrandizing speeches by medical professionals convinced the world couldn’t survive a day without them, followed by a filet mignon dinner and yet more diatribes set to the backdrop of overly eager career climbers hobnobbing their way up New York’s precarious social ladder. The clear standout among them, Elliot remembered calculating even then, was thirty-four-year-old Rudolph Giuliani, fresh back from a two-year stint at the Justice Department in Washington, now officially “white-shoed” as a partner in the Manhattan law firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler.

  Elliot had heard about Giuliani’s exploits in the early 1970s “flipping” corrupt cops for the Knapp Commission from Nicky Micelli and others, and understood him to be an easy guy to either love or hate upon first impression. That night they barely shook hands after being introduced by Dr. Dak. Of what interest could a socially backward, adolescentlooking Jewish physician like him be to an up-and-coming wannabe like Rudy? Still, Elliot, seated near the speakers’ podium, couldn’t help observing him as he smoked a cigar and sipped Scotch, waxing eloquent about his crime-fighting days to a cult mockingly called the Rudettes by his fellow law partners, five young women who worked dawn to dark for him often spilling over to late night for steaks at the “21” Club, then partying into the wee hours at many of the same discos Silvio and Elliot frequented.

  Giuliani had worked with detective Carl Bogan, whose career inspired the “Kojak” TV series, around the time of the French Connection case in which 300 pounds of heroin, procured with Gambino Family money, had been stolen from the police property room. That fiasco, coupled with the Knapp Commission report, cast a citywide pall of distrust over the NYPD, and Rudy knew how to make the most of it.

  Bogan taught Giuliani how to flip witnesses, turning them from defendants to undercover agents. The technique, pioneered by Elliot’s Studio 54 crony Roy Cohn during the McCarthy hearings, involved putting a suspect under oath, then bombarding him with questions, many related to an alleged crime, but others of a personal nature, the more embarrassing the better. To hide a cheating wife’s indiscretion or protect a loved one from unnecessary implication, the investigator’s job was to manipulate a cop into perjuring himself. The strategy was simple: If you can’t get him for corruption, get him for perjury, a crime that carried a five-year prison term, a daunting prospect for cops. They usually agreed to become undercover informers in exchange for immunity.

  It was mastery of this kind of intimidation that shaped Giuliani’s reputation as Southern District U.S. attorney when Bob Leuci, another cop caught in the Knapp Commission web, became an undercover informer wearing a wire for the NYPD’s Special Inv
estigating Unit (SIU). Working as a good cop-bad cop team, Rudy and Thomas Puccio, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District, plied Leuci for dirt on his fellow cops, eventually bringing him to the brink of suicide, as he attempted to survive the Kafkaesque world of trust for betrayal.

  Leuci’s story would be told in Robert Daley’s 1978 best-seller-movie, Prince of the City, casting Rudy as a moral crusader bringing scores of corrupt New York City cops to justice. In reality, Giuliani never prosecuted a single cop case involving Leuci because most had already been tried before he took his position or were handled by the special state prosecutor. Nevertheless, Rudy boasted that he’d convicted forty-three cops. In truth, the total number of cops convicted during the period he ran the corruption unit was only ten. But numbers like that held little sway with the media, so Giuliani invented more impressive ones then cloaked them in a self-formulated mythology used like a shield to protect himself from the truth about his family’s own Mafia ties.

  While Elliot gazed at the prosecutor that night at the Waldorf, he wondered if Giuliani was elaborating on childhood stories told to him by Adelina, his grandmother, about an insidious “monster” called the Mafia and the time his great-grandfather Vincenzo Stanchi received a note from the Black Hand signed with the ominous coal-smeared handprint demanding money for protection. Or another, involving her late husband, Luigi, a baker, who after being extorted, could pay no more and committed suicide. “Given five years and the right resources, a prosecutor like me could bring the Mafia to its knees!” Elliot would later hear Giuliani brag on national television.