See No Evil

by Ron Felber

  This was no problem for Hanna and Elliot, at least not until they entered the bar where almost immediately Angelo Ruggiero came rushing over, arms spread wide, trailed by mob attorney Barry Slotnick and Gene Gotti, John’s younger brother.

  “Dottore!” Ruggiero bellowed, wrapping him in a bear hug. “It’s good to see you!”

  He introduced Elliot to Slotnick and Gene, both of whom treated him like a long-lost brother.

  “John’s here. D’you ever meet ’im?” Angelo asked. “He’s with another friend of ours, Roy Cohn. Come on, lemme introduce you!” he said, taking Elliot by the hand and leading him toward a table as the group he was with, including Hanna, trailed along, dumbfounded.

  “How do you know him?” Hanna asked in a harsh whisper.

  “Uhmm, ahh, Mr. Ruggiero’s nephew was a patient of mine once. I guess he remembers me.”

  “And the other man at the table. Is that Roy Cohn, the prosecutor from the McCarthy hearings?”

  “Yes, I think it is,” Elliot replied.

  “And the other man, next to him. Don’t tell me that’s John Gotti, the gangster?”

  “It may be. Yes, I’m pretty sure,” he stammered unconvincingly. “I mean, it certainly looks like John Gotti.”

  Hanna nodded dubiously, his credibility about as strained as it could get when Cohn, sitting next to John Gotti at the table, looked up and grinned. “I didn’t think they let you and Silvio out of your cage before 3:00 A.M. Who said you could leave the hospital anyway?”

  Cohn’s comment didn’t help matters and later fueled one of the few genuine arguments Elliot and Hanna had ever gotten into. After members of Elliot’s party, including Hanna, had gone home, an interesting discussion followed with Gotti, who was already making a splash in the New York press. Standing near the bar, sipping grappa and espresso after the kitchen had closed, Johnny Boy, along with Cohn and Ruggiero, were watching CNN as excerpts from a speech made by President Ronald Reagan at the Justice Department earlier that day were being broadcast.

  “It comes down, in the end,” Reagan stated to the audience of Justice Department employees and the press, “to a simple question we must ask ourselves: What kind of people are we if we continue to tolerate in our midst an invisible, lawless empire? Can we honestly say America is the land of justice for all if we do not now exert every effort to eliminate this confederation of professional criminals, this dark, evil enemy within?”

  “Turn that fucking TV off!” Gotti called out to the bartender, and with the television silenced, Ruggiero recalled a recent encounter with the president.

  “You know last time that guy, Reagan, was in town, Johnny and me are at the Park Sheraton Hotel about to meet with Neil, and he’s there to make a speech. Well, I’m gonna tell you somethin’ the Secret Service guys see us, and they don’t know whether to shit or go blind. ‘Listen‚’ they say, ‘the president is here, and we’d‚’ what did they say John? ‘feel more comfortable’ if we’d leave before his car arrived. Can you imagine that? Even the president of the fucking United States is scared of us!”

  “That may be, but I wouldn’t take what Reagan’s saying too lightly. With these new RICO laws a lot can happen,” Cohn said.

  “Gimme a fucking break, Roy‚” Gotti shot back. “What are they gonna do,” he laughed, “take me down for eatin’ pussy? It’s still no crime, but if it was, you know I’d get the fucking electric chair!”

  “You should listen to me, John. In the next three months, they plan to add 1,000 agents and 200 prosecutors,” Cohn warned. “And wiretaps? The cap’s been lifted. By year’s end, these guys will have the Boy Scouts’ latrines wired trying to catch scoutmasters sucking cocks and calling it a RICO conspiracy!”

  Gotti didn’t seem very impressed with the government’s latest maneuvers and probably should have paid more attention, but even Elliot knew that he had a lot on his mind. Though he was still tanned and sporting $1,500 Armani suits with impeccably coiffed silver hair, his face was drawn, and he seemed preoccupied. A short time before, on March 18, 1980, Gotti’s twelve-year-old son, Frank, had been killed in a traffic accident two blocks from his home in Howard Beach. Apparently, the boy had borrowed a friend’s motorbike and was taking it for a ride when John Favara, a neighbor, was making his way home from work at the nearby Castro Convertible plant. Young Gotti darted out onto 157th Street where Favara accidentally ran him down and killed him.

  The NYPD traffic investigators ruled the tragedy an accident, but Gotti’s wife Vicki’s lust for revenge could not be sated, and soon Favara was receiving death threats. Two weeks after Frank Gotti’s funeral, Favara’s car was stolen and later found with the word MURDERER spray-painted on it. Not unexpectedly, considering Gotti’s reputation for violence, Favara panicked. He and his wife immediately sold their car and put their house on the market. Unfortunately, Favara’s intended move came too late as the plans to kill him had already spun into motion when, on July 25, John and Victoria Gotti left Howard Beach for an impromptu Florida vacation.

  On July 28, two days before the deal for the sale of his house was closed, as Favara left work, he was confronted by a heavy-set man who clubbed him with a baseball bat. The man then lifted Favara by the belt of his pants and threw him into a blue van. A watchman at the plant where Favara worked witnessed the abduction as did the owner of a nearby diner who ran out to confront the assailant. “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” he called out to him. “Our friend is sick. We’re taking him home,” the man replied. Both witnesses then watched in amazement as two accomplices got out of the van. One entered a green car parked behind it, the other entered Favara’s station wagon before following the speeding van toward the Jericho Turnpike.

  John and Victoria Gotti returned from their Florida vacation on August 5. To this day, Favara’s body has not been found. Police later received an unconfirmed report that he’d been slaughtered with a chain saw and his body parts placed in a wrecked car that was then compacted into a cube of metal and bone. According to Elliot, even within the Gambino and other families, everyone was very tight lipped on the subject of Favara, though most speculated the killing was carried out by Johnny Boy’s closest associates from the Bergin: Angelo Ruggiero, Tony “Roach” Rampino, and Willie Boy Johnson. Another theory, put forward by Frank Silvio, attributed the murder to the barbarous Roy DeMeo, street boss of the Gambino Family car-theft ring and cocaine addicted Studio 54 hanger-on, who specialized in dismembering his victims and making them vanish from the face of the earth. When asked about his missing neighbor by NYPD investigators, John Gotti replied, “I don’t know what happened to him, but I’m not sorry if something did happen. He killed my kid.”

  Adding to Gotti’s headaches were many of his own making. Already his reputation as an out-of-control gambler was legendary among family members as well as the FBI, who’d been spying on him for more than a decade. Losses of $40,000 to $50,000 a weekend on card games, horse racing, and other sporting events were not uncommon. He once won $275,000 on the Brooklyn numbers rackets and lost it within forty-eight hours shooting craps. In an FBI wiretapped recording, he was taped talking to Neil Dellacroce while alone one night at the Ravenite Social Club, the underboss’ headquarters in Manhattan.

  “I’m out $30 [$30,000] so far today with this fuckin’ college football … and there’s two more scores to come…. I guess that should put me in enough fuckin’ jeopardy for one day.” Then, when the two remaining scores came in losers, the bug recorded Gotti smashing a chair against the wall and screaming, “God is a cocksucking faggot!”

  At around the time Elliot met Gotti at P. J. Clarke’s, larger problems were converging around him that would remain hidden for years like the fact that close personal friend and Bergin crew member Wilfred “Willie Boy” Johnson, known to the FBI by code designation Source BQ 5558-TE, had turned informer as early as 1966, and that despite the best efforts of Gotti and his crew, weeks earlier a bug had been planted within an annex to the Bergin Hunt and Fish C
lub. The bug would, over the coming months, record many of Gotti’s most incriminating conversations, making him choice pickings for the newly activated RICO statutes.

  Neither Gotti, nor his boss, Paul Castellano, had the remotest idea what an adversary La Cosa Nostra had in Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani burned with white-hot political ambition and clearly saw the slaying of the Mafia hydra as a platform from which to launch a successful political career. At forty-three, he was associate attorney general under William French Smith. It was in that capacity that he seized a chance to get President Ronald Reagan’s ear during a White House cabinet meeting. Giuliani gave an impassioned plea for the administration to mount a “no holds barred” war against organized crime.

  The new president must have seen political mileage in the Mafia hobbyhorse because Reagan launched Giuliani’s plan on October 14, 1982, announcing a $100-million crackdown on the drug trade and organized crime. His ultimate goal, he told an audience of FBI, INS, and DEA agents with Attorney General Smith, FBI Director William Webster, and Giuliani flanking him, was to “eradicate these dark forces of evil” by launching a “virtual war,” led by twelve organized crime task forces armed with RICO and the Justice Department’s new ruling that allowed for vastly increased electronic surveillance, centered in the country’s twelve largest cities.

  The Racketeering-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute was the brainchild of Notre Dame Law Professor Robert Blakey. Enacted into law in 1970, it took federal prosecutors years to apply it to actual criminal cases so that even by 1979, only 200 cases had been tried, not one of them having to do with the Mafia. But all of that changed with Giuliani, who did not hesitate to use the sweeping, and many believe unconstitutional, powers of RICO against La Cosa Nostra. Under the RICO statutes, it became a separate crime to belong to an enterprise that engaged in racketeering, and even if the criminal acts were committed by others, a member of the group was guilty of conspiracy for simply being associated with it.

  16

  TROUBLE IN PARADISE

  “You get these gumbas of yours off our property now, or I’m never going to speak to you again.”

  Later, when Giuliani became U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, he would be on the cutting edge of the Reagan administration’s crackdown, becoming the most zealous Mafia prosecutor in the city’s history What was the cause of this obsession, beyond ambition and early childhood warnings from Adelina about his family’s past encounters with the “Men of Honor”? Why did Rudy, well along into manhood, carry that blazing personal torch against the mob? Elliot contemplated these questions long and hard during his years as a family associate, maybe to uncover the truth about Giuliani or Gotti, but likely, even he would concede, to try to better understand himself and the motives behind his own double life as respected surgeon and doctor to the Mafia. In Giuliani’s case, Elliot was convinced, the answer lay with his father, Harold, and a background that must, in many ways, have haunted the young prosecutor.

  Harold Giuliani was twenty-six-years-old when, on April 2, 1934, he and an accomplice hid behind a stairwell in a ten-family residential building in Manhattan, then jumped a Borden’s Farm milkman named Robert Hall. Giuliani, who was carrying a .38-caliber pistol, pressed the gun to Hall’s stomach demanding the cash he had collected on his milk run that day. Hall turned over $128 to Giuliani as the second man held him from behind. The robbers were about to make their getaway when a local patrolman, Edward Schmitt, hearing the commotion, burst through the front door of the building, collaring Giuliani as the accomplice escaped out the back door.

  Ten days later, Harold was indicted for robbery, assault, grand larceny, and criminally receiving stolen property. Interestingly, it was a Mangano Family associate, Valentine Spielman, who posted Giuliani’s $5,000 bail. There must have been more to the story, but aside from Mangano’s act of generosity, another strange twist occurred. Hall, a week after the indictment was filed, completely altered his story, swearing this time that it wasn’t Giuliani, but his unknown accomplice who carried the gun and pressed it to his stomach.

  Why the change in Hall’s account? Certainly, this dramatically altered the charges for which Harold would be tried. The answer came from Louis Capozzoli, the assistant district attorney handling the case, who when questioned by the judge explained that Robert Hall had been visited the week before at four o’clock in the morning by three men who threatened his life if he didn’t change his testimony. Hall, a simple family man terrified of possible reprisals, changed his story so that Giuliani could switch his plea to guilty for the less-substantial single count of armed robbery in the third degree.

  Harold’s relationship with La Cosa Nostra didn’t end there. Once released from Sing Sing Prison, he went on to become a “collector” for Vincent’s, a bar-restaurant front for a gambling and loansharking operation run by Rudy’s uncle, Leo D’Avanzo, and his underworld partner, Jimmy Dano. Taking in as much as $15,000 a week with the “vig,” or interest, starting at 150 percent, Harold became Leo and Jimmy Dano’s “bone breaker,” accepting payments slipped to him in envelopes over the bar, using a gun and a baseball bat to break legs, smash faces, and shatter the kneecaps of those who did not pay on time.

  The most notorious of Rudy’s family connections to organized crime, however, was D’Avanzo’s son, Lewis, who, while Rudy was attending law school at NYU, was working the hijacking and car-theft ring with the likes of Gambino Family hit man Roy DeMeo. In June 1969, Rudy’s cousin was arrested for the armed hijacking of a truck containing $240,000 worth of mercury and later sentenced to ten years at John Gotti’s alma mater, the Lewisburg Penitentiary. While serving that sentence, Lewis was indicted for his real meat-and-potatoes racket, which was running a document-forging operation to cover up the theft of more than $250 million in stolen luxury cars in New York City in 1971 alone.

  If the overall scheme appeared white-collar or somehow harmless, one had only to realize that serial murderer Roy DeMeo was lurking in the shadows, which made the operation anything but nonviolent. This became evident to the FBI when five ring members were found murdered gangland style in 1976 and when Lewis D’Avanzo’s partner, John Quinn, and his nineteen-year-old mistress, Cherie Golden, were found dead “DeMeo” style one year later. According to FBI informant Willie Boy Johnson, Rudy’s cousin Lewis D’Avanzo had put a contract out on Quinn, who’d shared sensitive details about the international car-theft ring’s inner workings with Cherie Golden.

  In October 1977, while Rudy and his first wife, Regina, were rubbing elbows with former FBI Director L. Patrick Gray and future Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, at their Prospect House luxury high-rise, Lewis D’Avanzo was spotted by two teams of FBI agents on the thirty-first of that month barreling through the streets of Brooklyn in a late-model BMW. Followed by the agents, who held an outstanding warrant and knew him to be “armed and dangerous,” D’Avanzo was in the process of switching from the BMW to a Ford Maverick when the first team of agents confronted him. At that point, Lewis jumped back in the car, smashed into the agents’ car, then tried to run them down while the others, unknown to Lewis, took aim with a .357 Magnum and a 12-gauge shotgun, firing into his windshield and killing him instantly.

  The killing didn’t end there on either side. Five months later, another D’Avanzo associate, Michael Manelino, brother of Leo’s mistress, Elizabeth, and colleague of Lewis, was assassinated outside of his body shop in broad daylight by the DeMeo crew. Suspecting he, like Cherie Golden, knew too much about the Gambino Family’s auto theft enterprise, he was shot in the head, his body stuffed in the trunk of a car, then set on fire.

  Interesting to Elliot was the way the web of corruption was spun through almost every aspect of American society. Of course, everyone reacted differently to it. Some, like him, simply accepted the fact that evil existed in every man, understanding that even his best efforts to exorcise those demons of taint could become their own form of corruption like Melville’s Ahab with his white whale. Bu
t when men like Dewey or Bobby Kennedy or Rudy became fanatical about prosecuting men like John Gotti, who or what are they really prosecuting? What was their motive for doing it? In the case of Giuliani and Kennedy, Elliot theorized that somehow they believed that if they went after members of the Genovese or Bonanno or Gambino families with unmitigated ruthlessness, they were cleansing their fathers’ pasts, ripping the taint out like a cancerous tumor so that they could expunge their own family history of crime from the record and from their own consciences.

  That may answer the question “why,” but when it came to their modus operandi, “how,” the logic involved was the most paradoxical of all. Men like Rudy possessed a feral aggression, Elliot surmised, a black hole in their soul that forced them to take the process one step further. They deeply understood the world of power and corruption, and with a sleight of hand worthy of Houdini, “metamorphosed” their own moral disease into a virtue, calling themselves “knights in shining armor” and “societal heroes” chasing down their white whale and killing it, while understanding with a nod and a wink that all of it represented the first leg on a well-paved path to political fortune.

  That to Elliot was Rudolph Giuliani in a nutshell: the ultimate political opportunist, armed with the new RICO statutes and no-holds-barred surveillance technologies, wrapped in a cloak of moral certitude, disguised as a Catholic saint. It would be with a combination of these new investigative tools and Rudy’s own brand of white-knuckled moral obsession that he would pursue the five families of New York in a landmark prosecution that would bring an entire Mafia empire crashing down into a heaping rubble of traitors, vengeance, murder, and lies.

  Elliot’s first taste of the imminent disaster that awaited him, Paul Castellano, John Gotti, and even Steve Rubell came in the summer of 1981. Between the incredible hours he was keeping at the hospital, partying with his pals in Vegas and Atlantic City, and doing his part for the Family as an international courier, there wasn’t much time left for Hanna and the twins. Beyond the obvious connections that even his wife knew he had with “those people,” his friends, new and old, understood he was an easy mark and took full advantage, using his Englewood home like a crash pad where drugs, alcohol, and women were never in short supply.