by Gene Mustain
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 - TABLE FOR SIX
Chapter 2 - THE NICE N EZ BUG
Chapter 3 - MEET THE NEW BOSS
Chapter 4 - I FORGOTTI!
Chapter 5 - BLOWN TO BITS
Chapter 6 - WE’RE READY FOR FREDDY
Chapter 7 - THE ROCKAWAY BOY
Chapter 8 - VELVET TOUCH
Chapter 9 - CLUB LEWISBURG
Chapter 10 - HOODLUM’S HOODLUM
Chapter 11 - MAKING HIS BONES AT SNOOPE’S BAR
Chapter 12 - DYING IN A STATE OF GRACE
Chapter 13 - JOHNNY BOY GETS HIS BUTTON
Chapter 14 - THE MAYOR OF 101ST AVENUE
Chapter 15 - BOY ON A MINIBIKE
Chapter 16 - FORGET ABOUT THIS PHONE
Chapter 17 - I AIN’T GOING CRAZY NO MORE
Chapter 18 - THE MERCHANTS OF OZONE PARK
Chapter 19 - BABANIA MADNESS
Chapter 20 - FOUR SOULS ON BOARD
Chapter 21 - ON THE CARPET WITH BIG PAUL
Chapter 22 - BETRAYERS BETRAYED
Chapter 23 - THE LAST STAGE
Chapter 24 - LET THE PLAY BEGIN
Chapter 25 - BRUCIFICATION
Chapter 26 - THE ART OF BEING MENDACIOUS
Chapter 27 - WAY TO GO, MR. G!
Chapter 28 - THE FIX
Chapter 29 - TEFLON DON
Chapter 30 - HEROIN REDUX
Chapter 31 - MULBERRY STREET
Chapter 32 - NETTIE’S PLACE
Chapter 33 - TICKLING THE WIRE
Chapter 34 - INVINCIBILITY LEGEND
Chapter 35 - PROVEN
EPILOGUE
POSTSCRIPT
INDEX
Copyright © 1988, 2002 by Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci
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For Jake Mustain, and for his beautiful mommy.
For Chuck Caruso—uncle, mentor, and friend who always stood by
his buddies, and always rooted for the underdog.
PROLOGUE
EARLY IN 2002, JOHN GOTTI finally shut up. But it wasn’t because anyone made him. That he would definitely want you to know. He lost his ability to speak to throat cancer, and then only after he fought it, as he would say, “tooth and nail” for nearly four cruel years. In an operation meant to prolong his life a little while longer, the most voluble of men was silenced. Ten years after he went to prison for life, he was imprisoned further—locked in, as well as up.
He may be dead, or still clinging to life when you read this. Either way, the end of the John Gotti story has arrived. He must have died inside when he lost his ability to talk, for Gotti lived to talk. He loved to gather his men and hold court. He loved to gab, muse, banter, cajole, and abuse. He loved to reminisce, speculate, and editorialize. He was good at it, too. His way with words distinguished him from other gangsters. In his gruff, crude way, he was lyrical, clever, and vivid. He could use words like knives. Backed by guns, he rose to power on them. Unable to stop talking, he lost power because of them.
After he went to prison for good, his way with words was all he had left. “Right now, I’m cursed,” he said early in 1998, after six years in solitary confinement at the toughest prison in America and eight months before the cancer came. “I’m stuck in this joint and that’s the end of it. This is my realm, right here. That’s the end of it.”
On that day, during a visit with his daughter Victoria and brother Peter, he used his way with words to artfully spin his legal history and life story. “You know why I’m here? It took them $80 million in three lying cases and seven rats that killed a hundred people in the witness-protection program to finally frame me! You understand?” A little later, he added: “My life dictated that I take each course that I took. I didn’t have any multiple choice. My time, all the doors were closed.”
He spoke for four hours that day and four the next. He raged at the decimation of his crime Family since he went way, and he lamented a case that had fallen on his son Junior and another case about to fall on his son-in-law Carmine. He said he felt increasingly estranged from his relatives and complained of being forgotten—except by strangers who sent fan mail.
Despite the doom and gloom, he sounded as egomanical as ever—“listen to me carefully, you’ll never see another guy like me if you live to be 5,000.” Talking about his mail, which did come in bundles after his name was in the news for something, he was so over the top he sounded delusional. “I get mail from all over the world where people wish they could be my grandchildren or my children … I got mail last night from Australia, South Africa, New Zealand—this was all last night! … I got a million people who, if they could come here to see me now, they would cry just to be able to be here and see me.”
He quoted some letters at length, including that of a 14-year-old Idaho girl writing a school paper on celebrities. She wanted him to write back and answer a few questions. “She says, ‘You know, I don’t know if you know it, there are millions of people out here (who) really love and adore you and respect you. I guess you and America was what was meant to be!’ This is a 14-year-old kid! None of my relatives ever write that!”
Between quoting letters, he insisted he didn’t care about them. It was obvious that he did, and it made you feel sorry for him. “I got a letter from England. (From) a couple, they just had a baby. They own a bunch of curio shops … they’re affluent people. The kid’s got carrot-red hair … you gotta see the letter! They named the baby ‘Gianna,’ like for Johnny in Italian. These are English people from London! ‘We’d be honored’—they sent me pictures of the kids and all that—‘we would be honored if you’d be the godparent’ … this is what the real world thinks!”
Gotti was well aware that his words, as so many more he spoke during what was supposed to be his secret life in crime, were being preserved. All visits between inmates and visitors at the United States Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois—a deliberately harsh hellhole for convicts deemed dangerous or incorrigible—are recorded on video and audiotape to discourage plotting of any kind. His words that day, January 29, 1998, and the next are among the
most compelling in this book, which uses many Gotti words to tell his story.
His words help us finish the picture we sketched when the first edition of Mob Star came out in 1988 and ended on a note of triumph for Gotti. Though the real ending wasn’t yet available, the first Mob Star remains a good story. It was the first book ever published about a mob boss who was, you might say, still in office. The main story is his rise to power. A key subplot tells the story of two men near him who lived dangerously—for years, they regularly informed on him to the FBI. Still-secret reports on these men’s contacts with the FBI will take the reader inside Gotti’s world during or after most major episodes of his pre-1985 life in crime in New York.
These many years later, we can’t think of a better book title than we thought of then, even though the title had unintended consequences. “Mob Star” captures the idea that in his realm, he was a star, and that he came to have the things we associate with traditional realms of stardom—money to burn, the best tables, magazine covers, autograph hounds. In truth, it came to us as we considered the word, “mobster.” Mob-ster. We were looking to make the second syllable into something. Mob Man … Mob Boss … Mob Star!
The title implied adulation we never felt. It fed Gotti fantasies, his and others. Just as it was for us, it was a thrill for him to see copies of Mob Star filling Fifth Avenue shop windows. The book’s cover, if not the story inside, made him feel heroic. It became part of the mythical identity he created in America and a large part of the world during his time at the top. His time lasted five years. That is the story we tell in the eight new chapters that begin with Chapter 28, “The Fix.”
Over those years, by winning trials in the world’s media capital and swaggering in the ensuing spotlight, Gotti did become famous or infamous, take your pick. In the hype-around-the-clock culture just taking off when he came on the scene, fame and infamy are the same thing. It happened because of who he was and what people expected. He was a perfect picture of what everyone imagines Mafia bosses to be. He was gravel-voiced and smart-alecky, and handsome in a dangerous-looking way. He was good on his feet. He did for the Mafia what JFK did for politics 25 years before; he made it entertaining.
A master criminal he was not, but what he was and came to stand for are at least fascinating. “Best I ever did was a couple hijackings,” Gotti once said. But people don’t know or care about rap-sheet details. What mattered with him was perception. He was what we imagine gangsters to be. He looked like one. He sounded like one. He was straight out of a shared experience, the gangster movie. “He was a James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson-type of gangster,” was how a former New York detective, Joseph Coffey, described him during a documentary a couple years ago.
Gotti brought the movies to life, which made it possible to invest real emotions in him: awe, envy, fear. Early on, when the press began pulling back the curtains on his life, the public learned that in 1980 a Gotti neighbor drove his car into one of Gotti’s children and killed him. It was a horrible accident, but some months later the man was thrown into a van by several men and was never seen again. The case was never solved, but everyone believes Gotti ordered the man killed, and he no doubt did. He had the power and will to do what many of us would feel like doing if we lost a child that way, and he got away with it, which we could only dream of doing.
Where it got more fascinating with Gotti was that he saw himself a gangster actor, too. He relished the role and was good at it—in public, anyway. In private, as the Marion tapes show, he was often repulsive. (He railed on about “coons,” “niggers” and Jews, and called his wife—in front of their daughter—a pig, a tramp, and a witch.) But in public, with his silvery showiness and sly smirks, he fed the public’s fantasies, which fed his.
It is hard to overstate the imprint The Godfather tale left on the minds of people who dream about living by one’s own rules, and on the minds of the Mafiosi who actually do. The movie version, with its even more romanticized treatment of Mafia life, came out in 1972. In the underworld then, the popular but mistaken notion was that it was based on the life of Carlo Gambino, leader of the Mafia Family known by his last name and which included then 31-year-old John Gotti, just out of the joint for hijacking.
When his crew leader was forced to lay low a while, Gotti took the man’s place in meetings with the aging Gambino. It was no doubt heady stuff because a year later, after his arrest on a disorderly conduct charge, Gotti gave his name as John “DeCarlo” (son of Carlo). Gambino didn’t much look like a gangster, but he talked like a godfather. He was prone to selectively quoting from The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli’s treatise on power. Soon, so was Gotti. “Fear is a stronger emotion than love” became one of his favorite lines.
By the time Gotti murdered his way to the top late in 1985, the godfather tradition was in steep decline. The federal government was putting all the big bosses away for life with new laws and surveillance capability that made it risky to even whisper about crime. Gotti went against the grain by beating a federal case and two state ones. That put him in the crosshairs of everyone with a badge. But he could not change who he was. Instead of retreating out of sight to try and operate on the sly, he paraded in public. Madison Square Garden one night, Rainbow Room the next. Worse, he required his men to attend weekly shapeups at his social club on a busy street in lower Manhattan. There and a block away on Prince Street, he took daylight “walk-talks,” titillating passersby and taunting cops, agents, and “girl” prosecutors.
On the Marion tapes, many years of numbing incarceration and terrible sickness later, he had only this to say about whether he should have done things differently, and, for once, he had trouble getting the words out:
“I take credit for my, my, my bad doings. I made mistakes.”
The Marion tapes were recorded about 18 months after Gotti, in prison, got what he may have never gotten before, at least not since he was a boy—a good beating. The scene was set during one of his cherished breaks from solitary confinement, when he and other inmates were allowed to exercise in an indoor recreation area just off his cell.
“Get out of my way, you piece of shit,” Gotti barked at another con who didn’t show enough respectful space quickly enough. “Don’t you know who I am?”
The inmate, a black man about 20 years younger than the then 56-year-old Gotti, did indeed know who Gotti was, and he let Gotti by, with a scowl. The next time they were in the recreation area, however, the heavily muscled inmate sucker-punched Gotti, then beat him bloody before guards tore him away.
No one in the Gotti camp ever spoke publicly about it, least of all Gotti, and for sure not during tape-recorded visits with his relatives where he knew he ran the risk that tapes could be leaked, as these indeed were, to us, and the world would get the story of him getting his. Given what he wouldn’t talk about, it’s amazing what he did.
Aside from the vicious epithets for his wife Victoria, he criticized his son Peter for ignoring his advice and failing to write. He criticized daughters Victoria and Angela for failing to send timely photographs and letters and burdening him with problems he was helpless to do anything about. He said his son Junior and some codefendants in a case just filed “should all be sent to the insane asylum” for their criminal mistakes. He called son-in-law Carmine Agnello a “slob” who “conducts himself like a barbarian.”
“You can’t be more disappointed than I am in my family, utterly impossible,” he said to his brother Peter, after daughter Victoria briefly stepped away from their Marion visitors’ cubicle. “If I could go home, I say it right out, I wouldn’t go near them with a ten-foot-long fucking pole.”
The most powerful moment on the Marion tapes came when a Gotti grandchild—dressed in a suit, as though bound for a wedding or a funeral—entered the cubicle to say hello. The meeting began with gentle razzing. Then Gotti told the child that if he did well in school, some day he could be a lawyer. The child already had someone to emulate—his mother Victoria, a successful writer. After her fa
ther went to prison, she wrote a top-selling mystery novel and a book about a heart ailment she suffers. His notoriety fueled curiosity buying of the novel, but at least her words were being put to honest use, and she would go on to write two more mystery novels.
With his mother now back in the cubicle, however, the child said he would rather be a professional athlete. His grandfather insisted on a lawyer: “To be a good basketball player or baseball player, first of all, you got to be a good liar. A good lowlife and an imbecile.”
The child said nothing and squirmed in his chair.
“And you got to take steroids! You must take steroids, and anybody who takes steroids is a garbage pail.”
Finally, softly, the boy replied: “Fine, then I will be a crook.”
The words were a sharp slap to Gotti’s face, sharper than the grandchild probably knew or meant. Briefly speechless, Gotti leaned back, stared, and then exploded.
“I don’t care if you’ll be nothin’! You think you’re being … spiteful with me? You’ll get an ass-kicking from me! I know how to raise children!”
The boy stayed silent.
“You ain’t doing me no favor coming to see me talking sass to me! I will put my foot right up your ass, you hear me?”
The boy fidgeted and peered through the glass barrier separating him from Gotti, cradling one of the cubicle’s telephones on his shoulder.
“You’ll never forget the ass-kicking you’ll get from me. You understand? Don’t you look at me like that. I’m more serious than cancer. You can look as sad as you want. Now, give that phone to your uncle and get outta here!”
The boy fled, head down. His mother soon left too, after agreeing that her child did deserve a whipping for smarting off.
A couple moments later, Gotti said to his brother: “That’s why these visits, I told you, I got to keep them to a minimum. When I go back upstairs (to my cell), it breaks my heart … let’s try and salvage some of this visit. You know anything good? Anything good anyone wants to talk about?”