by Gene Mustain
A “criminal enterprise” was any organization or group of individuals “associated in fact,” if not by law, which employed racketeering for group purposes. A “pattern of racketeering” was two or more violations of state and federal laws, against crimes such as murder, mail fraud, extortion, bribery, or 28 others.
Under RICO, it became a separate crime to belong to an enterprise that engaged in a pattern of racketeering. Even if the racketeering acts were committed by others, a member was guilty if he was shown to be a knowing and active member of the enterprise. RICO meant that some serious state crimes, such as murder, could be tried in federal courts.
The penalties upon a RICO conviction—up to 20 years and $25,000 in fines for each count—are much more severe than most of those provided by the 32 individual state and federal laws that can be cited in the pattern of racketeering. RICO also permits government confiscation of businesses or property obtained through the enterprise.
Defense attorneys say some RICO provisions are unfair, especially one permitting prosecutors, as part of the pattern of racketeering, to charge crimes for which a defendant has already been convicted and punished. This makes it possible, for instance, to convert two relatively minor violations into one serious RICO felony. Under RICO, a defendant may even be charged with a crime for which he has been previously acquitted, under a theory that committing the crime for the enterprise is considered a new crime.
A principal RICO author, G. Robert Blakey, now a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, defends RICO this way: “If you don’t want any more trouble, stay away from crime.”
RICO was part of a package known as the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970. It was proposed by Blakey and other young lawyers employed by a presidential commission under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson or by a Senate committee that held hearings on organized crime in the mid-1960s.
The testimony of Joseph Valachi—the Genovese mobster who first revealed the existence of La Cosa Nostra—had already helped RICO supporters guide other anti-mob measures through Congress, laws that gave prosecutors control of grand juries and greater immunity and surveillance powers.
“RICO was designed to zap the mob, not mobsters, but the mob,” said Blakey, “But few prosecutors understood it.”
Many within the Department of Justice, especially the FBI, had recently discovered this concealed weapon at professional forums and law-school seminars and were pursuing investigations which they hoped would yield RICO indictments.
As early as 1979, information from Sources BQ and Wahoo was going into a “Bergin Hunt and Fish Club (RICO)” file at the FBI office in Queens. Former federal judge William H. Webster had led the FBI into a wider assault on the Families than had his predecessor, FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover, who had four agents working Family cases in New York during the McCarthy era.
Aniello Dellacroce was now considered New York’s second most powerful mobster; FBI agents had learned that Castellano was in fact the Gambino boss.
Still, by starting an investigation of Dellacroce and his top skipper, John Gotti, Diane Giacalone was entering territory normally patrolled by the Eastern District’s special Organized Crime Strike Force. The Strike Force was located next to the U.S. Court House, where Giacalone worked, in the so-called IRS building. The two offices were distinct enterprises with their own methods and personalities.
Giacalone, who bears a physical resemblance to comedienne Lily Tomlin, already had an uneasy relationship with some FBI agents. In April 1981, because Strike Force prosecutors were occupied with several political corruption cases—the result of a spectacular FBI sting operation known as Abscam—a case the FBI had against Peter Castellanna, a cousin of both Carlo Gambino and Paul Castellano, had landed on Ciacalone’s desk.
Castellanna and two others had been arrested on extortion charges based on secret tapes made by the alleged victim as he was threatened with death. By September, Giacalone had not yet secured indictments. FBI agents thought she was dragging her feet; she thought the case needed more investigation.
Whatever the merits, the friction was undeniable. But Giacalone did not seem to care what they thought about her. The power and prestige of her office imbues some of its occupants with a sense of national mission and noble purpose that does not abide any distraction. She was outspoken, strong-willed, and occasionally tempestuous. In the mainly male world of cops and robbers, and agents and mobsters, she was a prickly outsider.
Many of the men whose cooperation she needed didn’t think the 31-year-old former tax attorney was ideally suited for the task of taking down Dellacroce and Gotti in a complicated RICO case. She felt absolutely confident that she was suited, and that she would not have had the job if her bosses didn’t think so, too.
Besides, it really wasn’t that complicated. Obviously, the Gambino Family—an associated-in-fact illegal enterprise if there ever was one—existed. Neil and Johnny Boy were certainly members; there was evidence—court records, guilty pleas—that they had committed at least two violations of state and federal laws during their careers. The case was a tedious but doable matter of pulling all the pieces from all the files and persuading a few people to testify about them. This was more the work of lawyers than cops, and Giacalone was a thorough, tireless lawyer.
Giacalone’s first strategy session was attended by Lt. Jack Fergerson of the NYPD’s Organized Crime Control Bureau, and three detectives: Kenneth McCabe, then of the Brooklyn D.A.’s office; Joseph Coffey, then commander of the NYPD’s Organized Crime homicide task force; and Billy Burns, who had worked on the IB case. Three federal agents also participated: Edward Magnuson of the DEA, and Richard Robley and Stephen Morrill of the FBI.
At the time, New York State did not have a law similar to RICO; it was common for the NYPD to assign detectives to cases better brought in federal court. Among other reasons, the DEA was interested because John, Peter, Gene, and Vincent Gotti, at various times, had been named in drug-dealing investigations. Significantly, although the FBI had special organized-crime squads for each Family, the two agents it sent to Giacalone’s meeting were members of a property-crimes unit. The FBI was used to taking Family cases to the Strike Force, not getting them from assistant U.S. attorneys.
All the agencies had their own informants. To varying degrees, they felt loyal to them, a result of the ironic bond that develops between good guys and bad guys during years of secret meetings under dangerous circumstances. They tended to regard their informants in a proprietary manner; informants, of course, give information, a source of power.
One informant that the DEA brought to Giacalone at the outset was Kenneth O’Donnell, an armed robber who had been an informer for the NYPD. Detective Joseph Coffey would later testify that O’Donnell was the best informer he ever had, but he had to be closely monitored.
Though difficult to handle—after some undercover work one night, he committed a robbery—O’Donnell was effective. He had introduced ATF undercover agent Dominick Polifrone to Vincent Gotti; he had set up Frank DiCicco for a loan-shark charge, eventually dismissed. He had also set up one of John Gotti’s barbers, Vito Scaglione, who had a shop on 101st Avenue and delivered a silencer-equipped pistol to an undercover agent for whom O’Donnell had vouched. Vito pleaded guilty.
Lately, O’Donnell had been helping the DEA make cases against drug dealers in New Jersey. He now told Giacalone he saw John Gotti give Peter Zuccaro, the man she had just prosecuted in the armored-car case, a “bag full of money” in front of the Bergin “for drugs.” The charge was never publicly made, but it fired the interest of Giacalone and the others.
In the beginning of the Eastern District-NYPD-DEA-FBI RICO investigation, there was goodwill.
18
THE MERCHANTS OF OZONE PARK
SUCCESSFUL INVESTIGATIONS DEPEND ON SECRECY, and a big secret was kept from Diane Giacalone as she began her pursuit of Neil Dellacroce and John Gotti.
John, Gene, and Angelo were about to be named in a wiretap request as
targets of a RICO investigation that Gambino Family specialists of the FBI and the Eastern District Organized Crime Strike Force already had underway.
Giacalone was not told; she worked for another agency. And neither the FBI nor the Strike Force believed that her RICO investigation, which had sprouted coincidentally out of the armored-car case, was any reason to shelve theirs, about which they naturally felt more loyalty.
An FBI squad in Queens—the “Gambino squad” involved in the Bergin fireworks raid—had been investigating the crew for nearly two years, collecting data from, among others, Sources BQ and Wahoo, who were described in an FBI affidavit as “never unreliable.” FBI policy precluded Giacalone from knowing the identities of BQ and Wahoo, but in time she would ignite a revealing behind-the-scenes battle over how to use them.
Citing the informants, the Strike Force had received permission from the Department of Justice in Washington to seek a wiretap order on Angelo’s home phone, which was granted November 9, 1981.
One of the other informants was 6 foot 9 inch, 400-pound George Yudzevich, the “heavyset man” in Gloria, a 1980 film directed by John Cassavetes. Yudzevich was with another crew, but had spent time on 101st Avenue in an unsuccessful effort to hook up with the Gotti squad as a loan-shark collector.
Loan-sharking and gambling were the initial focus of the FBI- Strike Force investigation, but not long after agents began monitoring Angelo’s phone, the work babania was heard. Several amazing turns ensued; one featured the FBI investigating itself because, somehow, Angelo Ruggiero found out that agents had been listening to him and he went into hiding.
At the time, the FBI did not know how Angelo penetrated its official secrecy; in 1985, it would learn that he had obtained a draft copy of a bureau affidavit, which told him and others they were in deep trouble. The affidavit caused panic and deception within the Family within a Family, whose titular boss equated drug dealing with death. When it was all sorted out four years later, and John Gotti was the new boss of a unified Family, a few people would look back at November 9, 1981, the day the Angelo eavesdropping began, and say this was the day Paul Castellano really died.
The tapped telephone in Angelo’s home was listed in his daughter’s name. It was singled out because he had told informants it was “safe.” They said that Angelo, only a few months after the Bergin wiretapping by Queens officials, was openly discussing—on the phone—the loan-sharking and gambling rackets that he, John, and Gene operated.
In its initial request to wiretap the telephone, the FBI listed Peter and Richard Gotti as loan-shark collectors and stated that Angelo was a “known murderer who would, without question, seek physical retribution and possibly murder a shylock victim who is unable to pay his debts.”
“Shylock,” another word for loan shark, has a literary etymology. In Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Shylock demanded “a pound of flesh” from delinquent borrowers. The unliterary underworld slurred the character’s name into “shark.”
“The shylock victim is generally a gambler who is deeply in debt,” the FBI document continued. “For the victim, a shylock serves as a convenient, if menacing, answer to an immediate debt. Accordingly, a victim is loyal to the shylock and seeks to protect him.”
The second day of the wiretap, Angelo and John Gotti, the merchants of Ozone Park, were overheard discussing a meeting about a loan to two men who ran a firm in the garment district, Mercury Pattern Service.
Later, “Marty” of Mercury called Angelo to see if it was okay if “Tommy” dropped off some “shirts” the next day.
“It’s all right to say ‘money,’” Angelo told Mercury’s Marty.
The tap also quickly showed that Angelo had not been able to cool Gotti’s ardor for gambling, now devoted to professional football, whose season was in full swing.
On Sunday, November 11, Angelo called to see how Gotti was doing so far that day. Gotti, already a big loser, was beside himself.
“I bet the Buffalo Bills for six dimes, they’re getting killed, ten-nothing. I bet New England for six dimes, I’m getting killed with New England … I bet six dimes on Chicago, they’re losing. I bet three dimes on K.C. They’re winning, [but] maybe they’ll lose, these motherfuckers.”
All told, Gotti was down for more than the $25,000 he allegedly made in a year allegedly working for Arc Plumbing. Angelo wondered which teams Gotti had bet on in the late-afternoon games.
“The Washington Redskins. I bet them for six dimes. Maybe they’ll lose, too, against the Giants.”
Angelo tried to steer the conversation into another area, but Gotti was distracted.
“We’re getting killed, that’s more important. I’m stuck almost thirty dimes here and nowhere to fucking go.”
Angelo tried again. He told a story that ended with a reference to a man being loyal to his brother “all his life.”
“Ah, Christ on the fucking cross. Right now I’d give my fucking life just to have fucking Buffalo win one.”
On the following Sunday it was worse. As the late-afternoon games were ending, Angelo tracked Gotti down at the Cozy Corner Bar, which FBI agents suspected was the base of the gambling operation that Gotti’s men ran for bettors besides themselves; the Berginites would bet with other bookies so as not to win their own money, if they ever won.
“Did you hang yourself?” Angelo asked as Gotti came on the bar phone. This time they used “dollar” as a synonym for $1,000.
“Forget about it. If I tell you what I lost you won’t believe it.”
“I could believe it.”
“Forget about it. I got killed. Forget about it. I lost … fifty-three dollars. You know the last time I lost fifty-three dollars?”
“I know all about it.”
“On my son’s grave, I ain’t got fifty-three fucking cents.”
Gotti then complained to Angelo he had just discovered that one of the men who managed the Cozy Corner operation had left a numbers bet in for him the last four weeks.
“He tells me another three dimes I owe … fucking motherfucker.”
The same conversation showed Gotti used loan sharks, too, and one shark wanted to be fed.
“There’s a problem,” Angelo told his gambling gumbah, “with the guy who lent you fifty dollars. I was told not to say nothing to you.”
Gotti sighed and complained that in the meantime “I got three days to go borrow” the additional $53,000 he had lost.
On November 21, the word babania popped up obliquely in a conversation between Angelo and Gene Gotti. Source BQ had recently told the FBI that the pair was contacting babania salesman Salvatore Ruggiero “just about every night from various public phone booths.”
Salvatore was wanted on three federal warrants for heroin dealing, hijacking, and tax evasion. For the latter, his wife Stephanie also was sought. They had been on the lam for six years.
Salvatore could afford life on the run. He secretly owned hideouts in Fort Lauderdale and the Poconos and traded stocks and bonds under other names. He also owned a diner, a greeting card store, and other investment property purchased through a company called Ozone Holding. He had four cars, including a Mercedes, and ten watches worth $12,000 each. He was living in a leased home in New Jersey while another was being built for him through a company run by Anthony and Caesar Gurino, owners of Arc Plumbing and paper bosses of John Gotti and Angelo Ruggiero.
At the time of Source BQ’s tip, Angelo—a big gambler, too, but not like Gotti—was broke. Six months later, he would cite a remarkable turnaround.
“I’m way out of debt now,” he told an acquaintance. “I’m no fuckin’ millionaire, [but] I’m sitting on four hundred thousand dollars.”
The furtive-phone-calls tip was evidence of a conspiracy to conceal a fugitive. The FBI intensified its surveillance of Angelo, John, Gene, and other Bergin men.
On November 24, Anthony Moscatiello, who had been forwarding mail to his old real estate partner, Salvatore, was stopped and searched by FBI agents. Tony qu
ickly called Sal’s brother.
“Two guys just took me out of the car.”
“You’re kidding,” Angelo said.
“Guns drawn”
“For what?”
“[They] told me [it] was the company I keep.”
Angelo called another Howard Beach neighbor, Joseph Massino, soon to be acting boss of the Bonanno Family.
“I don’t know what the fuck is going on over here,” he told his and John’s longtime friend. “Every time somebody leaves my fucking house … agents grab them on the corner.”
“What the fuck they want you to do?” Massino said. “Hang out with doctors and lawyers?”
Later that day, Angelo called John.
“There’s a little green car circling your block and my block.”
“Yeah, all right.”
“Broken taillight.”
“Yeah … fuckers.”
On December 1, the Angelo wiretap was removed because he moved from Howard Beach to nearby Cedarhurst, Long Island, to a house that he was having renovated. Angelo told informants it was a good move for him—the FBI wouldn’t know where he lived. In fact, pen registers at the Our Friends Social Club had disclosed several calls to Cedarhurst and FBI agents were watching on the day Angelo moved in.
The agents had increased physical surveillance of Angelo and John, suspecting they might be doing what they had not yet talked about on the phone: dealing drugs. Source BQ had just reported that they booted heroin dealer Mark Reiter, age 33, out of the crew—“to have everyone at the club think that they are on the outs with him. In reality, Reiter is arranging deals.”
On December 30, two telephones in Angelo’s safe house were tapped.
If John Gotti resolved to stop gambling in the New Year, he broke his resolution on New Year’s Day—and lost $90,000 on bowl games he bet on with three bookies.