by Gene Mustain
The first shot brought Willie Boy to his knees; six more tore open the back of his head. The killers were gone before his wife ran out and cradled his body in her arms.
Later in the day, Richard Rehbock, the lawyer who represented Willie Boy in the Giacalone case, spoke about the murder with reporters. In their stories, none noted that Rehbock had gone on to win an assault case for Junior Gotti and that he was in the Gotti camp more than the Willie Boy camp.
“He never expressed any fear [of Gotti],” Rehbock said of Willie Boy. “The only enemy that this man had in the world was the government.”
30
HEROIN REDUX
AFTER FOUR YEARS OF PRE-TRIAL MATTERS, the case that led to Sparks—the heroin-dealing charges against Angelo, Gene, and others—finally began after Gotti’s pretend peace pact with Chin Gigante in the fall of 1987. Several more crooked turns in what was already a twisted journey lay ahead.
In addition to Gene, Angelo, and Lino, the defendants included John Carneglia, a Bergin crew soldier and salvage operator who had been close to the Gotti brothers most of his life, and Mark Reiter, the heroin dealer whose arrival at the Bergin started babania madness.
The prospect of conviction weighed heavily on Gene Gotti. He faced a 50-year sentence if found guilty at trial. For months, his lawyers had been discussing a guilty plea in return for prosecutors recommending a 14-year sentence. Lawyers for Angelo and Carneglia were involved in similar talks for recommended pleas of a couple years more. Lino and Reiter, who faced lesser charges, intended to go to trial.
Gene was 42. Under sentencing policies at the time he was indicted, he would qualify for parole after serving two-thirds of the 14 years. That meant something of a life after he got out. Angelo and Carneglia, a few years older, felt the same.
As the trial neared, however, all were reminded of John Gotti’s earlier edict—prompted by Neil Dellacroce’s son Armond’s plea in the Giacalone case—that no one in the Family could agree to a plea in which they were required to acknowledge the Gambino Family existed and they belonged to it.
U.S. Attorney Andy Maloney and Robert LaRusso, the heroin-trial prosecutor, wanted plea deals, but would not budge on the Gambino issues, and so Gotti ordered his men to trial. Suspicious about the verdict in the Giacalone case, Maloney told LaRusso to be wary of jury tampering. “These people will try anything!” he said. “They don’t believe we have the right to put them on trial!”
Attempts to tamper began soon after the jury was seated. An informant told agents that two private detectives working for the defense were trying to acquire the identities of jurors. As in the Giacalone case, the jurors served anonymously. Next, agents learned that a Brooklyn stockbroker offered to give a new car to a man who had been chosen and then excused from the jury for personal reasons. The stockbroker wanted to ask the man about the remaining jurors.
Maloney ordered John Gleeson, the assistant prosecutor in the Giacalone case, to start a jury-tampering investigation with the FBI. As before, because the Gambino squad was part of the prosecution, non-Gambino agents began conducting checks of the jurors.
In the absence of proof, Gleeson still did not fully share Maloney’s suspicion that his case was fixed. And he continued to feel that way—even after he and agents found evidence suggesting the heroin defendants might have already bribed one juror and had learned the identities of five more.
“They did it again!” Maloney exploded.
“Maybe; it looks like it, but it’d be tough to prove,” Gleeson said.
“This time, we’re taking it to the judge.”
Late in 1987, after he and other judges reviewed the evidence, the trial judge, Mark Costantino, found a high probability of jury tampering, and declared a mistrial.
For Gene and the rest, a mistrial was not as rewarding as what brother John got—an outright acquittal—and it meant they would have to go to trial a second time.
Publicly, Maloney said his office would mount a new trial and pursue the case to verdict or plea. Privately, he fumed. For a second time, the Gotti wing of the Gambinos had embarrassed his office. It was hard for him to feel much better when, a few weeks later, the Eastern District Strike Force, the special squad of prosecutors attached uneasily to his office, won the Gambino Family hierarchy case. Jurors returned guilty verdicts against Joe N. Gallo and Joseph Armone, the old-guard Gambino leaders who had warily given their support to Gotti.
Gallo was released on bail, pending sentencing two months later. He was 77 and an informant correctly told agents he was no longer the consigliere. Bail meant the old man could spend a last holiday season with relatives. The judge proposed another plan for Armone, 70: He, too, could get bail and the holidays with his wife and daughter—but only if he made a statement publicly renouncing a life in crime.
The certainty of a sentence condemning him to death behind bars broke Armone’s normally iron will. In court, he indicated he would agree. The judge told lawyers to draft a statement and return to court the next day, Christmas Eve. Before Armone was returned to the Manhattan jail where federal detainees are kept, the judge told him the statement should show that Armone was renouncing any connection he might have ever had to organized crime and was resigning any position he might currently have.
That night, “Joe Piney,” as Armone was known, asked a nephew to send the new Gambino boss a message asking permission to make the statement. “Piney doesn’t think he’s ever gonna get out when he goes away, so he just wants this time with his Family,” the nephew told Gotti. “He doesn’t think it matters what he says, it’s just legal bullshit.”
Having told Gene and the other heroin defendants that they could not make such agreements, Gotti could not let Armone off the hook. Frank LoCascio might now have the position, but Armone, at least officially, was still underboss.
“I’m surprised by Piney!” Gotti shouted. “This is a Cosa Nostra! We don’t make no official statements! He can’t do it! You tell him that’s an order! He’s my underboss, even if he’s in fuckin’ jail, until I say different!”
Armone got the message Christmas Eve morning. In court that day, he dutifully announced he had changed his mind about making a statement. He was promptly jailed to await sentencing. In two more months, he got 15 years in prison; the judge gave Gallo 10. Gallo became the oldest inmate in federal custody anywhere, but he served his time and got out. On the other hand, in 1992, Armone died of natural causes at a federal prison hospital.
The second trial of Gene, Angelo, and the rest began in the spring of 1988. The details differed, but the result was the same—mistrial. The case actually got to the jury, but after a couple days, jurors told the judge they were hopelessly deadlocked—the word “hopelessly” immediately raised suspicions in the minds of Andy Maloney and prosecutor Robert LaRusso.
It takes someone like George Pape, refusing to talk or negotiate, to make a jury hopelessly deadlocked, Maloney believed. After hearing from the jurors, the judge told them to keep deliberating. Unlike in the first trial, it was too late for agents to start an investigation into whether the case was being fixed again.
As deliberations continued, federal marshals found cocaine hidden in a jogging outfit that a woman brought to a friend on the jury. If a juror’s girlfriend felt free to bring cocaine into the case, what else was going on? Maloney and LaRusso became convinced something else was going on when two jurors next told the judge in the case that they suspected FBI agents had tampered with the tape-recorded evidence.
“Too incredible to believe,” Maloney said to LaRusso. “Somehow, they got to these people too.”
When deliberations failed to break the deadlock, the judge declared the mistrial. There would have to be a third trial. Meanwhile, the judge decided it was no longer fair to keep Angelo Ruggiero in jail without bail. Angelo had been boiling and plotting in a federal lockup in Manhattan for 25 months while his main codefendants, Gene, Carneglia, and Lino, remained free.
At a hearing on Angelo’s reque
st for bail, his lawyer told the judge his client was a good candidate for bail because he was a good father who cared for his six children and was providing for two others left fatherless by the death of his brother, Salvatore Ruggiero, in a plane crash. To no avail, LaRusso argued the opposite: “He’s got the greatest motive to flee with the evidence we have on him. If this defendant is released, he probably will not return—he will not return.”
The statement was prophetic, but not in the way LaRusso intended. Free at last, Angelo fell ill before he could devise a plan for either getting “in the wind” or working his way back into the graces of the friend whose coattails he grabbed on to long ago and once telephoned each morning to go over the day’s dirty agenda.
Ruggiero was diagnosed with diabetes and emphysema. Depressed by these illnesses and his legal predicaments—in addition to the heroin case, he faced a separate trial on the same charges that brought Gallo and Armone down—Angelo actually obeyed the terms of his bail. He hung out in his house on Long Island, the one in middle-class Cedarhurst that he had remodeled with heroin cash even as Gambino squad bugs documented the progress.
The bail conditions forbade him from contacting anyone in the Gambino Family, but it depressed him that his old Fulton-Rockaway pal, Johnny Boy, never attempted a clandestine visit or even sent a secret message of goodwill.
Instead, several times over the next several months, Gotti told Sammy that rather than forgive Angelo, he should kill him. “He’s caused us so much fuckin’ trouble, and not just us,” Gotti said. “He don’t deserve any passes.”
The change of heart was breathtaking. The trouble Angelo caused was a big part of why Gotti was now boss. Then there were the personal ties; Angelo was Gotti’s oldest friend, and his eldest son’s godfather. Each time Gotti talked of killing Angelo, Sammy and Frank LoCascio pointed out that Angelo’s declining health made it pointless.
Late in 1988, Angelo’s doctors delivered a last bit of bad news: lung cancer, and they said he probably did not have long to live. Still Gotti did not visit or send a message, and Gene—now facing a third trial because his brother would not let him plead guilty—was particularly perturbed.
“I told him the other day,” Gene told Sammy. “I said, ‘The guy Angelo is broken-hearted. He don’t understand why you’re so hot still. This guy would’ve jumped in front of a car for you. Ain’t it time to let your beef go?’”
Gene said his brother shrugged and turned to other subjects. The indifference surprised even stone-cold Sammy. It would cost John Gotti nothing to bestow a little absolution—insincere as it would be—upon a dying old friend.
Illness would take Angelo to bed and out of the picture, but the heroin trial would have a third and final act. It would be a year more in coming because of a legal fight over whether it was fair to put the defendants on trial again. After they won that issue at the Supreme Court, trial prosecutor LaRusso and his aides chose to narrow the case by cutting loose some defendants, such as Eddie Lino, for separate trials.
It proved to be a good strategy. With fewer defendants, they were able to build a strong, simple case. Gene and Carneglia were convicted—but, incredibly, not before yet one more attempt to buy a juror. Without a break as lucky as the one John Gotti got in the Giacalone case, when a man already on the jury announced he was for sale, Gene was left to devise something on his own, and he did, quite ably, without telling his brother.
The plan relied on one of John’s sons-in-law, Carmine Agnello, and Gene feared John would object; it also involved Lino, who agreed to secretly help and risk the boss’s wrath, because of his special bond with his former codefendants. The plan was to force the disqualification of a seated juror and thus cause the selection of an alternate juror assessed by Gene during jury screening as sympathetic and bribable.
After employing private detectives to learn the names and addresses of the jurors, Gene found that one lived on the same leafy street as Billy Noon, an FBI agent who sat at the prosecution table with LaRusso. He sent Lino to the juror’s home with orders to leave an unsigned note questioning the juror’s fairness when everyone knew he was friendly with his FBI neighbor.
Gene assumed the note would provoke a hearing and the juror’s disqualification, and it did. In the meantime, Gene sent Carmine Agnello to the home of the first alternate juror, the one judged sympathetic and bribable. It turned out he was both. And after the other juror was excused on grounds that the note might have rendered him incapable of objectivity, the alternate took his place.
It was an artfully crafted scheme, but doomed. Rather than stay strong during deliberations and refuse to discuss anything but an outright acquittal, the alternate’s feet turned to clay. He sent a note to the judge saying that he was concerned about his and his family’s safety and must get off the jury because the wrong people knew where he lived. He didn’t mention the $25,000 he’d been promised.
Still, the judge smelled something rotten. He granted the alternate his wish, then ruled the case would be decided by the eleven remaining jurors, who took only three hours to lower the boom on Gene and Carneglia and bring down the curtain on the longest federal prosecution in history.
The judge allowed both to remain free on bail, pending sentencing. But both had already decided they were not going to flee. Because the case began in 1983, it fell under federal sentencing rules that were not as punitive as rules that came into effect in 1985 and that John Gotti had confronted in the Giacalone case.
A few weeks later, however, Gene and Carneglia got much stiffer sentences than they expected—thanks to the scrapyard czar, Carneglia. He had reverted to his Fulton-Rockaway days and promised a reporter that some day he would “piss on the grave” of the trial judge, John R. Bartels, an 89-old jurist who had dozed off a few times during the more boring parts of testimony.
Bartels, a Harry Truman appointee, remembered the slight at sentencing, and gave Carneglia and Gene sentences requiring them to serve more than 20 years before they had a chance to qualify for parole—and, in Carneglia’s case, carry out an ill-advised vow.
The end of the case continued the devastation of the original core of the Bergin Hunt & Fish Club. Peter Gotti, John’s older brother, was still around—and John made him acting captain of the Bergin—but Gene, Angelo, Willie Boy, John Carneglia, and Anthony Rampino were now in jail, dead, or dying.
Their boss had no time for regret or remembrance. The night before Gene was to surrender and begin serving his sentence, brother John told Sammy he had bawled Gene out after Gene finally spilled the details of his artful but failed fix.
“I told him, ‘You used Eddie and you used my son-in-law and you don’t think you have to tell me.’ He says, ‘I didn’t want to involve you.’ Involve me. I’m the fucking boss and he don’t want to involve me! He says, ‘Well, maybe you wouldn’t have let me do it, ’cause Carmine’s your son-in-law.’ Well, yeah, maybe, but I am the fuckin’ boss!”
Sammy, though growing weary of Gotti’s rants, listened as Gotti ranted on.
“I don’t mind them trying to fix a case. That’s what we do, but I’m the boss. I’m gonna wring the neck of that no-good son-in-law of mine. Can’t believe he didn’t tell me!”
31
MULBERRY STREET
SOON AFTER HE REVEALED IT, informants told the FBI that Gotti was making the Ravenite his headquarters and requiring men to report weekly. The news astonished Gambino squad boss Bruce Mouw and his case agent, George Gabriel. The club opened onto the sidewalk of a narrow street in one of the city’s busiest areas. Until late at night, because Little Italy and the adjacent Soho and Chinatown neighborhoods were all tourist centers, the area was jammed with people and cars. It seemed the worst place for regular meetings between the boss and his men.
Surveillance showed that the informants were right. In January of 1988, Gotti began going to the Ravenite almost every weekday, arriving between five and six in the evening. A special FBI surveillance squad also saw dozens of other men—including
many they recognized, but many they did not—entering and leaving the club over several days. The Ravenite meetings promised to open rich veins of information about the breadth and depth of the Gambino Family.
“Some secret society,” Mouw gleefully said, when he informed Andy Maloney.
To both men, the biggest implication of Gotti’s moves was immediately clear. Mouw, the former nuclear submariner who believed mightily in the value of electronic surveillance, had been mulling where to launch an eavesdropping attack on Gotti. The target had just provided the answer.
Mouw now decided to complement eavesdropping with video surveillance of the sidewalk in front of the club. Visitors frequently loitered there. The video surveillance would help identify them and, if a case could be brought against Gotti, help establish the “enterprise” requirements of the RICO law. Defense lawyers would find it difficult to argue their clients did not belong to the Gambino enterprise if jurors could see them on videotape meeting regularly, hugging, cajoling, and taking furtive walks around the block that the FBI dubbed “walk-talks.”
The key question with the video was where to install the camera. The buildings directly across the Ravenite on Mulberry Street were not options; many residents were as fond of Gotti as they had been of Neil. Gotti was a familiar figure on the street for nearly 15 years. Now that he was such a celebrity, many loved having him in their midst even more, and would quickly let him know if they noticed something odd in the windows of the buildings across from the Ravenite.
Telephoto lenses made it possible for Mouw to consider locations farther away, as long as they afforded a view of the Ravenite entrance. After scouting locations, he settled on a high-rise apartment tower two and one half blocks north of the Ravenite—far enough out of the Little Italy milieu, but near enough for a long lens. The building was at the northeast corner of Mulberry and Houston Street. One of its apartments, which was for rent, offered a view directly down Mulberry.