by Gene Mustain
In February of 1988, a federal judge secretly authorized the squad to begin audio and video surveillance of Gotti and several others at the Ravenite after Gabriel submitted an affidavit saying rather un-surprisingly that the FBI had cause to believe crimes were being committed there.
The “video plant” was quickly set up. The next trick was getting a listening device or “bug” inside the Ravenite, a ground-floor storefront in a plain four-story, brown-brick building. The club, just two large rooms filled with cheap chairs and tables, had its own street-level entrance, but it also could be entered through a door in the hallway of the building’s main entrance, which was used by tenants of the apartments on the upper floor.
It would take time to discover the significance of this, but the tenants included someone important to Gotti, an elderly woman named Nettie Cerelli. Her late husband, a Neil soldier, had been the club’s longtime caretaker.
While at the Ravenite, Gotti normally sat at a table in the rear room, beneath two framed photographs—one of Neil and one of Gotti. The latter was a copy of a photo on the cover of a newly published book chronicling Gotti’s rise to power. It was a tight head shot, taken when a scowling Gotti was outside the Brooklyn federal courthouse and stared directly into a photographer’s lens, and thus now into the eyes of anyone who looked at it.
Mouw wanted the bug as close to Gotti’s table as possible. With informants’ help, Gabriel diagrammed the Ravenite interior for the bureau’s Special Operations squad. In February of 1988, S.O. agents—maybe the best locksmiths in the world—descended on the club long after Norman Dupont, its caretaker and Nettie Cerelli’s nephew, closed for the night.
While others waited in the shadows, ready to distract passersby, two S.O. agents walked into the tenants’ hallway, picked the lock of the side door and entered the Ravenite. Dressed all in black, they ran wires, tapped into power sources, and installed a tiny transmitter that was never found—even though Gotti and his men were always looking for one. After the S.O. agents left, agents at an “audio plant” a few blocks away at the main New York FBI office could operate it from their desks.
Maloney beamed when Mouw reported the FBI now had an electronic ear in the Ravenite. “Fantastic!” he said, “the big mouth’s going to talk himself right into jail!”
Not so fast. Optimism spawned by the installation of the video camera and the bug soon faded. The camera worked fine, but agents in the audio plant could overhear only fragments of conversations and sometimes only the unintelligible noise of several men talking at once, coughing, laughing, and dragging chairs across floors.
Gotti’s arrival also always raised the decibel level. It was just too many people talking too excitedly in too confined an area for the bug to capture coherent talk. It also became apparent that Gotti—having been burned by the Bergin bug—was being cautious. The few times it sounded as if he might be talking about something incriminating, his voice dropped to a barely audible whisper. Frequently, he left the club and—joined by Sammy, LoCascio, or others—went for a “walk-talk.”
Though frustrated by the problems with the bug, Mouw was delighted with the video. Every morning, he reviewed the tape from the day before, and began compiling physical descriptions and other data on all the men making their required appearances.
“This is great,” he told Gabriel. “John is introducing us to everyone in his Family. We got guys coming in cars from New Jersey and Connecticut. We’re gonna get to meet everybody.”
Men they didn’t recognize were listed as “unsubs,” for unsubstantiated. But depending on with whom the unsub arrived, agents would know which of their files to pull, which informant to contact, or which law-enforcement agency might be able to help. Steadily, they began identifying many previously unknown soldiers and associates in the Family’s 21 crews—as well as men from other Families who dropped by.
“The secret society meeting in broad daylight!” Mouw exclaimed on another day. “The administration of the Gambino Family strolling down Mulberry like tourists!”
The audio tapes were not as pleasing to review. But while they did not add up to anything incriminating, they did offer enough snippets to satisfy the legal requirements for keeping the bug in place—and to open the window on Gotti’s world a little farther. They showed, for instance, he was still worried about the Sparks stories heroin junkie Anthony Rampino might have told after his arrest several months before. And although Roach had decided to stay loyal and was sitting in a state jail awaiting trial, Gotti still wanted to kill him.
“Go ahead, I want him dead,” he said, after another man wondered if it was possible to kill Roach in jail.
“You want him dead?” the man asked again.
“Yeah, I feel sad. But that’s what he gets for being dumb. He can carry away everybody.”
After overhearing this conversation—and others in which a contract on Roach also was discussed by Gene Gotti—Gambino agents alerted jail officials, who enhanced their security around Rampino.
On another day, Gotti was overheard using the words “ice” and “hit” and “whack” while apparently discussing a series of homicides. “You get that sort of respect with murder,” was the only intact sentence to emerge from the jumble of whispers.
At other times, the bug overheard fractured comments about construction jobs, waterfront shakedowns, union extortions and ghost payrolls, loan-sharking schemes, and gambling percentages. Taken together, however, they only proved that the Ravenite was not a Boys Club.
“We’ve got to get a microphone on the street,” Mouw told Gabriel, “or find out where they talk when they really want to talk.”
The fruits and frustrations of the FBI operation were not shared with other law enforcement agencies, some of which had their own get-Gotti ambitions. In the fall of 1988, a gangster trying to save himself offered information that fortified these ambitions and gave the media a story to rival Johnny Boy’s still seemingly legitimate acquittal in the Giacalone case.
The gangster was James McElroy. Along with members of the Gambino farm team known as the Westies, he was convicted in a case that led to Bosko Radonjich—broker of the juror, George Pape, arrangement—becoming Westies boss.
Like Rampino, McElroy was a violent, drug-addicted gopher; unlike Rampino, he felt no loyalty for Gotti. “I have done some things with Johnny Gotti,” he told the state’s Organized Crime Task Force, which earlier had failed to persuade Andy Maloney to mount a Gotti prosecution based on tapes made when it bugged the Bergin in 1985 and 1986.
McElroy was puffing his connection to Gotti. But one thing he said resonated: He was at a wake in 1986 when a former Westies leader departed a meeting with Gotti and said Gotti had just enlisted the Westies to deliver a stern warning to some union leader.
The story seemed to fit with other facts the state agents and others—including NYPD cops on the Manhattan District Attorney’s detective squad—had collected since the May 1986 shooting, in Manhattan, of John F. O’Connor, the corrupt boss of Local 608 of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, the largest local in the United States. One of the main facts was an excerpt from the Bergin tapes in which Gotti seemed to be promising some malice: “We’re gonna, gonna bust ’im up,” he said in his often repetitive way, or so it sounded.
O’Connor survived the shooting, but would not even answer questions about motive. However, the state agents thought they’d overheard Gotti providing the motive two months before, in February of 1986, when underlings told the new boss that O’Connor ordered a squad of carpenters to ransack a Gambino-backed restaurant newly built by non-union carpenters.
Another Westie who cooperated in an earlier FBI investigation had also secretly taped one of the four O’Connor shooters saying the “greaseballs” had given them the assignment:
“Oh yeah, [it was] for the greaseballs, something they needed quick. You know what happened? This guy O’Connor got a bunch of construction guys from his union. They went on the job and wrecked it. He
was supposed to get kneecapped, but the bullets ended up high and one went in his asshole. He’s got an extra asshole.”
Alone, each of these facts hardly made for a case against Gotti. In court, even his “bust-’im-up” remark could be turned him into harmless chatter by a man famous for exaggerated speech. But the state agents believed McElroy’s claim that the Westies leader told him the shooting was for Gotti, and McElroy’s willingness to testify about it tipped the case into prosecutable range.
Maloney, among many on the federal side of law enforcement, did not agree. But the state Task Force did not need Maloney. The O’Connor shooting was a state crime in Manhattan, which gave jurisdiction to the elected Manhattan District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau. The 68-year-old Morgenthau was a powerful local prosecutor who had once been the federal prosecutor in Manhattan. He also had a history with the Mafia, having in 1963 talked a run-of-the-mill hoodlum, Joseph Valachi, into becoming the first Mafioso to break the vow of omerta or silence.
With the usual concerns about imperfect evidence and reliance on a lowlife witness such as McElroy, who once slit a man’s throat for 100 dollars in drug money, Morgenthau and his rackets chief, Michael Cherkasky, came to agree with Ronald Goldstock, the state Task Force boss, that the case was winnable.
Neither would say their decision was affected by the accolades a Gotti victory would bring, but his notoriety guaranteed it. Still, a prosecutor’s code requires only belief in the defendant’s guilt and the possibility of conviction, not the beauty of the case. In addition, a provision in New York law dramatically raised the reward of convicting Gotti of ordering the assault of John O’Connor.
In the 1970s, Gotti was convicted of three felonies—attempted manslaughter and two hijackings. In New York (and many states), three-time losers can be deemed “predicate” felons—incorrigible career criminals who ought to be treated as such at their fourth felony conviction and locked up a long time. So rather than the five-to-fifteen-year sentence a judge would give for an ordinary conviction for assault, Gotti faced a twenty-five-years-to-life sentence.
It took a couple months to seal a deal with McElroy. A murder charged was dropped, his girlfriend got a pass on drug charges, and Morgenthau and Cherkasky agreed to write a letter on his behalf to the federal judge who sentenced him to 60 years in the Westies case. Worse criminals have gotten more, but not in such a theoretically simple assault case.
In January of 1989, for the third time in four years, Gotti was indicted. His arrest came on January 23, when 23 NYPD detectives and Task Force agents took up positions near the Ravenite and waited for him. Escorted by three bodyguards, Gotti left the Ravenite about 7 P.M. and walked north on Mulberry. The cops and agents stopped him just as he reached the adjacent neighborhood of Soho and the street of his Machiavellian dreams, Prince Street.
The suspect quickly fell into character. “I’ll lay you three to one, I beat it,” he said to Joseph Coffey, the Westies expert who had left the NYPD and joined the state Task Force, as Coffey told him the charges and slapped on handcuffs.
“I ain’t goin’ nowhere. Why’re you doin’ this shit?”
“Forget it, jerkoff, get in the fucking car,” Coffey said.
Booking at nearby Manhattan Criminal Court took some time. Gotti fumed in a crowded holding pen behind the bail judge’s court. Many two-bit drug dealers, thieves, and muggers—the detritus of the NYPD’s other efforts that night—were startled to see him led into their midst and responded with a standing ovation.
Gotti was held overnight for a bail hearing the next morning. Prosecutor Cherkasky did not expect the judge to refuse Gotti bail—as a defendant, Gotti had always shown for court, the main basis, in state law, for determining bail—but he argued for it anyway. He said Gotti led a major criminal organization and had “enormous financial resources” enabling him to flee.
“He has never missed a court date,” Bruce Cutler replied. “He gets to court before the building opens. He’s always on time. He has never run away from a problem.”
The lawyers argued several more minutes, long enough for Cutler to rhapsodize about Gotti the loyal husband, devoted father, and doting granddad unmercifully hounded around the clock by agents and cops who never saw him commit a crime. The judge pretended to pay attention, then set a bail that set the suspect back for about a week’s worth of gambling: $100,000—or half of what Gotti spent the month before on a Christmas party for 1,000 gangsters and their wives, children, girlfriends, and lawyers.
Exiting the courthouse, Gotti broke into a familiarly sly smile when asked whether the new case caused him any concern.
“Did I ever worry yet?”
The reporters clamored for more and he indulged. “I have nothing to be worried about. They have nothing.”
The questions kept coming in a hail, striking all around, accumulating in nothing, until Gotti heard one he felt it was productive to answer. It involved James McElroy, and his words tipped the tried-and-true strategy sure to be employed at trial: “This case is from the word of lowlifes.”
The performance charmed the media beast and, for the most part, produced the desired result. The lead paragraph of one newspaper story actually began with Gotti’s statement, in 1987 after the Giacalone case, that in no time at all, law enforcement would try to frame him again.
32
NETTIE’S PLACE
MORE THAN HE KNEW, Gotti was right that the law was coming after him. Besides the O’Connor case, the FBI was cutting a video-and-audio record that might play well before a jury some day. In Brooklyn, meanwhile, Andy Maloney and the Eastern District Strike Force were about to use their generous grand jury powers to apply more pressure. The idea was to start giving people near Gotti a choice: go before a grand jury and talk truthfully, or go to jail.
In Manhattan, rival federal prosecutors got the same idea after they rekindled an investigation of the Sparks murders. This was the piece of Gotti turf Rudolph Giuliani reserved when he and Maloney discussed Gotti after the Giacalone case. In 1989, with always annoying and sometimes dire effect, Manhattan federal grand jury subpoenas began landing on the doorsteps of Gambino Family soldiers.
Through Sammy and the crew chiefs, Gotti repeated standing instructions on how he expected soldiers to handle grand jury testimony: Tell the truth about things that don’t matter; fail to remember when questions get pointed; lie when there is no choice.
Several men would be squeezed, including Thomas Spinelli, a Brooklyn soldier whose only link to Sparks was that his captain, Jimmy Brown Failla, was one of the men inside Sparks waiting to see Paul and Bilotti that night. Still, this made all in Failla’s crew potential grand jury witnesses. Spinelli had already testified once when prosecutors sent another subpoena. He then made the mistake of saying out loud that he was not going to expose himself to perjury by telling lies his grand jury inquisitors would know are lies.
While uninformed about Sparks, Spinelli knew about Failla’s role in the Gambino Family’s private-sanitation rackets—the subject of many prior investigations by different agencies. The grand jury subpoena handcuffed him into trying to guess what the grand jury knew as prosecutors fired questions.
Spinelli’s fellow soldiers immediately informed their capo of his decision to tell the truth and hope for the best. It would have pleased Failla if Chin Gigante made a move against Gotti, but until then, he had to be loyal to Gotti, so he told him about Spinelli.
“Then he has to go,” Gotti responded. “If he don’t wanna play ball our way, he don’t play.”
Gotti gave the job to Sammy, who now believed it was unseemly for a man of his position to be out in the street killing people. But he and a Failla soldier lured Spinneli to a Brooklyn factory owned by some gangster’s son. As Sammy waited outside, the soldier shot Spinelli dead.
“It’s over,” he told Gotti the next day, in a walk-talk at the Ravenite.
“Good, can’t have no rats, or would-be rats. People gotta know that by now.”
Federal prosecutors use the grand jury cudgel in multiple ways. For instance, they can force people to testify under immunity grants that enable people to talk all they want about their crimes and avoid prosecution—unless they lie. Because this is a powerful tool that could be used to lead suspects into a perjury case, the law prohibits prosecutors from seeking immunity for an investigation’s primary targets. It reserves immunity for people on the edges of a case, people less important than their information.
In Brooklyn, Maloney and Strike Force Chief Edward McDonald decided that getting Tommy Gambino was not as important as learning what he knew. It was a dicey call—Tommy was not only a capo but, as Carlo’s son, a symbol of Mafia power in New York. Maloney and McDonald had to ask Washington superiors for approval, but the bosses agreed that sacrificing a potential racketeering case against Tommy was worth building one against Gotti.
For Tommy, the pressure of having to testify or go to jail was a new experience. During his father’s and Uncle Paul’s reigns, he lived a practically anonymous life, so far as the law was concerned, even though until Sparks, soft-spoken Tommy, who was married to the daughter of the Luchese Family patriarch, was set to replace Paul.
In truth, he had little lust for the job. He saw the meaning of the federal onslaught better than most. He was content with the millions he accumulated through his powerful connections. And after Sparks, he had demonstrated his practicality by quickly assuring Gotti that he savored neither revenge nor ambition.
Some of Gotti’s reaction to these assurances was voiced within range of the state Task Force’s Bergin bug and now provided part of the legal basis for subpoenaing Tommy before the grand jury, not that prosecutors ever have much trouble finding enough basis for a grand jury subpoena.