by Gene Mustain
“How does me staying off book covers—is that something bad to do?”
“They won’t know your name.”
“Oh, come on, dad. They won’t know who we are?”
“Look, if you think that my name has nothing to do with you, take your mother’s [maiden] name.”
Victoria didn’t reply, but she could easily have argued that the name is at least as much a curse as a blessing. She could have pointed no farther than the case of her brother Junior, who was indicted a week before that conversation. But for his father’s name, Junior would not have been acting boss of the Gambino crime Family. But for his father’s name, the media would not have cared much about his legal troubles. And but for his father’s name, Junior would not have amassed a fortune so impressive he could afford to leave $350,000 in cash wedding gifts hidden in a basement for eight years.
Most likely, Junior also would not have been hit with new charges five months later that alleged he robbed a drug dealer. That one prompted a protest call to The News from his mother Vicky, who hadn’t been heard from for a while. “He doesn’t have enough money, so he gets involved in drugs? Please,” she told reporter Greg B. Smith. “Can’t they come up with something better than that? “You’ve investigated what he owns,” she said, referring to a story in which Smith described Junior as a millionaire. “He’s going to steal $4,000? Please. It’s absolutely ridiculous. It’s beyond ridiculous. I shouldn’t even respond to it. I just want you to know what I feel.”
In April of 1999, as sister Victoria was working on her third novel, Junior wrote the end to his mob story—at least for several years. On the day jury selection was about to begin in his case, he broke sharply with his father’s tradition and pleaded guilty. He forfeited nearly one million dollars, his wedding money, and multiple vacation homes before going off to prison for six or so years.
His uncle Peter Gotti might be headed there, too. And so might another uncle, Richard Gotti, a low-key member of the clan who had remained in the shadows until early June 2002, when he and Peter were indicted on labor racketeering charges in the Eastern District. They and others were accused of extorting dockworkers and companies that do business On The Waterfront in Brooklyn. A couple of the others also were accused of extorting Hollywood action star Steven Seagal.
The indictment alleged that Peter, 62, a former sanitation worker who retired on a disability pension in 1979, had become the official boss of the Gambino Family, and that Richard, 59, had become a captain. Bruce Cutler showed up at an early court appearance, representing “Uncle Pete,” as he always called him, and naturally he dismissed talk of Peter becoming boss. “There are so many versions of who’s in charge,” he sneered. “Now it’s Uncle Pete’s turn.”
It almost certainly is Uncle Pete’s turn, and not much more need be said about the state of the Gambino crime Family 10 years after John Gotti went away.
In brief, here are accountings of some of the other characters in this book:
Like John Gotti, two important capos in the Gambino Family fought off the government for a while. James Failla, one of those men waiting inside Sparks to meet Castellano for dinner on the night Gotti made his move, also beat a RICO case. So did codefendant and fellow capo Joseph Corrao.
“Go talk to the prosecutors,” Corrao said, sounding much like Gotti after his 1987 victory. “They’re the ones who frame people, not us.”
The prosecutors, however, would get the last laugh on both Failla and Corrao, thanks to the testimony of a major new cooperating witness, turncoat underboss Sammy Gravano. Together with yet more FBI tapes, Gravano sank dozens of Gambino mobsters following the deal he struck with John Gleeson.
Meanwhile, George Pape, the corrupt juror whose 1987 dive enabled Gotti’s reign, was convicted of bribery and sentenced to three years in prison. He served two and was released.
On the first day of 2000, Pape’s fugitive bagman, former Westies boss Bosko Radonjich, was arrested at Miami International Airport, aborting a planned vacation in the Bahamas.
Former U.S. Attorney Andrew Maloney, back in private practice with a top Manhattan law firm, was elated. He was confident that with the testimony of one-time underboss Sammy Gravano, who nurtured the Pape-Radonjich deal, Radonjich would be made to pay.
“As imperfect as it is, we consider the jury system sacred and when someone tampers with it, he deserves the maximum possible penalty under the law,” said Maloney.
Less than two months later, however, Gravano became a less than ideal witness when he was caught returning to a life of crime and arrested for drug trafficking. Radonjich was cut loose and returned to his Serbian homeland.
Breaking Gotti’s rule about making admissions. Failla pleaded guilty to conspiring to kill Thomas Spinelli, the Failla soldier who broke a Gotti rule about grand jury testimony. He got seven years, and died on August 4, 1999, at age 80, at a federal prison hospital in Forth Worth, Texas, about six months before he would have been released.
Corrao also departed from Gotti rules, pleading guilty to bribing NYPD detective William Peist for inside information. He got 70 months. In November 2001, after serving his sentence, Corrao succumbed to kidney failure at age 64.
Peist went to the can too, and was released just before Christmas, 1999.
Dominick Borghese, who helped dispatch William Ciccone, the poor soul whom the paranoid Gotti crew mistook for an assassin, also pleaded guilty to conspiring to kill Spinelli, a murder that resulted in his promotion to “made man.” He got seven years.
More than a year after Failla and Borghese pleaded guilty to the Spinelli murder conspiracy, Joe Watts, the unmade man who was Paul’s pal, Sammy’s pal, and then Gotti’s pal, admitted taking part, too. He got six years, one less than the others because he did a little bit of secret spying for the FBI against Gotti and the others during a 13-month period in 1994-95.
In time, Watts also would be called to account for the torture murder of Ciccone. He would beat that charge, but go down for tax fraud and, in June 2002, money-laundering charges. He took a six-year plea deal as Borghese, who helped him kill Ciccone, was waiting in the wings to testify against him, after emulating Gravano and making a deal for himself.
Tommy Gambino, severed from the 1992 trial that ended with Gotti’s conviction, was found guilty when he finally went to trial, but of lesser racketeering charges. He served five years and returned to his Family and his Garment Center businesses in May of 2000.
Gotti’s 1992 codefendant, Frank LoCascio, went to prison for life, a lot of it in a prison hospital and some in solitary after authorities learned that Gotti supposedly had enlisted jailed members of a white-supremacy group to kill him. Gotti turned on LoCascio after learning that Gravano and LoCascio talked about turning on him had they won the 1992 case.
Retired consigliere Joe N. Gallo showed great staying power, until shortly after he got out of prison in June 1995. He died three months later at his home in Queens, at age 83.
Would-be adopted son and assistant press secretary Lewis Kasman served six months for lying to the Eastern District grand jury and resumed his role as Gotti’s unofficial spin doctor, especially after Gotti was diagnosed with head and neck cancer a second time.
Gotti pal Carlo Vaccarezza saw his upscale restaurant, Da Noi’s, go south very fast. With more FBI agents than customers in the place on some days, Vaccarezza went south, too, to Miami. He helped his old camera-shy acquaintance, actor Mickey Rourke, open a joint on South Beach. Before long, however, he packed that in, and was last heard scouting Chicago.
Another Gotti pal, Lisa Gastineau, became a boutique manager and did some modeling on the side. “I have great affection for him,” was all she wanted to say when contacted. “I was really disappointed to learn he was never coming home.”
On the other hand, John Gleeson—the young prosecutor when the Gotti saga began, the sage one when it ended—became a federal judge on October 24, 1994, third anniversary of his dramatic face-to-face with Gravano, the first
underboss to testify against his boss in court.
The former midshipman, Bruce Mouw—for getting Gotti and a decade’s worth of other accomplishments as boss of the Gambino squad—was given the Justice Department’s highest award for employee achievement. He helped case-agent George Gabriel and assistant U.S. attorney Laura Ward to build cases against the Gotti remnants, then retired.
Gabriel became head of a squad of Long Island-based FBI agents. Ward became a Criminal Court judge in Manhattan. Robert Morgenthau remained District Attorney of Manhattan, and the nation’s most influential local prosecutor.
The first important lawyer in John Gotti’s life, Michael Coiro, was convicted again, this time for lying to the Eastern District grand jury about his one visit to Nettie Cirelli’s place. He was released in February 1998, then moved back to Florida to resume retirement.
The most prominent lawyer in Gotti’s life, Bruce Cutler, was convicted of criminal contempt for violating an order by the 1992 Gotti trial judge against out-of-court prejudicial statements. He got three months’ home detention. A state court panel then suspended him from practicing law for three more months.
He returned with a flourish to represent “young John” Gotti in 1998. Cutler’s bald pate was glistening as he rushed into court just as a pretrial conference for Junior was about to begin. He beamed and shook hands all around, then kissed his handcuffed client on the cheek.
Another key lawyer in Gotti’s life, Gerald Shargel, was already on the case, handling the pre-trial legal arguments as well as the negotiations that led to Junior pleading guilty in 1999.
Inside the court, Cutler let Shargel handle the legal arguments. But outside, he expounded, “I came today to announce to the court and the world that Jerry and I will be representing John Gotti’s son at trial. We helped his father together, and we have a wonderful relationship. It’s great to be back in the arena.”
Cutler expounded when a reputed Gotti sketch of a lion fetched $2,500 in a Miami charity auction—a Leroy Nieman self-portrait got $700; a Muhammad Ali drawing got $600. “People love John,” Cutler said. “He did it (drew the sketch) to help needy, hungry children. And the lion. It’s one of his credos: It’s better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a lamb.”
Fifteen years after he was the star defense witness at Gotti’s 1987 trial, Matthew Traynor, who admitted lying from the witness stand, is still in prison. After five years in federal prison, he’s doing 7 to 14 years for bank robbery and 14 more for parole violation.
By contrast, two more characters from the 1987 trial, Crazy Sally Polisi and Dominick Lofaro, got probation and were released from prison that same year.
Nicholas Corozzo and Lenny DiMaria, the “other guys” in the 1987 Gotti case, fashioned plea deals to satisfy various indictments against them and are due out of prison in 2004 and 2005.
Heroin dealers Gene Gotti, John Carneglia, and Anthony Rampino fared worse. Gene and Carneglia are in federal prison until 2018. Rampino is in state prison until 2012.
After getting away with feigning insanity for three decades, Gotti nemesis Vincent “Chin” Gigante, long-time boss of the Genovese Family, was convicted of labor racketeering and put away for 12 years, thanks again in part to testimony by Gravano.
The Gigante trial was Gravano’s last trip to the witness stand for the government. It helped promote sales of his life story, which had come out a few months before. Later in 1999, however, the Arizona Republic disclosed that he was living in the Grand Canyon state, and Gravano gave its reporter some quotable words.
“I’m not running from the fucking Mafia,” he said. “I was a boxer. I know what it’s like to get hit. I know what it is to fight. You lose your fear. I could go to Montana and live 20 years in a cabin and be scared to death. Or I can live here … I choose to live here.”
At the time, Gravano ran a Phoenix construction company. He and his supposedly estranged-wife Debra also operated a Scottsdale restaurant. But these were not their most lucrative operations. On the side, they and their two adult children were also running an illegal party-drug business.
State authorities caught up with them first and later the federal government weighed in. For his part, Gravano pleaded guilty and is headed off to prison for a good long time.
Jack D’Amico, who served on a three-capo committee that helped Junior carry out his father’s wishes from prison during the mid-1990s, was indicted in the same case that led to Junior going away for six or so years. D’Amico pleaded guilty too, but only to bookmaking, and he served 17 months before getting out in September 2001.
The summer Junior and D’Amico went away, a woman who mounted an impressive Gotti fan club on the Internet and ran it for four years, called it quits and closed the site. She took down hundreds of upbeat items and photos of Gotti, Junior, Victoria, and Cutler.
In a last message to Gotti fans, Melissa (Ravenna) Angelini wrote, “Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end.”
The end for John Gotti went on a long time. The first stories hinting that the end was near appeared in the fall of 2000. In the meantime, various treatment crises prompted more stories and transfers between a prison hospital and a hospital in Springfield, Missouri. Each time, his lawyers and spokesmen kept saying what a fighter he was and how, even as they complained about this or that condition of confinement, he never complained about anything. Even if he were no longer in charge of orchestrating public opinion, how the public perceived him remained a large part of the John Gotti story.
If his Family has its way, he will be buried next to his son Frank and father John Sr., in a famous old cemetery in Queens where several infamous gangsters, including Carlo Gambino and Aniello Dellacroce, are buried.
These gangsters from Gotti’s life, and most others there, lie in crypts marked only by their names and dates of birth and death. No slogans, no last words. No use giving writers anything to work with. But Gotti leaves his warehouse of tape-recorded words, including those he employed to describe the way he believed things went in his crime Family after he went away for good.
“If I had to give a mark, a grade on how every situation was handled—the lawyers and everything else, jobs and getting jobs and working and all that—I can’t put a passing mark on one incident,” he told brother Peter in 1998, in prison, before the cancer came.
Naturally, he had his reasons why, and no one who ever knew John Gotti or came to know him would be surprised. “Why do you think this group of people fell apart without me?” he asked, before providing, as he often did, his own answer:
“Everyone became their own boss, set their own moral codes, set their own reasons, their own rhymes, and that’s the end of it … that’s the end of the ballgame.”
POSTSCRIPT
ON JUNE 10, 2002, three days after we finished this book, John Gotti died, giving us this last-second opportunity against a tight publishing deadline to make a few last comments.
We had every reason to suspect it, because we have been on the story 17 years and seen what happens in the media when a big Gotti headline comes along, but we were still amazed at the amount of coverage his death generated. Front-page stories and full-page photographs. Lengthy obituaries. Lots of essays by columnists. Much man-on-the-street. Many sidebars on this or that aspect of the man and his legacy. It went on several days, with follow-ups about disputes that erupted over shipping his body home to New York from the prison hospital where he died in Springfield, Missouri.
We didn’t measure the inches, but from the memory of our participation in that story, too, the death of Frank Sinatra—a big hero in New York who had a much longer time at the top—didn’t get near the attention Gotti’s did.
Naturally, we contributed. The New York Daily News published our obituary on Gotti and excerpts from one of our other books. The New York Post excerpted this book. The New York Times invited us onto its op-ed page. Reporters and broadcasters from Los Angeles to Auckland and New York to London called to ask for our comments.
All of it was evidence that for all the bad he did, Gotti was good on one level—as we said earlier, he lived up to our expectations of what a gangster is. The Gambino crime family is in ruins, because of him, but he looked, sounded, and acted like a gangster, and with such enthusiasm that we all became at least interested in his story, if not captivated. Our expectations come from our gangster movies, and Gotti was right off the big screen.
Ordinary people picked up on that, and used movie terms to talk about him. “He played that tough-guy role to his dying breath,” the former warden of the prison hospital where he died told the Daily News.
Meeting expectations, Gotti became part of our popular culture—he often was a case of life imitating art imitating life, but people were interested enough to pay attention. This is why the media gave us terrible new details about the suffering and indignity of his last few months of surgically imposed silence. It is why we learned he was to be buried in a crypt alongside son Frank, the boy on the minibike, in that Queens cemetery where so many gangsters lay. It is why we were told that while Roman Catholic officials would not grant his relatives’ wish for a Mass of Christian Burial, they would permit a church memorial service, but with no coffin present.
Nobody asked us, but we think his Family should have been able to say good-bye the way they wished. Death is always a sad ending, even for the villain’s family.
So long, John Gotti. You were a great story.
Gene Mustain
Jerry Capeci
June 14, 2002
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