by Gene Mustain
The next day he woke up still drunk. He telephoned Frank, told him about the call to Nino’s house, and said he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “Me and Artie have got to go down there before he kills someone, maybe himself,” Frank told Walter.
Before departing, they asked the marshals in Birmingham to check on him. The marshals ducked when the wild-looking veteran opened the door with the M-16 across his chest. They stayed with him until Frank and Artie arrived, then reported his behavior to their bosses in Washington. Dominick was then taken out of Birmingham to a meeting with marshal’s service brass in the District of Columbia. They wanted to boot him out of the program and let him fend for himself, but Walter intervened and a three-week-long tussle between federal agencies began. Dominick was stashed in a ghetto hideout in Maryland while Walter went to bat for him.
During that time he had many heart-to-hearts with his task force friends, who realized that losing Denise was not the only trouble he was having. The closer the trial got, the more guilty he was feeling about testifying. “I know I said I would do this, but do you know how hard it is going to be, getting up on that stand?” he said to Frank.
“Of course I do, but it’s the right thing,” Frank said.
“I mean, in ‘that life,’ it is the worst thing, being a rat.”
“Just think of the people you’re getting off the streets. You should get a fuckin’ public service medal.”
“Yeah, but the bottom line is, I have to look at myself as a stoolpigeon.”
“I’m tired of hearing that crap! You’re not Nino’s kid anymore. Look at what living by the code got ya. The code’s a bunch of bullshit.”
At the end of the three weeks, after Walter won the fight with the marshal’s service and got him a new placement in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Dominick seemed to gain some strength. He made a promise to the task force and to himself: “This thing is not going to beat me. I’m fine now. I was just blowing out some bad feelings. I am not going to let this beat me.”
In Albuquerque, at a health club, he met an outgoing woman who ran a tanning salon. She was hip, funny, and good-hearted. In a few weeks, they became a couple. He began to feel even better—though the fright and torment of going to court soon was never far away.
* * *
The witnesses in the case—and without electronic surveillance and murder weapons, it was basically a witness case—drove the task force crazy. Altogether, there were twenty-two cooperating witnesses, but the big three—Dominick, Freddy, and Vito—were the most troublesome.
The problem with Vito was his incessant demands for favors and perks, such as a barber’s chair for his prison cell. Shortly before he was to testify, he made another demand: He mailed the task force a newspaper clipping about cosmetic surgery, across which he had written: “I want to get this done or else I won’t testify. This is the answer to my problems.”
Once he was in New York for the trial, the task force decided to humor him—and play a trick. Artie made an appointment for Vito with one of the city’s top plastic surgeons, but asked the doctor to find some way to discourage the patient from going through with cosmetic surgery; the bill would look pretty silly on Artie’s FBI credit card. The doctor put Vito in a chair and began drawing lines across his face with a grease pencil.
“By the way, when was your blood pressure last checked?”
“Don’t know, long time probably.”
The doctor checked Vito’s blood pressure. “Uh-oh, it’s off the scale. Mr. Arena, I wouldn’t operate on you if you were dying. You’re going to have to lose a hundred pounds first.”
Looking the same as in crew days, Vito lumbered into court on October 31, 1985, a month into the trial, and promised to tell the jury, which was seated anonymously, the whole truth and nothing but. In his opening argument, Walter had told the jury: “This is a case about murder, money, and stolen cars. It is a case about a large criminal organization which stole hundreds of cars from the streets of New York, chopped them into small parts for sale, sold them after changing their identification numbers, at great profit, and murdered those that got in the way of the business venture.”
The jurors had already heard from Matty Rega and Canarsie car thieves Willie Kampf and Joseph Bennett. They had not heard the word “Mafia” or words like boss, underboss, capo, and the like. Judge Duffy had banished them from the courtroom; words like “business venture,” “president,” and “manager” were being used.
Spectators at the trial, including all the hometown press plus reporters from around the country and abroad, had already noticed how during breaks Paul and Nino never chatted with the younger defendants like Henry and Joey and Anthony, all neatly shorn and dressed each day in a different and fine suit. During longer breaks, the younger men went into the hallways to smoke Marlboros and chat with wives, girlfriends, and family members. In some spectators’ minds, the defendants had already acquired the sympathy a crowd reserves for underdogs; people hate criminals until the criminal comes to court with a history, a pretty wife, and a likable lawyer.
The case was not going well for Walter; his concentration had been sapped by his behind-the-scenes witness problems and his trial strategy torn asunder by Judge Duffy’s last-minute decision to split the case up. Judge Duffy had bluntly questioned Walter’s preparation and some of his evidence; he had even threatened to declare a mistrial if Walter failed, as he had once already, to promptly turn over material to which the defense was entitled under legal rules.
The judge, who liked to wisecrack with the lawyers, had described some early testimony as having the effect of a sleeping pill, but everyone woke up when Vito began testifying—and said Roy DeMeo had sent out for pizza and hot dogs as Ronald Falcaro and Khaled Daoud were dismembered in Freddy’s garage. He also was the first witness to name Paul Castellano as overall boss of the “organization” that formerly employed him.
In cross-examination, the defense lawyers played to Vito’s vanity and had a field day. Vito said he demanded so much from the government, tapes, tennis shoes, a barber chair, extra food, because he was the case’s “star witness”; he was, he boasted, in discussions with an agent about selling rights to his story, and wanted Tom Selleck to star as him. He turned sour, however, when Nino’s lawyer asked about sexually explicit photographs of Joey Lee and him that the NYPD seized in 1981 when they were arrested in a stolen car; many other times, he lost his temper as the lawyers badgered and baited him.
By the time Vito left the stand, it was hard to say whether he helped or hurt the case. The task force was convinced he told the truth, but feared the jury might believe he exaggerated—to up the price of his movie rights.
On December 4, that morning’s New York Times included a curtain-raiser about the scheduled appearance that day of the case’s real star witness. The article described how “Mr. Montiglio” was a Vietnam veteran, loanshark collector, and drug dealer who would testify that Paul Castellano was head of the car-theft conspiracy and Anthony Gaggi was second-in-command.
While the city’s trial-watchers read the story over morning coffee, Mr. Montiglio was wringing his hands and trying to stay calm in a bunkerlike compound beneath the courthouse where protected witnesses were housed between appearances on the stand. He was wearing Nino-style tinted eyeglasses, having recently become slightly nearsighted. Frank Pergola told him the glasses made him appear slinky, but he said it was the only pair he had. In truth, he did not need them except for driving, but they made it harder for people to see the anxiety in his eyes.
As he was led from the bunker and up to a waiting room next to the courtroom, he tried to get to another plane of consciousness, a zone of detachment from the whirl of the moment. At a time like this in Vietnam, he would have started chanting about being a lion and fox, but that mantra had grown hollow. Now, he thought of the simple vow he made two months before—“I am not going to let this beat me”—and silently recited it right on up to the time a marshal came in from the courtroom because
Walter had just said, “The government calls Dominick Montiglio.”
He followed the marshal through the door to the courtroom and for the first time in six years saw Nino and Paul, sitting closest to the door like stone idols, and then Joey and Anthony, and, behind them with a killing smirk on his face, Henry Borelli. He looked beyond to the crowded spectator section, and as he sat down in the witness chair, he saw Rose Gaggi, his uncle Roy Gaggi, and a dozen other relatives, including the “captain”—his iron-willed, eighty-seven-year-old grandmother Mary, who had come to court on crutches. I am not going to let this beat me.
Haltingly at first, but then more smoothly as Walter moved him along, Dominick told his story. Nino took “stacks of bills” to Paul every Sunday night, when both were in town. He himself had taken car money from Roy directly to “Mr. Castellano.” The witness tried to stay focused on Walter’s questions, but could not avoid the stares that came from all directions—particularly from Nino, who, in an amusing role reversal, was the one wearing untinted eyeglasses, no doubt on his lawyer’s advice.
“Always look a man in the eyes,” Nino had always said, “the eyes don’t lie.” So, as he grew more confident and willful, Dominick stared right into Nino’s. The kid forced to resign the class presidency because Nino said it was like being a rat came home to roost.
The next day, when it came time for a break, Judge Duffy excused the jury, then the witness. As Dominick was led off the stand and past the defendants’ table, a spiteful inspiration overcame him; remembering how Nino once made fun of him when he returned to the Veterans and Friends social club with his tail figuratively between his legs, he said with vicious delight: “Hey, Nino, Lassie came home.”
“Knock it off, Dominick,” a marshal said, leading him away.
He never spoke to Uncle Nino again, but for a parting comment, his last five words carried a number of messages. It was, however, too early to rub his testimony in Nino’s face, not with cross-examination still to come. Paul’s attorney, James La Rossa, threw him a curve right off the bat by producing some handwritten notes Dominick had made nearly a year ago—a list of points he remembered from a conversation with Walter about how to conduct himself on the stand. The notes could have come from only one source; in her hurt, Denise had found a way to lash back.
La Rossa used the notes to imply that Dominick was acting. His portrayal of the witness in place, La Rossa moved on to the first sworn statement Dominick had given the grand jury—the one in which he held back on Nino and Paul—and got him to admit he had committed perjury.
Pounding away at how the most damaging information against Paul came in the last of many task force debriefs, La Rossa then made it seem the witness invented a story to bail the government out of a jam. Dominick squirmed and became nervous again. He had told the truth in his trial testimony, but began feeling like a liar, and looking like one to many spectators. La Rossa then got him to agree again that he had committed another perjury.
Later, an exasperated Walter told him: “What were you doing! Do you know what perjury means?”
“Not telling the truth.”
“It’s giving a willful and deliberately false statement. You didn’t do that with Paul and the money! You just didn’t say anything because you weren’t asked the right question!”
The damage was done, however, and Paul left the courthouse that day feeling more confident about the car case than Nino did. Paul was a lot more worried about another case on the horizon—one in which he stood indicted with other bosses as a member of the Commission, the Mafia board of directors. He had been taped talking about the Commission on the listening device the FBI had planted in his house.
He was also troubled by an ongoing dispute with the Manhattan faction of the family—leaderless the last two weeks because underboss Aniello Dellacroce had died of old age and disease. He was thinking of making Thomas Bilotti—the capo who had replaced Nino in Paul’s deepest affections—the new underboss; he was going to get rid of the family’s factional structure too. Like everyone else, the Manhattan wing would have to report to him through Bilotti.
He was particularly perturbed at Dellacroce’s protégé, John Gotti. The FBI’s investigation of Gotti’s crew—the one that had allowed the Gambino squad to assign only Artie and then Marilyn Lucht to the task force—had yielded indictments of Gotti’s brother Gene and other top crew members on charges of dealing heroin—a violation of Paul’s rules. Paul had demanded copies of transcripts of tape-recorded evidence in that case that had been turned over to the defense; until he died, Dellacroce, on behalf of Gotti, had put Paul off. Gotti had enough troubles. The Eastern District had brought a RICO case against him, and he was also facing minor assault charges in Queens.
When a two-week holiday recess in the car case came, Paul focused on his family’s disarray. On December 16, 1985, he and Bilotti drove to a steakhouse in Manhattan for a scheduled sit-down with several crew leaders. As they stepped out of Bilotti’s Lincoln on Forty-sixth Street in congested midtown, several men in trench coats and fur hats came up and shot them dead.
CHAPTER 27
Nine South
Dominick learned about the murders of Paul and Bilotti the day after he returned to Albuquerque for a reunion with the new woman in his life. For several hours he paced the apartment they now shared, feeling soiled but also victorious about his testimony and wondering if it provoked the crime; a couple of newspaper reporters had opined that despite La Rossa’s cross-examination, his testimony had sunk Paul, and on national television newscasts, it also was being theorized that Paul was killed because some in the Gambino family feared he might cut a deal with the government.
In reality, Paul and Bilotti were simply victims of a power struggle akin to the one that resulted in Carlo Gambino ascending to the family throne in 1957. The murders generated such a media firestorm that the defense lawyers asked for a mistrial in the car case, which was renamed U.S. v. Gaggi; Judge Duffy denied the motion. When questioned, the jurors said they could still be fair toward the remaining defendants.
Roman Catholic Church officials in New York denied Paul a mass of Christian burial. Only personal-family members attended his funeral, a sure sign of betrayal and that his business family was falling in line behind a new leader—John Gotti. Unlike the statelike sendoff for Carlo, Paul was buried quietly near his childhood home, in Gravesend, the same Brooklyn neighborhood where Richie DiNome had come to his end.
After Gotti was publicly identified as the new boss, most media stopped covering the car case on a daily basis; most reporters never returned. They moved on to courthouses in Queens and Brooklyn where the new boss, a former hijacker with an antiheroic flair for the spotlight, was a defendant in two cases. Eventually, he won both, then another, and became the country’s most infamous celebrity gangster.
U.S. v. Gaggi was far from over, however. The main business left was Freddy DiNome’s testimony. The woman who had joined him in the program, his first wife Peggy, was glad to see him leave San Antonio for New York. During the Christmas holidays, Freddy had reverted to his abusive way with women and had hit her after they fought over her spending some of his once-again few dollars, talking long-distance to friends back home.
On the witness stand, however, Freddy came across as a docile and humble man and someone plainly uncomfortable testifying. Because he could not read, he also was a hard person to cross-examine. Defense lawyers were denied a favorite tactic—asking a witness to read from a grand jury document or other statement and contradict what he had just testified to. He was a good witness for Walter, but did say that Joey and Anthony, apart from the Falcaro-Daoud murders, had nothing to do with the Kuwait operation, the heart of the stolen-car conspiracy.
With some newspaper clippings about his testimony and Paul’s murder under his arm, Freddy went back to San Antonio—to an empty house in Emerald Valley. Peggy, angry because Freddy hit her, had packed her bags and gone to New York. Freddy went into another funk; he began drinking a
nd using drugs with his motley young friends at the Kettle, the forlorn pancake house that was his Gemini Lounge-type hangout. He told them his wife had left him; he did not say why.
One night he made a drunken pass at Judy Totter, a Kettle waitress. “Why don’t I pick you up after you get off?”
“I can’t go out with you! I’m married!”
“No problem. I’m a hit man—I’ll wipe him out.”
“Get out of here.”
“I’m a hit man. I’ll kill him.”
Totter told other regulars that Freddy was getting strange.
Late in January 1986, he invited another Kettle regular to live with him in Emerald Valley. It was like taking in a stray cat: Jack Knight was thirty-three years old, unemployed, recently divorced, and had been living in his broken-down Chevrolet Vega.
Knight’s presence in the house did not lift Freddy’s depression. He telephoned Peggy at a sister’s house in New York twice a day, but she did not want to live with his temper again. He told Knight all about his past as the two-year anniversary of brother Richie’s murder came on February 4. The Kettle was no escape from his gathering gloom; the first selection on its jukebox was a Merle Haggard song called, “I Don’t Have Any Love Around.” As part of its humdrum decor, the Kettle also featured a caricature of a sad-eyed fool saying, “I’m pretty good at most things, but being alone in San Antonio isn’t one of them.”
In New York, aware of Freddy’s fragile mood, Kenny, Artie, and Marilyn asked Peggy to stay in a hotel a few days and talk the matter through with them. They needed Freddy, like Dominick and Vito, for further trials. Peggy said she might try a week-long stay with Freddy, but wanted to think some more.
Kenny and Artie flew to San Antonio to massage Freddy. He met them at the airport and drove them to the Davy Crockett Hotel, where they chatted in the lobby. They noticed his eyes appeared glazed, like he was under the influence of some drug. “We saw Peggy yesterday,” Artie said. “She said she’ll come out next week, stay a week and see how it goes. If you play your cards right, and have a little patience, it might work out.”