Mob Star_ The Story of John Gotti Part 5

His family stayed behind, but his Family went along. He was accompanied by his driver, Bartholomew Borriello, and Joseph Corrao, a captain close to the late Paul Castellano. In Florida, he was spotted aboard a yacht with Ettore Zappi, a captain now based in Miami; James Failla, the captain from Eighty-sixth Street in Brooklyn who was Frank DeCicco's "rabbi," and Frank Dapolito, an official of a New York Teamsters local.

On the day Gotti departed, one of his codefendants in the federal case, Armond Dellacroce, disappeared. Armond was the son of Gotti's mentor. He was 30 years old and had dropped out of high school to emulate his father. He had pleaded guilty to racketeering after his father died late in 1985 and was on bail awaiting sentencing; he faced up to 20 years.

Maybe two decades in jail is why he failed to show for sentencing; maybe it wasn't. He had been regularly contacting the pretrial services division since the plea hearing, when his bail was set at $250,000. He was a good bail risk, his lawyer had said then, because bail would be secured by a deed to a Manhattan town house owned by his aunt and uncle. No Armond, no more town house.

"There is no question in my mind but that the moral commitment that Mr. Dellacroce has to these people is alone sufficient to ensure his presence," said defense lawyer Gerald Shargel.

Diane F. Giacalone, an a.s.sistant U.S. attorney, agreed that the bail arrangements were sufficient. Giacalone, age 36, was now steering the case toward trial after leading the three-year investigation that produced the indictment. The process had been bruising and controversial, but Giacalone was dogged and tireless. She had also attended a Catholic school in Ozone Park, Queens, and had given her life over to the pursuit of Gotti and the others.

Young Dellacroce's guilty plea was a victory for justice, she would certainly say, but also a victory for her, a scalp to silently wave at her detractors, which included other government attorneys in the courthouse and some FBI agents.

At the plea hearing, she pointed out that she had originally favored a higher bail. "Mr. Dellacroce, through his father's influence and power ... which reached throughout the United States, was capable of sustaining himself outside of this jurisdiction for a long period of time," she said. "It made possible his flight."

The death of the underboss changed her mind. Armond "no longer has the ability to call upon his father's influence and money ... his financial resources are changed and his position within the community ... has changed. [His] position ... was to some extent derivative of his father's position."

"We are surprised he did not appear," Giacalone said on March 31.

Five days later, John Gotti came back to New York on Interstate 95. The Florida sun had been soothing, and now a different kind of fireball lay just over his near horizon.

5.

BLOWN TO BITS.

FATE ROLLED JOHN GOTTI a 7-11 combination at the start of his federal trial in Brooklyn. It began on April 7 in Courtroom 11 of the United States Court House, a squat gray-white block of granite on Cadman Plaza East, near the Brooklyn Bridge.

The sudden disappearance of Armond Dellacroce had already cast a Piecyk-like shadow over the case. The truth, or Armond, might never surface, but his former codefendants were not happy that he had pleaded guilty. Armond was not scheduled to testify, but his plea would become part of the evidence against them.

Other shadows would roll in during the first week of the trial as the vexing task of finding a jury of unbiased, unafraid, and unlikely peers of John Gotti got underway.

On the trial's first day, Eugene H. Nickerson, age 67, a tall, droll, silver-haired man who looked the part of a federal judge, ordered that the names of witnesses be kept secret until they were about to testify. Diane Giacalone requested the unusual procedure and cited the 1976 murder of a witness in a state case involving the brother of a Gotti codefendant, John Carneglia, a soldier in the Bergin crew.

The victim was Albert Gelb, a court officer in Brooklyn who was shot four times a few days before Carneglia's brother, Charles, stood trial on a gun-possession charge. Gelb, who had arrest powers, had confronted Charles Carneglia in a diner after a woman companion noticed Carneglia was packing a gun.

In the current case, Gotti and the others were accused of violating a federal law making it a separate crime to commit crimes as part of an illegal enterprise-such as the Gambino Family. John Carneglia, for example, stood accused of killing Gelb to help his brother, a member of the enterprise. Charles Carneglia was indicted, too, but, like Armond Dellacroce, he was gone with the wind.

On the trial's second day, Giacalone seeded a storm by charging that twice in the past week, two men had approached a prospective witness about the Albert Gelb homicide: Dennis Quirk, president of the court officers a.s.sociation. In the first incident, two men, posing as detectives, went to Quirk's former home to ask where he now lived. In the second, which took place on the trial's first day, two men in a dark Mercedes pulled alongside Quirk's car in traffic, shouted they wanted to speak to him about the murder, and then sped off.

Ominously for the defendants, Giacalone said if anything similar happened, she would seek to revoke their bail-which meant going to jail. Bruce Cutler said that none of the defendants had contacted anyone but their lawyers. Even so, Giacalone's sensational charge led to another round of large headlines, further complicating the jury screening.

On the fourth day, the defense attorneys complained to Judge Nickerson about a "carnival atmosphere" created by the press and asked for a gag order, which they correctly expected would be denied. Cutler was particularly agitated by a Daily News Daily News editorial urging Giacalone to follow up her bail-revocation threat if any witnesses or jurors were hara.s.sed. editorial urging Giacalone to follow up her bail-revocation threat if any witnesses or jurors were hara.s.sed.

"They are making my client into a monster," Cutler said. The press had created an impression that "anyone who looks at Mr. Gotti disappears and is afraid." A "crescendo of hysteria" had sp.a.w.ned a notion "that my client is somehow a wild man."

When jury selection resumed, several potential jurors admitted they could not keep an open mind about the case. One man was excused after he admitted commenting to another, "Why did we have to get hoods?"

By week's end, the prospect of a twelve-member jury was far off and so was an early forecast the trial would last only two months. Over the weekend, the search for untainted jurors became a futile exercise and the optimistic forecast went up in smoke.

On Sat.u.r.day, John Gotti spent part of the day reviewing his gambling debts with Angelo Ruggiero. He owed money to "the tall kid," who was 6 foot 5 Joseph Corrao, the Little Italy capo; a man named "Eddie"; and men he referred to only as "Jersey," who, like his ice cream company partners, probably belonged to the DeCavalcante Family. One debt was costing him $1,000 a week in "vig"-interest.

The two men were counting money as they talked, probably the cash receipts from a sports-betting operation that they shared with Anthony Corallo, boss of the Luchese Family, according to a state Organized Crime Task Force affidavit.

They talked about who got what. They talked in terms of thousands, not dollars.

"So I got to give you forty-five and you want to give, give what's-his-name ten," Angelo said. "Ah, what's his name? Bruce Cutler?"

"That's the man," Gotti said.

"Yeah. Bruce Cutler."

As Gotti's attorney in both the Piecyk and racketeering cases, Cutler undoubtedly earned much more than that, probably in cash, the standard-and perfectly legal-way mobsters pay their bills.

Angelo suggested to his old street-gang friend that one of Gotti's debts could be forgotten-because "we pulled this deal for everybody, you know?"

"My f.u.c.kin' friends.h.i.+p is better than nothin', eh?" Gotti laughed.

The next day, April 13, Frank DeCicco's friends.h.i.+p with Gotti came to an end near his mentor James Failla's social club on Eighty-sixth Street in Brooklyn. As DeCicco sat down in the front pa.s.senger seat of a parked car, a bomb exploded beneath him.

The blast, probably triggered by remote-control, sent a black mushroom cloud upward and a flaming DeCicco outward. Some burning debris struck Frank Bellino, a Luchese Family soldier and an official of the concrete and cement worker's union, who was standing beside the car waiting for DeCicco to hand him business cards from the glove compartment. About 100 feet away, NYPD Officer Carmen Romeo forgot about the summons he was issuing and came to the aid of both men. Bellino, age 69, lived, but the underboss died at Victory Memorial Hospital.

The mangled car, a 1985 Buick registered to an official of the hotel workers' union, was parked across the street from Tommaso's Italian Restaurant, the site of the post-Sparks shuttle diplomacy among Gotti, DeCicco, and others after the December hits. DeCicco and Bellino had just left a regular Sunday meeting of Failla's crew at the Veterans and Friends Social Club.

Within hours, the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club began to fill up with men, but their information was as scanty as the early radio bulletins. No one knew who killed DeCicco, or why.

"We don't know," Angelo told an early arrival. "We've just got to get to the bottom of it, that's all."

"What a shame," the man replied, but not just because his underboss was dead. "That's the shame of it, Angelo, we don't know nothin' yet."

When Gotti arrived, someone asked, "How are ya, Bo?"

"I was doing good till a couple hours ago ... the bomb was f.u.c.kin' something ... the car was bombed like they put gasoline on it ... put a bomb under the car ... you gotta see the f.u.c.kin' car, you wouldn't believe the car."

Later that night, Kenneth McCabe and three detectives investigating the DeCicco bombing visited another Brooklyn social club where DeCicco hung out. The club on Bath Avenue had no name, but it did have ten men inside, apparently on a war-alert.

"Open the door!" shouted McCabe, who had left the NYPD for a coveted criminal investigator's job with the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan.

Through a window, Detective William Tomasulo of the Brooklyn South Task Force saw a man hurriedly load a bullet into a handgun, which he then anxiously pointed at the door.

"Police!" McCabe shouted this time. "Open up!"

All of a sudden, guns started dropping to the floor and the door to the no-name club was opened.

Inside, the detectives arrested Robert Fapiano, age 43, on a charge of illegally possessing a handgun. They also recovered three other handguns, including a .38-caliber revolver stolen in 1973 from a s.h.i.+pment at John F. Kennedy Airport, which by then had supplanted the waterfront docks as the prime place of Family pilferage. Twenty-three guns were heisted that day; in 1976, one was recovered from Peter Gotti, now occasionally one of his brother's many bodyguards.

In the 1950s, Peter had preceded younger brothers John and Gene into a street gang in which all received their criminal baptismals. But both John and Gene had preceded Peter into the Gambino Family. Peter, a former city sanitation worker and the former target of an FBI investigation into cocaine trafficking, was made after John took over.

Amid much Monday-morning speculation in the newspapers, the Gotti trial resumed in Brooklyn federal court. Hypotheses abounded; the most popular was that DeCicco was blown up as a payback by the Pope's soldiers, who believed DeCicco had helped set up Castellano at Sparks. In time, this gave way to the idea DeCicco was targeted by revenge-minded civilian friends or relatives of short-lived underboss Thomas Bilotti, acting on their own.

Many police investigators, unable to recall a Family hit in the Crime Capital in which a remote-controlled bomb was used, came to accept this notion of DeCicco's death.

Arriving at court, unlike other times, Gotti strode through the stampede of reporters without tossing off any disingenuous replies. He seemed grim and tense and was heard to complain to his attorney: "It's difficult being a gentleman around here."

Cutler asked Judge Nickerson to delay the trial, citing "a rash of publicity this morning regarding Mr. DeCicco, his body blown to bits yesterday." He said articles saying "some of Mr. Gotti's friends may have had complicity or involvement" had "broken and shattered" his client's presumption of innocence.

The judge denied Cutler's motion. At day's end, Gotti went home to Queens accompanied by several bodyguards. What he knew about DeCicco's murder was what most newspaper readers knew, which was only a dense package of details in search of a conclusion. Gotti went home weary of court and wary of war.

Enter the "Zips," a slang word for native-born Sicilians involved in crime. Ralph Mosca came back from a meeting with Gotti that night and instructed his men, including secret informer Dominick Lofaro, to contact all the friendly Zips they knew and put them on "standby." The Zips were considered willing gunmen and some cops even considered those loyal to Castellano as suspects in the DeCicco hit.

Lofaro told the state Organized Crime Task Force that Mosca was ordered by Gotti to meet the next day with two officials of an asphalt worker's union, which employed many muscular Zips. Lofaro also said that Gotti had issued instructions for all Gambino soldiers to attend DeCicco's wake, held over two days at a funeral home on Eighty-sixth Street, near the two-foot hole in the pavement and single black shoe left by the April 13 bomb.

In a driving rain on April 15, about 300 men made their way to the wake. The New York Times The New York Times had published a story that morning by Selwyn Raab saying Gotti may have been targeted for a.s.sa.s.sination due to internal Family strife and unhappiness over his rule and personal demeanor. Unidentified sources said some Family men did not like his "Hollywood-style" clothes. had published a story that morning by Selwyn Raab saying Gotti may have been targeted for a.s.sa.s.sination due to internal Family strife and unhappiness over his rule and personal demeanor. Unidentified sources said some Family men did not like his "Hollywood-style" clothes.

"One thing mob bosses don't like is scrutiny and notoriety," added an anonymous federal investigator. "Because of his legal problems, Gotti seems to be on television every night, strutting around the courthouse and relis.h.i.+ng it."

Though Gotti may have been wondering about all that as well, he was not ducking public appearances, or dressing down. Clad in another of his many hand-tailored double-breasted suits, he arrived at DeCicco's wake in his new Mercedes, which had tinted windows and wipers for the headlights. Naturally, there was a peeping crowd of reporters and investigators, including Kenneth McCabe and Detective John Gurnee, both of whom had spied on Gotti during the post-Sparks shakeout, when he began to receive boss-like kisses and hugs.

Now, "there was a definite increase in the amount of respect shown John," McCabe said later, "as he entered the funeral home, [as he left] the funeral home, people holding umbrellas for him, people stepping out of the way, people kissing him."

"It appeared to me that he was accorded more respect than he was on Christmas Eve," Detective Gurnee added.

Outside the wake, Gurnee said Gotti "had very, very hushed conversations" with several captains. At one point, he took a ride with Castellano loyalist Thomas Gambino, the owner of many Manhattan garment district trucking firms and a son of the Family patriarch Carlo Gambino. Gotti and Gambino returned 40 minutes later.

At the wake, McCabe also saw Bruce Cutler and Barry Slotnick, then law partners and an odd couple. Slotnick's courtroom style was the opposite of Cutler's, though historically as successful. He was cunning, too, but in a softer way. He also was a physical opposite; he was tall and slim, and sported a salt-and-pepper beard.

Slotnick's public profile then was much higher than Cutler's. He had represented many organized crime leaders and several major politicians, and was then defending Bernhard Goetz, the seemingly mild-mannered man whose bullet-filled meeting with four black teenagers in a subway car in December 1984 was worldwide news.

Dodging raindrops, Cutler, Slotnick, and all the other mourners departed the wake of the abruptly absent Frank DeCicco, who was buried later in the week in a cemetery on Staten Island, the same burial ground where the Pope also lay.

Extensive coverage of the wake once again hampered jury selection in Brooklyn, which resumed the next morning. Not much was accomplished, although Judge Nickerson warned Cutler and Gotti to stop laughing at the comments of potential jurors.

The warnings came after Nickerson asked one candidate whether he had read anything about a Mr. Castellano."

"You know, I read the names," the man replied. "They don't stick with me. You know, it is not something I would retain in my head."

The sounds of incredulous laughter reached Nickerson, who ordered Cutler to a sidebar.

"I get the distinct impression that you and Mr. Gotti are trying to intimidate these jurors by the way you are laughing," the judge said.

Cutler denied it was so, but Nickerson persisted.

"You keep a poker face. You tell your client to do that."

Cutler denied it again.

"It certainly was intimidating, and I took it as such," said the judge.

The laughter was a tonic for the last few days. The murder of DeCicco preyed on Gotti's mind. At night, encamped with soldiers in the fortress next to the Nice N EZ Auto School, he tried to figure it out, and what he would do if he had a clue.

For instance, a few hours after he was rebuked by the judge, the boss and his driver, Bobby Borriello, were taped discussing an article in the Staten Island Advance. Staten Island Advance. Before the bombing, the newspaper received, but did not publish, a letter predicting DeCicco's death. The anonymous letter writer said a revengeful relative was recruiting an inmate on Rikers Island, a city-run prison, to carry out a contract on the life of DeCicco. Before the bombing, the newspaper received, but did not publish, a letter predicting DeCicco's death. The anonymous letter writer said a revengeful relative was recruiting an inmate on Rikers Island, a city-run prison, to carry out a contract on the life of DeCicco.

Gotti speculated that the bombing might not have been the work of a relative, but "a crackpot"-after all, "it happens."

"It can't be a crackpot," Borriello said.

"Well ... so we gotta put some investigation on it right away," Gotti said.

Borriello did not think this would be so easy. After all, Rikers Island had about 7,000 inmates confined to overcrowded cells in the middle of the East River.

"No, not that," Gotti said impatiently, before explaining what he meant: "We don't take the guys who did this, we take the guys that sent them ... you gotta get the guys who're paying them. Know what I'm saying?"

Two days later, Gotti discussed the DeCicco hit with his brother Gene, five years younger. The brothers were similar, though Gene had a little less of all of John's traits, good and bad. It was a reason they quarreled a lot, but not now.

"Isn't it a shame that we lost him?" Gene said. "Isn't it a shame?"

John agreed that it was and the two brothers speculated about the possible culprits.

"Them kids ain't got the smarts for that," Gene said about one unidentified group. John said the same about another unspecified party, before wondering: "You know who it might be? That Irish mob."

Gotti was referring to the Westies, a notorious gang of Irish-American thugs from the hardscrabble h.e.l.l's Kitchen area on the West Side of Manhattan. In the past, some Westies had been employed by Paul Castellano to kill people; in the near future, Kevin Kelly, a 31-year-old Westie, would be indicted in the shooting of the carpenters' union official Gotti had complained about. Presently, they were the target of many investigations and trials. Their number-two man had "rolled over" and become a federal witness.

In time, it became clear that only those responsible knew who blew up DeCicco; for the second time in five months, talk of war subsided. And so the Zips went back to the asphalt trucks and the Westies went into hiding or jail. The specter of jail soon surpa.s.sed DeCicco in the worry department of John Gotti's mind.

6.

WE'RE READY FOR FREDDY EUGENE H. NICKERSON was an extremely patient judge, and determined to move forward in the Gotti trial despite all of the ex-parte ex-parte distractions. distractions.

For two weeks after the DeCicco murder, he kept trying to screen candidates-more than 200-for the juror pool. At one point, he had to take nine steps backward and eliminate those who admitted talking about the case among themselves. Finally, on April 28, citing all the contaminating publicity, he threw in the gavel and delayed the trial until August, when he said he would adopt a more elaborate screening process and consider seating jurors whose ident.i.ties would be kept secret.

"I'll get banged around some more with this," Gotti said afterward.