Mob Star_ The Story of John Gotti Part 17

"It's misdemeanors and stuff and fines. We're going to take the f.u.c.king thing and forget about it."

As it turned out, Angelo and Gotti were able to forget about being arrested themselves; and for a brief while, Gotti forgot about gambling. He stopped after Frank Guidici, who was suspected of running the Bergin bookmaking operation for John, Gene, and Angelo, complained he wasn't making any money because he had to cover John's personal losses with other bookmakers.

"He thinks he's got to go on welfare," John griped to Angelo.

Angelo said he would pacify Guidici by putting him on the payroll of Mercury Pattern Service, run by Marty and Tommy, who were still sending "shirts" to Angelo. The firm now also employed Angelo-or so its books might say-and soon Marty would even solicit more shylock customers/victims for him.

"I'll send him some place where [Guidici] can make a few hundred a week," Angelo added. "I make five hundred dollars a week myself."

Gotti laid off the action, at least through the 1981 Super Bowl on January 24. This surprised Johnny Boy-watchers like Neil Dellacroce, who was so informed when Angelo telephoned him to talk about their bets.

"Johnny's the only one that didn't bet," Angelo said. "He gave up betting. He's just going to watch."

"Who?" Neil asked. "Johnny?"

"Yeah."

"No kiddin'."

A few months after Angelo's phones were tapped, Diane Giacalone learned, unofficially, about the FBI-Strike Force wiretaps. In the world of agents and cops chasing the same suspects, especially among the fraternity of organized-crime experts, secrets are difficult to keep, despite official policy.

Although the wiretaps weren't hers, Giacalone decided to try to use them in her effort to link Dellacroce and Gotti to the IBI armored-car robberies. She would "tickle the wire"-prompt more conversation on the tapped phones-by issuing a grand jury subpoena for John Carneglia, the man Angelo sponsored into the Family. Two IBI robbers, Andrew Curro and Peter Zuccaro, were thought to have stolen cars for Fountain Auto Sales, a used-car lot and sc.r.a.p-metal business run by Carneglia, whose rap sheet included several arrests for car theft and related crimes.

If the tickling turned up indiscreet talking about the cash disburs.e.m.e.nts of the armored-car jobs, the FBI agents monitoring the wiretaps would have to inform the property-crimes specialists working for Giacalone.

A subpoena commanding him to testify before an Eastern District grand jury under Giacalone's control was served on John Carneglia early on February 8.

"Two hard-ons just left here, gave me a subpoena," Carneglia told Angelo in a call a few minutes later.

"For what?"

"I don't know, something to do with ... that kid Andrew [Curro], or some s.h.i.t."

Crazy Sally Polisi would later say that Carneglia offered to hook him up with Curro and Zuccaro so they could steal cars for him, which he could then sell to Carneglia. Now, however, Carneglia told Angelo that he told the agents he had nothing to do with Curro and Zuccaro.

"These kids are junkie motherf.u.c.kin' kids half my age," he quoted himself.

Carneglia said the agents replied they knew he didn't and the subpoena was "bulls.h.i.t," but a "lady prosecutor" had insisted.

"What's her name?" Angelo asked.

Carneglia didn't remember offhand, but he had seen it on the subpoena, which was signed by a "real, real Italian lady."

Charles Carneglia also got a subpoena. Crazy Sally Polisi would testify later that Charles told him "we whacked out" a court officer-a reference to Albert Gelb, who was to testify against Charles in a gun-possession case. James Cardinali would testify that John Carneglia told him-as they talked about what they would do if a cop ever happened on a crime-in-progress-that he had "whacked" a court officer.

According to court papers, on the night Gelb arrested Charles Carneglia for carrying a weapon, Carneglia threatened to kill him. Over the next thirteen months, Gelb, who had won three medals for heroic off-duty actions, received many threats. He became "very fearful of testifying" but decided to go ahead.

Gelb, age 25, was shot dead in Queens early one morning a few days before the trial began. A man in a white car followed Gelb home from his job in Brooklyn Night Court, cut off Gelb's car, jumped out, and fired four times through the windshield.

If Giacalone hoped remembrances of Gelb would turn up on Angelo's tickled wire, she was disappointed.

Angelo and John Carneglia did talk several more times about the subpoena, but not incriminatingly. Angelo advised Carneglia that all he had to do was take the Fifth Amendment-refuse to answer any questions-if the real Italian lady didn't give him immunity.

A grant of immunity, Angelo correctly told Carneglia, would have to come from Washington.

"Takes seven to eight weeks to get it," Angelo said.

"Yeah?"

"They can get it in three weeks if they want."

"Oh ...?"

"Listen, the fastest they can get it is two weeks."

"No."

"They could have it waitin' for you, don't get me wrong."

Without immunity, Carneglia appeared before the grand jury on February 17.

"How'd you make out?" Angelo asked.

"Yeah, good, Fifth Amendment, that was it, no nothing, no immunity ... two seconds I was in and out."

James Cardinali got out of prison a few days after Carneglia got out of the grand jury. Police in Brooklyn considered him a suspect in the murder of Michael Castigliola, the man who told John Gotti that Jamesy was selling drugs. A witness to the murder, Jamesy's 70-year-old friend, Tommie LaRuffa, now went up in flames with his house. Jamesy said he believes he knows who torched Tommie and he wasn't him.

Under his new parole terms, Jamesy wasn't supposed to be seen with John Gotti, so he avoided the Bergin and hung out at a small storefront in Brooklyn that Willie Boy Johnson used as the base of a small bookmaking operation.

After a few months, Willie Boy told him that Gotti was wondering why Jamesy wasn't around. "You never go over there. Just go over there and show your face."

Jamesy went, but had only a h.e.l.lo-good-bye conversation with Gotti, who had people waiting in the Our Friends Social Club. A few weeks later, he saw him again, long enough for Gotti to say one of his former drivers, Richard Gomes, had the same parole terms as Cardinali, but occasionally came by anyway.

In fact, two months earlier Gomes had been arrested by FBI agents who found seven-and-a-half kilos of hashish hidden in the closet of a house in Providence, Rhode Island, where he was apprehended.

Indirectly, Jamesy said, he ran at least one more errand for Gotti. He and others brutally beat the owner of a Staten Island bodega-a Hispanic grocery-who was suspected of running a numbers operation in territory that Gambino captain Joseph LaForte considered his.

Jamesy said he got the a.s.signment in a Toys--Us parking lot from Willie Boy, who said LaForte had taken the problem to Dellacroce, who pa.s.sed it along to Gotti, who gave it to Angelo, who handed it over to him, Willie Boy.

"Give him a good beating, [but] make sure you don't kill him," said Willie Boy. After all, he added, the bodega owner "was warned to stop."

As Willie Boy watched from a car, the attackers hid in a van until the bodega owner, who had a limp right arm from childhood polio, emerged.

"We went to work on him with sticks and hammers," Jamesy said. "I thought he was dead."

Antonio Collado was unconscious for 28 days. As he blacked out, he dropped a bag containing about $8,000 cash, the day's receipts. Jamesy said the muggers didn't take it, but somebody did-for good.

Years later, Collado said a man who worked for the bodega's former owner had taken a few bets in the store and outside in the parking lot, but was not employed by him. He recalled that prior to the beating two men appeared in his store and demanded that he turn his numbers operation over to them.

"But I said I was no knowing about that thing. That was the other people."

Willie Boy later discussed the beating with Jamesy. "You did great. Everybody knows about it. Neil and Johnny said if you get arrested, everything will be taken care of. This was a personal favor. But you did get a little carried away."

Within days, Neil Dellacroce's son Armond introduced Cardinali to Buddy LaForte, son of the capo for whom he had beat up a polio victim. They met at the San Gennaro feast in Little Italy, where Jamesy had a $100-a-night job as a security man. The feast honors a bishop of Naples martyred by Romans.

"Here is James," Armond said to LaForte. "He did that thing in Staten Island."

"Thank you very much. I appreciate it."

Jamesy did not appreciate Special Agent Paul Hayes, whose testimony had sent him back to prison for 9 months. And when Hayes arranged a visit, Jamesy, who had forsaken cocaine for heroin, decided he would kill him.

"I was going to shoot him for lying at my parole hearing and causing my mother, who was on chemotherapy and dying, to make a trip to Sing Sing in bad weather," Jamesy said.

But on September 30, 1982, Agent Hayes, for the first time, arrived with another agent from Bruce Mouw's Gambino squad and Jamesy could not lure them out of their car to a building where he planned to shoot them. He tried to entice them with a heroin dealer he could "give" them.

In a recorded conversation, Jamesy told the agents he had spent $40,000 on heroin-"I need money, I need drugs"-and had "a n.i.g.g.e.r and a house with one kilo of pure" to offer.

The agents, trolling for bigger fish, were unmoved.

"I could fill up this back seat with heroin," Jamesy said.

"What if it leads me to Johnny Gotti?" Agent Hayes said.

Jamesy wasn't suspicious like Source BQ. He told Hayes that drugs would never lead to John Gotti. Never.

"If you're not talking about Johnny," Agent Hayes said, I'm not talking to you."

Because Jamesy wasn't hanging with Gotti out of parole paranoia, it fell to Willie Boy to offer a little G.o.dfatherly advice now and then.

"Everybody knows your business. You are killing drug dealers," Willie Boy said one day as they drove along an Ozone Park street in Willie's car.

Jamesy said he couldn't deny it.

"Leaving guys in the street. I am not saying that you are wrong."

Jamesy replied that he had to make money somehow.

"I am not going to tell you how to make your money, but you've got to be more secretive."

As to secrecy, Willie Boy cited the example of Anthony Plate. This was the Florida loan shark who was indicted with Dellacroce and who then vanished forever about the time John, Willie Boy, and several newly tanned crew members returned to the club after being away several days. Plate's disappearance had helped Dellacroce get a hung jury.

"You did that?" Jamesy asked.

"Yes."

During the time Angelo was advising John Carneglia to take the Fifth Amendment, he also was advising others on legal matters.

One recipient of Angelo's wisdom was his son John, who was charged with attempted murder after a fight with an unidentified person. Another was Michael Paradiso, a Gambino capo from Brooklyn, who was trying to withdraw a guilty plea.

Paradiso had pleaded guilty in another undercover weapons-buy set up by Diane Giacalone's new informer, Kenneth O'Donnell. He had drafted his own motion to retract the plea, and called Angelo seeking a lawyer to "read it" in court.

"Any lawyer," Paradiso said. "I could use a f.u.c.king twenty-two cent lawyer" because "he don't have to do the work 'cause it's all done."

"Yeah, but you don't want to get a f.u.c.kin' imbecile to do it either."

"No, but in other words, a guy that we trust, that's all, like ... Marty Light."

Marty Light, a former a.s.sistant D.A. in Brooklyn, was a childhood friend of many of the Family men he later represented in private practice. In 1984, after 15 years of trying to keep mobsters out of jail, Light was sentenced to 15 years in prison on a heroin-trafficking conviction. He later testified before the President's Commission on Organized Crime about "doing the right thing" as a "mob lawyer."

The right things included bribing cops and judges, suborning perjury, obtaining secret doc.u.ments, intimidating witnesses, and, especially, conducting cases according to the wishes of Family leaders rather than the client's.

"It's always the Family comes first," Light said. "What's for the best of the Family is what counts."

Well, not always, Light added. The anti-drug-dealing policy adopted by the Families was routinely violated by "very important members" and "certain crews" searching for scores to replace the ones-such as hijacking, counterfeiting, and other kinds of fraud-that society had gotten better at preventing.

Q.: Why was it violated?A.: Why? Because it was too profitable ... and the easiest thing for them to do was to deal with drugs.

19.

BABANIA MADNESS.

I think this drug business will destroy us in the years to come.

-Don Corleone, 1948, in The G.o.dfather

IN LATE FEBRUARY 1982, the FBI-Strike Force team began to strongly suspect that John and Gene Gotti, Angelo Ruggiero, and John Carneglia were dealing drugs on a major-league level.

Their suspicions were based more on physical surveillance and informant reports than wiretapped conversations. Over a few days, FBI agents spotted a known drug dealer leaving Angelo's house and placing a package in the trunk of his car; saw Angelo and Carneglia visiting three known drug dealers in New Jersey; and spied Angelo as he entered a known drugcutting den in Queens.

Agents didn't see a transaction between Carneglia and Crazy Sally Polisi that Polisi later said went down about the same time. Though Polisi had become a big drug dealer, this deal involved real estate. He sold two buildings to Carneglia for $150,000. The buyer a.s.sumed a mortgage and gave cash for the equity value-about $90,000, all in twenty-dollar bills, all in a shopping bag.