AT AN UNGODLY HOUR at some unbugged location on January 16, 1986, John Joseph Gotti Jr., at the comparatively young age of 45, was officially selected as boss of the Gambino Family, the largest, most powerful organized crime group in America.
As expected, Frank DeCicco was confirmed as underboss and “for now” Joe N. Gallo remained counselor, according to Ralph Mosca, who attended the swearing-in ceremony and immediately informed Dominick Lofaro and other Mosca crew members.
DeCicco, who held a no-show International Brotherhood of Teamsters job, was given his own squad, the crew of the late Thomas Bilotti, and Angelo Ruggiero took over Gotti’s Bergin Hunt and Fish crew, which, besides Gene Gotti, included Peter and Richard Gotti. Peter was a year older than John, Richard two years younger. They had minor criminal records, but Gene—in addition to the heroin case with Angelo—was a defendant with John in the Brooklyn racketeering case.
After a meeting, Angelo accompanied Gotti back to the club. Angelo had come down a long dirty road with Gotti, a road with many bodies alongside it. They had suffered similar personal tragedies. Angelo relished this triumphant moment and felt partly responsible—he had served Gotti dishonorably well.
“Meet your new boss,” Angelo beamed to crew members as he and John walked into the Bergin.
“It’s gonna be nice, you watch,” Gotti told the men.
His election had as much suspense as a meeting of the electoral college an hour after the polls close. The fact that Gotti was under indictment made no difference. The fact that he could be sent away for the rest of his life made no difference. The only thing that made a difference was him, John Gotti—he had measured the odds, put all his chips on the table, and busted the house.
Almost everyone had already forgotten about another legal detail nagging the boss, whose victory was celebrated by the purchase of a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz SEL.
He also was under indictment in a state case, accused of assault and theft—the embarrassing result of a temperamental scuffle with a refrigerator mechanic over a double-parked car in Queens in 1984. Gotti was accused of slapping the man; an associate of Gotti’s was accused of taking $325 from the man’s shirt pocket—out of spite, not larceny, but it read like theft by both in the newspapers, which made it acutely embarrassing.
“The crime is beneath him,” his attorney would point out.
Except for the unseemliness of the idea that he had mugged a mechanic, the case was a nuisance to Gotti, compared to the federal case. The state trial was set for March, but he believed it could be handled. Somehow.
The day after his inauguration, Gotti griped about the miserliness of the old boss. Theoretically, a boss gets a cut of the operations of each captain, who get a slice of each soldier’s. But Gotti learned that Castellano had been taking $5,000 every Christmas from the life savings of the wife of an elderly captain who had only $2,000 coming in from an untypically moribund crew.
Castellano was a “fuck” for doing this. “Well, listen to me, that’s ended,” Gotti told an associate. “[It] don’t mean [however] that you don’t have to try to hustle and put something together for us.”
Other aspects of the Family’s far-flung money-making ventures crossed Gotti’s desk his first day on the job. He revised the payments that an unspecified industry was making to Castellano and Bilotti so that a soldier in the scheme got a bigger share. He discussed a plan to stop a threatened labor action against concrete plants if they would “sweeten the pie.”
Many conversations over the next several weeks showed the graduate of the blue-collar Family within a Family becoming a white-color boss, or trying to. On January 18, Gotti told Angelo about a deal headed his way with a representative of an unknown group: “He won a deal, supposed to get a job. Three and a half million in [contracts], a hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars in kickbacks or more than that. He says it all goes to Johnny Gotti.”
On January 23, the new Gambino troika—Gotti, DeCicco, and Gallo—traveled to the Helmsley Palace Hotel in Manhattan to meet with recording industry executives seeking venture capital for an album by a new artist. The introductions were made by a longtime captain, Joseph Armone.
Someone tipped off the police as well as a network television crew working on an industry payola story; they arrived as Gotti and the others stepped off an elevator into the lobby. The ambushed mobsters declined interviews, but sinister footage of a handsome, well-dressed man described as an unknown gangster with record-industry contacts was telecast nationwide.
A few days later, back at the Bergin annex, after someone brought a copy of the singer’s sample tape, Gotti was uncertain about the idea. It was risky to invest in a new singer—and the recording industry was too dishonest.
“They change two or three sounds and they make their own [record] and you get fucked.”
The duties of a boss were many, and one was punishing miscreant subordinates. He grumbled about one offender this way: “This kid is as high as he’s ever gonna get in life. This kid, I’m just trying to think of the way to punish him now. Enough to know how I didn’t like that. Teach him what bitterness is. Give him something fuckin’ [to] really feel sorry about. This ain’t a ball game here. This ain’t no ball game. This ain’t no game.”
Gotti was amazed after his ascension that at least one captain—Anthony Gaggi, uncle of the car-case witness against Castellano—had not adapted to the new game. He learned this during a telephone call from a soldier reporting about a dispute involving a Brooklyn restaurant. Family members had just bought into it and the landlord wanted to check them out.
The soldier said Gaggi had told him to “bring” Gotti to a sitdown with the landlord and the new partners.
“He’s under me!” Gotti shouted. “You tell him, [to] get his ass up here to see me!”
In the meantime, concerning the inquisitive landlord, Gotti told the soldier to tell Gaggi and the others not to engage in any more “warning shit” until a sitdown. After all, people could be reasoned with.
“People ain’t stupid, they know what we are,” Gotti said. “So what are we gonna do? What, are we gonna worry about cops now?
Three days after these comments, Angelo complained of having to visit someone about the same problem, which was “still up in the air.” Forty-eight hours passed, and then a fire damaged the restaurant; authorities proclaimed it arson.
As this restaurant problem was being solved, another was beginning. Some men, believed to be members of a carpenters’ local union, were vandalizing Manhattan construction sites using non-union labor. More than $30,000 damage was inflicted on the Bankers and Brokers Restaurant near Wall Street. It was owned by a Gambino soldier and previously owned by Castellano’s four children.
The business agent of the carpenters’ local, the largest in the country, was John F. O’Connor, 51. Gotti instructed two men to find out who O’Connor was “with”—not whether he was connected to a Family, but which one. In the Crime Capital, when it came to the construction industry, Gotti’s assumption was historically justified.
At the time, O’Connor was the target of an investigation into whether he accepted bribes from the contractors to allow them to use non-union carpenters. When Gotti learned that O’Connor might have ordered the restaurant sacked, he said the union official was “becoming overconfident” and wondered whether he ought to “bust him up.”
Over the next few weeks, inquiries went out to members of the Genovese Family, who reported that they had only partial control of the carpenters’ union and were “embarrassed” because a Gambino Family place had been trashed by a renegade element.
Weeks later, O’Connor was shot several times in the lobby of his union’s office building; the gunman, who fired four times, escaped. The victim crawled into an elevator, called for help, and survived. A few months later, O’Connor was indicted for taking thousands of dollars in bribes.
Sometimes the men in the Bergin annex were more paranoid about bugs than at other times. Years earlier, the pay phones in an empty storefront on the other side of the Bergin, which crew members used to place bets, had been tapped. So now and then they would whisper or turn up the volume on a television or radio, or run tap water while they talked.
This made it difficult to decipher some conversations, but usually at least a revealing sentence or two was picked up—such as when Gotti discussed a gambling operation using illegal slot machines: “He’s with me, the stops are mine, the machines are mine.”
Good “overheards” showed that while Gotti may have been a little uncertain about some aspects of his new position, he was not uncertain about himself. Late in February, he told Angelo: “You present the case, paint it up a little bit … This has got to earn some [money] here. For us, not for other Families, but for us first … I don’t know about concrete, steel, and construction, but I got a lot of spies in the street and I know everything.”
Again, early in March, underboss Frank DeCicco expressed concern about a “bad situation,” most likely a jurisdictional conflict between the Gambino and Genovese Families, possibly over a construction project just north of the city that involved Family-connected unions.
“I’m thinking all night long how the fuck to resolve this motherfucker,” the underboss said.
“You gotta understand we gotta be a little strong,” the boss replied. “We gotta be strong against other people who are strong.”
Gotti told DeCicco they didn’t want to be lulled into a false sense of security, like Paul Castellano was.
“Frankie, you know what I’m saying … that’s what this guy allowed himself to be tricked into, Frankie.”
Not all of the new boss’s business was about such serious enterprises as concrete, steel, and construction. The boss was wherever a buck was, or might be.
A periodic topic on the Nice N EZ bug was an ice cream company in New Jersey. Gotti, Angelo, and two members of the DeCavalcante Family had somehow acquired part ownership three years before. Gotti, who said he owned seventeen percent, wasn’t very happy with his lack of return or the company’s prospects.
On January 10, NYPD detectives tailed Gotti to a meeting in which he reviewed the matter with the DeCavalcante fellows. Beforehand, he told Angelo the agenda: “Do I want my money out of it, or get rid of it?”
The next day, at the Bergin annex, he gave a report. “So I said, ‘What’s this company worth?’ They said, ‘Four million right now. If we sold it, we owe nothin’.’”
Gotti was displeased that his investment would yield nothing, but the men insisted that “in two weeks” the company’s fortunes would turn around. The boss agreed to wait, but wasn’t convinced.
“I told my partners, all nice fellows, I said, ‘If conversation had calories in it, I’d be the fattest guy in the world, ’cause that’s all I’m getting, conversation.’”
In March, the subject came up again when an associate of Gotti apparently came in with the latest nonprofit statement.
“You tell me the ice cream business is worth this? This?” the boss fumed.
Gotti compared his investment to what he could earn by investing the same money in loan-sharking—the illegal lending of cash at usurious interest rates. He cited a loan-shark rate of 1.5 percent of vigorish, or interest, a week, and launched into an amusing tirade:
“This guy told me in two weeks we’re gonna see money! That’s two and a half months ago. I’m not his fuckin’ kid! We’ll make Dee Bee [a Gambino captain] buy me out. Corky [a DeCavalcante man] buy me out. Any fuckin’ body buy me out. I’ll sell it for fifty dollars!”
“No you won’t,” the associate said.
“Fuck I won’t. My end, I’ll sell it.”
Gotti was clearly weary of it all. “Afraid this ain’t my fuckin’ day,” he added. “Ain’t my fuckin’ day.”
He wondered if he should visit the company, investigate why ice cream wasn’t profitable in New Jersey, but the associate advised against it: too many surveillants around.
“This is pathetic,” Gotti complained again. “I don’t even get ice cream out of it. If I want ice cream I have [to see another person]. I love those fuckin’ frozen red somethin’s. We got the company three years, never saw a dime. Never seen an ice cream bar out of it! If you took [the money] and you put it on the street for a point and a half, we’d be rich over three years! We’d be rich without all the ice cream meltin’ or nothin’.”
Gotti’s impatience was easy to understand. He was in a much higher world of commerce now. On March 6, an unidentified man asked him to meet three others seeking to acquire control of gambling casinos in Puerto Rico. The men already owned a casino in the Bahamas. What the bug overheard was limited, but it appeared that the men wanted to give Gotti a piece of their action if he would solve a problem they were having with a disposal company they owned.
It was probably no problem at all. James Failla was an official of the Manhattan Trade Waste Association, the management group, and other Family men dominated the sanitation unions.
Another man, identified only as Joey, enticed Gotti with a story about gasoline. Two soldiers in another Family recently had been indicted by a grand jury because of a scheme to skim money from the sale of gasoline by not paying federal and state taxes. But Joey said that didn’t mean similar opportunities were not available.
“A fuckin’ twenty-eight cents [a gallon] you can steal,” Joey said. “I’m talkin’ about doing twenty, thirty million gallons a month.”
Gotti did some quick figuring, noting that even at two cents a gallon on 30 million gallons, “It’s six hundred thousand dollars.”
“Wow,” an unidentified person in the room said.
“I gotta do it right now,” Gotti said. “Right now, I gotta do it. I gotta call this guy …”
Gotti picked up a telephone, dialed one of his bodyguards and asked him to contact someone he referred to as “Bobby the Jew” and “tell him to call me.”
Gotti was free to receive such propositions because he had been granted bail after his indictment in the federal case. Ironically, a young and well-educated movie producer, who also was a capo in the Colombo Family, was being held without bail and preparing to plead guilty and pay $15 million in restitution for the largest gas-tax ripoff in history. The case was before the same judge who would preside at Gotti’s trial.
Somewhere in a schedule clogged by men bearing gifts, deals, and problems, Gotti was able to find time for his lawyers. To properly manage his Family, take advantage of opportunities, and enjoy his status, he had to stay out of jail.
The nagging business with the Queens mechanic he was accused of assaulting and robbing was about to come to trial. The case had taken a few remarkable turns since the events in December—unusual is usual in Family cases—and by the time it was over, there would be many more.
Even after the case was officially closed, the turbulence around Gotti would keep it unofficially open.
