Mob Star (28 page)

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 assignment in a Toys-я-Us parking lot from Willie Boy, who said LaForte had taken the problem to Dellacroce, who passed 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 nigger 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 godfatherly 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 fucking 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 fuckin’ 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 assistant 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 documents, 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.

—Don Corleone, 1948, in
The Godfather

 

 

 

I
N 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 assumed a mortgage and gave cash for the equity value—about $90,000, all in twenty-dollar bills, all in a shopping bag.

Though unaware of the deal, agents believed they already had enough information to justify invading Angelo’s privacy further by planting listening devices. In April, in an affidavit seeking approval to add bugs to wiretaps, the FBI, for the first time, told a judge that drug dealing was part of its investigation.

The document quoted an unidentified informant, probably Source BQ, as saying that John and Gene, Angelo, and Carneglia were partners in a major drug deal—“a fact which is kept from Gambino boss Paul Castellano due to his directive prohibiting Gambino members from [dealing drugs].” It said heroin dealer Mark Reiter had been evicted from the crew only to “appease” Castellano, but that he was dealing for the partnership. It quoted another informant saying that the partners were harboring Salvatore Ruggiero and also obtaining drugs through him.

A judge approved the bug request on April 5; within 72 hours, agents installed a bug in Angelo’s basement den. Later, two others were secreted in the kitchen and dining room. The methods used to accomplish such FBI missions are top secret. Sometimes they involve a ruse—a plumber who isn’t; other times, “surreptitious entry.”

The affidavit did not cite other details that BQ had recently provided. Though supposedly an outcast, Reiter was staying at Angelo’s mother’s house. He was driving a Mercedes, had just spent $70,000 in cash for two boats, and was buying a $200,000 house, also with cash.

Source BQ also had told the bureau that he believed Willie Boy Johnson was one of the drug partners, none of whom would actually “touch heroin, because if they are arrested or charged, they would be killed.”
Babania
transfers would be handled by non-Family men. BQ’s suspicion was rooted partly in the past; in a 1976 trial, while John Gotti was in state prison, Willie Boy was acquitted of heroin-trafficking charges; so was one of his codefendants, Angelo Ruggiero, then an unmade man.

Only days after the first bug was planted, Angelo began to get jittery—an encounter with FBI agents near his house made him wonder if his phone was tapped. He reached out for a private electronics expert, Jack Conroy, a former NYPD detective recommended by Michael Coiro.

Conroy’s arrival on the scene was a major plot twist. When he met Angelo, he lied and said he had been an agent for the Eastern District Strike Force. He let on that he was a big inside trader in the mob-intelligence market. He listened as Angelo described how he had been recently pulled over in his car by three men who “looked like fuckin’ junkies.”

“One guy reaches in, grabs me by the shirt. He’s pulling me, I’m pulling him. Another guy uses his head, says, ‘Hold it, hold it, we’re FBI agents.’ [I say:] You’re FBI agents, you’d better identify yourself ’cause you’re gonna have a bad problem.”

Angelo said one agent apologized that they had mistaken him for someone else, a fugitive, but to satisfy the others, would he mind showing his identification?

“They were looking for something,” Conroy wisely said.

“When the car cut me off, I had a telephone number in my hand. In a half-hour I was gonna go call this other guy.”

“Okay.”

“The telephone number, I swallowed it.”

“Oh, good.”

Conroy agreed to come back to Angelo’s house in a few days with the proper equipment to sweep it for taps and bugs.

Angelo again showed his alarm on April 13, in a call to his mother, who complained about noise on the line and asked:

“What is this, a party line?”

“FBI agents are listening in,” her son said.

Despite Angelo’s unease and despite obvious efforts to discuss matters in code, drug-dealing clues continued to pile up—mostly via the phone.

The same day that Mrs. Ruggiero talked to her son Angelo, her son Salvatore and another man met in Florida to arrange a heroin deal, an informant later told the FBI. Soon a drug courier was on his way to New Jersey with 13 kilos.

Late the next day, Angelo called his house and spoke to his 17-year-old daughter, Ann Marie, who said “Mark” had come by and left something for him.

“So long, Ann, don’t say nothing,” Angelo replied.

On April 15, a man named Arnold Squitieri called to say that someone had not yet shown up with their “bankroll.” Squitieri was one of the three New Jersey drug dealers with whom Angelo and Carneglia had been meeting.

Two days later, Squitieri called to ask Angelo, “Did you get that furniture yet?” Another man, “Charles,” also checked in: “The kid can’t make a mortgage payment yet.”

Squitieri made plans to come to Angelo’s house for dinner with the other two New Jersey dealers, Alphonse Sisca and Oreste Abbamonte. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) records show that they and Squitieri all have convictions for multi-kilo deals and are related by marriage. Angelo met Sisca and Abbamonte while incarcerated at Lewisburg.

The night of the dinner, Angelo told his New Jersey pals that he had contacted Bonanno boss-to-be Joseph Massino, who had been indicted recently and gone into hiding, and that “everything was all right.” Because so many of its soldiers were flouting the drug-dealing ban, the Bonanno family had just lost its seat on the Commission, the coalition of Family bosses, who, somewhat like a board of directors, set policy for all divisions.

 

 

On April 17, Jack Conroy lugged his phony credentials and electronic gadgets into Angelo’s house. After conducting tests, he correctly told Angelo that two phones were tapped; but, as to bugs, Conroy pronounced the house clean. Because it knew Conroy was coming, the FBI had shut down the bugs.

Conroy now said he had a source at the telephone company, which is notified when phones are to be legally tapped, and he could find out who authorized the taps. A week later, he told Angelo this would cost $1,000—$800 for his telephone-company source, $200 for him and his partner. No problem, Angelo said.

In a few days, Conroy delivered a bill of goods. He said the taps were legal because of a March 18 federal court order in the Southern District of New York, which is Manhattan and the Bronx. This invention caused Angelo to speculate that he was only peripherally involved in an investigation aimed at someone else. Just in case, however, he told Conroy, who had just suckered Angelo out of $1000, that he would get some other phone numbers for him to check. No problem, Conroy said.

“I want to get your phone checked,” Angelo told Gene, who dropped by after Conroy left. “I want to get the kid, Johnny Carneglia’s, checked.”