Mob Star (40 page)

Now, Jamesy was about to put Giacalone on the floor, by doing for Hoffman what he did for her, tell her the truth.

“Did [Giacalone] ever tell you about any things that go on between she and [Nickerson], how he treated her?”

“Objection! Objection!”

“No, I will let him answer that,” Nickerson said.

“Not during this trial,” Cardinali said, inviting a follow-up.

“Did you ever say that she said that he treats her like a daughter?”

“She told me that.”

“And that she gets whatever she wants from him and the defense gets nothing. Did she tell you that?”

“I’ve heard her say something like that.”

Later, in an embarrassing moment at sidebar, Giacalone would not deny that she had spoken so freely in front of Cardinali. It was an admission that she had trusted a criminal with something of value, even if her boasts were merely careless chatter.

After only a few hours of Cardinali’s candor, Gotti felt better and felt like swaggering. During a recess, he strolled over to the audience section; smiling confidently, he pointed his finger at three men—John Gilmore Childers, John Savarese, and Michael Chertoff, prosecutors from the Southern District who had just won guilty verdicts against all the bosses and underbosses in the Commission case and who later told friends that the atmosphere in the Nickerson court was much more tense.

“Childers, Savarese, Chertoff,” said Gotti. “You know who I am. Now I know who you are. It’s better when everybody knows each other.”

 

 

The job of leading Jamesy through his catalogue of crimes fell to David DePetris, former chief of the narcotics unit in the Eastern District. DePetris’s client was Tony Roach Rampino, the Gotti gopher who had become a heroin addict. Because Tony Roach tested positive for drugs early in the trial, DePetris had to assure Nickerson every day that Rampino wasn’t stoned and was able to assist in his own defense.

Under DePetris’s probing, Cardinali admitted using drugs while in the witness-protection program awaiting his debut as a star witness. He admitted that while at the MCC, he assaulted an inmate who ratted out a guard who was supplying him with heroin. His punishment was a transfer to a prison in California, where he again was caught using drugs.

Most of Cardinali’s direct testimony would remain intact despite the whacks of seven lawyers; he would be tripped up on only a few discrepancies. But details about his behavior, atop all the slime about his murders, were having their intended effect on the jurors—during jury selection, Larry King himself had said he would “have a problem” with the testimony of criminals singing for their freedom.

Halfway through DePetris’s questioning, Slotnick complained at a sidebar that Giacalone and Gleeson were making “facial expressions” as Cardinali testified. Giacalone denied it, the judge said he hadn’t seen it and called a recess. As the jury began to file out, Giacalone heard a murmur from the defense table, and once the jury was gone, spoke up:

“I think it’s ironic. On the way back from a sidebar in which counsel made claims about the behavior of the government, which they were unable to articulate, Mr. Gotti said quite loudly and I’m certain loudly enough for the jury to hear … ”

Gotti cut her off, “She’s lying to you!”

Giacalone finished her sentence: “. . . ‘she’s trying to protect that murderer, she’s the murderer, that mother.’”

“Judge, do I have to go through this all the time?” Cutler inquired.

“Those are lies!” Gotti said.

“Please,” Nickerson said.

Giacalone asked the judge to instruct the defendants to keep their comments to themselves when the jury is present.

“I sit here and I have to watch Ms. Giacalone making faces, grimaces, smiles, comments to Mr. Gleeson,” Cutler said. “I don’t like it … I don’t know why she’s brought this out now.”

“Because she’s a liar!” Gotti said.

Nickerson told the prosecution not to make faces, the defense not to make comments.

Later, Gotti said to a reporter: “Mendacity. The word for today is mendacity. It’s the art of being mendacious.”

 

 

On December 15, the start of Cardinali’s third week on the stand, Giacalone sought to rehabilitate him. Jamesy said he had told the truth in court; the only threats Giacalone had ever made were to prosecute him for lying; and he would be killed by the defendants if he ever returned to Ozone Park.

Jamesy said he was “frequently abusive” to Giacalone and “yelled” at her on the phone.

Giacalone used this response to get in a shot worthy of Cutler. “Did you ever speak to John Gotti the way you talked to me on the telephone?”

“Objection, judge!” Cutler cried.

“Sustained.”

“Are you kidding me?” Cutler said in disgust.

Several more times during the remainder of Cardinali’s testimony, Giacalone and the defense lawyers exchanged barbs. The defense, however, had a numbers advantage; they could rest on the bench while their teammates rushed Giacalone and Gleeson all over the field.

Giacalone ended her redirect by getting Jamesy to say that Cutler was pleasant, a “gentleman, soft-spoken,” when he spoke outside of court, unlike the way Cutler “behaves in court.”

As Giacalone sat down, a defense lawyer asked for a brief delay, but Cutler, who was to re-Brucify, was already up and storming toward Jamesy and one of the trial’s many low points.

“You made up with Ms. Giacalone, did you?”

“Yes.”

“So she’s no longer the same individual you described in May of 1986, is that correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“In other words, she’s no longer a slut, is that right, in your mind?”

“Correct.”

“She’s no longer a blow job in your mind?”

“Correct.”

“Excuse me a minute,” interrupted Nickerson. “Please keep your voice down.”

“Yes, sir, sorry, sir … I apologize to the court.”

“Please don’t make those comments and please keep your voice down.”

A few questions later, Cutler ignored an objection and the judge’s ruling—and kept punching.

“Mr. Cutler, please don’t do that. The objection is sustained. Please don’t do that.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

More questions, more objections, more questions.

“Please, Mr. Cutler, please.”

A little later, Cutler asked Cardinali about the “free ride” he got for his multiple murders.

“Objection!”

Another put-upon look from Cutler. “It’s all right if Ms. Giacalone interrupts me, but it’s not okay if I interrupt her, Your Honor?”

“Just a minute,” Nickerson said. “She’s entitled to make an objection.”

“I don’t want a speech from her,” Cutler snarled.

On many occasions, Cutler and the others tested the limits of Nickerson’s patience, and almost always found them expansive. And many times they stated grievances against Giacalone and Gleeson without the slightest compunction about their irony.

The next day, for instance, Slotnick moaned about Cutler-type tactics from Giacalone during his recross of Cardinali. “I would wish that counsel would follow the rules,” he said.

At a sidebar, Cutler complained that Giacalone was getting on Gotti’s nerves. “Your Honor, Ms. Giacalone is making a lot of comments … a lot of facial gestures. I spoke with my client. He’s very upset about it … He’s going to do the same thing, judge. He’s upset about it. I want you to know about it and I would like you to try and put a stop to it, judge.”

Giacalone fired back: The defense had decided “it is advantageous to harass me” and “create a record that is absolutely false” in “the face of the most extraordinary harassment” ever seen “in either a federal or state court.”

Giacalone said she sometimes could barely hear witnesses because the noise at the defense table was so loud—“I can hear them say, ‘The rat is dead.’”

“This thing about harassment is not true,” Cutler said.

 

 

On December 16, as Act II was winding down, FBI agents and cops handed out leaflets to Christmas shoppers on East Forty-sixth Street in Manhattan. The leaflets asked if anyone had been on the street the year before and heard or seen anything about the murders of Paul Castellano and Thomas Bilotti outside Sparks Steak House.

“If witnesses to the killings would only come forward, these murderers could be brought to justice. We need your help to solve this crime. We need your participation to keep the streets of our city safe for all. It is imperative to the maintenance of a civilized society.”

The Sparks investigation had stalled. Informants had stories, not evidence. One story recently out was that John Gotti’s driver and also Gene Gotti and seven crew members were at the scene of the crime.

In court a week later, John Gotti stood at the railing of the visitors’ section to accept season’s greetings from many crew members. After a dozen or so had passed in review, exchanging handshakes and kisses, Gotti jovially turned to reporters: “See all these good people. They come to wish me a merry Christmas.”

 

 

The New Year began with another “major” witness: Dominick Lofaro, who had worn a body wire for the state Organized Crime Task Force, which had touted him—once he was surfaced for trial—as the first made man to secretly tape-record other soldiers.

On January 6, 1987, the Feast of Epiphany, Lofaro pleaded guilty to racketeering—two of his predicate acts were murder. For his plea, Lofaro got immunity for anything he would say at Gotti’s or any other trial. The government requested that Lofaro be held at a “safe house” until sentencing, but Jack Weinstein, chief judge of the Eastern District, sent Lofaro to the MCC.

“After what this man told me, he is clearly a danger to the community,” Judge Weinstein said.

However, an interested observer, Bruce Cutler, predicted that at sentencing time, “Lofaro will walk.”

In reality, Lofaro didn’t have much to offer against Gotti. He had provided the probable cause the state Task Force needed to instill the Nice N EZ bug—his body wire recorded Gotti talking as though he ran a gambling operation—but none of the Nice N EZ tapes were part of Giacalone’s case; all of them had been made after Gotti was indicted in March 1985.

All Lofaro could testify about was the two times he taped Gotti, and though these were colorful conversations, they were not terribly incriminating. Giacalone already had plenty of colorful conversations, but state Task Force director Ronald Goldstock, eager to get credit for getting Gotti, had promoted Lofaro in the media and Giacalone was desperate for witnesses.

A day after his guilty plea, Lofaro caused more damage—to Giacalone. He told the Gotti jury that he had suckered the state Task Force and lied about being a made man; he was merely a lowly associate. He also had exaggerated the number of his murders, figuring, as only a denizen of the Crime Capital would, the more murders, the bigger catch he would appear to be.

“I figured I could get a better deal from them,” he said.

Lofaro self-destructed without defense help. He described his two murders, an attempted murder, dealing kilos of heroin, and how the Task Force—to set him up as an informer—let him keep $100,000 in drug money that he had when arrested.

A week later, just before her final witness—now-federal investigator Kenneth McCabe—took the stand, Nickerson ordered Giacalone to use the time during a recess to search for documents that the defense lawyers complained had not yet been turned over to them.

As the jury filed out, Giacalone approached George Santangelo and wagged her finger at him: “You’re lying!”

“Get your finger out of my face and stick it up your ass,” said Santangelo.

During the recess, the newspaper reporters who regularly covered the trial—Pete Bowles of
Newsday,
Leonard Buder of
The New York Times,
Daniel Hays of the
New York Daily News,
and Philip Messing of the
New York Post
—called their offices and picked up bulletins about another big case.

Across the East River in Manhattan, the defendants in the Commission case had just been sentenced. The aging bosses of the Colombo, Genovese, and Luchese Families, none of whom had made the cover of
Time
, got 100 years each.

“A hundred years! A century!” exclaimed Gene Gotti’s attorney, Jeffrey Hoffman, as he came into the courtroom to inform the Gambino boss.

Johnny Boy was cool. He moved over to the rail separating the well of the court and spoke to the reporters clamoring for a reaction: “Those cases got nothing to do with us. We’re walking out of here.”

The next day, January 14, on the forty-sixth day of testimony, after calling 78 witnesses, the government rested. Before it did, Cutler got Kenneth McCabe to say that in all the times he surveilled John Gotti he never saw him commit a crime. Cutler strutted away: Chew on that fact, Larry King and friends.

 

 

Very few people know the facts behind some facts that Jeffrey Hoffman had drawn out of Cardinali weeks earlier.

Cardinali testified that he learned in April 1985 that without his testimony, Giacalone had “an extraordinarily weak case.” Cardinali’s discovery was made when prison officials mistakenly showed him a letter intended for their eyes only. The letter was written by Giacalone’s supportive boss, Raymond Dearie, who wanted the prison personnel to make Jamesy’s life better.

Getting the star witness—who was about to be made into a villain—to say that without him Giacalone had a poor case, was another clever move by the defense. But Cardinali, Hoffman, and the jurors never learned that a top government official—before the indictment was handed down—told his Washington bosses and Giacalone’s boss, Raymond Dearie, that the case was a loser, even with Cardinali’s testimony.

In an October 23, 1984 memo, Edward McDonald, chief of the federal Organized Crime Strike Force in the Eastern District, said Giacalone’s case had “little likelihood of success.” He said it would prevent the Strike Force, which had been created to battle organized crime, from including Gotti in the Gambino hierarchy indictment it hoped to obtain the following year.