See No Evil (14 page)

“You should get the prescriptions filled first thing
tomorrow
. If you run into any more problems or if the pain
continues
, you need to give me a call. You could have a gastric ulcer, in which case you’re going to need an upper G.I. series.”

“That all sounds fine, Dottore, except for one thing. Why wait to get these prescriptions? Joe!” Gotti called into the adjoining room. Within seconds, his bodyguard/chauffeur had materialized “Take these to one of our pharmacies. I want the medicine back here in an hour. Also,” he said taking five $100 bills and putting them into the palm of Corrozzo’s hand, “take Il Dottore with you. Drop him off anywhere he wants.”

Elliot left the suite as quietly as he’d arrived with Gotti sipping his martini on the sofa watching the postfight
wrap-up
, the adorable Sandy Grillo, wife of Gambino associate, Ernie Grillo, daughter of Castellano underboss Neil Dellacroce, sitting on his lap, giggling as he played with her breasts, now exposed from the black lace negligee that was hanging loose from her body.

It was several nights later that Elliot got a chance to
discuss
his meeting with New York’s most powerful capo with Silvio, who knew a lot more about Gotti and the
undercurrents
within the Gambino Family than Elliot ever wanted to. The entire episode struck Frank as out of school. “An
unspoken
La Cosa Nostra rule is that a made man, especially a capo like Gotti, is not supposed to violate another man’s wife or children,” Silvio explained. “In sleeping with Shannon Grillo, Gotti seems to be violating two sacred oaths with the same woman. Even so, technically, it may not be a violation,” he mitigated. “After all, Ernie Grillo is a scumbag who is only an associate, not a made man, and Sandy Dellacroce is not the daughter of Neil’s wife, though he’s the father of a baby they adopted at birth.”

The coming days would be filled with explanations both subtle and profound. But no amount of lawyering, not Cohn’s, Giuliani’s, or even John Gotti’s, could prevent the
collision
of forces that were building both inside and outside of La Cosa Nostra. For Elliot Litner, even as he saw and felt those
forces hurtling about him, there was little he could do but watch and hope that somehow the better men among them would survive. In retrospect, he was uncertain that it came out exactly that way, but in a game of life-and-death poker, he would learn that blood beats technicalities.

E
lliot Litner’s life had more than the usual share of ups and downs. While the general trend was spiraling downward, there were, to be sure, moments when good fortune came his way. One of those occurred in late 1983 when, after months of living with her father, Hanna and the twins came back to their home in Englewood.

Elliot remembered the rainy November day they returned. That night, after Samantha and Rachel had gone to bed, he and Hanna sat in their living room, a fire blazing in the hearth. From Elliot’s standpoint, the subject of
reconciliation
, temporary though it was, would never have been broached except that Hanna would not let him escape it.

“I love you, Elliot, you know that, don’t you?” she asked. “Not in some glamorous, romantic way, but for who you are—especially during moments like this when you’re relaxed and able to talk to me like I’m someone important in your life.”

“You are important, even if I don’t tell you that all the time. You and the girls are all that I live for, really.”

“Then why aren’t you happier around us? It’s like you
think you don’t deserve to be happy, or you’re afraid to be happy, and so you keep yourself in a constant state of
jeopardy
with your gambling and friends and other women.”

“No, it’s just that I have trouble sometimes connecting deeply. I know what I feel, but I can’t explain it, and maybe I don’t express it very well. I don’t know why.”

“There’s a word for that, you know. It’s ‘estranged.’ You’re a man who is estranged. It means you ‘arouse enmity or
indifference
in where there had formerly been love.’” Hanna
recited
the definition as if reading from the dictionary. “Frankly, Elliot, I think you need to see a psychiatrist.”

That was classic Hanna, a woman who had to put
everybody
in a box, usually on one side of a line or the other marked good and evil. In Elliot’s case, however, she’d made a careful exception. He was estranged, not good or evil,
just
there,
like an eternal eunuch who for psychological reasons she couldn’t engage in either unconditional love or mortal combat.

Understanding that, Elliot resolved to take things as they came, happy to be living with Hanna, ecstatic to be part of his daughters’ lives again. Moreover, the reconciliation helped to stabilize him so that for a while, at least, he took a hiatus from Las Vegas junkets and Atlantic City all-nighters to play the role of a caring husband and father. As fortuitous, the
combination
of high-profile lectures, his work as professor of
surgery
at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and the dozens of articles he’d published led the Winthrop-Breon Committee to select him as the recipient for the prestigious American College of Chest Physicians Scholar of the Year Award. That kind of press didn’t go unnoticed at the hospital, and around that time, Al Rosengarten suggested they break bread at the “21” Club to “discuss the future.”

Entering the restaurant, Elliot was met by Rosengarten in the large anteroom that stood separate from the bar and
dining
area. Dressed to the teeth in a dark-blue business suit with gold embossed cuff links and a flashy red tie, Rosengarten clasped Elliot’s hand and clapped his back as he led him to his table where a snifter of Talisker single malt lay waiting.

“What will you have to drink, Elliot?” Rosengarten asked, angling himself into his chair. “Oh, that’s right, you’re the ‘Diet Coke’ man,” he said teasingly, “is that what you’ll be having?”

Elliot nodded. Rosengarten motioned to the waiter, then took a thoughtful pull from his snifter of Scotch. “You know, we’re proud of you, Elliot. Really. Genuinely proud. And impressed. The Winthrop-Breon awards, well, that helps. It helps a great deal.”

“Thank you, but I’m not sure I understand, Al.”

“I’m telling you that it’s official. Dr. Dak will be retiring as director of cardiac surgery at the hospital in June. More to the point, Simon has confided that it’s you who he’ll be
proposing
to the board as his successor.”

“Me?”

“Yes, Elliot, you. So, what can I say except
congratulations
! This is a moment of significance,” he proclaimed,
clinking
his snifter of Talisker’s against Elliot’s glass of Diet Coke, “something worth celebrating, am I wrong? What, with you, Hanna and the twins back together, and now this? These are the times you move, even at an early age, from journeyman to master. From Simon’s understudy to one of the cornerstones of the Mount Sinai tradition.”

He studied Elliot’s expression, one of total consternation, then guffawed. “Look, Elliot, I know what goes on. So does Mr. Castellano and these other friends of ours. The past
couple
of years have been tough on you and your family. We know that. The pressures of daily surgeries, the travel, the writing. Jesus! No one knows where you get the goddamned
energy!” The seventy-six-year-old Rosengarten reached across the table placing his hand, nails manicured and polished, over Elliot’s. “What I’m trying to say is this, you’ve been good to us, and now we want to return the favor. Dr. Dak will put your name forward, and the Mount Sinai board will
unanimously
approve that nomination. I guarantee it.”

Elliot sipped his Diet Coke, “W-why thank you, Al. You’ve been like a brother to me. And I appreciate what you and Dr. Dak and Mr. Castellano have done for me.”

The multimillionaire mogul and Gambino Family stalwart nodded his large head lovingly. His eyes glistened as he withdrew his hand, smiling. “While these two things are in no way connected, Elliot, I did want to bring up one last situation before we start dinner. We need you to carry a package back from Sao Paolo for us. Call it a final gesture on your part. Like before, it will be Carmine that contacts you with the details. Really, it won’t be much of anything. A formality, really.”

“Sao P-Paolo? Sao Paolo, Brazil?”

Rosengarten took a sip of Talisker. “Exactly.”

“But I don’t know anyone there. I have no contacts. There are no lecture dates on my calendar. Nothing!”

“What do you mean?” Rosengarten asked incredulously. “Elliot, you’re a visiting professor at Prontocor Hospital in Bello Horizonte. This was done by special appointment. Board initiated February 1978.”

“Visiting professor? Al, I’ve never b-been to Prontocor Hospital in Bello Horizonte, Brazil!”

Al Rosengarten sat back in his chair. He held his empty glass out to the waiter, who plucked it from his waving hand. Then, his eyes narrowed, small and shiny.
“Elliot,”
he said as if he was talking to the densest primitive on the planet.
“You’re
not
going
to
make
me
go
through
all
of
that
again,
are
you?”

So, that was the way it worked. When the goodfellows
wanted something done, they didn’t ask twice. Nor did they think they had to. That’s just the way it was in their world. No matter what Elliot did or how he tried to fool himself, at this point, he was entrenched in the Mafia, and there was no way out. More, whether he wanted to admit it or not, like Gotti and like Giuliani, he was hooked on the narcotic of power.

True, he still owed nearly $75,000 from past and recent excursions to Caesar’s, the Dunes, Aladdin, and other mobbed-up casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, but the fact of the matter was he coveted that directorship the way a sex addict lusts for a beautiful woman; wanted it badly, and that was all his Gambino Family friends needed to know. It would be several weeks later, in January 1984, before Carmine Lombardozzi contacted him with what eventually became two jobs, one to Tel Aviv, then another, his last, to Sao Paolo.

If the old Bronx and Brooklyn neighborhoods produced anything at all in the hearts and character of its alumni, it was brass balls and an incredible appetite for success. While Elliot was busy trying to become director of cardiac surgery at Mount Sinai, John Gotti was relentless in his pursuit of the title of bosses of bosses within the ranks of the American Mafia.

Still, there was no one among them, incubated in the ghettoes of those virulent New York enclaves, who burned with more white-hot ambition or worked more feverishly than Rudy Giuliani. What Elliot couldn’t know at the time, however, was that that feverish work ethic and white-hot ambition were, in effect, turning on him.

Piecing together bits of information gathered from the Ruggiero/Corallo bugs and wiretaps and the testimony of well-placed informers like Willie Boy Johnson, U.S. Attorney Giuliani put together a fifty-one count indictment against Paul Castellano and twenty-one others making it the largest
RICO case ever. Among other charges, the indictment alleged that Big Paulie had ordered Anthony Gaggi to kill Roy DeMeo. While DeMeo was alive, the indictment alleged, Castellano participated in the profits from the
multimillion-dollar
stolen-car ring that DeMeo ran and that Paul had ordered him, Gaggi, and a third man to kill two Gambino Family con artists who’d staged a phony charity event in 1979 attended by first lady Rosalyn Carter. The scam had
embarrassed
Castellano, who, a federal witness, later testified
considered
himself “an upright businessman,” to the point where he simply wanted DeMeo dead.

If the godfather’s sensibilities were offended by the
indictment
, considered the worst publicity for the Gambino Family since Albert Anastasia’s Murder Incorporated was brought to light, Castellano would find little solace in the proceedings to follow. In sworn testimony, witness Vito Arena, a
homosexual
member of DeMeo’s crew, dubbed “the Gay Hit Man” by the press, recounted the brutal slayings of rival stolen-car dealers Ronald Falcaro and Kaled Darwish by DeMeo killer Henry Borelli. DeMeo then ordered the corpses “cut up,” Arena explained, and since it was lunchtime and they were hungry, the team of butchers ate pizza and hot dogs while they dismembered the bodies using small saws and boning knives to parcel arms, legs, and torsos into Hefty bags for later disposal. During the exercise, one of them got so carried away with the dissection of the victim’s private parts that a readily identifiable organ slipped through the floor vent and could not be retrieved. “DeMeo went crazy,” Arena told the astounded grand jury members, “because he considered it unprofessional.”

So how did RICO umbrella this scenario? Dominick Montiglio, Gaggi’s nephew, testified that it was he who brought $20,000 in cash payments from the car-theft ring each
week to Castellano’s warehouse in Brooklyn. Additionally, it was he who accompanied his uncle, Nino Gaggi, to Dial Poultry, a Castellano chicken distribution firm, where sums of cash, at least that large, were turned over to their godfather. Under RICO, this was as clear a case as anyone had ever made. Big Paulie had profited from the car-theft ring and sanctioned all the murders that went along with it including Roy DeMeo’s. In other words, racketeering-influenced corruption at its worst and most obvious.

Working with attorneys Roy Cohn and James LaRossa, Castellano was released almost upon arrest on $2-million bail, but still he must have been wondering how the feds, and Giuliani, in particular, had learned so much about his La Cosa Nostra dealings. After all, this was his first brush with either local or federal law enforcement since his arrest on an armed robbery charge in 1934 at the age of nineteen. Now
seventy-years-old
, he no doubt blamed this latest misfortune on Angelo Ruggiero and his stupidity for talking so openly and allowing his home and telephone lines to be bugged and tapped in the first place. You have to figure that somewhere in the godfather’s subconscious, he must have anguished was there more? Additional information that a moron like
Quack-Quack
was capable of bragging about after two glasses of wine, information about family loansharking, gambling, political payoffs, pornography, union racketeering,
construction
bid rigging, extortion, drugs, and the dozens of
family-related
hits to which he could be tied.

But as knowledgeable as Paul Castellano had become
during
his nine years as godfather and chairman of the Commission, he was not yet aware of two potentially
cataclysmic
situations. First, in addition to Ruggiero’s house being bugged, the FBI had in May 1983 performed a “black bag” job at Castellano’s Todt Hill enclave, drugging his Doberman
attack dogs with shots from a dart gun, incapacitating the security system and motion-detection devices, then picking the lock to the garage’s pedestrian entrance door to gain access to the estate.

Once inside, they knew where family business was carried out thanks to interrogations of Castellano’s mistress, Gloria Olarte. The agents planted omni-directional listening devices within the estate so that conversations between Castellano and his capos were transmitted to a command center located in a neighboring house where they were recorded
unencumbered
. The second problem, that even Castellano couldn’t imagine, was that Ruggiero and he were picked up on
separate
surveillance tape recordings discussing the unthinkable: the Commission and the vast scope of the five families’
operations
nationally, internationally, and most specifically, in the State of New York.

As Elliot discovered later, it was through these tapes and information obtained from informants that Giuliani put a puzzle together that was custom made for RICO. It was long known that the five families controlled the New York
construction
industry through their infiltration of the
construction
workers’ unions. For Giuliani, however, a pattern was emerging so that he could now prove there was an
organization
, the Commission, that acted as a governing body to carry out these crimes. By controlling the unions through bribery, blackmail, and murder, the mob controlled the labor supply at a given construction site as well as the supply of critical
building
materials such as concrete and steel girders.