This Family of Mine: What It Was Like Growing Up Gotti (29 page)

But the celebration wasn’t without a little chaos. One hour before the event, I’d realized I’d left my dress shoes at home. I was wearing a beautiful white ball gown and a pair of bedroom slippers! I didn’t have anything else to wear—and most of the stores in the city were closed for the weekend. It was either the slippers or miss the wedding altogether. I was sure it would be the joke on everyone’s lips come Monday morning, but I refused to miss my brother’s wedding. Dad found out about my problem and within twenty minutes had a beautiful pair of shoes sent to the suite. Once again, he saved the day.

The next day was an all-day brunch held at a restaurant my father was involved with called Da Noi (By Us), on Seventy-fourth Street and York. We drank and ate into the night, and then the women were sent home. My father and John and some of their closest friends partied till the early morning, with grappa and goodwill flowing.

The partying had attracted city sanitation workers outside, who
were peering through the windows. They were invited in despite their garbage-covered uniforms. They sat and drank with Dad, John, and the other men who’d accompanied them to the restaurant after the wedding. They had coffee and cake and one toast because they were on the job.

The wedding gifts totaled several hundred thousand in cash.

John shared many a laugh that day with his best man, Bobby Borriello. One of the guests in attendance at the wedding was a man named Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, a member of the Lucchese Crime Family. He, too, had come to show his respect. He and Bobby drank together that day.

John was now newly married to his childhood sweetheart and a capo in the mob, with lots of cash. The sky was the limit. Life in
the life
was good.

The life was not without politics, its own set of laws, treaties, and board of directors. It had its own version of government, and when it came to peace treaties and wars, the two were very similar. Different mob families fought over territories and control. Sometimes a war would take place within one family—like the Colombo war in the early 1990s. The head of the family was Carmine Persico. He’d been arrested and convicted in the late 1980s for a bevy of things, like income tax evasion, RICO, and murder. While Persico was in jail, he turned the reins over to his son, Alphonse “Allie Boy” Persico. Allie Boy ran the Colombo family until he himself was arrested and sent to jail. With father and son in prison, the elder Persico temporarily put his trusted right hand in charge of the family. Vic Orena stepped up to the position comfortably . . . so much so that he refused to relinquish the reins when news of the younger Persico’s release from prison reached his ears. As a result, the Colombo family was divided. There were those men who staunchly stood behind Persico and those who welcomed change with Orena as their new boss. Between 1991 and 1993, there was
much bloodshed. Twelve mobsters and one innocent man mistaken for another mobster fell victim to the bloody Colombo power struggle.

After the war began, every other week it seemed there was another picture of a body riddled with bullets covering the front page of the newspaper. Predictably, a few days would pass and then there was the expected retaliation. It was an “eye for an eye”—a “man for a man.” I saw the disturbing images in the newspapers, but I didn’t recognize any of the names—I was relieved that the bloody mob war did not involve the Gambino family. I believed that no one I knew would be hurt as a result. I was wrong. When news spread of Joe Scopo’s death, everyone was shocked. Joe was extremely well liked by all who knew him. There were very few men he didn’t get along well with. He and Dad were very close—so close that I considered him a relative, even calling him Uncle Joe. He was shot to death in his car just outside his home. His future son-in-law, also in the car, narrowly escaped the barrage of bullets by crawling out of the passenger side of the town car Scopo was driving. His wife and son, Joseph junior, stood helplessly in the doorway of their Woodhaven, Queens home.

Whoever was responsible had sent a message—the rules were changing. Before, it was unheard of to kill a man at his home or in front of his wife and kids. But the new breed of gangsters didn’t care about the old rules. They only seemed to care about money and power.

While the war continued, there was little other Family heads could do. Sit-downs increased as did Commission meetings. Most of the men begged for peace and order on the streets. It was one mob funeral after another. The elders in the life grew increasingly concerned, and order needed to be restored quickly. My father intervened and called a Commission meeting and demanded that the heads of both sides at war be present. Ten hours later, there was
still no resolution. While the Colombo men were busy killing each other, the FBI was busy mounting indictments against them. Forty-two Persico soldiers and over a dozen men from the Orena faction were convicted and sent to prison. Orena, too, was sent to jail for life. After his conviction, his men retreated and the war was over. It was the last mob war of the twentieth century—it was also one of the bloodiest.

While Dad tended to important matters within his professional family, certain emergencies occurred in his own personal family. My oldest son, Carmine, was rushed to the hospital the following winter. Carmine and John had been battling a bad case of strep throat.

John seemed to recuperate within a week, while Carmine only got worse. One night he woke up with a fever of 104 and started to convulse. I called an ambulance. At the hospital, he was diagnosed with septecemia, blood poisoning caused by a severe case of strep that had traveled to his heart. He was only four years old and doctors thought he was going to die. The creator of
Sesame Street
, Jim Henson, had died of the exact same illness. And because of this, most people now knew what septecemia was—even my father. Dad had left earlier in the week for Florida, as he had business to tend to down south. Because he had a dislike of flying, he and a few of his men drove down to Miami. Mom let Dad know about Carmine when he called to check in. He literally turned the car around and raced back to New York. Early the next morning, Dad arrived at the hospital, still dressed in the same suit he’d left New York in. He looked worried and worn out. When he laid eyes on his grandson laying helplessly in a quarantined crib, his heart nearly broke. The doctor told Dad the next twelve hours were critical—and that there was a good chance Carmine would die. He spent the next few hours trying to convince me everything would be okay. But behind my back he was already preparing for the worst. He’d told his driver, Jackie, that he was to “get me out of
the hospital immediately” if anything were to happen to my son. He knew I could never withstand such a blow. Thankfully, after twelve hours of tears and prayers, the doctor who was head of infectious diseases declared Carmine “out of the woods.”

Meanwhile, the investigation of the Castellano murder continued. There was to be a roundup of men all connected to organized crime any day, so every guy, including my father, was prepared to be arrested. No one knew when or where this would occur. My father’s lawyer, Bruce Cutler, even reached out to the Organized Crime Task Force (OCTF) and offered to have my father turn himself in, in an effort to avoid a media circus. No such luck. The agents and politicians wanted their glory. They wanted their public grandstanding and perp walk of one of the most famous faces in the world. They wanted to walk John Gotti into the station, in front of all the media reporters, with his hands cuffed behind his back.

The raid came in the early hours of a morning in December 1990. My father was involved in a high-stakes card game, and when nearly two hundred agents burst through the door of the social club wearing riot gear, flashing badges, and yielding big guns, no one seemed less surprised than my father. He later laughed recounting how he greeted them: “Hey, guys. How are you? How about a game of cards? An espresso?” He never lost his sense of humor. The men turned down both offers and let the room know exactly which men they wanted. Besides my father, Sammy “the Bull” Gravano and Frank “Frankie Loc” Locascio were arrested as well. All were charged with a number of serious crimes including racketeering, obstruction of justice, extortion, and murder.

T
he arrest was all over the news by early the next morning, and it was unlikely that Dad would be released on bail. It was hard enough fighting a major RICO case, but fighting the case while detained and having only limited access to your lawyers is far tougher. Another blow came when Bruce Cutler was disqualified from the case. Dad considered Bruce his “lucky charm” and was really pissed when he was removed. The government argued that Cutler was “house counsel” to the Gambino Crime Family and would in all likelihood be called as a government witness, resulting in a “conflict.” This was a lie, of course, and Cutler was never used as a witness. It was another tactic to separate what law enforcement believed was a winning team—Gotti and Cutler.

Cutler paraded in a bevy of prospective lawyers—the best of the best—to fight one of the toughest cases in history. My father interviewed each lawyer brought before him with caution. Every one of them had an obvious agenda—all wanted to be dubbed
the
lawyer of the moment, working on the biggest organized crime case since Al Capone was convicted of income tax evasion.

My father finally chose powerhouse attorney Al Krieger from Florida. He was an older gentleman, well experienced in the field of law—especially in high-profile, organized crime cases. He came highly recommended by many other attorneys as well; even Cutler—who was severely distraught and depressed over the ruling that he could not represent my father in this case—approved of Krieger.

Most of the evidence consisted of taped conversations between my father and many men. These were telling conversations about the mob and mob life. These valuable tapes were obtained through bugs placed in an apartment above the Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy. The FBI watched the place so much and for so long that they realized only one person lived above the club, a “little old lady” named Mrs. Cirelli. She did as most lonely old ladies do, shop and run errands and go to bed early. The entire OCTF could not figure out why these men went into the Ravenite for such meetings, yet no conversations were picked up on any bugs. These agents would watch the men go in and come out, but no conversations, telling or otherwise, were recorded. Finally, they figured out there had to be another meeting place somewhere in the two-story structure. While agents often bragged about this coup, most people in the streets laughed their asses off, knowing it took nearly two hundred men—agents with access to the most technologically advanced equipment—ten years to figure out that most important meetings or conversations took place in Mrs. Cirelli’s apartment on the second floor of the Ravenite.

M
Y FATHER AND
his dream team immediately went to work, even engaging in weekly co-defendant meetings involving other men on the case, such as Sammy Gravano.

Gravano was a short man suffering from a Napoleon complex—when he was a teenager, neighborhood bullies constantly picked on him. He was five foot four, and in an effort to compensate for his small stature, he took daily shots of metabolic steroids and worked out daily at a local gym, earning him the moniker “Sammy the Bull.”

His parents came from Sicily and later settled in Downtown Brooklyn. Sammy was an only child. His parents owned real estate and a successful garment business. There was no shortage of money and the Gravanos lived a comfortable, middle-class life. This prompted many mob guys to later wonder why Gravano ever got mixed up in a life of crime, since his family obviously had money. Years later, Sammy admitted the reason he joined the life was for the “thrill.”

In his memoir published several years ago, Gravano admitted he was taken in early on by the flashy men who walked the streets of Brooklyn. The first chance he got to impress these men he did. As a teenager he often boasted to others of being a burglar, petty thief, and stick-up man, always using a ski mask. Gravano was once arrested for a robbery and caught a vicious beating from the cops. When he appeared in court, his face bruised and beaten, the case was demoted to a misdemeanor, with Gravano promising to join the army. He did, but not right away. He lied about enlisting, but ironically, less than a year later, Gravano was drafted. While in the service, he managed to occupy himself running card games at night and overseeing betting scams during the day. He made his stay in the army bearable by paying off military police and running
barracks card games and becoming a GI loan shark. After his release a few years later, he went right back to a life of crime. He became a self-proclaimed “associate” of the Columbo Crime Family and continued to enlist in petty rackets such as muggings.

Gravano admitted to committing his first murder at twenty-five. He whacked another wannabe for making fun of a made man. Gravano seemed to enjoy the surge of power the killing gave him and later remarked, “killing came so easy to me.”