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  At a nearby diner, they met Failla and John Riggi, boss of the small but prosperous DeCavalcante Family in New Jersey. It was important for the two bosses to maintain contact because Gambino crews operate in New Jersey. In addition, Riggi was the business agent of a laborers’ union and often sought the counsel of Uncle Paul, who manipulated many unions and their members.

  About 2:00 P.M., Bilotti and Castellano left for Manhattan to drop off the envelopes, visit with Castellano’s lawyer, and have dinner at Sparks. A table for six had been reserved. They drove toward the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, a silvery span named after the Italian explorer who discovered Staten Island in 1524 and the Narrows, the mile-wide Atlantic Ocean gateway to the deep water of New York Harbor.

  The Lincoln glided across the bridge to Brooklyn, the “Broken Land” of the early Dutch settlers. Then it veered onto the Gowanus Expressway and headed northeast, parallel to the waterfront docks of South Brooklyn, which the Gambino Family had corrupted long ago.

  In Red Hook, the Lincoln left the highway and went underground, entering an opening in the East River bedrock known as the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. It emerged a few minutes later onto the southern tip of Manhattan, where tourists gather for excursion rides to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, where many sons of Sicily landed in America. The Lincoln veered left through an underpass and then onto the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, locally known as the East River Drive, which was the road to midtown sitdowns.

  Around 2:30 P.M., Castellano and Bilotti arrived at the office of attorney James LaRossa, on Madison Avenue near Twenty-fifth Street.

  Recently, the news in Castellano’s stolen-car case was good. Originally, the indictment charged the ring with some two dozen murders, including that of the Pope’s former son-in-law, who was said to have cheated on his pregnant wife, which was said to have caused a miscarriage. In a setback for prosecutors, a judge had since broken the indictment down into several smaller, more defendable cases.

  In the first of these, the only evidence directly linking Castellano to the stolen-car ring had been the testimony of the nephew of Gambino captain Anthony Gaggi. The nephew had testified he took stacks of money to Castellano and heard him discuss with Uncle Anthony one of the brutal murders attributed to Uncle Paul’s henchmen.

  Under cross-examination, however, the nephew admitted first linking Castellano to the ring on the eve of the trial even though he had previously undergone two hundred hours of interrogation. The implication was that the nephew had embroidered his story to help prosecutors out of a last-minute jam. Castellano felt the man came across as a liar when he denied it; he hoped the jury did, too. Many prosecutors consider New York juries the most skeptical around, but one never knows about juries, not until they free you or jail you.

  “We talked very little about the car case, we thought we had it locked up,” LaRossa would say later. “We were in a vacation mode, a holiday mood.”

  Bilotti and Castellano left LaRossa’s office about 4:00 P.M., an hour before their sitdown with Failla, DeCicco, and two other people at Sparks.

  “See you in court tomorrow,” Castellano told LaRossa.

  With an hour to kill before going to Sparks, Castellano decided to pick up a special Christmas gift, a bottle of perfume, for a LaRossa secretary who had been especially courteous to him. He directed Bilotti to a store on West Forty-third Street, where they parked the Lincoln in a no parking zone. They could have afforded a garage; Castellano had $3,300 on him, Bilotti $6,300.

  Bilotti opened the glove compartment and removed a card issued by the New York City Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association; it had originally been given to a newly promoted police sergeant. Bilotti placed it on the dashboard but it didn’t do any good; the Lincoln was ticketed.

  The middle part of Manhattan is a tiny grid: avenues run north and south; streets go east and west. Now, at 5:00 P.M., the grid was locked with people and cars—it’s always a honking zone of despair during the Christmas season—and the boss and his new underboss were caught in a crosstown snarl.

  They would be late for their executions.

  In the vicinity of Sparks, in the fading light of day, about a dozen men empty of goodwill waited anxiously for the Pope’s arrival. Several sat in parked cars on Second and Third Avenues. At least three waited on benches located in a small street-level plaza at Forty-sixth Street and Third Avenue or paced the side street, pausing in apartment doorways to light cigarettes.

  Diplomatic bodyguards, a passerby decided.

  One of the three men on the street was gangly, pockmarked, and had eyes as dark as tombs. Another was short and tense like a cobra. They wore trench coats and dark, cossacklike fur hats.

  “Where the hell are they?” one grumbled to another, loud enough for someone to recall later. “They were supposed to be here by now.”

  At 5:25 P.M., Bilotti turned the Lincoln onto East Forty-sixth Street. It was dark now, and the car reflected a rainbow of seasonal colors. Both men were unarmed. The Pope had a rule about wearing weapons to Family sitdowns: Don’t do it. But there was no need for weapons—they were meeting members of the Family, in the middle of midtown, at a crowded restaurant. All of which made it a perfect setup for the hit men in fur hats.

  At 5:26, the Lincoln stopped in a no standing area in front of Sparks. Weapons drawn, two assassins moved directly in front of Castellano as he began to get out on the curbside; one confronted Bilotti as he emerged from behind the wheel.

  There was a flash of recognition; the Pope knew at least one of the men who were about to kill him.

  And now with a flash of blue-orange and a rapid crackling sound bouncing off the buildings, the bullets flew in from .32- and .38-caliber semiautomatic handguns and blood and bone flew out. The Pope and Bilotti were hit six times each, in the head and the upper body. A bystander recalled watching one of the gunmen leaning over and firing a be-sure shot into the Pope’s head.

  Castellano sank to the ground, his body wedged between the open car door and the passenger seat. His left hand clung to the bottom of the car door, a death grip; a half-smoked cigar glowed a few inches away, near his shattered glasses. Bilotti fell face up on the street, the car keys near his outstretched right arm.

  Murder still gets a rise out of New Yorkers. Many screamed and darted into doorways or ducked down behind two large stone lions guarding Chez Vong Restaurant of Paris and New York, adjacent to Sparks. The killers tucked away their weapons—one was equipped with a silencer—and walked east on Forty-sixth Street to Second Avenue; the tense cobralike one whispered into a walkie-talkie, no doubt to a man in one of the cars.

  At the corner, in front of the Dag Hammarskjöld Tower Condominium, another Lincoln pulled up and the assassins climbed in; the car slipped into the southbound traffic and disappeared. They and the men in the other cars, who were on standby in case anything went wrong, now relaxed and pounded the dashboards in exhilarated relief. Nothing had gone wrong.

  A witness saw three men leave Sparks shortly after the gunfire ended. Two of them resembled police mug shots of James Failla and Frank DeCicco. Whoever the men were, they ignored the hysteria, and the little red rivers on Forty-sixth Street—and faded away as anonymously as the car full of happy hit men.

  A Sparks bartender called 911 and the street soon filled with flashing lights. As word of the victims’ identities was beeped around the city, a rowdy convention of homicide detectives, police brass, and reporters was convened. FBI agents arrived from New York University Law School; a University of Notre Dame professor, an architect of the controversial racketeering law used to indict Castellano in both his pending cases, had been holding a seminar there.

  The excitement outside Sparks was palpable. The adrenaline rush the investigators and chroniclers of murder get when they come upon the smell of a big case and a big story always produces moments of thrilling confusion. A Family boss murdered in midtown the week before Christmas was big. Bosses had been slain in other boroughs, but one hadn’t been exe
cuted in Manhattan since 1957, when Carlo Gambino’s predecessor was assassinated in a hotel barbershop.

  Reporters crowded cops for tidbits. Chief of Detectives Richard Nicastro, asked what effect the slaying might have on the other defendants in the car-case trial, said he wouldn’t speculate. As for the Pope, however: “They don’t have to prove guilt or innocence anymore. That’s over.”

  Later, a detective—an expert on the Family—was astonished when told that the victims did not have bodyguards, considering the uncertain climate Neil Dellacroce’s death was known to have caused. It was like the president and the vice president walking around without the Secret Service.

  “They were always together. They made it easy.”

  The double hit provoked the usual expressions of outrage.

  “The decent citizens of this country are demeaned in the eyes of the world if brazen cold-blooded murders can be perpetrated on a street in New York,” said federal Court of Appeals Judge Irving J. Kaufman, chairman of the President’s Commission on Organized Crime.

  “The waste of a human life is shocking, no matter who it is,” commented federal District Court Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy, who was presiding over Castellano’s car case, as he adjourned the trial for three weeks to weigh motions from codefendants for a mistrial that was eventually denied.

  The Pope’s table at Sparks had been set for six. Failla, DeCicco, and an unidentified man were seen leaving as two other would-be diners lay in the street. Someone hadn’t come to dinner.

  The prime suspect in the drama, not the cameraman but the director, was at home that night in Queens. He was watching television with his longtime wife in their suburban Cape Cod-style home in the un-New York City-like neighborhood known as Howard Beach. The home had a rotating satellite dish on the roof; John Gotti had learned how to tune different worlds in or out.

  “Gotti will emerge as the head of the other captains,” predicted Lieutenant Remo Franceschini of the Queens District Attorney’s detective squad the next day. “That’s what this struggle is all about.”

  Over the next few days, the little that was known about Gotti was published and broadcast many times. He was said to have many double-breasted suits, his own barber’s chair, and a fear of flying. New Yorkers with a sense of history raised their eyebrows at one unnamed cop’s claim: “Gotti is the most vicious, meanest mobster I’ve ever encountered.”

  With justification, the cop might also have added “most reckless” or “boldest.” A few months before, even though aware that his words were being taped by government agents, Gotti had threatened to kill a nightclub owner if the man didn’t make a payment on a $100,000 loan.

  “Your partner was here the other day asking me to shoot him in the head, and I would have if he didn’t tell me in a taped joint,” Gotti began. “You deserve to get hit, but the reason why you ain’t … is because I gave my word [that] if you come up here to straighten it out [you wouldn’t be killed] but that is gonna be off, if you don’t come up with it.”

  “Johnny, you’re the best,” the man replied.

  The months before the murders had been especially tense. Dellacroce’s health had faded as the long-simmering conflict over drug dealing had heated up. Members of both Family branches had become jittery.

  “Everybody’s running scared, John,” one of Gotti’s crew members had said to him.

  “Well, fuck them, we ain’t.”

  “I’m telling you what it is.”

  “I ain’t running scared. I run scared … when I bet three games and lose the three games. Then I run scared.”

  After the Sparks hits, a few reporters tried to talk to Gotti, but he demurred. He also declined, through his attorney, to submit voluntarily to an interview with FBI agents, because he knew “nothing about the murders.”

  Gotti also declined to attend the wake of Castellano, who had declined to attend the wake of Aniello Dellacroce two weeks earlier—a miscalculation compounded by appointing Bilotti underboss.

  In fact, all except blood family boycotted Castellano’s wake, which was held in the same funeral parlor as Carlo Gambino’s, located in Brooklyn, in a peculiarly named section of the Pope’s childhood borough: Gravesend.

  2

  THE NICE N EZ BUG

  FOR A MURDER SUSPECT, John Gotti was a bold man in the days following the Pope’s timely demise.

  He was more irritated than worried that once again NYPD detectives and FBI agents shadowed him as he moved around the dense, tense city in a chauffeured car. The chauffeur was a necessary luxury; like the rest of him, Gotti’s foot was aggressive. His motor vehicle rap sheet included several speeding beefs and a drunk-driving conviction, for which his license had been suspended.

  He was not widely known in the lawful world, although he had been identified as the “new Godfather” of the “Gambino gang” in some premature newspaper handicapping in March, after Castellano’s second racketeering indictment. He was widely known in the unlawful world, where Johnny, Johnny Boy, or John all described the same explosive force, John Gotti.

  As Neil Dellacroce’s health faded away, Gotti had assumed more responsibility for the Family’s “other mob,” which controlled a large gambling network. This was turning the proverbial distillery over to an alcoholic; Gotti was an astounding gambler—losses of $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 a weekend on horse racing and sports contests were common. He once won $225,000 on the Brooklyn number—an underworld lottery—and lost it in two nights of shooting craps.

  Gotti’s crew included three of his six brothers and men he’d known since his teenage street-gang days. “We’re the fucking toughest guys in the fucking world,” he proclaimed in a voice as coarse as a gravel pit, as he berated someone who owed him money.

  Some members of his crew were afraid of him, only partly because of stories he told about himself. One of these—about a fight with someone he later learned was a cop—revealed a man who took delight in humiliating a beaten man.

  After describing how he had broken the unidentified officer’s legs, ankles, and jaw, Gotti said “I told him, ‘You want to play anymore? You want to play, you cocksucker?’ I open his mouth with my finger and put the gun in. ‘You want to play anymore?’ He can’t talk, he’s crying like a baby.”

  Like Castellano, Gotti also was under federal indictment. His trial was only four months away; he faced 40 years of imprisonment if convicted. He was out on bail, a time to lay low—unless you were Johnny Boy.

  The detectives and agents following Gotti were investigating a double murder and keeping watch for rumors of war. The murder of a Family boss was always cleared with the other New York bosses. Had the tradition held? Would there be revenge? Who would seek it?

  The day after Sparks, they knew where to look for answers.

  Gotti and many other captains had offices in what they euphemistically called social clubs. Legitimate social clubs, where friends meet to play cards or pass time, are common in many New York neighborhoods, but the Families adapted them to other purposes.

  In Manhattan, the surveillants saw Gotti and Frank DeCicco at the Ravenite Social Club, an unimposing storefront that was Dellacroce’s longtime command center. They tailed DeCicco to Brooklyn, where he met his mentor and Sparks companion, James Failla, at the Veterans and Friends Social Club.

  Later, they saw New Jersey Family delegates visiting Gotti at his headquarters, the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park, Queens. As Gotti’s notoriety grew, an early reporting error would be institutionalized and the name of this equally unimposing storefront would be spelled as “Bergen,” even though photos of the club’s sign show Bergin is correct.

  Outside the Bergin, the men watching Gotti also counted dozens of Gambino men entering and leaving. Were they readying for war, or making the peace?

  On Sunday, December 22, 1985, Kenneth McCabe—then an NYPD detective for the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office—saw Gotti at the Veterans and Friends. McCabe had never seen Gotti there during hundreds of stakeouts
. Gotti was accompanied by Joseph Massino, a longtime friend who had recently become acting boss of the Bonanno Family. McCabe also saw DeCicco, Failla, and several other captains, who in groups of two and three kept shuttling between the club and a nearby restaurant.

  “There appeared to be a meeting at the location,” McCabe later testified. “They would go in the club, come outside, go into the restaurant, back and forth into the club … so they would not be overheard.”

  On Christmas Eve, Gotti and DeCicco were back at the Ravenite. So was Andrew Rosenzweig, chief investigator of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Investigations Bureau. Gotti and DeCicco retreated to the narrow streets of Little Italy for several private talks, and at one point they walked within earshot of the unassuming, undercover Rosenzweig.

  “They’ve got to come to me,” Gotti said.

  The same day, from a surveillance van 100 feet away, NYPD Detective John Gurnee took photographs of two hundred men coming to see John Gotti. Outside the Ravenite, as one shiny car after another pulled up, he saw the men bypass all the others and go directly to Gotti, who they embraced and kissed on both cheeks.

  Gotti was always treated deferentially at the Ravenite Social Club, but never before like this. “It was very similar to the respect accorded Aniello Dellacroce,” Detective Gurnee said.

  It now seemed to McCabe, Rosenzweig, Gurnee, and all the other detectives and agents that there would be no war. Gotti was enjoying a peaceful Christmas Eve and many wiseguys—a New York term for gangsters—were rallying around his tree to wish him goodwill toward them.

  Without inside information, which is not always shared by the Crime Capital’s anticrime forces, the surveillants could only speculate who the new boss would be. They didn’t know the inside details that were available; these indicated that Gotti took control of the Family on December 20. A symbolic vote would be held in a few weeks, but Gotti was boss a day after the Pope was buried.