"It's gonna be nice, you watch," Gotti told the men.

His election had as much suspense as a meeting of the electoral college an hour after the polls close. The fact that Gotti was under indictment made no difference. The fact that he could be sent away for the rest of his life made no difference. The only thing that made a difference was him, John Gotti-he had measured the odds, put all his chips on the table, and busted the house.

Almost everyone had already forgotten about another legal detail nagging the boss, whose victory was celebrated by the purchase of a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz SEL.

He also was under indictment in a state case, accused of a.s.sault and theft-the embarra.s.sing result of a temperamental scuffle with a refrigerator mechanic over a double-parked car in Queens in 1984. Gotti was accused of slapping the man; an a.s.sociate of Gotti's was accused of taking $325 from the man's shirt pocket-out of spite, not larceny, but it read like theft by both in the newspapers, which made it acutely embarra.s.sing.

"The crime is beneath him," his attorney would point out.

Except for the unseemliness of the idea that he had mugged a mechanic, the case was a nuisance to Gotti, compared to the federal case. The state trial was set for March, but he believed it could be handled. Somehow.

The day after his inauguration, Gotti griped about the miserliness of the old boss. Theoretically, a boss gets a cut of the operations of each captain, who get a slice of each soldier's. But Gotti learned that Castellano had been taking $5,000 every Christmas from the life savings of the wife of an elderly captain who had only $2,000 coming in from an untypically moribund crew.

Castellano was a "f.u.c.k" for doing this. "Well, listen to me, that's ended," Gotti told an a.s.sociate. "[It] don't mean [however] that you don't have to try to hustle and put something together for us."

Other aspects of the Family's far-flung money-making ventures crossed Gotti's desk his first day on the job. He revised the payments that an unspecified industry was making to Castellano and Bilotti so that a soldier in the scheme got a bigger share. He discussed a plan to stop a threatened labor action against concrete plants if they would "sweeten the pie."

Many conversations over the next several weeks showed the graduate of the blue-collar Family within a Family becoming a white-color boss, or trying to. On January 18, Gotti told Angelo about a deal headed his way with a representative of an unknown group: "He won a deal, supposed to get a job. Three and a half million in [contracts], a hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars in kickbacks or more than that. He says it all goes to Johnny Gotti."

On January 23, the new Gambino troika-Gotti, DeCicco, and Gallo-traveled to the Helmsley Palace Hotel in Manhattan to meet with recording industry executives seeking venture capital for an alb.u.m by a new artist. The introductions were made by a longtime captain, Joseph Armone.

Someone tipped off the police as well as a network television crew working on an industry payola story; they arrived as Gotti and the others stepped off an elevator into the lobby. The ambushed mobsters declined interviews, but sinister footage of a handsome, well-dressed man described as an unknown gangster with record-industry contacts was telecast nationwide.

A few days later, back at the Bergin annex, after someone brought a copy of the singer's sample tape, Gotti was uncertain about the idea. It was risky to invest in a new singer-and the recording industry was too dishonest.

"They change two or three sounds and they make their own [record] and you get f.u.c.ked."

The duties of a boss were many, and one was punishing miscreant subordinates. He grumbled about one offender this way: "This kid is as high as he's ever gonna get in life. This kid, I'm just trying to think of the way to punish him now. Enough to know how I didn't like that. Teach him what bitterness is. Give him something f.u.c.kin' [to] really feel sorry about. This ain't a ball game here. This ain't no ball game. This ain't no game."

Gotti was amazed after his ascension that at least one captain-Anthony Gaggi, uncle of the car-case witness against Castellano-had not adapted to the new game. He learned this during a telephone call from a soldier reporting about a dispute involving a Brooklyn restaurant. Family members had just bought into it and the landlord wanted to check them out.

The soldier said Gaggi had told him to "bring" Gotti to a sitdown with the landlord and the new partners.

"He's under me!" Gotti shouted. "You tell him, [to] get his a.s.s up here to see me!"

In the meantime, concerning the inquisitive landlord, Gotti told the soldier to tell Gaggi and the others not to engage in any more "warning s.h.i.t" until a sitdown. After all, people could be reasoned with.

"People ain't stupid, they know what we are," Gotti said. "So what are we gonna do? What, are we gonna worry about cops now?

Three days after these comments, Angelo complained of having to visit someone about the same problem, which was "still up in the air." Forty-eight hours pa.s.sed, and then a fire damaged the restaurant; authorities proclaimed it arson.

As this restaurant problem was being solved, another was beginning. Some men, believed to be members of a carpenters' local union, were vandalizing Manhattan construction sites using non-union labor. More than $30,000 damage was inflicted on the Bankers and Brokers Restaurant near Wall Street. It was owned by a Gambino soldier and previously owned by Castellano's four children.

The business agent of the carpenters' local, the largest in the country, was John F. O'Connor, 51. Gotti instructed two men to find out who O'Connor was "with"-not whether he was connected to a Family, but which one. In the Crime Capital, when it came to the construction industry, Gotti's a.s.sumption was historically justified.

At the time, O'Connor was the target of an investigation into whether he accepted bribes from the contractors to allow them to use non-union carpenters. When Gotti learned that O'Connor might have ordered the restaurant sacked, he said the union official was "becoming overconfident" and wondered whether he ought to "bust him up."

Over the next few weeks, inquiries went out to members of the Genovese Family, who reported that they had only partial control of the carpenters' union and were "embarra.s.sed" because a Gambino Family place had been trashed by a renegade element.

Weeks later, O'Connor was shot several times in the lobby of his union's office building; the gunman, who fired four times, escaped. The victim crawled into an elevator, called for help, and survived. A few months later, O'Connor was indicted for taking thousands of dollars in bribes.

Sometimes the men in the Bergin annex were more paranoid about bugs than at other times. Years earlier, the pay phones in an empty storefront on the other side of the Bergin, which crew members used to place bets, had been tapped. So now and then they would whisper or turn up the volume on a television or radio, or run tap water while they talked.

This made it difficult to decipher some conversations, but usually at least a revealing sentence or two was picked up-such as when Gotti discussed a gambling operation using illegal slot machines: "He's with me, the stops are mine, the machines are mine."

Good "overheards" showed that while Gotti may have been a little uncertain about some aspects of his new position, he was not uncertain about himself. Late in February, he told Angelo: "You present the case, paint it up a little bit ... This has got to earn some [money] here. For us, not for other Families, but for us first ... I don't know about concrete, steel, and construction, but I got a lot of spies in the street and I know everything."

Again, early in March, underboss Frank DeCicco expressed concern about a "bad situation," most likely a jurisdictional conflict between the Gambino and Genovese Families, possibly over a construction project just north of the city that involved Family-connected unions.

"I'm thinking all night long how the f.u.c.k to resolve this motherf.u.c.ker," the underboss said.

"You gotta understand we gotta be a little strong," the boss replied. "We gotta be strong against other people who are strong."

Gotti told DeCicco they didn't want to be lulled into a false sense of security, like Paul Castellano was.

"Frankie, you know what I'm saying ... that's what this guy allowed himself to be tricked into, Frankie."

Not all of the new boss's business was about such serious enterprises as concrete, steel, and construction. The boss was wherever a buck was, or might be.

A periodic topic on the Nice N EZ bug was an ice cream company in New Jersey. Gotti, Angelo, and two members of the DeCavalcante Family had somehow acquired part ownership three years before. Gotti, who said he owned seventeen percent, wasn't very happy with his lack of return or the company's prospects.

On January 10, NYPD detectives tailed Gotti to a meeting in which he reviewed the matter with the DeCavalcante fellows. Beforehand, he told Angelo the agenda: "Do I want my money out of it, or get rid of it?"

The next day, at the Bergin annex, he gave a report. "So I said, 'What's this company worth?' They said, 'Four million right now. If we sold it, we owe nothin'.'"

Gotti was displeased that his investment would yield nothing, but the men insisted that "in two weeks" the company's fortunes would turn around. The boss agreed to wait, but wasn't convinced.

"I told my partners, all nice fellows, I said, 'If conversation had calories in it, I'd be the fattest guy in the world, 'cause that's all I'm getting, conversation.'"

In March, the subject came up again when an a.s.sociate of Gotti apparently came in with the latest nonprofit statement.

"You tell me the ice cream business is worth this? This?" the boss fumed.

Gotti compared his investment to what he could earn by investing the same money in loan-sharking-the illegal lending of cash at usurious interest rates. He cited a loan-shark rate of 1.5 percent of vigorish, or interest, a week, and launched into an amusing tirade: "This guy told me in two weeks we're gonna see money! That's two and a half months ago. I'm not his f.u.c.kin' kid! We'll make Dee Bee [a Gambino captain] buy me out. Corky [a DeCavalcante man] buy me out. Any f.u.c.kin' body buy me out. I'll sell it for fifty dollars!"

"No you won't," the a.s.sociate said.

"f.u.c.k I won't. My end, I'll sell it."

Gotti was clearly weary of it all. "Afraid this ain't my f.u.c.kin' day," he added. "Ain't my f.u.c.kin' day."

He wondered if he should visit the company, investigate why ice cream wasn't profitable in New Jersey, but the a.s.sociate advised against it: too many surveillants around.

"This is pathetic," Gotti complained again. "I don't even get ice cream out of it. If I want ice cream I have [to see another person]. I love those f.u.c.kin' frozen red somethin's. We got the company three years, never saw a dime. Never seen an ice cream bar out of it! If you took [the money] and you put it on the street for a point and a half, we'd be rich over three years! We'd be rich without all the ice cream meltin' or nothin'."

Gotti's impatience was easy to understand. He was in a much higher world of commerce now. On March 6, an unidentified man asked him to meet three others seeking to acquire control of gambling casinos in Puerto Rico. The men already owned a casino in the Bahamas. What the bug overheard was limited, but it appeared that the men wanted to give Gotti a piece of their action if he would solve a problem they were having with a disposal company they owned.

It was probably no problem at all. James Failla was an official of the Manhattan Trade Waste a.s.sociation, the management group, and other Family men dominated the sanitation unions.

Another man, identified only as Joey, enticed Gotti with a story about gasoline. Two soldiers in another Family recently had been indicted by a grand jury because of a scheme to skim money from the sale of gasoline by not paying federal and state taxes. But Joey said that didn't mean similar opportunities were not available.

"A f.u.c.kin' twenty-eight cents [a gallon] you can steal," Joey said. "I'm talkin' about doing twenty, thirty million gallons a month."

Gotti did some quick figuring, noting that even at two cents a gallon on 30 million gallons, "It's six hundred thousand dollars."

"Wow," an unidentified person in the room said.

"I gotta do it right now," Gotti said. "Right now, I gotta do it. I gotta call this guy ..."

Gotti picked up a telephone, dialed one of his bodyguards and asked him to contact someone he referred to as "Bobby the Jew" and "tell him to call me."

Gotti was free to receive such propositions because he had been granted bail after his indictment in the federal case. Ironically, a young and well-educated movie producer, who also was a capo in the Colombo Family, was being held without bail and preparing to plead guilty and pay $15 million in rest.i.tution for the largest gas-tax ripoff in history. The case was before the same judge who would preside at Gotti's trial.

Somewhere in a schedule clogged by men bearing gifts, deals, and problems, Gotti was able to find time for his lawyers. To properly manage his Family, take advantage of opportunities, and enjoy his status, he had to stay out of jail.

The nagging business with the Queens mechanic he was accused of a.s.saulting and robbing was about to come to trial. The case had taken a few remarkable turns since the events in December-unusual is usual in Family cases-and by the time it was over, there would be many more.

Even after the case was officially closed, the turbulence around Gotti would keep it unofficially open.

4.

I FORGOTTI!.

THE CASE OF THE MECHANIC versus the mobster began September 11, 1984, the day an empty double-parked car blocked the impatient way of Romual Piecyk. He was a gruff, burly man who earned a living wage fixing cooling equipment, including the large walk-in refrigerators used to hang animal carca.s.ses.

Piecyk was 35 years old, and no saint, at least not from 1972 to 1979, when on different occasions he was arrested for drunkenness, possession of a weapon, and a.s.sault. He was 6 foot 2 and considered himself a tough guy.

He ran into some other tough guys while in Maspeth, a tough working-cla.s.s neighborhood in Queens. His car was blocked by the double-parked car outside two gambling dens under John Gotti's control, a social club and the Cozy Corner Bar. He got in his car and leaned on his horn. Again and again.

Out of the Cozy Corner Bar came an a.s.sociate of Gotti's, Frank Colletta. He reached in through the open driver's window and smacked Piecyk in the face, according to the testimony of police officers who interviewed Piecyk moments later. Piecyk had just cashed his paycheck, and Colletta lifted $325 from his shirt pocket, apparently a fee he charged for aggravation.

Piecyk left his car and the pair began scuffling. Gotti then appeared and slapped Piecyk in the face; Gotti stepped back, glared, and made a motion with his hand, as if he were drawing something from the waistband of his trousers.

"You better get the f.u.c.k out of here," he said.

Piecyk did, and so did Gotti and Colletta.

Someone had called the police, and a car from the 106th Precinct arrived within minutes. Sgt. Thomas Donohue and Officer Raymond Doyle found the refrigerator man standing on the corner of Seventy-second Street and Grand Avenue. His face was puffy and he had cuts and blood on one hand and an arm.

"Two guys just beat me up and took my money," he said.

"All right, we'll make out a report," Doyle replied.

Piecyk pointed toward the Cozy Corner Bar, but it was now empty. Piecyk then looked through the window of a restaurant next door.

"There they are!"

Inside, Gotti and Colletta were sitting at a table with eight other men. Piecyk pointed them out and Sgt. Donohue told them they were under arrest and ordered them to stand.

In a showy display of solidarity, everyone at the table stood, and Sgt. Donohue, in a brief, tense scene, ordered all but Gotti and Colletta to sit down.

"Do you know who I am?" Gotti wanted to know.

"Step out," said Doyle, who didn't.

"Let me talk to this guy," Gotti said as Sgt. Donohue handcuffed him.

He wouldn't, and the heir to Carlo Gambino was led away like a miserable Times Square mugger.

Piecyk went to the precinct on his own and charges were filed based on his story. Gotti was booked and released on his own recognizance, pending action by a grand jury. A lawyer later involved in the case described it as "an example of one bully meeting another, except the first bully would be reformed."

At the time, FBI agents were regularly meeting with two daring men who knew a lot about the Gotti crew-they were part of it. They were not cooperating witnesses like the secretly wired Dominick Lofaro. They were informers. Years earlier, for revenge, for money, and to buy a little insurance against their own criminal acts, they had begun talking about Gotti and others as long as they never had to testify. Their tips enabled the FBI to make many arrests and recoveries of stolen goods. One, a personal friend of Gotti's, had been talking since 1966. The other had "gone bad," which is how the Family described such men, in 1976.

For legal reasons, the information they gave to the FBI was never made a part of Gotti's federal case in Brooklyn, but it is doc.u.mented in secret FBI files. Every time an agent met or spoke with them-and there were hundreds of contacts-a memo went into the files.

To keep their ident.i.ties secret, even within the FBI, the informers were known by code designations. The longtime personal friend of Gotti was Source BQ 5558-TE, "BQ" for Brooklyn-Queens and "TE" for Top Echelon, the highest informer rank in the RBI. The other was called Source BQ 11766-OC, "OC" meaning Organized Crime. The first source also was known as "Wahoo."

FBI agents always contacted their sources after a major event in Gotti's life such as the Piecyk incident. As in this case, the sources didn't always have startling information; sometimes they just had little brush strokes, little interesting details.

Source BQ 11766-OC, for instance, said Gotti told the officers who arrested him that he had $3,000 in his pocket and did not need to grab money off Piecyk. He said Gotti was shocked to learn that Piecyk didn't know him and had filed charges. Source Wahoo told how Neil Dellacroce reacted to his top captain's arrest. Neil told Gotti, he said, not to "interfere with the victim" because it will "bring heat on the Family."

A few days after the incident in Maspeth, Piecyk testified before a grand jury, which returned an indictment against Gotti and Colletta on felony a.s.sault and theft charges. The authorities said Piecyk was told Colletta and Gotti were wiseguys; he later said he was only told they were "punks." More than a year later, after the Sparks murders, a trial date was set, but now Piecyk began to read and hear more than he wanted to about Johnny Boy, who obviously wasn't just a punk, or even just a wiseguy.

Piecyk began looking over his shoulder. He bought a gun, which prompted his pregnant wife to temporarily move out. Exactly what happened during the next three months will most likely never be publicly known, but Piecyk did decide not to say any more nasty things about Gotti and Colletta. A lawyer familiar with the case said Piecyk couldn't get his mind off the idea of being found dead in one of the meat refrigerators he repaired.

Piecyk dictated a letter to his wife-which came to light later-in which he recounted the Cozy Corner encounter and said: "As time went on, my wife and I saw the name of one of the men who a.s.saulted me, John Gotti, appearing in the [New York] Daily News. Daily News. The media printed that he was next in line for G.o.dfather. Naturally, my idea of pursuing this matter dropped, and I cut off communication with [the Queens District Attorney's office]." The media printed that he was next in line for G.o.dfather. Naturally, my idea of pursuing this matter dropped, and I cut off communication with [the Queens District Attorney's office]."