His verbal exuberance and his constant worry about surveillance led to walk-talks. But Gotti feared that technology rendered walk-talks less than foolproof. The weather also made them impractical at times. More than almost anyone, Gotti needed a place where he felt safe to talk. Starting earlier, but more frequently beginning in 1989, he began feeling safe in two.

The first was a hallway leading to private apartments above the Ravenite. A door in the club opened onto a rear landing of the hallway, and Gotti could loiter there without anyone outside the club seeing him. He still spoke in low whispers, but about things he never would have spoken about in the club itself.

The second, and more important, place was a small apartment two floors above the club. It was the home of 74-year-old Nettie Cirelli, widow of a Gambino soldier who was Neil's driver and the Ravenite's caretaker. Whenever Gotti wanted to use her home for some secret talk, he would give Nettie's nephew and the club's new caretaker a few dollars and he would tell Nettie to go shopping.

This occurred first in 1986. Gotti had used it sparingly since, and only for meetings with men such as Sammy, Tommy Gambino, and Frank LoCascio. Sammy told Gotti the apartment violated conventional wisdom against speaking in confined places, but Gotti said if Nettie's was bugged, he would already be in jail. Even so, Gotti and his guests usually turned on her stereo to try and m.u.f.fle their voices.

Gotti's secret places were why Gambino squad agents housed in separate video and audio "plants" frequently argued with each other. The audio plant agents would tell their video counterparts that Gotti could not be in the club during some of the times the video team reported him to be there. Even amid the jumble of voices, they would have overheard some sound from his, so the video agents must have been dozing on the job and failed to notice Gotti had left the club.

Sometimes, the video agents would see with their own eyes the proof that Gotti was inside, which was him walking out the door of the Ravenite. Then it would be their turn to question the alertness of audio plant colleagues.

The video agents were certain they were capturing and helping to identify all the important people in Gotti's life. On occasion, they also were treated to the sight of many older men falling over themselves to greet a much younger man who frequently came to the Ravenite wearing a Walkman.

The younger man was the boss's son, John A. Gotti, and now maybe the youngest "made man" in New York. His father, as a Christmas present in 1988, inducted "Junior" into the Family amid the cronyism whispers one might expect. Junior now had his own crew active in car theft, construction, and extortion. He co-owned or owned expensive properties in two states, including a prosperous trucking company.

At the time, Sammy was among those who whispered. But after the O'Connor case was indicted, and federal grand jury pressure began to mount, he began to believe that by inducting his son, Gotti was being shrewd-cementing his control through his son, in case he had to go to prison.

Junior was still p.r.o.ne to juvenile behavior, however. In June of 1989, he and some body-building pals attacked three men in a disco after one objected to one of the pals ogling his wife. It was Junior's third barroom arrest in six years. The media yukked the story up for a few days; but the wife was actually hurt when someone slugged her, too. Richard Rehbock-the lawyer who moved so quickly from the Willie Boy corner to the Gotti-was called in to try and make the case go away.

Rehbock did not have to do much. In an echo of cases involving Junior and his dad, the victims forgot who attacked them. Though they had identified the a.s.sailants for police that night, they were unable to identify them in later meetings with prosecutors.

The outcome was about the only good news for Gotti that summer. He was named lead defendant in a federal civil racketeering lawsuit aimed at breaking the Mafia's hold on the private-sanitation industry. The Manhattan District Attorney's office began an investigation preparatory to a similar suit against Gotti and Mafia control in the Garment Center. Even his Fourth of July party was a bust: So many cops were sent to Ozone Park that Gotti's men managed to fire off only a few rockets from a nearby railroad trestle.

The worst news, by far, came late in June. Gotti learned that the underboss of the Philadelphia Family, Philip Leonetti, had "rolled over" and started talking to the FBI. It was shocking on many levels-Leonetti was the first underboss of a major Family to turn informer-but the level that mattered most was that in 1986, shortly after Sparks, Gotti had met with Leonetti and in vague terms acknowledged he was involved.

He could not recall his exact words, but remembered leaving a strong impression that it was a shoot-or-be-shot situation. But who knew what words Leonetti would recall?

"Can you believe this?" Gotti railed at Sammy. "A f.u.c.kin' underboss goes and rats."

"Whatever he says, he'll be wingin' it."

"Mother-f.u.c.king rats. We're surrounded by mother-f.u.c.king rats."

Gotti was overstating the matter-but not by much. In addition to its video and audio plants, the Gambino squad had launched another operation against him-and that was to increase its stable of informants. By 1989, at least nine men were meeting secretly with agents about Gotti. It was an unusually large informant pool that showed Gotti was resented and disliked more than he could conceive.

The information Bruce Mouw and George Gabriel wanted most was where Gotti felt safe to talk. At first, they suspected a Tommy Gambino-owned office in the Garment Center, then one in Gotti friend Lewis Kasman's building in the same area, but he never used either enough to indicate either was the place. Inevitably, all suspicions led back to the Ravenite, but where and how? In 1986, an early informant had insisted Gotti used an apartment above the Ravenite for an important meeting.

But only a little old lady, the widow Nettie Cirelli, lived there. The federal rules governing surveillance applications are expansive, but a judge needed more than this to allow the FBI to send a black-bag squad sneaking into the home of a 74-year-old widow not suspected of any crime.

The information gathered dust in FBI files. The informants did not mention the apartment again-not until three years later, after Tommy Gambino was arrested and accused of lying to a grand jury, and an informant simply code-named "Source C" told his control agent that Tommy, after making bail, had run right to the Ravenite to meet with Gotti in Nettie's place.

Suddenly, the decision to pressure Gotti by pressuring Tommy seemed a better ploy than anyone had imagined. Agents quickly checked the informant's claim against video-plant logs on the day in question, and there it was: a notation for the time Gotti and Tommy were spotted entering the club, but nothing for when they left, meaning they must have used an exit not covered by the video camera.

Only two possibilities existed-a rear fire escape for tenants of apartments above the first floor, which was highly unlikely, and the Mulberry Street doorway that tenants used, which strongly suggested that Gotti and Tommy had indeed used Nettie's place.

The FBI pressed "Source C" and the others for details just when Gotti was feeling more in need of secret places to talk. The need for secrecy was already the one unbroken thread of his life-from the time he turned to a life of crime and had to keep secrets from the police, from agents, from his crew, from lawyers and jurors, from Paul, from Neil, and, not least, from wife Vicky, about a longtime affair he had with Neil's out-of-wedlock daughter Shannon.

The need for secrecy was a yoke, and it was tiring carrying it around, especially when some matters, such as Tommy's arrest, demanded urgent focus. He knew the case against Tommy, coming in the wake of the O'Connor case and the reborn investigation of Sparks, was aimed at him. Events were piling up; the need for secrecy was great, but so was the need to talk.

As he told Sammy, Gotti had used the apartment before, with no ill result; so he started using it again. Soon, its existence and use became an open secret among the 50 or so men who shaped up at the club three and sometimes four nights a week, and soon more informants were corroborating Source C. They also reported that Gotti sometimes stepped into the Ravenite hallway when he wanted to talk privately. The informants said they had seen it before, but more often now.

"Now we know why the audio-plant guys couldn't pick 'im up sometimes," Mouw told Maloney, as they decided it was time to ask a federal judge to let the black-bag squad loose. The informants, backed up by evidence from the video logs, pushed gossipy information into solid probable cause justifying more electronic surveillance.

The pessimism brought on by the unproductive bug inside the club now turned to optimism. "Sooner or later, you just know the big mouth's gonna talk himself into a hole," Maloney jubilantly predicted.

By October of 1989, as the Gambino squad won approval to bug the hallway and the apartment, Gotti was using both regularly. The same "Special Operations" team that infiltrated the Ravenite itself almost two years before had no problem with the hallway; the bug was functional on October 15. For many reasons, Nettie's place was not going to be so easy.

"It's obvious we can't go in there at night, even if she's a sound sleeper," Mouw said as he, Gabriel, and team members mulled sneaky scenarios. "She might have a heart attack."

They agreed to wait and hope Nettie took a trip. They knew little about her, except that she was a widow who seemed to stay close to home, so they feared a long wait. Still, her home was such a potential a.s.set it was best to be patient and devise a careful plan. If someone saw them going in, the target would be alerted and stop using the apartment.

Agents began periodic surveillance-to learn where Nettie went on errands, and for how long. She never went far, nor for long. They monitored a pen register-a device that can be placed on a telephone without a court order because it merely lists incoming and outgoing calls-on her telephone, to find out when she stopped making and receiving calls at night and presumably fell asleep.

Usually, she was on the phone every night, but usually no later than ten. Testing this, Gabriel once dialed her number at midnight, and quickly hung up when she wearily answered. Still, a post-midnight break-in was deemed too dangerous, for the effect the sudden sight of figures clad in black would have on her if she woke up.

On November 19, the pen register showed that Nettie didn't use the telephone all day. Knowing nothing, but feeling a hunch, Gabriel grew convinced she had taken a trip, perhaps to visit relatives for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. He waited one more day, and again the phone was silent. It was time to go.

That night, after entering Nettie's home and making sure she wasn't there, the FBI's break-in squad scouted it for where they thought visitors would sit and talk. They decided on the living room, which contained a couch and two chairs around a coffee table. The bug went into the ceiling, directly above the table. It was the right location.

33.

TICKLING THE WIRE.

WITH HIS SECRET PLACES secretly bugged, it didn't take Gotti long to begin talking himself into more trouble. Even before Nettie's apartment was bugged, he was overheard on the Ravenite hallway bug in what amounted to obstruction of justice, a "predicate act" that could be used in a racketeering case. But over the next few months, in the hallway and then in Nettie's, he opened a much more d.a.m.ning window on his world.

He had help. Hoping to make him feel a need to talk, the Maloney-Mouw team contrived a legal squeeze play. The perjury case they had filed against Tommy Gambino after his grand jury lies gave them a perfect setup. The trial on those charges was set to start soon, and so George Gabriel served Gotti a subpoena requiring him to testify.

The subpoena was part of a ploy known as "tickling the wire." Its purpose was to make Gotti believe the Eastern District intended to ask Tommy's trial judge to give Gotti immunity, forcing Gotti to either testify or go to jail-and to talk about this dilemma on tape. In any event, the subpoena would be withdrawn shortly before trial. For legal and strategic reasons, no one wanted to muddy the waters of a future case against Gotti by immunizing him in a comparatively minor perjury case.

The subpoena had its desired effect. A few days later, an agitated Gotti huddled with acting underboss Frank LoCascio and key aides Jackie D'Amico and Joe Watts in the hallway. He said he had just learned that his lawyers Bruce Cutler and Jerry Shargel had met with Tommy's lawyers and devised a plan calling on Tommy to plead guilty in the perjury case. This would moot the Gotti subpoena.

Many clients might appreciate the sacrifice and ingenuity, but Gotti said the plan showed the lawyers did not understand for whom they toiled. He never permitted his men to plead guilty in an important case, even if it meant less worry for him and probably only six months behind bars for Tommy. "Now you tell Tommy to fight it," Gotti said, quoting himself talking to Shargel. "Break their f.u.c.kin' holes! And don't worry about us going to jail. Me number one! I like jail better than I like the streets. And do what I'm tellin' ya. And don't ever have these kind of meetings again."

As agents monitoring the bug happily listened in, Gotti added more obstruction. Two other men who also had received "tickle-the-wire" subpoenas would not be allowed to testify either: "n.o.body is taking the stand! Tell them to go fight! You go in there and break their f.u.c.kin' heads. Don't worry about us. Go in there and fight. Get my cell ready. ... n.o.body is taking the stand!" In a few weeks more, per the script, the subpoena against Gotti was withdrawn. On the other hand, Tommy Gambino went to trial-and won. His jurors agreed with his lawyer's argument that Tommy was improperly targeted by a grand jury that really had John Gotti in mind. No one in the Eastern District was too upset. They had a bigger fish on the line. And on November 30, 1989, he hooked himself deeper when-for the first time since the men in black visited nine days before-he visited Nettie's.

He went there just after learning more bad news. In Brooklyn federal court earlier that day, Michael Coiro, the lawyer who defended him during his hijacking days, was found guilty of helping two other clients, Angelo and Gene, hide their heroin money.

Coiro had been arrested in the case with Angelo, Gene, and the rest in 1983, but his trial proceeded separately, and the Angelo tapes hurt him as much as everyone else.

"You're not our lawyer, you're one of us as far as we're concerned," Gene had said to Coiro.

"I know it, Gene, and I feel that way."

Over the long pretrial, Coiro was defended gratis by Shargel. When it was time for trial, Shargel was busy elsewhere, and Cutler took over, setting up a duel with echoes of the Giacalone case. Cutler's opponent was John Gleeson, her former a.s.sistant; much ill will remained between them, ever since Cutler called Giacalone a "s.l.u.t" and Gleeson, in court, ridiculed Cutler-"he's not a lawyer."

Gleeson was starting to share Maloney's belief-based on what they now knew about the attempted fixes in the heroin trials-that the case that shot Cutler to almost as much fame as Gotti was fixed. He thought Cutler should be in prison, not in magazine spreads. He believed Cutler suborned perjury in the Giacalone case by urging a defense witness to invent stories about Giacalone offering him drugs and her panties.

Gleeson now headed Maloney's special-prosecutions unit. He was legally acute and relentless, and in the rematch with Cutler, substance overwhelmed style. Coiro was convicted.

Right after the verdict, Gleeson asked the judge to jail Coiro pending sentencing. The judge refused, ruling Coiro was unlikely to flee. Gleeson then said that Coiro should be barred from visiting places like the Ravenite, but the judge asked for a written motion the next day. After everyone left, Cutler visited the judge's chambers to make a special, fateful request: Could he escort his beaten client to the Ravenite to seek solace from a man who meant the world to him, John Gotti?

The judge, as much in the dark about the Ravenite bugs as Cutler, said yes-and Cutler took Coiro straight to the Ravenite and more trouble.

While Cutler stayed downstairs, Coiro entered Nettie's with Gotti, Sammy, and LoCascio. Audio-plant agents were on high alert because the video agents had reported the arrival of the Gambino troika, and now Cutler and Coiro, suggesting this might be one of those times Gotti felt a need for secrecy.

The audio agents fought their excitement when the voices of Gotti and Sammy gossiping about nonsense arrived clearly into their headsets. One of the agents, Mark Roberts, whispered to another: "This is incredible, they're up there, completely relaxed, talking freely! Tremendous!"

Over the years, Coiro's value to Gotti was based partly on his ability to learn law enforcement secrets from a source he never revealed. Now, as the agents listened in and after a few words of sympathy mixed with a wondrous display of Gotti's endless need to affirm his wisdom, Gotti asked Coiro to tap his source again. This was more obstruction of justice.

"First, you know, we're sorry," he said to Coiro.

"Thank you."

"I don't have to tell you how sorry we are."

"Oh, John."

"I knew you was guilty there. I didn't guess it. I knew it. And I don't think you're gonna go away [to prison] before the [obligatory legal] appeal. So, you got a f.u.c.kin' another year on the street, maybe. I think [the judge is] gonna give you ten years. Maybe look for you to do about three or four."

"I'll do it, John."

"Didn't I tell ya? I called the whole shot right down the line."

Gotti then turned to his own problems. Recently, these had flowed from so many directions he believed that both the state and federal governments were preparing cases against him-with both involving Sparks.

"Feds, they got a new statute. Enhancing your position, to commit murder to enhance your position. They're going at it tooth and nail, [to see] who's gonna try me first. I think it's easier to beat a murder 'beef' by the state."

"No doubt about it," Coiro replied. "Federal court, you get the kitchen sink."

While sure his information was accurate, Gotti asked Coiro to corroborate it with his source and learn exactly when the cases would be filed.

"But what you gotta do is you gotta grab this guy. Mike, we've been good to him in the past, we'll be good to him in the future. I never once asked you who he is. Did I ever ask you?"

"Never!"

"You know, Mike, again I'm, I feel lousy for pushing your sins aside, your heartaches aside."

"Forget about it. It's over."

"Now let me ask ya a question, Mike. Can you see this guy p.r.o.nto?"

"Tomorrow."

"Believe me, it's done tomorrow."

Gotti and Coiro then discussed Coiro's conviction-and how the case was a loser from the start because of Angelo Ruggiero, now dying in a hospital a couple miles away. Angelo jeopardized so many by being so indiscreet in his home, Coiro said.

"You never heard me f.u.c.kin' jeopardize," Gotti said.

"You never did!"

"As close as Angelo was, he was never in my f.u.c.kin' house talking. Nothin' to put us in f.u.c.kin' jail."

"That's the right way," interjected Sammy.

"Because you know why, Sammy?" asked Gotti, about to provide audio agents a particularly sweet moment of irony: "You gotta relax in your f.u.c.kin' house. The way we're relaxing right here."

Relaxed, Gotti fixated on Angelo. "That c.o.c.ksucker, and I hate to talk about people that are dying. He ain't a rat. He ain't a mutt. But I gotta call him a c.o.c.ksucker. A guy was telling me this morning, 'All your troubles came from two places, 'Willie Boy Johnson and Angelo's house.' Willie Boy Johnson and Angelo Ruggiero decided they wanted to be a big-shot operation. That's all our troubles."

The visit concluded with Coiro repeating his promise to contact his source and report to Gotti the next day; he said he would ask his neighbor and their mutual friend, Lewis Kasman, to telephone Gotti and schedule a meeting somewhere.

With no time to place additional bugs and wiretaps in homes and offices, Coiro's source stayed secret. In any case, Coiro and Gotti got a chance to talk privately only six days later, when Angelo died and they attended the wake.

Angelo had left the hospital to die at home. Gotti still refused to visit, or send a message, and considered boycotting the wake.

"He had to go and be a big shot and get us all in trouble," he complained to Sammy. "Oughta had his tongue cut out."

"Look, everybody knows how you feel," Sammy said, "but it's not gonna look right if you don't go to the wake."

So, Gotti went to the wake, having turned over the first few shovels of dirt from his own legal grave-by being as indiscreet as his old and dead Fulton-Rockaway pal.

Maloney and Mouw were under no obligation to inform other law-enforcement agencies about the breakthrough conversations or the existence of bugs at the Ravenite, and they did not, especially now that it seemed-based on Gotti's exchange with Coiro and another one in the hallway with an underling-that Gotti had access to two corrupt sources in law enforcement.

While elated with the new tapes, the pursuers wanted more than an obstruction of justice case. Gotti's carelessness in the hallway-and his remark about feeling "relaxed" in Nettie's-portended greater things.

For nearly two anxious weeks, however, the bugs picked up little more than Gotti commenting in the hallway that a man who does not gamble "has no compa.s.sion." Then, at half past seven in the evening of December 12, 1990, a week after Angelo's death, Gotti made a second visit to Nettie's and turned over darker, deeper dirt.

This time, it was just him and Frank LoCascio-or, as Gotti said as tape rolled, "my acting underboss Frankie." By itself, the remark was a problem, because it tended to establish LoCascio's role in an illegal "criminal enterprise." Similarly, Gotti did himself no favors by calling himself "the boss"-nor Sammy, by calling him "my consigliere. consigliere. " "

Gotti, alternately somber and angry, gave his eavesdroppers many more reasons for joy. In an angry moment, talking about a boss's duty to make the tough decisions, he came close to admitting that he killed Paul.

"Who's gonna challenge me? Who's gonna defy me? What are they gonna do? Take a shot? Like I did to the other guy? I'd welcome that. I'll kill their f.u.c.kin' mothers, their fathers."

Recalling how Paul's business deals with the Genovese Family hurt Gambino men, Gotti even supplied a partial motive: "That's what made me hate, really, f.u.c.kin' Paul. He sold the borgata out for a construction company."