Bugging John Gotti

When John J. Gotti took over the Gambino crime family after engineering the assassination of former boss Paul Castellano in December 2015, he knew he would become the object of intense FBI and NYPD scrutiny.  It went with the territory. If you wanted to be a gangster—and Gotti wanted to be nothing more than a gangster—you had to expect being in the sights of law enforcement.

The way Gotti acted after he became boss of the Gambino Borgata, he didn’t seem to care who was watching.  Late nights at nightclubs like Club A and Regine’s in Manhattan not only insured that the cops would be watching Gotti but that he would feed the demands of the news media, hungry for a new top crime boss to write about and eager to follow his every move.  Gotti loved it and knew that his “public” expected it.

Yet for all his flaunting of his new lifestyle, Gotti didn’t make it that easy for the FBI. He never said anything incriminating on the telephone and when he had to talk with his subordinates like Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, Frank Locascio, and his brother Peter, Gotti went for discreet walk-and-talk perambulations through the streets of Little Italy and Ozone Park. It seemed to be the best way to avoid electronic surveillance devices, which the FBI had been installing in the mob’s favorite social clubs all over town.

After the FBI declared Gotti a national priority, the agency gathered evidence to take him down in a number of ways. As described in my new book Gotti’s Boys: The Mafia Crew That Killed for John Gotti, (Citadel Press), by the time Gotti took over as boss, the FBI already had some key informants close to his inner circle. Top among them was Wilfred “Willie Boy” Johnson, a close associate of Gotti who for years had been doing double-duty as a spy for both the FBI and the Queens County District Attorneys Office. In an astonishing betrayal, Johnson’s identity as an informant was revealed by a federal prosecutor and despite assurances from Gotti that he wouldn’t be harmed, Johnson was gunned down on a Brooklyn Street in 1988. The murder was never officially solved.

There were a few other informants within Gotti’s camp. But still the FBI needed hard evidence in the form of Gotti’s own words to make a strong racketeering case. Taps were placed inside Gotti’s club in Ozone Park, the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club. But Gotti’s crew seemed to expect from the start that the phones were tapped and apart from some evidence about gambling, the boss didn’t let go anything incriminating.

By 1987, the FBI admitted it had “limited success” with electronic surveillance and began to look in earnest for locations where it might be best to plant a bug to spy on Gotti. The investigative team led by the special agent in charge, Bruce Mouw, picked the Ravenite Social Club at 247 Mulberry Street in Little Italy as the best place to have an FBI black bag team plant a listening device. The team got into the Ravenite rather easily. Unfortunately, they didn’t have much luck once they got in, because the acoustics of the club were terrible. An espresso machine was hissing from constant use and a soda machine made its own rattle. Simultaneous conversations made things even more difficult. The FBI team went back in a few times and moved the bug around and used special audio filters to pull out extraneous sounds. But even those steps didn’t work.

It was at that point that one of the informants the FBI had developed over the years came up with a tip that Gotti would sometimes leave the confines of the Ravenite through a back door and go into an adjacent first floor hallway of the building where he would talk with some of his captains. The same informant also reported that Gotti would often leave the hallway and go upstairs to an apartment in the building. After some snooping, the informant reported back to Mouw and his agents that the apartment Gotti was using was that of a woman named Nettie Cirelli, the widow of crime family soldier Michael Cirelli. The apartment had also been used as it turned out by the late Gambino underboss Aniello Dellacroce when he was alive for his own secret meetings.

It was over Thanksgiving weekend of 1989, when Mrs. Cirelli was on a vacation in Florida, that the FBI surveillance team, armed with a schematic of the interior of 247 Mulberry Street, planted the apartment bug. The tapes made from the Cirelli bug turned out to be pay dirt for the FBI. The recordings captured Gotti talking with Locascio, Gravano, and others. These were not idle mobster chit-chat talks. Rather on the recordings Gotti indicated he had approved or was aware of the killings of Gambino soldier Louis Milito, and Louis DiBono. Gotti seemed petulant in justifying DiBono’s 1990 murder in the parking lot of the old World Trade Center because the portly captain ignored his boss’s demand for meetings.

“You know why he is dying?” Gotti said. “He is gonna die because he refused to come in when I called. He didn’t do nothing else wrong.”

Other conversations between Gotti and Locascio proved troublesome for a different reason. Over time, Gotti had been concerned about Gravano’s acquisition of numerous construction companies, something that Gotti believed might become a power base from which Gravano could challenge him. Gotti expressed to Locascio irritation with Gravano, who was close to the family and had even functioned as his consiglieri or counselor for a time. This bad mouthing would prove costly later.

Eventually, the tapes and other evidence allowed the FBI and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn to craft a major racketeering indictment naming Gotti, Locascio, Gravano and reputed captain Thomas Gambino as defendants. On the night of December 11, 1990, agent Bruce Mouw watched with binoculars from an FBI command post set up in an apartment on Mulberry Street as various Gambino crime family associates and members arrived at the Ravenite. Gotti had decreed that they show up at the club at least once a week to show respect and check-in, something Gravano thought was imprudent because it allowed the FBI to photograph them on video and learn their identities. But Gotti wouldn’t have it any other way and insisted they all show up, including Gravano, who was in hiding at the time but made the trip in from Brooklyn.

As described in Gotti’s Boys, at about 6:51 PM the night of December 11, Gotti finally pulled in to the front of the Ravenite in a Mercedes-Benz driven by his trusted captain Jackie D’Amico. Spotting Gotti’s arrival, Mouw spoke into a walkie-talkie and said “Number One in in,” the signal for a nearby FBI arrest team to converge on the Ravenite. First through the club door was agent George Gabriel, followed by others, who went straight to the back room of the Ravenite where Gotti and Gravano were getting ready to enjoy a cup of espresso. On the back wall behind Gotti (as he sipped his espresso) were portraits of himself and his old mentor Dellacroce.

The mobsters were all stunned by the arrival of the FBI. But Gotti remained calm and said he wasn’t going anywhere until he finished his coffee. By that time Mouw had arrived and from a pay telephone called New York special agent in charge Jim Fox, informing him that the arrests had gone down.

Gotti, Locascio and Gravano were charged with serious crimes including racketeering and murders. Thomas Gambino, who was arrested separately in the garment district, was also charged but with lesser offenses and not for any murders. After months of pretrial proceedings, Gravano turned government witness and helped Mouw and federal prosecutors, after finding out how Gotti had bad mouthed him on the Cirelli apartment tapes. Gravano also knew that if he was convicted he would spend the rest of his days in prison.

Gravano’s cooperation was one of the seismic events in Mafia history and led to Gotti and Locascio’s conviction after trial in 1992. Gotti, once the “Teflon Don” for his ability to duck criminal cases, died in prison in June 2002 at the age of 62 while serving a life term. Locascio is still serving his life term. Thomas Gambino was sentenced to five years in prison and was freed in 2000. For his cooperation, Gravano received a light prison sentence, but soon after his release got into more trouble with drugs. In 2018 he was released from an Arizona state prison after serving a term for narcotics trafficking.

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