Posted on 06/11/2002 6:55:08 AM PDT by xsysmgr
On December 16, 1985 I was in the middle of my first trip to New York City. I had gone to visit a college roommate who was living and working in Midtown, and while he spent his days at work in what was then called the Pan Am Building I occupied myself by walking the streets of Manhattan. I covered lots of ground that day, walking from the Battery to Wall Street and the World Trade Center, then working my way up to midtown and all its Christmastide wonders in time to meet my friend when he left the office. Sometime after five that afternoon I was walking along East 46th Street where I passed a restaurant called Sparks Steak House. "Steak houses" had all but disappeared in health-conscious Los Angeles back then — all that meat, don't you know, so bad for you — and the very name of the place struck me as emblematic of the differences between my hometown and New York.I gave no more thought to the place that evening until I watched the eleven o'clock news. The top story, with lots of video of covered bodies and blood trickling into the gutter, was the murder of mobsters Paul Castellano and Thomas Bilotti, who were gunned down on the sidewalk outside the restaurant where I had trod no more than an hour before. They were, in the argot of their trade, whacked, and had I been passing by only a little later I might have found myself whacked right along with them, for in 1985 I had been a cop for a few years and had acquired the courage to take action but not yet the wisdom to know when not to. Any interference I might have offered surely would have been harshly met, and my trip to New York would have concluded prematurely and most unpleasantly, probably on a slab at the New York morgue in the disreputable company of two characters in shiny suits and see-through socks. I still get the heebie-jeebies thinking about it.
In his book Underboss, Peter Maas recounts a conversation with mobster-turned-informer Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano, who described the preparations for the Castellano job:
"The more we thought about it, the better it looked," Sammy said. "We concluded that nine days before Christmas, around five to six o'clock at night, in the middle of Manhattan, in the middle of rush hour, in the middle of the crush of all them shoppers buying presents, there would be literally thousands of people on the street, hurrying this way and that. The hit would only take a few seconds, and the confusion would be in our favor. Nobody would be expecting anything like this, least of all Paul. And being able to disappear afterwards in the crowds would be in our favor. So we decide this is when and where it's going to happen."
As one of "them shoppers" counted on to add to the confusion, I thus began a fascination with John Gotti, who engineered the hit and, according to Gravano, was sitting in a parked car on 46th Street communicating on walkie-talkies with the trigger men at the time I walked by. Castellano's death cleared the way for Gotti to assume command of the Gambino crime family, which he directed until his 1992 conviction for murder, racketeering, tax evasion, and a host of other charges.
But there was no earthly punishment for any number of Gotti's other misdeeds. As a young man he did three years for heisting cargo at Kennedy Airport, then another four for killing the man who had murdered Carlo Gambino's nephew, but until his 1992 conviction he proved a slippery target for police and prosecutors. In 1980 Gotti's 12-year-old son Frank was run over and killed in a traffic accident with a neighbor. The police did not charge the neighbor, but he soon disappeared and has not been heard from since. Gotti was not charged and claimed to have no knowledge of what became of him. He sat in the defendant's chair several times during his reign as boss, and each time he walked away as clean as a Safeway chicken. One trial was derailed by a "forgetful" witness, others by jurors who sold out, and all the while Gotti and his lawyers claimed he was merely a plumbing-supply salesman being hounded by a ruthless government. At the trial that finally resulted in his conviction, extraordinary measures were taken to guard the integrity of the process, including a jury whose members' identities were concealed even from the judge.
And now he's gone, dead in prison of throat cancer at age 61. Given his celebrity and the state of moral health in America today, I fear the biggest lesson John Gotti's life and death will offer is that he shouldn't have smoked cigarettes. He may have escaped most of his just deserts in this life, but I wonder what kind of sentence God will hand down in the next.
— Jack Dunphy is an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department. "Jack Dunphy" is the author's nom de cyber. The opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management.
I like Dunphy's style...sounds like a hard boiled dick, sorta like Philip Marlowe..hahahaha.
FMCDH
I don't. He's roasting.
Ain't PC grand!
The Dies Irae [The Day of Wrath,
funeral hymn composed ca. 1250]
Whatever is hidden, shall be brought out;
nothing shall remain unpunished.
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