December 2, 2008
Gotti Nose for Talent
"I know whose stomach is rotten," John Gotti once said. "I can smell it."
So now Sammy Gravano has bound himself and his wife and his sons over to the sanctuary of the federal protected witness program. John Gotti had trusted his underboss and his sense of smell and he has been betrayed by both.
He must know - we always do when we look back - that he should have scented Sammy Gravano's fear before it was too late. Even the federal wiretappers already had sensed panic fairly sweating from Gravano's pores in the table talks they gathered along the chain of Gambino Crime Family conference rooms.
By Christmas last, the threat of protracted prison time had become a recurrent theme in family conversations. And yesterday one agent remembered how often Gotti joked about, and Gravano so quailed before the prospect that once he came in still shuddering from the night before, when " `they' followed me to my door - to my door."
A prosecutor has but to tune his ear, pick up such quavers, and recognize the tonic chord of the witness he needs only to wait his time to collect. But Gotti went on listening and yet did not hear. He was perhaps too full of himself or more likely too possessed by a vision of the Mafia as sacred brotherhood all the more intense for him because he was its last true believer in his generation.
He venerated his elders in the tradition and blessed them for sending word to his prison cell that they were alloting "ten percent of a million-dollar business . . . to a jerk like me . . . best I ever did was go on a few hijackings."
"Guys like us, where were we going ?" he once said. "They would have killed us or made us."
He was true to the otherwise unheeded code of these ancestors; but Sammy Gravano wasn't true even to John Gotti. When Paul Castellano was Gambino family boss, these two couldn't, as Gotti put it, get a ham sandwich. Then a stroke of luck or policy disposed of Castellano; and from nothing, Gravano was himself proprietor of fifteen companies within five years.
He had Gem Steel, he had Rebar, he had construction, he had dry wall, he had asbestos, he had Italian flooring, he had rugs; and Gotti seldom got as much as a dollar for every four promised as his share. He deserved better because he was rendering Gravano a coarse service exquisitely useful to his game of monopoly. Whenever he acquired a partner, they unfailingly disagreed and Gravano would go to Gotti with reports that so-and so was "talking subversive" and "we'd kill him" and Gravano would be sole owner of one more enterprise.
Gotti's indictment imputes the murders of Bobby DiGregorio and Louis DiBono to Gotti's despotic vanity; but the chances are that they died instead for the cause of Sammy Gravano's entreprenurial progress. By Christmas last, Gotti's nostrils had begun belatedly to work; and he was denouncing Gravano's greed and half-determined to reduce him from consigliere to blush as merely one among 25 other capodecinas.
But then the New Year came and Gotti canvassed his executive establishment, recognized that, commercial ethics aside, Gravano's was a more skilfull hand than any other available, and decided that, rather than be humbled, he must be promoted to "official underboss" and family-head-designate, if prison enforced a leave of absence on Gotti.
Gravano greeted the offer gratefully but warily, being one of those who understand that to be conspicuous is to be put in trouble; and sure enough he quickly was in the preventive detention with Gotti from which he has contrived to wriggle.
"I want guys," Gotti said once, "who have done more than killing." So he had gone looking for talent and found it in Sammy Gravano, who has now applied the turn of the screw that has at last taught Gotti what a singular talent Sammy's is.
Mixx it!
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