Tale of the Tapes: Gotti's Rise and Fall

Crack FBI squad used don's own words to nail him

By Sean Gardiner | STAFF WRITER

June 11, 2002

Outside the Ravenite social club in Little Italy, Gotti, second from right, said goodbye to friends and business associates. At right is brother Peter Gotti and left is longtime friend Angelo Ruggiero. (Newsday/Al Raia)

When Bruce Mouw was named to head the FBI's then-fledgling "Gambino Squad" in 1980 his team had very little to work with; the man who would become his nemesis, John Gotti, wasn't even well known.

But during the next decade, Mouw and his investigators were able to take advantage of the very qualities that carried Gotti to the top - greed, arrogance and blind, ruthless ambition - to bring the once-powerful Gambino crime family to its knees.

There was also a little help from Gotti's loose lips.

"He helped to take down the Gambino family because of his big mouth," Mouw said in an interview before Gotti died. "He certainly isn't a notable figure in La Cosa Nostra history. The key to being a successful mob boss is to quietly run the family and die in your sleep in your own home, not in some jail somewhere."

Gotti's Climb

Up until 1980, the FBI organized squads along the lines of crimes, like the loan sharking squad or gambling squad. Agents tracked criminals but not necessarily crime families.

Beginning in 1980, however, the feds created a squad for each of the five New York-based crime families and began attacking them as criminal enterprises through the federal racketeering statute.

"One of the first cases I opened was captioned 'Bergin Hunt and Fish Club,'" Mouw said referring to Gotti's former Ozone Park headquarters. "And the target was John Gotti and his crew."

At the time Mouw started working the case Gotti wasn't the designer suit-wearing, coifed Dapper Don he later became but "just a very active captain, very ambitious, and his crew was engaged in everything," Mouw said.

"Some crews in the family aren't real active criminally," said Mouw, who retired from the FBI in 1998. "But John's crew was doing everything from A to Z. Every crime under federal and state jurisdiction they were doing; gambling, narcotics, truck hijacking, car theft, murder."

Because Gotti's guys were so active, many of them got caught and many of them flipped and became informants. Through those informants, Mouw's men were able to find the weak link - Gotti's childhood pal, an obsessive talker named Angelo Ruggiero.

A wiretap the FBI placed on Ruggiero's telephone and hidden microphones in his Cedarhurst home in 1982 proved to be "just a gold mine," Mouw said. It also became the fuse that would ignite the bald-faced power-grab that catapulted Gotti into the limelight.

The big-mouthed Ruggiero soon let his uninvited houseguests, the FBI, in on a secret - he, John Gotti's brother, Gene Gotti, and an alleged hitman named John Carneglia were heavily involved in heroin trafficking, something mob crews traditionally aren't supposed to do.

"We could never trace it back to John [Gotti]," Mouw said. "John wasn't involved in the conspiracy itself. Did he make a lot of money off it? Yes. These guys would kick money up to John and John being the hypocrite that he was would look the other way. He'd get an envelope with $50,000 in it and say, 'Thank you,' and that was it."

Mouw said they also found out that almost every Sunday Gotti and Ruggiero would travel to then boss Paul Castellano's mansion on Todt Hill in Staten Island and fill him in on what their crew was up to. This information provided the FBI with the probable cause to start an investigation into the Gambino chief.

In 1983 Mouw won a drug trafficking indictment of Ruggiero, Gene Gotti and Carneglia. But that was the least of the mobsters' troubles: Castellano was not going to be happy about the heroin.

With John Gotti in his corner, Ruggiero was able to put Castellano off by claiming the drug dealing allegation was just part of a government setup, Muow said.

But Castellano knew that the FBI had Ruggiero on tape and that Ruggiero's defense lawyers had those tapes.

Clearing the Path

By the summer of 1985, Castellano was demanding those tapes and Gotti and Ruggiero knew that if they handed over those tapes, they were in danger, Mouw said.