Many mob guys have little nicknames
because of something they've done or something they do.
It's like they like bananas, they call him Joey Bananas.
With me, I was labeled Sally Ubatz
because in Italian, it's pazzo, crazy, pazzo.
Because I would do outrageous things.
When I was 31 years old, I got a mob assignment
to go to Florida and send a message to this guy
who was sleeping with a made member's wife.
So I flew down to Florida. I met a guy down there.
He gave me a UPS uniform, a UPS truck, and I went to the house.
I knocked on the door.
I was delivering a little box. The girlfriend opened the door.
I pushed her to the side, went in there, put a knife to his throat,
and tied him down to the pool table.
I took his pants off.
And then I sliced his balls.
It was nothing personal. It was business.
There's three cardinal rules of the mafia.
Don't go with another made member's wife,
don't sell drugs, and never cooperate.
I mean, that's a death sentence.
Back then, it was the worst thing you could do.
You had to keep everything secret.
You're never allowed to reveal any information
and become a rat or a stool pigeon.
If you rat, you get tortured.
They cut pieces of you and burn you.
They make them suffer.
Many times, the mob would leave the body out.
They wanted to show an example of disrespect and disloyalty.
The reputed head of one of the nation's largest organized crime families
is on trial in New York.
The prosecutors charge that John Gotti
has murdered his way to the top of the mob.
My name is Diane Giacalone.
During the 1980s, I was an assistant US attorney
in the Eastern District of New York.
We investigated organized crime, we investigated drug cases,
hijacking cases, pretty much everything.
And in 1985, we filed our case against John Gotti
and eight members of the Gambino Family.
The charges were murder,
illegal gambling, loan-sharking,
and truck hijacking.
At stake is his personal freedom and his reputed spot
at the top of the nation's most powerful crime family.
As we're focusing on John,
and we're evolving as to how we're gonna attack the case,
suddenly, we get word that Diane's case was coming.
I mean, we were all a little surprised.
The FBI didn't have anything to do with that investigation.
We were investigating Gotti separately.
So there was a lot of conflict over this.
We were the only ones with a case.
So we were the ones on the line to bring him down.
We thought we had more than enough evidence
to convict John Gotti and his crew.
The charges cover an 18-year period
when Gotti was a Mafia capo, before he became family boss.
If convicted, Gotti could face 20 years in prison.
Outside the court, it was a circus.
This frenzied, electric atmosphere.
I'd never been in a trial that had this kind of national media attention.
We had a trial with incredible characters.
We had John Gotti.
You're the new head of the family?
My family. My house, wife and kids.
- That's the only family? - How about the Gambino family?
We had Diane Giacalone.
Some prosecutors didn't want the case.
One did, Diane Giacalone.
A girl from the neighborhood who went after bad guys.
- Morning, Mr. Cutler. - Good morning.
We had John Gotti's lawyer, Bruce Cutler.
- Who do you represent? - I represent John Gotti.
A boy from Brooklyn
who was obviously in love with this man, John Gotti.
Bruce Cutler. It's comical.
I think he wanted to fucking be John Gotti.
He dressed like John Gotti,
and he'd shake our hands and kiss us on the cheek like a wise guy.
And we had a string of other excellent defense attorneys
who defended their clients.
I'd have to say, if I have one rule of thumb,
it's I really never ask the client what happened,
because, frankly, I don't really give a fuck.
What's important to me is what the government says it can prove.
And that's what being a defense lawyer is about.
My name is Michael Shapiro,
and September of '85, I was 35 years old,
working on the Gotti case.
The primary charges were RICO charges.
RICO is Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
The beauty of RICO charge from a prosecutor's perspective
is that you can use crimes
for which there have already been convictions.
The defense team knew that the government had never lost a RICO case.
The Gotti case, one of the charges
was the killing of Jimmy McBratney in Staten Island.
Gotti had pleaded guilty.
He did prison time on that charge.
So, the only question for the jury was
was that killing and the other charges under the RICO indictment
in furtherance of the enterprise of the Gambino organized crime family?
And that was what Diane Giacalone set out to try to prove.
I'm a young guy, only on the job five years.
I've got a lot of, as the saying goes, piss and vinegar in me.
I'm sitting in the back row of the court.
John stands up, and he's looking around the courtroom, and he sees me,
I'm not a small person, and says, "Hey! Who are you?"
So, you know, I kind of stood up, and I did one of these.
I said, "Are you talking to me?"
He goes, "Yeah, who are you?" I said, "George Gabriel."
"I'm on Bruce Mouw's squad. Just, you know, here to kind of observe and…"
"Well, you go tell that Bruce Mouw
that I'm gonna come home. I'm beating this rap."
I go, "Oh, okay."
"Tell you what. If you do, I'll come by and congratulate you."
At the time, I didn't know, and I don't think a lot of reporters knew,
the FBI didn't want Giacalone to be doing this case.
So there was this tension.
When Diane Giacalone brought charges against John Gotti and his crew,
in that crew was a man named Willie Boy Johnson,
who was a Gotti loyalist. He'd been with Gotti since they were boys.
But he was also a "rat."
Willie Boy Johnson had been cooperating with the FBI
for years, but nobody knew. We didn't share that with anybody.
We went to Diane Giacalone, asking her not to indict him.
And I would tell my bosses,
"If we don't do something and put a stop to this,
he's gonna get killed by Gotti
if it becomes known that he was an informant."
Willie Boy Johnson was not just an FBI informant.
He was also a violent criminal.
He was intimately involved in some of the most violent conduct
that the crew committed.
And we could not separate him from the indictment
and still bring the case.
In the courtroom, Diane Giacalone, to the horror of the FBI,
explained to the judge that…
We wanted to remand one of the defendants
because he had been an informant for 15 years.
They call him "Willie Boy."
He is sitting next to John Gotti, but he is far, far from close.
It was pretty shocking. Gotti was sitting right next to him.
The way it was revealed… was terrible.
Willie Boy was around for years.
He was a big earner. He knew all the five families.
After they picked Willie Boy up off the floor,
John Gotti gave him a look that would have killed him.
You wouldn't wanna take a life insurance policy out on him
if you were an insurance company.
We took no pleasure in what we did, but we did what was necessary.
We knew that his life expectancy was not good.
When we have an informant,
part of our pitch is, "We will not disclose your identity."
Diane Giacalone threw that out the window.
In court today, Assistant US Attorney Diane Giacalone,
began her opening statement by telling the jurors…
Diane Giacalone gave a pretty good opening statement
in that trial.
Quite impressive.
We started with the McBratney homicide,
because it showed John Gotti's rise to power.
Then I talked about the various elements of the indictment.
So we went through the loan-sharking, we went through the hijackings,
we went through the gambling.
Giacalone claimed several crimes,
for which other defendants in this trial have already served time,
were not isolated incidents
but part of a conspiracy to work together to commit crimes.
When I sat down, I felt I did my job, and I felt pretty good about it.
That was probably the last time I felt at home in that courtroom.
Gotti's attorney, Bruce Cutler, immediately went on the attack.
Bruce Cutler crucified her.
Bruce told the jury
to think of the charges as a rancid stew.
And the reason I remember that is I wrote it for him.
He said, "You can't make a stew that anyone is gonna swallow
out of all of these rotten ingredients, no matter how long you cook it."
And, in fact, in his opening statement, Bruce Cutler just…
Just picked up the indictment
and basically said it was a piece of garbage,
and he tore it in half, which was extremely dramatic.
The jury could not take their eyes off him, and then he just…
Threw the indictment in the trash can in the courtroom and said…
"That's where this indictment belongs, in the garbage can."
Talk about a flourish. Talk about drama.
It was a… …moment.
Diane's case had a lot of cooperators in it. Always a lot of risk in that.
We're not talking people walking the street.
We're talking people who are in and around organized crime.
Who else testifies in a Mafia trial?
I was the first witness in the John Gotti 1987 trial,
and I was, like, the star witness.
In 1984, I was arrested with four ounces of cocaine.
I was held on a million dollars bail.
While I was in prison in the summer of '84, my wife came to visit me.
My two sons were outside the visiting room, waiting.
When she left, I saw my two kids crying.
That was the moment where I decided, "I gotta flip."
"I gotta get out of this life. I don't wanna keep torturing them."
Finally, one day, I made a phone call. I'm gonna work with the government.
Little did I know, two years later,
the government was gonna call me to testify against John Gotti.
Sal Polisi had a lot of history with the crew.
And he told it, and he told it well.
He's a smart man. He was articulate.
And then Bruce got up, and he just…
I've heard the word, "Brucified,"
and it's a fantastic way to describe how Bruce approached cross-examination.
Bruce Cutler, he attacked me every day for seven days.
And he really pummeled me and called me a lowlife, a yellow dog.
And he found out details about me,
you know, about how many girls I had in one night,
cutting the guy's balls off.
I had to admit everything that was true.
John Gotti was sitting at the end of the defendant's table,
and he took his right hand, and he put it on the table,
and made, like, a gun.
And I knew what he was saying.
"We're gonna kill you."
As well as Sal Polisi,
Diane Giacalone is counting on a few witnesses.
The paid witnesses, witnesses who've lied in the past,
witnesses who've gotten new identities, witnesses who've sold drugs,
witnesses who've killed people.
They were some of the most impeachable witnesses imaginable.
A veritable zoo of lowlifes.
James Cardinali is a key witness against John Gotti.
And each of them gets on the stand,
and one after the other is less credible.
Cardinali admitted he didn't wanna be in the witness chair,
but it was better than the electric chair in Florida, where he committed murder.
A second witness the government called was Dominick LoFaro.
Dominick LoFaro admitted today
that he originally lied to Federal authorities.
At first, he said he killed more than 15 people.
Today he said it was only two.
We were basically being portrayed as incompetent.
The government's case against John Gotti took a beating today.
A bank robber named Matthew Traynor was on the stand.
Now he's supposed to be a witness against Gotti.
Matthew Traynor was a problematic witness but useful.
Until I didn't trust him anymore.
He started to say things that didn't make sense to me.
And at that point, we decided we would not use him as a witness.
He actually testified for the defense
and said that Diane Giacalone had tried to bribe him.
I was given the drugs I wanted. I was given liquor.
He said she gave him her panties from a bottom desk drawer,
so that he could take care of himself.
I was provided with a kinky sexual release.
Matthew Traynor was later convicted of perjury for his testimony.
I turned to my co-counsel and said,
"What juror in his right mind would believe this shit?"
Traditionally, in New York,
the prosecutors publicly do not engage with the press.
Defense attorneys, that's what they get paid for.
Bruce knew how to engage with the press
better than any other defense lawyer I've ever dealt with.
He knew how to use the press. He knew how to amuse the press.
It's not nice to see you, Geraldo. I'm not a fan of yours.
John Gotti had his own media-spinning PR outfit
like the White House Press Secretary.
Lawyer Bruce Cutler charged
that the government doesn't like sharp dressers, gamblers,
people like John Gotti.
I never knew that I had a bias against sharp dressers.
I thought I was a pretty sharp dresser myself.
Bruce Cutler was always walking around, "The government will do anything
to put John Gotti in jail."
Cutler maintains that the government is just out to get Gotti.
They're hoping the jury will see that narrative,
the public will see that narrative,
the jurors' families will see that narrative.
All this just reinforced the image of John Gotti…
He's always been a respectable person in the community.
…and the public ate it up.
I find it very hard to believe what they're saying about him.
What Godfather? He's just a good man.
Good evening. This is the CBS Evening News,
Dan Rather reporting.
They returned the verdict on a Friday.
I remember exactly where I was when I heard the verdict.
A park in upstate New York, with my radio on, All News 88.
I'm on the street with my partner. We're driving around.
And we actually hear as the news comes out of the radio on the car…
John Gotti was acquitted by a jury
on all counts of conspiracy and racketeering.
He was found not guilty on all counts.
Disbelief,
I think, was the main feeling.
Disbelief.
I felt that I had been beaten, physically beaten.
My body was actually sore.
The result was a major defeat in the government's fight
against organized crime.
John Gotti strode out of that courthouse like a star.
How do you feel, Mr. Gotti?
In a six-month trial,
the government couldn't make their case stick.
Were you surprised?
I was flabbergasted.
It was the first successful defense of a RICO case.
God bless America.
The vindication was proper,
and we both expected it. And we're very pleased we got it.
When the not-guilty verdict came in,
people were saying, "Bruce Cutler, he's the best attorney."
No, it wasn't Bruce Cutler. It really wasn't Bruce Cutler.
The case was beat because somebody paid the juror $60,000.
Jurors then taken home by federal marshals in limos.
I told Diane Giacalone,
"I cannot believe that you got the jurors getting in a limo
and driving all over Brooklyn, dropping 'em off."
"You think the mob is stupid? They're following them."
"John Gotti's gonna pay somebody off."
And she said, "Sal, you're watching way too much television."
And I laughed.
You know, when he got acquitted, I go, "Yeah, he pulled it off."
John Gotti had a lot to smile about,
as he picked his way through the cameras outside his home.
I didn't find out till later that there was a compromised juror.
There were many signals I missed.
I missed the fact that John Gotti never was nervous.
Never.
He was just as cheery as could be. He knew that he could not be convicted.
And so what would have been an extraordinarily risky defense
for any other defendant
was just sport for him.
When the verdict came in "not guilty," it was a big party.
I turned to my partner and said,
"Let's head to the Bergin Hunt & Fish Club."
And the place was a mob scene. I spot John Gotti.
I walked straight up to him and said,
"You probably don't remember me. I'm George Gabriel."
"I told you I'd be here to congratulate you. Congratulations."
"I'll be seeing you."
And I turned around and got back in the car, and we left.
You know, after that trial, he got a boat.
And on the back of the boat, he named it… "Not Guilty."
The government says John Gotti is a cold-blooded killer,
perhaps the most ruthless and powerful mob boss in America.
Gotti became a paparazzi subject.
Then why is the guy so popular?
♪ Tell me how do I feel ♪
♪ Tell me now how do I feel ♪
He went from being the criminal mob boss
to the New York American celebrity.
Recently, Gotti made the big time.
Time magazine commissioned Andy Warhol
to do a portrait of Gotti that would be on the cover.
There are heroes who do great things for our country,
and they're not on the cover of Time magazine, but a mob boss is.
Mr. Gotti is almost as famous for his sartorial splendor
as for his reputation as a crime overlord.
That's when he got the nickname.
The man they call "The Dapper Don."
Because of Gotti, we were movie stars, because people wanted to be like us.
The celebrities wanted to hang out with us.
I'm blowing coke with Andy Warhol. I'm blowing coke with David Bowie.
They trusted us, number one, they knew we weren't gonna call up the magazines.
They knew we had good coke.
It was great because you're around so much money,
excitement, prestige, glamour.
I was with him one night.
Brooke Shields stuck her phone number in his pocket in Club A,
and he ripped it up.
I told him, "What the fuck are you doing?"
He goes, "She's my daughter's age."
I said, "Give me that number."
Okay, we're back with a prank
on America's most famous alleged Godfather,
New York's Dapper Don John Gotti.
When you see him on TV, when he's wearing his $2,000 suit,
his hair is perfect, people see him, they love him.
He's a star.
But behind closed doors, he's a ruthless killer.
And look what happened to the guy who had the job before him.
See what a high-stress job can do to you?
John Gotti is two for two in the win column.
The Diane Giacalone trial was primarily based
all on informant testimony.
So the next case was gonna have to use electronic surveillance
where John Gotti himself was intercepted in many conversations.
We still had the bug evidence from the Bergin Hunt & Fish Club.
And we had tremendous conversations.
We still had every intention to make our own case.
We had conversations that no one else could possibly have.
And so we were competition for the FBI.
And that meant the FBI needed to step up its game.
The FBI has yet to bring a case against John Gotti.
But we knew the crimes he was responsible for,
and he's walking the streets.
He and everybody else knew
that the government was gonna come back at him.
The government had no choice.
Whenever you undertake one of these cases,
you gotta work closely with the prosecuting attorney.
In this case, it was the Eastern District of New York.
Laura Ward was a very knowledgeable prosecutor,
very skilled, very brilliant.
She was great to work with.
After Diane Giacalone's case, the FBI immediately focused on Gotti.
And now we were gonna take him down.
George Gabriel was appointed with the task of getting Gotti.
I was not gonna be in a rush.
I knew that to put this guy in jail, if he was able to beat the feds once,
you had to be really good at whatever your evidence was gonna be.
Had to be airtight, had to be very strong.
George was on a mission to get Gotti,
but he had to get Gotti good.
While we're working the case on John, we're surveilling him and doing our thing.
Suddenly, I get a call from one of the squads in New Jersey.
A man was killed mob-style outside his home in Brooklyn this morning.
The victim, Wilfred "Willie Boy" Johnson,
who police call a close associate of alleged mob boss, John Gotti.
That guy's destiny was already written. That guy was going. He was going to sleep.
Johnson was shot several times in the head outside his home.
One of the rules is don't kill a guy in front of his house.
That's an insult to his wife and kids.
So, if they really hate a guy,
and wanna send a message, they'll whack him by his house.
I'm sorry he was killed.
I feel very sorry for his family,
but it was an inevitable end to a life that led in only one direction.
The day after Willie Boy Johnson was murdered by Gotti's men…
Morning, Mr. Gotti.
…he comes out of his house, and we say,
"What do you think of Willie Boy Johnson? What's your opinion? What do you think?"
And he said, "Well, we all gotta go sometime."
A couple of months into his administration,
informants started saying that Gotti was gonna set up
his headquarters at the Ravenite Social Club.
When John took over the Ravenite,
he gutted it out. He built the brick wall.
He made a little small window so you couldn't see in.
I would say he fortified it.
The Ravenite's located in Little Italy.
Little Italy has every organized crime family hanging out there.
They've got restaurants. They've got clubs.
It's their backyard.
So we're the outsiders.
We can't go in there without being spotted.
Everybody in those apartments, on the streets,
are loyal to the wise guys, so it's very difficult to do anything.
We supply people with jobs. On Thanksgiving, we gave out turkeys.
People grew up with us and trusted us,
and we helped them. We helped the community.
If people came to us for favors, we did 'em.
I'm not afraid. In fact, I feel safer.
- You feel safer? - Well, I sure do.
Why is that?
My cars have been stolen in every area but this one.
In Ozone Park, on Mulberry Street,
we're the bad guys, not the good guys.
Despite that, you have to do your job, right?
So I had to get in my van.
I had a surveillance van.
And try and park it to get a good position on the club.
You are clear.
You get in the back with all your cameras,
and you wait until people start showing up.
There'd be several times these guys would be walking down the street,
and they're knocking on every van, saying, "We know you're in there."
The hope was to try and get a plant some place, right?
Some fixed location
that I could keep a camera on the front of the club.
And we could be a little bit more secretive.
We found this condo.
It was on the sixth floor, about two and a half blocks away.
The good news was we had a plant.
Kind of our home base of operations.
The bad news was it was two and a half blocks away.
I had access to the Special Ops teams.
And we got fortunate
because the Bureau had some very high-tech equipment.
Not a lot of people knew it existed. I didn't know it existed.
As a technically trained agent,
one of our primary duties was to devise,
implement, and install surveillance devices
in order to get the evidence to successfully prosecute
the Mafia in New York City.
We installed state-of-the-art telescopic video surveillance equipment
that allowed us to record the activity
at the entrance to the Ravenite and the street adjacent to the Ravenite
seven days a week, 24 hours a day.
The beauty of it was you could take video two and a half blocks away
and make it look like I was a hundred feet away.
Even at eight o'clock at night in the middle of winter,
you'd think it was 3 p.m.
The video camera from that plant
gave you beautiful black-and-white pictures of these guys coming and going.
You'd identify who they are,
what they're wearing, what kind of cars they came out of.
Just tremendous bonanza of intelligence.
It was mind-blowing to have that kind of technology.
By '89 into '90, the Ravenite was in full swing.
John was always there with his administration.
And the most incredible and helpful thing that Gotti did for us
is every Wednesday night, he had the capos come down
with their associates and soldiers as a group.
And it was John Gotti,
Frankie LoCascio,
Sammy Gravano.
So he basically gave us the outline of the family.
The mob is supposed to be a secret organization.
Having everybody show up at one place in broad daylight
is not particularly secretive.
John Gotti was a gangster. He didn't give a fuck about the FBI.
He didn't give a fuck if the FBI took your picture.
He put everybody on front street, and he felt like,
"You're in this life, you come to see me. You ain't gonna be afraid of the cops."
"You ain't gonna be a captain or a wise guy and hide in your house."
"You're gonna come here like I'm here every day."
It wasn't the smartest thing to do, but John Gotti thought he's invincible.
Gotti didn't stay inside the club.
What he would do, he would go out on walk-talks around the block.
You could see the dynamics of the hierarchy of people.
So, for example, there was a time,
John and Sammy are going for a walk.
And it starts to drizzle.
And Sammy's holding the umbrella for John. John's not gonna hold the umbrella.
And then, you look two or three feet behind 'em are the bodyguards,
the guys that are supposed to stay and protect him.
Other times, you'll see if people are coming up to greet John,
they're gonna greet John before they greet Sammy.
So all of those are little telling factors
that give you an idea of what the administration looks like,
the who's who, and the closeness of some people
and/or the distance of others.
Once we had people coming and going, we had informants telling us
that John Gotti was in there talking about crime.
But we had no idea what they're saying.
So, armed with that information, we made an application
to go up on a bug inside the social club.
Once we knew we were gonna bug the Ravenite,
I'd then go back to the Special Ops guy
to figure out how we're gonna make this happen.
We didn't really have any real-time practical knowledge
of what the actual layout of the inside of the Ravenite Social Club was.
Where were people sitting? Where was John?
Where was his lieutenants? Where were the conversations taking place?
Sometimes, the tech guys have to go in,
kind of scan the place, figure out what equipment they have to bring in.
Because when we would later go back at night,
in the middle of the night, in the dark,
knowing what was in the room and how it was configured,
it would help us tremendously.
Obviously, law enforcement personnel can't just walk into a Mafia social club
in broad daylight.
So we had to get them to invite us in, frankly.
And the way we did that was to do what we called a trouble call.
Basically, place a little bit of technical trouble
in some of the telephone capabilities of the Ravenite,
which pre-empted somebody in the Gambino family
to call for a New York Telephone repairman.
But instead, they had the friendly members
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation SO1 visit their location.
I arrived off the street as a repair service person.
When I first walked into the Ravenite, it was very apparent
that the interior was very rudimentary.
Interestingly enough, there was a portrait of Mr. Gotti
in the back of a room where he would sit.
We were able to observe
that there was some bookmaking operation going on in there.
And they had what appeared to be a fax machine connected to a phone line.
And in no uncertain terms, wanted me to get the effing thing fixed
as soon as I can effing get it fixed, they'd really appreciate it.
We were able to "fix their problem," quote-unquote.
And they were overjoyed.
One of the members of the crew walked up and handed me
two brand-new, shiny $100 bills,
which being a good service person, hard-working man, I accepted.
We left the scene. And courtesy of the Gambino crime family,
took several members of the SO1 technical squad out
to pizza and beer that day.
Now, we had the intelligence of where we needed to put the bug.
The Ravenite had two rooms.
John had a table in the back room that he would typically sit at.
That's where people'd come to talk to him.
The bug had to be as close as we could get it to that table.
In the 1980s, I was a special agent with the FBI.
I was one of only six specially trained lock agents in the country.
I had a partner, Ken Reader. The man was brilliant with locks.
Now, what Kenny was gonna do
is he was gonna impression a key for the Ravenite.
And impressioning is something that's been done by locksmiths
for the last 100 years.
It's a bit of an art.
You put the key blank inside the cylinder,
and it leaves a mark, and you pull it out,
and you file it, and you keep doing that.
Eventually, you wind up getting the key to open the door.
It normally takes about 15 minutes.
…22 to Kenny.
In this particular case, with Kenny, it took him three, four hours,
because every time the coast was clear, Kenny'd almost get to the door…
Eight-three-seven, 820.
…and they would call him off and say, "No, somebody's coming."
But by the end of the night,
he wound up with a key, and we were ready to go to do our break-in.
Once the entrance was made,
we had to surreptitiously install microphones
and transmitters, bugs, et cetera.
We had to take great pains in order to conceal them.
And we had to basically watch ourselves
in very, very low light with very small flashlights in our teeth.
Finally, we did some audio tests.
Hey, one, two, three, four. Four, three, two, one.
Can you hear me, Charlie?
And Charlie would come back and say…
Loud and clear.
It was a very cool orchestration.
It was an event.
Within one to two hours, we were gone.
Once we get the bug,
it's exciting to get to the plant, put those headsets on.
Listen to all of the tapes
to see if there was anything that was usable.
There's an ice machine in the front.
A cappuccino machine in the front.
You're picking up every sound that you can imagine.
So you know there's a lot of conversation going on.
You're not hearing any of it.
I just could not believe it.
You couldn't hear a thing.
I mean, it was a complete waste of time and energy.
If the mics are not in the best position,
you regroup with the Special Ops guys.
You know, "Is there anything we can do to enhance this?"
And then you gotta weigh the risk of trying to go back in.
We must have entered the Ravenite more than a dozen times
over a 14-month period, constantly moving the mics around.
We readjusted the bug. We moved it next to the table.
We moved it to the ceiling over the table.
We tried different things, but acoustically it was just a disaster.
Too many people in a small place.
That's where it really got frustrating, because we had the video plant.
We could see these guys coming and going. We see the walk-talks.
We had the bug there, but we couldn't hear squat.
We knew we couldn't rely on these tapes.
We knew we had to do better.
Even though we had heard that the FBI had their own bug up,
we still had every intention to make our own case.
So we went back to all our old bug conversations
recorded inside the Bergin Hunt & Fish Club in 1986.
Greg comes to see me one morning.
He had been listening over and over again to the Gotti bugs
and had found something that everybody else had missed.
Greg was so excited about it.
And, uh, you have to know Greg to appreciate this.
He wrote a note.
And I put it on his desk that night with a Post-It
that he's gotta look at the transcript.
In the event that, while he was going home,
he had been in an accident and was unable to tell us the next day.
So, the conversation was intercepted in 1986
about a labor union leader who went to a place called Bankers and Brokers.
Bankers and Brokers is a restaurant in Manhattan
that's owned by a wise guy in the Gambino family.
And he had non-union carpenters come in and fix it.
The president of the carpenters' union,
O'Connor I believe his name was,
he said, you know, "What the fuck are you doing?"
"You gotta use union guys."
'Cause the carpenters' union was controlled by the mob.
So, what happens is he took it upon himself
to go in there and have the place torn apart after it was fixed.
The guy that owns the restaurant is with John Gotti,
he's one of his soldiers. So now the Gambino family has to step in.
A New York City Carpenters' Union official was shot and wounded
in the lobby of the union's offices.
It had all the markings of a gangland-style warning.
So the conversation was very specific.
It mentioned John O'Connor.
The victim was 49-year-old John F. O'Connor.
Mentioned 608. The union.
Vice President of Local 608 of the United Carpenters' Union.
Shortly before 7:00, O'Connor walked into this building
at Broadway and 51st Street, which houses his office.
And mentioned that…
…"We're gonna bust him up."
O'Connor was shot four times in the buttocks.
I listened to the recording, and it was great. It was dynamite.
We had all the elements of a crime.
Suddenly, we hear Gotti's been arrested.
The Manhattan DA is bringing murder conspiracy charges against Gotti,
stemming from the May 1986 shooting
of allegedly corrupt carpenters' union official John O'Connor.
I called a source that I had at the FBI,
and he said, "John Gotti's not been arrested."
"If John Gotti were arrested, I would know."
That's it, folks. That's it, folks.
But he didn't know.
And the reason he didn't know
is because the New York State Organized Crime Task Force
was acting on its own,
was not working with the FBI.
OCTF wanted the publicity of putting John Gotti in jail.
And because we couldn't make a case fast enough,
they brought the O'Connor case to the Manhattan DAs,
and they went forward with it.
Right now, it's almost a competition. "They can't do it. Can you?"
So, all these people were competing against each other
for the glory of prosecuting John Gotti.
John Gotti was, you know, daring them,
like, "I dare you to come get me."
He was like, "Fuck you."
- You ready for this next case? - I'm always ready.