GL News 12/09/2021

[AnIrishGuy]

Ex-IRA Member Joe Doherty Recalls John Gotti & Other Wiseguys He Met At The MCC

A longing to be most anywhere else was about the only thing that one of the best-known, long-term detainees at the now shuttered Metropolitan Correctional Center had in common with the murderers, robbers, swindlers, drug kingpins, spies, Nazis, child sex traffickers and professional gangsters that he met there. Joseph Doherty, a fugitive from Northern Ireland, became friendly with many wiseguys whose names and mugshots have appeared in Gang Land after he was arrested and detained in 1983 for entering the U.S. with a bogus passport.

Doherty immediately became the center of a protracted legal dispute over whether he should be sent back or granted asylum; he would spend more time at the MCC than any other inmate during the 46 years it was open. To those who believed as he did — that the British had been giving the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland a raw deal for the last several hundred years — Doherty was not a criminal at all. For those who did not believe as he did, Doherty, the son of a Belfast dock worker who like so many sons of Belfast became a member of the neighborhood resistance, the Irish Republican Army, was a murderer and terrorist.

It is not for me here to examine that divide, but to recall some of the wiseguys Doherty was imprisoned with until 1992 when the Supreme Court ruled that he should be turned over to the British in connection with the death of a British special forces officer killed in a 1980 shootout with an IRA unit that included then 25-year-old Doherty.

Doherty was near the end of his MCC stretch when I first interviewed him about his life's journey, which included a night in April of 1988, when he witnessed the beginning of the end of the life of Gambino capo Anthony (Nino) Gaggi, a fellow cellmate in maximum-security Nine South who suffered a heart attack and died, with more than a little help from the guards on duty.

Gaggi was on trial in a racketeering case involving murder, an international stolen-car racket and much else. He was in a cell directly opposite Doherty's, and they had exchanged teasing remarks about many subjects, including tough Irish cops in Nino's childhood haunts on the Lower East Side and tough-on-Irish British cops in Belfast. That night, Doherty heard Nino's cellmate call out for the guards because Gaggi was suffering chest pains.

"Get the doctor, will ya?" Doherty then shouted.

Across several moments, Doherty watched in disbelief as guards mangled their response to Gaggi's heart attack. They marched him up to his cell so he could change into his prison jumpsuit after they had already led him down a flight of stairs leading to the MCC infirmary. Gaggi died there not long afterward, not the only prisoner to die during Doherty's MCC time.

While on trial for murder in Belfast and detained in a prison that like the MCC had been touted as escape-proof, Doherty and seven others had overwhelmed guards, changed into their uniforms and the suits of lawyers visiting clients, then fled to waiting getaway cars. He made his way to New York and worked as a bartender in Manhattan until his arrest.

"I was housed on Nine South," Doherty told me in a series of recent email exchanges. "Here was where all the notorious, famous inmates were held."

Joseph Doherty CornerSome of the notorious included other mafia chieftains the federal government began hammering in the 1980s with its new racketeering laws. This was how Doherty became friendly with John Gotti, chief of the Gambinos. It is a tossup as to who was more well-known at the time. No less than Cardinal O Fiaich, prelate of all Ireland, had visited Doherty at the MCC. New York mayor David Dinkins had visited twice. The City Council had named a street corner outside the MCC after him. Gotti, on the other hand, thanks to a double-breasted, made-for-the-movies public swagger and courtroom winning streak, had adorned the cover of Time and that of the only book ever written about a Godfather still in office.

With Gang Land's Jerry Capeci, I had a hand in that book, and so I'm biased, but its title, Mob Star, pretty much summed up who Gotti was, until the streak ended and he wasn't. The tabloids had their own titles — Dapper Don, Teflon Don — and plenty of headlines trumpeting those qualities made Gotti a symbol for people with an eye for flair and a beef against authority.

Doherty got to know the mob boss over two Gotti layovers at the MCC. "John was a good reader and always hit my bookshelf, even the political stuff," Doherty said. "I remember the first Iraq war, when he put an Iraqi flag on his cell door. He was pissed about another U.S. invasion and talked about the lads from his neighborhood never coming back after signing up for Vietnam.

"Some of the correction officers who were Vietnam veterans didn't appreciate the Iraqi flag and asked Doherty to ask Gotti to take it down. "None had the balls to tell him. They knew we were close and that he would listen to me, and so I went up to John and told him that this was maybe going too far."

Gotti, however, wanted to talk with the guards about Mohammad Ali, who was stripped of his heavyweight boxing title in New York state because he wouldn't, as Gotti put it, according to Doherty, go to Vietnam to kill other poor colored people. "But you fuckers did, burning down villages and killing innocent people. And now you are cheering on . . . war against another poor people. It has nothing to do with democracy, only oil and American interest. So fuck off."

In the end, Gotti took the flag down. "He just wanted to let these people know about not being a sheep," Doherty said.

Some MCC guards began regarding Doherty as Gotti's Tom Hagen, his non-Italian consigliere, just like Robert Duvall in The Godfather. "They often called me Tom Hagen, and I would negotiate with them. No one went directly to John unless through me. John would often give me money and ask me to hand out goods to those not well off. The [guards] were being watched all the time for any contact with John, and any payments [to them] went through me. These were perks like smuggled cigars, gym gear and even small handheld televisions. I would hide the items in places I knew and give them out at night before lockdown."

Doherty was present shortly after Gotti began to see ominous handwriting on the wall. It was when Gotti returned to the MCC from a hearing in his second racketeering case, most likely in January, 1991, shortly after he and members of his administration, Salvatore (Sammy Bull) Gravano and Frank (Frankie Loc) Locascio were arrested and jailed without bail.

He had just listened to tape recordings from a bug that the FBI had placed in the apartment of an elderly widow who lived above the Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy, which was frequently under FBI surveillance. Against all logic, Gotti and his key honchos, after slipping the woman a few bucks to go shop for a while, met regularly there to discuss sensitive matters.

On the Ravenite tapes, Gotti was heard complaining about his underboss Sammy Bull. He also heard his own voice, talking about murder. "John sat down with such an expression on his face," Doherty remembered. "Then, he told me, 'We're fucked. It's all over, Joe.' I thought, 'Teflon, it can only stretch so far.' This was the beginning of the end for John and the start of Sammy becoming a witness for the government."

That day, in fact, Gravano did go straight to his cell on Nine South, the high security unit, and didn't come out for a few days. He later ventured into the MCC gym, where he ran into Doherty and complained about losing money while stuck in prison. "I told him he should be worried about the trial more," Doherty said.

Gravano did grow worried about the trial and became furious that Gotti ripped him behind his back and implicated him in murders while talking on the Ravenite tapes with Locascio. And as Gravano later learned, and as attorney F. Lee Bailey told Gang Land in an exclusive interview in April, Gotti had planned to try and beat the case by throwing Sammy Bull and Frankie Loc under the bus.

In not much time more, the warden informed the Gambino honchos on Nine South they would be moved to new cellblocks. Gotti, Gravano, and Locascio, who was Gotti's actual Tom Hagen, were all sent to different units. Gravano was deposited in Eleven South. "It was the worse place to be," Doherty said. "It was an overcrowded dormitory with 40 lads in one room. I thought the FBI was making a move on Sammy. He had heard another tape where John attacked him. And now they were putting him in gladiator school with 40 young Turks."

Doherty's suspicion and his premonition were, as history knows, spot on. Gravano flipped and in 1992 became the first Mafia underboss to take the stand against his boss. "John was the boss; I was the underboss. John barked, and I bit," he famously testified. Gotti spent most of his life sentence in a maximum security prison in Illinois. In 2000, he was moved to a federal prison hospital in Missouri. He died there in 2002 of throat cancer at age 61.

In February of 1992, the same month Gravano took the stand against Gotti, Doherty lost his case at the Supreme Court and was sent back to the same prison in Belfast from which he had escaped a dozen years earlier. He served eight years before his release. He works now for a social services agency in Belfast, trying to steer neighborhood kids straight.

Murder Machine Editor's Note: Gene Mustain, Gang Land's Daily News colleague and coauthor of Murder Machine, recently made contact with former IRA member Joe Doherty, whom he interviewed about the death of a Gambino capo at the MCC for our 1992 book. Doherty recalled his time with John Gotti and some other wiseguys he met while behind bars in Downtown Manhattan.

Their encore chats — via email — were triggered by Gotti's main nemesis, Salvatore (Sammy Bull) Gravano. Back in September, he told Gang Land that Doherty was a cellblock mate who might recall their time together at the MCC. Doherty did, and he recalled dealings he had with The Bull & The Dapper Don, and a few other inmates in this week's guest column by Mustain.

As for Doherty, Gotti himself vouched for him in the only interview he ever gave any newsman. It happened during a lull in the jury selection process for his 1992 trial when Mustain told him Doherty had told him to say hello if he saw him in court. "Ah," said Gotti, "Joe is a nice man. And honest. You ought to get him to write for you."

The Shark And The Exterminator

Doherty shared with me a draft chapter of a book he began to write, then set aside several years ago. Part of it tells the story of two organized crime figures who by appearances didn't seem to have much in common.

The first was Michele Sindona, a world-class swindler from Sicily who had drained banks in the U.S. and Italy because he was good with numbers. He also was a lawyer with connections to top-echelon Italian gangsters and politicians. He finally got caught, charged and convicted of numerous crimes surrounding the collapse of the Franklin National Bank of Long Island. He was at the MCC awaiting extradition to Italy, where he was wanted for similar crimes and by people with grudges who knew he knew too much, including about the murder of an Italian lawyer who had been assigned the job of liquidating Sindona's Italian banks.

At the MCC, Doherty noticed that Sindona always kept at least three feet away from others while standing in the chow line. The Shark, as some called him, insisted on picking his own chicken slices from the community tray before placing them on his plate. When he drank coffee, he covered his cup with what appeared to be a playing card until he could get it into close sipping range.

Doherty told Mchael O'Rourke, another IRA detainee who had become known as the MCC's jailhouse lawyer, that Sindona must have allergy problems; he seemed so hypersensitive. O'Rourke, who spent much of his time in the MCC library researching case law and procedure and helping prisoners with their briefs and protests of MCC rules, had his ear to the MCC ground. He told Doherty that Sindona's only allergy involved fear of cyanide poisoning.

Doherty came to understand what O'Rourke meant after he met another MCC prisoner, William Arico, a bank robber who struck Doherty as a pleasant man. Doherty then learned that Arico also was regarded as a hitman for hire; one clue was his nickname: "Billy the Exterminator." Arico, who hailed from Valley Stream, was rumored to be available for overseas jobs. At the time, like Sindona, he was awaiting extradition to Italy, where he was wanted in connection with the murder of an Italian lawyer. Yes. The same lawyer who had been assigned the job of liquidating Sindona's banks.

"I guess that is why Sindona always politely moved away from our dining table when Billy came over to talk to us," Doherty wrote. "I sensed there was something really serious going on between them."

At the time, something else serious was going on between Billy and his cellmate, Miguel Sepulveda, a Colombian exterminator. He and Billy, who had escaped from the city jail on Rikers Island a few years before landing at the MCC, had been hatching an escape plan for weeks, sawing silently away on the window frame of their cell with whatever makeshift tools they could steal. The plan also relied on stray bedsheets knotted into a rope on which they planned to lower themselves to a rooftop 40 feel below.

The plan called for Billy to pop the window free and go first down the rope, which he did one night in February of 1984. Sepulveda, who was obese, was to follow, but only after Billy got to the rooftop. Sepulveda, however, became anxious, and climbed out on the rope shortly after Billy, who screamed for him to stop and wait. The heavy hitman, whose English was weak, kept going down the rope. He soon grew fatigued, lost his grip and slipped down the rope onto the Exterminator, who fell off and landed flat on his back. Sepulveda landed a few seconds later, pancaking Billy.

Doherty heard alarms go off and went to his cell window; soon, police and helicopters were all over the roof. He heard Sepulveda screaming and saw him led away. He saw Billy prone on the roof and kept hoping he would stand up, but then he saw someone carrying a body bag toward Billy.

In Irish, Doherty shouted, loud enough for O'Rourke, his Irish-speaking jailhouse lawyer friend a few cells away, to hear: "Ta Billy maribh anois, is cinnte." (Billy is dead now, for sure.)

The next day, in the dining hall, Doherty sensed a new aura of relaxation around Sindona, who spoke solemnly of Billy's death, calling it a tragedy.

Months later, Sindona lost his extradition fight. In Italy, he was convicted of hiring Billy the Exterminator to murder the lawyer assigned to liquidate Sindona's banks. In 1986, while in a prison cell eating breakfast, he collapsed and died. The cause of death was cyanide poisoning.

Attica! Attica! Attica!

The skinny, sad sack inmate Doherty saw shortly after he arrived at the MCC didn't look much like the actor who portrayed him in Dog Day Afternoon. So it took Doherty a while to figure out that John Wojtowicz was the real-life bank robber Al Pacino made famous in the 1975 movie.

When he learned some details about Wojtowicz's case — he was at the MCC to challenge his federal bank robbery conviction, with the help of O'Rourke — a memory bell rang: Sonny! Al Pacino! Dog Day Afternoon! Attica! Attica! Attica!

Wojtowicz had robbed a Brooklyn bank to get money to pay for his male lover's sex-change operation. And his standoff with cops outside the bank brought cheering supporters to join his condemnation of inmate deaths during a riot at Attica Prison in upstate New York.

Wojtowicz lost his challenge, but Doherty nonetheless admired O'Rourke's analytical legal skills and appreciated insights he had given on his own case. They met after Doherty was released from 23-hour detention to general population. O'Rourke had escaped from a Dublin prison in 1976, made his way to America and then been arrested in Philadelphia three years later. "We agreed that we would have much rather have met in some midtown bar on St. Patrick's Day," Doherty wrote in the draft chapter of his book.

O'Rourke lost his case too and was extradited to Ireland in 1984, but not before taking Doherty on tours of the prison library and spending hours with him explaining legal terms and nuances, and even coaxing him to appear at a hearing on behalf of another prisoner's complaint.

Doherty learned enough about the law to understand and greatly appreciate the relentless work that a New York lawyer, Mary B. Pike, began doing on his behalf. Not many cases get to the Supreme Court. After he lost his case and was sent back to Belfast, he also came to greatly appreciate the heartfelt work that two law students at City University of New York who went on to big careers, Marty Glennon and Sean Crowley, did in his honor — setting up the Joseph Doherty Civil Rights Fellowship at CUNY in 1996.

It was a honor he could not have conceived all those years ago, when he and all the young lads in his neighborhood got steered into the IRA resistance.

[AnIrishGuy]

This is a guest article by Gene Mustain - in case that isn't clear

[Adam]

This is a guest article by Gene Mustain - in case that isn't clear

But it reads like Capeci. Can't get enough of those Gotti stories. But as always, thank you for posting this week's article.

[JohnnyS]

Thanks for posting.

[Southshore88]

Thanks for posting

[SonnyBlackstein]

Thanks for the post.

[Boston+matt14]

Thanks for posting, pretty interesting GL. I had no idea Sindona spent time in the MCC. Wonder what his interactions with the Gambinos was like.

[bronx]

he was with john gambino