Gangland 4/28/22

[Dr031718]

Sammy Bull and Gotti Prosecutor John Gleeson Both Had Big Trust Issues With Their Bosses

Gang Land Exclusive!gotti-wars-coverWhen Salvatore (Sammy Bull) Gravano made up his mind to turn on his Mafia boss, John Gotti, there was only one person he knew he could trust to contact the feds: His wife.

And when Brooklyn federal prosecutor John Gleeson got the stunning news of Gravano's plans to defect, he had his own trust issue: He feared that his own boss, U.S. Attorney Andrew Maloney, might spill the beans. So he didn't tell him until the deal was done.

Those are two choice nuggets contained in Gleeson's new tell-all book, The Gotti Wars, about the two John Gotti racketeering and murder trials that made Mafia history.

Debbie GravanoGang Land has obtained an exclusive look at the soon-to-be released blockbuster. In his book, Gleeson reveals that he kept top prosecutor Maloney in the dark as he met secretly, first with Gravano's savvy wife of 20 years, Debbie Gravano, and then with Sammy Bull himself about his decision to flip.

Gleeson writes that while he knew the move could cost him his job, he agreed with both the FBI and Judge I. Leo Glasser, who was overseeing the case, to keep the talkative Maloney from learning the most explosive secret in his office.

Gleeson was so cautious that he asked Glasser for permission to tape record their meeting as he told the judge that Sammy Bull wanted to cooperate with the government. Gleeson also taped a second pressure-packed session with the judge and the turncoat underboss, the one that locked Gravano into a cooperation deal.

Salvatore GravanoIt wasn't until the deal was done, that Gleeson brought the stunning news to Maloney, the chief federal prosecutor for eight million people in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and Long Island.

The Gotti Wars is chock-full of intriguing new details about the two trials in which Gleeson tangled with Gotti, including the news they were related through marriage — Gleeson's brother-in-law and Gotti were cousins — and the impact that Gravano's cooperation had on the outcomes of both trials. (See below)

But the 350-page book's most intriguing insight is how Gleeson, four FBI agents, Glasser, and the Gravanos managed to team up against Gotti during a four week stretch in October of 1991, ten days before Sammy Bull's decision to flip would become public in early November.

Gleeson writes that when he finally told Maloney on October 28, 1991 about the cloak and dagger routine he had used, "it occurred to me in that moment that I was about to be fired." Maloney's response was understandably annoyed: "You had no business not telling us," Maloney said, referring to himself and his Chief Assistant, Mary Jo White.

John GlessonGleeson, however, says he soon realized he "was going to be okay." The tip-off, he writes, came when "Andy tilted his head upward . . . trying unsuccessfully to suppress a smile."

Maloney, who had suffered through Gotti's 1987 acquittal, quickly shifted from anger to the huge advantage they had just gained in the case. The top prosecutor noted that the specific charge that Gotti had killed Paul (Big Paul) Castellano that had been "weak," was now, thanks to Gravano, "a lot stronger."

A few minutes after the meeting, Gleeson realized how lucky he was. White, who later served as Manhattan U.S. Attorney, told him that if it was up to her she would have fired him.

According to The Gotti Wars, the initial urging to keep the huge news of Gravano's planned defection away from Maloney, originated with FBI supervisor Bruce Mouw. It was Mouw's edict, writes Gleeson, that "nobody else" other than case agent George Gabriel, and the two Staten Island-based FBI agents that Debbie Gravano originally contacted, Matty Tricorico and Frank Spero, should know about Sammy Bull's plans.

Broce MouwGleeson wrote that when Mouw told him to "keep this quiet," he protested that if he didn't tell Maloney, then he couldn't tell his co-prosecutors Laura Ward, Pat Cotter and Jamie Orenstein. "Andy will kill me if he's the only one we keep in the dark. He's the U.S. Attorney," he told the agent.

"So don't tell anyone," said Mouw.

"The problem was," Gleeson explained, "Andy made an appearance just about every night at the University Club, where he met with friends." His pals included former Manhattan federal prosecutors who were his colleagues "in the sixties and seventies, and who were now the lions of the city's defense bar." Mouw "was right to question his ability to keep the news about Gravano to himself," Gleeson concludes.

"The Gotti case was the talk of the town, especially as the trial approached," Gleeson recalled, "so no doubt Andy was being asked about it over drinks every night." The trial began in January.

Matty Tricorico & Frank SperoGleeson joined the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's office several months before Gotti took over the Gambino crime family by killing Big Paul. He says he was keenly aware of the ethical issues that could evolve by meeting Gravano, a defendant in his case who was then represented by a heavyweight defense attorney, Ben Brafman.

"If meeting with Gravano or his wife was going to blow up in my face, the fact of it wasn't going to be a surprise to Judge Glasser," Gleeson wrote. He recalled visiting the judge's chambers and seeking permission to use a tape recorder to place something on the record that was "so singular and so sensitive" that "the fewer people who know of it the better."

"All right," said Glasser. "Go ahead."

Gleeson turned on the recorder. He said he planned to meet the next day with Debbie Gravano at a "hotel in New Jersey" to discuss an overture Sammy Bull made to cooperate with the feds. He would then arrange a "secret meeting with Gravano" to see if a deal could be made. He would "keep the Court apprised" of his "contacts with Gravano and his wife," Gleeson told the judge.

Gleeson wrote that he "was nervous, and staring the whole time at the recorder." He told Glasser he would seal the "tape in an envelope" and give copies to Gotti and Frank (Frankie Loc) Locascio if Gravano became a government witness. When he turned the recorder off, "and started to leave," Glasser said, "John, you didn't make an application."

"Lawyers come to judges for relief," said Glasser, who "seemed to be enjoying himself," Gleeson wrote. "They make an application, give reasons for it, and the judge either grants it or denies it. You haven't asked for any relief."

Gleeson, who had decided not to ask permission "to speak to Gravano's wife" or Sammy Bull for fear that "Glasser would prohibit" him from meeting either, merely said, "Yes sir, that's true," and continued to leave, he wrote. But the judge "wasn't finished."

"Judge I Leo GlasserJohn," the judge asked, "Who knows about this?"
"Just me in my office" and the FBI, said Gleeson.
"Not even the U.S. Attorney?"
"Just me," said the prosecutor.
"Keep it that way," said the judge.
"Yes, sir," said Gleeson, who "hastened out of chambers before the judge could say anything else."

"Debbie Gravano wasn't what I'd expected," wrote Gleeson. "There was no make-up, fancy hair, jewelry, or gum-chewing. She was exactly my age, which made her seven years younger than her husband. With short hair, and dressed in jeans and a cotton sweater, she could have passed for any one of about fifty girls from my suburban high school class."

She said, "Hi," but was "nervous," and she stated "mechanically," as if "she'd memorized her lines," that "Sammy is willing to cooperate" but he "wants to meet you first, and he wants immunity," and he wants to limit his testimony to one year and "won't testify against his friends."

Andrew Maloney & John GleesonThere was no way Gleeson was going to limit his testimony to one year, or give him immunity, he wrote. He told her to tell Sammy that pleading guilty and "a 20-year cap" was "the absolute best" he could hope for, to "forget about any one-year limit on his cooperation," and he would have to testify against any defendants that his Uncle Sam had accused of mob crimes.

The following day, he learned "that Gravano wanted to meet with me." But "the deal was still on a knife-edge" because Sammy Bull had a new condition: "Whatever ruse we used to get him into the building for our encounter, we had to put Gotti and Locascio through it as well" because otherwise Gotti's "suspicions would be aroused."

Sammy Bull "turned out to be far more intelligent than we expected," Gleeson wrote. The ruse the agents devised called for the three defendants — Gotti, Gravano and Locascio — to provide voice and handwriting samples. Gravano was the last to be brought to the courthouse from the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

Gleeson was present as he and the agents met privately with Gravano in a jury room. The prosecutor's first question to Gravano was why he had asked to meet without his attorney present.

"I can't trust Brafman," Gravano replied. "If I told him I wanted to meet with you, John (Gotti) would know immediately. I'd be killed."

Ben BrafmanGravano's response made Gleeson breathe easy: He would now be able to speak with Gravano without his attorney present.

"Why did you want to meet?" continued Gleeson.
"I want to jump from our government to your government."
"Why do you want to switch to our side?"
"I think if we manage to beat the case, John will try to kill me when we hit the street. So if we do win, I'd have to kill him or be killed by him. If I kill him, I'll have to kill his brothers Gene and Pete. And his kid, probably some others, too. It would get complicated."

Gleeson "started sweating," he wrote, when his query, "Did we get anything wrong in the indictment?" was met with silence, and when Gravano answered his followup question, whether he had killed capo Robert (DeeBee) DiBernardo, by stating: "I liked DeeBee. I didn't want him to die."

"My mind was racing," Gleeson wrote. If Gravano denied killing him, that would have been Brady Material he was required to tell Gotti about if Gravano did not agree to cooperate.

Robert DiBernardo"Are you telling me that you're not guilty of DeeBee's murder?"
"No, I'm not saying I'm not guilty. I'm saying I liked him. I didn't want him to die, and he shouln't have been killed. I never told John he was subversive. Angelo (Ruggiero) did. But the word came out of the MCC that John wanted him whacked, and I'm responsible for the murder. I'm guilty. I had him hit in my office on Stillwell Avenue."
"Were you there?"
"Yes."
"And John ordered it?"
"Yes, while he was in jail on your first case against him."

"I felt like hugging him," Gleeson wrote. He noted that Sammy Bull was both a participant and eye-witness to the killing of Big Paul, he confirmed the other murders and other crimes that were charged in the indictment. The new witness appeared "very sure of himself, but not the least bit cocky."

John Gleeson & Salvatore Gravano"I could barely contain my excitement," Gleeson wrote. "Gotti was soon going to have a very bad day."

Gleeson was pleased that Sammy Bull knew he had to admit all his crimes. But he and the agents were taken aback by the number of murders he admitted, and when he qualified his answer by saying there were "about 18" of them.

"What does "about" mean?"
"It means I think it's 18. Could it be one more or one less? Yes. I need to write them down, and you know I can't do that in the MCC."

To cement the government's ageement, Gleeson told Gravano that the trial was set to begin soon and he should ask Judge Glasser "to recommend an attorney. That way there'll be a lawyer waiting for you when we pull you out."

"How do I ask the judge?"
"He's upstairs. I'll ask him if he'll come down right now. All right?"
After a pause, Gravano said, "All right," knowing, Gleeson wrote, that would be a point of no return.

As soon as Glasser got there, "I pulled my tape recorder out of a Redweld folder, put it on the table, and turned it on," Gleeson wrote. "It took only a minute or two to get Gravano to confirm on the record that he didn't trust Brafman, which justified our meeting with him behind Brafman's back, and to ask the judge to recommend a replacement. The judge said he'd give it some thought and left."

"As the jury room door closed behind him, I turned off the recorder," Gleeson wrote. "It was a small machine," but "it made a sound like a rifle shot in the enclosed jury room" and he and the agents "knew there'd be no turning back for Gravano."

"We had a tape recording of Sammy the Bull Gravano asking the judge for a lawyer to help him cooperate," Gleeson wrote. "Gravano could never return to his former life knowing that the government had such a tape. He was ours."

The Anonymous Jury System Helped Gotti Win A Bogus Acquittal In 1987

Bosko RadonjichFor then-prosecutor John Gleeson, this one was personal: His brand new cooperating witness, Salvatore (Sammy Bull) Gravano, had just told the FBI that Gambino family associate Bosko Radonjich had fixed the jury in the first murder-racketeering case against boss John Gotti, a case that Gleeson had worked heartbreakingly hard to win.

When Gleeson learned that at 6 AM on November 8, 1991, he knew that he'd have to move quickly to obtain a small measure of revenge against the juror who'd sold his vote to Gotti for $60,000, and helped him win a bogus acquittal at his 1987 trial.

That was the first thing that FBI agent Bruce Mouw, who had supervised the FBI's removal of Gravano from the MCC shortly after midnight, told Gleeson when he arrived at a heavily guarded motel to discuss Gravano's cooperation agreement with his new lawyer.

The fix had been arranged, Mouw told Gleeson, by Radonjich, a Serbian national whom Gotti — in a truth-stranger-than-fiction scenario — had installed as the leader of the Westies, the Irish-American gang from Hell's Kitchen. Gravano matter-of-factly gave that blockbuster info to Mouw when he was asked why the Gambinos "were congratulating him" at the Ravenite Social Club victory party after the stunning acquittal.

Diane Giacalone"Simple," Gravano said. "I fixed that case."
"Just like that?" Gleeson asked.
"Just like that," Mouw replied.
"How?"
"Through Bosko. Sammy handed Bosko sixty grand to give to the juror."
"How did Bosko get to him?"
"He didn't. The juror already knew Bosko and went to him."

When Gleeson spoke to Gravano about that, the new witness gave the prosecutor all the details he had, which weren't many. He didn't even know the crooked juror's name.

"Shortly after we picked the jury," Gleeson writes, "Bosko came to Gravano and told him he had a juror who'd vote not guilty and try to convince the others to do the same. Since Gotti was in detention, Gravano met with Gene Gotti, who spoke to his brother in court the next day. They were delighted and approved the plan. Gravano gave Bosko $20,000 in cash on three separate occasions during the trial."

George Pape"I was stunned," Gleeson wrote. "Diane (Giacalone) and I had given two years of our lives to that prosecution, and the high-profile acquittals of all seven defendants was the worst experience of my professional life by far."

Since it had been an anonymous jury, Gleeson didn't know the juror's identity yet. But he knew he was juror #11. At about 9:30 PM two days later, on November 10, 1991, right after he worked out a cooperation agreement with Gravano's new attorney, Gleeson stopped at his office to begin the investigation that would lead to the indictment of George Pape, of East Norwich L.I., before the five year statute of limitations would run its course on March 13, 1992.

Pape who would be convicted later that year and sentenced to three years in prison, "showed us," Gleeson wrote, "that all the measures taken to protect honest jurors from bad guys can enable a corrupt juror to work with those same criminals. Emboldened by his anonymity, he turned the entire concept of anonymous juries on its head. If Gravano hadn't flipped, a measure designed to ensure an untainted jury would have ensured forever the success of a scheme to taint one.

"It was a profoundly disturbing revelation, and not just because the jury process had allowed Gotti to fix the jury," Gleeson wrote. "We were about to use the identical process in the upcoming trial."

By the time Pape was indicted, Gravano had testified against Gotti. The Teflon Don was well on his way to being found guilty of racketeering and five murders by jurors who could not have done what Pape did. As they were selected for Gotti's 1992 trial, they were immediately sequestered. Except for an occasional trip home, or to another approved location, when they were accompanied by a deputy U.S. marshal, they remained sequestered for the entire six-week-long trial.

Gleeson Convicted His Brother-In-Law's First Cousin — John Gotti

John GottiDuring his first Christmas as an assistant U.S. attorney, John Gleeson became a celebrity prosecutor to his family members when they learned he was working on the case that had become famously known as the John Gotti case. This was nine days after the Dapper Don was publicly named as the architect of the December 16, 1985 brazen Midtown Manhattan assassination of Paul (Big Paul) Castellano.

In April of 1985, two months after he joined the office, Gleeson was assigned to the racketeering case that prosecutor Diane Giacalone filed against Gambino underboss Aniello (Neil) Dellacroce, who had died two weeks before Castellano was whacked. His job was to help her with the "slew of pretrial motions" she expected to receive from lawyers for Dellacroce and his seven codefendants.

Gleeson, the "baby brother" of seven children, enjoyed the Yuletide adulation of his siblings and their spouses. He "regaled them with stories about Gotti," whom he described as "a ruthless, violent, drug-dealing upstart from Queens" whose mob career he and Giacalone were "going to nip in the bud by getting him sentenced to life in prison."

Castellano AssasinatedA few days later, Gleeson discovered what he saw as a "huge problem" that might get him bounced from the big case: His sister Mary told him that her husband Eddie and Gotti were "first cousins."

"Who’d a thought we'd have this snag and it would be you?" said U.S. Attorney Raymond Dearie when Gleeson and Giacalone reported that Gotti's father and Eddie's mother were brother and sister. "The Irish kid from Westchester," said Dearie, and not Giacalone, who "grew up Italian in Queens and walked past these guys’ social clubs every day on her way to grammar school."

"You sure you want to stay on this case?" Dearie asked.

Gleeson was, and he was allowed to remain on the job, "but only barely," he wrote. "Not a word of this to anyone," Dearie instructed them after deciding Gleeson could stay. "It will be on the front pages of the tabloids if it gets out, and Eddie's life won't be the same."

After speaking to his sister and brother-in-law, Gleeson learned that "the two strands of the family had stayed almost completely separate. Eddie's mom, Thomasina Gotti, had married Patrick Carvin, an Irish electrician, and moved to Mount Vernon," while "her brother John stayed in Brooklyn, where they'd grown up."

Judge Ramond Dearie"Eddie had been to the wake of one of their sisters," Gleeson wrote, and "Gene Gotti was there with some of his friends, but apart from that he never knew or saw his gangster cousins" and he "didn't care if I prosecuted them."

It turns out, Gleeson wrote, there are rules about family relationships between prosecutors and the defendants they prosecute which focus on the "degrees of consanguinity" between the two families.

"Four degrees or less and you were toast," Gleeson wrote. '''But I had five: me to my sister Mary, Mary to Eddie, Eddie to Thomasina, Thomasina to her brother John, and him to his son John, my defendant. I was free to prosecute my brother-in-law's first cousin," twice as it turned out.

[Cheech]

Jerry. Really good article. No one thinks you’re mailing it in at all. Keep going, you’re doing great.

[Pmac2]

lol early morning yawn. coffee. work

[Uforeality]

Pretty good read. I bet Gravano would have had the Genovese "ok" to hit every one in the Gambino family who's last name is Gotti.

[Hired_Goonz]

Why would anyone buy this guy's book now that Capeci gave away all the best parts lol.

[dack2001]

Gleeson has probably been a Capeci source dating back to the 80's. This column is a nice thank you.

[JohnnyS]

Yawn.

Thanks for posting Dr

[Amershire_Ed]

Thx for posting

[moneyman]

I guess the Balsamo bust was too soon for him to write about. I think Capeci was the first one to report the Bellomo was upped to Boss and Dicharia being part of the admin - hopefully Capeci has a chance to speak to that source and provide new info on the case.

[Etna]

If you have trouble sleeping at night, just open a gangland issue. It'll knock you right out.

[Dave65827]

We got the grandson of a boss cooperating and a new Genovese bust and he wants to write about Gotti

[SonnyBlackstein]

We're down to book reviews now.


Thanks for the post anyway.

[Wiseguy]

Jerry. Really good article. No one thinks you’re mailing it in at all. Keep going, you’re doing great.

[Cheech]

Poor bastard might not even know Balsamo was busted. Its over for Jerry. I still fork over the $1.00 a month cause I like the archives. At least we got all these turncoats coming out and spilling the beans.

[TommyGambino]

mayo face and anastasia are the same, finished