When Salvatore Gravano, known as Sammy the Bull, took the witness stand in 1992 against John J. Gotti, the Gambino crime family boss, he electrified the New York courtroom and sent panic through the underworld. His testimony sent Mr. Gotti to prison for life and started his crime family on an irreversible decline.
But betrayals of the Cosa Nostra blood oath are becoming less and less novel. So far, five Gambino crime family turncoats have testified in the federal racketeering trial of Mr. Gotti’s son, John A. Gotti, which begins its fourth week today.
Instead of suspenseful drama, the mob defectors are part of a polished confessional ritual, a courtroom amorality play in which, one by one, they recount their lives in crime with the icy cool they learned in their work.
The government’s two most important cooperating witnesses against Mr. Gotti, Joseph D’Angelo and Michael DiLeonardo, have admitted a total of six murders, crimes more serious than the charges against Mr. Gotti.
The rats, as they call themselves, have provided strong evidence for the prosecutors in Federal District Court in Manhattan, corroborating under oath many details of Mr. Gotti’s role as a Gambino street boss after his father went to prison, including his orders for two assaults in 1992 on Curtis Sliwa, the Guardian Angels founder and radio talk-show host.
But they have also shown the jury, with chilling repetition, that they are vicious criminals and liars who made deals with the government in the hope of reducing their prison time, and who have more nostalgia than remorse for “the life” in the mob.
Mr. Gotti, 41, is accused of broad racketeering offenses, including kidnapping, in the attack on Mr. Sliwa. His lawyers say Mr. Gotti abandoned the mob life and cut his ties to the Gambinos after being imprisoned for racketeering in 1997.
The turncoats’ testimony is crucial for the government to prove that he continued to order crimes during more than six years he was in prison.
Mr. D’Angelo, 36, who testified that he drove the taxi in which Mr. Sliwa was shot, recalled the murder two years earlier, ordered by Mr. Gravano, of Edward Garofalo, a contractor.
“We walked toward him and we shot him,” said Mr. D’Angelo under questioning by a prosecutor, Joon Kim. Mr. D’Angelo said he and other henchmen disposed of their guns in the ocean off Brooklyn and then, “like every day, I went to the office.”
“You didn’t have any major problem with that, did you?” Mr. Gotti’s defense lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, asked during his cross-examination.
“No, it was just a job to do,” Mr. D’Angelo said with a shrug. “I was happy to please Gravano.”
For his part Mr. DiLeonardo, 50, said he helped Gambino associates kill a man named Jack, whose last name he never bothered to learn. “I got an order my from boss and I went,” Mr. DiLeonardo said, recounting that he drove the getaway car for other gunmen.
“I was a killer,” Mr. DiLeonardo responded calmly to a question by Mr. Lichtman. “I’ll always live with the fact that I killed in my life.”
Mr. DiLeonardo, who also testified last year in the trial of Peter Gotti, Mr. Gotti’s uncle, came to court carefully groomed in a blue blazer and yellow silk tie. Describing himself as a “gentleman gangster,” he addressed Mr. Lichtman as “counselor” and sought to parry his cross-examination with jokes and explanation of mafia mores.
Mr. DiLeonardo recalled the first time the Gambinos ordered him to kill someone. The killing never occurred, he said, and he concluded they were just testing him before inducting him into the family.
“I think they just wanted to look at my eyes” to see if he would hesitate to kill, he said.
After the elder Mr. Gotti took over the family in a bloody 1985 coup, he dispatched Mr. DiLeonardo to assert the family’s power in Teamsters Local 282, making him a foreman even though Mr. DiLeonardo did not know how to drive a truck. His skill, he said, was knowing when to use “a little force” if contractors or other unions did not allow Gambino mobsters to draw salaries from phantom construction jobs.
Mr. DiLeonardo testified that for nine years after 1993 he was the head of the Gambinos’ construction panel, a committee that made sure extortion money was distributed according to mob rules. In court, prosecutors displayed two $50,000 checks paid by Mr. DiLeonardo to a company controlled by Mr. Gotti.
Mr. DiLeonardo was promoted to captain and his career was thriving, but he started to have personal troubles after deciding to have a child with a mistress, identified in court only as Madelina. That move in itself was not unusual, he said.
“We don’t really socialize with our wives,” he explained. Not wanting their wives to mix with other gangsters, he said, “we all have girls.” But a Gambino rival wrote a Christmas card to his wife, Toni Marie, telling her about his new son. She filed for divorce and refused to allow Mr. DiLeonardo to speak to his elder son, Michael, now 19.
Arrested in 2002, Mr. DiLeonardo said he learned from his mistress that the Gambinos had put him “on the shelf,” stripping him of his rank. He called the demotion devastating. “I went inside and I cried,” he said.
He said he decided to cooperate with the government in November 2002, after his son Michael went to visit Mr. Gotti in Ray Brook federal prison in upstate New York. Mr. DiLeonardo said he believed Mr. Gotti was turning his son against him.
The crime family “took away my cause when they broke me,” Mr. DiLeonardo said of his decision to talk to prosecutors.
Other cooperating witnesses are Anthony Rotundo and Andrew DiDonato, Gambino associates, and Frank Fappiano, who confessed to being a gunman with Mr. D’Angelo in the Garofalo murder, among other crimes. Mr. Gotti’s father died in prison in 2002. Peter Gotti, 66, his uncle, was sentenced in July to 25 years in prison.
After serving three years in prison, Mr. DiLeonardo was released on bail in June and relocated in the witness protection program with Madelina and their young son.
Asked by Mr. Lichtman if he repented his killings, Mr. DiLeonardo replied, “Sometimes I cried thinking about it. At times I felt remorse, yeah.”
But now, he said, he prays every day. “I pray to sanitize my past.”
