Read Mob Star for Free Online Page B

was convened. FBI agents arrived from New York University Law School; a University of Notre Dame professor, an architect of the controversial racketeering law used to indict Castellano in both his pending cases, had been holding a seminar there.
    The excitement outside Sparks was palpable. The adrenaline rush the investigators and chroniclers of murder get when they come upon the smell of a big case and a big story always produces moments of thrilling confusion. A Family boss murdered in midtown the week before Christmas was big. Bosses had been slain in other boroughs, but one hadn’t been executed in Manhattan since 1957, when Carlo Gambino’s predecessor was assassinated in a hotel barbershop.
    Reporters crowded cops for tidbits. Chief of Detectives Richard Nicastro, asked what effect the slaying might have on the other defendants in the car-case trial, said he wouldn’t speculate. As for the Pope, however: “They don’t have to prove guilt or innocence anymore. That’s over.”
    Later, a detective—an expert on the Family—was astonished when told that the victims did not have bodyguards, considering the uncertain climate Neil Dellacroce’s death was known to have caused. It was like the president and the vice president walking around without the Secret Service.
    “They were always together. They made it easy.”
    The double hit provoked the usual expressions of outrage.
    “The decent citizens of this country are demeaned in the eyes of the world if brazen cold-blooded murders can be perpetrated on a street in New York,” said federal Court of Appeals Judge Irving J. Kaufman, chairman of the President’s Commission on Organized Crime.
    “The waste of a human life is shocking, no matter who it is,” commented federal District Court Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy, who was presiding over Castellano’s car case, as he adjourned the trial for three weeks to weigh motions from codefendants for a mistrial that was eventually denied.
     
     
    The Pope’s table at Sparks had been set for six. Failla, DeCicco, and an unidentified man were seen leaving as two other would-be diners lay in the street. Someone hadn’t come to dinner.
    The prime suspect in the drama, not the cameraman but the director, was at home that night in Queens. He was watching television with his longtime wife in their suburban Cape Cod-style home in the un-New York City-like neighborhood known as Howard Beach. The home had a rotating satellite dish on the roof; John Gotti had learned how to tune different worlds in or out.
    “Gotti will emerge as the head of the other captains,” predicted Lieutenant Remo Franceschini of the Queens District Attorney’s detective squad the next day. “That’s what this struggle is all about.”
    Over the next few days, the little that was known about Gotti was published and broadcast many times. He was said to have many double-breasted suits, his own barber’s chair, and a fear of flying. New Yorkers with a sense of history raised their eyebrows at one unnamed cop’s claim: “Gotti is the most vicious, meanest mobster I’ve ever encountered.”
    With justification, the cop might also have added “most reckless” or “boldest.” A few months before, even though aware that his words were being taped by government agents, Gotti had threatened to kill a nightclub owner if the man didn’t make a payment on a $100,000 loan.
    “Your partner was here the other day asking me to shoot him in the head, and I would have if he didn’t tell me in a taped joint,” Gotti began. “You deserve to get hit, but the reason why you ain’t … is because I gave my word [that] if you come up here to straighten it out [you wouldn’t be killed] but that is gonna be off, if you don’t come up with it.”
    “Johnny, you’re the best,” the man replied.
    The months before the murders had been especially tense. Dellacroce’s health had faded as the long-simmering conflict over drug dealing had heated up. Members of both