Original subtitles

~subtitles ripped and corrected by~ Rapunzel@addic7ed.com

Shake this square world and blast off for Kicksville.

America's public enemy number one is drug abuse.

Just say "No".

The mafia is a major player

in the international drug underworld.

At the end of the day, it's all about the dollar.

It's all about the dollar.

American people want the mob and its associates

brought to justice and their power broken.

There's now an understanding

that the war on drugs was an abject failure.

You have to stop and ask yourself "How did we get here?".

I would go out in the morning,

I would sit down,

I would order an egg sandwich and a cup of coffee,

and my friends would come, and we planned the day.

How we're gonna pillage and plunder New York City.

And that was our job.

My name is Anthony Ruggiano junior.

I'm called Anthony or Ruge.

I was an associate of the Gambino Crime Family.

Listen, the mob, we are self-centered people.

It's all about us.

You know what that means, right?

How much money's in it for me?

Let's kill our best friends.

Let's sell heroin. Let's poison the city.

It don't matter.

John Gotti, he was very impressive.

My father told me once when I was about 18 years old,

only three things are gonna happen to John Gotti.

He's either gonna become the boss one day,

he's going to get 100 years in prison,

or he's gonna get shot in the head.

That was my father's future for John Gotti.

So, my father, his name was Fat Andy.

He met John when John was a teenager in east New York.

He always knew John was a tough kid,

and, you know, it went from there.

John was charismatic,

like, you know, he had a flash about him, you know?

He definitely had a flash about him.

They had conversations,

John Gotti and my father used to have conversations

with each other about how many people they killed.

I actually had an argument with my father

because he wanted me to kill somebody, and I told him no,

and he got mad at me because I didn't want to kill somebody.

That's how much they believed in this life.

John Gotti and my father believed that it was okay

to tell your son to go kill somebody.

And then if he says no, you get mad at him.

Ha. Let's talk about that.

I mean, you know, right? Yeah.

John Gotti was one of the known heavies,

if you will, in the Gambino Crime Family.

Somebody the family could rely on for acts of violence,

for killing people.

He was a thug.

The Gambino family, they ran the show.

I mean, they had all the nightclubs,

they had all the construction companies.

If you needed cement, you had to go to them.

They had all the bookmaking.

They had the police on the payroll.

When we went to prisons, they had the COs on the take.

The Gambino family, and all the families,

had their hands in everything.

Cut it out and let us through.

Come on. Make a hole and...

Paul Castellano, who's the boss,

has put out an edict: Nobody deals drugs.

It's verboten.

And if you deal drugs, no appeal, we're gonna kill you.

And it wasn't that Castellano thought drugs was a bad thing,

there wasn't a moral situation.

They didn't need the money, they didn't want the aggravation

that came with dealing drugs.

They didn't want the law enforcement pressure

that came with dealing drugs.

We know the rules, we know the regulations.

We don't discuss them.

But when Gotti senior steps into the mafia,

he does Gotti's rules.

He breaks every mafia protocol and every rule.

And one of those rules was selling drugs.

I'm Johnny Alite.

Enforcer, drug dealer, and, uh, killer for John Gotti.

So when I'm approached to get involved in the heroin trade

with the Gotti family, I'm on the bottom of that totem pole.

And when they ask me to step into business,

obviously, when you're asked a question like that,

it's not an ask,

it's telling you you're now in the heroin business.

So I was in the heroin business.

You got heroin coming in back then from Turkey.

It was coming in from Spain and the Sicilian faction.

So they had different routes they were bringing heroin

and moving it from every direction.

Every single guy around the Gotti family,

anybody who was within our crew, was moving heroin.

They were a drug dealer's drug dealer.

They were wholesaling the drugs to big time heroin dealers.

John Gotti doesn't want to know about the drugs.

At the end of the week or the end of the month,

he wants his envelopes.

He doesn't want to hear where it comes from.

When someone brings you

a shopping bag full of money,

you're not going to give the guy the third degree.

Yeah, he broke the rules,

but, you know, I guess rules are made to be broken.

Back then we thought it was normal,

because that's how I was raised.

I was raised in that atmosphere,

and it was really a good time in my life, to be honest with you.

So I would go out to Manhattan

and everybody was there blowing coke,

and everybody was in the, it was just a big party scene.

We always were well manicured.

You know, getting manicures was classy.

I got a manicure yesterday for this shoot.

Yeah.

I even got my eyebrows waxed for you the other day.

Today there's a zillion different kinds of drugs,

but back then in the day, it was coke, pot and heroin.

I never saw John snort coke, so I would say he never did.

You know the problem,

when you talk to people around him at the time,

is John Gotti, among other things,

was a degenerate gambler.

And apparently wasn't a very good gambler.

He wasn't an average guy losing $50 a game,

he was a guy that's losing 100,000 a game.

There's only one business that could bring in

this kind of money, and that's the drug business.

So, Paul Castellano was a different style

than John Gotti was.

Old guy, old school, very low key.

Paul kept hearing these great things about this guy,

John Gotti.

He's guarded his family.

What a capable guy he's got.

What a powerful crew he's got.

Paul sees it as a threat.

Oh, everybody likes this guy.

Hey, no, the attention's supposed to come to me,

not to this guy.

So, right there Paul's got a problem with John Gotti.

When I was 16 years old, my father looked at me

and he goes, "You want to work for me?"

He said, "Going to jail was all part of the job" he told me.

My life escalated from working in a blackjack game

when I was 16, to a dice game, to a number office,

to hijacking trucks, to violence, to commit a murder.

I mean, that was the progression of my life.

You know, listen, when I was a kid,

my father's partner told me,

"Before you definitely commit to this life,

go to Washington, D.C.,"

he told me, "and look at the justice department building,

and look at that building, and I want you to know

that that building is gonna chase you and come after you.

your whole life", he told me.

I didn't do it, but that's what he told me to do.

Yeah.

The time has come to cripple the power

of the mob in America.

Can we honestly say that America is a land with justice for all

if we do not now exert every effort

to eliminate this confederation of professional criminals,

this dark, evil enemy within?

You know the answer to that question.

The American people want the mob and its associates

brought to justice and their power broken.

My name is Bruce Mouw.

I was the FBI supervisor for approximately 20 years,

responsible for all investigations

involving the Gambino Crime Family.

When I was first assigned to our office in Queens,

and we started hearing informants

reporting on this active crew in Ozone Park

called the Bergin Hunt and Fish Crew,

the captain being John Gotti.

That was his kind of traditional, historic club.

When he was running his crew, that was his headquarters.

It was a very active crew.

There were a lot of killers in the crew,

and so it was one of the biggest targets for our squad.

When you target the crew of a crime family,

you always look for weak links,

and our informants told us that a very weak link in the family

was a guy named Angelo "Quack Quack."

He had a big mouth, he talked a lot and he was a gossip.

Gotti's right-hand man, best friend,

and known to be his cousin, was Angelo.

He was Gotti's personal strong arm, henchman,

intimidator, and moneymaker.

Along with his brother, Genie Gotti,

these guys were the two biggest earners for Gotti senior

in the heroin trade.

Our informants told us that

he's having meetings in his house.

The big house on Barnard Avenue, Cedarhurst, Long Island.

There was a little dining area right outside his kitchen,

and he's meeting other organized crime members and associates.

So we put a bug in the little dining area,

and we also put it in the downstairs den.

And after a while we start picking up Gene Gotti

showing up there,

and they were talking about major multi-kilo heroin deals.

Paul Castellano was the boss at the time,

and he didn't react too well.

He wasn't happy.

He wanted the tapes.

He wanted the tapes, number one,

just to make sure that his name wasn't involved,

that was the first thing,

And the second thing was that he knew that was the way

to get rid of John and Genie,

because the rule was you can't sell heroin,

and it still could be enforced by a guy like Castellano.

Once Paul started sending for those tapes,

and they weren't gonna give them up,

the **** was gonna hit the fan.

I heard rumors.

Somebody told me on Mulberry Street

that Paul was going around telling people

that he was gonna take care of John after christmas.

You don't say that about a guy like John.

John didn't wait for christmas,

because John didn't give a **** about christmas!

After them tapes,

after Paul wanted to listen to them tapes,

John knew, at that point,

it was kill or be killed, and basically we all knew that.

Sometimes I feel like I talk too much,

but that's a good thing, right?

My name's Karen Gravano.

I'm the daughter of Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano.

I was about nine years old when I started to realize

that my father had a different type of lifestyle.

He was a gangster and, you know, whatever that meant.

If you crossed him, you had a problem.

When he came home, he wasn't a gangster at home.

He was a father, he was a friend, he was a protector.

There's this one time, when we were kids,

like my father took us to a duck pond,

and I think we had a couple of my cousins.

So everybody was feeding the duck, and the duck went crazy,

and I think it bit me or my cousin,

and I remember my father just, like,

grabbing the duck by its neck and choking him.

Feathers were flying, ducks, we're all screaming.

Everybody was running.

But, you know, he was protective.

I mean, I would choke a duck if they attacked my daughters.

And then it's just like all of a sudden,

John Gotti appeared in my life.

He had come to my father because John knew

that he couldn't make a move on Paul

without including my father.

My father felt like Paul wasn't kicking down to his own family,

he was making a lot of money,

and he really wasn't spreading the wealth.

I don't want to sit here and say, like,

my father loved to do murder,

because I don't think anybody really likes that,

but he was actually good at it.

It's snowing out, a little snow, white christmas.

I know it's gonna happen any day now.

So the plan that they came up with

was rather ingenious.

They decide to take Paul Castellano out

by luring him to one of his favorite restaurants

with captains that he absolutely trusted.

Their scheme was all the shooters,

and they had many of them

because they wanted to be able to pull this off,

were gonna be in trench coats, Russian hats.

You see that a lot in New York, and it's just so nothing.

No one's really going to pay attention to anything.

If anything, they'll focus on,

"Well, there's a guy with a trench coat and a Russian hat,

I can't tell you anything else about him."

One of the busiest sections of midtown Manhattan,

four o'clock in the afternoon, around the holidays.

So John Gotti was in the car up the corner

with Sammy the Bull.

He hated Paul so much

that he wanted to see him laying in the street.

I happen to be at another guy,

I was at dinner at his house, sitting at the kitchen table,

and he had a little television on the table.

And while we're sitting eating,

we get some 911 texts on our beepers.

Back in those day, it was beepers.

And I kept getting them, 911, 911.

And behind the 911, I'm getting 9-8.

That means come to the club on 98th street, the Bergin.

So I know something happened.

It's all over the news.

It's flashed everywhere.

That Paul Castellano was hit in front of Sparks Steakhouse.

Big Paul Castellano,

reputed godfather of the Gambino family,

was on his way to a Manhattan steakhouse.

As he stepped from his black Lincoln,

three men wearing fur hats and trench coats suddenly appeared,

pulled guns, pumped six bullets into Castellano

and six into his top capo, Thomas Bilotti,

and then calmly walked away.

I was upstairs in my room, and all of a sudden

on the news, I'm hearing, you know, Paul Castellano,

mob boss, is killed outside Sparks Steakhouse,

and I'm thinking, like, "Wow, who could have done this?"

After the hit, Sammy Gravano and John Gotti

drove the car down the street

and they slowed up and looked at the bodies and kept on going.

Because he was a gangster,

and he wanted to be there and see it for his own eyes.

And then John was the boss.

The old-time mob bosses, you'd say, you know,

they ruled with an iron fist, covered with a velvet glove.

Well, Gotti saw no need for the glove,

that's what it came down to.

This was a hostile takeover in every sense of the word.

After he was killed and John became the boss,

all the heroin dealers that were around John

all got straightened out.

Gotti was a boss who reflected the times.

He was always grabbing and reaching for more and more.

So by the time that we reach about 1986, 1987,

we expand the heroin business into the cocaine business.

I have Colombian connections,

so we're coming in from Colombia.

There's loads coming in from Miami,

coming in from Detroit.

The allure was money, and very easy money.

If you've got the connections, it's about the logistics.

It was money.

So we go out to the Hamptons, Fire Island.

Party, drink, broads,

champagne flowing from the morning till night.

Listen, when you have keys to the city, like John Gotti did,

he was arrogant, he didn't care that he broke every rule.

You know, this was supposed to be

Cosa Nostra, our thing.

When John Gotti took over,

it was no longer "our thing," it was "my thing."

His transformation was like a caterpillar

turning into a butterfly.

All of a sudden, he's wearing $3,000 ties,

and the cocoon opens and out comes the dapper don.

He's out and about.

He's good with a quip and a sound bite.

Why don't you just behave yourself?

I'm behaving myself.

You're not behaving yourself.

John Gotti changes the whole dynamic

of organized crime.

No longer the old Sicilian-style,

"make money not headlines, stay in the shadows."

The idea was, what's the point of being a gangster

if nobody knows who you are?

Every fourth of July he throws a free fireworks bash

for the neighborhood.

When police had tried to stop it,

the crowds have driven them back.

Gotti is somewhat of a local hero here.

Ironically, the neighborhood thinks

John Gotti's keeping the drug dealers out of here.

Yet John Gotti's a drug dealer,

but he's not the guy pedaling it on the street, right?

So it's the perception.

He's saving us from drug dealers.

No, he's not.

Gotti was every day, in your face, look at me,

I'm a gangster doing this, and that drives law enforcement.

You're in my face, you're doing this?

I'm coming to get you.

He was such the boss.

He says, "And the worst I'll ever wind up with,"

he said, "is a hung jury, because the public loves me."

And he was convinced that the public loved him,

that they would never convict him at a trial.

Every time there was a trial against John Gotti senior,

we were ordered to intimidate, hurt, or bribe the juries.

Get them not to give a guilty plea,

and we'll take care of you and a family member.

If you can't get to them,

tell them we'll take of you's a different way.

In other words, we'll hurt you or kill you.

We find him not guilty.

Are you happy?

Well, for sure.

- We're all happy. - We're all happy.

We got a good decision.

The whole city should be happy.

By the time he beats the third one,

the public is convinced, the media's convinced,

law enforcement can't put him in jail.

The charges just don't stick.

He starts developing the nickname The Teflon Don.

Brooklyn, Queens, Bushwick, East New York,

South Jamaica, jails.

If we seen a business that we like, we'd step into it,

and there was nobody was gonna stop us.

Well, without a doubt he felt invincible,

and he put it in their faces.

And plus, he was an egomaniac.

So, yeah, it was unheard of. It was unprecedented.

Everybody knew in their heart that we were headed for trouble.

We're moving it through Rikers Island,

through guards that are giving it to inmates.

The easy connection is they're from our neighborhoods.

These guys grew up in our neighborhoods,

they grew up in poverty.

We have connections to them through people, family members.

So one of the guys that I was doing business with in heroin,

he was a sergeant at Rikers Island.

His brother actually worked for me in the cocaine business.

We use him to get me the other connections of the other guards,

guys that he trusts, guys that he knows for years.

You just had to have a half of a brain, a little bit of balls,

and with the power structure behind me and other guys,

the city was ours, and the way we made money was ours.

John's style was completely different

than Paul's.

Paul ran the Gambino family within La Cosa Nostra rules,

like a business.

There were protocols to how you, to how things are gonna happen.

Gotti ran the organization like it was a gang.

I mean, that's what he knew, that's what he came up with.

You had guys dealing drugs, you had guys doing scams,

you had guys out doing this, that and the other thing,

and so he brought that same gang mentality to his leadership.

I believe it was 1986 my father became the underboss.

My father was basically his pit bull, his friend,

his confidant, and someone that Gotti can trust.

John's motto was, "Let's put it out there, Sammy.

Let's put it on front street."

He was the boss.

He had everybody standing at attention.

He had everybody coming to see him.

Like, he would basically call meetings every night

that they had to be on Mulberry Street

at the Ravenite Social Club at 6:00 pm,

and that's not what gangsters do.

Cosa Nostra is a secret society,

you're not supposed to show people what you are,

and that became a strain between my father and John.

I mean, we could never figure out

who these guys were under Paul Castellano.

There were 250 members in this family.

John made 60%, 70% of them at some point

show up at the Ravenite Club to pay homage to him.

We were able to identify a huge number of members

of that family, associate them with their vehicles,

associate them with their crews.

That's important and vital information.

John handed it to us.

So the strategy was we got to bug this guy

anyplace he's potentially doing business.

The trick was finding the right places to put bugs.

So the first place we knew John was going every day

was back to the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club,

which was in Queens.

Then we knew every night he was going to the Ravenite,

so that would be the next place to try and bug.

And sources tell us that he's now using this apartment

two stories up to have his very important meetings.

We had a widow living there.

Our tech guys went in, they put the bug into her apartment.

We're all excited.

So we're sitting there waiting for that first conversation

and, you know, day one goes, nothing.

Day two, nothing. Day three, nothing.

But a few days later we hear the back door open.

We heard him walking through the hallway,

going up these wooden steps upstairs.

We activated the apartment mic,

and we also hear the apartment open up,

and we hear three guys come in.

And I'm home, you know, and I get a phone call,

and all they told me was, "He's in the apartment."

"He's been up here for an hour plus."

"We could hear everything great."

"I think you're going to be happy."

"It sounds like they were talking about murder."

I can't wait to get in the office the next day,

because I have to listen to this.

We put the tape on to review it,

and not only is it great conversation,

and it's John and Sammy,

and the first conversation we get,

in the one place we were hopeful to get good conversations,

is on why they killed Paul Castellano.

I mean, you couldn't have scripted that for Hollywood,

to make stuff like that fall out.

It was incredible.

The plan was we wanted the impact of arresting all of them

at the Ravenite together.

We're just waiting for Sammy, number two.

So once Bruce told me we had them,

I just had to get down there as fast as I could.

I'm the lead car.

We go, I mean, I'm, once I'm going, nothing is stopping me.

Bust through traffic, go up Mulberry Street the wrong way,

block off the street.

Jump out of the car.

Run into the Ravenite.

You know, kind of make my entrance,

say, "Alright, everybody, know who I am.

You know why I'm here. I want you to be cooperative.

The guys behind me are gonna deal with you."

And one of the guys looks at me and says,

"What guys behind you?"

And I turn around and I was like,

"Well, there will be guys behind me any minute now.

I'm not sure where the heck they are."

John was drinking coffee.

You know, and John, you know, typical arrogant self,

"I knew you were coming."

"Well, I'm glad you knew I was coming."

Says, "Oh, let me just finish my coffee."

The one thing about John,

he didn't buckle under, under the pressure of the FBI or mob.

Mr. Gotti. Thank you.

Mr. Gotti, please.

- That stuff's in the way. - I know.

Everything started going fast, you know?

It just all started to come together in my head.

So I realized that my father's in trouble.

Like this is something big.

A few days after that we had the remand hearing

where the judge decides

whether they're going to be released on bail or not.

I'm sitting opposite the three defendants,

and it was going to be the first time

they were going to hear a little bit of what we had.

As this was all being played, I'm looking at John,

like, I told you it was good, and he's just kind of staring,

like, yeah, I don't know what I'm going to do about this.

Sammy Gravano's a very shrewd guy

and a very intelligent guy,

And Sammy Gravano looks at the lay of the land,

and on some of the tapes,

Gotti is not saying very nice things about Gravano.

He implicates Sammy in a bunch of murders

that are going to put Sammy in jail for life.

I mean, somebody described it as

Gotti was being what they call a dry snitch.

He's talking about murders and blaming Gravano

in case anybody's listening,

and Gravano interprets all of that

as "This guy was ready to throw me under the bus,"

or "This guy is throwing me under the bus."

He felt betrayed,

and the feds were actually smart enough,

because they used this tape

as the wedge between my father and Gotti.

It's the old saying,

there's no loyalty amongst thieves.

You do what you got to do.

It's the name of the game.

This particular time when I went on a visit,

I could tell that something was different.

And he came over, he sat down,

he was like, "I'm going to tell you something

that goes against everything I believe in,

and everything I've ever taught you to believe in."

"I'm going to cooperate with the government."

And it was like, I couldn't even believe that those words

came out of his mouth.

Like I never could imagine him doing that.

Everything that he ever taught me as a kid,

like, he was so against that.

That he's actually saying this to me right now,

it just broke my heart.

So when we were making the decision

whether or not to make the deal with Sammy,

with that came concerns

as to how he could adversely affect our trial.

I now had somebody the defense could beat up,

they could cross examine.

The jury can hate this guy.

That's all a problem to my case.

It was a risk.

The guy dressed like Fonzi

is the prosecutor's star witness.

He was Gotti's number two man.

"Sammy the Bull" Gravano was Gotti's underboss,

and now he's going to tell the jury all about it.

I'd have to say that he's the most significant

organized crime figure ever to cooperate with the government.

On the witness stand, I mean, even the first time

he came out having to face and square off against John,

and the two of them lock eyes,

and John's kind of giving him that stare-down,

and Sammy's like, "I'm here because of this ****."

Once that moment ended, it's like, under control, got this.

Not a problem.

They couldn't get under his skin.

They played the rat card.

They did everything.

This guy was one of the best witnesses

I've ever seen testify.

Better than some cops I've ever seen testify.

He was unflappable.

The teflon is gone.

The don is covered with velcro,

and every charge in the indictment stuck.

That's when it finally hit me, I almost teared up,

knowing all this hard work for years and years

had finally come to fruition.

We did something that nobody thought

was gonna happen, right?

Nobody thought this guy was gonna go to jail,

and we slammed the doors on him.

Gotti's friends had organized a rally of supporters

from Gotti's neighborhood to come and protest the trial,

which they claim was unfair.

The swelled to the front of the courthouse,

overturned U.S. Marshals' cars and clashed with police.

Gotti was a boss, the celebrity gangster.

Gotti was the boss who grabbed with both fists

his whole way up the mob ladder.

There was a lot of money to be made dealing drugs,

whether it's coke, marijuana, heroin, meth, whatever,

but reality was the way he managed this organization

drove it into the ground.

He felt the public loved him,

and those were his words:

"They love me and the worst I'll ever get is a hung jury."

And that's what he thought.

And that's what he believed.

But at the end of the day, he was wrong.

I don't hurt nobody. I don't rob nobody.

I don't lie to nobody, but sometimes I miss the action.

I miss the money.

My life was all about greed.

I never had enough.

You know, greed is the gasoline

that feeds the engine in the mob.

At the end of the day, it's all about the dollar.

It's all about the dollar.

~subtitles ripped and corrected by~ Rapunzel@addic7ed.com