Two From the Neighborhood

By Richard Stengel

When she was in high school, Diane Giacalone, dressed in her blue-and-gray- plai d uniform, used to stroll down 101st Avenue in Ozone Park, Queens, on her way to Our Lady of Wisdom Academy. Ozone Park, then as now, was a neighborhood of two-story row houses with small, well-tended yards, awnings over the windows and crucifixes above the doors. Most of its residents were Italian and middle class. She would pass mom-and-pop stores, funeral parlors, and butcher shops that displayed an array of Italian sausages in the window. On her right, she often glanced at an inconspicuous red brick building known, oddly enough, as the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club. It caught her attention because there were always men loitering out front. She recalls wondering, What do these men do for a living?

The Bergen Hunt and Fish Club was then the haunt of a smart and sharp young hoodlum named John Gotti. Over the next 15 years, while Giacalone moved from college to law school to a job at the Justice Department, Gotti was moving up through the ranks of the Mafia. Four years ago, their paths crossed more decisively. Giacalone had become an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, and Gotti was a feared capo in the Gambino family who ruthlessly ran his empire from the same red brick building on 101st Avenue. Giacalone had just successfully prosecuted four men for two armored-car robberies totaling $1 million, and set about to trace the unrecovered money. Some of it, she discovered, had found its way to a place she vaguely remembered, the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club.

For the next four years Diane Giacalone pieced together exactly what those men loitering in front of that red brick building did for a living. In doing so, she painstakingly constructed against John Gotti and nine others a case involving loan sharking, gambling, hijacking and murder. Today, in an unembellished chamber at federal court in Brooklyn, Gotti and Giacalone sit across from each other, about the same distance apart as the width of 101st Avenue.

At the urging of Giacalone, Gotti has been denied bail and currently resides in the Metropolitan Correctional Center. It is a comedown for the flashy, fastidious man who likes driving his black Mercedes 450 SL, sampling the delicately prepared pastas at little-known Italian restaurants, and playing the courtly gentleman in his double-breasted $1,800 suits. At 45, Gotti -- his once lean figure having become stocky but his imperious gaze just as chilling -- is a mixture of the old and new Mafia styles. Like the traditional mobsters, he does not flinch at the promiscuous use of violence; informers report he has a temper of titanic proportions. But unlike the aging leadership, Gotti seems to revel in his own notoriety.

Gotti was born in the Bronx, the son of a construction worker who was equally at home on a building site and in a street brawl. When he was twelve the family moved to Brownsville, near East New York, the grim neighborhood whose mean streets gave birth to Murder, Inc. The young Gotti got involved with local gangs and, though he was a clever student, was suspended from school in the eighth grade. He never went back. The streets became his sole education.

He soon became a foot soldier under Carmine and Danny Fatico, reputed old- guard members of the Gambino family. Arrested several times, Gotti served a year in jail starting in 1965 for attempted burglary and three years, beginning in 1969, for a hijacking from an airport warehouse. He was not around much for the early years of his five children by his wife Victoria, the daughter of an Italian builder and a Russian-Jewish mother.

By 1968 Gotti was considered a highflyer and was working for the Gambino ^ family underboss, Aniello Dellacroce, a Mafia traditionalist whom Gotti emulated. He endeared himself to the Gambino family when, in 1973, he took part in the killing of a 6-ft. 4-in. Irishman who had supposedly kidnaped and murdered a nephew of Carlo Gambino's. Gotti pleaded guilty to attempted manslaughter and served two years in Green Haven prison.

Gotti became frustrated and angry in 1976 when Paul Castellano, rather than Dellacroce, succeeded Carlo Gambino as the family boss. Gotti reportedly thought Castellano, who was Gambino's brother-in-law and had little in common with hard-core mobsters like Gotti, was unworthy of the high position; the prudent Castellano was wary of the hot-tempered young capo. When Dellacroce died last year, Gotti was in line to become the new underboss. Castellano, however, had other ideas and seemed ready to elevate his chauffeur-bodyguard, Thomas Bilotti. Last year Castellano and Bilotti were mowed down in a brazen late-afternoon slaying outside Sparks Steak House in midtown Manhattan. The FBI believes Gotti ordered the hit, but so far no one has been arrested. Afterward, Gotti consolidated power as the head of the family.

In parts of Ozone Park, Gotti is a folk hero. He lives in Howard Beach, a few miles away, in an unpretentious, tree-shaded house. On a corner of 101st Avenue, a few blocks down from the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club, Connie, a school crossing guard, has been escorting children across the same street for ten years. "People here look up to him," she says of Gotti. "As soon as you mention his name, he gets respect. As far as I'm concerned, they're crucifying him." A young mother in a powder blue jumpsuit, who is picking up her small daughter, says of Gotti, "I think he's good for 101st Avenue. There's no riffraff around here. If it weren't for him, this neighborhood would be carried away by the drug addicts." Every year on the Fourth of July, the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club holds a picnic for the community, with fireworks, hot dogs, hamburgers and ice cream. A woman wearing red Reebok sneakers and wheeling a small baby in a stroller recalls part of Gotti's past: "He lost a son. You want to know something? I hope he gets away with it. I pray for him." In 1979 a neighbor accidentally killed Gotti's twelve-year-old son when the boy rode a motorbike in front of his car. Gotti was distraught; his wife seemed broken. A few months after the boy's death, the neighbor disappeared. Police suspect that he was stuffed into a car as it was about to be compacted.

Diane Giacalone, the Ozone Park girl who moved across the river to Manhattan, is not remembered so clearly. The only daughter of a civil engineer, she grew up middle class; she is backyard-wise, not streetwise. Giacalone was an anomaly in the neighborhood; she wanted to go to college. At New York University she protested against the Viet Nam War, but was otherwise apolitical. Even though she opted for law school at N.Y.U., she was never sure that she wanted to be a lawyer. Later, while in Washington with the Justice Department's tax division, she began to do some work with the U.S. Attorney's office in New York's eastern division. She became an Assistant U.S. Attorney in 1979 and fell in love with being a prosecutor.

Giacalone, a slender woman with a wide and warm smile, has built a reputation as a relentlessly thorough prosecutor who works long hours. She likes solving intellectual puzzles; to assemble her cases, she has used masses of records and files that go back for 18 years, records that other prosecutors did not think worth the time. "Blind alleys disappoint some people," she says. "But I like them. You find many interesting doors on both sides as you walk down a blind alley." In 1985 she sent the Justice Department a 100-page memo outlining how Gotti and the others could be prosecuted.

In the past, some who have crossed Gotti have not lived to boast of it; those who have been scheduled to testify against him have suddenly lost their enthusiasm and much of their memory. It would be understandable for someone in Giacalone's position to worry about safety. "The thought does not even cross my mind," she says. "It's not Diane Giacalone that matters. It's the system. If I vanish, another prosecutor will be ready to try the case within a month. And let's not kid ourselves about who has more resources." She says the fact that she is Italian and from the same neighborhood as Gotti has nothing to do with her zeal to prosecute the Mafia. "It has never occurred to me."

Giacalone says she "does not seek convictions for the sake of convictions, as if scoring points in some game. It's a balancing act between the claims of justice and civilized society's proclivity for compassion. You don't lock someone up because you can." But the woman who once walked to school along 101st Avenue does not have much compassion for the men who hung around the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club; she wants to lock up John Gotti not because she can, but because he deserves it.

With reporting by Raji Samghabadi/New York