By Philip Newman
The late John Gotti's brother has been accused in a federal indictment of planning a rub-out of Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, a one-time gangland assassin whose turncoat testimony sent the mob kingpin to prison for life.
The indictment in U.S. District Court in Manhattan named Peter Gotti, 63, of Howard Beach along with five other suspected members of the Gambino crime family.
“The allegations demonstrate the length to which Gotti and his confederates would go to preserve the power and profitability of their ruthless criminal enterprise,” said Jim Comey, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Comey referred to Peter Gotti, a onetime New York City Sanitation Department worker, as “the boss of the Gambino organized crime family.”
John Gotti, his flamboyant brother who headed the Gambino family and also lived in Howard Beach, died in a Missouri prison last year.
The indictment accused Peter Gotti of engineering a 1999 plot to send a hit squad to hunt down and kill Gravano in Arizona, where he was living after leaving the federal witness protection program.
But Gravano was arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison for involvement in an Ecstasy drug ring.
Indicted along with Peter Gotti were Thomas Carbonaro, 55; Frank Fappiano; Edward Garafola, 66, a brother-in-law of Gravano; Louis Vallario, 61, and John Matera, 32.
Carbonaro, Fappiano, Garafola, Vallario and Matera already faced indictments on charges of racketeering conspiracy, murder, extortion, loan sharking, bribery, witness tampering and illegal gambling.
Gotti, who could get up to 70 years in prison if convicted on murder conspiracy and a variety of other charges, is already in jail while awaiting sentencing following conviction of loan sharking and racketeering n Brooklyn.
It was to a great extent the testimony of Gravano, once John Gotti's No. 2 man in the Gambino crime family, that finally brought down Gotti, long known as the “Teflon Don” for going through trial after trial without convictions.
But the outlook for John Gotti darkened during his last trial in the spring of 1992 when Gravano took the witness stand. Gravano testified for nearly five days and admitted taking part in 19 mob hits. He implicated John Gotti in nearly a dozen of them.
Gravano told the court of an incident that might have been taken from a movie script in the early evening of Dec. 16, 1985 on Manhattan's East Side.
Gravano said he and John Gotti sat in a Lincoln Continental parked on East 44th Street where they briefed a gunman assigned to kill Gambino crime family boss Paul Castellano, who was gunned down a few minutes later in front of Sparks Steak House. Gotti seized the helm of the Gambino organization at that point.
John Gotti, once called the “Dapper Don” for the impeccably tailored $1,000 suits he wore, was convicted of murder and extortion on April 2, 1992 and sentenced to life without parole on June 23, 1992. Gotti served most of his time at the federal penitentiary at Marion, Ill. He died of cancer at age 61 on June 10, 2002 at the Federal Prison Medical Center at Springfield, Mo.
Peter Gotti took over the Gambino crime family in 1999, according to prosecutors.
Reach contributing writer Philip Newman by e-mail at Timesledger@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 136.
