Surviving the Mob (7 page)

At that time, major construction was underway at Battery Park City. The Gambinos controlled one of the labor unions with members working there. A deal was worked out where guys from all the crews were hired for the construction jobs. About 10 crew members rotated on and off the payroll at a time.

“My job title was pipe insulator. I was credited with all kinds of overtime and my take-home pay was around a thousand a week. Multiply that by ten guys and you’re talking serious money. When I got my paycheck, I took it right to Nicky and signed it over. When he cashed it, he gave me a couple hundred and split the rest with the union guy.

“That wasn’t a lot of money for me, but it was free. The best part was that after twenty-six weeks, we got laid off and went on unemployment. Then other crew members were hired to replace us. The unemployment checks were all mine. On top of that, because I was single, they taxed the shit out of me and I got almost all of it back as a tax refund. I think I got a refund of eight or nine thousand and I gave a thousand to Nicky. Not that I had to. It was a way for me to thank him for setting this deal up for me. I don’t know if all our guys had the same exact arrangement, but that’s the way it worked for me.”

Around this time, Andrew got involved in a memorable rebuildable-car episode.

He purchased two Cadillacs that an insurance company was selling as recovered stolen vehicles for about $2,000 each. Their book value was about $20,000 each. Then he stole two cars that were identical right down to the color.

Within a couple of months, he rebuilt both cars. He sold one to a crew member for $13,500, well under book. That gave him a profit of about $11,000 and left the crew member room to make some money when he did an insurance job later on. Andrew helped him strip the car again and he filed an insurance claim. They gave the adjuster a few hundred not to total the Cadillac, just to show damage of around ten thousand. The check from the insurance company was pure profit. After that, they put the car back together and he now had a $20,000 car that cost him only $3,500 out of pocket. Then he sold it at book value and realized $16,000. Between them they made $27,000 on that one car.

“On the downside, the second insurance claim within a year on that Caddy brought me to the attention of an organization I didn’t know existed until then. A couple of investigators from the National Auto Theft Bureau showed up at my house. They wanted to know about my car-restoration activities. Did I have receipts for the parts I supposedly bought to rebuild? And why did the cars I was involved with have a habit of having multiple insurance claims filed in short periods of time?”

Ironically, as they sat there talking, the second Caddy was in Andrew’s garage, all stripped down. He was doing the same thing with that car as his crewmate had done. He’d paid off the adjuster, filed a claim, and was waiting for the check.

“They finally left, but they made it clear that I was on their radar. Any future insurance claims I was connected to would get a real close going over. That forced me to change my methods. I had enough friends in the business I could work with on a percentage basis without having my name
appear on any of the paperwork. So I still made money on insurance fraud, just in a little different manner.”

In late 1984, VISA credit-card companies began converting their cards to a hologram format for security purposes. In 1985 and 1986, the new cards were issued to new applicants or as renewals to existing customers. Although the idea behind the new format was to cut down on fraud, for Andrew and his associates, the issuance of the cards opened the door to vast financial rewards. Andrew explained it this way.

“We’d already been making a lot of money off credit cards. But when the companies issued these hologram cards, we made a real killing. I remember that a couple of guys from a Lucchese crew we were friendly with had a meeting with Nicky. I wasn’t there, but that same day Nicky told us we had access to thousands of new credit cards with all the related account information.

“Nicky never told us how this all came down. It seemed apparent, though, that the Luccheses had stolen the envelopes containing the new cards from a post office or mail truck. The envelopes contained the cards, personal identification information, and account information that included passwords, PINS, and credit limits.

“Through Nicky’s contacts we got stacks of blank New York State driver’s licenses. This was just prior to the state issuing photo licenses. We didn’t have enough blanks to make a license for every card, but we had a lot of them. That put whoever was using the card in good shape if a merchant requested identification.

“We sold most of the cards to customers for five hundred dollars each. We kept some of them for ourselves too. I knew a lot of merchants who weren’t exactly honest. Say I had a
card with a three-thousand-dollar limit. I took it to one of them, banged it for twenty-five hundred, and split it with the merchant. The remaining five hundred I used to have fun with, like doing some nightclubbing.

“This scam lasted for several months and we made a killing during that time.”

Late in 1986, Andrew found his lucrative marijuana operation in Utica Park under threat. Another gang evicted Andrew’s dealer and claimed the location as its own. This was a challenge that required a swift and firm response.

The new gang was a large group of young Russians who hung around the park at Avenue N and Utica Avenue where Andrew had one of his marijuana dealers. Because he was the only game in town, he was doing $500-$700 a night from there.

“These newcomers didn’t know the rules. They didn’t know it was my spot and they had to keep their hands off. They told my dealer they were taking over and he had to get out. They even tuned him up a little bit to make their point. Like all things Mafia, this was more than just something between me and them. These kinds of things became known on the streets. People watched to see how the situation was handled. I was trying to expand my operations in that part of town. If I’d have backed down, when the word got around, other people would have challenged me. And it would have reflected badly on the whole crew. Interlopers might figure if I could be pushed around, the rest of the crew was probably soft too. And if I wanted to become a made man in the future, I had to prove I could hold down my territory. For all those reasons, my response had to be fast and decisive.

“The very next day I went to the park with two friends. I had them wait at the entrance, guns in hand, while I went
to look for the new drug kingpin, a guy named Ivan. Under my jacket I had a police baton that had been drilled out in the center and filled with lead. Ivan was sitting on a bench with six or seven other guys around. As I approached, they thought I was there to make a buy and asked me what I wanted. I said I wanted to see Ivan, that I heard he had some good stuff. As Ivan got up, I pulled out the baton and hit him on the crown of his head. The sound of the impact was so loud that one of my friends ran over and said, ‘Please, Andrew! Don’t hit him again. You’ll kill him.’

“With Ivan unconscious on the ground, I pulled my gun and told Ivan’s boys if I ever saw any of them in the park again, I’d kill them. The next day I flew to Jamaica and stayed for a couple of weeks to let the heat die down. Ivan and his crew never returned to the park.”

In December 1986, Nicky opened yet another door for Andrew. He asked his underling to learn how to operate one of the horse rooms the crew ran. These betting parlors were the Mob’s equivalent of the Off Track Betting (OTB) sites run by the New York State government. They were not only patterned after OTB, they were set up using actual OTB technology and were an important part of the crew’s income. Nicky’s guys had bribed an OTB cleaning crew to let them into the building at night. They took the computer chip, had it duplicated, then returned it.

“I was real excited when Nicky assigned me to learn the horse room. He had me train in one of the small rooms for a week or so in late December. I liked the job and enjoyed learning it. The place I was working at was run by a girl named Margo. I remember one day that I couldn’t work my assigned shift and asked her to switch with me. When I pulled up in my car to go to work, the cops were there and they were taking
Margo out in cuffs. I felt so sorry for her, because on a normal day it would have been me under arrest. She took it well, though, and we laughed about it later.”

Right after New Year’s Day 1987, Nicky put Andrew in one of the bigger OTB operations. It was a great opportunity, but it almost cost him his life.

For Andrew, 1986 had been another successful year financially and personally. Fraudulent automobile, employment, and credit-card deals had generated a lot of money. His drug and shylocking businesses were going strong. And he was being groomed for taking on the additional responsibility of running a horse room. His personal stature had grown over his handling of the attempted takeover of his Utica Park drug operation and he was engaged in a passionate but stormy liaison with Dina. Although his personal relationship with Mike Yannotti was still somewhat strained, professionally they were working well together.

As for the crew, their concerns over the family’s direction under John Gotti’s leadership never materialized. In fact, Andrew and his crewmates at the street level liked their new boss’ blue-collar style. John Gotti was going to be good for business. Or so it seemed.

8

Gambling accounted for a major portion of the Gambino family’s income, as it did for all the New York City crime families. The operations were run by individual crews within each organization and the take often ran into the tens of millions of dollars per year
per crew
. The income was so steady and reliable that Andrew referred to it as “the McDonald’s” of the various family enterprises.

The Gambino and Genovese families had the biggest gambling presence and the two sometimes worked together to maximize their returns—there was more than enough to go around.

As usual, to get into the game as an operator, you first had to get permission from the higher-ups. Once permission was granted, the typical arrangement was a 70/30 split, with the bosses taking the 70. There were bonuses for production and a good earner might get a better deal on the split.

In return, the bosses provided the bank and absorbed losses. They also had the connections for sports-betting “layoffs” when necessary. (In the world of sports bookmaking, the house tries to avoid having too big a position on one side of a game in order to keep its risk in check. So if a side gets too much action, the bookie looks for ways to bet some of it with other bookies, which is known as “laying off.”)

The operators did the work and assumed the physical risk of running the games. They were on what’s known as a “make-up” with the bosses, which meant that while they didn’t have to cover losses when they occurred, they also couldn’t take any money out of future winnings until the losses were recouped.

Andrew’s introduction to the world of organized-crime gambling was a new experience for him. He understood gambling and was fast with numbers. Still, he had to learn the ropes, which he did working in the Gambino off-track-betting parlor and from other operators, such as the boss of a family-run crap game dating back to the 1970s.

Craps was one of the most popular and lucrative gambling options organized crime offered. The Gambinos ran their game six days a week. In order to participate, a gambler had to either be known to the operator or vouched for by a known player.

Although the action took place at various sites, the method by which gamblers got to the games was always the same. A player first showed up at 129 Mott Street. From there he was taken by a Gambino-provided shuttle to wherever the game was being held that night.

Of course, these measures were in place for security. Surprisingly, there was almost no payoff (known as “pad”) to law enforcement, so the games had to be protected from raids conducted by the “morals squad,” the arm of the NYPD that tried to find and shut down the illegal casinos. The venues changed all the time, which is where the name “floating crap game” comes from. When the police did raid a game, they wrecked the venue and confiscated the money. The consequences for the operators were most serious if they were caught with $10,000 or more in their possession (a felony).
To avoid this, the bank was kept off-premises and money was continually shipped out of the location as it was won from the players.

Contrary to what’s often portrayed in movies and on TV, the games weren’t held in dingy back rooms. Rather, they tended to be in high-profile “social clubs,” where a lot of activity didn’t look out of place.

So a lot of steps were taken to protect the games, but at the same time, there was always a question about how much the local law really cared, as Andrew explains.

“In the early eighties, President Ronald Reagan was coming to New York City and one of his arranged stops was a restaurant called Angelo’s that was located on Mulberry Street in the heart of Manhattan’s Little Italy. A few days before his arrival, the Secret Service, along with local police captains, reached out to a Genovese-family wise guy named Sammy ‘Meatballs’ Aparo, along with two other capos from the Gambinos, and asked them to ‘please’ close down the crap games until the president’s trip was over. Everyone accommodated the request and the games were closed for two days. But after that, both families assumed that not only did the local authorities have a pretty good idea about the size and locations of the crap games, but maybe even the Secret Service knew, too.”