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Valiquette.
    At the New York state law enforcement level, we thank Ellen Corcella, Michael Cherkasky, Ercole Gaudioso, Barbara Jones, Eric Krause, Robert Morgenthau, Pasquale Perrotta, Jeff Schlanger, and Eric Seidel.
    Though they often wouldn’t say much, we also appreciate courtesies shown us by defense lawyers Benjamin Brafman, Anthony Cardinale, Charles Carnesi, Bruce Cutler, David DePetris, Jeffrey Hoffman, Susan Kellman, Albert Krieger, James LaRossa, John Mitchell, Richard Rehbock, George Santangelo, Michael Santangelo, Gerald Shargel, and Barry Slotnick. We also thank Lewis Kasman and Carlo Vaccarezza, two friends of John Gotti, for speaking to us on the record.
    We also thank some journalism buddies who often made covering Gotti a lot of fun—Pete Bowles, Bill Boyle, Leonard Buder, Ying Chan, Irene Cornell, Ed Frost, Pablo Guzman, Hap Hairston, Beth Holland, Patricia Hurtado, David Krajicek, Terri Lichtstein, Michael Lipack, Arnold Lubash, David Martin, Eric Meskauskas, Phil Messing, John Miller, Mary Murphy, Juliet Papa, Karen Phillips, Tom Robbins, Faigi Rosenthal, Philip Russo, Larry Sutton, and JoAnne Wasserman.
    At Alpha Books, we thank Development Editor Jennifer Moore and Production Editor Billy Fields for the special care they afforded us, and we convey an extra special thank you to Gary Goldstein, the Acquisitions Editor who sought us out, encouraged and reinforced our efforts, and was the brainchild of this updated edition of Mob Star.
    Lastly, we thank the people we love the most and who will always be tops in our book—Ms. Doreen Weisenhaus and Jake Mustain, and Barbara, Matthew, Kim, Haley, Jenna, and Craig Capeci.
     
    Gene Mustain, Jerry Capeci
June 5, 2002

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    TABLE FOR SIX
    THE POPE LIVED ON A HILL called Death.
    His home on the hill was a stately mansion his followers called the White House. He owned or controlled many businesses in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Florida. He was a national expert on unions and labor contracts. He was an elegant dresser, dined in expensive restaurants, and rode to meetings in a chauffeured car. He said he was a butcher.
    Only some of his followers called him the Pope. Others called him Paul, Paulie, or Uncle Paul; outsiders called him Big Paul. His natal name was Paul Constantino Castellano. He was born in Brooklyn on June 26, 1915, the son of immigrants from the oppressed island of Sicily. His father was a butcher.
    Presenting himself as merely a butcher who wound up a successful businessman and labor consultant was an unpapal pose, a shield for his family against the whispers of strangers. His three sons were successful businessmen; his daughter was happily married, although for a time she was not, and this had made the Pope very angry.
    It was the way he presented himself to his followers that enabled him to acquire great wealth. As a young man he fell in with other men whose families came from Sicily, where thrived a culture outside the law. In the new land of opportunity, they felt isolated and discriminated against. And so they resorted to native customs, which included the use of violence and intimidation to get what they wanted. Crime became their profession.
    The young pope was talented—and lucky—and in 1976, he became the most powerful criminal in America.
    That was the year he customer-built his White House on Todt Hill, or Death Hill to the Dutch settlers of Staaten Eylandt, which became one of the five boroughs of the capital of crime, New York City. He succeeded his brother-in-law, Carlo Gambino, as the “boss” of a large “Family” of criminals—the largest of the Crime Capital’s five Families and the nineteen others around the country. Gambino, a boss for twenty years, died of old age. His Family, out of respect, carried on as the Gambino Family.
    Most of the time, the Families found it advantageous to cooperate and to recognize each others’ criminal spheres of influence. In 1931, Salvatore Maranzano, a boss who