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.