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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.