Surviving the Mob (15 page)

“As we were scuffling, someone grabbed me from behind in a bear hug. I reached behind me, grabbed the guy’s hair, and flipped him over my neck. When he hit the ground in front of me, I saw it was a goddamn correction officer. He was screaming in pain and I saw his arm was bent in two directions. Then the response team swarmed us. Me and Joey were handcuffed and taken to the prison assembly area, then to the nurse’s office where we were stripped down and photographed. And then my troubles really began.

“I was taken to the bathroom and placed in one of the stalls with my hands cuffed above my head. The goon squad then went to work on me with fists and nightsticks for hurting one of their own. They beat me until I was a bloody mess and unable to stand. After what seemed like an eternity, they carried me to the Special Housing Unit, otherwise known as the Hole. When we got there, they put me down and told me I had to walk the rest of the way and carry my property that they’d taken from my cell. I was in tremendous pain and as I walked, I called the officers everything I could think of. That brought on an additional beating. Here I was after only a couple of months in the facility, facing charges for assaulting an officer and a shitload of time in Special Housing.

“At my hearing a few days later, I was sentenced to eighteen months in the Hole. Eighteen fuckin’ months! I intentionally shot a guy in the goddamn head and got a short end of five years. They gave me almost a third as much for something that was an accident. It was ridiculous. I told the hearing officer what I thought of his decision, that I intended to file an appeal and that I’d win.

“Four months later it was determined that my civil rights had been violated and an order issued that I be released from the Hole immediately. They had to let me out, but they weren’t real happy about it. They wanted to give me another tuning up before I left the unit. I told them that if another
officer raised his hand to me, I’d arrange to have him shot after he got off work. I said if they didn’t believe I had the connections to make that happen, all they had to do was read my file. After that, staff left me alone like I had the plague.

“So I got back into population and Joey wasn’t charged for possession of the ice pick he tried to use on Patty. In fact, the weapon was never found that I know of. I can’t prove it, but I’ll always believe our buddy the sergeant made that ice pick disappear.”

Upon Andrew’s return to general population, he was reunited with his friends Joey Urgitano and Fat Philly. But as the euphoria of being out of the Hole wore off, Andrew realized that the root cause of the December incident was still smoldering under the surface.

That feeling was confirmed by Joey Urgitano, who told Andrew that the animosity from December was rising out of control. Any day things were going to pop between them and Patty O’Keefe’s small group, who seemed to be Italian haters. So they made preparations to protect themselves and got ready for what was sure to come. It didn’t take long.

“The following Sunday, we were in the school building where church services were held. As we waited for Patty’s unit to arrive, Joey positioned himself on one side of the hallway and Philly was on the other. I was in the middle of the corridor. When Patty came in and saw me standing in front of him, it was on. Like a shot out of a gun, Patty came at me. Joey blindsided him and stabbed him twice with an ice pick. Then Philly—all three hundred pounds of him—came crashing down on him. The Irishman had no chance. I was just joining in when the response team was on us. Patty was rushed to the infirmary. Joey, Philly, and me were put in lockdown pending a full investigation. Within two days
of the incident, Joey was transferred to Elmira and Philly was sent to the maximum-security Southport Correctional Facility. Mysteriously, again Joey’s ice pick was never found. I stayed at Coxsackie in lockdown. Patty stayed in the infirmary for two or three days and was released back into population.

“The night-shift watch commander tried to get me to cooperate by providing information against Joey and Philly. I told him to go fuck himself with his false promises. I said he didn’t even have the juice to get himself off the night shift, much less make deals for anybody else. They were unable to find a weapon or anybody to talk, so when the investigation was over, nobody got charged. Not me, not Joey, and not Philly.

“Because I wasn’t charged in this case and my previous guilty finding had been reversed, I was automatically eligible for assignment to a medium-security prison. About two days after getting out of lockdown, I was transferred to the Hudson Correctional Facility. I never saw or heard of Patty O’Keefe again.”

The improvement in Andrew’s life after his transfer to Hudson Correctional Facility was dramatic. If a man had to do time in a state prison, he was convinced this was the place to do it.

He realized almost immediately he was actually going to like the place. He was there only a few minutes before he was greeted by some friends he’d made in Coxsackie. After that, he was amazed how much more freedom the inmates had. Within a year he was made secretary of the inmate Italian-American organization. They held fundraisers and he used the money to have festivals during the summer. Each member of the organization could invite his family to attend. Everybody
ate together, took photos, and listened to music.

“I was with a tremendous bunch of guys in Hudson,” Andrew recalls. “One of them was a capo in the Genovese family named Danny Pagano. We hit it off really well. He was a gentleman and an all-around great guy. My family and Danny’s sent us hundred-pound packages of food once a month. That was enough for us and our little clique to have nice dinners every night.

“Another one of the guys from Coxsackie named Joey Jacona became a great friend of mine. Once in a while Joey and a few of the other guys would make homemade wine for all of us. We had a lot of fun. It was still prison, but all things considered, it wasn’t that bad.”

Andrew’s life behind bars was tolerable overall and sometimes even enjoyable. However, as the months passed and he got closer to eligibility for work release and then parole, he experienced some disappointments. He also had to start thinking about his other life, as an associate of the Gambino family and a member of Nicky Corozzo’s crew. It was a life he’d be rejoining at some point and all was far from rosy on that front.

In 1992, Andrew became eligible for work release, but he was denied because of the violent nature of his crime. It was frustrating to watch everyone around him getting into the program or out on parole. Also, by this point his relationship with Dina was distant at best. She hadn’t been to see him in months and he’d stopped calling her at all.

In fact, around that time a couple of crew members came to visit and give him some advice. They said he needed to get a divorce the minute he got out of prison. It was their way of telling Andrew his wife was being unfaithful. Then word got back to him that Nicky had seen Dina outside Gambino capo
John “Jackie the Nose” D’Amico’s social club. When he asked her what she was doing there, she turned white as a sheet and made up a story that she was waiting for a friend.

“I didn’t really care about Dina anymore. My only concern was for my son. But I was livid about Nicky and Jackie getting involved in my personal life. And I felt the crew had betrayed me too. It seemed that when there was bad news from the street that my wife was fuckin’ around on me, they couldn’t get there fast enough to tell me. But what about the promise they made to me about Sammy Karkis? It was going on three years and he was still alive.

“I sent a letter out with one of my visitors for Mike Yannotti. In it I expressed my anger that after all we’d been through together, they hadn’t fulfilled the promise they made to me before I was incarcerated. That letter apparently pissed Mike off. We didn’t communicate for the whole year and I didn’t speak to anybody else from the crew either. The only people I kept up with were my few friends from other crime families, such as Robert Arena, Teddy Persico, and Joey Urgitano. We wrote to each other once a week. As far as I was concerned, I wouldn’t ask Nicky or the crew for anything ever again.”

While Andrew was in prison, two other things occurred that later impacted his life in major ways. First, gangland strife broke out in 1991 in what became known as the Colombo War. Second, on June 19, 1992, Guardian Angel founder Curtis Sliwa was shot in the back seat of a taxi while on the way to do his early-morning radio talk show at WABC-AM. According to a
New York Times
article the following day, Sliwa was the victim of a well-planned attack.

The taxi in which the shooting occurred had been stolen two days earlier. As Sliwa settled into the back seat, a gunman
who had been hiding in the front seat next to the driver sat up and opened fire. Shot several times, Sliwa tumbled out of the vehicle as it lurched around the corner at East 7
^th
Street and Avenue B. He was rushed to the hospital and emerged from five hours of surgery in critical but stable condition.

The police had no immediate suspects and said Sliwa routinely received threats due to Guardian Angel activities and the sometimes-controversial opinions he voiced on his radio show. But speculation among those in the know was that the attempted hit was a direct result of Sliwa’s radio rants against recently convicted Gambino boss John Gotti.

Even though Andrew was incarcerated at the time of the incident, he would eventually be drawn into the Sliwa shooting.

In September 1993, Andrew received some unexpected good news from the state. He’d been approved for the work-release program and would be leaving the prison in 48 hours. His next stop was the Edgecombe Correctional Facility in New York City, his residence while in the program. If all went well, he’d be released on parole a year later.

13

While Andrew was in prison, a changing of the guard in the Gambino crime family took place. In 1992 the feds at long last convicted John Gotti; the former Teflon Don was sentenced to life in prison without parole. However, even though he was incarcerated, protocol called for Gotti to maintain his status as the boss until all of his appeals were exhausted. In his absence, the day-to-day operations of the family were handled by a committee consisting of Junior Gotti, Jackie “the Nose” D’Amico, Nicky Corozzo, and Andrew’s old friend and Nicky Corozzo’s co-boss Lenny DiMaria, who had been released from prison and officially promoted to capo. So as he left Hudson Correctional, Andrew was heading back to a slightly different landscape.

His new home, Edgecombe Correctional, was located at 611 Edgecombe Avenue, Manhattan, a multi-floor minimum-security facility used for inmates participating in the work-release program. The convicts were required to sleep on site two nights per week, in a dormitory setting rather than in cells. On those days they were subjected to mandatory drug testing. Andrew’s sleep-in nights were Monday and Tuesday. He had to be in the facility by seven o’clock on those evenings. On Tuesday and Wednesday mornings he was released at 4:45 a.m. to go to work at his job as an aircraft
cleaner at JFK Airport. From Wednesday through Sunday nights he was to stay at his mother’s house. Violating these or any of the other rules was grounds for disciplinary action, including return to full incarceration.

However, unknown to the authorities, the man who ran the aircraft-cleaning business where Andrew was to be employed was a friend of his and a Lucchese associate. In reality, Andrew was employed there only on paper. And sleeping at his mother’s five nights a week didn’t last very long. He quickly made other arrangements the powers that be knew nothing about. With these freedoms, Andrew was ready to get back into business.

“When I got to Edgecombe in late September, I met with a counselor,” Andrew recalls. “He called my mother to confirm my living arrangements. Then he called my friend at the airport to verify my employment. After that, I called Dina to let her know that I wanted to see my son the next morning. After the gates opened, my first stop would be at her mother’s place where they were living.