Gotti heard calling jury tampering 'ingenious move'John "Junior" Gotti called an effort he allegedly masterminded to derail a federal jury-tampering investigation an "ingenious move" as he tried to impress his late father in a tape-recorded 1994 jailhouse conversation that was played at the Gambino family prince's murder-and-racketeering trial Wednesday.
Gotti, according to earlier testimony from former lieutenant John Alite, set up a plan to identify and compromise jurors in the 1989 heroin trafficking trial of his uncle Gene Gotti, and then stymied a federal probe by having brother-in-law
Carmine Agnello take responsibility after Agnello got an immunity grant from a grand jury.
His father, Gambino boss John J. Gotti, imprisoned in 1994 in Marion, Ill., was skeptical - at least on tape. He told his son he hadn't known about the plan in advance and didn't like the idea of family members talking to a grand jury under any circumstances.
"If there was a church I robbed and I had the steeple sticking out of my --, I wouldn't say nothin,' " Gotti told his son on the tape played in federal court in Manhattan.
The younger Gotti said it had stopped prosecutors in their tracks.
"From what I was told, it was a very ingenious move," he told his father. " . . . I was told by all the lawyers, all the lawyers involved, it was a very ingenious move."
His father praised him: "Well then, whoever done it should get stripes or somethin.' "
"Junior" Gotti, 45, of Oyster Bay, is being tried for the fourth time in five years on racketeering charges. His first three trials ended in hung juries, but Alite is a new witness, and his testimony that the younger Gotti oversaw a system of spotters with walkie-talkies to track and identify anonymous jurors is a new allegation. Prosecutors Wednesday called Mineola lawyer Robert LaRusso, who prosecuted Gene Gotti, to describe how two earlier trials ended in hung juries. LaRusso also testified how one juror in Gene Gotti's 1989 retrial was disqualified after getting an anonymous note and was replaced by an alternate juror who, it turned out, had been tampered with. Another former prosecutor described how Agnello "took the weight" before the grand jury.
That was Gotti's plan, Alite testified two weeks ago: "
Carmine would get the immunity, and once he gets the immunity he would BS the government and take the blame for everything, because once he gets immunity, the government can't do nothing about it."
In earlier testimony Wednesday, a prosecution informant admitted on cross-examination that he wasn't sure John "Junior" Gotti ever received tribute payments from him in 2004 that he had described on Monday, leaving Gotti's claim that he withdrew from the mob in the late 1990s viable.
Former Gotti associate Michael Finnerty, one day after testifying about a $5,000 payment in 2004 that appeared to puncture Gotti's defense that he left the mob before the five-year statute of limitations for racketeering, conceded he passed the payment through an associate, not to Gotti.
"When he was the boss," Finnerty told defense lawyer Charles Carnesi. "He had crew members above me and I gave the money to them."
http://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/gotti-heard-calling-jury-tampering-ingenious-move-1.1523141
