It was just a pre-trial session but the Gotti IV case was already an SRO event last week.
Lawyers, FBI agents, prosecutors, news reporters, sketch artists and other spectators took up so many seats on Tuesday morning, that a few late-arrivals to courtroom 520 had to scurry to locate appropriate spots to park themselves.
Attorney Seth Ginsberg managed to find a seat in the second row right behind his former co-counsel at three prior trials in Manhattan Federal Court, Charles Carnesi.
Curtis Sliwa, the outspoken radio talk show host who had been the focal point of all three tension-filled trials, grabbed a spot in the last row, right next to the FBI supervising agent of all New York mob investigations, David Shafer. The G-man was already seated appropriately enough, next to Theodore Otto, the "case agent" in the matter that was about to begin.
Finally, U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel Gorenstein got to the matter at hand, the second arraignment in the year-old case against a washed-up gangster who's scheduled to begin his fourth racketeering trial in four years next month.
John (Junior) Gotti entered the court wearing a big grin and baggy dark blue prison fatigues. He was much more slimmed down from the last time we saw him. He spotted Ginsberg and gave him a quick hello wave. Then he sat down at the defense table between Carnesi and his co-counsel for this go-round, John Meringolo.
Before the sketch artists could even complete their drawings, the proceeding was over. The spectators and participants - including prosecutors Elie Honig and Steve Kwok - began filing out. And Gotti was on his way back to a federal lockup in Brooklyn, after Carnesi entered a "not guilty" plea for his client to the same essential crimes that he was hit with a year ago.
But as Gang Land suspected and reported last week, Tuesday's session was not an inconsequential pre-trial proceeding in the high-stakes case. It stemmed from a strategic decision by prosecutors to get around the "withdrawal defense" that the Gotti defense team has used in three prior trials to stymie their bid to put Junior behind bars for the rest of his life.
In addition to the original racketeering conspiracy charge that includes three murders from 1988 to 1991, the new indictment adds a separate federal murder charge for two of the slayings on the grounds that each was a "drug-related murder" ordered by Gotti.
The two killings - of drug dealers George Grosso on December 20, 1988, and Bruce Gotterup on November 19, 1991 - were allegedly ordered by Junior as part of the ongoing coke business that he was running at the time, according to what his old buddy, John Alite, has told the feds.
The separate murder counts are designed to let jurors who accept Junior's claim to have quit the mob in 1999 to still find him guilty of one or both killings. In other words, even if jurors decide that Junior is not guilty of the racketeering conspiracy that continued up until 2003, they could still convict him of capital crimes, since the statute of limitations does not apply to those charges, which are punishable by death.
Actually, that's the one thing that Junior doesn't have to worry about. In court papers that were filed along with the new indictment, prosecutors say that the Justice Department has already decided not to seek the death penalty in the case. To goose the trial judge a little more, they also stated that the new charges should not delay the trial, now slated to begin on September 14.
Seated in the back of the courtroom, Sliwa, who was allegedly abducted on Gotti's orders in 1992 and shot three times by one hood as he rode in the back seat of a taxicab driven by another Gotti gangster, wore an angry scowl during the brief arraignment. Unlike a session six weeks ago, when Sliwa said he believed Gotti had threatened him, there were no outbursts against the onetime Junior Don.
Outside the courtroom, the Guardian Angel leader told reporters he was disappointed that the feds had decided against capital punishment in the case.
"I would have preferred that we put the juice in this guy's caboose," cracked Sliwa, in one of his patented rhyming couplets.
Gang Land expects Gotti's attorneys, who recently were denied a 45-day adjournment for the start of trial, to seek another postponement, citing the new charges. But the lawyers declined to spell out any motions they plan to file with trial Judge P. Kevin Castel.
But Junior's lead attorney, however, was not shy to state why he thought Manhattan prosecutors had charged the murders as separate crimes nearly a year after a federal grand jury in Tampa, Florida had charged them only as crimes committed in connection with Gambino family business.
"Apparently, they were not confident they would prevail on the merits in the so-called Florida indictment," said Carnesi. "All along they've been saying that the withdrawal defense was a sham that wouldn't work this time; they had new witnesses, new crimes - loansharking and extortion up until 2007.
"Obviously," the lawyer continued, "if that were true, they would not have had to go back to the grand jury to give the trial jury an alternate theory to convict. It's just their way of covering themselves in anticipation of being unsuccessful. Trying to hedge their bets.
"You do have to give them credit for innovation, though," he said with a grin. "During the first three trials, they tried to intimidate defense witnesses with grand jury subpoenas and by threatening perjury indictments. And when all that failed they tried to move the case away from the defense witnesses and hijack the case to Florida.
"That didn't work, so now they're trying to eliminate the withdrawal defense entirely. No matter how they try to package the case, it still stinks," said Carnesi, who was quick to add: "There is no credible evidence that John had anything to do with these murders."