Great Moments In Goonery

The Advance has fun relating the details of radio host-gadfly Curtis Sliwa’s 1992 run-in with John Gotti’s goons — “Organized Crime? Hardly!”:

Mob snitch Joseph D’Angelo, in his second day on the stand at the retrial of John A. (Junior) Gotti in Manhattan federal court, recited a litany of disorganized screw-ups in their effort to carry out their mission.

First, they forgot to fill the tank. The taxi in which he and an accomplice lay in wait for Sliwa outside his apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side was just about out of gas, necessitating a hurried fill-up.

Then, D’Angelo, who was behind the wheel, had to shoo away a couple who thought the cab was legit. Had the couple entered the cab, they wouldn’t have been able to get out, as it was rigged to thwart Sliwa’s escape.

And, the surveillance was so lengthy and unproductive that alleged gunman Michael Yannotti complained that his wife suspected he was seeing a girl friend.

Early in the morning on June 19, 1992 the two were again waiting for Sliwa. A beat cop told the two to move their car. They circled around the block. Then Sliwa jumped into the cab:

Sliwa gave D’Angelo an address. As they started off, “Mike jumped up and said, ‘Give me your wallet!’ The next thing I know, Mike is shooting,” D’Angelo said.

“The gun is going off. We’re driving. [Sliwa is] jumping around in back. Mike’s wrestling with him in front. It was just a crazy scene,” D’Angelo recalled.

Sliwa escaped by jumping through the front passenger window, which was open.

Dr. Jeffrey Nicastro, now the director of Trauma and Surgical Critical Care at Staten Island University Hospital, Ocean Breeze, treated Sliwa in Bellevue Hospital’s emergency room.

Yesterday, Dr. Nicastro testified that a bullet tore through Sliwa’s rectum and bladder. The surgeon noted that a second bullet entered the outside of Sliwa’s right thigh, exited through the inside of the thigh, then lodged in the left thigh.

“I was a shooting duck in a duck pond,” Sliwa told jurors on Monday.

D’Angelo and Yannotti ditched the cab on Delancey Street, where they hopped into the getaway car, a Lincoln, that had been trailing them.

They repaired to an apartment in Brooklyn, where, according to D’Angelo, Gambino captain Nicholas (Little Nicky) Corozzo sputtered, “What the hell happened? You better hope this [expletive] guy don’t [expletive] die.”

D’Angelo said Corozzo offering to call him a cab to get back to Staten Island. “I said, no, I don’t feel like taking a cab.”