Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires

by Selwyn Raab

and to collect up to $2.5 million in profits from a recent drug deal. Suspecting that he was now being trailed by agents, Ruggiero brought in a retired city detective to examine his home for taps and bugs. Alerted by informers, the FBI turned off their concealed mikes on the day that Ruggiero’s home was swept for electronic listening devices. The former detective informed Ruggiero of the “good news”; he had no bugs to worry about. But,

spawned, the two relatively young mobsters, Gotti and Gravano, had been acquainted but had not worked together on a criminal venture. The forty-one-year-old Gravano, five years younger than Gotti, had grown up in Brooklyn but in less straitened circumstances than his future boss’s indigent childhood. Gravano’s Sicilian immigrant parents were

can.” Besides the two federal prosecutors, the Manhattan district attorney’s office

circumstantial. The bugs, they agreed, were insufficient to convict Gotti on predicate counts—that he actually knew or participated in the crimes. “We need more evidence to back up the bugs,” Maloney

searching for an escape hatch to wriggle out of a life prison term, reached out to the authorities. For a reduction in his sentence he could implicate the nation’s most