John Gotti was a plumber. Not in any sense that involved actual plumbing. Not in any sense that required him to know the difference between a ball valve and a gate valve or how to sweat a copper joint or what the New York City plumbing code required for residential drain installation. Not in any sense that involved showing up at a job site with tools or looking at a pipe or solving a problem that water was creating in someone’s building.
Anthony Gino, 49, owner of Arca Plumbing and Heating, Ozone Park, Queens, a friend since boyhood of Gotti and his brothers and currently serving a 5-year sentence for obstruction of justice, said he gave Gotti for parole purposes a salesman’s position in 1977. I didn’t teach him the business. I told him what it was about for parole purposes.
Four words that contain the entire absurdity of the situation. John Gotti had been parrolled from Green Haven Correctional Facility after serving time for his participation in the murder of James McBratney. His parole required him to demonstrate legitimate employment. His childhood friend, Anthony Gorino, who ran a plumbing company in Ozone Park, Queens, gave him a job title, salesman.
He didn’t bring any business to Gino. He was simply listed to satisfy parole requirements. This was not unusual. This was in fact the specific and deeply established tradition of the Italian-American mob’s relationship with the construction and building trades in New York City. The no-show job, the paper employment that satisfied official requirements while generating no actual labor.
The system by which convicted criminals maintained parole compliance and the businesses that employed them on paper received something considerably more valuable than plumbing sales in return. But the Ark plumbing story is not simply the story of a no-show job. It is the story of how the mob’s relationship with the plumbing industry in New York was so comprehensive, so thoroughly embedded at every level that John Gotti’s name appearing on a plumbing company’s payroll was barely the most interesting element of the entire arrangement. And
it illuminates in the most complete possible way what happened when an honest plumber, a real one with real tools and real knowledge, showed up at a mob figures house and handed someone a bill for $1,000. The plumbing industry in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s was not a free market. It was an organized market.
organized in the specific sense that the mob’s presence in the construction trades had produced over decades. The labor unions, the contractors associations, the specific arrangements between bidding companies and city agencies, none of it operated according to the competitive market principles that the official framework of contracting was supposed to produce.
It operated according to the principles of organized crimes labor racketeering which had been developing in New York since the 1930s and which had reached by the time Ark Plumbing was winning city contracts in the late 1970s and early 1980s a level of organizational sophistication that made it effectively invisible to the city agencies that were supposed to be running competitive procurement processes.
Since 1977, Ark Plumbing had won at least 14 city contracts, including work on the Queen’s House of Detention and four police precinct houses. The company also had won numerous contracts with other city agencies that included work on Flushing Meadow, Shea Stadium, and Wulman Rink in Central Park. 14 city contracts, the Queen’s House of Detention, four police precinct houses, Shea Stadium, Wulman Rink in Central Park.
The breadth of the contracting portfolio was a direct reflection of the organizational relationships that produced it. These contracts did not come from winning competitive bids on the merits of price and quality. They came from the specific combination of political relationships, union relationships, and the ambient organizational pressure that made directing contracts to specific companies a natural and unremarkable part of how city contracting actually functioned.
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Ark Plumbing’s owner, Anthony Gino, was not a peripheral figure in this arrangement. A childhood friend of Gottiis, Anthony Gurino has been sentenced to 13 years in prison in two federal cases, including one in 1987 that involved a conspiracy to hide the assets of a multi-million dollar heroin ring headed by Gotti’s brother, a nextoor neighbor of Donald Maine’s Anthony Gino did plumbing work at Queensboro Hall in the early 198 1980s, though he was under federal surveillance since 1982.
Next door neighbor of Donald Mines. This detail is not incidental. Donald Mines was the Queensboro president who killed himself in 1986 in the midst of a corruption scandal that eventually revealed systematic corruption in New York City. contracting that stretched from the parking violations bureau through multiple city agencies.
The investigation produced prosecutions, resignations, and the most significant municipal corruption crisis New York had seen since the fiscal crisis of the previous decade. Gino was living next door to the man at the center of that crisis, the man who was central to the contracting relationships that produced Gino’s city contracts.
The specific geography of their residences was itself a statement about the proximity of money and political influence. The trial where all of this became public record was the 1992 federal racketeering prosecution of John Gotti. IRS documents showed $211,182 income as reported by companies for which he allegedly legitimately worked, but for which his lowest income for any year was the year after the Castayano assassination when Ark Plumbing Heating Corp.
said he made only $11,400 as a salesman. $11,400 for a year as a salesman for a plumbing company. This was the declared income of the man who had just organized and executed the murder of Paul Castayano on a Midtown Manhattan street and installed himself as the boss of the most powerful criminal organization in America.
$11,400 from Ark Plumbing. The IRS had been trying to build a tax evasion case against Gotti for years. The same legal mechanism that had sent Al Capone to prison was the instrument they kept reaching for when the direct criminal cases kept collapsing. The no-show jobs at Ark Plumbing and various other companies were the paper trail that was supposed to satisfy the question of how Gotti supported himself.
They satisfied it in the most technical sense. They did not satisfy it in any meaningful sense. The board found ARK to be non-ooperative by the failure of its president and sole stockholder, Anthony Gino, to answer questions regarding his indictment, the underlying relationship with Mr. Rugierro, and the failure to produce as witnesses, John Gotti, according to the city’s papers, a leading member of an organized crime family in New York and a salesman for Ark.
the city’s papers, the official documents of the New York City contracting process, a leading member of an organized crime family in New York, and a salesman for ARK. The two descriptions appearing in the same official document. The city had been doing business with a company whose listed employees included the boss of the Gambino family, and the city had been doing this business for years.
While that company’s owner was under federal surveillance, the honest plumber who showed up at a mob figures house had no idea what he was walking into. This is the essential character of the story’s most human element. The trades operated in New York in this era through a complex web of union relationships, contractor affiliations, and informal organizational arrangements that determined how work was allocated and how pricing was established.
Within that web, the mob’s presence was comprehensive enough that plumbers who had been working in the city for a decade had developed an ambient understanding of which neighborhoods and which clients required what kind of approach. Not every plumber had this understanding. The independent plumber who worked through the legitimate channels, who had his license, who pulled permits, who charged rates that reflected his actual costs and his actual overhead and the actual complexity of the job.
that plumber did not always have the specific intelligence about the specific client that would have told him before he rang the doorbell that the standard approach was not appropriate here. He rang the doorbell. He was let in. He found the leak. He fixed the leak. He did the work that his training and his tools and his knowledge of plumbing systems had prepared him to do competently and professionally.
Then he wrote up the bill, $1,000 in the 1980s for work that had taken him several hours and that had involved parts and materials on top of the labor. a fair bill within the normal range for the complexity of the job. The kind of bill that a professional presents when he has done professional work and expects to be compensated at the professional rate.
He handed it to the man of the house. The man of the house’s response was not what the plumber expected. This is the part of the story that the title promises and that the reality delivers in a way that is simultaneously predictable and instructive. John Gotti’s relationship with money was complicated by the specific combination of enormous wealth and officially documented poverty that his lifestyle required him to maintain.
He was generating millions annually from the construction racketeering and the gambling operation and the various other enterprises that the Gambino family’s organizational structure produced. The money was real, enormous, and completely undocumented for tax purposes. He was also officially a salesman making $11,400 a year from Ark Plumbing.
A man of limited means living in a modest house in Howard Beach, Queens on a salary that the IRS was supposed to find plausible as the primary income of a workingclass person from Queens. A $1,000 plumbing bill sat inside this contradiction. Not because he couldn’t afford it, because the official version of who he was, the fiction that supported the no-show jobs and the parole compliance and the tax filings that the IRS was scrutinizing, was not a person who paid thousand plumbing bills as a matter of routine.
The conversation that followed the presentation of the bill is the kind of conversation that does not appear in any official record, but that circulates in the organizational world as the specific kind of story that tells you who someone is more precisely than any official documentation could.
He told the plumber that the bill was too high. Not that he didn’t have it, not a request for a discount framed as a financial constraint. The specific assertion of a man who understood the plumbing industry’s organizational structure in New York well enough to know that the rate on this bill was not the rate that applied to him.
that the relationships and the organizational weight and the specific position he occupied in the world that governed how plumbing work was allocated and priced in Queens meant that a $1,000 bill was not what the job cost him. The plumber did not know this. The plumber left without the full payment. This is the moment that the story turns on.
Not the confrontation itself, not any particular drama, the specific quiet fact of a man who had done legitimate work and been handed a fraction of what he was owed and who now had to process what had just happened and what, if anything, he was going to do about it. He couldn’t call the police. Not because calling the police about a contract dispute was inherently impossible, because the specific person who had underpaid him was John Gotti.
And reporting John Gotti to any official agency for any reason in Howard Beach in the mid 1980s was an activity that required a level of either ignorance or courage that most people who understood the neighborhood did not possess simultaneously. He could try to collect through whatever informal means were available to him, through the union, perhaps if the job had been union work, through the contractor’s association, through the specific channels that legitimate tradesmen used when clients didn’t pay. Each of those channels in
the specific geography of Queens in the mid 1980s would have delivered him to exactly the same organizational world that had just told him the bill was too high. The union relationships ran through the same network. The contractors associations were the same network. The informal mechanisms for dispute resolution in the trades were at their foundation the same organizational infrastructure that had put John Gotti on Ark Plumbing’s payroll as a salesman.
He was not going to collect the full bill through any of those channels. The plumber had done his job and had been paid less than the job was worth. This was not unusual in the plumbing industry in New York in the 1980s. It was in fact the normal operating condition of a legitimate tradesman working in territory that the mob’s organizational presence in the trades had effectively claimed as its own pricing territory as much as its geographical territory.
The Ark plumbing story that the Village Voice broke in 1986 was the public version of something that every plumber in Queens already understood. Not the specific details, not the 14 city contracts and the Woolman rink and the Queensboro president’s next door neighbor. the general principle that the plumbing work in New York was not allocated through competitive markets, that the relationships that produced contracts and the relationships that determined pricing were the same organizational relationships that the
mob’s presence in the building trades had built over decades. The plumber who showed up at Gotti’s house had charged $1,000 because that was what the work was worth in a legitimate market. He had not accounted for the fact that he was not operating in a legitimate market. He was operating in Gotti’s market where the labor union relationships were organized to produce specific outcomes where the contracting relationships were organized to produce specific outcomes.
where even the residential service call on a quiet street in Howard Beach was embedded in an organizational context that determined what the bill was going to say before the plumber wrote it. $1,000 was what a plumber in a legitimate market charged. In Gotti’s market, the bill said what it said because Gotti said what it said.
The IRS’s attempt to build a tax case around Gotti’s legitimate employment collapsed in the same way the direct criminal cases had collapsed. He did send in a $5,000 unexplained payment to the IRS in 1990, the year he was indicted. $5,000 unexplained. the most powerful mob boss in America with millions in annual criminal income, sending the IRS $5,000 with no explanation in the year he was indicted.
The specific quality of this payment is almost too perfect. It is the tax filing of a man who knows that the IRS is watching and who has decided that some payment, however arbitrary the amount, is better than the absence of any payment. There were withholding records for the income from the employers, but there were no tax returns from GotTotti.
No tax returns for years. The man who was listed as a salesman for Ark Plumbing who had withholding records at multiple companies had not filed tax returns. The official employment was the legal fiction. The tax compliance that the employment was supposed to facilitate was not happening. The IRS could document the income from the legitimate companies.
They could document the absence of tax returns. What they could not document because it existed in the organizational world that left no paper trail was the actual income, the millions from the construction racketeering and the gambling and the various other enterprises that were generating the actual money.
Gotti was convicted in 1992, not on the tax charges, on the racketeering and murder charges that Sammy Graano’s testimony made possible. The Ark plumbing job title had served its purpose for 15 years. It had satisfied parole requirements. It had provided a documented income source for tax purposes, however implausible.
It had been the specific fiction that the mob’s construction industry presence required its leadership to maintain in order to operate in a world that required everyone to have a legitimate answer to the question of how they earned their living. Anthony Gino, who had given Gotti the job title and who had built Ark Plumbing into a company that won 14 city contracts with the Gambino boss on the payroll, was sentenced to 13 years in federal prison.
The city eventually disqualified Ark from future contracts. Wulman Rink survived. She stadium survived. The Queen’s precinct houses that Ark had worked on continued doing their daily business of processing the criminals that the same organizational world that had built Ark plumbing kept producing. The plumber who showed up at Gotti’s house and handed him a bill for $1,000 had encountered in the most domestic and mundane possible way.
the full architecture of organized crimes relationship with the building trades in New York. He hadn’t encountered the extortion or the murder or the federal prosecutions or the Senate hearings about organized crimes control of city contracting. He had encountered the end product of all of those things. The moment where the organizational structure that the mob had built over decades in the plumbing industry expressed itself as a homeowner, telling a tradesman that the bill was too high.
It was too high for the organizational world the homeowner operated in. In that world, plumbing work cost what the organizational relationships said it cost. The legitimate market’s pricing was irrelevant because the legitimate market was not the market that governed the relevant transactions. The plumber left with less than he was owed.
This was not an injustice in the specific sense that it was unique. It was the ordinary condition of operating a legitimate business in New York in the 1980s when the territory you were working in was the territory of a man who was on the payroll of the same plumbing industry you were working in. A man whose name was on the books of Ark Plumbing as a salesman.
a man who understood better than any licensed plumber in Queens exactly how the plumbing industry was organized and why the $1,000 bill was not the relevant number. The $1,000 bill was what the legitimate market charged. The other number was what the organizational market charged. In Queens in the 1980s, in a house on 85th Street in Howard Beach, one of those markets was the real one.
