December 12th, 1989. Apartment 10, 3rd floor, 247 Malbury Street, Little Italy, Manhattan. After 7:13 in the evening, two men were talking in a small apartment above a social club. The apartment belonged to a 74year-old widow named Netty Cerelli. She was not home. She was in Florida on a vacation that had been paid for by the man using her apartment.
She came home regularly to find groceries that had been bought on his account in her refrigerator. The arrangement was informal and the understanding was mutual and nobody asked too many questions about what happened in apartment 10 when she was not there. The two men were John Goti, boss of the Gambino crime family, and Frank Locassio, his consiliary.
Goti was talking. He was explaining to Locassio why a man was going to die. He said, “You know why he is dying? He is going to die because he refused to come in when I called. He didn’t do nothing else wrong.” He was talking about Lousie Dono, a Gambino family soldier and drywall contractor who had been avoiding Goti summons.
A man who had done nothing illegal by the specific standards of the organization except failed to appear when the boss asked him to appear. That failure, that specific and persistent refusal to present himself was sufficient. You know why he is dying? The FBI was listening, not in real time, in the room the bug had been planted in the apartment 6 weeks earlier over Thanksgiving weekend. While Mrs.
Celli was on her first Florida vacation of the season, the audio was being recorded on equipment in a surveillance van parked on Malbury Street. The agents monitoring the feed heard John Goty explain to his conciglier exactly why a man was going to be killed. They could not stop it. They could not warn Dono without burning the entire investigation.
6 weeks of recordings, hundreds of hours of organizational intelligence, the most comprehensive wiretap evidence ever assembled against a sitting American mob boss. One man’s life against the entire case. The FBI documented what they heard and kept listening. Louie Dono was shot multiple times in the head and chest in the parking garage beneath the former World Trade Center on October 4th, 1990, 10 months after John Goti explained on tape exactly why he was going to die.
The FBI had the recording. They had heard the death sentence handed down. They had watched it carried out and they could not stop it. And that recording alongside the 600 hours of conversations captured in apartment 10 of 247 Malbury Street between November of 1989 and December of 1990 eventually put John Goty in federal prison for the rest of his life.
This is the story of how a bug in a widow’s apartment above a Little Italy social club ended the Teflon Dawn era and the man who died in a parking garage because the FBI needed the case more than they needed to save him. If you are watching this for the first time, subscribe right now and drop a comment telling us which state you are watching from.
New York, Texas, California, Florida, anywhere in the country. Hit subscribe, drop your state, then let us get into this. 247 Malbury Street sits in the heart of Little Italy, Manhattan, the neighborhood that had been the organizational and social home of the Gambino family’s Manhattan operations since the 1950s. The building is a fivestory brick structure that by the time John Goti moved the center of his operations there in the mid 1980s had been associated with the Gambino family for over 30 years. The Ravenite Social Club occupied
the ground floor. It had been established decades earlier as the operational headquarters of the family’s Little Italy interests. Neil Delacross, the underboss we covered in a previous episode, the man who dressed as a priest and whose eyes a senior NYPD detective, said were the only mob eyes that had ever genuinely frightened him, had run his operations from the Ravenite across his entire tenure as under boss.
The portraits of Delacross and John Goty hung on the back wall of the club’s rear room. When Goty became boss in December of 1985 after the shooting of Paul Castellano outside Spark Steakhouse on East 46th Street, he continued to use the Ravenite as his primary meeting place. He required every capo in the Gambino family to appear there every Wednesday night to show respect.
The club became the most surveiled location in American organized crime history. FBI cameras photographed it up to 5 days per week during daytime hours from 1987 through 1990. Systematically identifying every person who entered and building the organizational map of the Gambino family one photograph at a time. Goti understood the surveillance.
He was not oblivious to it. His response was characteristic. He ordered the facade of the club bricked over in the late 1980s, the windows filled in, the exterior made visually impenetrable. A deliberate architectural counter surveillance measure applied to a social club on a public street in lower Manhattan.
The FBI simply moved their cameras to better angles and kept photographing. The audio surveillance was the harder problem. The FBI had been trying to get clean audio on John Goty for years. By 1987, the bureau’s own internal assessments acknowledged limited success with electronic surveillance against him. Goty knew about bugs.
He had been educated by the experience of watching Angelo Riierro’s home recordings destroy the careers of Gene Goti and Rugierro himself. the tapes that had captured open discussions of heroine dealing and had contributed to the federal cases that put both men away. He did not talk openly in the Ravenite.
He knew the club was watched and suspected it was wired. He installed a white noise machine. When sensitive matters needed to be discussed, he left the main room. Supervisory Special Agent Bruce Mao was running the FBI’s Gambino squad, the dedicated investigative unit focused specifically on the Gambino family.
Mao was patient, systematic, and technically sophisticated. His team had the full resources of the bureau’s New York field office directed at a single target. They had cameras on Malbury Street. They had informants. They had patients. And then an informant gave them something that changed everything. The informant reported that Goti sometimes left the Ravenite through a back door and moved into an adjacent firstf flooror hallway where he would speak privately with captains.
More significantly, the informant reported that Goti regularly went further up a back staircase to an apartment in the building itself. The apartment was apartment 10 on the third floor. It had previously been used by Neil Deacross for his own private meetings. Delicacross had understood that the club floor was observable and had used the upstairs apartment to conduct the conversations that required true privacy.
After Delacro’s death in December of 1985, Goty had continued using the same apartment for the same reason. The apartment belonged to Netti Cherelli, 74 years old, the widow of Michael Cherelli, a Gambino family soldier who had died earlier in the year. She had been associated with the Gambino world through her husband for decades. She lived on Goty’s dime.
He paid for her groceries. He paid for her Florida vacations. He paid for the specific convenience of having an elderly widow in an upstairs apartment who understood without being told that when she was not home, certain things happened in her apartment and that she should not ask about them. The FBI now knew where Goty was having his most sensitive conversations.
The question was how to get a bug in there without alerting him. Thanksgiving weekend, November of 1989. Mrs. Cirelli was in Florida. The FBI surveillance team had a schematic of the interior of 247 Malbury Street. The floor plans, the layouts, the specific configuration of apartment 10. They had waited for the right opportunity, a Florida vacation.
Over a holiday weekend, when the building’s activity would be at its lowest, they went in. They planted the bug, they left. They restored the apartment to exactly the condition in which they had found it. Mrs. Cerelli came home from Florida and found her groceries and her apartment, and nothing unusual.
John Goty continued using apartment 10 for his most sensitive conversations. He had selected it specifically because he believed it was clean, a space the FBI had not penetrated, a room where he could speak without the discipline he maintained in the main club. He had spent months avoiding saying anything substantive on the Ravenite floor.
He had bricked up the windows. He had run the white noise machine. He had done everything a cautious man does when he knows the government is listening. In apartment 10, he relaxed. he spoke. He conducted the business of the most powerful crime family in America in the apartment of a 74 year old widow above a Little Italy social club while FBI recording equipment captured every word.
He had moved the conversation upstairs to escape the surveillance. He had walked directly into it. December 12th, 1989, apartment 10 after 7:13 in the evening. The conversation between Goti and Locassio that the FBI recorded that night covered multiple subjects. The Ravenite transcripts, 600 hours of them, eventually were comprehensive in their coverage of the Gambino family’s organizational operations, commission relationships, internal disputes, financial arrangements, personnel decisions, and murder. At the beginning
of one segment running approximately 1 minute, John Goti explained to Frank Lucasio why Louis Dono was going to die. You know why he is dying? He is going to die because he refused to come in when I called. He didn’t do nothing else wrong. Louis Dono was a Gambino family soldier who ran a legitimate drywall contracting business.
He had construction contracts in the World Trade Center area. Significant lucrative work that was generating real money. He was not dealing drugs. He was not cooperating with the government. He was not stealing from the family. He was simply busy. He was making money. And he was avoiding the meetings that Goti kept summoning him to. He thought he could manage it.
He thought he could stay out of Goty’s way long enough for the issue to resolve itself. He thought that being too busy making money was a forgivable offense. He was wrong. He didn’t do nothing else wrong. That sentence on an FBI recording captures the specific and absolute nature of Goti’s authority as he understood it.
The refusal to come when called was not a minor infractions. It was the only infraction that mattered. In Goti’s organizational framework, a captain who would not appear when summoned was a captain who was communicating something about his relationship to the boss’s authority. And that communication had one available response.
The FBI agents monitoring the recording heard this in real time or as close to real time as the logging of surveillance audio allowed. They heard John Goti explain a murder. They documented it. They kept it and they made the calculation that the investigation required. Louis Dono’s death was documented on tape. The recording was evidence.
If they intervene to prevent it, if they warned Dono, if they moved on Goty before the murder, if they burned the investigation to save one man’s life, they lost everything. 6 weeks of recordings at that point. the organizational intelligence that was accumulating, the case that was building toward the most comprehensive prosecution of a sitting American mob boss in the bureau’s history. They kept listening.
Louie Dono lived for 10 more months after John Goty explained on tape why he was going to die. He was shot multiple times in the head and chest in the parking garage beneath the former World Trade Center on October 4th, 1990. The garage where he was killed sat beneath the building where he had been doing his drywall contracting work.
He was found in the garage. He had been avoiding Goti’s summons for months. Charles Carglia was among the people present at the killing. We covered his story in a previous episode. John Elite, as we also covered, was part of the group. The killing was the one that earned Carglia his formal induction into the Gambino family. Killing Dono was the specific act for which he received his button.
Goti’s exact words from the December 12th tape were entered as evidence at the 1992 trial. The jury heard him explain why Dono was going to die. They also heard him explain that Dono had done nothing else wrong. The death sentence was for the refusal, nothing more, nothing less. The FBI had heard the same thing 10 months before the murder happened.
They had the tape. They had documented it. They had watched the murder take place. They had preserved the evidence. And now they were using it to convict the man who had ordered it. The Teflon Dawn had spoken freely in apartment 10 of 247 Malbury Street because he believed it was safe.
He had moved the conversation upstairs to avoid the government’s surveillance. He had walked into the government’s best evidence against him. The full scope of what the Celli apartment bug produced is worth sitting with specifically 600 hours of recordings. Not 6 hours, 600. The FBI recorded approximately 600 hours of conversations in apartment 10 between November of 1989 and December of 1990.
The date Goti was arrested on December 11th when agent Mao watched through binoculars as law enforcement arrested the Gambino family’s hierarchy at the Ravenite. 6 hours of those 600 were entered into evidence at the trial. The selection of those 6 hours from the 600 was not arbitrary. They were the hours that contained the most direct and most damaging evidence of Goty’s personal involvement in murders, organizational decisions, and the specific criminal direction of the Gambino family.
The Dono tape was the most damaging single piece of audio. But it was not alone. The recordings captured discussions of the murder of Gambino soldier Louis Milito, a murder that Graano had arranged with Goti’s approval. They captured organizational decisions about territory, tribute, and the management of the family’s criminal operations.
They captured John Goti speaking freely at length with his conciglier and his underboss about the running of an organization that the United States government had been trying to prosecute for decades. He had moved the conversations upstairs because he thought upstairs was
