The Hit: How One Gangland Murder Brought Mob Down -- Crime Made John Gotti A Marked Man

NEW YORK - Christmas time in the city, 10 years ago. Heart of Manhattan, midst of the evening rush. Four men stand outside Sparks Steak House in matching outfits: black Russian fur hats, pale trench coats, loaded handguns.

They're waiting for Paul Castellano, boss of the nation's biggest Mafia family. They're working for John Gotti, an obscure thug who wants Big Paul's place atop the Gambino family.

Around 5:30, a black Lincoln Town Car pulls to the curb, ignoring a No Parking sign. Inside is Castellano, 70, a big, hawk-nosed man in a dark business suit. He carries $3,300 in cash, but no weapon.

Inside, his table for six awaits. He will confer with a few trusted capos, and enjoy his favorite - prime rib, third cut.

But Paul Castellano has already eaten his last meal.

As he steps from the car, the gunmen greet him with a half-dozen bullets.

As bystanders scream and duck for cover, a car moves slowly through the chaos. John Gotti inspects his gunsels' handiwork through the tinted windows, then drives on.

That was Dec. 16, 1985. So began the rise of the most famous mobster since Capone - and the fall of the Gambino crime family.

"It was a coup d'etat," says Bruce Mouw, who headed the FBI's Gambino squad. "It made John Gotti the nation's No. 1 mobster."

But it also made Gotti the FBI's No. 1 target. That, Mouw observes, "led to the downfall of it all."

Today, the Gambino family has shrunk from 21 crews to 10, and

its lucrative monopolies in garbage carting and garment trucking are under siege. Most of the conspirators who seized power are dead or behind bars. Gotti, betrayed by a fellow plotter, is doing life without parole.

The rival Genovese family refuses to even meet with the acting Gambino boss, a 31-year-old known as "Junior." His name, John A. Gotti, is his only apparent qualification for the job.

Paul Castellano knew the risks.

"This life of ours, this is a wonderful life," he said two years before his death. "If you can get through life like this and get away with it, hey, that's great. But it's very, very unpredictable."

Particularly among the Gambinos, where murder most treacherous was a family tradition and underboss routinely plotted against boss.

When Carlo Gambino died in 1976, Castellano - his brother-in-law - took over. But by 1985, the Gambinos were a family divided. Castellano, an old-fashioned mafioso, forbade drug deals. This infuriated one underboss whose crews were heavily into the trade.

The underboss was John Gotti.

After one of Gotti's footsoldiers was busted for dealing heroin, Castellano demanded to hear the government's tapes in the case. Gotti decided to hit Paul before Paul hit him.

He began assembling a cabal called "The Fist." His key recruit was a squat, musclebound man known as Sammy Bull.

Salvatore Gravano was an eighth-grade dropout who started small - "armed robberies, burglaries, shylocking," he once said. He had murdered six people by 1985, and had no qualms about making the boss who inducted him into the family the seventh.

Five hours after the shooting of Paul Castellano, two detectives went to Gotti's modest house in Queens. The homeowner answered the door in his robe and pajamas. "Paul got hit?" he said evenly. "That's too bad."

A week later, Gambino soldiers gathered for their annual Christmas party at the Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy. Each one kissed or hugged John Gotti.

They hadn't expected Castellano's murder, but they weren't disappointed. He was greedy, remote, arrogant. In the end, no one cared enough about Big Paul to stand up for him.

No one except Vincent "Chin" Gigante, boss of the Genovese family. Chin had a very personal interest in upholding the Mafia rule that no boss is killed without approval of the bosses of the city's other families.

Within two years, bad things began to happen to Gotti's associates:

In 1986, Frank DeCicco, Castellano's traitor, was killed by a car bomb. In 1989, Eddie Lino, one of the gunmen, was found dead inside his Mercedes with nine bullets in his head. In 1991, Gotti's driver, Bobby Borriello, was shot 10 times in his driveway.

Gotti seemed haunted. Even in private, he acted ignorant about the Castellano hit. "Probably the cops killed this Paul," he said.

The new boss was a made-man's man. He'd made his bones by killing a punk who foolishly kidnapped Carlo Gambino's nephew. Arrested, he kept his mouth shut and did his time. When he got out, he was inducted into the family.

After the Castellano hit, Gotti demonstrated a sensational knack for beating the rap. In five years, he won three criminal trials. They called him the Teflon Don.

Gotti made the cover of Time - an Andy Warhol portrait. He wore $1,800 silk suits and held his son's wedding at the Helmsley Palace Hotel.

But FBI agents managed to plant a bug in a hideaway above the Ravenite Club. They listened as the boss talked family business with the new underboss, Gravano.

Gotti still was obsessed with Castellano, with betrayal.

"Everybody in the city's got rats near them," he told Gravano in January 1990. "But we ain't got 'em near us, these rats."

Wrong.

By year's end, he and Gravano were indicted, on the basis of the FBI bug, for the murder of Castellano and others.

Listening to the tapes, Gravano heard Gotti speaking contemptuously of him and saw the future: They would probably go to prison for life - and if not, Gotti would have him killed.

Gravano broke the oath of silence. He ratted on John Gotti.

It took Gotti's jury 13 hours to reach its verdict: guilty of murder and racketeering. The sentence was mandatory: life without parole.

Gotti now tries to run his crime family through his son from one of the toughest lockups in the country: the federal prison in Marion, Ill. He lives in a 7-by-8-foot cell. He is allowed just three visitors a week, and only on certain days. He has limited phone privileges.

Gravano served five years in prison and joined the Witness Protection Program after his testimony jailed 37 former associates. He still has his millions. As a federal prosecutor noted, Sammy now has only one problem: "The rest of his life he'll be looking over his shoulder."

Most of the other mobsters involved in the Castellano hit are dead or in jail.

The Gambino family remains under the nominal control of the junior Gotti, a muscle-bound lout who heads a crew of other young toughs. In fact, the FBI says, the remaining capos do their own thing and hand Junior a certain amount of tribute.

Since Gotti's fall, New York's mob busters have never let up.

Hundreds of mob-linked workers have been fired from the Javits convention center. Mob-linked unloaders have been replaced at the Fulton Fish Market. The mob's 30-year stranglehold on Garment District trucking has been loosened. A giant out-of-town corporation is challenging the mob garbage cartel.

For Gotti, who believed he could make the Gambinos the U.S. Steel of organized crime, this anniversary of his ascension will be a bitter one.

"This is gonna be a Cosa Nostra 'til I die," he once blustered. "Be it an hour from now or be it tonight or a hundred years from now when I'm in jail. It's gonna be a Cosa Nostra."