Surviving the Mob - Dennis Griffin [49]
“I didn’t really care about Dina anymore. My only concern was for my son. But I was livid about Nicky and Jackie getting involved in my personal life. And I felt the crew had betrayed me too. It seemed that when there was bad news from the street that my wife was fuckin’ around on me, they couldn’t get there fast enough to tell me. But what about the promise they made to me about Sammy Karkis? It was going on three years and he was still alive.
“I sent a letter out with one of my visitors for Mike Yannotti. In it I expressed my anger that after all we’d been through together, they hadn’t fulfilled the promise they made to me before I was incarcerated. That letter apparently pissed Mike off. We didn’t communicate for the whole year and I didn’t speak to anybody else from the crew either. The only people I kept up with were my few friends from other crime families, such as Robert Arena, Teddy Persico, and Joey Urgitano. We wrote to each other once a week. As far as I was concerned, I wouldn’t ask Nicky or the crew for anything ever again.”
While Andrew was in prison, two other things occurred that later impacted his life in major ways. First, gangland strife broke out in 1991 in what became known as the Colombo War. Second, on June 19, 1992, Guardian Angel founder Curtis Sliwa was shot in the back seat of a taxi while on the way to do his early-morning radio talk show at WABC-AM. According to a New York Times article the following day, Sliwa was the victim of a well-planned attack.
The taxi in which the shooting occurred had been stolen two days earlier. As Sliwa settled into the back seat, a gunman who had been hiding in the front seat next to the driver sat up and opened fire. Shot several times, Sliwa tumbled out of the vehicle as it lurched around the corner at East 7th Street and Avenue B. He was rushed to the hospital and emerged from five hours of surgery in critical but stable condition.
The police had no immediate suspects and said Sliwa routinely received threats due to Guardian Angel activities and the sometimes-controversial opinions he voiced on his radio show. But speculation among those in the know was that the attempted hit was a direct result of Sliwa’s radio rants against recently convicted Gambino boss John Gotti.
Even though Andrew was incarcerated at the time of the incident, he would eventually be drawn into the Sliwa shooting.
In September 1993, Andrew received some unexpected good news from the state. He’d been approved for the work-release program and would be leaving the prison in 48 hours. His next stop was the Edgecombe Correctional Facility in New York City, his residence while in the program. If all went well, he’d be released on parole a year later.
13
Back on the Street
While Andrew was in prison, a changing of the guard in the Gambino crime family took place. In 1992 the feds at long last convicted John Gotti; the former Teflon Don was sentenced to life in prison without parole. However, even though he was incarcerated, protocol called for Gotti to maintain his status as the boss until all of his appeals were exhausted. In his absence, the day-to-day operations of the family were handled by a committee consisting of Junior Gotti, Jackie “the Nose” D’Amico, Nicky Corozzo, and Andrew’s old friend and Nicky Corozzo’s co-boss Lenny DiMaria, who had been released from prison and officially promoted to capo. So as he left Hudson Correctional, Andrew was heading back to a slightly different landscape.
His new home, Edgecombe Correctional, was located at 611 Edgecombe Avenue, Manhattan, a multi-floor minimum-security facility used for inmates participating in the work-release program. The convicts were