Informant: Gotti wanted brother to take over family

BY ANTHONY M. DESTEFANO | anthony.destefano@newsday.com

April 9, 2008

A confidante of the late mob boss John Gotti told the FBI that the ailing and imprisoned Dapper Don wanted his brother Gene to take over command and rule the Gambino crime family from his own jail cell, according to government records.

Lewis Kasman, formerly of Woodbury and the self proclaimed "adopted son" of Gotti, told federal investigators of the mob boss' succession plans after he decided to become an informant in 1997, while he was still visiting a cancer-stricken Gotti in prison.

While there is precedent for a mob boss running a crime family from prison -- Carmine Persico is believed by investigators to have done so for years with the Colombo family -- Joseph Coffey, a former NYPD organized crime expert, said Gotti's brazen plan for his brother likely would have been rejected by the bosses of the other crime families because Gene Gotti was in prison for heroin trafficking.

The records of Kasman's role as an informant, which was publicly revealed last month in federal court in Brooklyn, show that he spent part of the last five years, and possibly longer, meeting with reputed mobsters at Long Island and Queens hotels and restaurants and taping them for the FBI.

In addition, Kasman claimed during debriefings with federal investigators that he was aware of and involved in bribing Nassau County officials to get certificates of occupancy and that a now-dead mob lawyer was involved in paying off a county judge, according to the FBI records. Neither the officials nor the judge were identified in the documents.

Revelation that Kasman had been an informant even while Gotti was dying shocked some in the legal community after it was revealed in court papers that he had been providing information to the FBI for more than a decade. Wearing a recording device, Kasman, a former garment industry executive, taped attorneys, mobsters and even Gotti's children in apparent efforts to find incriminating information. Gotti died in June 2002.

He sometimes had meetings with gangsters in the Marriott Hotel in Uniondale and the Garden City Hotel, the records stated. Some of the information Kasman collected was used in the prosecution of Luchese family consiglieri Joseph Caridi in 2003 for a shakedown involving Hudson & McCoy restaurant in Freeport. Kasman also taped Gotti's daughter Victoria during a funeral in Queens in 2006, according to the reports.

During his sessions with the FBI, Kasman said Gotti entrusted him with $150,000 in mob money in 1986 and that ultimately he handled up to $3 million of the crime bosses proceeds, according to government records. Gotti had amassed a fortune of $11 million, but according to Kasman that money was all squandered, in part by Gotti's brother Peter, who served as street boss of the crime family, according to the records.

Kasman admitted to the FBI that he laundered mob money through his Manhattan garment trimming companies, earning commissions of as much as 30 percent, government records stated. But last September Kasman pleaded guilty in Brooklyn before Judge Nicholas Garaufis to fraud and obstruction of justice charges after the FBI caught him committing crimes on their time. He faces up to 24 months in prison when he is sentenced, court records stated.