Mr. Gotti, 44, was taken into custody by the F.B.I. at his Oyster Bay home, and was expected to be arraigned in Manhattan federal court later in the day, the person said. The charges, brought by federal prosecutors in Tampa, Fla., accuse Mr. Gotti, whose late father was the head of the Gambino organized-crime family, of playing a role in the three murders, committed in the late 1980s and early ’90s.
At least two other men — Michael Finnerty and David D’Arpino — were also arrested on Tuesday and charged with racketeering in connection with the case, the person said. Mr. Gotti was also charged with narcotics conspiracy, the person said.
A lawyer for Mr. Gotti, Seth Ginsberg, said, “We’re confident that there is no strength to the allegations and that he will prevail once again.”
Mr. Ginsberg said that his client would probably transported to Tampa quickly for arraignment there in United States District Court.
He added, "I think Herman Melville already wrote this story,” referring to the government’s persistent pursuit of Mr. Gotti, who has been tried three times before, always ending in mistrials. Federal authorities say Mr. Gotti served for a time as the acting boss of the Gambino family, but at each of the trials, Mr. Gotti insisted that he had left the Mafia life.
In September 2005, after a six-week federal trial that included charges that he ordered the June 1992 kidnapping of Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels and WABC radio talk-show host, a divided jury failed to reach verdicts on three charges — kidnapping, racketeering and extortion and conspiracy — and voted not guilty on a fourth charge of securities fraud.
A retrial on the three unresolved charges ended in a mistrial in March 2006 when, after hearing from more than a dozen witnesses, the jury deadlocked for a second time. |
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Prosecutors made a third attempt in in September 2006, but after a six-week trial, jurors again failed to reach a verdict, though they said they believed Mr. Gotti was guilty of organizing the kidnapping of Mr. Sliwa. At that point, the prosecutors, lacking any new evidence, chose not to try him a fourth time in the case.
The latest charges, leading to the arrest on Tuesday, involve the 1990 shooting of a Gambino soldier and construction contractor, Louis DiBono, who was found shot seven times — with four bullets to his head — slumped in a Cadillac sedan in the parking garage of the World Trade Center.
The elder Mr. Gotti, who was convicted of murder and racketeering in federal court in Brooklyn in 1992 and sentenced to life in prison, was found guilty of authorizing the killing of Mr. DiBono, along with four others. Mr. Gotti died in prison in 2002 at age 61.
Jurors at his trial heard the elder Mr. Gotti, whose speech was often punctuated with expletives, boasting that Mr. DiBono was killed because he ignored orders to report to him.
“He’s going to die because he refused to come in when I called,” the elder Mr. Gotti said. |
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