It is, one person close the administration recently observed, a “classic Gambino-style roll-up.” To understand how Mueller might now proceed, to get a sense of the compromises he’d be willing to make to bag the larger prosecutorial targets in his sights, it’s eye-opening to go back to the deal he cut with Sammy the Bull.
When Gravano sent word from his cell in 10 South that he wanted to meet with the F.B.I., and that, more pointedly, he wanted to speak to them alone, the overwhelming suspicion was that it was more bull from the Bull. Robert Mueller didn’t believe it. And neither did Bruce Mouw, the head of the F.B.I.’s C-16 team that had painstakingly built the case against Gotti and his henchmen. As Mouw told me years ago, when I was writing my book Gangland, both Mueller and he, as well as just about everyone else involved in the case, thought it was a gangster’s scam. Ignore him, was the dismissive consensus. We’d be giving his lawyer—then Ben Brafman, the same canny criminal attorney now shaping Harvey Weinstein’s defense)—ammunition to hurl back at us with incriminating innuendo in the courtroom.
But Mueller had the final say, and he ordered the F.B.I. to arrange the interview—ensuring that it was done as covertly as any mob sit-down. Ten South was, after all, little more than a narrow corridor, a self-contained universe of adjacent cells. Gravano’s was flanked on one side by mob boss John Gotti, and on the other by the Family consigliere, Frankie Loc. If either of them, men who lived by the kill-or-be-killed rules of their ruthless profession, suspected that the Bull was contemplating becoming a rat, the news would swiftly be passed on to the avenging Gambino family foot soldiers. And Sammy would be a marked man.
The shrewd specifics of the plan that ultimately went forward was conceived by Mouw, who had studied strategy at Annapolis in a previous life. On the morning of October 10, 1991, Gravano was escorted from his cell with deliberate pageantry by a phalanx of guards for a scheduled appointment. The ostensible purpose was to conduct a voice-analysis test; the government wanted to be able to distinguish the Bull’s words from the rumble of muttering tough-guy voices on a series of surreptitiously recorded tapes. Gotti and Frankie Loc had each already suffered through similar sessions.
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Did Flynn wear a wire?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/03/michael-flynn-plea-agreement-mueller-russia
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