His Grandeur Was a Delusion

Jimmy Breslin

June 11, 2002

"Do you know what this is?" one of the other hoodlums in the car said.

"No, why should I?" Eris Blount said.

"This is Gotti's neighborhood."

"Who?"

"Gotti."

"Don't mean nothin' to me," Eris Blount said.

He was 21 and came out of East New York and he cared about nothing. He was the closest thing to David Berkowitz we had in the city. He raped and robbed and murdered all over. He got into a group home for the blind in Brooklyn and beat every one of them and walked out with electronics. He raped and killed a woman named Kaminaw in Flushing. Who knows what else he did. He was blank and pitiless.

Now he and the two others got out of the car and began to stalk through the street, 104th Street just off 101st Avenue in Ozone Park.

At that time they had a safety motto in the city, "Leave a Light On, Stop a Thief."

Blount and his crew went behind the houses and looked into each one that had a light on. Seeing helps a criminal.

Blount was a half block down from 101st Avenue, whose sidewalks supposedly were owned by Gotti. Included was the red-brick front of the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club. When Gotti walked in each day, he glanced at the newspapers on the round table where they drank coffee and played cards. When he would not see his name or picture in the papers he would go into the back, sit in his barber chair and go on tirades.

Later, Gotti would drive to Mulberry Street, where he would sit in the Ravenite Club, also with a brick storefront, and tell himself that he ruled the world. He talked so much that the agents listening to the live talk and to the tapes wilted in their headphones. He pretended to rule the world.

To his rooters and accomplices on 101st Avenue, Gotti's presence in the neighborhood meant ultimate safety. "You don't only walk safely on the streets around here," they always said. "You can sleep on them."

Eris Blount, who could care less about John Gotti, saw one house that he liked. He and the others crashed through the back door and got inside where an elderly couple, the Albergas, were watching TV. They had two sons who were retired detectives.

Eris Blount skinned them alive, the medical examiner said later. He did this to make them scream out where they had money. Then he shot their remains.

One night shortly after this, Blount came marauding into the supposedly safe Gotti neighborhood and broke into a house only a couple of doors up. There was another elderly couple. Blount threw a shot into the ceiling to scare them. Then he beat the husband on the head with the gun. He tied up the man and wife and took whatever cash was there.

For some reason, a whim, Blount did not kill the couple.

The woman said her husband never was right after the beating. She said that at his wake.

In those days, there was no DNA. But in going over the Albergas' house they came on a palm print on the back door. It matched Blount's prints from an early arrest.

My friend Bill Clark made the arrest. It is startling how often we run into each other in life now and in stories from then.

He is the producer of "NYPD Blue." But once, he was a detective in Queens assigned to the case of Howard Beach youths chasing one black to his death on the Belt Parkway and beating two others at a pizza stand on Cross Bay Boulevard. Clark was driving one young guy around Howard Beach.

"That's Jason's house," the young guy said. "That's where Billy lives." They came up to a corner. "And that's Mister Gotti's house."

Clark writhed and snorted. He had been up since 5 a.m. and at day's end he was going to the Old Stand on Third Avenue in Manhattan to work until 1 a.m. or so as a doorman. Here was a kid extolling a guy, Gotti, who never had worked in his life.

And yesterday, remembering Eris Blount, who made so much of Gotti's power a fable, Bill Clark was saying, "I asked him if he knew he was murdering people at Gotti's doorstep.

"He said, 'Tell Gotti he be hidin' behind his door.'"