A pint-sized Irish mob underling said he became John Gotti’s lucky charm after he fixed a jury for the mob Don and helped him become “Teflon.”
Mafia turncoat Kevin McMahon, 42, testified that he won his way into Gotti’s heart by taking down a juror’s license plate number during the Gambino leader’s 1986 assault trial, which ended in an acquittal.
After that, Gotti started calling on McMahon whenever he went to play cards.
“He said I brought him luck, but he never won anyway,” McMahon said yesterday as he testified against a top Gotti henchman, Charles Carneglia.
McMahon, who stands just a shade over 5 feet, also said Gotti would appropriately take him along for rides on a boat he named “Not Guilty.”
“I would go out on the boat and sit behind him,” said McMahon, who admitted attempting to fix juries for three other Gambino wiseguys, including Gotti’s brother Gene.
Gotti won two more acquittals before he was convicted of racketeering charges in 1992. He died in 2002 from throat cancer.
McMahon said his cozy relationship with Gotti was a major change from how it started in 1980, when the mob boss partly blamed him for the death of his young son Frank
“I don’t think he liked me,” McMahon said and explained how Frank was struck by a neighbor’s car as he rode a mini-bike that McMahon had just been using. “Everyone thought [the bike] was mine.”
McMahon – who was “adopted” by Carneglia’s family when he was a 12-year-old and considers the Gambino soldier an “uncle” – fingered him in five murders.
The witness said he was present for two of the slayings, including the hit that earned Carneglia, 62, his membership into mob – the October 1990 murder of wiseguy Louis DiBono.
Besides killing, Carneglia’s other main use to the mob family was his skill at getting rid of corpses in an East New York barn that he called the “body shop.”
When John Favara, the man who accidentally killed Gotti’s son, was murdered for his blunder, Carneglia “dissolved” the body and then threw some bones into a fellow wiseguy’s soup as proof, McMahon testified.
Brooklyn federal court Judge Jack Weinstein ruled before the trial that prosecutors and witnesses were barred from alluding to Carneglia’s penchant for disposing of bodies in vats of acid.
McMahon also testified about Carneglia shooting then pistol-whipping an armored-car driver, José Delgado-Rivera, during a heist at JFK Airport in December 1990.