If the government rats are to be believed, John Junior imitated his father in another aspect as well: he made a fortune through the sale of illegal drugs. It has long been a popular myth that the Mafia does not deal in narcotics. The reality is, as the government’s star witness, John Alite testifies, three-quarters of the wiseguys have got a hand in the dope business, and half of them are using drugs. Alite puts it this way: “As far as the world was concerned, we didn’t deal cocaine. We’re not in the drug business. We are in the drug business, but we’re not in the drug business.” In other words, “Don’t get caught.” As Sonny Corleone opined in The Godfather when the Don demurred over getting into the junk business, “There’s money in that white powder.” And the mob is all about one thing over all else: money—just like corporate America, the biggest drug dealers of them all. Respect, honor, omertà: all have a price tag.
John Gotti Senior ran afoul of the Gambino Family leadership in the mid-1980s when it became known in mob and FBI circles that the Gotti crew, through Senior’s trusted lieutenant and boyhood pal, Angelo Ruggiero, known as “Quack Quack” for his relentless chatter, in partnership with Gotti’s brother, Gene, were generating millions for the family in the heroin business. The FBI had tapes of Ruggiero discussing countless junk deals over the phone from his Long Island home. After a series of high-profile busts of Gotti lieutenants on narcotics charges, the “charade,” as Junior’s main accuser John Alite describes the mob’s prohibition of drug dealing, was debunked. Paul Castellano, Carlo Gambino’s brother-in-law, who had assumed leadership of the crime family (and who also received millions in drug profits from a crew of Sicilian junk dealers paying tribute to the boss) demanded to see transcripts of the Ruggiero tapes. To be implicated in heroin transactions would have meant a death sentence for Ruggiero, and probably for John Gotti as well. Castellano would be pleased to find any excuse to have Gotti killed. The powerful upstart capo already represented a threat to Castellano’s leadership. Then, in December of 1985 in a preemptive strike, Castellano and his bodyguard, Thomas Bilotti, were shot and killed outside Sparks Steak House in Manhattan. The daring, classic mob hit in broad daylight during the Christmas season was brilliantly planned and coordinated by Gotti and Sammy “the Bull” Gravano. Gotti Senior became the new Gambino godfather and Boss of Bosses.
Growing up, Junior Gotti idolized his father. In her book, This Family of Mine, Victoria says Gotti Senior was a tough but adored dad who was often either in prison or in the headlines. When a gang of local kids attacked Junior with baseball bats, John Senior beat three of them to a pulp, and forced the others to beg for their lives. He then ordered his son to fight each of his attackers one-on-one to regain his honor.
“My father on the street made you want to be part of it, because he was that kind of guy,” Victoria Gotti writes. Gotti Junior said, in a conversation recorded in a prison visiting room, “You had to be part of it. You wanted to be as close as possible to him. The only way was by being that. You wanted to be in it.”
“Mob fathers almost never want to involve their sons,” Sonny Grosso (no relation to murder victim George Grosso) tells me over dinner at Rao’s, the famous mob restaurant and hangout in East Harlem. “But it’s almost impossible to keep them out. Sons look for their fathers’ approval.”
BY ALL ACCOUNTS, John Gotti Senior was different. He gloried in “the life,” as those who live in it refer to the Mafia milieu. He broke with Mafia custom and upset mob traditionalists like Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, boss of the powerful Genovese Crime Family, by publicly flaunting his wealth and criminal status, and by shepherding his son into the secret society. While John Gotti Senior angered his peers and put a target on his back for law enforcement agents, he became a folk hero to a gangster-adoring public. He was cheered and feted at block parties in Queens and Brooklyn neighborhoods to celebrate his acquittals on state and federal charges. Movie stars and sports celebrities sought Gotti’s company when he held court at Manhattan’s best restaurants. Anthony Quinn and Mickey Rourke made guest appearances at his trials. His face graced the cover of Time magazine in a portrait by Andy Warhol. Surrounded by his entourage of eight bodyguards, drivers, and button men, gleaming for the paparazzi, a cocky Gotti Senior reveled in his role as Mafia godfather. John Junior, standing on the sidelines, could not help but be impressed.
There was another side of Gotti Senior that few but his closest intimates, criminal underlings, and FBI agents got to see. “He was a sucker,” a mob bookmaker tells me. “A degenerate gambler. And a tyrant. He squeezed everybody around him for money, then blew millions on stupid bets.” On FBI tapes, Gotti Senior was revealed as a foul-mouthed dictator with an explosive temper and scatological sense of humor. He ordered the killing of Gambino soldier Louis DiBono for the crime of not coming in to report. “You know why he’s dying?” Gotti Senior asked his underboss, Sammy Gravano, in a conversation secretly recorded by the FBI. “He’s going to die because he refused to come in when I called. He didn’t do nothing else wrong.” According to John Alite, Gotti Senior gave responsibility for carrying out the hit on DiBono to his son, John Junior.
Senior was a tyrant at home as well. On the witness stand John Alite tells of Senior Gotti raving at his son about how he should treat his friends. “Fuck your friends!” the father yelled. “Use them and abuse them!” Gotti Senior had not noticed Alite camped out on the living room sofa. “Oh,” he said when he saw him, “I didn’t know you were here.”
Caught on tape complaining about FBI wiretaps after the feds bugged Angelo Ruggiero’s house, Gotti Senior joked, “You know how they invade your privacy. You hear a baby crying, your wife crying. You say, ‘It could be my house, my baby, my wife.’ Where the fuck are we going? Maybe you wanna throw a fart in the bathroom, you hear it in open court. They hear you farting. Like that poor fuckin’ ‘Frank the Wop.’ His phone was in the bathroom. He’s takin’ a shit, and he’s talking. That’s a fuckin’ shame. . . . Then he goes, Phphphhh! Bing! He said, ‘I feel better now. I couldn’t move.’” Gravano cracked up. Gotti too was laughing, clapping his hands. “In open fuckin’ courtroom. Madonna!” he went on. “You gotta get a heart attack.”
The boss might have had a heart attack if he had known the feds were listening in and busting a gut laughing.
Gotti Senior was a notorious womanizer who spent long hours at Manhattan nightspots like Regine’s sipping Rémy Martins with his various high-profile mistresses. He fathered a child with girlfriend Sandy Grillo, the common-law wife of a wiseguy, thus disdaining Cosa Nostra’s strict prohibition against consorting with another made member’s woman.
In time, John Gotti Senior became enamored of his own myth and began to see himself as invulnerable to the onslaught of criminal investigations swirling around him. He seemed to set himself up for his own fall, allowing himself to be captured on an FBI bug in an apartment above his headquarters at the Ravenite Social Club as he discussed a mounting body count and bad-mouthed his vicious underboss, Sammy Gravano.
In 1991, both Gravano and Gotti Senior were in custody, locked up in the maximum-security unit on the ninth floor of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Manhattan—the same federal lockup where John Junior resided during his trial. The two most feared and powerful gangsters in the world were awaiting court dates on a massive racketeering case that detailed thirteen counts of murder, including the brazen hit on Paul Castellano. Gravano soon flipped on his boss after FBI agents showed him transcripts of the Ravenite tapes. Gotti was caught on the wire calling Gravano a “mad dog killer,” criticizing him for being too greedy and creating a “family within a family.” Convinced Gotti’s defense strategy was to heap blame for the killings on him while Gotti portrayed himself as a peace-loving boss, and because he couldn’t stand doing time in jail, Gravano made a deal with prosecutors. He pled guilty to a single count of racketeering, admitted responsibility for nineteen murders, and took the stand to betray his oath and summon the Gotti curse. Both the father
’s and the son’s most trusted brothers in blood would stab them in the back. For his testimony against Gotti, Gravano’s admitted nineteen homicides were forgiven. He was sentenced to five years, and back out on the street in less than two years.
TWO YEARS AFTER John Junior became a made member of the Gambino Crime Family in 1990, he was elevated to the level of captain. In 1992, soon after his father was locked up for good, Junior was promoted again. His father anointed him acting boss. It was an all-too-swift rise to the top of the underworld. Mafiosi both inside and outside the Gambino Family questioned the wisdom of naming Junior, only twenty-eight at the time, boss of what was then the most powerful Mafia family in the country. Even Junior would later claim he was unprepared to lead the crime family. An old Mafia saying has it that “the Family is only as strong as its boss.” The elder John Gotti, cognoscenti maintained, had demoralized the Gambino crews by imposing his son as a surrogate boss.
Sometime after taking over the family, John Gotti Junior began to change his image. He started wearing expensive business suits in place of the warm-up suits. He donned a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. He would come to appear more as a distinguished, thoughtful, and businesslike version of his father. In 1990, Gotti married Kim Albanese in the most lavish Mafia wedding of all time. Wiseguys, mob associates, and their wives and families from around the country were in attendance. At the reception held in the Helmsley Palace in Manhattan, each of the five New York families and the New Jersey branch had their own tables. The newlyweds moved into a six-bedroom Colonial mansion on three acres of rolling hills in Mill Neck, an exclusive community on the North Shore of Long Island and began to grow their young family. In 1997, during a search of one of Junior Gotti’s properties, FBI agents found over $300,000 in cash and a typed list of the made Mafia members who had attended Junior’s wedding with the dollar amounts of their gifts. News of the discovery enraged imprisoned Gotti Senior and earned Junior the moniker “Dumbfella” in New York tabloids.
But Carnesi tells the jury that the Mafia life is over and done with for John Junior, and it has been over for many years. He tells the jury that in 1998 John visited his father in prison to seek his permission to plead guilty to federal racketeering charges of bribery, extortion, gambling, and fraud. According to Carnesi, Gotti Senior reluctantly gave his son permission to take the plea and withdraw from the family, even while maintaining that it was something he himself would never do. Gotti Junior was sentenced to serve seventy-seven months in prison. His father died while John Junior was still locked up.
Then, just days before Gotti Junior was to be released in 2005, the government hit him with a new indictment. This is a favorite government tactic, exactly what they did to FBI agent John Connolly. If they can’t break you the first time around, they wait until you are about to be released, and then bring a whole new set of charges in hopes of getting you to surrender. Again, Junior was charged with a pattern of racketeering, and the prosecutors added a new count to the indictment to allege that Gotti had ordered the 1992 kidnapping and beating of Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa. A popular radio talk show host, Sliwa had infuriated the Gottis by calling John Senior “Public Enemy Number One” and repeatedly denigrating the powerful crime boss on his morning radio show.
Jeffrey Lichtman, then a rising star of the Manhattan criminal defense bar and most recently appearing as Mexican drug lord El Chapo’s lawyer, represented John Junior at his first trial in 2004. Lichtman eviscerated Sliwa on the witness stand with a vicious cross-examination. Sliwa admitted he concocted multiple stories of having been attacked in the past and fed them to the press to gain sympathy for himself and the Guardian Angels. Sliwa also confessed to being “addicted to publicity.” Lichtman so discredited Sliwa’s testimony that by the time of Junior’s trial in 2009, the government thought better of recalling him to the stand.
Lichtman secured the first in the series of mistrials by presenting the novel defense that Junior Gotti had formally withdrawn from organized crime. Gotti’s withdrawal defense, what is known as an “affirmative defense,” contends that, yes, the defendant, John Gotti Junior, was a made member of the Gambino Crime Family, indeed he became acting boss of the family after his father was sent to prison. But he pled guilty to those charges; he went to prison, where he renounced his position as boss, and severed all his connections to organized crime while serving his six-and-a-half-year sentence. He quit the mob and became, in his words, “a civilian.”
The government counters with the argument that the withdrawal defense is no more than convenient fiction concocted by Gotti and fronted by his lawyers. The prosecutors and government agents maintain that it is not possible for Gotti Junior to have quit the Mafia, as he contends. Nor can a made member withdraw and become a civilian because it is not allowed under penalty of death. Haven’t you seen The Godfather? Of course, we all know after having seen Coppola’s masterpiece that once you are sworn into Cosa Nostra that’s it; it’s a blood oath, you are a made man and a member for life. The only way out is death. Or you become a government rat, you join Team America, debrief, and testify against other organized crime figures for the government, like Sammy Gravano—and then spend the rest of your unhappy life in the Witness Protection Program. Furthermore, the prosecution maintains, with regard to the present indictment, Gotti’s withdrawal defense is null and void since there is no statute of limitations for murder or conspiracy to murder.
But wait a minute: First of all, who says you can’t quit the Mafia besides novelists, filmmakers, snitches, and government agents? That may be true in the movies or on TV, but in real life we’ve seen it done before. Sonny Franzese’s son Michael quit, as did Joe Bonanno’s son, and neither of them were killed as a result. Bonanno Senior, like Gotti Senior, was a boss when his son decided to quit. Still, it is difficult to imagine that the son of John Gotti, first-born son of the charismatic don of the most powerful crime family in the country—the man who famously proclaimed, “Cosa Nostra forever!”—would be allowed to leave the life his father embodied even if he wanted to.
The Boss of Bosses, Gotti Senior died a slow and agonizing death, locked up in solitary confinement for over ten years to pay for his sins. Gotti Senior never wavered from his position as a staunch and resolute defender of, and a believer in, “the life” of organized crime. It was what defined him as a man. He accepted his punishment and never complained of the unduly harsh treatment he received. Whatever else he may or may not have been, Gotti Senior was no hypocrite, and he was no rat. To imagine that John Senior would ever consent to allowing his son to renounce his position as his father’s stand-in, to break his vow of omertà, and to give up his claim to rule the Gambino Crime Family through his son—no, that is unthinkable. Although I have taken the assignment to cover the trial, I am far from convinced of John Junior’s defense—until I hear all the evidence.
“THIS IS A case about fathers and sons,” defense attorney Jeffrey Lichtman told the jury in his opening statement at the 2005 John Gotti Junior racketeering trial. “One son, my client, John Gotti, wants to reverse and forever rewrite his father’s legacy, and another set of sons, the government’s cooperating witnesses who are following in the bloody footsteps of their Mafia father, the most famous turncoat in history, Sammy ‘the Bull’ Gravano.
“The relationship between fathers and sons is something that has been examined for as long as there have been fathers and sons on this earth,” Lichtman continued. “Anyone who has ever been a son can tell you they want to please their fathers, earn their approval. Sometimes a son will do anything just to be around his father, to be accepted by him. When your father is John Gotti, the flamboyant Mafia boss that everyone wants to be around, the oversized personality everyone wants to touch, it is even harder to get a minute with him let alone have any father-son moments that kids want.
“You will learn when John had these moments, they weren’t at the Yankee games, they were not in the park on a Sunday afternoon, they weren’t spent on a boat f
ishing on a lake. Instead, they were in social clubs surrounded by wiseguys where Mafia talk and criminal activity was all around. You will learn most of the time John’s father wasn’t even around to take him to any place or spend any of these quality moments with him. He was taken around by his uncles because his father was in prison most of the time. None of you could possibly know that. When you hear the name Gotti, you just shut off. It is normal. When you hear the name Trump, you think of money. When you hear the name Gotti, you think of crime.”
As argued by Jeff Lichtman, the withdrawal defense worked well enough to cause Gotti three mistrials after juries became hopelessly deadlocked. For the fourth trial, the government has brought new charges, including murders that were not charged previously and are not protected by the statute of limitations, and they have a new star witness, John Alite, who they unearthed from a Brazilian jail. The prosecutors also managed to get the case transferred to a male judge after Gotti’s previous trial judge, United States District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin was believed to have been too accommodating to the defense.
“The defendant has killed with his own hands,” Assistant United States Attorney Honig declares in his opening statement to the jury. Honig tells us that government witnesses will testify that Junior Gotti stabbed to death a kid named Danny Silva, nicknamed Elf, in a senseless barroom brawl at a Queens pub called the Silver Fox. The killing took place in 1983 when Gotti was just nineteen. Honig says that the jury will hear from government witnesses that after the Danny Silva murder, Gotti Junior bragged how now that he had killed, he had proven himself “capable,” and “a tough guy,” mob vernacular for being a killer, like his father.
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