In the World

by Richard Stratton

  To those who are close to John Junior, there is another, private side of the man that is in stark contrast to the street thug described in witness testimony and that bears little resemblance to his father’s public reputation as a brutal killer. Defense attorney Jeff Lichtman was a longtime member of the Gotti inner circle until he quit the defense team, which Junior saw as a betrayal. Lichtman tells me that when he first met Gotti Junior in the law offices of Michael Kennedy, John struck him as, “intimidating, sullen, a wild animal.” But when they met again six years later, after Lichtman had gone to work for alleged Gambino house counsel Gerry Shargel, who represented Gotti Senior, Lichtman found he and Junior had a shared interest in and sympathy for the plight of Native Americans. In particular, they were both fascinated by the life of Sitting Bull and the Battle of Little Big Horn.

  Junior, according to Lichtman, has a sensitivity he found likable. “We hit it off. Gotti would plop down in a chair, and we would talk for hours. We talked about boxing. Sports—and family. I found him intelligent, caring; he would ask a lot of questions. He was introspective. Human. Sensitive . . . even warm, especially when he talked about his family. We bonded over a love for our kids. John did not want to take a plea [to the 1997 racketeering case]. He was practically crying, talking about how much he loved his kids, and how he wanted to be there for them when they were young.”

  Lichtman says he and John Junior had similar relationships with their fathers, who were not around when they were boys growing up. They both wanted to stay close to their children and experience the joys and trials of fatherhood while hopefully setting a good example. “He changed his kids’ diapers,” Lichtman tells me. “All he cared about was his kids. He would insist on calling in to parent/teacher conferences from prison. I loved the guy.”

  The tragic inevitability in John Gotti Junior’s life is that he was destined to become who he is and end up on trial for his life. How does a young man grow up in the shadow of this ubergangster—named for him, following him around as a young boy, and watching adoring fans and sycophants fall all over themselves to be around him—and not want to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a gangster like his dad? You either renounce your father and his life—a virtual impossibility—or you embrace it.

  “You’ve got to understand what it’s like to live in these neighborhoods,” the wife of a friend who comes from a mob-infested Brooklyn neighborhood tells me. “You don’t think about the police or politicians when it comes to who is running things. You don’t even know who they are. What you know is the local Mafia guys. Everyone knows who they are, and everyone accepts it.”

  Fathers and sons. Two boys brought up by the same dad, and one may become a crook, the other a man of God, as in the family of Genovese boss Vincent “Chin” Gigante, whose brother is a priest. Or as in the Bulger family, where one son becomes the president of the Massachusetts State Senate and the other a killer and FBI informant. John Junior has a younger brother, Peter Gotti, who is not involved in organized crime. Peter bonded with his father watching professional sports on TV. “Who do you like in the Giants game?” Senior would ask the boy. Then he would place his son’s bets along with his own. Peter became a compulsive gambler like his father.

  There was another Gotti son, known as Frankie Boy, who was run over by a car and killed while out riding on a friend’s minibike. Frankie was just twelve years old when he died. He was the favorite son: a good student, an athlete, and he had an outgoing and engaging personality. Gotti was devastated by the death of his middle son, and Victoria never got over it. John Junior changed as well after Frankie was killed. According to his brother, Peter, John Junior became hardened and distant.

  John Favara, the neighbor who ran over Frankie, did not attempt to show any remorse. He didn’t bother to have his car repaired but kept it as a visual reminder of the accident. He had outdoor parties in his yard adjoining the Gotti’s backyard within days of the boy’s death. Victoria had to be heavily sedated for weeks. One night she was found trying to break down the door of the funeral home where her boy was lying in his coffin. She said Frankie Boy was cold and she had brought him a blanket. She showed up at Favara’s door with a baseball bat and gave the neighbor a hospital beating. After he was released from the hospital, Favara put his home up for sale. But a few days before he was to sell his home and move, he disappeared. Witnesses would later claim Favara was whacked over the head with a two-by-four and thrown into the rear of a van, never to be seen again. Gotti Senior had an alibi: he was vacationing with his wife in Florida at the time Favara vanished. FBI informants said Gotti ordered his men to keep Favara alive until he returned so he could personally cut him to pieces with a chainsaw.

  But vengeance would not bring the Gottis peace. Each year on the anniversary of Frankie’s death, an announcement runs in the Daily News: Frank: The pain of losing you never leaves our heart. Loving you, missing you always, and always hurting. Years after his son was killed, as John Senior was followed by FBI agents on what became a weekend ritual outing to the graveyard where Frankie was buried, they watched as Gotti placed a bouquet of red roses at Frankie’s headstone. Gotti sat staring at his son’s grave for half an hour, quietly talking to himself . . . or to his dead boy’s spirit.

  Once the reign of Gotti Senior ended, and when the father died and John Junior went on trial, the Gotti regime had changed the face not only of the Gambino Crime family but also of the modern American Mafia in New York City. Between them, Gotti Senior and Gotti Junior broke all the long-held rules of the secret society. They tore the mask off the hidden visage of the Men of Honor. Senior was a celebrity gangster who basked in the limelight and who thrust his son into the life. Junior, caught in the harsh glare of his father’s infamy, tried to take a bow and leave the stage. Rats lined up on deck ready to leap from the sinking Gotti ship into the welcoming arms of the FBI. Their testimony would forever blaspheme the criminal brotherhood. John Junior balked. Whether he was afraid or incompetent, whether he was brave and determined, he made it clear that he did not want to be his father, he did not want to be the Godfather. He wanted to be a father to his children.

  Whatever John Gotti Senior might have thought of his namesake for violating his Cosa Nostra blood oath—first by admitting there was such an organization, and that he was a member, and, finally, by the traitorous blasphemy, as far as the elder Gotti was concerned, of renouncing his Mafia membership—whether he loved or hated his son for what he had done, the old don may twist and turn in his grave for eternity with one guilty certainty: John Junior was the better man. He may have followed his father’s example, but only up to a point. He would come to defy him. He would renounce the treacherous criminal life his father embraced. He would become his own man, a father to children, uncle to his nephews and nieces—the engaged, loving father that he never had.

  FURTHERMORE, THE GOTTI defense will claim, there is evidence to prove John Junior’s withdrawal defense. Yes, Charlie Carnesi says, there is actual, physical proof of John’s claim that he quit the Mafia and stepped down from his role as Gambino acting boss. And the evidence will prove that he did it with his father’s approval.

  Throughout the trial, when the jury is not present, and after the prosecution witnesses have testified, I keep hearing statements and argument from both the prosecutors and the defense lawyers concerning a videotape that recorded a final visit between father and son while John Senior was at the Federal Medical Center in Springfield, Missouri, being treated for the cancer that would ultimately kill him. Both sides request the court’s permission to enter specific portions of the videotape, along with transcripts, as evidence to prove their opposing positions.

  The tape was made in 1998 while John Junior, who was also in custody, was awaiting trial in New York. A federal judge granted John a special visit with his father to seek Senior’s permission to plead guilty to the outstanding racketeering charges for an agreed-upon sentence of ten years rather than risk going to trial and receiving a cer
tain life sentence if convicted. This, according to the government’s theory, is proof that John Junior was the acting boss of the Gambino Crime Family—it’s clear in the interplay between father and son—and that in his position as acting boss, John takes his orders directly from his father.

  Yes, the defense agrees: the tape establishes John Junior’s leadership position in the crime family, which Gotti Junior does not dispute. But the defense maintains that the tape also proves Gotti’s contention that he went to his father specifically to ask for his permission not only to plead guilty to the indictment but also to ask his father to release him from his vow, to give him leave to quit the crime family, to withdraw from his role as the acting boss and, in John Junior’s words heard on the tape, to get “closure” and to “move on with my life,” which the defense argues is John Junior specifically asking for his father’s permission to quit the crime family.

  The judge must decide whether or not to admit the tape and, if so, which parts will be played for the jury.

  Really? There is a tape of this singular meeting between a father and son—but not just any father, the godfather, John Gotti, and his first-born son, his successor to the position of boss of the Gambino Crime Family? Where is it? Who has this tape? How can I see it?

  When I ask the defense attorneys, they say no, they do not have the tape. They assume that the government must have it since they keep bringing it up. The actual physical existence of the tape seems to be of less importance to the litigants than the arguments concerning its content and admissibility.

  In keeping with my documentary filmmaker’s maxim to always go for the videotape, to at least try to get ahold of whatever actual footage that might exist in any given story I am working on, on a whim, I go down to the clerk’s office on the ground floor of the courthouse, and I ask one of the staff for the Gotti tape.

  “Who are you?” the young man inquires. I say something to the effect that I am “with the lawyers,” which is partially true as I have only just left them upstairs in the lawyer’s conference room, and I mention that I am, “covering the trial.”

  I must appear believable because once again the gods of documentary filmmaking smile upon me. The man goes and gets the videocassette tape; he hands it to me without so much as asking for my name, asking me to show identification, or asking me to sign a release to record who I am and that I have received what turns out to be the only copy of the tape in existence.

  This has become an uncanny boon: first there was the Mike Tyson Junior Olympics footage; then the Troy Kell prison murder surveillance tape; and now this, Gotti father and son. Part of me is inclined to flee from the courthouse before the clerk realizes what he has done. Instead, I go back upstairs to the lawyer’s conference room where Gotti’s attorneys are still meeting. John Junior has been returned to his cell in the MCC.

  “I have the tape,” I tell them.

  “What tape?” they ask.

  “What tape? The tape you guys have been arguing about with the government for the past several days.”

  “You have it?”

  “Yes,” I say and show them the videocassette.

  Then, before anyone can inquire how I got it and what I intend to do with it, and perhaps even demand I hand it over, I put the tape back in my bag, turn, and leave the courthouse.

  What can I say? These things happen. My motto is “Go for the tape.” You never know; sometimes you get lucky.

  THIS TIME, AS with the Troy Kell prison murder tape, as soon as I watch the video, I know that I have something unique, something journalists, magazine editors, and TV executives covet, and something readers and viewers would otherwise never have an opportunity to see or to learn about. This is the goods, the real stuff of insider storytelling. It is a look into a room in a prison where an intimate, private father-son meeting takes place, and it allows viewers to eavesdrop on an emotional conversation between a proud, dying Mafia godfather and his heir-apparent son. To me, watching the tape, it is like something out of Shakespeare. John Junior is Hamlet—to be or not to be a gangster. He meets Julius Caesar, his proud, doomed emperor warrior father, who has been betrayed by his Brutus, Sammy Gravano, and who knows that his empire is in peril, entrusted to his reluctant heir, and besieged by enemy forces. It is a ninety-minute visit duly recorded by the Bureau of Prisons, and it is the last time these two men will ever see each other. The bureau recorded all of Gotti Senior’s visits with his family and friends, even visits with his attorneys, although to do this is specifically forbidden by law as a violation of attorney/client privilege. You can only get away with doing it when the defendant’s name is Gotti.

  The Gotti father-son tape, an hour and a half of extraordinary, intense, and emotional conversation between a dying father and his deeply conflicted, emotionally devastated son, is not only proof to me of John Junior’s innocence and corroboration of his claim to have quit the Mafia; it is also striking evidence of the courage I know it must have taken for John to go to his father and ask his permission to essentially disclaim and repudiate everything his father stood for and believed in. It is true-life Mafia drama at the highest levels in a universal, intimate relationship any father or son can relate to and hope to understand. And the jury will never see it—at least not during the trial.

  A frail, sick, but still proud and ramrod erect Gotti Senior shuffles on camera draped in chains, shackled, handcuffed, and surrounded by prison guards. He meets his son, John Junior, who wears a sports coat and looks like a supplicant bowed under the heavy weight of his request. The men approach the prison captain, who is accompanied by two FBI agents. The agents say they have been sent to observe the meeting. Really? “Well,” Gotti Senior looks at his son and says, “I love you, John, and as glad as I am to see you, it’s not going to happen.” To the guards he says, “Take me back to my cell.” Gotti refuses to sit in the room with FBI agents present. The captain intercedes. He says that the visit was ordered by a federal judge, he has the court order, and nowhere in the order does it say that the FBI is to be present during the visit. He tells the agents they must leave, and he orders the visit to proceed.

  Father and son take seats across from each other at a long table in the prison conference room. A prison official is present to operate the single video camera on a tripod offering a stationary two-shot and affording poor quality audio that it will take several viewings to fully transcribe. John Junior is a bodybuilder, but despite his obvious physical size he appears diminished in the presence of his father. He slumps in his seat, looks up to and up at his father. Gotti Senior is a wraith of his former self. He’s not so much lean as he is physically wasted, clearly ravaged by the disease eating away at his once handsome face. And yet he appears unbowed, sitting up straight, leaning into his son, and in full command, ever the boss, ever in control. He has a sheaf of court papers he brought into the room with him, as well as some paper napkins he uses to blow and wipe his nose of the drainage from his disease.

  John Junior winces when he sees how the cancer has disfigured his father; he wipes away the tears from his eyes. Senior jokes about it. He says that the doctors removed a chunk of his chest and attached the flesh to his face and neck where they had removed the cancerous tissue.

  “You mean they took the skin?” Junior asks.

  “They took the meat,” Senior tells him.

  He turns to the camera operator and says, “I just wanna show him the scar.”

  Senior rips open his jumpsuit to show his boy where the doctors removed a slab of his pectoral flesh and stuck it to his face.

  Senior jokes, “Yeah, I told your mother, I don’t even have tits, and they gave me a mastectomy.”

  Now I see why the defense attorneys sought to have the entire tape played for the jury. It is no help to the government’s case, not at all. Indeed, it supports John Junior’s claim that he quit the crime family with his father’s blessing. Watching the meeting between these two men and listening to the conversation, however difficult to understand
at times, it is clear that John Junior did ask for his father’s permission to plead guilty so that he could, in his words, “have closure . . . and give the government their pound of flesh,” do some time and live to make it out of prison in time to once again become an active, free man and personally involved father to his own kids and his father’s many grandchildren. At first, Senior demands of his son, “Where’s your dignity, John? Where’s your manhood?” He says, “Closure? That’s a word for overeducated and underintelligent motherfuckers.” But then, about three-quarters of the way through the meeting, there is an amazing moment, a kind of transformation as the godfather changes and becomes a father. Gotti Senior looks at John Junior and sees his son for who he is: a man who has found his dignity and his manhood not in being a crime boss but in being a husband to his wife and a father to his children. Senior tells him, “There’s nothing in the world, no one in the world I love more than you, John.”

  John Junior replies, “I’m not one tenth the man that you are.”

  Senior says, “No, John, when it comes to being a father and a husband, you’re ten times the man I am.” He appears to have given up.

  But Gotti Senior did not rise to become the boss of the Gambino Crime Family and Boss of All Bosses by chance or simply by force, nor even by acquiescing to the will of others. The man is a master manipulator, and a brilliant negotiator. He has a physical presence that cannot be denied, even as he is a disfigured ghost of his former self. He killed and connived his way to the top of the mob. He broke all the rules, including the ultimatum that a boss is beyond reproach, and certainly must never be murdered by his own men. And Gotti’s ability to control other men, not excluding his own son, comes through over the course of the meeting in such a way that by the time he has given John Junior his permission to plead guilty to the government’s charges against him, even to move on with his life, Senior manages through sheer egoism, by relating everything that happens in the world to him and to his view of how things must and should be done, to turn it all around. By giving in, by giving John Junior what he asks for, what he thinks he wants, he causes his son to question his motives, question the very idea of who he is, and finally to change his mind.