In the World

by Richard Stratton

  “You know how I am, John,” Senior says. “When it comes to the government, I raise the black flag. Do you know what that means?”

  “The whole world knows what it means, dad,” Junior answers.

  “No,” Senior says, “it means you give no quarter. I kill you, or you kill me. That’s the end of the fucking story. They could accuse me of robbing a church, I could have the steeple stickin’ out of my ass, and I’m gonna deny it.”

  “I’d follow you off a cliff,” John Junior says. He’s in tears now.

  “No, that’s not right,” his father tells him. “You’re your own man, John.”

  The boy is so in awe of his father, so in love with the man, that even to get from him what he came for in the first place undercuts his resolve. He doesn’t want to win at his father’s expense. All Junior ever wanted was to be loved and respected by this man. Senior says, do it, John, if that’s what you want to do. But he tells him that the government will never leave him alone. They will never accept it, never allow it—unless he beats them at trial. He is a Gotti. He is John Gotti Junior. And the fifteen hundred–plus extended family members, all those cousins and brothers-in-law and friends of friends and associates—subtle reference to the Gambino Crime Family members—and their families, their wives and children who depend on the family, what are they to do? What are they to think? Have you considered that, John? How, Senior asks in so many words—as indeed both men talk not so much in coded language, as the government would claim, but with words that have more than one meaning—how do you plan to deal with all of that, John? All of those extended family members out there to whom we have an obligation as men, men who have chosen a path and, as Senior believes and lives by and will die holding on to that belief, which is all he has left: the conviction that once a man chooses a path, once he decides on a way of life, he must see it through to the end no matter that he comes to understand the error of his ways, no matter that the path he has chosen leads to prison or to death. A man finishes the journey he sets out on, or he is not a man.

  John Junior says he disagrees. It may well be the one and only time in his life that John has ever questioned or disputed his father’s faith in Cosa Nostra and his concept of what it means to be a man of honor. No, John Junior says to his father; as a father himself, he believes that his first obligation is to his wife and children, to his blood nieces and nephews, to Senior’s grandchildren. “It’s about the kids,” he says. Who is going to be there to take care of the kids if he ends up like his father, doing the rest of his life in prison? Or dying in the street?

  Senior sits back in his seat, he rustles the court papers, he blows his nose on the napkins, he rants on about President Clinton getting a blowjob in the White House and denying it, how they are all a bunch of lying scumbags and he hates them all, how he could have been president himself if he had been born in different circumstances: “I didn’t choose this life,” he says, which hardly seems believable. “It was forced on me.” He’s losing ground, or so it seems, and, appearing to acquiesce, he gives his son his permission. He tells him, okay, do it, John, do whatever you decide; it’s your life. But make sure you get what you want out of the deal. Make sure you have your deal with the government set in stone because they will come for you again and again. You are a Gotti, and Gottis are not subject to the rules of fair play.

  It is mesmerizing to see the old mobster in action. No wonder he evoked such blind loyalty even when it was plain he was on a path that would lead to the destruction of the entire crime family. The guy is who he is, the force of his personality will not be denied, and it must be reckoned with. John Junior may have gone into the meeting with a plan, but in acquiescing to the plan, and releasing him from his position in the crime family, with a masterful stroke of what appears to be compromise, his father manages to cause John Junior to doubt his plan, and to question and reconsider everything he stands for. The kid is really in a quandary: To be or not to be a gangster, whether it is nobler to stay true to his doomed father’s way of life or to become his own man and a father to his children?

  John leaves the meeting with his father determined to go to trial. Then, sometime later, John tells me in one of our first interviews, he was in the backyard at his home in Mill Neck watching his kids play soccer. One of his young daughters sat on his lap and asked him about plans for her upcoming birthday party. “Will Pop Pop come to my party?” she asked her father, using the nickname the kids have for John Senior.

  “No,” John told her, “Pop Pop won’t be able to come.”

  “Why?” the girl asked. “Because he’s in that place?”

  “Yes,” John says. “Pop Pop loves you and he wants to come to your party . . . but he can’t.”

  The girl looked at her father and said, “Are you going to go to that place, too, Daddy? And then you won’t be able to come to my birthday parties?”

  That is when John Junior changed his plans yet again. He pled guilty. He went to prison, he served his time, seven years, and he was about to be released when he was indicted, went to trial three times, and now finds himself back in this courtroom facing his fourth verdict and a possible life sentence.

  THE DEFENSE RESTS. The lawyers give their closing arguments. Although the tape is never played for the jury, after they are sent out to deliberate, I leave the courtroom convinced there is enough dubious testimony from sleazy prosecution witnesses, along with enough evidence from the defense in taped visits and recorded telephone calls with Junior while he was in prison where he states emphatically his resolve to “move on with my life” and refuses to accept the role of Gambino boss upon his release from prison, to give credence to his claim of withdrawal, so that it looks likely that trial number four could result in an acquittal or another hung jury. No matter that Judge Castel excused one of the jurors and ordered the jury to go back to deliberate with an eleven-member panel over objections from the defense. (In an ironic note, the government cites my own case, United States v. Stratton et al. as precedent to allow for a verdict from eleven jurors when one of the jurors is excused for reasons having nothing to do with the case.)

  The jury comes back in and claims that they are unable to reach a verdict after more than two weeks and after several charges by the judge, known as Allen charges, ordering them to go back into the jury room and continue to deliberate. The Thanksgiving holiday looms. Finally, the jury foreman stands firm and declares that they are hopelessly deadlocked. The judge has no alternative but to declare yet another mistrial. The government prosecutor makes a startling admission that the government is unwilling to try Gotti again. He even places his hand on John’s shoulder and wishes him luck.

  John Junior leaves the courtroom and walks out from the courthouse and into the midst of a media blitz on the courthouse steps as a free man after ten years of trials, seven years of imprisonment, having forfeited millions of dollars in cash and property to the government, forsaking everything his father lived and died for, walking out now into the world to try to rebuild his life with a name that has become synonymous with organized crime.

  “How does it feel to be free?” one of the reporters asks Gotti.

  “I’m just looking forward to getting home to see my wife and kids,” John says.

  Over the several weeks of the trial, I met and became friendly with members of John’s family: his mother, Victoria, who clearly was every bit a loving mother devoted to her children and a force to be reckoned with as a fierce wife to a husband she fought bitterly over his decision to bring John Junior into the crime family. When I asked Victoria about how she reacted when she learned John had brought her son into the life, she told me she was enraged, she refused to speak to him on the phone or go visit him in prison for over two years. She told him she hoped he would rot in hell.

  “He told me he did it to protect him,” Victoria told me. “That—if they couldn’t get to him, they would go after John. But if he was . . . one of them,” Victoria shrugged and gave me a look, “it wouldn’
t be so easy.”

  She didn’t appear any more convinced by this Mafia reasoning than I was. We both knew that Senior broke his word to his wife and brought his son into the crime family because it meant more to him than anything else. That was the vow he took, to put his loyalty to the crime family before everything else, even his wife and kids.

  I met John’s sisters Angel and Victoria and his brother, Peter. We often ate lunch together in the courthouse cafeteria. They are a close-knit clan, and they adore Gotti Senior. Whatever else one might wish to say about John Gotti, he undoubtedly evoked powerful family ties. I met Senior briefly when we were both locked up in the Metropolitan Correctional Center. He was the only man I ever saw who looked good in a blaze-orange prison jumpsuit. Gotti was not only handsome, he not only had charisma, but he had something more—gangster élan. John had a personal style and easy sense of himself that came down somewhere between being the scariest, toughest guy you ever met and the most charming, the most fun to be around. He exuded confidence and a love of life. Most of the mob bosses I met and got to know over my years in MCC and other federal prisons were more like Joe Stassi: haunted, festering with contained rage and bitterness over their fate. Or they were sullen, trapped in the inescapable reality of where their lives of crime had brought them. John Gotti seemed to love being who he was; even prison could not dampen his enjoyment of being John Gotti, mob star.

  Once I learned about John Senior’s childhood from his wife and children, I began to understand how and why he became the man who would be a celebrity crime boss, the dapper don glorying in his extravagant wardrobe, and in love with his role as a Mafia prince who would become king.

  “Do you know why my husband had so many pairs of shoes?” John’s wife, Victoria, asked me one day. “Because when he was a boy growing up he sometimes had to go to school with two shoes from different pairs and both with holes in them. The kids would tease him and call him poor white trash.”

  John Senior was one of thirteen kids, eleven of whom survived, born to a loving mother and an abusive father who often disappeared for weeks at a time and gambled away most of the money he made at menial jobs or blew it on booze and other women. When John Senior, in talking to John Junior about his father—who was also named John Gotti (so, in fact, John Senior is a junior, and John Junior is a third)—Gotti called his father “a bum.” He regularly beat the kids when he returned home from one of his absences simply to let them know he was back: “a preemptive beating,” John Junior called it, just in case they were considering doing something wrong. He mellowed as he got older—or perhaps his tough son, who was a leader even as a boy, called “Crazy Horse” by his friends for his indomitable spirit, had intimidated his father into becoming less abusive. The children all said Gotti Senior’s father would have been locked up now for the way he abused John and his brothers and sisters.

  John Senior was on the street from his early teens in the tough Brownsville, East New York, neighborhood. The family moved from the tenements to church welfare housing while the father was off on one of his gambling and boozing binges. At one point John Senior was sleeping in a pool hall. Later, an African American family took him in. Soon he was a member of a street gang, the Fulton Rockaway Boys, and hanging out at the local social club running errands for the neighborhood boss, a Gambino lieutenant named Carmine Fatico. With his intelligence, his nerve, his ambition, his ferocious temper, and his charm, Gotti quickly distinguished himself. He killed a man, an Irish thug named McBratney who made the mistake of kidnapping the nephew of Gambino boss Carlo Gambino. Gambino paid the ransom, but instead of returning the nephew, McBratney and his cohorts killed him. Gotti, with his lifetime right-hand man, Angelo Ruggiero, and another Gambino associate located McBratney in a Staten Island barroom. They posed as police detectives and tried to get McBratney to leave the bar with them. McBratney refused to go, there was a struggle, and when things began to get out of hand, Gotti took out a gun and shot McBratney. Carlo Gambino hired Trump mentor and criminal defense attorney Roy Cohn to represent Gotti. Cohn managed to get Gotti a deal to plead to a lesser charge of manslaughter instead of homicide. John went to prison and did his time. When he got out, with Gambino’s blessing, Gotti was inducted as a made member of the family. He rose to the position where he was able to effect a coup within the Gambino Family by plotting and carrying out the audacious, dramatic hit on his predecessor, Paul Castellano.

  THE DAY AFTER the end of John Junior’s fourth and last trial, I am doing my morning workout routine when my cell phone rings.

  “Is this Richie Stratton?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is John Gotti.”

  I congratulate John on yet another hung jury and what appears to be a final victory. John thanks me and asks if I have the videocassette tape of his meeting with his father. I admit that I do. John says he would like to have it, as it was to be the last time he would see his father alive. I agree to give him the tape, which I have already had digitized, and ask if John will agree to let me interview him for my Playboy article. We meet, along with John’s lawyer, Charlie Carnesi, at a pizzeria on Long Island. The article, “Godfather and Son,” is published in the April 2010 issue of Playboy. It wins the 2011 New York Press Club Award for Crime Reporting.

  In a meeting in 2012 with executives Molly Thompson and Brad Abramson at A&E network, I pitch them a multipart documentary series based on the Gotti father-and-son story as told in the Playboy article.

  “Can you get John Junior to agree to go on camera?” they ask. I say I believe I can. John wants to tell his story. While Senior was still alive, it is doubtful John Junior would have gone on camera. But, after sitting mute in courtrooms for the past several years and listening to cooperating witnesses and FBI agents tell their versions of the Gotti story, John has much he wants to say that never came out in any of his trials. He has written and self-published a book, Shadow of My Father, and he wants to profess publically his decision to quit the Mafia and become a civilian in the hopes that even the FBI might come to believe him.

  What about the FBI? the executives ask. Will they cooperate? Well, let’s find out. My producing partner, Doug Biro, and I shoot a sample interview with John at his office in Oyster Bay, Long Island. Gotti strikes everyone who sees the interview as being not only articulate and intelligent but also empathetic and an engaging storyteller. If I can get the FBI to agree to come on board, A&E will greenlight the project.

  The docuseries for A&E is derailed once the Playboy article makes the rounds and John Junior sells his life rights to a producer who intends to make a feature film. I get a call from Sylvester Stallone, who says he read the Playboy article, and he wants me to write the screenplay. He’s going to direct the film and play the part of Gotti Senior. John Junior goes out to Hollywood and meets with Stallone. The producer, who has never made a feature film before, is able to raise millions of dollars based on having secured the rights to Gotti’s story.

  It quickly becomes evident, however, that the neophyte producer has no idea what he’s doing. He blows millions of dollars of the financier’s money on rich pay-or-play deals with actors before there is even a script. Stallone bows out, as do I when it becomes clear that the producer is in way over his head and is too arrogant and full of himself to listen to people who at least have some idea what they are doing. The project appears doomed. With the feature film in development limbo, John Junior comes back on board to be interviewed, and the documentary series is back on track at A&E.

  At first, the FBI agents I contact want nothing to do with the documentary when they learn that John Junior has agreed to be interviewed. It takes a call from Joe Pistone, a.k.a. undercover FBI Special Agent Donny Brasco, whom I met and became friends with while working on the Connolly/Bulger story, to get me access to FBI agents who were involved in both John Senior’s and John Junior’s investigations. After speaking with Pistone, the agents are willing to talk to me. When I assure them that I am seeking to tell a balanced story and g
ive both sides an opportunity to present their case, a number of agents who were active members of the FBI’s Gambino Squad and were responsible for the arrest and conviction of John Senior as well as agents involved in the investigation and prosecution of John Junior, along with Judge Shira Scheindlin, who presided over three of John Junior’s trials, and a former federal organized crime task force prosecutor all agree to go on camera. When I track down Gotti Senior’s infamous, flamboyant criminal defense attorney, Bruce Cutler, now practicing in Chicago, and he agrees to be interviewed, I know we have a compelling cast of characters.

  WHEN I INTERVIEW Judge Scheindlin, she says she believes that the government made a mistake when they entered clips from the Gotti father-son tape into evidence in the trials she presided over—which is probably why it was alluded to but kept out of the last trial. Judge Scheindlin says she felt the tape hurt the government’s case and worked to support the withdrawal defense and evoke sympathy for John Junior from jurors.

  The FBI agents and federal prosecutors who were determined to convict Gotti and lock him up for the rest of his life or flip him and turn him into a cooperating witness have an entirely different view. They are apparently still smarting over their inability to get a conviction after four tries. They are unwilling to accept that John quit the life of organized crime to become a civilian; some even hint that after all these years he may still be in the life and under active investigation. In my interview with FBI Special Agent Lou DiGregorio, he takes the party line and insists John Junior would never have been allowed to leave the mob. He holds to the belief that a made member can leave Cosa Nostra only by coming to the government, renouncing his vow of omertà, and agreeing to become a witness against other organized crime figures. A casket is the only other way out, according to DiGregorio. But, I ask, what about the visit at Springfield where John goes to his father and asks his permission to plead guilty and become a civilian? DiGregorio insists that it never happened. But there is a tape, I say, a videotape of John Junior in a visit with his father asking for, and receiving, Senior’s blessing to leave the life. At first DiGregorio says the tape does not exist, because the visit never happened. But when I assure him that I have the tape and have watched it, he maintains that, in the first place, it makes no difference to the FBI if in fact Senior did release his son; that is not the same as coming to law enforcement and declaring that you want out. Besides, the FBI agent insists, the entire meeting between John and his father at the Springfield Medical facility was an act, it was a sham devised and rehearsed by the two men to make it appear John Junior had stepped down and quit the Gambino Crime Family when in fact it was all a ruse the gangsters staged to win over a gullible jury.