How, I ask, were John and his father able to compose the lines and rehearse their parts so that the staged meeting plays so convincingly, with Junior in tears and emotional turmoil when at the time Senior was dying in isolation in Missouri and Junior was held in solitary with no phone privileges except to speak with his lawyer in New York? If indeed they were acting, they were compelling performances. The Gottis missed their calling when they became criminals. They should have gone to Hollywood instead. But DiGregorio, like most of the FBI agents we spoke to, remains as steadfast in his view of the gangsters as the gangsters are in their opinion of the agents. Once a gangster, always a gangster—unless you become a rat. DiGregorio will later assent, off camera, that perhaps John Junior did withdraw; or, in mob terms, he was “put on the shelf,” forced by the ruling body of the family to go into retirement, given that he does not appear to have been involved in criminal activity for the past several years. The agent maintains, however, that if they (the Mafia) were to come to John and order him to act on their behalf, Gotti would have to do whatever they ordered him to do, or he would be killed.
While we are in production on the four-hour documentary series based on the Playboy article, and with extensive interviews with John Junior, the feature film is revived, this time with John Travolta playing Gotti Senior. Kevin Connolly, an actor on the HBO series Entourage, directs. We visit the set at Sparks Steak House and do an interview with Travolta in character as Gotti.
It takes a little over two years from the time the deal is signed to complete the A&E documentary. The four-part series, Gotti: Godfather and Son, airs on A&E over two nights to record-breaking audiences in June 2018. It is later picked up and aired by Amazon Prime and other video streaming services.
Chapter Eighteen
FATHERS AND SONS
He died hating that kid, you know that.
—Mob rat Lewis Kasman, Gotti Senior’s so-called
“adopted son,” speaking of Senior’s feelings for
his son in a taped conversation with Gambino
consigliere Joseph “JoJo” Corozzo
DURING THE Q&A after the premiere screening of the first two hours of the A&E documentary at the IFC Theater in Manhattan, when questioned about what drew me to the story, I remark that had it not been for John Junior’s decision to quit the mob and his resolve to go to his dying father in prison and ask his permission to do what went against everything his father lived for and would die defending, I never would have wanted to make the docuseries in the first place. Without John Junior’s decision to quit the mob, and without the videotape of his visit with his father to ask his permission, it would have been just another show about gangsters. What impressed me was John Junior’s courage. He could have waited until his father died to plead guilty and become a civilian. But he had the integrity and the fortitude to face his father with what he knew was going to be an affront to everything Senior stood for.
It is the universal father-son story that attracted me. The unique dynamic between these two men as bosses of a powerful crime family and as men like other men when it came to their relationship—a boy and his dad. And finally, the decision John Junior made to quit the life and his brave commitment to confront his dying father moved, intrigued, and inspired and challenged me to want to tell this story. I knew there was a story worth telling as soon as I got a view into their relationship through the tape of John’s final sit-down with his father. But how to give context and emotional depth to that meeting? How to bring in voices that could fill in all the necessary background and make these characters’ stories resonate in a way that would move viewers to feel the same empathy I felt watching John with his father in that prison conference room?
John Junior’s unique talent as a storyteller and the FBI agents’ counterpoint is what made it all work. What impresses me, and I believe will move the audience, is John Junior’s devotion to his wife and kids. He made the choice to be an engaged father to his children. He decided not only to leave the mob but to step down from a position of tremendous power, to walk away from a vast and immensely profitable criminal empire to become a traitor in the eyes of Mafia legions, a target for both government agents and wannabe tough guys who would view him as a rat who betrayed his vow of omertà by even talking about his life in Cosa Nostra—a violation that calls for a decree of death. That will always be something Gotti has to live with.
“Where’s your dignity, John? Where’s your manhood?” Those words of John Senior can be asked of any man. But they are especially relevant and poignant when one is faced with the possibility of being shot to death in the street at any time or spending the rest of one’s life in prison. I have to wonder if, given the same set of circumstances, I would have been able to make and carry out the choices John Junior made to find my dignity, to define my manhood.
I had no family when I was arrested; I was separated from my wife and had no children. What if I had had a family, young children at home waiting for me when I stood trial in federal court in New York faced with a possible life sentence? Would I still have had the will and courage to resist the government pressure to join Team America and rat out my friends? It’s a tough decision, maybe the toughest decision a man or woman will ever face. Even Senior in that final meeting with his son had to admit that John Junior was the better man when it came to being a father and a husband.
Isn’t that the real test of a man?
I recall once seeing Victoria Gotti, John’s wife, when she was stopped by reporters in the street and asked what her husband did for a living. She replied, “He provides.” A telling reply. She didn’t say, “Never mind what he does for a living. He’s a great dad.” That requirement of a man—to provide for his wife and kids—must also be factored in to anyone’s assessment of a father. John Junior had a much easier time coming up in the world than his father. Everything was provided for Junior except what he wanted most: undivided love and time with his dad. Senior had had to fight for every morsel of food; he had to go to school in his brother’s worn-out, hand-me-down shoes. He was on the street in early childhood, and he was in prison for most of John Junior’s childhood.
It is clear by the end of the father-son tape that both Gotti men are as perplexed and challenged as are fathers and sons everywhere with their given roles that often seem to be at cross purposes. How to be a man in the world and a devoted father? To constantly measure and test oneself against the will or financial resources or even the physical force of other men, men who are not necessarily there to help you face the challenges to be a breadwinner while also a loving, dutiful father and husband who endears and engenders love and respect? It strikes me how much simpler this question of manhood and fatherhood is when one is in prison. It all comes down to basic survival, staying alive one day to the next without the challenges of fatherhood or the demands of earning a living and supporting a family. There is little to nothing you can do to be a father when you are locked up. Your manhood is all about respect and your personal survival. It’s such a self-centered existence, it does not prepare you for the conflicting challenges of fatherhood.
My oldest boy, Max, is in the front row of the audience with his girlfriend at the IFC Theater. Discussing John’s relationship with his father during the Q&A after the screening, I admit to my own lingering feelings of inadequacy, of having failed as a father, and how that feeling of not measuring up to my own concept of what it means to be a good father had also drawn me to the subject. To be a father and have a family was the one thing I believed I wanted most to succeed at upon leaving prison, and yet it had eluded me. I remember sitting in prison visiting rooms seeing fathers with their kids and feeling their pain when they were separated at the end of the visit. I remember the days and long, lonely nights in prison when I wondered if I would ever make it out alive and have enough life left in me to share with a wife and children. And I remember Kim’s adamant demand that I give up criminal activity before she would agree to marry me and have a family; yet what was I to
do? From my late teenage years, all I knew was the outlaw life. I needed to reinvent myself in my midforties. I remember the joy I felt when we learned Kim was pregnant, and the joy we felt as each of our three children was born. I lost all that through my own failure as a father.
“No,” Max tells me later at the reception after the screening. “You were a good father, a loving dad.” Perhaps, when Max, his younger brother Dash, and their sister, Sasha, were kids and I was there for them, I had been a good dad. But once the marriage fell apart, and when I left to pursue my career . . . no, it was inevitable, or at least so I believe, that my role as father to my boys and to my daughter suffered. I simply wasn’t there when they needed me. I was off trying to make a living. It is the undeniable tragedy of divorce; the kids suffer. I still feel the pain of losing my family every day these many years later. I failed at that which I wanted most of all to achieve: to be a good dad, to be a present and loving father—to be the father I never had.
For the truth is, I had no training at fatherhood, no example of hands-on paternal love and guidance to follow. My own father, Emery Paine Stratton (my mother used to call him Emery “Pain in the Neck” Stratton) was typical of his background and generation yet even more so. A quiet, reserved, handsome, old-school Yankee WASP, he was wrapped up in his own world as certainly I have proven to be wrapped up in my career. I don’t recall ever sitting on my father’s lap as a boy, of being hugged by him, definitely never kissed. We didn’t go out in the yard and throw a baseball, though I did play in a couple of father-son golf tournaments with him, and a few times he took me fishing. About the only sure way I knew to get my father’s attention was to get in trouble with the police, something I started doing and would prove good at from an early age.
Coming out of prison at forty-five, even as I pursued a family and fatherhood with Kim and our children, I was also fixated on my career. I felt I had a lot of catching up to do—indeed, I had to remake myself in the world. In time, I would come to learn that you can never catch up with something that is lost and gone forever. For an ex-con and lifetime criminal to remake oneself as a citizen with a career is an ongoing, day-to-day process and challenge.
When the boys were young, I used to wrestle with them on the big king-size bed. They loved it; I loved it. And while we lived in Manhattan, I walked them to school each day at PS 11. The day my daughter Sasha was born, I took the boys on a long walk on the land we owned upstate and showed them a new adjoining seven-acre parcel we had purchased. There was a spring on the new land that we named after Sasha.
WHILE I WAS working on the Street Time series after 9/11, Kim and the kids moved to Toronto to join me in a big home we rented. The production van would pick me up for work each day, and Max and Dash would come to the set with me. Those were happy times. As the second season was nearing completion of the final few episodes, we had a long break over the Labor Day weekend. I took Kim and the kids to a camp on a lake in Ontario. It was one of the happiest times in our marriage. But there was a fissure in the relationship between Kim and me that would continue to widen and solidify as I spent more time traveling and Kim was left at home with the kids.
I take at least half the blame for being unable or unwilling to do the work needed to mend the marriage. When Kim told me on our first date that she didn’t drink, I didn’t understand that what she was saying is that she couldn’t drink. Years later, when it was obvious that alcohol was a major contributing factor in the unraveling of the marriage, I was not willing to do what it appeared needed to be done and quit drinking to help Kim stay sober.
Who knows if it ever could have worked? Yes, we stayed together for thirteen years, and though Kim accused me of being unfaithful, I never was. A serial monogamist, I take my vows seriously. I was devoted to her and to our children, but two self-absorbed writers in the same household is a challenge no matter who they are. And in my case, though I make no excuses, I will say that a long stint in prison takes years to get over and does not leave one prepared for fatherhood. The cauterizing of emotion one needs to survive a long-term imprisonment may be permanent, and one’s emotional self may never be fully resensitized. Even now, nearly thirty years after my release, the prison experience is as indelible as a convict’s tattoos. I avoided the tattoos, but the emotional scar tissue is still there.
If there is one piece of advice I would give to any young, or even not so young, couple considering marriage, it would be to make certain they both want to live in the same geographical location, be it city or country, New York or the Hudson River Valley. Don’t let your careers and your desire to put down roots pull you in different directions. When Kim and I met, we were both living in New York City. I have never wanted to live anywhere else.
I first saw New York City as a twelve-year-old boy when my father uprooted us from our home in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and moved the family to Puerto Rico, where he had taken a job as assistant pro with Chi-Chi Rodriguez at the Dorado Beach Hotel and Golf Club. We spent a night in transit in New York before boarding the plane to San Juan the next day. I was fascinated by what my mother told me was the greatest city in the world, and where, if you could make it there, you could make it anywhere. When I was a young teenager, a close friend’s father brought us to New York for a weekend, and again I was captivated by the energy and diversity of the place. During my years in the marijuana underground, though we worked all over the country and all over the world, smuggling marijuana and hashish from South America, Asia, the Middle East, the island of Jamaica in the Caribbean, it was always to New York that we came to distribute the product in the world’s biggest illegal marketplace and to celebrate with the proceeds. Even after I was locked up, it was while at the MCC in Manhattan that I met the celebrity criminals who would become characters in my writing and where I would have my richest experiences in the criminal justice system that became the subject matter of my journalism and my books.
Kim had come to New York from Texas, and I assumed she was equally committed to living in the city. But she was convinced that New York City was no place to bring up children. Now, having lived here full time since the divorce and brought up another son here, I’m convinced that kids who grow up in New York City have a lot of advantages over their rural or suburban contemporaries. The move to the Hudson River Valley, with my work in the city and frequent travel taking me away from home, precipitated the beginning of the end of our marriage.
THE DAY MY father died, I was at work at the Fortune Society editing Fortune News. Max was still a toddler and had been sick when I left for work. I was already worried about him when I got a message at the office to come home immediately. All the way across town in the taxi I prayed that Max was okay. When I walked into the apartment, Kim was on the floor in the living room playing with Max. When I asked her what was wrong, if he was okay, she said, “No, he’s dead.” I thought she had lost her mind. What was she talking about?
“What do you mean, he’s dead?”
“No,” she said, “not Max. He’s fine. It’s your father. He was killed this morning.”
Emery had been out for a walk, taking his morning constitutional. Nearing eighty, he was still in good shape. He stepped into the street to go around a parked car blocking the sidewalk. He was hit by a van and killed instantly. I went from thinking I might have lost my son to realizing that it was my father who was gone, who I would never see again. We set out to drive from New York to Massachusetts for my father’s memorial service, but we were stranded in Connecticut in one of the worst blizzards of the season. Emery was gone from my life in much the way he had lived: beyond his son’s ken, ever out of my reach. A man I never really knew.
I was closer to Norman Mailer than I was to my own father. Mailer was my intellectual progenitor. And I spent more undivided time in close quarters with Mafia don Joe Stassi than with anyone I’ve ever known. Stassi was my gangster guru. Mailer and Stassi were the mentors of my twin personae: the artist and the criminal. Mailer was dying at Mount Sinai hospi
tal on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in October 2007. When I went to visit him, he couldn’t speak. He had had a tracheotomy and could only mouth or write words. His illegible scrawling reminded me of Joe Stassi’s handwritten notes that I used to decipher and transcribe in letters to his family and friends. To see Mailer at pains to communicate, this man who had so distinguished himself by his monumental talent with words, was as poignant as seeing Joe Stassi in his diaper in a wheelchair raging against the Kennedy brothers. Mailer would regain his ability to speak before he died. His biographer, J. Michael Lennon, told me that Norman awoke once from a dream or some near-death altered state and exclaimed: “I have met God!”
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