Mob Star

Table of Contents

 

 

 

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E
ARLY IN 2002, JOHN GOTTI finally shut up. But it wasn’t because anyone made him. That he would definitely want you to know. He lost his ability to speak to throat cancer, and then only after he fought it, as he would say, “tooth and nail” for nearly four cruel years. In an operation meant to prolong his life a little while longer, the most voluble of men was silenced. Ten years after he went to prison for life, he was imprisoned further—locked in, as well as up.

He may be dead, or still clinging to life when you read this. Either way, the end of the John Gotti story has arrived. He must have died inside when he lost his ability to talk, for Gotti lived to talk. He loved to gather his men and hold court. He loved to gab, muse, banter, cajole, and abuse. He loved to reminisce, speculate, and editorialize. He was good at it, too. His way with words distinguished him from other gangsters. In his gruff, crude way, he was lyrical, clever, and vivid. He could use words like knives. Backed by guns, he rose to power on them. Unable to stop talking, he lost power because of them.

After he went to prison for good, his way with words was all he had left. “Right now, I’m cursed,” he said early in 1998, after six years in solitary confinement at the toughest prison in America and eight months before the cancer came. “I’m stuck in this joint and that’s the end of it. This is my realm, right here. That’s the end of it.”

On that day, during a visit with his daughter Victoria and brother Peter, he used his way with words to artfully spin his legal history and life story. “You know why I’m here? It took them $80 million in three lying cases and seven rats that killed a hundred people in the witness-protection program to finally frame me! You understand?” A little later, he added: “My life dictated that I take each course that I took. I didn’t have any multiple choice. My time, all the doors were closed.”

He spoke for four hours that day and four the next. He raged at the decimation of his crime Family since he went way, and he lamented a case that had fallen on his son Junior and another case about to fall on his son-in-law Carmine. He said he felt increasingly estranged from his relatives and complained of being forgotten—except by strangers who sent fan mail.

Despite the doom and gloom, he sounded as egomanical as ever—“listen to me carefully, you’ll never see another guy like me if you live to be 5,000.” Talking about his mail, which did come in bundles after his name was in the news for something, he was so over the top he sounded delusional. “I get mail from all over the world where people wish they could be my grandchildren or my children … I got mail last night from Australia, South Africa, New Zealand—this was all last night! … I got a million people who, if they could come here to see me now, they would cry just to be able to be here and see me.”

He quoted some letters at length, including that of a 14-year-old Idaho girl writing a school paper on celebrities. She wanted him to write back and answer a few questions. “She says, ‘You know, I don’t know if you know it, there are millions of people out here (who) really love and adore you and respect you. I guess you and America was what was meant to be!’ This is a 14-year-old kid! None of my relatives ever write that!”

Between quoting letters, he insisted he didn’t care about them. It was obvious that he did, and it made you feel sorry for him. “I got a letter from England. (From) a couple, they just had a baby. They own a bunch of curio shops … they’re affluent people. The kid’s got carrot-red hair … you gotta see the letter! They named the baby ‘Gianna,’ like for Johnny in Italian. These are English people from London! ‘We’d be honored’—they sent me pictures of the kids and all that—‘we would be honored if you’d be the godparent’ … this is what the real world thinks!”

Gotti was well aware that his words, as so many more he spoke during what was supposed to be his secret life in crime, were being preserved. All visits between inmates and visitors at the United States Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois—a deliberately harsh hellhole for convicts deemed dangerous or incorrigible—are recorded on video and audiotape to discourage plotting of any kind. His words that day, January 29, 1998, and the next are among the most compelling in this book, which uses many Gotti words to tell his story.

His words help us finish the picture we sketched when the first edition of
Mob Star
came out in 1988 and ended on a note of triumph for Gotti. Though the real ending wasn’t yet available, the first
Mob Star
remains a good story. It was the first book ever published about a mob boss who was, you might say, still in office. The main story is his rise to power. A key subplot tells the story of two men near him who lived dangerously—for years, they regularly informed on him to the FBI. Still-secret reports on these men’s contacts with the FBI will take the reader inside Gotti’s world during or after most major episodes of his pre-1985 life in crime in New York.

These many years later, we can’t think of a better book title than we thought of then, even though the title had unintended consequences. “Mob Star” captures the idea that in his realm, he was a star, and that he came to have the things we associate with traditional realms of stardom—money to burn, the best tables, magazine covers, autograph hounds. In truth, it came to us as we considered the word, “mobster.” Mob-ster. We were looking to make the second syllable into something. Mob Man … Mob Boss …
Mob Star!

The title implied adulation we never felt. It fed Gotti fantasies, his and others. Just as it was for us, it was a thrill for him to see copies of
Mob Star
filling Fifth Avenue shop windows. The book’s cover, if not the story inside, made him feel heroic. It became part of the mythical identity he created in America and a large part of the world during his time at the top. His time lasted five years. That is the story we tell in the eight new chapters that begin with Chapter 28, “The Fix.”

Over those years, by winning trials in the world’s media capital and swaggering in the ensuing spotlight, Gotti did become famous or infamous, take your pick. In the hype-around-the-clock culture just taking off when he came on the scene, fame and infamy are the same thing. It happened because of who he was and what people expected. He was a perfect picture of what everyone imagines Mafia bosses to be. He was gravel-voiced and smart-alecky, and handsome in a dangerous-looking way. He was good on his feet. He did for the Mafia what JFK did for politics 25 years before; he made it entertaining.

A master criminal he was not, but what he was and came to stand for are at least fascinating. “Best I ever did was a couple hijackings,” Gotti once said. But people don’t know or care about rap-sheet details. What mattered with him was perception. He was what we imagine gangsters to be. He looked like one. He sounded like one. He was straight out of a shared experience, the gangster movie. “He was a James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson-type of gangster,” was how a former New York detective, Joseph Coffey, described him during a documentary a couple years ago.

Gotti brought the movies to life, which made it possible to invest real emotions in him: awe, envy, fear. Early on, when the press began pulling back the curtains on his life, the public learned that in 1980 a Gotti neighbor drove his car into one of Gotti’s children and killed him. It was a horrible accident, but some months later the man was thrown into a van by several men and was never seen again. The case was never solved, but everyone believes Gotti ordered the man killed, and he no doubt did. He had the power and will to do what many of us would feel like doing if we lost a child that way, and he got away with it, which we could only dream of doing.

Where it got more fascinating with Gotti was that he saw himself a gangster actor, too. He relished the role and was good at it—in public, anyway. In private, as the Marion tapes show, he was often repulsive. (He railed on about “coons,” “niggers” and Jews, and called his wife—in front of their daughter—a pig, a tramp, and a witch.) But in public, with his silvery showiness and sly smirks, he fed the public’s fantasies, which fed his.