Mob Star (2 page)

It is hard to overstate the imprint
The Godfather
tale left on the minds of people who dream about living by one’s own rules, and on the minds of the Mafiosi who actually do. The movie version, with its even more romanticized treatment of Mafia life, came out in 1972. In the underworld then, the popular but mistaken notion was that it was based on the life of Carlo Gambino, leader of the Mafia Family known by his last name and which included then 31-year-old John Gotti, just out of the joint for hijacking.

When his crew leader was forced to lay low a while, Gotti took the man’s place in meetings with the aging Gambino. It was no doubt heady stuff because a year later, after his arrest on a disorderly conduct charge, Gotti gave his name as John “DeCarlo” (son of Carlo). Gambino didn’t much look like a gangster, but he talked like a godfather. He was prone to selectively quoting from
The Prince,
Niccolo Machiavelli’s treatise on power. Soon, so was Gotti. “Fear is a stronger emotion than love” became one of his favorite lines.

By the time Gotti murdered his way to the top late in 1985, the godfather tradition was in steep decline. The federal government was putting all the big bosses away for life with new laws and surveillance capability that made it risky to even whisper about crime. Gotti went against the grain by beating a federal case and two state ones. That put him in the crosshairs of everyone with a badge. But he could not change who he was. Instead of retreating out of sight to try and operate on the sly, he paraded in public. Madison Square Garden one night, Rainbow Room the next. Worse, he required his men to attend weekly shapeups at his social club on a busy street in lower Manhattan. There and a block away on Prince Street, he took daylight “walk-talks,” titillating passersby and taunting cops, agents, and “girl” prosecutors.

On the Marion tapes, many years of numbing incarceration and terrible sickness later, he had only this to say about whether he should have done things differently, and, for once, he had trouble getting the words out:

“I take credit for my, my, my bad doings. I made mistakes.”

 

 

The Marion tapes were recorded about 18 months after Gotti, in prison, got what he may have never gotten before, at least not since he was a boy—a good beating. The scene was set during one of his cherished breaks from solitary confinement, when he and other inmates were allowed to exercise in an indoor recreation area just off his cell.

“Get out of my way, you piece of shit,” Gotti barked at another con who didn’t show enough respectful space quickly enough. “Don’t you know who I am?”

The inmate, a black man about 20 years younger than the then 56-year-old Gotti, did indeed know who Gotti was, and he let Gotti by, with a scowl. The next time they were in the recreation area, however, the heavily muscled inmate sucker-punched Gotti, then beat him bloody before guards tore him away.

No one in the Gotti camp ever spoke publicly about it, least of all Gotti, and for sure not during tape-recorded visits with his relatives where he knew he ran the risk that tapes could be leaked, as these indeed were, to us, and the world would get the story of him getting his. Given what he wouldn’t talk about, it’s amazing what he did.

Aside from the vicious epithets for his wife Victoria, he criticized his son Peter for ignoring his advice and failing to write. He criticized daughters Victoria and Angela for failing to send timely photographs and letters and burdening him with problems he was helpless to do anything about. He said his son Junior and some codefendants in a case just filed “should all be sent to the insane asylum” for their criminal mistakes. He called son-in-law Carmine Agnello a “slob” who “conducts himself like a barbarian.”

“You can’t be more disappointed than I am in my family, utterly impossible,” he said to his brother Peter, after daughter Victoria briefly stepped away from their Marion visitors’ cubicle. “If I could go home, I say it right out, I wouldn’t go near them with a ten-foot-long fucking pole.”

The most powerful moment on the Marion tapes came when a Gotti grandchild—dressed in a suit, as though bound for a wedding or a funeral—entered the cubicle to say hello. The meeting began with gentle razzing. Then Gotti told the child that if he did well in school, some day he could be a lawyer. The child already had someone to emulate—his mother Victoria, a successful writer. After her father went to prison, she wrote a top-selling mystery novel and a book about a heart ailment she suffers. His notoriety fueled curiosity buying of the novel, but at least her words were being put to honest use, and she would go on to write two more mystery novels.

With his mother now back in the cubicle, however, the child said he would rather be a professional athlete. His grandfather insisted on a lawyer: “To be a good basketball player or baseball player, first of all, you got to be a good liar. A good lowlife and an imbecile.”

The child said nothing and squirmed in his chair.

“And you got to take steroids! You must take steroids, and anybody who takes steroids is a garbage pail.”

Finally, softly, the boy replied: “Fine, then I will be a crook.”

The words were a sharp slap to Gotti’s face, sharper than the grandchild probably knew or meant. Briefly speechless, Gotti leaned back, stared, and then exploded.

“I don’t care if you’ll be nothin’! You think you’re being … spiteful with me? You’ll get an ass-kicking from me! I know how to raise children!”

The boy stayed silent.

“You ain’t doing me no favor coming to see me talking sass to me! I will put my foot right up your ass, you hear me?”

The boy fidgeted and peered through the glass barrier separating him from Gotti, cradling one of the cubicle’s telephones on his shoulder.

“You’ll never forget the ass-kicking you’ll get from me. You understand? Don’t you look at me like that. I’m more serious than cancer. You can look as sad as you want. Now, give that phone to your uncle and get outta here!”

The boy fled, head down. His mother soon left too, after agreeing that her child did deserve a whipping for smarting off.

A couple moments later, Gotti said to his brother: “That’s why these visits, I told you, I got to keep them to a minimum. When I go back upstairs (to my cell), it breaks my heart … let’s try and salvage some of this visit. You know anything good? Anything good anyone wants to talk about?”

A long silent ensued. “Not really, everything’s normal,” Peter finally said.

“That’s perfect,” Gotti answered, “that’s terrifying. Normal. Normal in this family is terrifying, that’s for sure. Normal in this family is terrifying.”

Later, with daughter Victoria back in the cubicle, Gotti turned to another topic obviously stuck in his gloomy craw: His family failed to send him a photograph of his kids and their kids for the Christmas just past. He blamed Victoria the most, but she protested she had. He kept insisting she hadn’t.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he told her. “I want to die before you have a toothache. But I got nothing! I got no group picture!”

Victoria remained silent as Gotti raised his voice and sarcastically fumed that he received group photographs from many other admiring families, just not his own. “I didn’t get none from mine! I got nothing! Nothing!”

Victoria then exited the cubicle again. Gotti turned to Peter: “What, am I wrong? I gotta beg them for a group picture of my grandchildren! When you come [the next time], come the fuck alone!”

His loss of power and freedom and the bleak terms of confinement—until he was hospitalized, he lived in a gray, closet-sized cell with only a 13-inch black-and-white television for company—were enough to put Gotti in a permanently agitated state, but his son Junior’s legal troubles contributed to his hair-trigger mood the days of the visit. Junior and others were indicted a week earlier in a case based partially on evidence hidden behind a basement wall in a building owned by a friend of Junior’s; the evidence included lists of “made men” in three Mafia Families and men who gave Junior cash when he got married—plus the cash itself, all $350,000 of it.

“These people here, if ever found guilty, they should never be sent to jail,” Gotti yelled at Peter. “They should all be sent to the insane asylum. From keeping the wedding money down in the basement, right down the line. I want to know what part of this was intelligent!”

At least with Junior, Gotti paused to say how it was impossible for him to love Junior more than he did. Then he compared Junior to his uncle, Gotti’s brother Gene, who went to prison for heroin dealing. “He’s a tough kid, he’s a smart kid, but he’s another (Gene). They think they know everything and they don’t. It’s heartbreaking.”

Gotti said he was sick of getting only bad news. He then took off after daughter Angela for failing to tell him about such good news as a new house. He complained he hadn’t received a letter from son Peter in two years.

“I wish one day you would bring me good news,” he told his brother. “I really wish one day you would bring me good news. You know more about Angela’s house than I do.”

Peter protested that he didn’t even know where the house is.

“You know more than me … I know absolutely nothing!”

His voice rising higher, Gotti growled that son Peter not only failed to write, he ignored his wishes. It hurt because men of “lesser ilk” had sons who do what their fathers say.

“If I tell him, ‘Go this way,’ he goes that way,” Gotti said. “If I tell him, ‘Go that way,’ he goes this way.

“I don’t know absolutely nothing about none of them. I don’t know if they’re home, who’s living together no more, who ain’t living together no more, who’s talking.

“And I don’t want to know. They choose that route, ahh, let them take that route.”

With Victoria back in the cubicle, he started up again, complaining that he is forced to extract information about some relatives, such as her husband.

“So what’s the story with Carmine?” he asked.

“Whaddya mean, what’s the story with him?” she replied.

“Is he feeling good? Is he not feeling good? Is his medication increased? Decreased? Is it up? Down? Does he get in the back seat of the car and think someone has stolen the steering wheel?”

“It’s the same,” she said, answering only the question about medication.

Gotti predicted that hot-tempered Carmine, who operated a car-salvage business between minor dustups with cops, would be the next member of the clan to get in serious trouble. “He’s gonna get in-dicted any day, this moron. He’s built himself a gallows. He’s bought the noose.”

Near the end of a visit saying much of what there is to say about John Gotti doing hard time, Gotti recalled for Peter that one of their early Mafia mentors had warned that it was best for mobsters if they never married.

“He was right. In this life, you can’t get married. You’re better off if you don’t have no fucking body, and this way, that’s the end of it.”

 

 

Author (and now New York newspaper columnist) Victoria Gotti wasn’t the only person to benefit from Gotti’s notoriety. We did. Besides the original
Mob Star
and this update, we wrote another book about him, and a third about some of his Gambino friends and enemies. We also did television documentaries, magazine pieces, and a thousand or so talk-show appearances. Our association with the story brought friendly newspaper and magazine interviews and profiles from New York to Hong Kong, and reasonable status at the
Daily News
, where we used to work. One of us, that’s Jerry, owns and operates a very popular website,
ganglandnews.com
; it gets 200,000 hits a month.

Others also did well on the Gotti beat. John Miller, first for local television, now ABC; Michael Daly, who wrote the first major Gotti profile, in
New York
; the late Mike McAlary, who wrote several great columns for
Newsday
, the
Post
and the
Daily News
, and virtually all the reporters chosen to cover the 1992 trial—with its bomb threats, its tapes, showdowns, and staredowns, it dominated the news in New York for three months.

It wasn’t just we reporters. Bruce Cutler, Gotti’s lawyer, benefited. So did Gerald Shargel, another Gotti lawyer. They got profiles in
GQ
and
The New Yorker,
and all the other media they could possibly want. They were good; now they’re big. John Gleeson, the lead prosecutor in the 1992 case, is now a federal judge in Brooklyn. Coprosecutor Laura Ward became a judge, too, on the state bench in Manhattan. Bruce Mouw, boss of the FBI’s Gambino squad, won a big Justice Department award. Gotti case agent George Gabriel now has his own squad. Remo Franceschini, a Queens detective on many Gotti cases, got what most cops don’t, a book about his career:
A Matter of Honor: One Cop’s Lifelong Pursuit of John Gotti and the Mob.

Going out wider, many other institutions and individuals also benefited. HBO got a ratings record out of
Gotti,
which was based on our second book. Other networks and cable channels, publishers, distributors, and bookstores, they all got a bounce out of Gotti. All the publicity also helped create an audience for HBO’s
The Sopranos
series
.
Two members of the show’s cast, Tony Sirico and Vincent Pastore, were first in
Gotti,
the movie. They and all the other make-believe gangsters from
Gotti
shaped up at Elaine’s, a media hive on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It is a few blocks from where Gotti, when he was out and about, used to hoist glasses of Cristal Rose with the late Anthony Quinn, who—the circle keeps turning—portrayed Gotti’s gangland mentor in
Gotti.

The Sirico-Pastore crew called themselves GAG, for Gangster Actors Guild.
“Gotti
started everything for me,” said Pastore; his character was killed off at the end of the second
Sopranos
season, but he has many other roles coming out or up. “Before that, I had bits and pieces.
Gotti
was the beginning of it all for me.”