This summer a familiar tableau will play out in New York City. It will be a scene as quintessentially Big Apple as Broadway, yellow cabs and the Statue of Liberty. John A. Gotti (also known as “Junior Gotti”), scion of the famous Gambino Mafia family, will walk into a Manhattan courtroom. The prosecution will claim he is at the nexus of a web of brutal murder and crime. Gotti, a man known for his charm and wit, will protest his innocence. The tabloid newspapers will carry every breathless detail of the murders, beatings and robberies that form the prosecution’s case. A spotlight will be shone on the shadowy world of the Mafia. Cops, criminals and reporters will mix and mingle. For a while, The Mob Trial will be the best show in town.
It has all the marks of a classic showdown between the Cosa Nostra and the cops. Gotti, whose father, John Gotti Jr, was one of the mob’s most notorious dons, is charged with three gruesome killings and a host of lesser crimes. The Feds are determined to put him away for decades. Having beaten three previous cases against him, Gotti wants to walk free a fourth time. He says he has long retired from mob life and is a victim of police harassment. A jury of 12 New Yorkers will decide the truth.
But while the Gotti trial, which could start by April, is guaranteed to become water-cooler chatter across the US, it masks a far more complex and compelling story. For the fact is the Mafia in the US are in deep decline. The once-feared mob has been overshadowed by a new wave of criminal gangs from Russia, China, Albania and Jamaica. Its numbers have been depleted by endless FBI cases, its ranks penetrated by informers and its formidable code of silence shattered. The organization that could once decide the fate of mayors, police chiefs and senators is almost powerless. Worse still, it has become a cultural cliche. Wise guys and “made men” are rarely to be found on the streets of New York any more; they are found in repeats of The Sopranos and on reality TV.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
A high-profile mob trial was once a fearful thing for New York, but as Gotti takes his place in the dock he will be a last hurrah for what was once the most powerful criminal conspiracy in the world, but which now seems fated to fade into history.
“Ten years from now we will reminisce about the Mafia. We will remember them fondly. But it will be part of the past,” said Thomas Nolan, a former police officer turned teacher of criminology at Boston University.
Among the many deaths that will be wheeled out in this summer’s trial will be the long, strange demise of the American Mafia itself.
The Feds came for Junior Gotti at 6am on Aug. 5 last year. As the sun rose over New York, FBI agents surrounded Gotti’s modest home in Long Island. There were no guns blazing. No last stands. Just a bleary-eyed, bespectacled Gotti being led out of the door of the home he shares with his wife and six children. He was wearing a blue shirt and sweatpants. He was in a Manhattan court a few hours later as a massive case file against him was unsealed. The judge did not grant bail and Gotti headed to jail. He’s been there ever since.
That was no surprise. Prosecutors say Gotti remains a senior figure in Gambino mob operations that span from drugs and extortion to illegal gambling and loan-sharking. They say he tried to extend those operations from New York to Florida and that, in his role as a mob boss, he organized the killing of three men. But these are far from the honor killings that movie mythology associates with the mob. The first was of low-level drug pusher George Grosso. He was shot on Dec. 20, 1988, and his body dumped in Flushing Meadow park. Then came the death of Louis DiBono, a construction worker. His giant, 140kg corpse was found slumped in a car parked in an underground garage at the World Trade Center on Oct. 4, 1990. He had been shot seven times; four bullets in his skull. The final victim was Bruce Gotterup in 1991. A threat to Gotti’s own drug-selling activities, Gotterup’s body was discovered on the boardwalk at Rockaway Beach, after staff at a nursing home heard late night gunfire. He was found face down and had been shot in the head.
“It captures a lifetime of criminality,” said Elie Honig, a Manhattan federal prosecutor, describing the huge charge sheet.
Gotti was certainly born to the family business, or, rather, to the business of being Family. His father was the infamous “Dapper Don,” who murdered his way to the head of the Gambino family. Gotti Jr, who died in jail, became godfather of the Gambinos with the infamous murder of the then boss, Paul Castellano, gunned down in 1985 outside Manhattan’s Sparks Restaurant. That murder became part of mob legend. As Gotti watched, his 11-men hit team gunned down Castellano amid the rush-hour crowds and then drove by to make sure his quarry was dead. Soon after, he was the boss.
But Gotti Jr is dead, and his actions are not the subject of this coming trial. The question is: Did the son really follow the father? Or is Junior Gotti — like the US Mafia — a pale shadow of what has gone before? One man who suspects the latter is Selwyn Raab, author of the seminal Mafia history, Five Families. Raab has covered numerous Gotti trials involving both the father and son, and he believes the difference between the two men could not be more stark.
“His father was different,” Raab says. “Gotti Senior had gimlet eyes. There was something in that look that was scary. Not so with Junior. He smiled at you and it did not frighten you.”
Raab — and many other Mafia experts — see little of the elder Gotti in Junior Gotti. But he was undoubtedly a Gambino figure in the 1980s and 1990s, running drugs and trading on his father’s name.
“Gotti in his twenties was a real terror. He was always palling around these tough guys and he considered himself untouchable,” Raab said.
He is believed to have become a “made-man” shortly after the death of Grosso (suspiciously so, according to prosecutors). Then, when his father went to jail, Gotti Jr took over the Gambino reins. But he soon found out he was not untouchable, after all.
Junior Gotti was arrested in 1999 and charged with the usual mish-mash of gambling, extortion and fraud. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six-and-a-half years in jail. When he got out, he announced he had left the Mafia life behind. Three further attempts to convict him of more Mafia crimes — the last one in 2006 — failed to stick. Indeed, the crimes Junior Gotti is currently accused of appear to be all old deeds (Grosso was murdered almost two decades ago). Nor are they exotic Mafia hits like the killing of Castellano; these are low-level whackings, often linked to squabbles over drugs. Nor is the prosecution suggesting Junior Gotti pulled any triggers, but that he organized them.
So why go after Junior Gotti at all? The reason may lie simply in his name. When the FBI bring a big mob trial, they send a message to both the public and the mob that the Mafia are still being watched. As one law enforcement source put it: “It’s just the name ... in terms of a law enforcement issue I don’t think it’s important.”
The Mafia was once the most dangerous criminal organization in the US, and the Gambinos its most feared clan. Mafia activities once reached up into the highest parts of the state.
“They had such power they could influence Washington. They could decide what senators did,” said Thomas Reppetto, author of Bringing Down the Mob.
Its and their bribes could win or lose elections, corrupt unions and scare off the police.
The Mafia’s rise was a classic rags-to-riches American story. The culture was born among the Italian immigrant gangs in the teeming slums of New York in the early 20th century and grew more organized during Prohibition. As the profits poured in on the back of illegal booze, the Mafia discovered a simple formula: Their street violence, combined with strict codes imported from Sicily, could flourish on the edges of the business world. Prohibition, gambling, extortion and loan-sharking all provided a ready cash flow. Italian-American communities — which in New York alone numbered more than 1 million people in the 1920s — provided a steady supply of recruits, opportunities and refuge from the law.
They had their own culture. Families were looked after and clans organized on a strict hierarchy of soldiers, made men, under-bosses and bosses, all sworn into the mob via a secret ceremony. It was an entire lifestyle of Italian-American culture and food, deeply rooted in a community only recently arrived in the New World. Transgressions were brutally punished. Wars were hard-fought and much blood was spilled, but the 1920s to the 1950s was a boom time. It was the era of Al Capone, Joe Bonanno and Lucky Luciano. The Mafia was huge in New York — where five separate families ruled — but it also rose in Florida, Cleveland, Philadelphia and dozens of other cities. The Mafia helped create Las Vegas. It also moved into legitimate businesses, such as waste management or the docks, or transport firms, often by infiltrating unions.
A government study showed that during the 1960s, Mafia families made more than US$7 billion in annual profit — more than the combined earnings of the country’s 10 largest industrial corporations. As people liked to say: the Mafia’s business model was better than General Motors, and it had been around longer.
“The Mafia was crime organized as a business. The Mafia blurred the law between normal and acceptable and the underworld. They could walk the line,” said Robin Sax, a district attorney and expert on organized crime.
But it was an impossible balancing act, and eventually the Mafia were tripped up by Frank Costello’s hands. Costello, a Mafia figure of national repute, had agreed to appear before a Senate hearing on organized crime in March 1951. The hearings had been touring the country to little attention, but arriving in New York they discovered the awesome new power of television. The New York hearings were carried live on the networks, coast to coast, and Costello was top billing. He had appeared perhaps out of bravado, perhaps out of enjoying the notoriety, but he insisted on one condition: his face not be shown. As a result, over the monotone sound of his gravelly voice describing the world of organized crime, an increasingly horrified American public watched Costello’s hands, drumming on the desk, his thick fingers clasping and unclasping.
It was a turning point. From now on the Mafia was public enemy No. 1. Gone were the old days of local cops tackling local mob families. The Mafia was seen as a national threat and treated accordingly. It was a long battle. Mafia cases were hard to prosecute. They took years of investigation. The families were almost impossible to infiltrate. But the breakthrough came in 1970, with the passing of the RICO (Racketeer-influenced Organized Crime) legislation. Now, anyone “organizing” or “profiting” from Mafia crimes could be prosecuted, not just the soldiers. At a stroke it allowed Mafia bosses — who always left the execution of their crimes to subordinates — to be targeted.
By the early 1980s the Mafia were effectively under police siege. That led to the second breakthrough, as the once formidable laws of omerta — silence punishable by death — cracked. As prosecutions mounted and bosses trooped off to jail, more and more came forward to cut deals. It reached its pinnacle in 1991 with Sammy “the Bull” Gravanno, right-hand man of John Gotti Jr, and a notorious Mafia killer. He was the highest-ranking mobster ever to flip and his last hit was to kill the illusion of mob honor.
“They broke the omerta rule. The people that are the main witnesses are the American Mafia themselves. They lined up to rat each other out,” Thomas Nolan said.
But the final blow to the Mafia was simply demographic. As Italian-Americans assimilated into mainstream America, the second and third generations moved to the suburbs. That cut away the supply of new recruits and slashed the Mafia’s ability to extort within its own community. Italian-Americans now had ambitions to become lawyers, accountants or bankers, not mobsters.
All of these events are summed up in the trial of John A. Gotti. The huge, bulking indictment against him is the product of the Rico laws. He is also suffering from the lack of omerta. The star witness against him is expected to be John Alite, a former childhood friend and Gambino mobster, who is ready to talk and implicate his old friend in three murders.
And finally, there is Gotti’s own life story. He did not live in Little Italy, he lived on Long Island and raised his kids in leafy suburbia. He grew up wealthy. Perhaps, in Gotti’s protestations of long-standing retirement, we might just be seeing a genuine outcry from a man born to the mob, but who later discovered he no longer wanted anything to do with it.
Indeed, the Gottis and the Mafia’s relationship with the rest of the US has mutated beyond the criminally dangerous into something surreal. For what price is omerta when you have your own reality TV show? Junior Gotti’s sister, Victoria Gotti, has been the star of the TV series Growing Up Gotti, which endeavored to show the trials and tribulations of life bearing the infamous Gotti name. It was trashy, terrible, train-crash TV.
“That show was bizarre. Who else could do that? You don’t see Russian drug gangs with their own TV shows. But you do with the mob,” said Stacy Dittrich, a former detective turned crime writer.
Certainly the Mafia now seems far more important as a cultural archetype than as a genuine threat to society. Films such as The Godfather trilogy and GoodFellas are works of genuine American art. Television shows such as The Sopranos have made Americans as familiar with the language and customs of the Mafia as any made man. The dons have come to occupy a special place in US culture — that of the venerated outlaw, a place once occupied by the wild west gunfighter.
“We enshrined them. We all lived vicariously through this. We deified them. They got business done. They cut through the bullshit,” Nolan said.
The fact that it had little to do with reality did not hurt that powerful imagery. The real life of a Mafia soldier was as poorly paid as the office workers who worshipped his TV image. But that did not matter. For the cultural imagery of the Mafia was so powerful it fed upon itself. No consumer of Mafia culture was more voracious than the Mafia themselves. They watched The Godfather movies and they watched The Sopranos. Many FBI agents and cops, listening on wiretaps, have remarked that their quarries seemed to be picking up tips on how to act and behave from Mafia TV shows and movies. The Mafia snake was devouring its own tail.
The bitter truth, long known to Gotti, is that the realities of modern Mafia life are nothing like the movies. Take the recent case of a New England mafia boss, Carmen DiNunzio, arrested earlier this year. An FBI sting had caught him trying to illegally sell landfill for a large Boston construction site. Known as “the Cheeseman” because his main source of income was a cheese shop, the morbidly obese DiNunzio cut a pathetic figure widely lampooned across the US. This was the Mafia as a huge joke.
“He was selling dirt,” Nolan said. “He was a laughing stock. This was as far from the image of The Godfather as it is possible to get.”
Or listen to a wire-tap recording of a conversation in a car park between Victoria Gotti and Lewis Kasman, a once trusted Gambino member who was seen as the adopted son of Gotti Sr, but who handed over the tapes in return for FBI cash.
“Do you realize how fucked up our family is?” Kasman asked Victoria, who could then be heard replying incredulously: “Now you’re realizing! It’s been like that for ever.”
Indeed, the Kasman tapes, far from incriminating Gotti as a member of the Gambino family’s top ranks, may actually form part of his defense. In one conversation recorded between Kasman and Joseph Corozzo, a senior Gambino boss, the two men discuss Gotti and his future prospects within the mob.
“He’s gone. He’s forgotten about,” Corozzo said contemptuously.
Those thoughts echo the words of Gotti Jr himself, who was once recorded bemoaning the mob life his father had put him into.
Perhaps Gotti really did retire from mob life after he got out of jail. Perhaps he took a look at the grim reality of the modern Mafia and decided enough was enough.
But is the coming Gotti trial really the last of an era? Is the long story of the US Mafia truly coming to a close? There are those who think not, who see in the troubles of the present the seeds of a revival.
“There is always going to be some form of crime, and the Mafia has got the ability to regenerate itself,” said Mark Feldman, a former top anti-Mafia prosecutor who has put many Gambino mobsters in jail.
Feldman said that despite endless prosecutions, there are still five families left in New York: the Gambinos, the Bonannos, the Colombos, the Genovese and the Lucchese. They have retreated to their “core businesses” of low-level loan-sharking, shaking down small businesses and illegal gambling, but they can still bring in millions of dollars. These are also areas of activity that are likely to boom in the recession.
They have also been given a last-minute reprieve from the law. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the priorities of the FBI and the American public have changed. For the first time since Costello’s hands electrified a nation, the Mafia has dropped off the law enforcement radar, replaced by a radical Islamic threat that few saw coming.
There are hints that the trial of John A. Gotti still means more than just a grandstanding piece of criminal theatre. For at the end of last year, wardens in a Florida prison intercepted a strange parcel. It was a piece of rag on which was written a message describing a “TOS,” jailhouse slang for “terminate on sight.” The note, written in broken English, was a hit contract. It urged Latino gang members to rub out a suspected witness against Gotti who was being held in prison.
“The TOS is in lockdown now ... Pep in da street is payin good to get the job done. So finish that TOS ASAP,” the note read.
Someone, it seems, was still taking the defense of John A. Gotti very seriously indeed. Seriously enough to try to kill a witness. Perhaps Gotti and the Mafia will go down the old way after all — with all guns blazing.
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Acting Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) has formally announced his intention to stand for permanent party chairman. He has decided that he is the right person to steer the fledgling third force in Taiwan’s politics through the challenges it would certainly face in the post-Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) era, rather than serve in a caretaker role while the party finds a more suitable candidate. Huang is sure to secure the position. He is almost certainly not the right man for the job. Ko not only founded the party, he forged it into a one-man political force, with himself
RSS