Piecework

Late one night a few months ago, a man named John Gotti walked into a jammed Manhattan restaurant called Columbus. This is a New York hangout favored by actors, models, ballplayers, agents, reporters, and second-string hoodlums. On this night, the big corner table was filled by Steve van Zandt, most of the E Street Band, and some beautiful women. As usual, nobody paid any attention. Then Gotti walked in with two very large associates. The room hushed.

Impeccably dressed, his body thick and powerful, a diamond ring glittering on the pinkie of his left hand, his small eyes searching the room for friends or danger while a thin smile played on his face, Gotti was pure Mob. Not just a soldier. Not just some strong-arm boy who muscles people tardy with payments to the loan sharks. John Gotti was bigger than all of that. In fact, at this moment in the long, dark history of American organized crime, he was the Boss.

There was only one empty table, and Gotti and his friends were led there by the maitre d\ As the gangsters sat down, the hum of conversation resumed. Gotti’s eyes drifted to the corner table. The musicians were dressed with the calculated raffishness of rock ’n’ rollers: headbands, bandannas, leather vests over bare skin, earrings, beards. Gotti called the maitre d’ over.

“Tell me something,” he said, looking down at the corner table. “Who are these guys dressed like fuckin’ pirates?” He was told about the E Street Band and how they were the musicians for the great Bruce Springsteen.

Gotti smiled.

“You see,” he growled, “everybody wants to work for the Boss.”

That was pure John Gotti: hip enough to know that Springsteen is called the Boss, sardonic enough to suggest that he considered the show-business title an act of hubris. Gotti, at forty-eight, was the first major Mob leader to have grown up with rock ’n’ roll. But in the world he inhabited there was only one boss at a time, and on that evening in the big city, the time belonged to John Gotti. He was certainly making the most of it. Nobody since Al Capone had taken such sheer pleasure in the role and been embraced so ecstatically by the media and the public.

One night last spring, I came out of a restaurant in New York’s Little Italy and saw a crowd gathered down the block. I went to see what was happening and found myself among a group of tourists, late-night diners, and neighborhood regulars. They started to cheer John Gotti, who had just left the Ravenite Social Club, as if he were a hero. In a demented way, he was. Gotti smiled, climbed into a Lincoln, and was driven away. It is impossible to imagine Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, or Carlo Gambino having that effect on people or appearing to welcome it so grandly.

Gotti clearly cherished the myth of the Mob, even in the years of its precipitous decline, and seemed to have shaped his public image to fit that myth. This is not surprising. John Gotti, after all, is an American — profoundly shaped by movies and television over the past thirty-five years. To his generation of hoodlums, The Godfather was a training film. In the way that Ronald Reagan drew on our nostalgia for the simple patriotic myths of old movies, Gotti had begun to draw upon a similar nostalgia for the clarity and romanticism of the gangster film. Even in the 1980s, nothing excites Americans more than the glamour of the outlaw, his existential drama, his willingness to risk all, even his life, to obtain power and riches. Image is everything these days, and when it can be reduced to a ten-second bite, the media embrace it and so does the public. Reagan derived much of his personal power from the fact that he looked the way Americans wanted a President to look. When Gotti appeared on the public stage, he looked like the Boss.

Here, at last, was a gangster who dressed like a gangster, down to the pinkie ring; the clothes were cut a little too sharply, the shoes almost too highly polished. His hands were carefully manicured, and when he was seen in public, his skin was so closely shaved it seemed glossy. The perfectly waved gray hair added a touch of Old World dignity. And more important, he had mastered the Walk. All stars have a great walk; think of the way John Wayne walked, or Cary Grant. I saw Gotti stroll into a courthouse one morning, dressed in a white raincoat, engulfed by lawyers, while the cameras recorded every detail. Still photos caught the amused, almost ironic smile, and the chilly foreboding in his eyes, acknowledging that Gotti might lose a Mob primary some bloody evening while reaching for the pepper. But only the video cameras captured the Walk: the back straight, the hips rolling, the feet moving in a rhythm that was at once swaggering and delicate, defying the dark knowledge that lived in his eyes. When other kids in Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn were trying to master algebra, Gotti must have been working on the Walk.