Piecework

“I don’t know what he did bad,” a black woman said of Gotti in another courthouse last year, “but he sure looks good to me.”

Until December 16, 1985, not many Americans had ever heard of John Joseph Gotti. At 5:26 that evening, a neatly dressed seventy-year-old man named Paul Castellano arrived with a friend for an early dinner at Sparks Steak House on East Forty-sixth Street. Castellano looked like a businessman; he was in fact the boss of the Gambino family, and his companion, Thomas Bilotti, was an underboss. Neither man made it to the bar. Three gunmen suddenly appeared and blasted them into eternity. By midnight, those police scholars who major in the Mob were predicting that an obscure younger hoodlum from Howard Beach, Queens, would emerge as the new boss. A “good fella” named John Gotti. They were right.

The next day, Gotti’s name and face were all over the newspapers and local television news shows. The rough sketch of his personal story was burnished into the thrilling shape of tabloid legend. For Gotti was a throwback, as elemental as an ax.

The most frequently related tale was about the death of Gotti’s son Frank and what happened later. One day in March 1980, twelve-year-old Frank was riding a minibike on the quiet bourgeois streets of Howard Beach. He was the middle child of two girls and three boys born to John and Victoria Gotti. As Frank darted out from behind a Dumpster, he was struck and killed by a car driven by a man named John Favara. On July 28, while John and Victoria Gotti vacationed in Florida, Favara walked out of the Castro Convertible plant where he worked and went to his car, parked in front of the Capitol Diner. Suddenly, a heavyset man walked over and clubbed him. Favara was thrown into a blue van and driven away, never to be seen again. His car also vanished. When Gotti returned from Florida and was visited by police, he said, “I don’t know what happened. I am not sorry if something did happen. He killed my kid.”

That story became central to the Gotti myth, because it was so direct, personal, dramatic, unforgiving; that is, it resembled a scene in a movie. In the years since then, witnesses against Gotti in other cases forgot what they once saw; others disappeared; prospective jurors declined the privilege of judging him; he has developed an aura. He did what gangsters were supposed to do: he inspired fear — simple, runny fear. Nobody wanted him as an enemy. The Feds and the police watched his movements; they developed stool pigeons to report on his activities; they placed bugs in and around the Bergin Hunt 8c Fish Club in Ozone Park, a storefront private club that Gotti used as his personal Sierra Maestra. They could not nail him.

And a peculiar thing seemed to be happening. When Gotti took power, the Mob was in terrible shape, as bad off as Chrysler was before the advent of Lee Iacocca. Cubans and Colombians totally dominated the multibillion-dollar cocaine business. The old days, when such as Lansky and Costello owned county leaders, judges, and politicians, were long gone.

By the early ’70s it was becoming clear that the Mob had no bench. The hoodlums who remained in the rackets were generally dim-brained gavones, reduced to hijacking, loan-sharking, stealing cars, or peddling heroin. Some were even using the drugs they were supposed to be peddling, something the older generation never permitted, because a junkie would rat on his own mother. At the same time, the federal government was attacking the Mob with a variety of sophisticated electronic techniques, and with the RICO statutes.

Then along came Gotti, with a message of inspiration and hope. It was morning in Mob America. In private, Gotti was apparently a shrewd and persuasive politician. In the first months after accepting what Adlai Stevenson called the “bitter cup,” he moved among the various Mob families, offering conciliation, peace, and revival. The tattered legions of the Mob knew he was willing and able to use lethal force to exert discipline; he wanted to show them that he could also think (he claimed to have scored 140 on an IQ test in prison) and that he had a vision of the future.

At one point, the Feds managed to place a bug in the doorway of the Nice ’n’ EZ Auto School, down the block from the Bergin Hunt & c Fish Club. And in January 1986, while Gotti was consolidating his power, they heard him tell another wise guy:

“The law’s gonna be tough with us, okay, if they don’t put us away. If they don’t put us away, for one year or two — that’s all we need. But if I can get a year run without being interrupted: get a year — gonna put this thing together where they could never break it, never destroy it. Even if we die, be a good thing.”

The other wise guy said: “It’s a hell of a legacy to leave.”