Piecework

“Well, you know why it would be,” Gotti answered. “Ah — because it would be right. Maybe after thirty years it would deteriorate, but it would take that long to fuckin’ succumb, you know…” Then, like De Gaulle or Mao, he quoted a third party in reference to himself. One of the men he’d asked to join the grand new coalition of the Mob, its version of the Popular Front, had said to Gotti: “You were our last hope. …”

The last hope was soon part of the texture of the popular imagination. The tabloids labeled him the Dapper Don. He was followed by TV crews. He starred in the gossip columns. But mobologists were also talking about his troubles. Like most Americans, the major problems he had were within his own family. His brother, Gene, was convicted of peddling heroin at a time when the Boss was telling his infantry to get out of the smack racket. Then his son Little John got in trouble. Last winter, the young man and some friends beat up a man in a diner in the neighborhood where Gotti lives. The guy turned out to be a cop. Gotti apparently ordered the kid to do his drinking out of the neighborhood. So Little John, who dresses like his father right down to the pinkie ring, went to the next county. There he and his friends got into a fight in a club and punched out a woman.

“The old wise guys don’t like this stuff,” one mobologist told me. “There’s two laws: one for everybody, one for John’s relatives. And who could imagine Frank Costello punching out a woman?”

The grumblings about the Boss were not, however, in evidence at the twentieth annual Fourth of July block party thrown by Gotti’s Bergin Hunt & Fish Club this year. Like any decent American politician, Gotti had long ago learned the importance of securing a local base; every year since 1969 his club had donated hamburgers, sausages, and fireworks to celebrate the birth of the country that has allowed the club’s members such affluent and leisurely lives. In return, the locals spoke of Gotti with a certain affection. “If he does bad things,” one said, “he doesn’t do them around here.” But great fame, alas, also brings great scrutiny. Under pressure from editorial writers, the cops told Gotti he could cook sausage but he couldn’t blow up firecrackers. Ah, fame: the two-edged sword.

Gotti threw the party anyway. As reporters, cops, and kids looked on, homemade barbecues were set up in the street (they were made from split fifty-five-gallon drums, of the sort sometimes used for disposing of stool pigeons). A Mister Softee truck arrived early and stayed late; an inflated rubber Kiddie Kastle filled IoIst Avenue, and one corner was occupied by a ride called Ernie’s King Kong. Gotti himself slipped quietly into the club in the afternoon; on the street, orders were barked by Little John, dressed in a sleeveless undershirt, trim Guido haircut, Bermuda shorts.

As daylight faded, the crowd grew to about four thousand. And the assembled jackals of the press wondered about only one matter: Would the Boss defy the law and set off fireworks? Some of Gotti’s neighbors complained about the injustice of life under the embattled American flag. “It ain’t fair,” said one. “They’re blowing up firecrackers all over the city and we can’t do it here, because the newspapers say all those rotten things about John.”

After a while, as the TV lights brightened the street, a group of young men started chanting, “We want the Boss!” But members of the wise-guy directorate whispered to them, and the chant became “We want John!” and then was transformed once more into “We want the works!” And then suddenly, from the rooftop of the building housing the Our Friends Social Club (a branch of the Bergin), the sky exploded with fireworks. The cops moved to seal off the building, and from another direction, a gigantic volley went off on the rooftop of Ozone Electric Inc. The crowd roared. The rockets now seemed to come from everywhere: rooftops and backyards and a railroad trestle down the block, spiraling through the summer night. The crowd was delirious with triumph and defiance. The cops looked timid in the face of … the aura.

Then the door of the Bergin Hunt & Fish Club opened. Inside, where the Italian flag was hung on the wall and another door led to the inner sanctum where his dead son’s picture is on the wall, John Gotti could be seen laughing. He came to the door, engulfed by ten sides of Mob beef, and stood on the doorstep. The Boss then nodded at the cheers of the exultant populace, but he did not smile. He just stood there, solemn and dignified, staring up at the rockets’ red glare. John Gotti, American.

ESQUIRE,

October 1989

ON THE RUN

DAYTONA BEACH, FLA.