The Last of the Old Time Gangsters - 14 June 2002

John Gotti is dead.

To many Americans in the seedier section of cities, from New York to Miami, to Las Vegas to Los Angeles, that simple sentence was as stunning as to Frenchmen two centuries ago the sentence "Napoleon is dead" must have been.

In random street interviews in New York, in New Jersey, you could see and hear that the name John Gotti inspired fear in some, relief in most, in everybody awe.

Unlike most top officers of the Mafia who moved swiftly and warily in public in the middle of a wedge of bodyguards, John Gotti - 5ft 10, 200 pounds, beautifully garbed in the most opulent Italian suits, his handsome and daily barbered face surmounted by a breaking wave of silver hair, which was also tended once a day - John Gotti made his daily excursion from a barber's chair to his office something of an informal royal procession, bowing to fans known and unknown, scattering smiles and autographs and at regular intervals saluting detectives or FBI men posted on a stakeout.

The dapper don, they called him. The FBI, more testily, called him the Teflon don because for many years he evaded the law or defeated it in court more agilely than anyone since Al Capone.

John Gotti was one of 13 children born to an under-employed day labourer, son of poor Italian immigrants.

A quick-witted, restless boy he was bored by school, he did not pay much attention and he dropped out when he was 16.

It may be interesting to some Europeans I think that even back then the normal school leaving age in this country was 18.

The family moved from the comparatively alien borough of the Bronx downtown among fellow Italians in the lower east side, which was in the early 1950s a jungle of petty crime and a recruiting ground for the crews of the Mafia families.

At that time there were five Mafia families - the Bonanos, Colombo, Genovese, Luchese and the one that young John Gotti would come to join and eventually dominate, so that he could boast and justly that he was the Godfather of the United States.

Each of the five mob families worked through crews of about a score of young men who started as errand boys and moved up if they were good and ambitious, to be thieves, protection bullies and well paid hit men.

The crews, in turn, recruited their members from boys' street gangs.

John Gotti began his life's work by immediately proving with his fists that he could lead a gang.

And he recommended himself to the capo (the captain of a crew) by his quick mind and the almost delightful ease with which he could suggest to shopkeepers and restaurants that they badly needed protection from some unseen enemy.

In no time he was himself well in with the Gambino family and for eight years practised much theft, street assaults and stealing of cars, for which he served six months in jail four or five times.

These little stretches were not signs of defeat, they were exercises in the normal apprenticeship of a first class mobster.

Just before he turned 30 he pleaded guilty to holding up and stealing cargoes being delivered to Kennedy Airport and this time he served three years.

And when he got out at the age of 32 he was ready for the big time. He became the captain of a Gambino crew.

A nephew of Gambino himself was murdered and John Gotti was ordered to perform the necessary act of revenge, which he managed successfully through a three-man ambush which disposed of the murderer.

Gotti was indicted and went to trial.

But by now John Gotti had learned a lesson that the Capone school of criminology had taught in the long ago - find and clutch to your bosom for life a brilliant and conscienceless lawyer.

Mr Gotti's man not only got a life sentence reduced to four years but did a deal with the county district attorney's office that allowed Mr Gotti to come out from time to time to see his family, to dine at a fancy New York restaurant, to visit with friends and, in a soft voice, conduct the business of the Gambino family.

Only after he was free again was it proved - but not beyond an absolute doubt - that some prison guards and body guards had been bribed.

Out again and settled for life, like all the top gangsters, in a quite modest suburban house, John Gotti very soon moved onwards and upwards from being the capo of a Gambino crew - through the accident of a series of deaths or jailings in the family established himself as the head of the Gambino family itself and was very busy presiding over big robberies, drug deals, corrupting trade unions and ordering the liquidation, as the Russians used to say, of rival mobsters, sometimes of ordinary citizens who got in his way.

Like a motorist who accidentally ran over Gotti's 12-year-old son riding a bicycle. The motorist was never seen again.

It would be excessive to say that all this - Gotti's very active criminal life - went on in the light of day.

The only time these crimes came to light was in the light of a court house.

Time and again Gotti was indicted and tried and time and again the jury acquitted him.

One time after he'd been acquitted it was discovered that the foreman of the jury had received a whopping $80,000 bribe.

But most of the time the jury lacked the absolutely certain evidence of guilt.

Inside the courtroom Gotti every time defined his profession as that of a plumbing supply dealer with a maximum annual income of $100,000.

The investigators, time and again, had certain evidence that in his life of racketeering he received from his employees something between 10 and 12 million dollars a year.

At long last the federals moved in on state and county investigators and examined the extent, the appalling extent, to which the Gambino family, and Gotti in particular, controlled the pay checks and the working hours of some of the nation's most vital industries - the labour of the waterfront, the construction building industry, the collecting and disposal of everybody's garbage.

And finally in 1990, with court-approved [telephone] taps, Gotti was heard by the jury planning hijackings, boasting of murders done.

In all he was successfully charged with 13 counts of racketeering, five murders, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and - Al Capone's only punishable sin - tax evasion. Gotti was put away for life.

I go into all this, not to indulge a passing bow to the New York Times, which had a two-page obituary of him, or because it was time to notice the last of the old time gangsters, but because from time to time listeners and friends say, "By the way whatever happened to the gangsters?" - such a star feature of American movies in the 1930s and of American crime stories in the 40s.

The official answer is that in the 1940s the famous cocky little reform mayor of New York, Fiorello Le Guardia, went after the top mobsters in the biggest way, by appointing a special prosecutor of rackets - a city lawyer, one Thomas Edmund Dewey, who sent to jail the New York leader of the Democratic Party and a federal judge and broke Lucky Luciano's prostitution racket and is also credited with crippling the highly lucrative protection racket.

Until the second war every resident of the island of Manhattan paid extra high prices for laundry, fruit and vegetables and most food stuffs that came on to the island by ferry or tunnel from New Jersey and the south.

There were alert gangs on the New Jersey shore, very anxious to see that we had clean laundry and edible fruit and vegetables at a price.

Prosecutor Dewey was so successful he became governor of the state and twice ran for president.

In the 1970s the federal government appointed a supervising team over the chronically corrupt Teamsters Union - the truckers, the most influential union in the country since it had come to replace the railroads as the nation's main carrier of goods and foods.

In the 1980s and 90s Rudolph Giuliani, a federal prosecutor, weakened four of the five families, cleaned corruption out of the big downtown trade show centre and really broke the grip of the mob on the city's chief fish market.

It's difficult to say today how wide the mob's influence spreads because down two or three generations the first families, so to speak, have transformed their image, their social character and optimists say their character.

The children of the old bosses stayed in school, they went to the big universities or to business school, sometimes under new names, looking, talking and acting like the genuine preppy article, they moved quietly into the more respectable fields of investment banking and related enterprises.

So only a first rate and daring investigative journalist could say how deep and wide is the Mafia's influence.

A former governor of New York, with an Italian name, maintained through the most gruesome days of the mobs that there was no such thing as the Mafia.

Today it would be Utopian to believe that their hands have been permanently crippled and plucked from the fabulously rewarding industries of construction and garbage removal.

Certainly our garbage everywhere costs a bundle and the unexplained freakish item of the economy is that while the stock exchange declines steadily every week - and since half the country owns stocks and people worry about their shrinking income - the cost of building of new houses and of rented houses and apartments goes higher than ever.

However, we don't have time to look into this, as you may have heard we have fatter fish to fry.

We worry today more about al-Qaeda than about the last of the Al Capones.

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