Case File: John Gotti

John Joseph Gotti Jr. was born in the South Bronx, N.Y., in 1940 into a family that struggled to make ends meet; his father worked as a day laborer while his mother took care of the couple’s 13 children. The Gottis moved often, eventually settling in Brooklyn's East New York neighborhood.

As a youth, Gotti spent most of his time on the streets, eventually becoming the leader of a gang known as the Fulton-Rockaway Boys. By age 16, he dropped out of high school and was committing petty crimes such as stealing cars and, in one infamous incident, attempting to steal a cement mixer, which fell on his foot and crushed his toes.

Gotti got his start in organized crime when he began to run errands for a neighborhood club headed by Carmine Fatico, leader of a small crew in the Gambino family, which was one of the “Five Families” that dominated organized crime in the New York City area. By his mid-20s, Gotti had been arrested five times and sent to prison twice.

In 1968, Gotti, his brother, Gene, and an associate were arrested for cargo theft and truck hijacking near John F. Kennedy International Airport. The three men pleaded guilty to reduced criminal counts, and Gotti served a three-year sentence. During that time, the Fatico crew had moved to Queens and set up a fake nonprofit group called the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club.

After his release from prison in 1972, Gotti returned to his crew at the Bergin club, where he thrived under the leadership of Aniello Dellacroce, a powerful underboss of the Gambino crime family. The following year, Gotti murdered James McBratney, a member of an Irish-American gang suspected of kidnapping and killing Carlo Gambino's nephew.

Despite killing McBratney in front of multiple witnesses in 1975, Gotti was able to get the charge reduced to attempted manslaughter, for which he served only a two-year prison sentence. During his incarceration, he was allowed to dine at restaurants in Manhattan with his Gambino family associates and visit his wife and family at their home in Queens. Investigators later determined that prison authorities had been bribed to provide Gotti these privileges.

"He had led a charmed life, even when he committed a murder," Selwin Raab, an organized crime reporter, told CNN. "Carlo Gambino, who was then head of the crime family in the '70s, got him a very smart lawyer, Roy Cohn. And, somehow, he managed to get a murder in which there were two eyewitnesses reduced to second-degree manslaughter."

After serving just two years of his sentence for manslaughter, Gotti rejoined his criminal associates at the Bergin club in Queens and a Manhattan location called the Ravenite Social Club, located on Mulberry Street in Little Italy.

Mafia don Carlo Gambino died in 1976 while Gotti was imprisoned; prior to his death, Gambino appointed his brother-in-law, Paul Castellano, as his successor. Gotti and others who were loyal to Dellacroce were disappointed that he remained an underboss, even though he controlled 10 of the Gambino family’s crews. This set up a rivalry between the two factions that would eventually have deadly consequences.

Tragedy struck the Gotti family in 1980 when a neighbor, John Favara, accidentally ran over and killed Gotti’s 12-year-old son, Frankie, who was riding a minibike. When Favara tried to apologize, Gotti’s wife, Victoria, attacked him with a baseball bat. Four months later, Favara disappeared, never to be seen again.

As Gotti and Dellacroce rose to prominence within the larger Gambino organization, federal investigators kept a close eye on the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club through a wiretap. This would prove useful when Gotti and others decided that Castellano—an unpopular leader who reportedly lacked the streetwise attitude of his underlings—had to be eliminated, partly because Castellano opposed entering the lucrative drug market.

After Dellacroce died of cancer in December 1985 and Castellano refused to attend his wake, Gotti knew he had to act quickly to capitalize on the power vacuum. In an infamous event, Castellano and an associate were gunned down in front of Sparks Steak House in Midtown Manhattan while Gotti watched from a parked car with his trusted associate, Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano.

With both Dellacroce and Castellano gone, Gotti was able to seize control of the entire Gambino operation, which by now included racketeering, gambling, loansharking, extortion, money laundering, prostitution, fraud, hijacking and—with Castellano gone—drug trafficking.

Throughout his career, Gotti presented himself as a charismatic, affable, media-friendly business leader known for getting his hair carefully coiffed every day and wearing expensive Brioni suits, leading to the nickname the “Dapper Don.” But behind closed doors, Gotti was a foul-mouthed, “narcissistic tyrant with a furious temper who betrayed allies and who ordered the slayings of Gambino loyalists…who he thought had not shown him proper respect,” according to The New York Times.

A string of criminal cases gave Gotti a second nickname: the “Teflon Don” who repeatedly escaped punishment for his crimes. In 1985, he was tried for assault and robbery of a refrigerator repairman, but on the witness stand, the repairman said he could no longer recognize Gotti, and the charges were dismissed.

One year later, Gotti and six other men were tried for racketeering. Gotti and the others were acquitted, though that jury’s foreman was later convicted of accepting a $60,000 bribe—arranged by henchman Gravano—to vote for an acquittal.

In 1989, Gotti was arrested on four charges of assault and two charges of conspiracy linked to the shooting of a union official, John O'Connor. Gotti told his arresting officer, "Three to one I beat this charge." He did, due in part to Gravano’s jury tampering and witness intimidation. After the acquittal was announced, a group of locals set off fireworks in celebration.

Gotti’s lucky streak seemed endless, so when he, Gravano and their associate, Frank Locascio, were arrested at the Ravenite Social Club in December 1990 and charged with five murders, conspiracy to murder, illegal gambling, loan sharking, bribery, obstruction of justice and tax evasion, it didn’t cause much alarm within the Gambino organization.

What Gotti didn’t know is that his Ravenite headquarters had been wiretapped for years. Worse, his once-trusted associate Gravano agreed to cooperate with prosecutors when they revealed to him that Gotti, who was caught on tape criticizing Gravano, also intended to frame Gravano for the five murders or have him killed.

Moreover, the presiding judge ordered all jurors to remain anonymous, identified only by number, and with co-defendant Gravano unable to fix a jury, the stage was set for Gotti and the entire Gambino criminal enterprise to go down.

The trial was tabloid fodder for weeks, and Gravano’s bombshell testimony proved to be exactly what the prosecution needed. “Gravano was an almost unimaginably good witness,” Deputy U.S. Attorney Gleeson, a top Mafia investigator in Brooklyn, wrote in his book The Gotti Wars: Taking Down America’s Most Notorious Mobster.

Gravano “made no effort to minimize his crimes and was aided in his attitude by a deep-seated belief that they were all justified by ‘the life.’ Even the murders; ‘they broke our rules,’ he testified of his victims, and by breaking the rules of the life they’d chosen they had it coming.”

By April 1992, the jury found Gotti guilty on all 13 counts against him. After he was sentenced to life without parole, Gotti was whisked immediately onto a plane and flown to the maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Ill.

"The Teflon is gone,” announced James Fox, assistant director of the FBI's New York Field Office. “The don is covered with Velcro, and all the charges stuck."

Despite committing a total of 19 murders, Gravano was sentenced to just five years in prison, a reward for his now-legendary testimony. In addition to convicting Gotti and Locascio, Gravano helped put away 39 other mafiosi from other mob families, including Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, the head of the Genovese family, along with bosses in the Colombo, Lucchese and DeCavalcante organizations.

After his conviction, Gotti appointed his eldest son, John Gotti Jr., as acting boss of the Gambino family. "He was just an immature kid who was in over his head in running a major crime family," retired FBI agent J. Bruce Mouw told CNN. "He had a tremendous ego, like his father, and didn't know what he was doing, and the other families had no respect for him. So he was a very, very ineffective, mediocre boss."

In 1999, Gotti Jr. pleaded guilty to racketeering and was sentenced to six years and five months in prison. By then, the once all-powerful Gambino organization was a shadow of its former self, and though it’s still active, its influence, wealth and reach have waned considerably over the years.

Gravano entered the U.S. federal Witness Protection Program in 1995 but left after eight months and continued a life of sporadic criminal behavior, including drug trafficking, and subsequent jail sentences. His testimony against the Gambino family is said to have inspired other career criminals to turn state’s evidence and testify against their associates.

Gotti died of cancer in the federal prison hospital at Springfield, Mo., at age 61. Despite being a cold-blooded killer with psychopathic tendencies, he achieved near-mythical status as a folk hero. Gotti has been portrayed in numerous movies and television programsm including the 1996 film Gotti and Get Gotti, a three-part 2023 docuseries.

"I think the 'Dapper Don' will remain an image of the 20th century. I don't know if there will be one in the 21st century," Juliette Pappa, a crime reporter for WINS radio in New York told CNN. "I think he was an image that was unique to the time. He was perhaps a throwback to older times that you didn't really see anymore. And he did have star power. His aggressiveness, his looks, his dress, the image that he liked to portray, was definitely out there."