The purpose of this paper is to discuss the rise and fall of Mafia boss John Gotti and his Gambino Family gang. John Gotti was born in New York City, the son of John Joseph Gotti, an impoverished Italian day-laborer who had emigrated to America in 1920 with his young wife, Fannie. They had 13 children, of whom two died in infancy. John Gotti (Jr. while his father was alive) was the fifth child (Cummings and Volkman, 1990, pp. 10, 14-15).
John grew up in a neighborhood dominated by the Mafia, or the honored society, the organization, the mob, the syndicate, the outfit, or La Cosa Nostra, depending on who was talking. By whatever name, it was organized crime. While John Gotti was growing up, the most notorious capo of a Mafia gang was "Lucky" Luciano, who inevitably became an idol for Gotti to worship (Cummings and Volkman, 1990, pp. 21-29).
John Gotti attended Public School 113 in the Bronx, and, rather than being victimized by the local borgata, gangs of boys, Gotti, with his violent temper, soon organized his own Borgota and soon was doing odd jobs for the local "men of respect." His father, worried about how the neighborhood was affecting his sons, managed to move his family to an apartment on the Brooklyn waterfront in 1950--thus unwittingly jumping from the frying pan into the fire as far as his family's safety was concerned. This was the neighborhood dominated by the Mafia Don Toddo Marino (Cummings and Volkman, 1990, pp. 20-22, 29-32).
However, after two years in Public School 209, where he continued his borgata activities, Gotti was moved by his family deeper into Brooklyn, and into an even worse neighborhood, East New York, which was dominated by the gang run by Albert Anastasia that controlled the Brooklyn docks and therefore most of the imports into and exports from the United States. Anastasia was assassinated in 1957 by Carlo Gambino, who soon became the most powerful Mafia chief in New York (Cummings and...