Rise & Fall of Mafia Boss John Gotti

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 a total of 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, also known as 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 run by the Mafia Don Toddo Marino (CUMMINGS AND VOLKMAN, 1990, pp. 20-22, 29-32

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to the attention of the higher-ups, including Carlo Gambino. Fatico then put Gotti in command of an important Mafia operation: hijacking goods coming through John F. Kennedy International Airport. By 1967 Gotti had bungled this task so much that he was sentenced to four years in a federal prison. He served three years, and was then paroled (Cummings and Volkman, 1990, pp. 65-73). Fatico now began John Gotti's advanced education in Mafia crime, first in illegal gambling and loansharking, pornography, infiltration of legitimate businesses, and illegal drugs (Cummings and Volkman, 1990, pp. 73-80). In 1969, Fatico's gang had relocated to Ozone Park, where Fatico set up the "Bergin Hunt and Fish Club" as his headquarters on 101st Avenue. After his parole, Gotti began to hang out there. Fatico put him in charge of the gambling operations, a task at which he excelled despite his own addictive gambling (Cummings and Volkman, 1990, pp. 86-92). In 1973, as an outcome of a Mafia war, John Gotti ordered the murder of one James McBratney. For this he was arrested by the FBI on a charge of murder, and after some plea bargaining with the corrupt legal system, went off to state prison for a four-year term in 1975. He was paroled in l

Category: Government - R