NEW YORK -- Maybe this "Teflon Don" John Gotti isn't so slick after all.
How else to explain why he talked when he should have walked, why he trusted an underboss who turned rat, and why, no matter how expensive his suits and how silken his socks, the minute he opens his mouth he comes across like a high school tough who just discovered four-letter words?
Yet this is the same John Gotti who has avoided jail terms three times in six years because prosecutors couldn't make the charges stick and who is reputed to have battled to the top of the Gambino crime family, reigning dynasty of the Mafia.
So it is that some people now see Mr. Gotti as the most prominent symbol of the Mafia's imminent demise, for he is once again seated in a courtroom, smirking and wisecracking as he faces the most formidable evidence amassed against him to date.
"The traditional Mafia as we know it is finished," Ed Wright, chief investigator for the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, said last week. Even those who aren't as optimistic as Mr. Wright give the Mafia a life expectancy of only about a decade.
Mr. Gotti is charged with five Mafia murders, conspiracy in a sixth, gambling, loan sharking, tax evasion, obstruction of justice and racketeering -- and some of the most damaging evidence has come from his own mouth.
Investigators spent years painstakingly making him an unwitting star witness, by recording his conversations for hours on end at his favorite hangouts, chiefly the Ravenite Social Club, a storefront in Manhattan's Little Italy with bricked-up windows and a scrawl of graffiti on its battered door.
Like other reputed Mafia officers, Mr. Gotti grew used to such attention, and he often took precautions against being overheard by hidden microphones, especially after his acquittal on racketeering charges in 1987. Knowing that the club was probably bugged, "he made a practice at the Ravenite of going on these walk-talks," Mr. Wright said, meaning that Mr. Gotti took his sensitive confabs to the sidewalk, strolling and chatting while bodyguards kept their distance and noisy traffic rolled by.
"But then he'd circumvent that by going upstairs in the Ravenite and talking without even turning on a TV in the room," Mr. Wright said. "So it was like getting studio-quality tapes."
Then there's the matter of witness Sammy the Bull, a.k.a. Salvatore Gravano, the former boxer who became Mr. Gotti's trusted underboss. As Mr. Gravano testified in court Thursday, "I was a good loyal soldier. John barked and I bit."
But when federal investigators barked last fall about the possibility of a life sentence for Mr. Gravano, he decided to bite Mr. Gotti, and in October -- on Mr. Gotti's 51st birthday -- Sammy the Bull decided to become a Mafia rat. In appreciation for his testimony, the government has offered the prospect of a 20-year maximum sentence and a new identity under the witness protection program.
His accounts have been the highlight of the trial, with blunt descriptions of his part in 19 mob murders, nine of them since Mr. Gotti allegedly took over the Gambino operation in late 1985 with the slaying of former Gambino boss Paul Castellano.
That murder, carried out on a crowded rush hour sidewalk by men in trench coats and black furry hats, left Mr. Castellano and his underboss lying in a pool of blood by their limousine at the entrance to a midtown steak house, while crowds of pedestrians screamed and ducked for cover.
All the while, Mr. Gravano testified, he and Mr. Gotti idled in a nearby limousine, waiting to cruise by to confirm the kill.
Not that Mr. Gotti admits to any of this. His public posture is that of a $60,000-a-year plumbing contractor who's being persecuted because he leads a flashy lifestyle and likes to socialize with the boys in Little Italy and out in Ozone Park in Queens.
Mr. Gotti lives in Howard Beach, a Queens neighborhood of small, trim lawns and tree-lined streets. Folk singer icon Woody Guthrie once lived a few blocks up the same street.
The home of the Teflon Don looks like Ward Cleaver's, except that the Cleavers didn't have a surveillance camera overlooking the sidewalk. The house is two stories of white brick and white siding, with a pair of fake ducks squatting on the front lawn and a "Beware of the Dog" sign on the backyard gate. Two yellow ribbons are tied to a small, bare tree out front, awaiting Mr. Gotti's return (he has been jailed without bail since his arrest 15 months ago). A few neighbors have similar displays.
Atop his roof is a huge satellite dish. But all the neighbors have the ungainly zigzags of conventional antennae. Not even having Mr. Gotti around could bring cable TV to Queens.
A couple miles to the north in the Ozone Park neighborhood is the Bergin Hunt and Fish Social Club, where Mr. Gotti allegedly began engineering his move up the Mafia's corporate ladder. He started early, dropping out of school at age 16 in Brooklyn and joining a group of young toughs known as the Fulton-Rockaway Boys. That led to an affiliation a year later with the crime organization eventually headed by Carlo Gambino, investigators
say.
In 1975 Mr. Gotti got a two-year prison sentence for helping hold still a fellow named James McBratney while another guy plugged away with a gun. Attorney Roy Cohn got the charge reduced to attempted manslaughter. By the time Mr. Gotti was back on the streets in 1977, Mr. Gambino was dead, and it took eight more years of maneuvering to reach the top.
The Bergin club, like the Ravenite, isn't much to look at from the outside. The first floor is dingy red brick, with two sagging air conditioners bulging from the wall and a pair of banged-up metal doors with padlock closures. The place is sandwiched between a party store and a manicurist, Fantasia Nails, done up in pink and lace.
The manicurists have nothing much to say about Mr. Gotti these days, and neither does anyone else in the neighborhood. Questions are met with scowls -- for the questioner, not for Mr. Gotti, because he has endeared himself to Ozone Park with his generosity and by throwing an annual July 4th picnic and fireworks display.
About the only parts of Manhattan visible from this neck of Ozone Park are the twin towers of the World Trade Center, shining in the sun like beacons, symbols of the seemingly easy money that can be had only a half-hour's subway ride away.
Not that Mr. Gotti ever took the subway. He made his almost daily trips on the choked expressways, gliding along in the back of a dark chauffeur-driven limousine on his way to a midtown restaurant or a popular disco. But almost always there would be a stop at the Ravenite, the site of his fateful blabbing.
And, oh, such blabbing. Some samples:
"You tell this punk, I, me, John Gotti, will sever your [bleep] head off!" he shouted once.
Speaking about the 1986 murder of Robert DiBernardo, he said, "When 'DiBee' got whacked . . . I was in jail when I whacked him. I knew why it was being done. I done it anyway."
All this from the man who investigators say ran an empire with rackets in construction, restaurants, loan sharking, garbage hauling and the garment industry that together grossed about $500 million per year.
But, as others have pointed out, junk-bond king Michael Milken made about the same amount single-handed only 20 blocks south of Little Italy, with a safer, tidier brand of crime on Wall Street. And when Mr. Milken was caught, it was considered stiff punishment when he got a 10-year sentence. Mr. Gotti faces life in prison if convicted.
Perhaps an even surer sign of how the Mafia is becoming outdated is the almost nostalgic romp New York's three tabloid newspapers have taken in covering Mr. Gotti's trial. The shrieking headlines reached their peak during Mr. Gravano's testimony, when the New York Post covered the front page with the names of his 19 victims inside a tombstone, including a 1983 victim, "Jackie, last name unknown." Newsday's major contribution is its daily "Gotti Garb" feature, a color sketch of the latest high-fashion outfit worn by one of the courtroom figures. Mob chic.
Such coverage is part of what seems to be a subtle longing for the supposed good old days of Mafia crime. Some of the spectators who wait in long lines to get a seat in the courtroom (one drove all the way from Poughkeepsie) say they prefer the Mafia's orderly ways to the violent chaos taking its place. But their longings are based on false images put out by movies such as "The Godfather," said Jerry Capeci, a reporter for the Daily News and co-author of "Mob Star," a Gotti biography. " 'The Godfather' portrayed gangsters with a reverence that just isn't true."
Robert G. Blakey, the University of Notre Dame law professor who helped write the federal racketeering statutes, cites Mr. Gotti as "a throwback" to the Mafia's coarsest and most ruthless days. "He's an indication of the decline of the mob, not its success."
It is his ruthless reputation that keeps federal authorities on their toes during the trial. Dogs from the bomb squad sweep the courtroom daily, and motion detectors were installed for after-hours security. The names of the jurors have been locked in a safe; even the judge knows them only as numbers, and news media sketch artists aren't allowed to draw their faces.
Some of the caution stems from Mr. Gotti's past trials. The foreman of the jury from his 1987 racketeering acquittal was indicted two weeks ago for taking a $60,000 bribe, and the man whom Mr. Gotti allegedly assaulted during a parking dispute in 1984 never testified, claiming a sudden loss of memory.
Just last Tuesday, the sister of a standby witness against Mr. Gotti was shot in the neck as she sat in a car in front of her home, although investigators think the shooting was probably related to another mob trial, in which the same witness has a bigger role.
Meanwhile, as government attorneys work to wrap up their case, Mr. Gotti acts as if he isn't a bit worried. He scowls and points his finger at witnesses, smirks and grins after remarks that appear to amuse only him, and looks ever splendid with his trim, steel-gray hair and his $1,400 suits.
And did we mention the $300 floral ties? With matching pocket hankies.
But the bravado rings hollow to some. "He's dead one way or another, even if he beats this trial." Mr. Wright said. "So much has come out that he should not have been talking about that he's finished. I don't think he'd last six months on the street."