Oct 2, 2006 8:38 am US/Eastern
Pablo Guzman's Gotti Files: The Victoria Interview
CBS 2's Veteran Reporter Of Stories On The Mob Gives A Behind-The-Scenes Look At His Interview With The Widow Of 'The Teflon Don'
by Pablo Guzmán
(CBS)
Admittedly, I took a chance. She didn't know I was coming.
The last time I saw Victoria Gotti, Tuesday September 26, the jury was weighing her son's fate had ended its sixth day of deliberations, and it was clear that they were deadlocked.
Rather than declare a mistrial right then, even though the jury sent out a note saying they were deadlocked the day before, Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin (herself a bit testy because she had tickets to Israel) asked them to consider staying through the evening, offering dinner and rides home.
They insisted on coming back Wednesday instead.
The Gotti family in the courtroom did a 180 when court ended that Tuesday, from the restrained optimism they had earlier that day, when it looked like John Gotti would get his third mistrial on racketeering charges, to a muted anger at the end of the day.
Their fear was that the longer the jury continued, the greater the chance that jurors holding out against conviction might be swayed. You could see on Victoria Gotti's face, John's mother, when she left, that she was not happy. And under a lot of stress.
By the way, and I brought this up with Victoria when we sat down later: her son, John A. Gotti, was never known as "Junior" to his family and friends, and she confirmed that. In spite of the media's insistence at tagging him "Junior Gotti." The only distinction by name between father and son is the middle initial: John J. Gotti is her husband. His father. And of course, the late boss of the Gambino crime family.
The whole "Junior" thing started years ago as a term of derision said behind his back by enemies the Gottis had among the Gambinos and in other crime families (remember, to get to the top, the old man took out the then-boss, Paul Castellano, in a hail of bullets outside Sparks steak house on East 46th on December 16, 1985. Paul had, and still has, a lot of loyalists inside the Gambinos, and friends in the other families).
The agents assigned to the Gambinos picked up on it, and passed it along when they talked to contacts in newspapers and television. Pretty quickly, it stuck. But it's not John A. Gotti's nickname, street name, or any name used in his own family. In fact, no one who doesn't want one under the chin calls him that to his face.
When Victoria speaks, she uses "Johnny" for her husband, and "John" for her son. And yes, one of her daughters is also "Victoria." As a kind of inside joke, Mom signs letters and the many canvases she paints '"Victoria Gotti Sr."
"I tell people, we're both artists: she's the writer. I'm the painter."
When the judge finally declared a mistrial Wednesday, Victoria was not in court. It was one of the few times she was not present. "This whole thing has taken a toll on her," Victoria (the daughter) told me.
I had a feeling, though, she'd be a bit better Thursday morning, now that there was a third mistrial; and, because it looked like the Feds would not bring a fourth trial on these charges (however, as I reported Wednesday, I learned that investigators were looking at whether or not to bring a new trial on new charges, outside New York City).
And, Wednesday night, Victoria had to be cheered by the gathering at her home: her surviving four children, daughters Angel and Victoria, sons John and Peter, and most of the 15 grandchildren (a fifth child, Frank, 12 at the time, was accidentally killed by a neighbor of the Gottis in Howard Beach, John Favara. He hit the boy, who was on a bike, as he backed his car out. He couldn't see him. The death left Victoria devastated and practically in mourning for years. Four months after the accident, Mr. Favara disappeared. It is a hardly disguised underworld secret that friends of John Gotti saw to it that Mr. Favara was no longer among the living).
I knocked on the side door of that Howard Beach home. A cousin was cleaning up the kitchen inside. She got Victoria, who came downstairs; surprised, but not completely. It was still morning. She opened the glass, outer door. I made a gesture with both hands held low, palms up, arms wide at my sides. I cocked my head slightly, and shrugged a shoulder. By my body language, I was saying, Sorry to bother you; but I think you know why I'm here.
It was also my way of letting her speak first.
"You alone?"
"I have a guy waiting outside." My cameraman, Charlie Simmons.
"You come in. He stays out there." It was an order.
We talked in her dining room, next to the kitchen, for an hour (another cameraman, the next day, Ron Gerellini --- he grows herbs and tomatoes and things in the garden of his Staten Island home --- said, "I would've killed to shoot that interview! I would've been talking recipes with her forever!").
She gave me a pretty startling insight that I had never heard before on one of the reasons why her son had left the mob (whether he had truly left or not, and when, was exactly the obstacle that had hung three juries). She made it clear, though, that he had learned the hard way that the life he had chosen would mean he wouldn't be there for his six kids. "He loves his children."
I told her how strangers cheered when he left court. How people said, "You won."
"We didn't win anything. The government won't rest. My daughter says, Ma, you're a glass half empty kind of person. No, I'm a realist. That's why I want him to take his family far away from here."
"John said, after the verdict yesterday, that he wanted to be the father his father had not been." She paused; then said, "Johnny's world was out there. When my son Peter had meningitis, when we had to travel the country to find specialists because my daughter Victoria's heart valve wasn't working --- I was the one who did all that. When John was behind bars, and had to be told, this one was sick, this one was having problems in school, this one made the team --- I think it finally dawned on him."
"He was missing on what he really loved the most. He thought he could be in the street, to please his father. He's not really of the street. His heart is with his family. And he saw he was going to lose it."
A side note: I have spent many years getting to know the FBI agents, and the NYPD detectives, among the many investigators (from different states, the various DA's, other Federal agencies, etc.) who have gone after organized crime, John Gotti in particular. And I know that their contempt for Gotti is so wide that when they read or hear reporters like myself conveying a human moment with any Gotti, they get ticked off. And a lot of it is understandable.
"Look," I've been told, "the guy killed people. A lot of people. Or ordered them killed. The guy made millions in dirty money. And his family has lived damn well off that money. The kid (John A.) says he's got all these properties? Really? How? The daughter lives in a mansion. Really? Come on. And you guys glamorize these people."
There is another reason why the Feds continue to go after everything Gotti: unlike other mobsters, who always followed the code of flying under the radar because the spotlight was bad for business, John J. Gotti got a kick out of the attention. And the Feds felt he (and Bruce Cutler) were rubbing it in their faces.
So all these prosecutions are payback. The ultimate vendetta.
I can't do what I do as a reporter unless I have access to all sides of the story. Because the truth, pilgrims, is somewhere in everybody's version. Sometimes the wiseguys are completely full of it. More times than you may realize (maybe not), the government is full of it. To try and get a handle on where the truth really is, all the parties I talk to have to know they can speak to me without getting burned. And they have to know that what I report will be fair, and down the middle.
And in Victoria Gotti's case, when you report on someone's husband and children for 21 years, the time comes when you let them have their say. She knew I would not put words in her mouth. She knew that I was not so naïve that I didn't know there was a Mafia. She knew that I believe law enforcement has to do its job. She knew that I would handle the story of her falling out with her husband over their son with care.
At the end of that hour, with my cameraman fretting outside, she said, "All right. Let's do it. Just show my paintings, Pablo: I want people to see that I actually do something besides watch my grandkids. I know they're not gonna give you a lot of time. But, you think you can let people see I'm a person? That I've got a sense of humor?"
No problem.
As I went to tell Charlie outside, she said, Come back in an hour. Every reporter knows the feeling I had then. Something like this, you don't exhale until it's in the can. An hour, I thought, she's going to change her mind.
Instead: "You gotta let me put on my face. I mean, I'm going in front of a camera!"
An hour later, she was true to her word.
(© MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
