Nov 28, 2007 10:47 am US/Eastern
Why John A. Gotti Finally Spoke Out
And Please, Don't Call Him 'Junior'
WHITE PLAINS (CBS) ―
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In a rare display of public anger, John "Junior" Gotti lashed out at rumors suggesting he is a mob rat and that he will be indicted for murder. The outburst happened while Pablo Guzmán questioned him outside Federal Court in White Plains.
CBS
John "Junior" Gotti lashed out at rumors suggesting he is a mob rat who will be indicted for murder. That headline ("Don't Call Him 'Junior'!") of course, includes an admonition that his mother, Victoria Gotti, has chided us in the press about.
"Pardon me if my opinion of journalists is not the highest, Pablo," she once told me in a courtroom. A place where her son John was, once again, fighting to stay out of jail.
"My family, as you know, has been victimized by the press more than a few times. But you wonder when they can't even get that right: He was never a 'junior.' His father, John J. Gotti, was actually the 'junior.' If you want to be technical: His father was John Gotti Senior. But nobody was ever called 'Junior' in this family," Victoria Gotti said.
As I've noted before, that "Junior" label passed on to tabloid writers, who picked it up from the agents who had the Gottis under surveillance, and from rival wiseguys inside and outside the Gambino crime family, who used it sarcastically when talking about John Gotti's kid. Nobody ever called him "Junior" to his face. It was always a term of derision.
I thought about all this as I saw him, yet again, in a courtroom. There's gray in the hair now. And a kind of maturity in the face you once thought might never come -- when he was a wild kid, who wanted desperately to get the approval of his old man. Maybe he threw his weight around; Maybe he carried himself with the kind of arrogance, the kind of entitlement, that made real hard cases in the Gambinos and Genoveses and Colombos wonder just where the hell this kid was getting off.
"If it wasn't for the old man," I was told more than a few times by guys in the life, as they say, "this kid would be nothin'. And the father has him set up like a capo. He hasn't even made his bones!" The parlance for your first killing for the organization.
So there were always resentments against him. "Now the old man has him as part of the Administration," another soldier told me a few years later. Gotti, the father, was in jail. And the whispers were that the son, his uncle Pete and one of the two Corozzo brothers alternated as a kind of triumvirate running the family for him.
Even though the assaults by the Feds were relentless, the biggest challenge to the Gotti regime was always the fear that the resentment against their leadership among others within their own family – particularly those loyal to the tradition that Paul Castellano had represented; the boss that Gotti had whacked in his grab for power --- would grow to a poisonous level and merge with say those in the competing Genovese family to one day get payback for how the Gotti boys got to the top.
John, the father, always worried about his son. He assigned bodyguards to look over the kid. When he was young, the son could be a hot head. Maybe thinking that's the way he had to be. Because now, at 43, you can see that he has grown disillusioned wasting so many years chasing…what? This thing of ours? This once-mighty institution that began to crumble between the outside hammering of one federal case after another, and the inside erosion of betrayals once unheard of within the Mafia. Coupled with just a poor generation of raw material that made up the new second and third levels of leadership who couldn't quite step up to match those who had been killed or incarcerated.
The son had even grown cold towards his uncle Peter, as wiretap conversations revealed. Because he and others who had promised the father that Victoria would be taken care of even after he was put away for life, didn't quite keep that promise ("a good thing I always took care of myself," Victoria once said to me inside her home).
One of those bodyguards was Mark Caputo. On March 13, 1983, he was with John -- 19 then -- and a couple of other guys at a bar in Ozone Park called the Silver Fox at 105-16 Liberty Ave. (it's a furniture store now). Sometime after 2 a.m., the kind of fight breaks out that happens at joints like that at that hour of the morning. I've heard several variations of what happened. One from a guy who was actually there. One from a guy who knew a guy who was there. Most from cops or FBI agents. Basically, it seems to boil down to that petty macho thing of "Who are you lookin' at?" Although some people swear "Junior" was hitting on this young lady and her boyfriend didn't like it. And the boyfriend was basically told to take a hike by John's crew (this apparently was a misdemeanor thrown often at young Gotti in those days).
The upshot of the pushing and fists ultimately was that 24-year-old Danny Silva was killed. Stabbed and stomped to death. So, since 1983, various law enforcement authorities have tried to pin this rap on Gotti. Caputo took the weight and was arrested, but was released when things began happening. John Cennamo for example, also known as Vinny, told police he saw John Gotti heavily involved with Caputo in the collective assault that became the murder of Danny Silva. But Cennamo apparently killed himself soon after talking. That was followed by other witnesses suddenly leaving the state or losing their memory.
Correction: Late last year the Feds began to leak that before the first of Gotti's Curtis Sliwa trials, in 1995, he allegedly told them that Cennamo did not commit suicide. That he was killed by the mob, and it was made to look like a suicide. The timing of this leak was interesting, as it came about a month after the Feds had lost their last Sliwa case against Gotti.
The day after he walked out of the courtroom for what he hoped would be the last time, I was trying to arrange a one-on-one interview with Gotti through his lawyer, Charles Carnesi. "This may not be a good time," Carnesi said. "It's not over. We hear the government is trying to dig up some old murder cases to pin on John."
Now, the original story that had John Gotti's kid allegedly giving up mob secrets was broken by the ace of all Mafia journalists, Jerry Capeci, on his "Gang Land News" Web site and later, in his column in the "City Sun." However, later, it got blown up by the New York Post as only the Post can, with the word "rat" attached to Gotti's name. This, folks, is the kiss of death on the street.
Then last week, the Post said Gotti would be indicted soon for the murders. And that he would be accused of participating in bribing cops.
This is what led to the notoriously low-profile John A. Gotti venting, exploding, outside federal court in White Plains, in the raw video you can see here at WCBSTV.com.
When I asked him about the murders. And asked him to elaborate when he said the FBI and the Post had put his family "in harm's way." It was an extraordinary session, there on the street.
"Does it make it all better -- if I get one in the head?"
"Does it make it all better -- if I get found in the street?"
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