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| June 13, 2002 | |||||
| By Jerry Capeci | |||||
| Oct. 27, 1940 - June 10, 2002 | |||||
 "Listen carefully to me. You'll never see another guy like me if you live to be 5000." John Gotti, Jan. 29, 1998 |
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Say what you will about John Joseph Gotti Jr., he had a way with words, words that will survive long after he is buried in St. John's Cemetery in Queens beside his son Frank and his father, John Sr.
"I'm the boss of my family. My wife and kids at home," he smiled as Gambino gangsters guided him into Brooklyn Federal Court for a pre-trial hearing. He arrived at the courtroom door at the same time as radio reporter Mary Gay Taylor, he grasped the door with one hand and graciously ushered her in with the other. "I was brought up to hold the door open for ladies," he said. When the case went to trial, he had several tabloid reporters scratching their |
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heads and checking their thesauruses and dictionaries as he made the point that a witness wasn't telling the truth. "Mendacity," he said. "The word for today is mendacity. It's the art of being mendacious." In
1992, after lawyer Bruce Cutler was disqualified because of a conflict of interest from
representing Gotti at the trial that would doom him to die in prison, Gotti said assistant
U.S. attorney John Gleeson had "the
conflict; he's had one the last eight years. You know how they
say I'm Bruce's only client the last eight years? Well, I'm (Gleeson's) only case. This
guy, you know what he says to his
Prosecutors weren't Gotti's only targets. He often used words like knives when he talked about his relatives, including his wife, son Junior, and former son-in-law Carmine Agnello, the last two in prison for basically following the Teflon Don's bad lead. In a jailhouse conversation with his daughter Victoria, and his brother Peter, Gotti said his wife |
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Vicky was a pig, tramp and a witch. Son Junior, he said, was an idiot, an asshole, and an imbecile for allowing investigators to find money, guns and other evidence in a friend's basement. "This is stupidity from down the line," he said. Gotti exhibited a
special flair for biting sarcasm when it came to his son-in- "You gotta see the charges," said Gotti. "Malicious mopery. Possession of brains with intent to use. Malicious mopery. Malicious mopery. Stolen bumper. Hubcab." At another point, he asked Victoria, who has since divorced Agnello, "So what's the story with Carmine? Is he feeling good? Is he not feeling good? Is his medication increased? Decreased? Is it up? Down? Does he get in the backseat of the car and think someone has stolen the steering wheel?" He saved some of his most descriptive lines for rival hoodlums. When he learned that a gambling operation headed by Greek organized |
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Gotti's crack about what he would do to Velentzas was played at his 1992 murder and racketeering trial. The remark did not show Gotti to be an evil butcher, but merely demonstrated that Gotti ran a gambling business and felt strongly about interlopers. At trial, prosecutors used the words of Gotti's turncoat underboss Salvatore (Sammy Bull) Gravano to make Gotti out to be a murderer. Gravano told how he, Gotti and other insurgents killed Gambino boss Paul Castellano and took over the crime family. But when it came to three other murders for which the jury found him guilty - |
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Gambino soldiers Robert (DeeBee) DiBernardo, Louis Milito and Louis DiBono -- prosecutors put Gotti's own words to great use.
Milito was killed, said Gotti, because Gravano (right) reported that Milito had badmouthed Gotti: "I took Sammy's word that he talked behind my back. I took Sammy's word." About DiBono, Gotti said: "He didn't rob nothing. Know why he's dying? He's gonna die because he refused to come in when I called." Because eavesdropping FBI agents failed to grasp Gotti's exact words about DiBono until much later, they failed to prevent his death, which was carried out in a parking lot of the World Trade Center, by the city's own home-grown terror. |
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| Editor's note: This Week in Gang Land will be off a couple of weeks, taking in an international conference in London that will focus on different types of crime. The column will resume on July 4. | |||||
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wife when he gets up
in the morning? 'Hi ya, John.'
law, whom he consistently
described as a moron and much worse. During that same conversation, he pretended to read
from an imaginary rap sheet of 
crime boss Spiros
Velentzas (left )was infringing on his turf, he told a cohort to deliver him a message.
"You tell him, I, me, John Gotti will sever his mother fucking head!"
