FBI tapes of jailhouse conversations of John A. (Junior) Gotti (right) depict a broken and embittered man – angrily resentful of both his crime family and his blood relatives – a lot like his old man sounded in his last years. 

The tapes picked up Junior complaining that the Gambino family had gone to the dogs while he was in prison and that his gangster relatives had betrayed him, the late Dapper Don, as well as their respective families. 

During the 14-months that the FBI eavesdropped on visits from friends – and attorney Richard Rehbock – the Junior Don vowed to exact revenge against Peter Gotti, his uncle and replacement as acting boss of the crime family, whom Junior insisted had wronged him, and his late father, following Junior’s incarceration in 1999.

His father “could do forever in jail,” Junior said. He could easily do 20-30 years, Junior said, but there weren’t too many other “real men” left. Most, he said, were “pieces of shit” who just wanted “to make a buck. I am ashamed of who I am. I would rather be a Latin King.”

Time and again, he pointed to “bad blood” among his relatives as a major reason for the sorry state of their crime family. It had become a breeding ground for “rats,” he said, singling out turncoat capo Michael (Mikey Scars) DiLeonardo as the family’s main nemesis.

In an affidavit that details many tape-recorded conversations Gotti had with visitors at the federal prison in upstate Ray Brook, FBI agent Gerard Conrad

wrote: “Gotti stated that if DiLeonardo (left) is telling authorities the truth, the Gottis are ‘finished.’” 

In one conversation, Junior forlornly disclosed that he had instructed an attorney to try and work out a plea deal to cover the allegations lodged by Mikey Scars – stating that he would agree to do 10 additional years in prison to put it all behind him.

At another point, the college educated mob scion questioned his father’s decision to bring him into the Mafia, and talked about relocating to Canada with his family if he ever got out of prison.

“My father loved me, but how much to bring me into this life,” he opined to pal John (Johnny Boy) Ruggiero, whose late father and the elder Gotti, both of whom died of cancer, had been close friends and partners as they rose to the top of the Gambino family. 

In March 2003, when bugs were activated in the main visiting room of the Ray Brook facility, as well as a glass-enclosed 8ft. by 12 ft. visiting room reserved for attorney visits, Junior told Johnny Boy that Peter Gotti (right) had “robbed my father blind.”

He instructed Ruggiero to remind Peter and Richard V. Gotti – another uncle and family capo – that they had assured their dying brother that they would provide

for his widow and daughters. Thus far, the angry nephew said, “these promises were lies.”

“They better hope and pray they don’t end up in the same facility as me. I will beat them down like a cheap two dollar French hooker,” Junior said about uncles Peter and Richard, (left) and Richard’s son, Richard G. Gotti, following their racketeering convictions last year.

Junior blamed them for shattering his fidelity to the crime family.

“They turned on me,” he told Ruggiero, urging Johnny Boy to decline induction into the crime family. “I’m bitter. When my father went to jail, I took responsibility. I got pinched and went to jail. Jack (D’Amico) told me Pete (Gotti) won’t push me around. When my father was in two or three years, I sent him messages.”

“I don’t have an ounce of loyalty to them,” said Junior, according to the FBI affidavit obtained by Gang Land. As for his cousin, Richard G. Gotti, he had “robbed everybody,” Junior insisted. The affidavit alleges that Ruggiero, Rehbock, (right) and others served as go-betweens for Gotti, carrying messages between him and criminal associates. 

Conrad’s affidavit – a summary of discussions Junior had with visitors from March 2003 through last April – provides a complex picture of young Gotti. Filed in federal court in Albany, the affidavit was used to authorize continued eavesdropping at Ray Brook in May, allowing the FBI to capture amazingly embarrassing remarks – by

Rehbock, not Gotti – that enabled the feds to revoke bail of a mob associate last week.

On May 5, Rehbock told Gotti that Edmund Boyle, (left) a defendant in a bank robbery case, “calls up the state of Florida and gets motor vehicle records” while posing as “an investigator for an insurance company,” adding, “I told him. ‘You beat this case, I’ll hire you to work on (Junior’s) case.” (Rehbock declined to discuss his description of Boyle's activities. Boyle's attorney, Martin Geduldig, said Rehbock's words were untrue, and can't understand why he uttered them.)

During several taped conversations with Rehbock and Ruggiero, Junior expressed anger, and surprise, that Dileonardo, who had been inducted into the crime family with Junior on Christmas Eve of 1988, had turned on him and implicated him in the 1992 shooting of WABC radio personality Curtis Sliwa.

“My uncles abused him. My uncle Pete degraded him. I felt bad (that Mikey Scars had flipped) but at the end, I said, ‘You know what, it ain’t my fucking business.’ Meanwhile, now he is hurting me, the only guy that was good to him in his life.” 

The affidavit disclosed that Junior engaged in two failed efforts to dissuade Mikey Scars from testifying against him. One involved a personal plea to

DiLeonardo’s teenaged son after Junior arranged a prison visit for the youth. In the other, Ruggiero visited the turncoat’s ex-wife on Junior’s behalf.

Junior also voiced anger toward former brother-in-law Carmine Agnello (left) for cheating on his sister Victoria. “I got no respect for him; wife and kids are sacred,” he said. 

Agnello, a family soldier serving nine years for racketeering, earned a special mark of dishonor for haggling with Victoria over the estranged couple’s luxurious Westbury, Long Island home – the setting for A&E’s new reality show, Growing Up Gotti. “Even that rat Mikey Scars gave his wife the house. Carmine is not even half the man I thought he was,” said Junior.

Gotti’s attorney, Jeffrey Lichtman, said the tapes show his client wants nothing to do with gangsters. “In the end,” he said, “John wanted, and still wants, to move on with his life and have nothing to do with the criminal world. Throughout the entire period, my client’s words are those of a man who desperately wants to start a new life, perhaps out of the country. They are not the words of a Mafia capo or boss. And despite what the government describes as surreptitious meetings with his closest confidantes for more than a year, John never admitted any involvement in the Curtis Sliwa (right) shooting. Why? Because he had nothing to do with it.” 

Asked why Junior, if innocent, had sought to cop a plea bargain, Lichtman said: “The government had been leaking that it was going to bring a case. John knows that with his last name, it’s not easy to get a fair shake from a jury.” In hindsight, he added, it was the feds who had played dirty and undermined the legal process, not his client.

“It’s very difficult to negotiate a fair plea bargain when the government is listening in on your client’s legal strategy sessions,” said Lichtman.