Word: gotti
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Gotti quit school at age 16 and joined a violent teenage gang known as the Fulton-Rockaway Boys. By the time he was 25, Gotti had joined a mob crew headed by Carmine Fatico, a captain in the Gambino crime family, and was now a full-time gangster...
...gradually worked his way up through the ranks doing contract killings and hijacking trucks before blasting his way onto the big stage in the early 1980s. After ordering a very public hit on boss Paul Castellano in Midtown Manhattan on Dec. 16, 1985, Gotti assumed control of the Gambino family. He reigned as boss from 1986-1992, and during those years he became the city’s most notorious media-darling, mainly because federal prosecutors just couldn’t seem to convict him. As he won acquittal after acquittal—either by intimidating key witnesses...
Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise, therefore, that many of the city’s tabloids and journalists, in their coverage of his death, chose not to portray the real John Gotti. Few were willing to acknowledge that, yes, the man had been a murderous criminal. A New York Post columnist argued that while “Gotti sure as hell may have whacked some goodfellas-badfellas in the pursuit of business…his crew didn’t come near mine or your wallets, like the Enron sissies did.” This same...
...late boss to New York Newsday as “[a] most remarkable human being who was a champion in my book.” Defense attorney Ronald Kuby, who handled some of Gotti’s post-conviction legal matters, stressed to Newsday that “John Gotti had the same skills as the CEO of any large, successful corporation. He had that sort of touch where he remembered names and faces. He was gracious. Had his life gone differently, he would probably be running a large corporation and doing it well, better than Enron...
...canonization of John Gotti is truly unfortunate, particularly at a time when Americans, and especially New Yorkers, have been forced to regain a sense of moral clarity about the world in which they live. The much-maligned concept of “good and evil” returned in full force after Sept. 11, we are repeatedly told; but differentiating between good and evil requires us to recognize even subtle, craftily-disguised forms of evil. The bottom line is this: John Gotti was a vicious thug who either murdered or ordered the murders of many, many people, including...