Word: gotti
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...dragging its feet in pursuing CIA traitor Aldrich Ames, who worked for the Russians in Washington (and under the FBI's and CIA's nose) for nine years before he was finally captured. Such failures tend to crowd out the agency's successes--the imprisonment of Mob boss John Gotti, the conviction of the World Trade Center bombers, the capture of the alleged Unabomber, the solution of the Montana Freemen standoff--and leave morale at an all-time...
...seller. Americans have long been drawn to the symbiosis between criminal life and pop culture--from Frank Sinatra and his alleged mobster pals to the success of the Godfather saga, which is scheduled for an anniversary re-release this week, to the fact that John Gotti's daughter has a new novel out. In the case of gangsta rap, however, the music, though often purchased by suburban whites, is primarily identified with a segment of society, young black males, that is particularly ravaged by crime. Is gangsta mythologizing for people already living under the gun a form of release...
Determined to discover the family's elusive charm, I reached for the nearest concilliari: the On-line Mafia Guide. You could create a small (albeit criminally insane) nation from the number of mafia fans on the web. From "John Gotti's Homepage" to "Gangster Mansion," the devout are eager to share the legacy of "La Cosa Nostra," even with a confessed Irish girl from upstate...
Both "Big Paul" Castellano (Richard Sarafian), famously whacked by Gotti soldiers outside a Manhattan steak house in 1985, and Salvatore ("Sammy the Bull") Gravano (William Forsythe), whose turncoat chattiness with the feds ultimately landed Gotti his life sentence, are portrayed as the real evildoers here. Why? Because they were Michael Milken greedy. While Gotti's silk-and-cashmere flamboyance may have embodied the underworld side of '80s excess, Castellano and Gravano were, in this film's view, the true moral lepers because they threw around terms like "joint venture" and "bottom line" and believed in the coldhearted notion that...
...Gotti--prone here to declarations like, "I'd rather die broke than bleed my family to death!"--may have had different ideas about the Mob's purpose in life, but the filmmakers are so entranced by the sheer myth of him that they haven't bothered to explore what those ideas might be. Nor do the filmmakers try to make sense of Gotti's many paradoxes. Here was a man obsessed with rules, yet when one of his associates breaks a pre-eminent one by dealing drugs, Gotti does not toss him out; instead he visits him in the hospital...