Word: gotti
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...like Commodus, Gotti, who died of cancer in a prison hospital last week at 61, made up for his shortcomings with entertainments. He threw Fourth of July parties for his neighbors in Queens, N.Y., making himself the toast of the locals. (His folk-heroism was always a peculiarly parochial, New York City phenomenon, like Ed Koch or egg creams.) He made like a mobster out of central casting, plunging into night life wearing $2,000 suits (hence his nickname "the Dapper Don") and taunting the feds by being acquitted three times (hence, "the Teflon Don") before the charges stuck...
...media gladly helped inflate that image. The '80s were the new '20s, and here was its Capone! And Gotti obsessed over his coverage. TIME put an Andy Warhol portrait of him on its cover in 1986, and Gotti framed it in his office. On one surveillance tape, he and his associates can be heard critiquing a TV re-enactment of the Mob hit that brought him to power. Even that hit was cinematic: his predecessor, Paul Castellano, was gunned down in front of Sparks steak house in crowded midtown Manhattan at Christmastime. All Martin Scorsese would have added were credits...
Good Mob bosses--the ones who lead long careers and die of old age in their own homes--do not act like Mob bosses. Gotti was foolhardy, he was blowhard-y, he talked too proudly and loudly, and the government finally gave him enough blank tape to hang himself. In 1992 he was sent up for murder and racketeering. If his mobster act was his doom, though, it was also his source of legitimacy. Where did he learn what we expect a Mob boss to look like? Well, where did you? Pop culture's fascination with mobsters--in movies...
...Godfather I and II were nostalgia movies, harking back to the glory years of a racket whose best years were behind it even in the '70s. They held up myths of honor among thieves--we don't sell drugs, we don't kill civilians, we don't sing--that Gotti and his cronies abandoned, if they ever really existed. Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990) got closer to the stupidity and venality of Mob life, but wiseguys still embraced it: from Henry Hill's glamorous Copacabana entrance to his ignominy in bland, witness-protection mid-America (where there's no decent...
...lives on: Russians, Chinese, South Americans--embattled but not yet as systemically crushed as the Italian-American Mafia, nor as well discovered by Hollywood. How will we know when they're finished? First they'll get their own movies and TV shows. Then they'll get their own John Gotti. And trust me, we'll hear all about it then...