John gotti biography murder

American mobster (1940–2002)

"John Gotti Jr." redirects here. For his son, see John A. Gotti.

"Teflon Don" redirects here. For other uses, see Teflon Don (disambiguation).

Not to be confused with John Gaddi or John Gaddy.

John Joseph Gotti Jr. (GOT-ee, Italian:[ˈɡɔtti]; October 27, 1940 – June 10, 2002) was an American mafioso and boss of the Gambino crime family in New York City. He ordered and helped to orchestrate the murder of Gambino boss Paul Castellano in December 1985 and took over the family shortly thereafter, leading what was described as America's most powerful crime syndicate.

Gotti and his brothers grew up in poverty and turned to a life of crime at an early age. Gotti quickly became one of the Gambino family's biggest earners and a protégé of Aniello Dellacroce, the family's underboss, operating out of Ozone Park, Queens. Following the FBI's indictment of members of Gotti's crew for selling na

Born: October 27, 1940, Bronx, New York
Died: June 10, 2002, Springfield, Missouri
Nicknames: The Dapper Don, the Teflon Don
Associates: the Gambino Family, the Five Families, the Commission, Paul Castellano, Sammy “The Bull” Gravano

John Gotti took control of the most powerful of New York’s Five Families by the old-fashioned Mob method of assassinating his predecessor. It was a huge prize. The Gambino crime family was one of the original Five Families of New York and for decades was the most powerful and profitable.

The Gambino family had for decades been one of the most public and most violent of Mafia families. Gotti ordered the murder of the previous boss, Paul Castellano, in 1985. Castellano had been appointed acting boss of the family by the aging Carlo Gambino in 1975. Gambino had moved into the family top spot in 1957 after arranging the murder of his predecessor, Albert Anastasia. Anastasia, in turn, had been elevated to boss after his predecessor, Vincent Mangano, disappeared and was presumed murdered in 1951.

Gotti’s elevation to boss came after members of his crew were indicted for selling narcotics. He reportedly was afraid that Castellano would kill him for violating the family’s rule against drug dealing. However, Castellano’s murder was not sanctioned by the other crime families and this was the basis for continuing resentment and hostility with the other families. Gotti also engendered resentment from other mobsters for being conspicuously flashy — for example, by posing for newspaper photos.

For years, that public presence didn’t seem to hurt him. Through methods that prosecutors would later prove included jury tampering and witness intimidation, Gotti was able to beat federal charges and trials in the 1980s for assault and racketeering, earning him the “Teflon Don” label from the media. The title wasn’t really indicative of Gotti’s legal history – he had served three years in a federal prison for theft and tru

John Gotti elevated the public’s notion of a mob boss to near mythic status. As head of the Gambino crime family in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he cut a colorful and extremely public figure not just in New York City but across the nation.

Tabloid newspapers called him the Teflon Don for his seeming ability to avoid prosecution. He was also known as the Dapper Don, due to his immaculate style, which consisted of double-breasted Italian suits from Brioni, hand-painted silk ties and his halo of perfectly coiffed hair.

[Watch Gotti: Godfather & Son on A&E Crime Central.]

Gotti's public and private personalities differed

“He was the first media don,” J. Bruce Mouw, a former FBI agent who supervised the unit that helped ultimately convict Gotti in 1992, told The New York Times. “He never tried to hide the fact that he was a superboss.”

In public, Gotti cut an amiable figure and played to the cameras. In private, he was a tyrant and a narcissist with a hair-trigger temper, according to testimony from former mobsters and secretly recorded tapes that ultimately placed him behind bars for the remainder of his life.

The fifth of 13 children raised by his Italian immigrant parents John and Frannie, John Joseph Gotti was born in the South Bronx on October 27, 1940. It was a hardscrabble life with Gotti’s father earning a living as a day laborer. The family moved often before settling in the East New York section of Brooklyn when Gotti was 12.

In his formative years, Gotti learned a life of crime by running errands for Carmine Fatico, a capo in the early days of the Gambino crime family. It was during this time he first met Aniello Dellacroce, who would become a life-long mentor to the future crime boss.

Gotti dropped out of Franklin K. Lane High School when he was 16 and led his own mafia-related street gang in his Queens, New York neighborhood called the Fulton-Rockaway Boys, which included future Gambino m

American mobster

Not to be confused with John Gotti.

John Angelo Gotti (born February 14, 1964) is an American former mobster who was the acting boss of the Gambino crime family from 1992 to 1999. He became acting boss when the boss of the family, his father John Gotti, was sent to prison. The younger Gotti was imprisoned for racketeering in 1999, and between 2004 and 2009 he was a defendant in four racketeering trials, each of which ended in a mistrial. In January 2010, federal prosecutors announced that they would no longer seek to prosecute Gotti for those charges.

Early life

Gotti was born in Queens, New York City on February 14, 1964, to Italian-American mobster John Gotti and Victoria DiGiorgio Gotti, whose father was of Italian descent, and mother was of half-Italian half-Russian (Jewish) ancestry. Gotti was raised in a two-story house in Howard Beach, New York, with his four siblings, which include sisters Victoria Gotti, and Angel, and brothers Frank and Peter.Angelo Ruggiero was his godfather and middle namesake, whom he and his siblings considered an uncle. Gotti attended New York Military Academy in his youth.

After graduating school, Gotti's father helped him start