The glory days of the Mafia were long gone by the 1980s. The FBI was using wiretaps, turncoats, and the latest technology to battle organized crime. Unlike the Hoover years, the FBI considered the Mafia to be one of their top priorities. While most of the new dons were content to lay low and out of the limelight, Gotti thrust himself in front of a camera whenever he got the chance.

John Joseph Gotti Jr. was born in the Bronx in 1940. He came from a poor family. His family moved to Brooklyn, and the angry young kid found himself in the land of the wise guys. They became his heroes. Like Al Capone a few decades earlier, he began his life in crime running errands for the local mobsters.

He became the member of a criminal street gang. Gotti was no “Fonzie,” however. The gang was involved in car theft, robbery, and other criminal activity. He was arrested five times while still a teenager but avoided any jail time, a bit of luck that would follow him through most of his career. His luck did run out eventually.

Married to the Mob

John Gotti married Victoria DiGiorgio in 1962. His marriage was volatile, full of separations both by mutual consent and imposed by trips “up the river.” After a brief flirtation with the legitimate world he quickly returned to a life of crime. The couple had five children. One would die tragically young, and another, Victoria, became a successful author, fundraiser for charities, reality TV show star, and tabloid fodder. His namesake, John Gotti Jr., ascended to the boss of the family briefly in the 1990s, but the FBI were hot on his tail. After serving a sentence for racketeering he beat three other indictments. He was arrested yet again and indicted in Tampa, Florida, in 2008 for overseeing a crew into robbery, drug dealing, and murder.

The Ozone Layer

Gotti hooked up with the Gambino crime family when he joined a group of low-level hoods that reported to Aniello Dellacroce, who hung out at the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, a storefront in Ozone Park, Queens. Gotti's beat was nearby John F. Kennedy International Airport. The pack of thieves hijacked stuff that landed at the airport and had yet to make it to its final destination. Gotti and his crew would steal anything; one of their favorite things to steal was women's designer clothing. In 1968 Gotti was nabbed in the back of one of his heist trucks by the FBI and went to jail for three years.

Gambino underboss Dellacroce took a liking to Gotti and promoted him to capo. When Dellacroce went to prison, Gotti's star rose even further. His leadership enamored him to his crew, and they became as close-knit as a mob crew can get, with little of the petty bickering that plague the Mafia at every level.

Irish Need Not Apply

Kidnapping was a common means of intimidation among Mafia families in the 1970s. Members of one family would snatch someone from a rival family and demand ransom in the form of loot or other conditions. Often the kidnapped hood was released intact; on other occasions he was sent home on an installment plan, one piece at a time. Carlo Gambino's nephew was kidnapped and killed, and the old don wanted to put an end to the practice. An Irish gangster with the pugnacious sounding name of Jimmy McBratney was believed to be the killer. Gotti curried favor with his boss Gambino by sending the errant Irishman to meet his maker. It turned out that McBratney was less of a brat than that. He was not the killer. Gotti got the wrong guy and did two more years in the slammer, but he got in good with his boss. That is an example of upward mobility, Mafia-style.