Mr. Gotti's Meat

Former mob boss John Gotti

I followed the can’t-look-away criminal trial unfolding in New York while on vacation in Spain over the last few weeks, benefited especially from the detailed coverage in several Substack newsletters I follow. These include especially Joyce Vance’s Civil Discourse, my old friend Lucian Truscott’s excellent daily posts and the historical perspective Heather Cox Richardson has offered on this platform since its early days.

Here was a profoundly entitled defendant—accustomed to getting his way in all things, but especially with women—being balked by a legal system he assumed he could manipulate at will. Since my own very brief encounter with the man in question came when he tried to nudge me into a limo in front of Studio 54 in the late 1970’s (I’d heard the stories, and so dashed down the street to hail a cab), I had felt first-hand the implicit violence that underlies his particular brand of entitlement. Of course, most women who experience this kind of threat, most often at work or at home, do not have the option of jumping into a taxi to get away. According to her testimony, Stormy Daniels did not believe she had the freedom to escape, either.

The details of the trial stirred memories of another courtroom encounter I’d experienced, this one between a wise-cracking, camera-loving criminal defendant confident of his acquittal, and a hard-working female prosecutor meticulously building a case against him. Because I was present at that trial, I got an unforgettable lesson about how male entitlement can manifest as both charisma and threat.

As a freelance journalist in the 1980s, I often covered organized crime. Which is how I came to be sitting through the 1986 trial of John Gotti in Federal District Court in Brooklyn.

Gotti, then boss of the Gambino crime family, had beaten various murder and assault charges in the past. But this time, assistant US attorney Diane Giacalone was using the federal RICO statute to charge him with racketeering.

The media treated it as a celebrity trial, with cameras popping every morning as “the Dapper Don,” resplendent in one of his many Brioni suits, strutted into the courthouse. He grinned as he waved to the masses who lined the sidewalks like adoring fans, as well as the reporters who scrambled to beg him for “just a word.”

Gotti’s smirking and audible commentary during the trial, futiley rebuked by the judge, provoked the laughter he was after in the courtroom, cementing the folk hero status he succeeded in cultivating despite having murdered his way to the top.

For me, one moment encapsulated how a raging sense of entitlement played into the mystique that Gotti clearly viewed as proof that the law could never touch him.

The trial had broken for lunch, and we all rushed off to hole-in-the-wall restaurants or picked up sandwiches at neighborhood delis. Returning to the courtroom early in order to grab a better seat, I spied Diana Giacalone just ahead of me, carrying a soft drink and a brown bag.

As we crowded into the elevator that would return us to the courtroom, everyone was suddenly pushed aside by several husky men bearing a gigantic platter. Their shirts bore the name of one of downtown Brooklyn’s best-known restaurants.

“Everybody out of the way!” they shouted. “We got Mr Gotti’s meat!”

Those of us not carrying such precious cargo found ourselves mashed against the elevator walls, the federal prosecutor trying the case included. In the peculiar dynamic of a trial in which the defendant was treated as a celebrity, even those charged with enforcing the law had become became bit players, while those serving the criminal defendant, however tangentially, were clearly emboldened by his aura of privilege and invincibility.

At that moment, in that elevator, I knew that Gotti would once again beat the charges.  What I didn’t know, of course, was that the defendant’s uber-confident manner, which sprinkled a magic dust over even over those who carried his meat, was not the only element at work. A criminal to his core, Gotti had made sure that he would not be held to account by having his team bribe one of the jurors to hold out for acquittal.

And so, after days of deliberations that were fruitless even before they had begun, the jury folded. And the defendant swaggered from the room to cheers and adulation, like an actor who had just won an Oscar.

For six long years, Gotti would continue to hobnob around town, mugging for cameras, waving to passersby, and reveling in his own entitlement. The end came in 1992, when testimony from his former underboss Sammy Gravano finally put him away from murder.

The takeaway here is not just that the law inevitably brings to justice even those whose mystique of power and threat seems to protect them. But rather that powerful men, whose aura of invincibility extends even to those who serve them, are likely to press that advantage at every turn upon the less powerful in order escape the consequences of their actions, sometimes for many decades.

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