John Gotti has been dead for more than 20 years, but like Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel, John Dillinger and Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and Carlo Gambino, he is still remembered as one of the most notorious and ruthless figures in organized crime history. In the 1980s, Gotti became a huge celebrity who eschewed the usual mob traditions of keeping a low profile as he courted a media that was all too willing to turn him into a celebrity, to the point where Time magazine commissioned Andy Warhol to do a portrait of Gotti for a cover story. Unbelievable.
However, as the solid and fast-paced three-part Netflix documentary series “Get Gotti” reminds us, the man wearing the $2,000 bespoke suits and reveling in such press-created nicknames as “The Dapper Don” and “The Teflon Don” wasn’t a charismatic movie star — he was a stone-cold killer, a vicious and ruthless thug who never should have become a media darling and avoided prison time for years due to sometimes incompetent prosecution, various law enforcement agencies refusing to cooperate with each other, witness intimidation and compromised jurors.
