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.
Relying on a bounty of archival news footage, excerpts from wiretapped conversations and interviews with an array of colorful characters from both sides of the law, “Get Gotti” chronicles the three high-profile trials in which Gotti managed to win acquittals — and the fourth trial, in 1992, which resulted in Gotti’s conviction on 13 felony counts and Gotti spending the remainder of his years in prison, until his death in 2002 at age 61.
“Get Gotti” opens with the murder of mob boss Paul Castellano in December of 1985 just outside of Sparks Steakhouse in midtown Manhattan — a hit orchestrated by John Gotti, who was poised to take over the Gambino crime family. Gotti, who had made his bones after serving time for murder in the 1970s, set up shop at the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Queens.
As former mobsters, a mob wife, FBI agents, prosecutors, et al., share their memories of the time, we learn about the sometimes serio-comic efforts to put Gotti away, as when the government managed to install bugs inside the club and were excited when they heard voices talking about committing crimes — only to realize they were hearing a mob movie that was playing on the TV. Then there was the witness in an assault case against Gotti who developed a case of amnesia on the stand, resulting in an acquittal for Gotti and the New York Post headline, “I FORGOTTI.”
We see how Gotti became a folk hero in certain circles and openly courted the media’s attention, much to the dismay of old-school mobsters. TV reporters from the time acknowledge they were complicit in turning Gotti into a celebrity, while former mobster Sal Polisi says that Gotti was “romantically involved with his own image.” Former prosecutors and special agents recall their frustrations in putting together winnable cases against Gotti, and the problems of having a motley crew of informants and associates taking the witness stand, where their credibility would be shredded by Gotti’s notoriously flamboyant attorney, Bruce Cutler.
Eventually, though, it was Gotti’s hubris that brought him down, as the wiretaps caught him in a number of expletive-laden rants in which he clearly acknowledged being a mob boss and ordering multiple crimes, including murders.
They finally Got Gotti.
