Blue Sky Country: 'Mafia Stories: The "Teflon Don" John Gotti'

Source:Blue Sky Country- with a documentary about New York City Italian mobster John Gotti.

"As a successor to the Gambino crime family after masterminding the assassination of Paul Castellano, John Gotti would end up violating the very code of the Cosa Nostra which had made the organization so powerful. Gotti's insatiable thirst for media attention would allow the US government to infiltrate the Gambino family, and the Italian Mafia would face the greatest struggle it has faced since the Prohibition Era of the 1920s, when the federal government first waged war on it's greatest fear: organized crime." 

From Blue Sky Country

John Gotti is someone who could've been pretty successful in life as someone who was not a criminal, had he finished school and perhaps gone on to college and done well there. He wasn't a dumb man but someone without much of a real-school education and dropped out of school very early in life. And decided that he was better off working in the New York Underworld, where he had friends in it and people that could get him work and where he could make fast money. And became very good at that and went from there.

John Gotti became a career criminal as an adolescent working in the Italian Mafia for the Gambino Family in New York and it went from there. But something he didn't know about the Italian Mafia, that the more quiet you are and the better you are at keeping your business and life secret, the more successful you'll be and the less attention you'll bring to city police departments and more importantly the FBI. Because if they don't know that you are business with the mob, they'll have nothing to come at you with. This is something that Gambino Boss Paul Castellano understood which is one reason why he was successful and something that John Gotti never understood.

John Gotti was called the Teflon Don, because in the 1980s, the FBI kept bringing cases against John Gotti. But the New York U.S. Attorney's Office could never convict Gotti of anything pre-1989-90 and only really were able to nail Gotti at the end because John Gotti's Underboss, (his Vice President if you will) Sammy Gravano became a snitch for the U.S. Attorney's Office and FBI. And ratted on Gotti and his business in the Gambino Crime Family. 

John Gotti up until then was always able to keep potential witness's silent thanks to Gravano his lead hitman, but Sammy wasn't going to whack himself to save Big John and saved himself instead, which is how Gotti ended up with a life sentence. John Gotti ruled through intimidation and to a certain extent political skills that he had in the Gambino Family, but at the end of the day wasn't able to scare everyone and keep everyone inline.

Again, John Gotti could've been very successful in life who built a good family with loving kids and so-forth. Victoria and John JR who have both been successful in life and who aren't mobsters but decided to go a different route and paid a heavy price for it. Ending up living in solitary confinement in prison in Indiana dying in a prison hospital at the age of 62 in 2002. And got what was coming to him.