The Last Don

Batts proceeds to tell his buddies that when Tommy was a kid, he used to make shoes look like mirrors. “They used to call him Spit-Shine Tommy,” he says derisively. The tension escalates (Scorsese slowly brings the camera closer to each of the men with every exchange). Tommy then coldly explains he doesn’t shine shoes anymore and both men then apologize, if only out of convenience.

“Now go get your f—-n’ shinebox!” Batts says, unable to hold back. A fight breaks out as Tommy leaves in a huff. But he comes back when everyone else is gone except for Henry Hill and Jimmy Conway, both friends of Tommy’s. Batts is taken by surprise as Tommy pistol-whips him into unconsciousness while Jimmy stomps all over his body, which is quickly wrapped up and thrown into the trunk. But on the way to the gravesite (and after a stop at Tommy’s mother’s house) they realize he isn’t quite dead yet. Tommy stabs the very nearly dead Batts several times with a butcher’s knife. And then Jimmy puts a few bullets into him. As Henry Hill explains in the voiceover, they had a real problem with Batts. “Batts was part of the Gambino crew and was considered untouchable.”

But Batts was more than just a part of the Gambino crew. He was, in real life, a friend of John Gotti’s. At the time, Gotti was still working his way up the mob ladder. In the end, it was the Gotti crew who settled the score by killing the real Tommy (in the movie version Tommy’s own family, the Lucheses, rubs him out). It’s all meticulously explained in Nick Pileggi’s “Wiseguy.”

The death of John Gotti this past Monday in Springfield, Missouri, marked the end of the era of famous, high-profile godfathers at a time when other ethnic mobs, especially the Russians, are now on the rise. Gotti, who suffered from throat cancer, never wanted it to end this way and thought he had a better hold on his own men and the law than he actually did. Throughout the 1980s, Gotti had escaped conviction for various crimes, earning him the nickname of “Teflon Don.” But in the early 1990s, all that changed, thanks in part to successful FBI wiretaps at the Ravenite social club and the defection of his underboss, Sammy “the Bull” Gravano.

On April 2, 1992, Gotti was found guilty on 14 counts including racketeering, tax evasion, and murder. He was slapped with several life sentences without parole and sent packing to Marion, Illinois. Even in jail, however, it was alleged that he still continued to run the Gambino family. There was, no doubt, a struggle to find leadership for a crime family that at its height boasted a total of 2,000 associates and more than 300 “made” guys. The Gambinos were involved in everything from the garment district to construction to waste management.

For a while, the family was run by John A. “Junior” Gotti, the don’s nephew. But he too was imprisoned on racketeering charges. And more recently the family was ruled by Peter Gotti, the don’s brother. But with Peter’s indictment–just five days before Gotti’s death–on charges of shaking down the Brooklyn waterfront, the family, which has slipped to second place behind the Genovese, is once again a ship without a rudder.

Looking back, it becomes clear that while the media lavished much attention on Gotti and even fawned over the “Dapper Don,” the actual members of his organization and other families didn’t exactly feel the same way. Rather, they resented all the attention he received, and the attention he brought to organized crime.

Explains Sam Gravano in “Underboss,” “John worked at it real hard, the whole image of himself. Being the boss, the Godfather. The Don. The Dapper Don. The Teflon Don. He loved them terms. . . . That’s why all the old foxes in Cosa Nostra hated him. And a lot of the bosses. It wasn’t the life. Just like when we said [former Gambino boss] Paul Castellano was being selfish about money, this was equally selfish. Because it was for me, me, me. It wasn’t for Cosa Nostra. Cosa Nostra was supposed to be family. Not me, me, me.”

Castellano’s selfishness (and his belief that he was going to have Gotti bumped off) led to his murder on December 16, 1985. As Castellano and his right-hand man, Tommy Bilotti, were walking out of their limousine for dinner at Spark’s Steakhouse (the porterhouse there is mouth-watering), two men in trenchcoats opened fire, hitting both with shots to the head and chest. Here’s how the “New York Post” reported it: “Big Paul . . . tumbled onto the sidewalk, his head coming to rest on the limo’s floor and his blood flowing in rivulets into the gutter. . . . His half-smoked, partially chewed cigar fell from his lips and was found on the curb alongside a piece of his skull the size of a ping-pong ball. And blood was splattered over his elegant dark blue mohair suit, light blue shirt, and $200 designer Italian loafers.”

Gotti orchestrated the hit with the backing of the other families. He and Gravano were in a nearby car, supervising the entire operation. And for the next six years, John Gotti would preside over the Gambinos with more clout than any gangster since Al Capone. He loved his high-profile status and even framed the cover of “Time” when he appeared on it. He also appeared on the covers of the “New York Times Magazine,” “People,” and “New York.” Around him were not only the media, who treated him like a Hollywood celebrity, but also real celebrities: Mickey Rourke spent time with Gotti when he was training for his role in the “Pope of Greenwich Village.” Actor John Amos would appear years later in the courtroom, to show his support for the don. (Of course the connection between stars and mobsters has existed from the very beginning, whether it was Frank Sinatra drinking with Sam Giancana, or “Crazy Joe” Gallo getting married in Jerry Orbach’s apartment in 1972.)

There were many sides to John Gotti. To some, he was that Dapper Don who wore $2,000 Brioni suits and exited courtroom after courtroom with a smile on his face. He once gave a bottle of champagne to a newlywed couple at a club and then posed for pictures with them. An elderly woman whose husband was connected lamented to a friend of mine that the gangsters of today are nothing more than punks. “But John Gotti,” she says, “now there’s a real gentleman. I remember he opened the door for me once and said, ‘Where I come from, the men open the doors for the ladies.'”

Gotti could be a real charmer when he wanted to. But there was, of course, a gruffer side. At a 1990 trial, Gotti’s consigliere, Frank Locascio, offered his boss an orange he smuggled out. “Stick the f—–g orange up your motherf—–g ass,” Gotti snapped back. And then there was the murderous side, too.

But in terms of brutality, he was no different from the other “workhorse” crews. Some, in fact, were a lot worse. (The most feared of the crews was run by Roy DeMeo. It was thought by other associates that they not only did their work efficiently–but that they enjoyed it. Sam Gravano relates a story of when he was at a diner with DeMeo along with “a whole bunch of senior citizens . . . minding their own business. All of a sudden, for no reason at all, right in the middle of our conversation, he says that with a couple of nine millimeters, he could blow them all away before they knew what was happening. I remember thinking, I’ve killed people myself. But a roomful of senior citizens? What kind of insanity is this?” DeMeo’s body was eventually found in a trunk.)

Most of all, Gotti may be remembered as the high-maintenance don: “The barber, the stylist, would come every single day,” says Gravano. “Shampoo his hair, cut it, blow-dry it, comb it out and shape it. I used to tell him, ‘Bo, why do you get a haircut every day? Your hair can’t grow that fast.’ And he’d say, ‘Well, he finds little things. He snips the hair in my nose and ears, he snips this and that.”

He was a long way from the days when he ran the crew that avenged the death of Billy Batts, when he was content to live the simple life. Gotti once said that “All I want is a good sandwich. You see this sandwich here? This tuna sandwich? That’s all I want–a good sandwich.” At the very least, he’s finally sleeping with the tunas.

Victorino Matus is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.