This Family of Mine: What It Was Like Growing Up Gotti (11 page)

The drama escalated when Uncle Angelo arrived. He came thundering up the stairs of the apartment building. He and Aunt
Marie lived two floors down and word spread quickly that there was a dispute going on in our apartment. The entire flat was like a battlefield, complete with wounded combatants and terrified onlookers.

The moment Uncle Angelo saw Dad holding the dress over his shoulder—blood-soaked and still dripping down his back—he, too, started screaming. “What the hell did you do to him?” he shouted at my mother. “Why? Why? Why?”

Uncle Angelo gave my mother a final dirty look and rushed my father out of the apartment and to the hospital. My siblings and I sat shivering from the shock, unable to speak or move. Mom, of course, quickly became remorseful. I know she didn’t mean to hurt my father, but her anger got the better of her. Exhausted and teary-eyed, she quietly sent us off to bed, feebly trying to assure us that “Daddy will be all right.” She told us he’d be home in an hour or so and that by morning, all of this would be just a bad memory.

I don’t think any of us actually slept that night. My sister and I shared the room just past the front door of the apartment. All night we waited for Dad’s return. We wanted him clean and free of blood. We wanted everything to be back to normal.

It was light out by the time he finally came home. Bandages were easily visible through his white T-shirt, and we later learned that a dozen stitches were required to close the wound. Dad didn’t say much when he walked through the door; he gave us each a little pat on the head, smiled, and then retreated to his bedroom to sleep. And, no, he never brought the blood-soaked dress back. My sister Angel teased me for days over this.

There were too many episodes and blowups between Mom and Dad to count. And not all of them ended badly or in bloodshed. Some were so funny that I laugh out loud just thinking about them. Like the time Dad came walking in at 6
A.M
. after an all-night card game. He was drunk and stumbled into bed, and passed out
a minute or two later. Mom couldn’t argue with him if she tried. Dad waited till noon before leaving the house again. Mom usually left around 11
A.M
. to run errands each day, so Dad did the best he could to avoid a run-in with her. Mom was so angry when she returned later that day and learned that Dad had already left. To get back at him, she called a local moving company and arranged for Dad’s things to be delivered to the social club. Around 9
P.M
., the movers knocked on the door and told one of the guys hanging around that there was a delivery for John Gotti. Everyone in the club, including Dad, was perplexed. Dad went from being surprised to stunned as the men unloaded a tall, wooden armoire filled with all of his clothes and left it on the sidewalk in front of the club.

Then there was the time Mom and Aunt Marie decided to spy on Dad and Uncle Angelo. The men were inside the club, playing cards. Mom and Aunt Marie were hiding behind a parked car across the street. After waiting for nearly an hour, the two women grew frustrated. They had hoped to see something telling, like perhaps some strange girls talking to their husbands. But that night, nothing went on but the usual, boring card game. So for spite, Aunt Marie picked up a brick and hurled it at the club’s front window. Within seconds the men inside hit the floor! They assumed they were under attack from a rival crew. Mom and Aunt Marie high-tailed it down the avenue and back up to the apartment. Dad never found out that it was Mom and Aunt Marie.

One of the funniest episodes occurred while Mom was learning how to drive. Dad was very old-fashioned and he didn’t believe women should drive. Mom signed up at a local driving school without my father knowing. Unfortunately for her, the instructor was always drunk—so she didn’t get much help from him. This was evident when Mom and Aunt Marie decided to steal Uncle Angelo’s car. He had come home just before midnight and it was obvious Angelo had a lot to drink. After he’d passed out on the bed, the
two women swiped his keys and went joyriding around Brooklyn. But Mom was an inept motorist and managed to sideswipe another car—twice. When Mom and Aunt Marie returned home, they were careful to park the car in the exact same spot. The next morning, Uncle Angelo was cursing and screaming outside the apartment building. But because he was so drunk the night before, he assumed
he’d
gotten into an accident. Little did Mom or Aunt Marie know that he’d actually borrowed the car from Uncle Pete, Dad’s older brother. For the next twenty-five years, Uncle Angelo and Uncle Pete argued over that car. Both men never knew it was Mom and Aunt Marie who were actually responsible.

I’d like to say that Mom and Dad somehow found a way to express their love while keeping their disputes to a minimum. But that was simply not the case. I witnessed many fights as a child, some more vigorous than others. Most of the disagreements arose from my mother’s dissatisfaction with the late hours my father kept, or the places he frequented, or the people he was with (these three things were all linked, of course). As an adult, I can now say that I understand what my mother must have felt—life was very hard for her. At the time, however, I was more sympathetic to Dad; most of us were. We could not understand why Mom was always yelling, or why she seemed to instigate the fighting. To our young and naïve eyes, Dad seemed to be the victim, and Mom the abuser. How were we to know that her anger was justified?

After each fight or argument, my siblings and I would always have the same talk: “If Mom and Daddy get a divorce, who would you want to live with?” The very thought of it—that our family could be ripped apart—used to make me cry. It was usually my sister, Angel, who orchestrated this conversation, as she was not only the oldest child in the family, but a realist as well.

During my early childhood in Brooklyn, life consisted of Dad trying to hustle a dollar and Mom doing her best around the house
to stretch whatever income they had. The fighting continued, of course, ebbing and flowing throughout the years. In good economic times, they fought less; when money was particularly tight, the bickering escalated. In time, my siblings and I grew accustomed to the roller-coaster ride. When you are young and impressionable, and your favorite television shows are
The Brady Bunch
and
Little House on the Prairie
, you expect your own family life to mirror those of the people you see. I really wanted a perfect family—whatever that was. I wanted a mother in the kitchen, smiling and baking apple pies, and a father who worked nine to five and never went away to jail.

Even when Mom would reach the point of exasperation and take off on one of her “excursions,” as we called her time away from Dad when we got older, we were less fearful and traumatized. Experience had taught us that eventually—probably in just a matter of days—she would cool off and return. Sometimes, if one of Mom’s absences stretched out over a week or two, I would turn to Dad for reassurance. He would always smile and announce rhetorically, “Can a man
ever
really lose his family?”

There was such wisdom in those words, and he delivered them with such authority. It wasn’t until I was much older that I came to learn the source of that sentiment. It wasn’t something my father had dreamed up. Oh, no. Nothing like that.

They were spoken by Michael Corleone in
The Godfather.

T
o some extent, most women of my mother’s era discovered that when they married a man, they also married his career. For some women, of course, this was not a problem. But when your husband’s career involves a significant amount of illegal activity, things can get a little more complicated.

Contrary to most published accounts, my mother was not fond of this thing called
La Cosa Nostra
. She would tell us years later that she always lived in fear that one day there would be a knock at the door, and she would have to greet one of my father’s close friends or associates and try to make him feel comfortable as he delivered the crushing news: that her husband had been arrested or, worse, killed.

“When I met your father, I was a young, impressionable, and
naïve girl. Like anyone else who met him, I fell enormously and immediately in love with his looks and his personality.”

Considering her background, this response was understandable. A young girl from Brooklyn was programmed practically from birth to find a man who was like a father figure: strong, handsome, and proud; a man who would care for her and provide for her. And yet, Mom was not shy about voicing her displeasure with Dad’s business and lifestyle, and indeed most of their disagreements in some way were sparked by her disapproval. But back then, the number one priority was feeding her kids and paying the bills.

Oddly enough, as she would discover, there was money in her family—she just didn’t have access to it.

Mom and Dad had been together for nearly two years when her biological father, my grandfather, began coming around.

My father by this time was already nurturing a reputation on the streets. He was tough and capable—a man on the rise in the mob ranks. He could make things happen, go away, or be settled with just a few words during an appointment. My grandfather, whom I never really knew, wanted to be a part of my mother’s life; he also wanted to spend time with his grandchildren. But with all of this came, by necessity, a relationship with my father. That would prove to be a challenge. When Mom realized Dad was “Mr. Right,” she’d brought him around to meet her family. My grandfather was not pleased with her choice in men and let Mom know it. He told her in so many words not to bring “this punk from Brooklyn” to his house ever again. Except, of course, when my grandfather needed John Gotti.

I never trusted my mother’s father, especially since his wife had such obvious distaste for my mother. This was evident in the few get-togethers we did have over the years. With my “grandparents” came two aunts, Mary-Beth and “Little Della,” and one uncle, John. The two aunts were attractive blondes. Uncle John was also
blond and very tall. He was so tall, I always thought of the Jolly Green Giant each time I saw him—in other words, he was frightening to me as a child. Both women would openly flirt with my father, a display of affection that disturbed both my sister and me. We found their behavior appalling, even though we were kids and we couldn’t quite articulate our feelings. We also wondered why Mom seemed so oblivious to it. I couldn’t figure out if Mom was just so happy to feel wanted by the family she never knew that she was willing to overlook the inappropriate advances of her half-sisters, or whether she just didn’t notice.

One night my grandfather invited us to his home, a palatial spread in Port Chester, New York. He was the owner of one of the top contracting firms in New York and was doing quite well for himself. I remember the long drive from Brooklyn, and the feeling of excitement the moment we pulled off the exit to their neighborhood. It was a different world from where we lived, that’s for sure. I was utterly amazed by the sight of their property: a three-acre spread with a sprawling two-story home.

As we walked to the front door, Mom wore an expression of pride, an expression that seemed to say
This is my lineage, this is where I really come from.

My father’s face said something else completely. Actually, it said nothing at all. Dad would never let anyone feel as though they were superior to him, so he put on his best poker face.

Inside, my grandfather greeted my father with a martini, as two or three staff members dressed in white scurried about the mansion, taking coats and preparing dinner. For me, it was surreal—I thought only movie stars, or characters in movies, lived this way. I’d never seen anything like it. The foyer was vast, with glistening black granite floors. There was a long hallway to an even larger space, the family room, we were told. There was a pair of leather couches—one red, one black—a bearskin rug, a baby grand piano,
and floor-to-ceiling windows; a sliding-glass door opened to a brick patio, and an in-ground swimming pool. I had never seen an in-ground pool before. We had a plastic twelve-inch tub in our backyard. The “pool” (if you could call it that) only served to cool us off in the hot summer heat. Years later we had many a laugh remembering that pool—as Angel, having quite a vivid imagination, managed to convince most of the neighbors’ kids that the plastic tub was in fact a built-in pool. She’d told everyone the pool only looked “small and shallow.” But once you got in you were under nearly four feet of water. The neighbors’ kids would step into the pool and not see or feel any difference. “You have to sit and stay put,” Angel would say. “And then you’ll see the difference.” She was so convincing, the other kids believed it was a built-in pool. My sister had that way about her—she was so kind and generous and sincere that you couldn’t help but believe everything she said. That day at my grandparents’ house, when Angel saw the pool, she leaned into me and whispered, “Wow, imagine what the kids from Brooklyn would say if they saw this pool?”

W
E WERE SO
excited! Naturally we were eager to go for a swim. It was nearly ninety degrees outside and the sun was still out. But no one extended the invitation (and my father wasn’t about to ask). Clearly, the intention was for us to look, but not touch.

When we finally sat down for dinner, my grandfather was cordial; my step-grandmother was not. After all, she hardly knew us. We felt like the outcasts she considered us to be. And her daughters were equally dismissive and condescending. They were flirtatious toward Dad and treated Mom with an apparent act of phoniness. My siblings and I were one step short of invisible.

After a few hours, while the adults were busying themselves with cocktails and chatter in the billiards room (I couldn’t believe
the rooms actually had names), I was bored beyond belief. One of the staff took me by the hand and showed me my aunt’s closet, which was filled with old toys—mostly beautiful Barbie dolls. For me—a poor kid from Brooklyn—it was like a trip to FAO Schwartz. The woman took down a bunch of dolls and some costumes and told me I could play on the kitchen floor while she worked. I was as happy as could be—until my Aunt Della, who was a good ten years older than I was, entered the room and saw me. She was with a few of her girlfriends, and they stopped right in front of me and stared in disbelief.