This Family of Mine: What It Was Like Growing Up Gotti (2 page)

Even a well-known local newscaster was indebted to Dad because he had saved her father’s life after the poor guy had fallen in too deep with a couple of made men from Brooklyn. The mobsters had been enticed by the man’s investment strategy, which turned out to be little more than a badly planned get-rich-quick scheme. When the venture inevitably failed, the Brooklyn investors demanded much more than their money back.

And so it went, story after story. I’d heard them for years, and I heard even more and then some at Dad’s wake and throughout the day—tales of benevolence that belied the tabloid image of John Gotti.

“Give us this day, our daily bread . . .”

The New York papers circulated the rumors that the diocese
had refused to accept my father’s body and host a Catholic mass for him. The tabloids claimed that the “Gotti family had been turned down.” There was absolutely no truth to this—we never requested that Dad be buried with a full Catholic mass.

Nevertheless, my mother was enraged by the controversy. She carried vivid memories of the diocese embracing Dad only a few years earlier, characterizing him as a pillar of the community after he’d agreed to fund a much-needed face-lift for a neighborhood church in Queens. Mom later labeled the Catholic Church “a house of hypocrites”: “When John Gotti’s money or help was needed—and welcomed—he was a wonderful man. But in death, he couldn’t offer the Church much, and the moment the negative controversy surfaced, they turned their backs to suit the politically correct standards that were expected of them.”

So when the subject came up, Mom was adamant: there would be no request for a Catholic burial mass for Dad. Let that speak for itself.

“On earth, as it is in heaven . . .”

The crowd at the back of the room inched forward; each mourner made the sign of the cross, laid down a rose, and paid their final respects. As the pile of flowers mounted on the casket, one man caught my attention. Perhaps it was his wool trench coat worn in June, or maybe it was the air of unease about him. He seemed nervous—holding his coat closed, his eyes darting around the room—while making his way to the coffin. What was most noticeable was that he didn’t have a rose.

Security noticed as well, and moved in closer—one tall, burly guy to the right of the trench coat, another to the left. In the blink of an eye, the interloper was hoisted up and carried out the door. I was later told he was a reporter—the trench coat had been used, not very effectively, to hide a video camera. Of course, he wasn’t the only reporter posing as a mourner; nearly two dozen members
of the press would be physically removed from the chapel before the service ended. That there were mourners not supposed to be in attendance was of great concern to some of the bereaved men present. These men were the “higher-ups” in the mob, and the FBI went out of their way trying to spot them in the crowd. These mobsters were forbidden by law enforcement to attend the funeral, and the unwanted publicity played an even bigger factor.

“Lead us not into temptation . . .”

Immediate family members were funneled through a side door, led by nearly a dozen security guards whose primary function was not to protect us from enemies but to keep the press at bay. We filed into the waiting limousines amid flashing bulbs and harsh inquiries. One reporter stared right into my eyes and asked, with a hint of a smile, “Victoria, how are you holding up?” He aimed a microphone in my direction, nodding conspiratorially.

“Come on, what was it really like . . . growing up Gotti?”

THIS
Family
OF
Mine

Winter 1952

T
he door blew open with driving force; shards of wood like shrapnel sprayed the cold, cramped Brooklyn railroad flat. To a twelve-year-old, the U.S. Marshal’s arrival came in the form of an unfathomable explosion that would haunt his dreams into adulthood. Two local police officers and one marshal from the housing department had been dispatched to evict a poor and hungry family of thirteen—despite the fact that Christmas was less than one week away.

My father lay huddled with his six brothers, all forced to survive in one room, on two mattresses, in the musty three-room apartment. It was in the dead of winter and none of the Gotti children—seven
boys and four girls, ages five to sixteen—had clothing suitable for protection against the elements. Dad would later recall that evening as being not only unbearably cold but accompanied by a dark, empty sky.

The Gotti children were accustomed to sharing tight quarters. If it seemed unnatural, even cruel, it was nonetheless preferable to sleeping on a cold bare floor “or being homeless,” as my father used to say. The family bounced around in those years, from a poverty-stricken section of the South Bronx to a modest apartment in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. My grandfather, John Senior, made some money in an all-night card game and moved the family into a middle-class neighborhood; however, it wasn’t long before his luck (and money) ran out. Within a few months the Gotti clan ended up in more humble surroundings, a shabby apartment in Downtown Brooklyn. “Times were hard,” my father said. “And they were about to get a lot harder.”

The eviction in 1952 was swift and heartless. Dressed only in worn flimsy garments, the Gotti children and their mother, Fannie, stood shivering in front of the dilapidated apartment complex that only a few minutes earlier had been their home. John Senior was out that night, off on one of his business trips. Monthly rent on the apartment was a paltry sum, but even that proved more than my grandfather could manage.

Philomena “Fannie” DeCarlo Gotti was a hardworking housewife who often took on odd jobs outside the home—doing the neighbors’ laundry, cleaning apartments, bagging groceries at a local market to help make ends meet. But lately there never seemed to be enough money. The family was barely able to keep food on the table and heat in the apartment. Conversely, my grandfather, John Joseph Gotti, was a perpetual adolescent, forever in search of excitement and fun. An avid gambler, drinker, and womanizer, he rarely held a steady job; whenever he got the “itch,” as Grandma
called it, he would take off for parts unknown, typically accompanied by some barmaid he’d only recently met.

There were times when Grandpa hit the road on one of his so-called “business trips” and didn’t return for months. For a while he had a job as a camera grip for a major film studio and even traveled to Hollywood on one occasion. This failed to result in any sort of legitimate career, but it did produce a handful of entertaining tales. My grandfather was fond of embellishment, and so he would tell anyone within earshot of his work-related war stories, like the time he met Jane Russell.

During the filming of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, Grandpa swore the gorgeous actress was attracted to him (forget for a moment the professional chasm that separated the lowly tech and the leading lady), and that she looked for excuses to talk to him. According to his story, she even winked at him on occasion.

Then there was the time he met Tony Curtis at the studio commissary. Grandpa insisted the two had become fast friends.

“That guy is a class act,” Grandpa had often said. Then he would smile and laugh. “Very personable, too.”

So instantaneous was their bond that Grandpa and Tony Curtis went out together that very night and took the town by storm. They drank themselves blind, eventually winding up in a seedy motel with a “couple of real lookers.” Or so Grandpa claimed, anyway.

The odd brush with greatness apparently was far more important to my grandfather than the mundane responsibilities of family life. It seemed not to matter that he had a large family to feed, or that there was never enough money to pay the rent or heating bill. And every so often, the Gotti family was kicked to the curb.

This naturally produced a degree of cynicism in my father, who years later would erupt any time he read a cliché-ridden newspaper article or book that described Grandpa as a hardworking Italian immigrant.

“These fuckin’ bums that write books—they’re worse than us,” he would rail. “Lies. All lies! My father was born in New Jersey. He’s never been to Italy in his whole fuckin’ life. He never worked a day in his life. He was a rolling stone. He never provided for his family. He never did nothin’. He never earned nothin’. And we never had nothin’.”

D
AD RECALLED HIS
mother’s reaction while standing at the curb on the night of the eviction, in the freezing cold, wearing a tattered sweater over a worn and faded housedress. She was only in her mid-thirties, but looked closer to fifty. The years, overloading her with work and anxiety and neglect, had not been kind to her. Grandma was a “cold woman,” Dad often said, hardened by years of sacrifice and disappointment. Mostly, Dad blamed his father for this. A man was supposed to take care of his family: put a roof over their heads, food in their bellies, and keep them warm in proper winter clothing. But, rather than struggle to fulfill his responsibilities and obligations, Grandpa chose instead to run—usually to the nearest bar to drown himself in his failure as a husband and father.

On this evening my father saw that she was understandably upset. Although Grandma rarely showed weakness in front of her children, the tears streamed down her cheeks. She stared at the old apartment building, then out at the street, and then back to the apartment building. Her eyes, my father noticed, were empty and sad, and the expression on her face frightened him.

The Gotti clan stood shivering outside for nearly an hour that night, a mid-winter drizzle chilling them to the bone. “An hour,” Dad said. “But it felt like an eternity.”

Exhausted and fearing for the welfare of her children, Grandma finally took action, marching the entire, rain-soaked clan nearly a mile through the streets of Brooklyn to the House of the Good
Shepherd, a church-sponsored residence for “wayward girls” (the facility catered to young, single women who had unplanned pregnancies). It must have been painful for Grandma to beg—she was a proud woman, after all—but that is what she did. For the sake of her children, she asked for mercy, and Sister Mary Margaret, dressed head-to-toe in black, responded with kindness, showing Grandma and the Gotti children to the building’s attic.

In reality, it wasn’t really an attic at all; it was a four-room apartment, a conversion made in the early 1940s to accommodate housing needs for the staff. Although the apartment had only an efficiency kitchenette, it was better than nothing, and Grandma saw its potential. The living room was really more of an alcove, adjacent to the kitchenette; it would likely serve as a fourth bedroom for the oldest male children. The two other rooms would be shared by Grandma and the remaining children, including my father, at least until Grandpa could find his way to the family’s new home. No one knew when that would be, but at that point, one of the three bedrooms would then be used as a master, resulting in eleven children sharing two small rooms. Tight quarters, to be sure, but, as Dad explained, “It was definitely better than the alternative.”

The days that followed would prove nearly as bleak. At the age of twelve, Dad was forced to hit the streets and find work, as were the other Gotti children. Everyone was expected to pull their own weight, especially the boys.

Dad combed the neighborhood looking for employment. Options, he quickly learned, were limited. A corner service station on Fulton Street had recently dismissed two mechanics in an effort to cut costs. A local deli already had two full-time day workers and three part-time night staffers. The manager at the A&P supermarket offered little encouragement, telling Dad he was too young for anything but carrying bags for customers. My father gave that one a moment’s consideration before spotting a crowd of eager boys
fighting over customers in the parking lot. Realizing that his pay would consist only of tips, and that the store already seemed overstaffed, he walked away.

Not enough customers, not enough hours, not enough money.

S
IX WEEKS LATER
, my grandfather ambled down the street to the House of the Good Shepherd, having easily tracked the family down through a network of friends and acquaintances. Along the way, he’d been told of the eviction and the dire circumstances faced by those whom he had abandoned. If his father felt guilt or remorse, Dad said, it wasn’t readily apparent. Accountability was not high on Grandpa’s list of virtues. He preferred to play the victim, forever damning the world and cursing God for having dealt him a raw hand. And so he rationalized his behavior and his vices—the alcohol, gambling, loose women, and the nasty temper as well.

Grandpa turned up at the attic apartment late one night, itching for an argument with my grandmother. At first he rang the bell and waited patiently, but there was no answer. After three tries, he began pounding the door like an impulsive child—pounding and kicking with such force that Sister Mary Margaret nearly called the police. Realizing who the belligerent man was she told him, “Please, sir. Use the top bell.”

M
EANWHILE, OBLIVIOUS TO
the commotion three stories below, my grandmother and her brood slept peacefully. Of all the Gotti children, only two were awake. Dad was restless and couldn’t sleep, and one of his younger brothers, I believe Ritchie, was wide awake because he had to go to the bathroom. Since there were seven boys in a single room, and only two beds for them to share, the
Gotti sons took turns. One night someone was lucky to get a semicomfortable cot, and the next one was handed an old army blanket and relegated to sleeping on the floor. That particular night, my father was lucky to have been assigned a cot.

Or so he thought.

Since the attic apartment was a considerable distance from the main plumbing, a bathroom had never been installed. What had begun as a generous offer of temporary shelter for my grandmother and her children had evolved into a more permanent arrangement. In exchange for room and board, my grandmother was expected to clean and maintain the House of the Good Shepherd. This meant washing and waxing the massive wood floors every night, as well as cleaning the mess hall after dinner. And there were additional duties: monthly window cleaning, repairing and sewing (such as pillows, blankets, and quilts), and any other household repairs that had been neglected. Given that my grandmother already had a full-time job at a local butcher shop, this wasn’t the most ideal arrangement, and it surely took its toll on her health and temperament. But it was the best that Grandma could manage at the time; until she had saved enough money to rent another apartment, or until her husband returned (hopefully with a few dollars in his pocket), it would have to do.