December 2, 2008
Commentary
No Gotti, No Glamor for the Mob
April 14, 1993 - If the itch to be loved is perilous even for reputable enterprisers, it is ruinous to disreputable ones.
John Gotti could not often enough stifle the impulse to do a kindness to a friend with an act of extreme malice to somebody else. None of these benignities earned him any profit except the gratitude and affection of the faithful who saluted him as "God's gift to the Mafia."
Gotti is unlikely to leave his federal prison
alive. No man - and few women long - could love Salvatore Gravano; and he was immune to the weakness of caring whether anyone did or not. And so he has survived to lodge in the federal Witness Protection Program and sing for the mercies of the federal prosecutors.
In due course, Gravano will have his new identity and access to a substantial fortune earned in a previous career busily criminal and will come to old age as vivid testament to the law that he travels the farthest who travels untied to sentiment.
This week Gravano is passing through the second lap of his trot in law enforcement's silks as a government witness against John and Joseph Gambino, who had been officer and trooper in John Gotti's command. He spent most of yesterday morning's session on the details of Salvatore Olivieri's murder, one of the 19 in his copy book.
In 1988, Giuseppe Gambino, uncle to John and Joseph, lost his containment in neighborly quarrels with the Olivieri family; and Sal Olivieri met his responsibilities as head of an embattled household by beating Giuseppe Gambino to death in the hallway of their apartment house.
John Gambino repaired at once to John Gotti with a plea for permission to avenge his uncle's ghost. The offense had been entirely domestic in origin and of no moment for Gotti's profit or loss; but, all the same, he yielded so far to his charitable instincts as not merely to license the killing of Sal Olivieri but to provide the work crew for the job.
As Gotti's master mechanic, Sal Gravano was assigned to planning and execution. The first fruit of his studies was the discovery that Olivieri regularly emerged at 9:30 a.m. to move his car in obedience to the alternate-side-of-the-street parking regulations.
No good citizen, no matter how indifferent to the lethal potentiality of his fists, cares to be identified with scofflaws. Gravano supervised the stealing of two cars, installed a five-member hit team, set himself at the ready as back-up shooter, waited for Olivieri's morning oblations to the parking rules, and watched him shot dead at their altar.
This exercise had certain uses for Gotti as a test of the fitness of his troops for more consequential employment; but its rewards seem otherwise to have been confined to enlargements of the sense of his own benevolence whose satisfactions he appears to have craved more than earthly riches.
Yesterday the prosecutors spread forth their tap of a conversation between Gotti and John Gambino that shone as a parable of the Kindly Master and the Honest Servant.
"Gambino: . . . we split like $6,000 there . . . I took a 20 percent from you. If it's enough?
"Gotti: Yeah! It's too much. It's too much, John. It's too much . . . Not necessary."
And there we have the distinction between John Gotti and Sammy Gravano; and it has been all to Gravano's temporal advantage. In matters of calculation Gotti was disabled by the same romantic vision of self and office whose absence strengthened Gravano and has brought him through by disciplined indifference to how he might look. The brutta figura is as close as his vision gets to an ideal. The achievement, while triumphant, extorts some costs in the aesthetic line. To hear him running through a murder in the tones accountants bring to their annual reports is very much to miss John Gotti. Take away creatures of folklore and fantasy like him, and you have reduced the mob to a bore.
Note: New York Newsday Columnist Murray Kempton died on May 5, 1997.
Mixx it!
Copyright © 2008, Newsday Inc.