THE GOTTI VERDICT:Don's Learned Behavior

By Murray Kempton | New York Newsday

April 3, 1992 - On or about the hour of 1:26 yesterday the court clerk was halfway through her litany of the acts of conspiracy imputed to John Gotti and Frank Locascio; and the responses of "Proved" as to act and "Guilty" as to crime were coming back from the anonymous Juror No. 1 in unbroken succession.

Defense counsel John Mitchell already knew that the federal prosecutors had swept the board. He did not need to hear more and he lowered his head toward the table. John Gotti patted his leg and put an arm about his shoulder.

John Mitchell looked up and Gotti said, "It's all right. Don't worry about it. It's all right."

He turned his gaze back upon Juror No. 1. As Spartans at Thermopylae did, so was John Gotti holding up his head. Flintlike and unflinching, overwhelmed by his conquerors and looking upon them larger than ever in the presence of his pride and nobler than ever before in an absence of his malice.

Near the end of the office upon him, there were stirrings of resentment in the second row of the courtroom where his retainers had taken their stations for the last eight weeks. John Gotti put a cautionary finger to his lips. Suddenly and perhaps unwontedly, he seemed to be anxious about nothing so much as to keep somebody else from getting into trouble.

When it was time to depart, he stood up, flicked his tie and straightened his jacket with the gesture so long familiar as the vanity of a dandy and now transformed into the dignity of an unconquerable. In the pens downstairs, he said to his lawyers,

"Tell everybody not to worry. I'll come through this."

Tell it in Howard Beach, shout it on Mulberry Street: This is how a Don of the Honored Society looks upon his everlasting worst.

"I feel about him the way I would about some lion," John Mitchell said. "I would hate to think of a lion dying in the zoo because his cage is too small. He deserves a better end out in the jungle or out in the street.

But his death in the street would have been the sort mandated by the Cosa Nostra creed, whose dictates are seldom over-attentive to the dignity of lion or alley cat. There would, it is true, be degrees of ceremony in the dispatch of an executive of Gotti's distinction. He would not be shot in the back of the head like Bobby DeBernardo. He would be met instead face to face and gunned down like Paul Castellano.

Soldiers are murdered; and bosses are assassinated; but in either case the prelude to the deed is the treason. Just before he was killed in the street, Gotti would have known himself betrayed by his friends. Now he had met his undoing from the organized society he has so long marked and defied as his enemy; and it may indeed be an end fitter for preserved illusion.

For John Gotti could not have borne himself as admirably as he did yesterday if he were not the last Cosa Nostra primate to believe every article of its doctrine. His bearing suggests an almost heroic endurance of the faith through all experience of its repeated violation by himself and other elders of his church even though we can acquit him of any direct part in the smooth assurances that set up the victim for his doom.

That is work for the Sammy Gravanos; and Gotti would have been the poorest of hands for such, since he is too incapable of hypocrisy to be false to what he is whether in reviling his prosecutors or almost sweetly consoling those who cannot conceal their grief for him as well as he does his own for himself.

As the courtroom cleared yesterday, a woman of great wisdom and an habitually stern view of malefactors said how sorry she was about John Gotti, because "he has made me like him." And so, in some foolish way, he has. It is the singular triumph of a not altogether deplorable man in an altogether deplorable job. Carmine Persico said once in speaking of another gangster of far worse character than his own or Gotti's that "Carmine Galante wasn't that bad a guy. He just didn't know how to behave because he wasn't brought up right." Someone, probably himself, brought John Gotti up right enough and left him enough of the training to know superbly how to behave yesterday.

Note: New York Newsday Columnist Murray Kempton died on May 5, 1997.

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THE GOTTI VERDICT:Don's Learned Behavior

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