Gotti Garb Defined Goodfella Glitz

By Denise Flaim | STAFF WRITER

June 11, 2002

Gambino Crime family head John Gotti leaves Brooklyn Federal Court in 1986. (Newsday/Richard Lee)

If there can be a legacy in the glint of a diamond pinkie ring, then John Gotti has left his mark on popular culture.

Long after a life sentence made the term "Teflon Don" a misnomer, the "Dapper Don" label still fit John Gotti as snugly as one of his hand-cut $2,000 suits. The Howard Beach wiseguy was nothing if not flamboyant, silk handkerchief peeking from the pocket of his double-breasted suit jacket, monogrammed Gucci socks flashing under a perfectly cuffed pant leg.

And well before new episodes of "The Sopranos" left restaurants sitting empty on Sunday nights, Gotti made the mob hip. Clothes-wise, he was trendier than any polyester-suited Corleone, more stylish than any sweat-suited Soprano. Indeed, his personal style not only prompted enormous public attention-during the mobster's 1992 trial, the city edition of this newspaper ran a daily feature called "Today's Gotti Garb"-but its influences still linger.

"People really respond emotionally to the glamour and the almost idealization of what he represented, and I think that's very apparent in clothing today," says Mark-Evan Blackman, chairman of the menswear-design department at the Fashion Institute of Technology. "The slick, continental, gold-chained- guy approach to dressing have filtered down into the mainstream." Though the double-breasted suits of Gotti's 1980s heyday are dated now, "the sensibility that shows behind it has not faded," says Blackman. He sees it in the work of virtually every major designer, from Gucci to Prada, in the pursuit of what he calls "in-your-face luxury."

Gotti, who owned a Mercedes outfitted with wipers for the headlights, took that sense of theatrics to his lifestyle as well. It explains why today we are fascinated by Tony Soprano and his McMansion, filled with expanses of lacquered furniture and TV screens better suited to a drive-in.

"Prior to Gotti, nouveau riche was considered quite gauche," explains Blackman. "But because of his popularity and the romanticism associated with him, people are not only not ashamed-they're flaunting it."

The connection between gangsters and glamour hardly started with John Gotti. In the films of the 1920s and '30s, cinematic goodfellas mirrored the high living of real-life mobsters such as Al Capone, swigging fine champagne and nibbling diamond-dripping dames. Determined to drive home the message that crime does not pay, the studios enacted production codes that required, among other things, that the mobster-hero must die by film's end.

Still, subsequent film portrayals of the mob, most notably "The Godfather," painted a romanticized picture of the mob patriarch, who, despite ordering the occasional whack job, is pursuing a twisted, but nontheless recognizable rendition of the American dream.

"The symbolism of moving from a thug to a mob boss in a tuxedo sitting in nightclub-that's what Americans do when they reach a certain level" of success, says Frankie Bailey, an assistant professor of Criminal Justice at the School of Criminal Justice at the State University of New York at Albany who specializes in crime and mass media.

And in many respects, John Gotti-the dirt-poor kid who was out on his own at age 12, the pompadoured mobster who stopped on his way from the courthouse to slip a panhandler a $50 bill-fits that idealized bill.

"The idea of consumption, that's a part of being a good American," says Bailey. "You're living well."

But in the end, a mobster is still a mobster, and most prefer to admire from a polite distance-if they admit to admiring at all.

"We don't comment on any real-life gangsters," said an HBO spokeswoman in response to a request for an interview with the show's costume designer. "'The Sopranos' is a work of fiction, and we don't want to be connected to any of that."