John Gotti
John Gotti was only 45 when he became boss of the Mafia's most powerful family.
Born John Joseph Gotti Jr., on
October 27, 1940, the future chieftain grew up poor in the South Bronx,
one of 13 children born to a Neapolitan immigrant couple. John's father was God-fearing day laborer with no ties what so ever to the Mafia.
At the age of nine, he started running with the street gangs that staked out turf in his neighborhood. When he was twelve the family moved to Brownsville-East
New York, a working-class section of Brooklyn where Gotti followed his older brother Peter into the Fulton-Rockaway Boys, a gang whose colors were a sinister purple and black.
In 1956 John dropped out of Franklin K. Lane High School. At 16 Gotti got a job right out
of school--as a coat presser in Brooklyn.
When he was 17 he began his long contest with the law. The first entry on his criminal resume
noted that he and some friends were caught stealing copper from a construction firm. He pleaded
guilty and got probation. At 19, he was caught in a raid on a gambling den.
At 20 he was arrested for disorderly conduct and drew a 60-day suspended sentence.
Gotti clearly had his wild side, but it didn't discourage a sanitation worker's daughter named
Victoria DiGiorgio-a petite, darkly pretty girl two years younger than John. By 1962 the two were
married, and Gotti was a father. He shed his Rockaway Boys colors for the sturdy jacket of a working man and
took a job as a truck driver's helper for the Barnes Express Company. For the future mobster, this was a smart move.
In his new post Gotti learned much about shipping manifests and bills of lading that would be useful in his later
labors as a hijacker.
"You don't get released from my crew. You have lived with John Gotti and you will die with John Gotti".-John Gotti
With his new domestic situation, the future don had serious obligations to meet. He also liked to be out most nights gambling and raising
hell. To carry the resulting two pronged financial burden cost a lot of money. Gotti started heisting cars, and when he was 23, he and
Salvatore Ruggiero were caught driving a stolen rental car. Now, for the first time, Gotti went to jail. But it was only for 20 days
and scarcely counted. Two years after he was jailed again, for two attemted thefts. This time he got a year behind bars. With no money coming in, Victoria and their three children went on welfare. When Gotti emerged from jail at the age of 26, he badly needed money, both to support his
family and to move out of the South Bronx. Blacks were coming into the neighborhood and he didn't like that.
The answer was obvious: Crime had to pay better than a job, so Gotti started hijacking trucks loaded with salable goods.
The trough that virtually all of the mob hoods fed from was the immense John F. Kennedy Airport in Queens, a veritable banquet
of air cargo from all over the world. At 5,000 acres, with literally hundreds of warehouses, the place was simply too huge to protect
and still remain a civilian facility. Crooks who managed to bribe or extort inside help at the airport stole everything from high-tech Japanese cameras and electronic equiptment to the latest European fashions
and furs.
Mr. John Gotti
Reg.# 18261-053
USP Marion
P.O. Box 1000
Marion, IL 62959<