John “Teflon Don” Gotti: High Profile Mafia Godfather

Law enforcement – the FBI and the NYPD – had long been chasing Gotti and trying to put him behind bars. After Gotti beat three prior cases – two state and one federal – the press labeled him the “Teflon Don” for his ability to escape unscathed from prosecution. The law enforcement community was eager to remove the Teflon from the Don and put him behind bars for a very long time. They just needed that one break that would allow them to catch Gotti with his guard down. That break came when an unidentified informer – someone close to Gotti – tipped off the FBI about an apartment above Gotti’s social club – the Ravenite – in which Gotti and his close allies would routinely venture to discuss their mob business. After gaining entry to the apartment and installing several eavesdropping devices – wiretaps – the apartment was wired for sound and ready for Gotti to expose all of his secrets. And Gotti did not disappoint!

Over the course of about three weeks time, Gotti was recorded freely talking about an array of mob business: loan sharking, extortion, bribery, fraud, and murder. On one tape, as the mesmerized FBI agents listened in, Gotti was heard describing a series of murders that he had ordered. One murder, about a criminal associate named Robert DiBernardo or Di B, Gotti was heard to say: “When Di B got whacked they told me a story. I was in jail when I done it. I knew why it was being done, and I done it anyway”! Armed with such irrefutable evidence, Gotti was arrested on the night of December 11th, 1990, as he sat cavorting and fraternizing with his mob associates in his Ravenite social club. Unbeknownst to Gotti at the time, that was to be his last night of freedom. John Gotti would never walk the earth as a free man again!

John Gotti was tried and convicted and sentenced to five-consecutive life terms in prison. Gotti was charged with five murders, racketeering, and a host of other criminal activity. Shortly after being convicted and sentence in June of 1992, Gotti was transferred to Marion Federal Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, one of the toughest and most restrictive federal prisons in the United States. There, in his small eight-by-ten prison cell, with nothing more than a cot, a small washbasin, a toilet, and a small black and white television set, Gotti would spend on average about 22-23 hours of every day. In late 1998, John Gotti was diagnosed with head and neck cancer and would spend the last few months of his life housed in a federal prison hospital in Springfield, Illinois, where he would die on June 10th, 2002, aged 61.