John A. “Junior” Gotti, son of the nation’s most notorious gangster, was sentenced Sep. 3 to 77 months in prison by U.S. Dist. Judge Barrington Parker who castigated him for choosing his organized-crime family at the expense of his own. “I’m a man’s man,” Gotti told Parker. “I’m here to accept my medicine.”
“You grew up in circumstances where your father was incarcerated, so you knew the kind of toll that takes on family and particularly children,” Parker said to Gotti. “The pattern, for reasons I am unable to fathom, is duplicated.” Gotti’s father, John “Dapper Don” Gotti, was convicted in 1992 of ordering numerous murders as head of what was then the nation’s largest mafia clan, the Gambino crime family. Though jailed for life, the elder Gotti has remained a ghostly presence throughout his son’s case, which began in Jan. 1998 with the unsealing of four sweeping indictments against the younger Gotti and 39 others.
In Apr. 1999, a day before his criminal trial, reputed Gambino crime family boss, Junior Gotti, pled guilty to involvement in a racket that involved bribery of union boss, extortion, loan-sharking rings, mortgage fraud and tax evasion, and threats of violence. In his plea, he admitted to four acts of racketeering including bribing a union boss, which prosecutors identified as a Teamsters Local 445 offical. Reportedly, the bribe was an attempt to win a construction contract worth up to $10 million for an airport in New Windsor, N.Y.
Gotti is was scheduled to sign a contract of sale Sep. 4 on his $1.8 million Mill Neck, N.Y., mansion and begin moving his family into a more modest home at an unnamed location. His attorney, Sarita Kedia, says he also might buy a new vacation home. He has two months to scrounge up the $243,000 he still owes the federal government, and he still will owe $300,000 restitution for mortgage fraud and $32,000 in back taxes and penalties and a $10,000 fine. He has relied heavily on family friends to subsidize the $757,000 he has paid to date, and if he doesn’t come up with money that prosecutors think came from legitimate sources, the prosecutors will begin selling off some of his assets, including rental property in Queens and a vacation plot in Pa. [Daily News 9/4/99]