John Gotti | Making a Man | 1

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A helicopter nearly decapitated him, and he almost drowned.

He did it for his art.

He did it for what he loved.

He did it for Waterworld.

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It's December 16th, 1985, in a secluded park along New York's East River.

In the far distance, Christmas lights twinkle, casting a ghostly glow over the wintry ground.

John Gotti, a burly man in his forties, struts to a clearing and leans against a bare tree.

He lights a cigarette, the flame just barely illuminating his mischievous smile.

He exhales, foggy breath mixing with the smoke.

Soon, he's joined by another man, dressed in a too tight trench coat that strains against his biceps.

Sammy the Bull Gravano lumbers up to John and raises a clenched fist.

John returns the gesture and offers Sammy a light.

Neither of them speak until Angelo Rugiero emerges from the bushes.

He's heavyset with a face like a bulldog, but a better sense of humor than either John or Sammy.

The three of them make sparse chit-chat as the rest of the crew arrives.

Eventually, there are nine men surrounding John.

Each of them repeats Sammy's sign, a raised fist.

John claps his leather gloves together and calls the secret meeting to order.

Even in the low light, he exudes authority, a hulking figure who always seems to be scheming.

First, he pulls aside four of the conspirators who were dressed nearly identically in tanned trench coats and fur hats.

He speaks to them in hushed tones, giving them their assignment while the other men await their orders.

Then John turns his attention to the rest of the group.

He's sure that everyone assembled is a loyal soldier, men who answer to him and him alone.

But even so, what they're about to do is risky.

He called them together to break one of the three sacred rules of the Mafia.

It'll take nerves of steel, and there can't be any mistakes.

A missed shot means death for them all.

He announces their mission quietly but sternly, telling them it's Paul that's getting popped.

John lets the shocked whispers ripple around the group for a moment.

This is big.

Paul Castellano is the don of the Gambino crime family, the biggest of the five mafia families in New York, the family each of these men belong to.

It's Paul Castellano, not John Gotti, who's technically the ultimate authority.

But John continues talking as if no one's expressed a single iota of doubt, running through the operation step by step.

When John's done, the crew all raise their fists one more time.

Then they split into groups and climb into their assigned cars with a mixture of excitement and nerves.

From what John described, it sounds like a foolproof scheme, but no plan survives the battlefield unchanged.

As he pulls away from the Riverside Park, John grits his teeth and grips the steering wheel of his Lincoln tight.

Tonight, he'll either make history or seal his own fate.

From Airship, I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal.

John Gotti was one of New York's most notorious gangsters.

Coming from extreme poverty, he entered the mob at a young age with clear eyes and boundless ambition.

He knew that if he was going to get to the top, he'd have to fight for it with everything he had.

As he climbed the ranks, he showed he was willing to get his hands dirty, proving himself a brutal, fearless soldier in the cutthroat world of organized crime.

Of course, John wasn't the only one walking that road, but he distinguished himself by cultivating a certain style to go with his substance.

As the years went on, he got splashy with his ill-gotten wealth and used his clout to buy popularity in his local community.

From afar, he seemed like a gentleman criminal, a mob boss from another time, a more civilized time, an idea furthered by pop culture and Hollywood movies.

But John Gotti was no gentleman.

Beneath his polished exterior and braggadocio, he was a violent man with a vengeful nature and a lot of baggage.

No matter how much power and wealth he accrued, he never moved past his frustration at the way some guys just had it easier than he did.

He had a short fuse and a desperate need to hold on to power.

That's why he organized one of the most audacious hits in mob history.

And ironically, the parts of himself that John used to climb to the top of his kingdom were also the things that brought him spectacularly undone.

This is episode one in our four-part series on John Gotti, Making a Man.

It's 1954, and the noise of a Brooklyn construction site thunders in John Gotti's ears.

To him, the grumpy yells, clattering jackhammers and roaring trucks sound like home.

Still, his heart pounds as he and his adolescent crew, the Fulton Rockaway Boys, slip through a gap in the chain link fence.

At only 14 years old, John is already a seasoned thief.

He keeps his small gang organized, making sure everyone wears the trademark colors, purple and black.

Even his older brother Peter follows John's example.

He is the leader of the pack and there is really only one rule.

Whatever Johnny Boy says goes.

Giddy with anticipation, John leads the group to a dusty, relatively empty corner of the site.

He scans the scattered supplies carefully.

When his gaze settles on a cement mixer, his eyes light up.

It's big and heavy, but it has wheels which should make it portable enough.

Plus, it looks expensive.

He rushes up to the machine and starts fiddling with it, trying to get it to move.

The other boys take their posts as lookouts or try and lend a helping hand, giggling as they push the mixer out of a rut in the dirt.

John puts his back into it, in his mind already spending the money that this job will earn him.

For the past two years, John and his gang have been airing boys for Carmine Fatiko, a mafia captain in the local Gambino family.

John gets a kick out of working for Carmine, a bona fide gangster, and is always happy to do anything from petty theft to vandalism, gateway crimes.

But John is also eager to move up in the ranks.

He's out to get rich, to pull himself out of poverty and be somebody.

And to do that, he's more than willing to get his hands dirty.

Though he's not the only kid wrapped up with organized crime, John stands out among the other delinquents in East New York as uniquely headstrong.

He's not afraid of anything or anybody, and he doesn't care about rules.

No matter who's with him or against him, his path is set.

He likes to think that even when he's following orders, John Gotti only works for himself.

All that confidence helps him keep his peers in line, but it also makes him reckless.

The boys throw themselves behind the cement mixer, and the machine totters on the bumpy terrain.

John throws out his arms, trying to keep it from falling over, but it's far too heavy for him to shoulder on his own.

As the mixer crashes to the ground, John springs backward a moment too late.

He screams as the massive machine lands on his foot, crushing his toes.

He falls down and spins in the dirt, moaning in pain and sucking air through his teeth.

The boys try to help him.

When they can't get him to stand, they start to panic and scatter.

The commotion alerts a nearby police officer, who finds John and his brother Peter next to the mixer.

Busted.

Given the circumstances and their age, the cop believes the boys when they insist they were only horsing around.

No one's charged for trying to steal the cement mixer, but John's had a commission for months.

He spends the summer before high school nursing his shattered digits.

He even loses the second toe on his left foot, which changes his walk forever.

The pain of putting pressure on his feet during that period causes him to develop a unique gait.

He starts bouncing off the balls of his feet just before his wounded toes hit the ground.

He doesn't walk especially fast, but that quick pop lends him a sort of strut that he'll carry for the rest of his life.

A permanent injury like that might give some boys second thoughts about their life choices.

Not John Gotti.

When he recovers, he goes right back to spending most of his time with the Fulton Rockaway boys.

If anything, he becomes even cockier after the cement mixer incident.

When he bothers showing up to school, he's a menace.

Though he's far from the biggest kid, John can hold his own in a fight, mostly because of how fearless he is.

He takes pleasure in escalating conflict.

There's no line he won't cross to come out on top.

Frankly, his teachers are grateful that John cuts class more often than not.

Needless to say, this reputation frustrates his parents to no end.

But with 15 other kids to worry about, they just don't have the time to give John the right sort of attention to straighten him out.

John's father has a brutal temper and lashes out when he hears about his son's antics, but it makes no difference.

John doesn't respect his dad, who relies on unsteady work as a day laborer.

In John's eyes, his dad is a lazy do nothing.

So, as he gets older, John only gets further from the straight and narrow.

His parents eventually kick him out of the house and he drops out of school at 16, the earliest age he can do so.

After that, he's on his own, a chip on his shoulder and hungry in every sense of the word.

To make ends meet, he's forced to take a couple of dead-end jobs working as a coat presser and a trucker's assistant.

Temporary gigs like these make him feel like his father, so he drops those jobs as soon as he can.

He's pinning his hopes instead on the mob.

That's gonna be his ticket to real wealth.

Now that John's in his late teens, Carmine Fatico starts to trust him with more than petty theft.

For one of his first big assignments, Carmine teams John up with an amateur boxer named Willie.

Their mission is to beat up a man who helps run a local stolen car ring.

The two boys set out in the middle of the night.

It doesn't take them long to find their target at a used car dealership, a front for the illegal operation.

They approach an office in the back of the building, the only one still lit at this time of night.

Finding their target behind the desk, they lay into him without much introduction.

Their job isn't to collect the dead or intimidate the man, it's simply to dole out punishment.

John has no idea what this guy has done to even deserve a pounding, but he's not going to ask.

He and Willie beat the man mercilessly, breaking bones and ripping his clothes.

The sickening noises are loud enough that they're picked up on a police listening device.

It just so happens that the cops are looking into the stolen car ring and have the office bugged.

Now, the cops don't want to compromise their investigation by bursting in there themselves, but they're kind of worried John and Willie are going to kill the guy, so they call in a report of a fire at the car lot.

A few minutes later, the sound of sirens fills the night, scaring John and Willie off.

Firefighters follow the sounds of moaning and come upon the bleeding man curled up on the hard floor.

Though he's beaten half to death, he won't say a word to detectives, and he definitely won't file a police report.

He knows what will happen if he does.

That's how John climbs the ranks of the mafia, by doing the dirty work without asking questions.

And over the years, John slowly sketches out the shape of the complex secretive organization.

In New York, the mafia is helmed by five families, which each control organized crime in their allocated territories.

Of these, the Gambino family is by far the largest.

At the top of each family is a Don, or Big Boss.

He's attended by under bosses who may have multiple gangster crews working under their control.

The crews are run by capos, or captains, who may have up to a few dozen soldiers working under them.

These are the guys who pull major jobs, like murder, but they're also responsible for maintaining the local loan-sharking and gambling rackets.

All the way down below the soldiers are unofficial or unmade men who do the grunt work, which can often be violent.

They're called associates or errand boys.

That's where John stands, taking his orders from Carmine Fatica, who's a Gambino capo.

Like any budding mafioso, John's ultimate goal is to become an official member of the Gambino family, a made man.

The honor is only awarded to candidates with full-blooded Italian ancestry, and membership is up to the discretion of the Don.

John does everything he can to get Carmine's approval, which means he's often getting in trouble with the law.

Between the ages of 17 and 21, he's arrested at least five times on charges ranging from street fighting to possession of a gun to stealing cars.

He never serves more than six months in jail for any of the offenses, which he figures is a small price to pay for the promises of a better life.

A little time cooling his heels is fine with him if it means he gets to move up the ranks of the mafia.

Besides, when he's in prison, he knows it's only a matter of time before he's out and back to business.

Soon enough, he starts to feel bulletproof, free from the rules all the other kids have to follow.

But he's not so different from people his age.

Whenever he's not working, he spends his free time looking for a date.

In August of 1960, a couple of months before his 20th birthday, John has a passionate night with 17-year-old Victoria DiGiorgio.

She gets pregnant and the two of them start dating.

It's a turbulent relationship from the start.

At the time, there's an intense social pressure to marry before a pregnancy is carried to term.

But Victoria isn't so sure about John.

The two of them fight all the time and she's hardly thrilled about his criminal background.

There is an on-again-off-again romance and they split up every few months after blowout fights.

Once their baby arrives, though, things start to settle down.

Victoria is suddenly less concerned with John's vocation so long as he can provide for them.

Eventually, in 1962, they get married.

By the time he's 27, John and Victoria have five kids together.

It's a lot to handle, but John is an expert hijacker and makes a good living boosting cars and cargo trucks, which he and his mafia connections fence for profit.

That isn't the only racket he's involved in.

Bold as always, if he sees a good opportunity to take something, he seizes it without too much thought.

In 1968, he and his crew rent a U-Haul and drive it out to John F.

Kennedy Airport.

Posing as truckers, they pull right up to a loading zone as if they belong there.

After a quick look around, the men find a shipment of women's dresses lying nearby.

They stuff their truck full of the merchandise and rumble away.

Easy, except they aren't alone.

A van of FBI agents is watching the loading zone already, on the lookout for thieves like John.

They pull the men over, and there's really nothing John or his crew can do.

The feds have them red-handed, and because they stole goods that were technically in transit, John's booked for hijacking.

For once, he's sentenced to real time at the US.

Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.

Unlike his previous months' long-terms, this is a whole different story.

He's gonna have to wait it out for three long years.

It'll feel like a lifetime to a guy in his 20s.

In theory, it could be a wake-up call for John, a chance to take a look at his choices and find a different path that'll keep him out of prison once he's served his time.

But if John Gotti can be described in a single word, it's headstrong.

Once he's made a decision, he doesn't back down, no matter the risks.

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It's 1972, and John Gotti's just finished his three-year sentence at the Pennsylvania Penitentiary.

Now that he's out, he comes right to the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club, the gathering place for Carmine Fatiko's crew.

Cigarette smoke hangs in the air.

A man in the corner chows down on a hoagie, another's on the payphone in the corner, threatening to break a man's neck.

All of them drop what they're doing when they notice John walk in.

He gives a foxish grin, cracks a joke and sits down to start dealing out a hand of poker.

Someone gets him a cold beer.

It's good to be home, and it's about to get a lot better.

Carmine, the Gambino Captain John's been working for since age 12, is facing serious heat from the police.

He needs someone to take his place while he lays low to prepare for a murder trial.

And he chooses John.

His loyalty has been rewarded.

So, at age 31, John becomes acting captain before he's even officially a made member of the Gambino family.

He now reports to an underboss named Neil Delacroche.

That means he's only one step away from the Don, and he sets out to prove himself.

Under John's direction, his crew becomes Neil's top earners, hijacking trucks full of consumer goods and selling everything for pure profit.

This gets him in good with the upper crust.

Then another bit of luck has him suddenly mixing with the big names of the mafia.

When Neil is sent to jail in late 1972, John starts meeting with Carlo Gambino himself, the head of the biggest crime family in New York.

That kind of a rise is nearly unprecedented and basically guarantees John will be officially inducted into the Gambinos to become a made man.

There's only one obstacle in his way.

To weed out undercover cops who have infiltrated their ranks, made men are required to be involved in at least one murder before their induction.

To date, John Gotti has done plenty of crime, but hasn't ever crossed that line.

Not that he isn't willing, though.

He's desperate to cement his place in the family.

Now that his time has come, John revels in meeting with Carlo Gambino and starts dressing the part of an influential mobster.

He spends his new cash on expensive tailored suits.

After a childhood of hand-me-downs, it feels good to be dressed sharp.

It gives him a feeling of power, like he's making his adolescent dreams come true.

He's finally going to be somebody.

Somebody dangerous.

The best part of John's month is right after his regular meetings with Gambino, when he gets to pass down the boss's orders.

He calls his men to the Bergen Club in Ozone Park, Queens.

He surveys his crew and throws his shoulders back.

In his deepest, most authoritative growl, he tosses out the latest regulations.

Drug dealing has long been banned in the mafia, despite its profitability.

That said, plenty of dealing goes on under the table, and most higher-ups, including John, often look the other way.

In 1973, there are new bans on certain types of crime.

Counterfeiting and other white-collar infractions are out, since these are federal offenses, and Gambino doesn't want to attract any more government attention.

And then there's one more, a ban on kidnapping other criminals.

Though it doesn't sound very profitable, kidnapping each other's henchmen is a popular trend among warring gangs.

Gambino's new ban is entirely personal.

Earlier this year, his nephew was kidnapped.

His immediate family scraped together $100,000 for the ransom, more than 10 times the median home price at the time.

But the kidnappers were demanding $350,000, and the nephew was killed anyway.

The tragedy has left a sour taste in Gambino's mouth.

Hearing about it, John is eager to prove himself to the boss and earn his promotion to full membership.

If kidnapping is out, that means anyone caught engaging in it is fair game.

That will be John's ticket in.

Rule breakers need to be exterminated, and John needs to commit homicide to become a made man.

Ideally, he'd love to wipe out the men who killed Gambino's nephew, but he can't track them down.

Undeterred, he soon hears about another ripe target, Jimmy McBrattney.

Jimmy and some other men kidnapped a Staten Island loan shark and took home $21,000 for their trouble.

A few neighborhood kids who saw the abduction pass Jimmy's license plate info to John, and he starts making a plan.

It's time to get made.

It's 11 p.m.

on May 22nd, 1973.

Miriam Arnold, a bartender at Snopes Bar and Grill on Staten Island, hears the door open.

Despite the hour, the bar is an unusually bright place, so Miriam sees the three new customers clearly as they enter.

She recognizes the men from a previous visit, one where the trio poked around and left without ordering a drink.

Seeing them now, the hair on the back of her neck stands on end.

Miriam watches uneasily as 33-year-old John Gotti walks brusquely to the end of the bar with his men.

They surround a lone drinker.

Jimmy McBrattney, a stout Irish guy, barely has time to put his creme de menthe down before John pulls him up by the scruff of his coat.

One of his partners, Angelo Ruggiero, pulls out a pair of handcuffs and forces Jimmy's hands behind his back.

All eyes are on the scuffle, but only one man has the gall to speak up.

A patron at the back of the room demands an explanation.

Gotti's other partner, Ralph Galeone, tells the man they're police officers.

When the patron asks to see a badge, Ralph fires a gun into the ceiling.

Woodchips and plaster fall like confetti and the bar goes quiet.

Ralph orders everyone to stand against a wall but doesn't notice Miriam.

She slips out from behind the bar and quietly across the room and dials 911 on the payphone while the trio are distracted restraining Jimmy.

Despite the handcuffs and three grown men holding him down, he puts up a hell of a fight.

Unfortunately, it's not when he can win.

When John and his men finally get Jimmy under control, they drag him toward the door where they find Miriam, frozen with fear, phone in hand.

She watches in horror as Galeone points the gun at Jimmy's head and fires three times.

Blood splatters over the bar and drips onto the ground.

John lets go of Jimmy's body and he crumples to the floor.

Miriam's terrified she'll be next.

But John and his partners strut out of snopes without another word.

It seems they don't care who saw what they did.

Even for John Gotti, killing a man in a room full of witnesses is bold.

Or depending how you look at it, sloppy.

Maybe he wanted to make sure he got credit for helping with the murder.

Or maybe he thought posing as police officers would be enough to get Jimmy out of the bar quietly.

Either way, the mistake comes back to bite him.

Three months after the murder, Miriam Arnold and another patron pick out Angelo and Ralph in a police lineup.

John's not there though.

So despite all his missteps, John still almost gets away clean.

But in August, a police informant overhears him bragging about his role in Jimmy's death.

John's pinched and is indicted just a few days before his 33rd birthday.

He knows he could go down in a major way for killing Jimmy.

And just when he's about to really get some respect in the Gambino family, he can't have that.

So when he's out on bail, John skips town, leaving Victoria alone to take care of the kids.

By that point, she's used to it.

John has never been the most attentive father.

For about a year, he dodges the authorities while stopping by to see his family on the weekends, when it's safe.

But he can't hide out forever.

In June of 1974, the FBI pick up his trail.

They corner John and arrest him.

Even then, John manages to avoid serious trouble.

After some cunning negotiation by his lawyer, John's charges are pled down to attempted manslaughter.

He's sentenced to a relatively mild two years in prison, to be served at the Greenhaven Correctional Facility, about a hundred miles from his home.

Normally, taking a charge like that would get John made immediately, and he'd be officially inducted into the Gambino family.

But Carlo Gambino, who's reaching his late seventies, tells his men that he's concerned with the changing tide of organized crime.

He believes the family is being infiltrated by too many rash and violent young men.

He doesn't specifically have John in mind when he voices these concerns, but the description certainly applies.

Gambino also knows that despite his repeated warnings, his men are getting involved with drugs, which the boss worries will bring them too much federal heat.

So, at Gambino's orders, the mafia closes its doors to new members for now.

That means as he's about to ship off to prison for a murder he committed in the family's name, John will be denied official Gambino membership.

He finds out about the rule change before his prison time, and it stings.

That said, he knows he can't fight the boss, and things aren't all bad.

While he isn't made yet, his reputation among his peers is sterling.

Under his leadership, his crews continued to be among the family's top earners, thanks to their prolific hijacking operations and a lucrative loan-sharking racket.

John's not the best administrator, but he can delegate with the best of them.

And most importantly, he has his men's respect and their fear.

And he'll have to count on both in the coming years.

So, John Gotti enters prison with his head held high and rides out the next two years in a cell, continuing to lead his crew as well as he can from the inside.

In other words, he lets his most trusted men take over the day-to-day operations, passing the long-coded advice and making judgment calls when they visit him in prison.

It's not ideal, but he knows it won't be forever.

In his line of work, few things are.

By the time John is released in 1972, there's been a change of leadership in the family.

Carlo Gambino is dead and his cousin Paul Castellano is the new top dog.

That means the rules have changed again.

John finally gets what he's owed.

One evening, soon after he gets out of prison, John's sworn in in a secretive ceremony.

Exactly what happens at these things has never been public knowledge.

But like all mobsters, John vows to follow the organization's three unbreakable rules.

No drug dealing, no romantic involvement with a family member's wife, girlfriend or daughter, and finally, no killing cops.

Violating any of these rules, or speaking publicly about the mafia's dealings, comes with a death penalty.

But John Gotti never met a rule he couldn't break.

It's 1979, two years after John Gotti was officially inducted into the Gambino crime family.

He still keeps an office at the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club, a room that's only opened by invitation.

On his desk, half-finished cigarettes clog an old ashtray, and torn bedding slips are piled up in a waste paper basket.

John, now 38, leans back in his chair, adjusts his expensive tie and rubs his temples.

The telephone rings.

It's a low-level associate, a guy John has been trying to get a hold of for a while now.

He calls John Buddy, which sends his boss over the edge.

John pounce at the desk and screams at the top of his lungs.

He's been phoning for three days.

What's the holdup?

On the other end of the line, the man stutters out an excuse, which only infuriates John more.

He shouts so forcefully that spit rains down onto his desk.

John tells his employee that he's looking to turn someone into an example.

If the guy doesn't start answering his home phone, John's gonna blow up the house himself.

He slams down the receiver.

Working for John Gotti isn't pleasant most of the time.

He's moody, controlling and bullheaded.

Unlike other capos, he keeps his men on a short leash.

No disappearing for more than a day at a time.

No missing the family dinners every Wednesday.

No skipping the after parties either.

Those parties are what John really cares about, mostly because they involve playing poker until dawn.

John loves to gamble.

On top of his poker nights, he makes so-called dime bets of $1,000, several days a week at the horse track.

Then there are the sports bets, which can reach tens of thousands a pop.

Add in some long periods at the craps table, and John is winning and losing some major cash, mostly losing.

Luckily, he's got money to burn.

As acting capo of his crew, he takes a cut of the weekly illegal gambling operation.

He does a lot of loan-sharking too, which nets him a pretty penny.

His smallest stream of income is probably the phony no-show job he keeps as a legal front, a salesman gig at a company owned by his childhood friend.

Even with all that capital, John's losing streaks are legendary.

He often has to turn to other loan sharks to settle his debts, but in the end, he always pays.

It's part of his twisted sense of honor, itself a haphazard blend of exaggerated machismo and a business-first mindset.

He falls into a cycle, going to extreme efforts to pay back his mounting gambling debts, hitting a hot streak, then burning through his winnings, only to fall deeper into the red.

His addiction puts him under a lot of stress, made worse by his uncertain position in the family.

Though he's made now, he's still only an acting capo.

Technically, his crew belongs to Carmine Fatico, John's original mentor.

Carmine is in his late 60s now, and has been facing police investigation for nearly a decade, so he's basically retired.

Yet the new Gambino family boss, Paul Castellano, refuses to officially turn the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club over to John.

Though it's really just a dispute over a job title, John still finds it galling.

A man like him can't stand even a perceived slight.

It obsesses him.

The riff drives John away from Paul and closer to Neil de la Croix, an underboss in John's direct superior.

Even when John's stewing in his discontent, he remains a loyal soldier.

Mostly though, he's finding himself loyal to Neil rather than to the family, and he'll go to great lengths to protect his mentor.

In 1979, Neil is indicted in Florida for ordering the murder of a loan shark.

He's slated to show up at trial alongside Anthony Plait, the young man accused of trying to carry out his orders.

According to witnesses, Anthony leapt on the desk of the loan shark and spat in his face, then threatened to bite chunks out of him.

This is far from the first time Neil has faced legal troubles, and he's an expert at tugging on the jury's heartstrings.

In the courtroom, his biggest asset is his ability to play a kindly old man.

But that won't work with hot-blooded young Anthony sitting next to him.

Something has to be done before this goes to trial.

Enter John Gotti, now almost 40.

He flies down to Florida with three of his trusted goons.

Soon after John touches down, Anthony Plate walks out of his Miami Beach hotel and is never seen again.

A few days later, John and his partners return to New York, looking refreshed and suntanned.

In the end, Neil beats the case, just like always.

With his mentor safe and sound, John turns his attention back to the Bergen Hunting Fish Club.

Over the years, he's taken pains to get on the good side of the surrounding community of Ozone Park.

It's an insular area, where even law-abiding citizens are wary of police.

John spends his money generously there, ordering his men to patronize only local shops, and throwing big barbecues and Fourth of July parties every year.

The investment pays off.

Locals salute him on the streets and tip off the Bergen boys when they notice a stranger in the area.

But while John Gotti consolidates his power by winning friends, the head of the Gambino family just keeps making enemies, including John himself.

Paul Castellano doesn't come from the same place as John.

He's always had family connections and thinks of himself as more of a businessman than a criminal.

So, over the years, he's used his wealth to climb the ranks of the Mafia.

And now that he's at the top, he doesn't want to act how John thinks the boss should.

Clad in a custom suit that he sets off with ruby-tinted glasses and his prominent nose, Paul could be mistaken for an upscale banker.

There's no macho bluster, no blue-collar attitude.

All of that really grates on John.

He's had to fight and scrape to survive.

In his eyes, anyone who doesn't exude a hyper-macho persona isn't a real man.

He has more legitimate gripes with Paul, though.

The new Don treats the family's income as his own personal checking account.

He takes full advantage of being the boss, putting his fingers in as many pies as possible.

His MO is to extort money from legitimate businesses and use that capital to gradually force his way into the market.

That's how he runs a successful poultry company with few competitors and makes plenty of allies in a prosperous garment business.

Alongside those, he sets up a construction cartel to squeeze money from concrete distributors.

Yet no matter how much Paul brings in, it's never enough.

He always maintains a domineering, overbearing attitude that only leaves crumbs for the rest of the family.

He'd rather money flow into his pockets than go out to the Gambino family as a whole.

John's men make plenty of money for the organization, but barely see any of their profits thanks to Paul's greed.

So, they don't have much love for the boss.

Even the other four families that run New York notice the Gambino dons greed and grumble about it amongst themselves.

That said, a boss is a boss.

For now, John Gotti has to play by the rules and continue earning his keep.

In the back of his mind, though, he's got plans to boost his bank account and get out from under Paul Castellano's thumb.

Trouble is, there are plans that place him squarely in the Don's crosshairs.

From Airship, this is episode one in our series on John Gotti.

On the next episode, John continues his meteoric rise in the Gambino family, even as he experiences personal tragedy.

If you'd like to learn more about John Gotti, we recommend Mob Star, The Story of John Gotti by Jean Mustaine and Jerry Cappecci, Gotti's Boys, The Mafia Crew That Killed for John Gotti, by Anthony M.

Distofino, as well as Reporting in the New York Times.

This episode contains reenactments and dramatized details.

And while in most cases, we can't know exactly what was said, all our dramatizations are based on historical research.

American Criminal is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Jeremy Schwartz.

Audio editing by Mohammed Shazi.

Sound design by Matthew Fillett.

Music by Thrum.

This episode is written and researched by Terrell Wells.

Managing producer, Emily Burke.

Executive producers are Joel Callan, William Simpson and Lindsey Graham.