On This Day in History: April 2

John Got goes down

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On April 2, 1992, mafia boss John Gotti was convicted of murder and racketeering and later sentenced to life in prison. First, I want to talk about a murder he almost certainly ordered but wasn’t convicted of.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: April 2, 1992--

Gotti was a piece of shit. In 1980, when Gotti was a captain (capo) in New York’s Gambino crime family, his son died of stupidity. John’s 12-year-old son Frank had a friend visiting. That friend owned a motorized minibike. The friend was letting people try the minibike. When it was Frank’s turn, he didn’t wait for instructions. Instead, he leapt on it and hit the gas and zoomed out into the street, entering the road from a blind spot behind a construction dumpster, and got creamed by a passing vehicle.

The vehicle was driven by John Favara, Gotti’s backyard neighbor. Favara was a hardworking husband and father, and despite no criminal charges being filed—it was the kid’s own fault—his days were numbered. Favara died of stupidity as well. He immediately started getting death threats, and Gotti’s wife even attacked Favara with a baseball bat. I’d have said fuck this and moved to New Zealand. Favara knew Gotti was a mobster but didn’t believe he was in danger. Favara disappeared four months later and was never seen again. It’s rumored his body was dissolved in acid, and that Gotti definitely ordered the hit. Continues below …

If some mobster takes issue with this post and orders a hit on me I’d like my family to be looked after so please click the green button.

That’s just one story about the kind of guy he was. His kid behaves like a dumbass and gets dead, and Gotti murders the poor dude who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But he did a lot of other bad shit too. Gotti ordered the murder of Paul Castellano, the Gambino boss, in 1985 so he could be boss. Before long Gotti was seen as the most powerful mob boss in the country, earning the nickname Teflon Don because prosecutors couldn’t get any criminal charges to stick.

But the FBI was determined to see the fucker go down. They wiretapped the shit out of him and on one of the recordings Gotti trash talked his underboss and assassin “Sammy the Bull” Gravano. In the same recording Gotti implicated both himself and Gravano in several murders. So the FBI went to Gravano and said hey John is talking shit about you and we have evidence of all your killin’ but we’ll cut you a deal if you testify.

So Gravano ratted and Gotti was convicted of five murders plus a ton of other shit including tax evasion by an anonymous jury that had been fully sequestered because Gotti had a reputation for jury tampering. You can bet your ass I’d have not wanted to be known for putting him in prison. Hell, I’m a bit nervous writing this piece and the fucker has been dead since 2002.

Gravano, despite confessing to being involved in 19 murders, got a helluva deal for his testimony. But since then he’s kept breaking the law and spent a lot of time in prison.

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