Former mob target Curtis Sliwa claims John "Junior" Gotti gave him the equivalent of a Mafia "kiss of death" yesterday during a dramatic courtroom confrontation.
The incident unfolded after a routine pretrial conference, when the jailed Gambino family scion rose from his seat, turned around and pointed into the gallery.
Sliwa, seated in the back row, said Gotti's finger was directed straight at him, and was followed by a sotto voce prediction: "You're going down."
The Guardian Angels founder and talk-radio host immediately leaped to his feet and gestured back, cursing Gotti and calling him a "son of a bitch."
"When I flipped him the bird and said 'eff you,' he had that big demonic smile on his face," Sliwa said afterward. "He was eye-fornicating me."
The brief exchange stunned observers and left Sliwa visibly shaken.
He noted that the incident occurred two days before the 17th anniversary of his near-fatal shooting by Gambino henchmen after they picked him up in a stolen taxi with rigged doors.
The failed rubout -- along with an earlier baseball-bat beating -- was allegedly ordered by Gotti as payback for Sliwa's on-air diatribes against his father, the late "Dapper Don" John Gotti.
"Obviously, for him this is a blood feud -- a vendetta," Sliwa said.
Sliwa -- who is set to testify at Gotti's upcoming racketeering retrial -- said he reported yesterday's threat to the FBI, calling it a classic case of witness intimidation.
An FBI spokesman declined to comment.
Gotti lawyer Charles Carnesi said Sliwa got it all wrong.
Carnesi said Gotti was actually pointing to a friend and said, "He's going down," referring to how Carnesi was headed for a meeting with Gotti in a secure interview room.
Also yesterday, Carnesi said Gotti -- noticeably thinner after a recent kidney-stone ailment -- had called off a planned interview with "60 Minutes" that was to air on the eve of his Sept. 14 retrial.
Carnesi said the popular TV show had been pursuing a sit-down for several years, but officials at the Metropolitan Detention Center blocked it.
He also asked the judge to crack down on what he said were law-enforcement leaks during Gotti's earlier trials that hurt his defense.
Federal Judge P. Kevin Castel said he wouldn't impose a gag order, but would sign a stipulation from both sides agreeing not to discuss the case outside of court.
The judge also refused a defense request to refer to federal prosecutors as "the prosecution" instead of "the government" during jury selection.
Prosecutor Elie Honig argued that tradition dictated the terms, noting that Gotti would be called "the defendant," not "the criminal defendant, or the accused triple murderer."
http://www.nypost.com/seven/06182009/news/regionalnews/gottis_evil_eye_174824.htm
