In her book This Family of Mine (and this is mere speculation on my part) she claims that instead of Gotti being a renegade and taking out Castellano on his own that it was approved by The Commission with the exception of Gigante. We all know Gigante was unhappy about this and used the fact that Gotti broke the rules by taking a boss out. However, Gigante used Casso, a puppet to use a car bomb which is also against the rules to try and take out Gotti. Why would he try and insulate himself by doing this and using Casso as a proxy if it was in his right to kill Gotti by trying to make it look like he didn't order it? The Genovese also did something similar with Caponigro.

Then there is the instance of Gotti and Gravano meeting with Scarfo claiming they "got the ok for the hit"...Yes, they could be lying of course but it was also known people were unhappy with Castellano.

Then there is the issue that Victoria Gotti is just trying to make her dad look better and might not be credible because her version might be bias. Her book for the most part is surprisngly well written because I did not have a high opinion on her before but I was thinking about why Gigante would take those measures if he knew he was doing the right thing.

Victoria is well educated and is a good writer. What she says CAN be true but who knows. The Genovese are masters at getting other families to do their dirty work. You gave a great example with Caponegro( whom my uncle speaks very highly of).. Then again, my uncle though the world of tino f, so go figure.

Please, didn't Victoria claim her family never dealt drugs? She loses her credibility right there.

At least she doesn't claim that Gotti had nothing to do with it. I read that Gravano and Gotti once staged a conversation (knowing they were taped) that "the cops" had killed Castellano.

Who killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy?
Who killed Costantino Paul Castellano?

She says Gotti didn't deal drugs but said his crew "hung around drug dealers". Yeah her creditbility is questionable for sure but that doesn't take away from the fact why Gigante used Casso as a proxy to use a carbomb, ya know?

She gets wrong in the book what family danny marino is from, she says genovese when its gambino

Vince was using them.

In a perfect world (in that world anyway), the car bombing would have worked on Gotti, Vince would have backed Jimmy and Danny in the Gambinos, whacked Casso to cover it up, then backed the Bronx-Harlem Faction of the Luccheses. That was his plan, and it almost worked.

Even with the car bomb fuck-up, the Westside and Luccheses still work so closely together in the Bronx (especially in construction), that they may as well be the same family.

Right, as I said before in my original post was similar what happened wth Caponigro. Im not disputing his plan, im curious to know if there was a commission meeting to take out paul that gigante disagreed with.

On another note, what is with true crime novels when they are told first person that they always have grammarical errors, peoples last names spelled wrong, dates mixed up and incorrect crime family info in them? Raab and possibly capeci are the only ones o see that dont do this or rarely fuck up. All the rat and family member books do this and its quite embarassing

Well, that's actually on the publisher. Books like that are typically published by low end, sometimes straight to paperback publishers, on shoestring budgets, with idiots for editors.

Idiot editors, you got that one right.

How could the commission have approved it? Paul was on the commission. Vince and Vic were also on the commission- and attempted to kill Gotti as revenge for taking a boss out with permission. Bonanno were no longer on the commission in 85.

Who does that leave? Granted, I think it is pretty well known there was some support for the hit within the Bonannos and Colombos. But to say the commission approved it is bs. The politics were quite a bit more complicated, as pb mentioned.

No there wasn't really a Commission meeting but Gotti's loyalists went to key people in the other families except the Genovese and they were pretty much neutral. DeCicco went to Gaspipe who told him he's taking a huge risk and that he shouldn't go along with it, but otherwise was not going to hinder their plans. Somebody else went to the Colombos who were like.. fuck it, whatever. Gotti was also tight with Vic Orena I think and he later backed him.
The Bonannos had been kicked off the commission but Gotti was good friends with Big Joey, so that was it.

Not really a meeting or a sitdown, he just sent his guys to talk to key, trusted people from the families and feel them out.

Well the fact that Gotti survived was a testament to the fact there was at best some support from other families and at worst ambivalence.

But let's not pretend this was sanctioned in any official way (if that is Victoria's point). Gotti was just good at politicking and felt confident that he was going to get a pass for the hit because of his connections.

True. He did have friends in the other families, though. Just Big Joey alone was a powerful ally regardless of the commission seat and if he'd done a better job at backing Orena, who knows? It could have turned out better (in HIS perfect world) and he'd have 3 families against the Chin.

Big Joey? Wasn't Massino on the lam at that point?

I'm not completely sure, but he was a close friend of John's so he'd probably have his back.. I don't see any reason why he'd choose Paul over John.

He had been in hiding for awhile and arranged his surrender right around that time. He really had his own problems at the time, though. The 814 case alone had him with head just above water.

As far as Gotti and the Westside, there wasn't a single guy in that family who would gave risked the wrath of both the Village and 116th Street by backing Gotti at that time. Not a single one. The Uptown Genovese guys hated Gotti with the same passion as the Downtown and Village guys.

No way it would have worked, imho. Not only they targeted the wrong individual, since the man with DeCicco wasn't Gotti, but the explosion didn't even kill this man. Therefore, DOUBLE failure. Maybe Gotti wouldn have whacked the Chin if he hadn't gone to jail (not that I would have wanted that to happen, I would have rooted for the Chin all the way if there was a real war).

Anyway, look at the bombings by Toto' Riina and the ones by American amateurs. The most powerful country on the planet has yet to learn from the islanders

I said in a perfect world. But even with that "failure," if the Feds didn't tip John to the Manna plot, it's possible that he wouldn't have seen 1990 (the year he got indicted). That faction (North Jersey) hated him, too. With a vengeance. And they were not people to be fucked with, either.

The Feds wanted John for themselves, or they never would have tipped him to the Manna tapes. Forget that good government, "moral duty to warn him" crap. If he didn't spit in their faces after the first RICO, they would have let him die in the street like a dog. Just like Castellano. You think they really care? It's the Government, man.


No argument there, buddy. None at all.

I agree. They just do as they please. While they warned Gotti about Manna's conspiracy, they never warned DiBono about Gotti wanting to kill him, or Schiff when he was about to be whacked by Manna.

Exactly. They wanted him for themselves.

she gets a couple things like this wrong, and u are closer to the mob life than her because you research online all the time?

I am sure you were much closer to mob activity than a Gotti relative.

Kind of off-topic but somebody (I think it was PB) said that when Castellano was killed it was like the president had been shot in New York. That's pretty fascinating to me. If that was you, PB, are there any other killings that came close to that effect in your lifetime?

Well, I was probably half-joking. But when the news broke, I was at the bar with my Dad in a Morris Park restaurant called Frankie and Johnnie's Pine Tavern. It's an institution in the Bronx.

Anyway, Morris Park was still heavily Italian back in '85, and there were A LOT of wiseguys in the neighborhood (today it's mostly Albanian). And even though the place has always been a family type of restaurant, quite a few knockaround guys hung out there. So when it came across the television at the bar, in THAT particular neighborhood, yeah, it may as well have been the President.

And I assume you just meant mob killings, not celebrity deaths. So in my lifetime, the Galante hit probably got the most press after Big Paul. Maybe even an equal amount.

I find it very disturbing that a woman like Victoria Gotti can continue to profit from her husband's life of crime and drag her family into it - with these books and reality TV shows.

A completely innocent man was murdered and her neighbor's innocent children were left without a father because he done something that - knock on wood - could happen to any of us.

Some of her comments and actions, before and after Favara's disappearance, have implicated her.

Some accounts have her encouraging and demanding her husband to avenge her child's death (by murdering the man). Some accounts say John Gotti actually understood that what happened was a tragic mistake but that his wife would not rest until the man was hounded out of his home and then, ultimately, murdered.

And of course there was the physical assault, damage to property and intimidation of neighbors that was committed by Victoria Gotti...

I just don't get it. Nevermind her husband. Was she ever properly, and thoroughly, investigated for this?

Or did the feds adopt a kid gloves approach because she lost her child.

Like I find it hard to have any sympathy for her. She lost her child. What about the children that were left without a father figure, a 9 to 5 working man, after he was allegedly tortured and dissolved in a vat of acid?

Welcome to the mafia Moe.

Gotti didn't have commission approval. And how would have Chin failed if the bombing thing worked? He didn't misidentify Gotti for someone else, he wasn't even present at the attempt. It was Jimmy Brown, Gotti's own capo, who informed the Chin of what Gotti had been up to and his plans for that day, he was still in the midst of setting his crime family in order with him on top, and was meeting with various people, he was supposed to meet with Failia at his club but backed out for whatever reason at the last second. Not knowing this, Casso detonated the bomb thinking he saw Gotti & DeCicco enter the car. Gotti didn't have the balls to go against Chin, he feared him. So if it failed or not, Gotti wasn't going against the Genovese.

Caponigro got what he asked for, it wasn't really back handed, and the Genovese never tried to place blame on anyone else, they just never made their part public, why should they? And let others speculate. Scarfo knew the whole time Caponigro was murdered on the spot inside the Triangle Club. Funzi used Caponigro, thinking he had the authority to okay something like that. Anyways, the whole thing was just a ploy to get the Gambino's out and the Genovese in, in Philly and the parts of Jersey they wanted.

Bingo