I agree - a little tiff definitely didn't dent his reputation. im not a gotti fan by any means but its obvious the guy was a tough son of a bitch who I'd bet money on any day in a square fight. The special on the AB on Nat Geo channel was funny with that ayran slob saying "yeah, John Gotti pays US for protection...thats how big we are in here" - which is probably a half truth. Given his high profile and how closely he was monitored Gotti would have been crazy to go after the black guy himself. on top of that he still had the "boss mentality" - having other people do his dirty work. I bet he wasn't paying the AB for protection, it was more like "these guys are scumbags who'll do anything, lemme toss them a few dollars to kill this guy"

another interesting prison fact about Gotti I read in an interview with Seth Ferrante (a prison writer) was that apparently at the MCC there were a bunch of black kids on his tier for drugs, who obviously looked up to him. he would bullshit with them about street life and their cases and basically convinced all of them that real gangsters go to trial and fight the government, not take pleas. so you have a bunch of kids from harlem and the bronx who don't know anything about the system rejecting pleas going to trial with the cheapest pay lawyers possible, losing, and getting an extra 15 years on to their sentence because of what Gotti told them. LOL