Dapper Don's Time Gone



		Dapper Don's Time Gone Like the gangsters, life's moved on in Mr. Gotti's old neighborhood "Nothing fails like success." — Budd Schulberg, "The Disenchanted." If he could rise today from his deathbed in the federal prison hospital in Springfield, walk out a free man and be driven through the night for one last hour on Mulberry St., John Gotti would not recognize the place. His world is gone. Here on Mulberry St., the grandchildren of the old immigrants long ago laughed at the notion that they must prove their fealty to tradition by living in five-story walkups. They laughed at the myth of the gangsters, too. And so they moved away, with their college degrees and solid jobs, returning only on nostalgic journeys to explain to their own kids just how far they had traveled. So if John Gotti stepped out of a limousine on the corner of Canal St. and swaggered toward the Ravenite Social Club he would know very few people in the crowded streets of what is now called the Mulberry St. Mall. He'd hear French being spoken at sidewalk cafes, along with Japanese and Russian and Dutch, the languages of tourists, not residents. Those restaurants, many of them new, were jammed over the weekend. Waiters delivered great coiled mounds of linguini and fettucini and calamari to packed tables, along with bottles of wine and steins of beer and loaves of fresh bread. Music drifted from loudspeakers. Gotti, the first mob leader to grow up with rock 'n' roll (he was born in 1940), would be pleased by one thing: He could walk four blocks among these visiting strangers and never once hear hip hop. But everything else is gone. Starting with the mob itself. Long ago, Frank Costello owned the Manhattan leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties; he passed on the appointments of judges; he traveled to the 1932 Democratic Convention in the company of Jimmy Hynes, one of the most powerful politicians in the country. A Shadow of Its Former Self Today the mob is a shriveled remnant of treacherous numskulls, fighting for garbage contracts, stealing money from unions or retailing dope. If they are not using the drugs they peddle, they are singing to the feds. They have the power to kill people, of course, a power they share with any addled high school student in any middle-class suburb; but they can't even fix parking tickets anymore. Gotti is an intelligent man and must have known this, particularly after he won the mob primary with Paulie Castellano on the sidewalk outside the Sparks Streak House in 1985. He was like one of those European kings who provided the basic old-country model for the mob. The old monarchs, all gangsters wrapped in bogus nobility, periodically assassinated their rivals (sometimes their relatives), promising the dukes and lords a new era of glory. And then they discovered that the treasury was empty and the court was filled with fools. In the early days of the American mob, Frank Costello and Charlie (Lucky) Luciano found counsel from Meyer Lansky, Arnold Rothstein and Abner Zwillman, among others; poor Gotti was stuck with the likes of Sammy Gravano. "The law's gonna be tough with us, okay, if they don't put us away," he said in a tape-recorded conversation in January 1986, after discovering the true state of his ragged kingdom. "If they don't put us away ... one year or two — that's all we need. But if I can get a year run, without being interrupted, get a year — gonna put this thing together where they could never break it, never destroy it. Even if we die." In that first year of his reign, Gotti presented himself to the impoverished younger hoodlums as the mob reformer, the man who would return La Cosa Nostra to the old certainties, the old glories. Men of Honor That didn't mean a return to the realities of the gangster life. Gotti was an American, after all, so he was shaped by the movies. He was not immune to the sentiments of "The Godfather." Many hoodlums of his generation saw the Puzo-Coppola masterpiece as if it were a training film, a reminder of what they were supposed to be. Men of honor. Loyal to each other. Members of a close, secret family united against the state. And because he sincerely believed the myth, Gotti performed his role better than anyone had in years. He was what Americans wanted a mob boss to look like (just as they wanted a President to look like Ronald Reagan, not Nixon or Carter). Gotti's perfect silvery hair, gangster clothes, gangster walk, and ironically cynical public style were a throwback to the movies inspired by Al Capone. Gotti made the covers of Time and People. He was silkscreened by Andy Warhol. He was the subject of at least five biographies. Even now in the Mulberry St. Mall, nobody would recognize sparrowy little Carlo Gambino or scary Junior Persico. They would rise from their linguini to have their napkins signed by John Gotti. But even at the gaudy height of his celebrity, Gotti must have felt that the mob was less a great criminal enterprise than an entertainment genre. Gotti was famous, the basic measure of American success. But the feds pursued him ferociously because he was a media star, because he flaunted his mob image and his apparent immunities. His fame was a challenge, and they took him down. A New Day Since Gotti's departure for prison in 1992, the gangster genre has been transformed. The romantic saga of "The Godfather" movies has given way to the pathetic truths of "GoodFellas" and "The Sopranos." If Gotti could have walked up Mulberry St. the other day, one final sign would have told him that his time had passed. The old Ravenite Social Club was at 247 Mulberry, and it was here that Gotti was often hailed as a visiting sovereign. Here, generations of "made" men waged their war against honest work. They played cards. They conspired. They drank. On hot nights, they stood outside and scratched their crotches. Now the Ravenite is gone forever, too. The five-story building was seized by the feds in 1997 and sold, and the club was gutted. The dark wood and stained floors were piled in the street, carted off with the lies and the contracts and the delusions of grandeur. Now it's a bright boutique called Amy Chan. Inside, where gangsters once dreamed of sweet felonies, young women now hold dresses against their lean bodies and stare into mirrors. They see only dresses, and not John Gotti or the shabby ruins of the past.