My Washington Times Review Of 'Gotti's Boys: The Mafia Crew That Killed For John Gotti'

The Washington Times published my review of Gotti’s Boys: The Mafia Crew That Killed for John Gotti.

Much has written about the late Cosa Nostra Gambino crime family boss John Gotti, and there have been several films made about him.

In Anthony M. DeStefano’s “Gotti’s Boys: The Mafia Crew that Killed for John Gotti,” the author recounts the well-known Gotti story, quoting liberally from other books on the mob boss, but he concentrates on the criminals who served under him.

“During the mid-1980s the big news in the world of organized crime was the rise of a once unknown gangster from Queens named John J. Gotti to head the Gambino crime family through the bloody elimination of the former boss, Paul Castellano. In a move that took much of the world of law enforcement by surprise, Gotti, a little-known hi-jacker and compulsive gambler, engineered the murder of ‘Big Paul,’ as Castellano was known, as much as a method of self-preservation than anything else,” Mr. DeStefano writes in his introduction to the book.

"With the rise of Gotti to leadership of Gambino family, one of the five Cosa Nostra groups in New York, the public was subjected to a barrage of superlatives about the man who had the daring to kill a major crime boss. ‘The Most Powerful Criminal in America,’ and ‘Al Capone in an $1, 800 Suit’ were just some of the ways Gotti was described. He was handsome, ambitious, ruthless, the journalists told us, all of which was true.”

Mr. DeStafano goes on to state that with so much already written about Gotti, what more could another book reveal? Plenty, he tells us. He notes that the FBI’s archives of public figures have become available since the 1990s. The once secret FBI files were made available to the author and he says that they proved most helpful in enabling him to see the interplay of events that brought about Gotti’s downfall.

“Reading through these materials, both old and new, it became clear that there was more to discover about the men who bonded with Gotti from the start of his career, killed for him and propelled him the top of the Gambino family,” Mr. DeStefano writes. “Without this band of criminals, Gotti would have never made it to the top of organized crime.”

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/aug/21/book-review-gottis-boys/