How the feds took down John Gotti and made it stick on ‘The Teflon Don’

He was untouchable, until he wasn’t.

For years, mob boss John Gotti was The Teflon Don. One of his thugs would threaten a juror, a mouthpiece would pay off some guy, and everything went away. Extortion charges, murder raps – nothing stuck.

But nobody’s luck lasts forever.

John Gleeson’s “The Gotti Wars: Taking Down America’s Most Notorious Mobster” explains how the kingpin’s reign finally ended. The combination of determined prosecutors, a disgruntled underling, and one man’s enormous ego was powerful enough to do the unthinkable – take down the don.

In 1985, six weeks after he was sworn in as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York, Gleeson was assigned to assist senior AUSA Diane Giacalone prepare a racketeering prosecution. It was initially known as “the Dellacroce case,” after Aniello Dellacroce. He was the old-school underboss of the Gambino crime family, and the indictment charged him and his crew with everything from loansharking to murder.

One of his co-defendants was a man named John Gotti.

“There was something special about Gotti,” Gleeson acknowledges. “Dellacroce was the underboss, but he was old and frail and looked as if he’d been brought in from a nursing home. The other defendants all came across as ordinary guys, bewildered by the formality of the courtroom and off their stride. And they orbited around Gotti, who was confident, handsome, well-dressed, completely at home in the courtroom, and in charge not only of the other defendants but their lawyers as well.”

Very soon, Gotti would make his leadership official.

The current head of the Gambino family was Paul Castellano. Although he and Gotti loathed each other, so far, Dellacroce had kept the peace. But when Dellacroce died of cancer on Dec. 2, 1985, Gotti saw his chance. Ignoring the Mafia’s rigid rules about murdering a made man, he assembled a team of assassins. They gunned down Castellano in the street two weeks later, outside a Manhattan steak house.

That night, Gotti announced the new head of the Gambino family: Him.

No one dared object.

So the ongoing “Dellacroce case” now became “the Gotti case.” As the junior lawyer, Gleeson’s main job was sifting through hundreds of hours of wiretaps. It didn’t just take incredible patience. It required real imagination. Some conversations, Gleeson says, were barely decipherable. “’Did you see that guy?’ ‘What guy?’ ‘The guy from over there. The one we saw last week.’ ‘The tall guy?’ ‘No, the other guy!’…

“Every once in a while, wiseguys ended up whacking the wrong guy,” Gleeson writes. “After all those hours listening to them, I found myself wondering why that didn’t happen more often.”

The first federal trial of John Gotti finally began on Sept. 26, 1986. Gotti’s lawyer, Bruce Cutler, immediately declared war.

He said there was no such thing as a Mafia. He defended Gotti as a proud, hard-working man, the kind “that made this country great.” He said the prosecutors were dealing in “guilt by association” like the witch hunters of the McCarthy era or the war-time officials who had sent Japanese-Americans to internment camps.

Then, declaring the indictment garbage, he picked it up and threw it in the judge’s wastebasket.

It would get worse when, after four months of the prosecution’s case, it was time for the defense witnesses to take the stand. The first was Matt Traynor, a bank robber who earlier offered to help the prosecutors if they deposited money for him in the prison commissary. When they refused, he threatened to lie about them in court.

And now he did, testifying that they tried to bribe him. He swore that Gleeson’s wife, a nurse, had gotten him drugs. Giacalone had slipped him a pair of her panties. It was absurd, but the judge allowed it.

Finally, the trial ended, and the jury went off to deliberate. They announced their verdict a week later. All eight defendants – including John Gotti – were found not guilty.

“Diane and I knew immediately that even if we lived another fifty years, we were experiencing what would be the lowest point of our careers,” Gleeson writes.

They didn’t know, until years later, that one of the jurors had been tampered with, bribed to insist on the defendants’ innocence. Eventually, he convinced the other jurors there was “reasonable doubt.”

Over the next few years, Gotti’s fame only grew. “The American public has always glorified outlaws: Robin Hood, Jesse James, Bonnie, and Clyde,” Gleeson writes. “A handsome gangster in a thousand-dollar suit thumbing his nose at authority is a surefire recipe for celebrity status.”

The government was ready to take another shot by the start of the next decade. They had new evidence of illegal gambling, two murders, a couple of obstruction-of-justice charges, and – every gangster’s weak spot – tax fraud. Gotti claimed to earn a modest living, mainly as a zipper salesman.

And, thanks to Gotti, they had more tapes.

Once he made himself don of the Gambino family, Gotti imperiously insisted subordinates visit him. At the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry, tribute would be paid weekly and new orders issued. Of course, the feds had bugged the place. And, of course, Gotti suspected as much, which is why he held any truly sensitive meetings in a borrowed apartment upstairs.

He didn’t know that the feds had bugged that, too.

By the time of Gotti’s second racketeering trial, some things had changed. Gleeson was now the lead prosecutor. Gotti had a new lawyer. Cutler appeared on some of the government wiretaps and because he might be called as a witness, he was disqualified from serving as counsel.

But more importantly, the prosecution had a new weapon: Gotti’s confidante, Sammy “The Bull” Gravano.

Gravano had heard the tapes, too. That meant he listened to how Gotti talked about him when he wasn’t around. It sounded like the boss didn’t think the Bull had much of a future in the organization. Maybe not much of a future, period. So Gravano cut a deal. If the government promised him protection, and no more than a 20-year sentence, he’d tell them everything.

Not just about his lifetime in the mob. Not just about the murders he committed (”about 18″ – he had lost count), but about how Gotti had ordered most of them. How Gotti had even sat in a car across from that steakhouse in 1985, waiting for Castellano to arrive — and then gave the order to shoot once he saw him drive up.

This trial was even more of a spectacle than the first one. The defense filled the court with B-list celebrity supporters – Mickey Rourke, an elderly Anthony Quinn, Al “Grandpa Munster” Lewis. And this time, the attacks on the prosecutors weren’t limited to a few libelous insults. Word went out that Gotti had put out a hit on Gleeson.

But the hitman never showed. And this time, the jurors – which were sequestered from the minute they were sworn in – were far away from the mob’s bribes or threats. The verdict took less than six hours. Guilty, on all counts.

“The Teflon is gone,” announced the head of the FBI’s N.Y. office. “The Don is covered in Velcro.”

John Gotti died in prison in 2002. He was 61.