Carelessness of ‘Junior’ Deplored by Elder Gotti

Flabbergasted by the carelessness that helped get his son indicted, John J. Gotti said an insane asylum might better suit “Junior” than prison.

Prosecutors filed transcripts of a prison conversation taped in January 1998 that the elder Gotti had with his daughter and his brother.

The material was submitted in advance of a sentencing hearing set for next Thursday for John A. “Junior” Gotti, who pleaded guilty in April to racketeering, bribery, extortion, fraud and gambling.

“I know too much about indictments to believe anything I read in the indictment,” the elder Gotti said in the transcript. “But these people here, if ever found guilty, they should never be sent to jail. They should all be sent to the insane asylum.”

Gotti was especially appalled that FBI agents had found $358,000 in cash in a basement his son controlled.

“My son, who is the most legitimate, upstanding citizen you could find, if you want to be technical. Look what he gives them to [hang] their hat on. Funny money in the basement,” he said in the transcript.

He implied the money could have been from wedding gifts to his son and said, “A beautiful wedding, you got your money, you take your money and you put it in a safe deposit box. That’s what a normal person would do.”

“I wanna know what part of this was intelligent,” he said.

Gotti Sr., the onetime head of the Gambino crime family, got the nickname “Teflon Don” for escaping conviction in three trials. He was finally found guilty in 1992 in a racketeering case that featured the Mafia’s highest-ranking turncoat, Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano. He is serving a life sentence.

Prosecutors accused his son of taking over the crime syndicate, saying he performed all the duties of a crime boss and kept a “promotion list,” which was available only to high-ranking Mafia members, according to the court papers.

Junior Gotti’s lawyer, Gerald Shargel, implied that the prosecution’s argument was actually meant for the press.

“There is nothing in that letter that the judge has not already seen,” he said. “I wonder who they’re doing it for.”

In a letter accompanying the transcripts, prosecutors asked federal Judge Barrington Parker to sentence young Gotti to seven years and three months, the maximum mentioned when he pleaded guilty. They detailed some of the evidence prosecutors would have presented at trial.

For example, Junior Gotti received $400 each week for having lunch with the owner of a construction company, the papers said. He was also the only “employee” to get a Christmas bonus: $10,000.

But Gotti’s lawyer said his client “is not the villain that the government portrays him to be.”