This Family of Mine: What It Was Like Growing Up Gotti (17 page)

I was seventeen and in my first year of college at St. John’s University. I had skipped a year in high school because of good grades. On the afternoon of March 18, 1980, I was at school late that day and I missed my usual ride home. I had to call my grandfather to pick me up.

Believe it or not, Grandpa may not have been much of a father, but he became a good grandfather many years later. I don’t know if Dad could ever completely forgive his father for his terrifying childhood, but once he had his own family, Dad chose to put all of that behind him. I believe what prompted this decision was my grandfather’s treatment of my siblings and me. When Dad was in prison, my grandfather often stopped by the house to check on us and he always asked Mom if we needed anything. He couldn’t offer much financially, but when it came to babysitting and driving us here and there, he was more than happy to help. I believe my father found it in his heart to make peace with his father and move on.

As a means of doing “the right thing,” my father always sent Grandpa some money each week. “Just enough to place his racetrack bets and have his few drinks every night,” my Dad would say. I also knew my father paid my grandfather’s rent, which was now for a two-bedroom apartment on Liberty Avenue, just around the corner from the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club. Family was so important to Dad, and even though he had many violent confrontations with his father, he didn’t want to prevent us from having a grandfather. Plus, with Grandpa close by, Dad could keep an eye on him.

When we reached Crossbay Boulevard, in Howard Beach, I begged my grandfather to stop at the local McDonald’s even though dinner was usually 5
P.M
. I was starving and needed something, even a small order of fries, to sustain me.

Coming out of McDonald’s I saw my younger brother, Frankie, horsing around with his friends; all of them were on bicycles. I stopped and said something to him like, “It’s late and you know you have to be home for dinner at five or Mommy will be pissed.” He nodded and took off down the avenue toward home. Grandpa and I passed the group after we took a right turn down 160th Avenue.

Mom was in the kitchen, preparing dinner and feeding my baby brother, Peter, then four years old. It was easier to feed him before dinner before the rest of us actually began, as he loved to entertain and often played with his food.

I arrived home ten minutes late, threw my school bag to the side of the steps, and ran upstairs to quickly change and head back to the kitchen to do my usual chores. I set the table first, then finished preparing the pasta and pork chops that Mom had started earlier in the day. I also relieved Mom and finished feeding Peter, who was sitting contently in his child safety seat, his face covered in red sauce and his chair’s tabletop stained with his red fingerprints.

The phone rang four times before I was able to wipe my hands clean on a nearby dish towel and pick up the receiver hanging on the wall in the hall just outside the kitchen. It was a close friend of my sister’s. Her voice was frantic and quick: “Vicki, this is Marie Lucisano—your brother’s had an accident. Don’t worry.” She went on to add, “He’s okay—I think he just broke his leg.” She also asked me not to tell my mother and instructed me to come to her house right away.

I dropped the plate I was holding into the sink and grabbed my sneakers. Just as I was frantically tying my shoes, my mother came flying down the stairs sensing something was wrong. “What’s going on?” she screamed.

It took me a moment before I could answer, then I said, “Frankie’s been hit by a car. Marie Lucisano called. It happened in front of her house.” Before I could even stand up, Mom was outside
the door running the four or so blocks to the Lucisano’s house on Eighty-seventh Street.

By the time she got there, the ambulance was already on the scene and things were far worse that just a broken leg. My brother had borrowed another kid’s mini-bike and was riding in a construction site near the side of the road. But that dreadful day, a drunk driver was speeding down the avenue and struck my brother. He dragged him some two hundred feet before angry neighbors stopped the car, pounced on his hood, and stopped him from crossing the avenue. All the while, he had no clue he was dragging my brother beneath his wheels.

“Don’t you even realize you have a kid under the wheels of your fuckin’ car?” one neighbor, Ted Friedman, recalled yelling out.

According to the neighbor, the driver, John Favara, then stopped the car. Another neighbor reached in and grabbed his keys, shutting the ignition off and pointed to my brother’s near-lifeless body under the front wheels. My brother’s blood seemed to leave a trail down the entire block, leading up to the now parked car. Favara jumped from the car and started yelling, “What the fuck was he doing in the street?” According to the neighbor, “the driver of the car was angry, not remorseful.” Only when Marie Lucisano, a family friend, shouted, “Oh my God, that’s Angel Gotti’s brother” did Favara calm down.

Ted Friedman later told me the guy was belligerent—a real asshole until he realized the kid trapped under his wheels was John Gotti’s son.

Favara then appeared to be “dazed and confused,” according to eyewitnesses.

When my mother arrived, the Howard Beach Fire Department was already on the scene and working on my brother. My mother ran to him, knelt and was cradling his head, screaming his name over and over, “Frankie, it’s Mommy—can you hear me? Frankie,
Mommy’s here.” Mom would later tell me that he seemed scared beyond belief. Of all the things she could remember, it was “the look of abject fear in his eyes.” His clothes—a sky-blue leather jacket with a brown long-sleeved T-shirt underneath, and an old pair of jeans—were covered with blood, tissue, and bone fragments. The firefighters cut away at his clothes and loaded him onto a gurney. The only person allowed to ride with him in the ambulance was my mother.

The ambulance arrived at the hospital and Frankie was rushed inside to the trauma unit. The hospital officials waited until my father arrived. They believed it was wise to tell him first that my brother had died. The doctors didn’t have the stomach to tell my mother—even though she’d suspected as much. Minutes before Dad arrived, according to one eyewitness, Mario Borrito—Frankie Boy’s best friend—my mother started screaming at Frankie, yelling and cursing because he was on the bike at all. Mom hated minibikes; she called them “death traps.” She warned John and Frankie over and over to never ride one. She said she always had a feeling, some sort of premonition, that one of her children would die tragically. As a result, she was always reluctant about certain things. But Frankie ignored her and it had cost him his life. Mario’s father, also at the hospital, later told me it was “heartbreaking” to watch.

My father nearly collapsed when he was first told that Frankie was hit by a car. He got the call in the middle of a meeting at the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park, Queens.

My father said the hardest thing he ever had to do was tell my mother that their son was dead. He’d told me that just seeing her sitting in the waiting room, just outside the trauma unit, shaken and looking like a ghost, made him afraid for “the first time in my whole life.” He knew how she’d react, like any mother would. He said he “felt no emotion that day” and that “it was as if he was on
automatic pilot,” especially when he had to identify his own son’s body in the morgue.

I had stayed at home throughout the ordeal, making sure the rest of the Gotti clan—my sister and youngest brother—had the dinner my mother had started. I was told to “hold down the fort.” I was the most responsible of the clan and often left in charge of the other kids. I did just that. Dad stayed at the hospital. Besides having to identify Frankie’s body, there were reports and procedures that needed to be done. Uncle Pete drove Mom home. When I first saw her face, the blank look and pale pallor, I knew she was in shock. She walked into the kitchen and started folding laundry from a nearby bin. She didn’t say a word.

I asked her where Frankie was and if he was okay. She didn’t answer—so I asked her again. Still no answer. Her silence terrified me and I started screaming, “Where’s my brother?” over and over. Finally, Uncle Pete blurted out, “He’s dead. Frankie’s dead.” That’s when it really hit Mom and she lost it. Uncle Pete had to hold her arms down and literally drag her up to the master bedroom—she was screaming and kicking the entire time.

I was shocked—so shocked I didn’t move from the hallway, grabbing onto the banister for support—ignoring my brother Peter’s screams for attention. I couldn’t comprehend what I’d just been told. I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard my uncle say. Dead? Frankie? My younger brother, gone? It was all too much for me to handle. I remember watching my mother pass Frankie’s room, and she broke down. She cried into Uncle Pete’s arms, holding on to him for dear life. Her sobs resonated throughout the house, cries for the son she’d just lost.

M
Y FATHER HAD
to force himself to face the fact that his boy was dead. He went through the motions of everyday life. There were
things that were expected of him. He had to plan his son’s burial. He bought a crypt inside St. John’s Cemetery in Queens—a three-some, should something ever happen to either him or my mother—as he didn’t want his boy to be alone. My mother, on the other hand, was literally out of it. She was deeply medicated, from a doctor who’d paid a house call hours after the accident. Still, she was not sedated enough to sleep.

We all heard the crash, and then blood-curdling screams. My mother had awakened later that night from a drug-induced haze, and realizing that her son was indeed gone, smashed the mirrored vanity in the master bathroom and then attempted to cut herself with the jagged edges from the broken mirror.

Once again my father had the doctor visit, this time increasing her medicine to a more powerful dose. She was still wild with grief, so much that she tried to take her life again. This time, she was smarter. She swallowed a fistful of pills. Fortunately, my father had made a point of checking on Mom every half hour. He went back and forth from his newfound grieving spot, a recliner in his private den that doubled as a TV room when he wasn’t home, to the master bedroom and back again. He would sit there deep in thought, pretending to watch a ball game or the news, while his mind was filled with grief. He struggled to come to grips with it. I remember him running from my parents’ bedroom, carrying my mother in his arms, her limp form looking more like a broken doll than a grown woman.

He rushed her to a local doctor’s private home, just around the corner. My mother needed her stomach pumped and different medications to stabilize her before he took her back home, this time making sure that I would monitor her four-times-a-day dosage. She refused to eat. She just slept; completely lost in the drug-induced slumber the doctor had prescribed.

I also had to take over all my mother’s day-to-day tasks, from
keeping the house maintained, to looking after my youngest brother, making meals, and cleaning up the house at night. Due to the sudden tragedy, a lot of relatives came and went that night. My sister Angel, being the most sociable out of all of us, did her best to keep these guests comfortable. My brother John was away at military school in upstate New York, so Dad sent two of his “associates” to retrieve him. Later on, John would tell me that he knew someone was seriously ill, or even worse, dead, when the school chaplain came to tell him that he was going home for the week. John said that as soon as he saw two of my father’s closest friends, Charlie and Bobby, arrive to pick him up he assumed it was my mother who had passed away and the mere thought drove him crazy with grief the entire two-hour-plus ride back to Queens. No one spoke in the car. Both men had been told not to tell John anything. My father wanted to tell John, himself.

I remember sitting at my bedroom window, that night, long after I’d put Peter to sleep, waiting for John to arrive. The moment the car pulled into the driveway Dad met my brother outside. They walked down the street and Dad told John that his little brother, his best friend, had been killed earlier that day. I watched in horror as my brother John collapsed with grief. He would have hit the pavement, except my father was there to catch him. They embraced and had a long cry. The sight was devastating for me.

Dad came inside first. John couldn’t bring himself to come in. He couldn’t bear to face Mom. He stayed outside, shivering in the cold night air, and had a moment to himself. I continued to watch him, and it broke my heart all over again.

As for my mother, she slept all that night and most of the following day. But then, she became restless again. The night before my brother’s wake, she somehow convinced my father’s younger, rebellious brother, Uncle Vinny, to help her escape through an open
window in the bedroom and take her to the funeral parlor a few miles from the house, because she believed her “baby was cold and needed a blanket.” She couldn’t bear the thought that he wasn’t at home with the rest of her brood, asleep in his bed.

We knew the owners of the funeral home very well, and out of pity, I’m sure, they allowed my uncle and mother entry late that night and gave her access to my brother. She covered Frankie’s lifeless body with a heavy wool blanket. The site of seeing her son embalmed and lying in a coffin destroyed her to the core.

The next day, the funeral was surreal. It was as if nothing, even my brother’s death, was real. Thousands of people came and each expressed their deepest sympathies, leaving behind mass cards and offers of help with the cooking, cleaning, and shopping. Meanwhile, my father remained stoic and stiff; a blank expression covered his face. He was standing watch over my little brother’s coffin as if he was a guardsman in the Queen’s court. He greeted those he knew with forced smiles of graciousness and those he didn’t know with polite half-smiles and thank yous. I’d never before witnessed my father so distraught or emotionless as I did then.

T
HE FACT THAT
a neighbor, John Favara, had hit my brother was horrific. Favara, whose backyard abutted ours, was known throughout the neighborhood as a disruptive drunk. He was a man who over the years had prompted many calls to the police from other neighbors due to his inappropriate behavior.