I’m presented with an article entitled “ John Gotti, Dapper Don Mafia boss”. It is an obituary published in 2002 by The International Herald Tribune .and it is mostly destinated to Americans living in Europe . It deals with one of the most prominent mobsters of the Mafia in the United States of the middle of the twentieth century. My commentary will be centered on 3 parts: Gotti’s life, a notorious Mobster and the downfall.

We are first going mention some of the major facts in Gotti’s life. He was born in 1940 and he died in 2002 at the age of 61, at a prison hospital in Springfield. He was once known as the Teflon Don, a nickname that was in reference to the material on which nothing can stick, just like Gotti who always found a way to make sentences just slip past him. In 1992 Gotti was sentenced to life for racketeering and six killings, the major one was the Castellano murder, whom he succeeded as boss of New York Gambino crime family in 1985. He passed himself of as a plumbing supply salesman and yet he was dressed in 2000$ suits, which a salesman would never have afforded.

In the second part we are going to discuss why Gotti was a notorious mobster. After the Castellano murder, he became the nation’s most high profile mobster, sneering at laws who kept trying to put him behind bars without any success. He was the leader of the Gambinos who happened to be the most important Mafia family with about 300 members and 2000 associates and fingers in every pie. He was so powerful that he even did not discourage the comparison of him being the most important gangster, like Al Capone. Besides, he even appeared on the cover of Time magazine, which made him even more famous, but his high profile attracted so much attention from prosecutors that it led to the fatal loss of money and power for the crime family and to the big downfall.

I am now going to talk about the mentioned downfall. After that Gotti appeared on the cover of Time magazine, the federal