The Legacy Of The Dapper Don

In 1986, Time magazine commissioned Andy Warhol to paint a portrait of John Gotti for its cover. The assignment made perfect sense. Warhol had spent two decades transforming celebrity into art. Gotti had spent one year transforming a mob assassination into a media career. The portrait was never published. The celebrity it would have immortalized ran for another six years.

This book asks how that happened.

John Gotti was convicted on thirteen federal counts including five murders. He bribed a juror - $60,000 in three installments - to walk out of his first major trial a free man. He intimidated witnesses in every proceeding that came close to convicting him. He ran an organization that extorted businesses, corrupted labor unions, and used violence as a routine operational tool across New York City for years.

He also wore Brioni suits to court. He stood on sidewalks outside federal courthouses and talked to reporters with the ease of a man who had nothing to fear. He made crowds of supporters cheer his acquittals. He said, of the press that covered him, "No, this is my public. They love me."

He was right. They did.

The Legacy of the Dapper Don is the story of how a murderer became a celebrity - how the tabloid machinery of 1980s New York, the celebrity economy of the Reagan era, and one man's extraordinary instinct for public performance combined to produce something the organized crime world had never seen before and has not produced since: a mob boss who was also a genuine American star.

The suits were beautiful. The grin was real. The murders are in the court record.