John "The Dapper Don" Gotti

Gotti ran the Gambino family for six years and spent them being photographed. Every boss before him had treated anonymity as a working condition. He treated it as a limitation, and the decision that made him famous is the same decision that put him in a cell in Illinois until he died.

He came up in Queens, in the crew that ran out of the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park, and his early record is unremarkable for a man of that generation: hijacking at the airport, a federal conviction in 1969, two years served. What separated him was the man above him.

Dellacroce's man

Aniello Dellacroce was the Gambino underboss and the authority the street crews actually recognised. Gotti was his protege, and the arrangement gave a Queens capo a line to the top of the family that his rank did not justify.

In May 1973 a Staten Island bar owner named James McBratney was shot dead. McBratney had been involved in the kidnapping of Carlo Gambino's nephew. Gotti pleaded to attempted manslaughter, served two years, and was formally inducted into the family in 1977, shortly after his release. The sequence is worth noting: the conviction did not slow the career, it was the career.

Boss

Dellacroce died of cancer on 2 December 1985. Two weeks later Paul Castellano was shot outside a midtown steakhouse. Gotti had the family by the new year.

What followed had no precedent. He held court on Mulberry Street, dressed for the cameras that waited outside, and was acquitted three times between 1986 and 1990 — once when the complainant declined to testify, once in a federal racketeering case, once in a state assault case. The press named him for it.

The Ravenite

The Federal Bureau of Investigation had a microphone in an apartment above the Ravenite Social Club. Between 1988 and 1990 it recorded Gotti at length, in a room he believed was safe, discussing the business of the family and the men who ran it for him.

On 11 December 1990 he was arrested there with his underboss Salvatore Gravano and Frank Locascio. When the recordings were played to Gravano in custody, they included Gotti's assessment of Gravano. Gravano began cooperating in November 1991.

Gotti was convicted on 2 April 1992 on thirteen counts, including the murder of Castellano, and sentenced to life without parole. He died in federal custody in Springfield, Missouri, on 10 June 2002, of cancer.