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Everyone likes to tell war stories, including cops and definitely gangsters. Such tales provide the fuel for Get Gotti, Netflix’s new three-part docuseries that tries to breathe fresh life into a story that ended well before there was even such a thing as Netflix. Fast and slick, well-sourced and cogently told, it opens up most when the tea gets spilled by those on both sides of the law.
Loose lips, of course, eventually doomed Gotti, the Eighties New York crime boss who couldn’t stop talking into the bugs he somehow didn’t know were there. Until then, however, he beat one rap after another, triumphing in court over the Department of Justice and then the Organized Crime Task Force before finally succumbing to an FBI case built on his own braggadocious tendencies. He was the Dapper Don, and then the Teflon Don, fawned over by a press corps that all but enabled the murders he ordered. He was great copy, and he cut a dashing figure in his tailored silk suits. Time magazine commissioned Andy Warhol to design a cover portrait. The tabloids loved him. So did juries, especially when he was buying them off.
Get Gotti picks up the story around 1985, when Gotti ordered a hit on then-boss of the Gambino family, Paul Castellano, who was likely about to do the same to Gotti. “That’s like shooting the president,” gushes Andrea Giovino, a “Gotti associate” interviewed here in a pink pantsuit as she has her hair done. (Get Gotti is not without a sense of humor). He settles into his fiefdom at the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, an unassuming brick building that the OCTF promptly has bugged. This surveillance didn’t pick up anything, save for a mob movie briefly mistaken for the real thing, and out it went. But there would be more. Many more. Get Gotti features more onscreen bugging than any story this side of The Conversation.
Former Gotti associates Giovino, Anthony Ruggiano Jr., and Sal Polisi add a constant stream of color; the latter tells a lovely story about the time he castrated a man who was sleeping with a made man’s wife. We also hear from representatives of the FBI, the OCTF and the DOJ, and it quickly becomes clear that these groups were rarely on the same page. They often didn’t trust each other, and they each wanted credit for landing the big fish. Between these circumstances, and the media’s eagerness to make Gotti a celebrity (a status he was happy to flaunt), it’s little wonder the Don came to believe he was invincible, or at least made of Teflon. Eighties New York was quick to worship at the throne of excess, and Gotti, who loved the nightlife, was nothing if not excessive.
When Gotti eventually got got it was because his pursuers played nice together. Get Gotti grinds through this process with admirable clarity, detailing the Sisyphean process behind something you might think wouldn’t be that difficult: bringing a world-famous criminal to justice. One can imagine a completely different documentary about how America’s blinkered culture of celebrity gave life to Gotti’s reign; as it is, Get Gotti includes this phenomenon in its larger mix. The extensive reenactments have a suspenseful neo-noir feel, and the series puts the text from the surveillance bugs to imaginative use, at one point pasting the words onto Manhattan skyscrapers.
The devil is in the details here, which is fortunate because anyone who cares a great deal about the Gotti story already knows it pretty well, including how it ended. As the title suggests, Get Gotti is about the how, not the what; in a sense this is fine-grained procedural, with a dose of cultural context on the side. The series explains how a well-dressed gangster got away with thumbing his nose at the authorities, while too much of the world cheered him on.
