This Family of Mine: What It Was Like Growing Up Gotti (40 page)

In the end I never did tell my father. But I did speak to my mother. She was shocked, to say the least, but observed “He’s always had a dark side to him. And when it came to you, I knew he’d never let you leave willingly.” Cutler also felt it was best not to bring this news to my father. We both knew it would only destroy him. All that mattered to us was his well-being. We didn’t know how much longer Dad had left.

I
spent many nights wondering if I’d made the right decision, especially when I noticed the changes in the children. They went from happy, healthy, obedient, and well-disciplined to quiet, depressed and at times, rebellious. Nothing I could do seemed to help the situation. I worked longer hours at the
Post
to try and keep up with the bills. Carmine still refused to pay any support; he wouldn’t even pay half of their tuition. When my attorney had called his attorney, he was told, “My client doesn’t feel it’s necessary to keep them in private school.” I was stunned. This from a man worth nearly $200 million! This from a man who had stolen almost $2 million from me! This from a man who had lied, cheated, and broken nearly all of his wedding vows. This from a man who was married to John Gotti’s daughter.

I blamed myself. In time, I too, became withdrawn and more depressed. The breakup of my marriage couldn’t have come at a worse time. Dad’s health was failing by the day, and I couldn’t face the fact that I was going to lose him. My family became very concerned and staged what they called “a necessary life intervention.” My brother Peter came over one night around 10
P.M
. when the kids were already asleep. He literally dragged me in front of a mirror in my bedroom and said, “I used to be so proud of you. You were always beautiful and so smart. Look at yourself.” He held my head with both hands and forced me to take a good hard look. “You would let a man do this to you?” Peter was right. It was bad enough I allowed Carmine to do all the terrible things to me while we were married, but to continue to let him ruin my life was ridiculous.

Then he pulled out the big guns.

“Daddy would be so disappointed if he saw you like this.” He was right again. I was wasting away to nothing. I needed to get ahold of myself. My family needed me and I couldn’t allow my physical and emotional deterioration to go on any longer. With a father dying in jail, a brother also incarcerated, an estranged husband behind bars, and various health problems, it was easy to slip into a dark place, but I had to snap out of it. I needed to channel all my energy into my father and his battle with cancer.

M
EANWHILE, MY BROTHER
John was serving his sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution, Ray Brook in Upstate New York. It was near Lake Placid and bitterly cold in winter. The visits there were taxing, especially on the kids. Thankfully, his five-year sentence was coming to an end and he would soon be home. He would once again take back the reins of the Gotti family, and I could be free of responsibility and worry. I was nearing my breaking point. And then more bad news: newspaper articles surfaced that John
was to be indicted again. This time, the Feds were going to charge him with being in a supervisory position of the Gambino crime family. Dad had been right. John foolishly believed the language in the plea agreement. He believed taking the official plea would bring him closure—how wrong he was.

Dad’s health was getting worse and worse by the day it seemed. I had filed a request with the BOP (Bureau of Prisons) seeking permission to have Dad treated by private physicians. This would alleviate the federal government of any monetary responsibility and give us peace of mind and hope. It was not an unusual request and had been granted to other inmates before, including organized crime members. I believed there was a chance our request would be granted, since even some prison doctors admitted to us that the cancer would not have spread as quickly if it had been treated properly in the early stages. I also believed the government and BOP thought we might sue. The answer came nearly a month after application. It was denied.

The family continued our regularly scheduled visits, but the prison wouldn’t allow any extra time, even though Dad was dying. On one visit, Mom looked tired and pale. She complained of a stomach upset that had started a few days earlier. Dad seemed concerned. When she got up to go to the bathroom he handed me a note. He could no longer speak and his only means of communicating was by writing down brief sentences on a legal pad. “Take Mom to the hospital when you get home. I don’t like the way she looks.”

I didn’t even wait to go home; we went to St. Francis Heart Hospital directly from the airport. Dad was right. One of her main arteries appeared to be eighty-five percent blocked, but the doctors needed to do an angiogram to be sure. Afterward, she would probably only need a stent, the doctors said. I was relieved; I couldn’t handle having another parent seriously ill.

The angiogram should have only taken a few minutes. After
twenty-five minutes, and no word from the doctor, I went into a panic. Finally he came out, “Victoria, during the procedure your mom’s artery ruptured. It’s a one in a million occurrence. We need to operate immediately.” The rest of the family was down in the waiting room. I sent the orderly down to get them. The doctor allowed me to see Mom for “only a minute.” Normally, she would have been whisked to the OR, but seeing as the doctor was a friend and seeing as I might never get a chance to say good-bye, he allowed me to go in.

I remember trying to stay calm. All I wanted to do was scream, cry, and panic, but I spoke to Mom clearly and calmly. I told her there was a small problem and the doctors would fix it. She looked so scared. I kissed her on the forehead and said, “I love you.” Then they wheeled her away.

The surgery took hours. Doctors had to stop the internal bleeding first before they could attempt to replace the damaged artery with one from her leg. The cardiac care nurses wheeled her out of the OR, and I remember she looked very, very gray. Honestly, I thought she was dead. She was hooked up to monitors and machines and she had tubes coming out of the side of her neck. I cried.

The next day, Mom was conscious and moved from the ICU to recovery. Three days after that, she was moved to a private room. When she was released after ten days, she came to live with me for a while. I couldn’t sleep without her there.

Dad, meanwhile, was furious that he couldn’t speak to us. He was allowed to call only twice that month. One call was a regular scheduled call and the other was considered a “special call” due to a family emergency. It was so hard to understand what he was saying. His words came out like a bunch of groans and grunts. But rather than draw attention to it—as I knew he’d be terribly embarrassed—I just rambled on about how well Mom was doing. I
assured him Mom would be fine. I didn’t need him worrying. John was also distraught. He felt helpless because he could not be with us or with Mom. It was the first real emergency without a man to hold down the fort, as Peter wasn’t even thirty years old, and I don’t know how I managed.

Financially, I was out of money, but I dared not tell anyone. It was my responsibility to provide for my children and I was too proud to ask for help. Carmine had promised to “strangle me financially” if I moved forward with the divorce and he made good on his promise.

After three months, Mom was well enough to go home. I was so used to having her stay with me and was deeply saddened to see her leave. So I asked her to move in permanently. She thanked me for the offer, but she was too independent and politely refused. Luckily, my younger brother Peter had a better plan. He and his wife and four kids decided it best to move in with Mom. They lived a few blocks from her anyway, so it wasn’t a difficult move.

A few weeks later I received a call from my divorce lawyer. The judge had awarded me the marital home despite Carmine’s claim to half of it. That was good news and I was relieved. At least it was one less thing to worry about, even though the divorce battle with Carmine and the government over the remaining assets continued. The bad news was finding out the son-of-a-bitch took out a million-dollar mortgage against the house without my permission. The monthly mortgage payment was a whopping thirteen thousand dollars a month! I was in more financial trouble. While Carmine fought for a fifty percent share of the house, he was ordered to pay all of the maintenance as well. But the moment the judge awarded me sole custody of the marital residence, Carmine stopped paying even that. When I arrived home from work one night, I found the electricity had been shut off. The kids and I sat in the dark for
nearly three days until I could raise nearly four thousand dollars to turn the power back on. As a result of the divorce and Carmine’s legal troubles, I was financially bankrupt.

I was too embarrassed to tell my father—instead, I borrowed the money from Lewis Kasman.

But that was nothing compared to the blow I received next.

June 10, 2002

I
can remember what I was doing when I learned my father was dead.

Where I was standing.

What I was wearing.

I was at my desk in my home office. I was trying to keep myself busy, working on extra stories for the
Post.
The television was on; someone at CNN was talking about yet another politician caught up in a scandal. There was a moment of silence, then the newscaster announced there was “breaking news.” For a second I couldn’t catch my breath—my heart started pounding. The anchor said, “This just in: Mob boss John Gotti has died of throat cancer. Gotti,
often dubbed ‘the Dapper Don’ for his flamboyant fashion sense, was serving a life sentence for murder and racketeering in Marion, Illinois. He was sixty-one years old.” Next came the news crawl at the bottom of the screen: “
MOB BOSS JOHN GOTTI DEAD AT
61.”

It felt like time stopped and everything was still around me. Then the calm passed and I started screaming, beating the wall with my fists. At that moment my children came in from school and learned the news.

My oldest son, Carmine, walked with his head down to his room, locked the door, turned the lights out, slipped into bed, and got lost in one of his deep black holes. The man who had served as both father and grandfather his whole life was gone, and the impact was enormous.

Frank, the youngest, broke down in the hall, looking to me for comfort. But I couldn’t go to him—I was still caught up in my own shock and grief. I imagine the scene must have terrified him.

John, my middle son, reacted like the strong, in-control little man his grandfather always bragged he was. He rushed to my side and hugged me with all his might and whispered, “Everything’s going to be okay, Mommy. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you.”

Less than an hour later, we were in the car heading to my mother’s house.

We were the last family members to arrive. My mother was lying on the couch, crying, with a bunch of old photos of Dad scattered on the coffee table in front of her. My brother Peter had called earlier asking for a nice picture of my father for the funeral mass cards. My sister, Angel, was in the den, sitting in Dad’s favorite chair, an old, comfortable recliner covered in rich burgundy velvet with black piping on the seams. She was staring into space, her eyes watery and red.

Through a window in the den, I could see groups of reporters,
photographers, and curious neighbors gathering outside. Minute by minute, the crowd seemed to grow, and within an hour there were so many people outside the house the local police arrived. The group was mostly friends and neighborhood men and women who had come to show their support. Some were crying and one man held a sign saying, “We’ll always love you, John.”

I drew the curtains for privacy, but also I didn’t want my mother to see the commotion that was going on outside. It was a taste of things to come.

I
T TOOK TWO
days to get my father’s body released. The amount of red tape was astounding. The warden had to “sign off” on all the paperwork before we could remove Dad from the prison. The media surrounding the Springfield medical facility was similar to the waiting press circus in New York. My brother Peter had a difficult time. He had been witness to my father’s rapid transformation from robust and buff to frail and emaciated. Peter had sat constant vigil, at least on designated visiting days, at Dad’s bedside for the last six months of his life. Maybe he was hoping for a miracle like the rest of us. In our eyes John Gotti was the toughest man on Earth. Nothing could rattle him; nothing except cancer.

The emotional toll caused by watching our father die was noticeable. With John in jail, Peter had to step up as the man in the family, and much of the responsibility fell on his shoulders. It was clear that trying to care for Dad and navigate all the prison policies and bureaucracy was wearing on him.

My last visit with Dad was a month before his death. It was so emotional I was sick in bed for two days afterward. Both he and I knew that the end was near and it would probably be our last visit. Since he could no longer speak, he wrote everything on a small
blackboard he kept on the bed. We were talking about Andrea Bocelli and his new CD. The last thing Dad wrote was how much he loved the song “Time to Say Good-bye.” He wrote the word “ironic.”

Amid my grief, I was mad, angrier than I’d ever been, ever since I’d found out that the prison had performed an autopsy despite strict orders from my father and protests from me. Since I was Dad’s “designated next of kin,” anything pertaining to his medical care had to be approved by me. The moment my kid brother found out about the autopsy, he called me from the prison. We had already made arrangements for a local funeral home to pick up my father’s body. These plans were made even before Dad died, just in case the warden tried to pull something. Dad and I had signed affidavits, notarized and reviewed by lawyers, stating that there would be no autopsy. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know what my father had died from; he had been treated for throat cancer for the past four years.