Cosa Nostra News

Gambino boss John Gotti, not knowing he’s already living his last year of freedom ever, discusses potential candidates for membership in the Gambino crime family, and laments how difficult it was to find worthy contenders.  John Gotti, 1987. He queries Salvatore (Sammy the Bull) Gravano about whether he would feel more comfortable with a different title: “So, I’m asking you how you feel. You wanna stay as consigliere? Or you want me to make you official “underboss”? “Acting boss”? How do you feel? What makes you feel better?” The future is so uncertain. You never know what fresh hell is waiting just around the corner. (At least these guys didn’t have to bother about wearing a goddamn facemask.) We include surveillance video of John Gotti farther down in this story...also: I keep ads to the barest minimum; please disable any ad blocking solutions... JANUARY 4, 1990 FILE NUMBER: 183A-3507 PLACE: Apartment above the Ravenite Social Club, located at 247 Mulberry Street...

UPDATED The FBI surreptitiously recorded about 600 hours of discussions in the apartment above the Ravenite social club, six hours of which were entered into evidence during the 1992 murder and racketeering trial of John Gotti and his consiglieri Frank Locascio. John Gotti and Sammy (The Bull) Gravano circa 1990. We started this way back in February of this year, when we published The Ravenite Transcripts: John Gotti's Secret Meetings In Mrs. Cirelli's Apartment . See previous installment here ...all previous installments here ... As for "dry snitching" -- the notion that goes something like, John Gotti had to know there were wiretaps around so he deliberately talked to bury everyone, including himself presumably - may sound compelling to some; not us, to us it's ridiculous. We submit: it's a reverse-engineered fictional construct that ignores reality because the fact is: For organized crime to function, there must be organization. That means the...

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“ We got nothing but troubles… You know what I want you to do, Frank? We gotta both buy chemotherapy with the money I got .” The secret meeting place above the Ravenite. We’re approaching the highly incriminating stuff... John Gotti digs graves for himself, Frank Locascio, and for whatever was left of Salvatore (Sammy the Bull) Gravano's career in the underworld--the underboss would escape the indictment by flipping. Are wiseguys who would fault Gotti for these legal tribulations on the money? An argument could be made that a mitigating biological factor exists. As we continue to stretch the boundaries of science -- we further enrich our understanding of humanity's intrinsic need for stories. For those interested in this: Stories “are our earliest sciences, a kind of people-physics . Their logic is how we naturally think. They configure our biology, and how we feel, in ways long essential for our survival. Like our language instinct, a story drive—an inborn hunger for ...