John Gotti Quotes

I never lie because I don't fear anyone. You only lie when you're afraid.

It’s better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a lamb. —John Gotti CHAPTER

I never lie to any man because I don’t fear anyone. The only time you lie is when you are afraid. —John Gotti CHAPTER

Vinny was flying on Learjets all over the country to gamble. The fact is, Vinny Gorgeous was the mirror image of John Gotti. The two mob bosses were degenerate gamblers. Vinny even got himself barred from Atlantic City.

The concrete for Trump Tower came from S&A Concrete, then owned by the heads of two New York crime families: “Fat” Tony Salerno, of the Genovese family, and Paul “Big Paul” Castellano, of the Gambinos (Castellano was assassinated in 1985 outside Sparks Steak House on Manhattan’s East Side in a Mafia hit organized by the mobster John Gotti).

According to his daughter Karin, Kunstler always justified his cases in political terms. Kunstler extended the political nature of representation far beyond blacks. It eventually included American Indians, Muslims, and even mobsters such as John Gotti. Michael Ratner believes that Kunstler was more “flexible” than most New Left lawyers in finding political significance in certain facts and in certain clients, a matter that caused some disagreement with his wife Margie. Nowhere was that flexibility more apparent than in Kunstler’s explanation of why his representation of mob figures had political significance:

Wiseguys, like all career criminals, are careful on the telephone to the point where they sound as if they're talking about a crime even when they're not. "Did you see that guy?" Angelo Ruggiero would ask Gotti. "What guy?" "The guy from over there. The one we saw last week." "The tall guy?" "No, the other guy. The one with the fucking...the guy who had the union beef last year." "The guy from 86th Street?" "No, not that guy, the other one, who we saw with what's-his-name from Canarsie." Every once in a while wiseguys ended up whacking the wrong guy. After all those hours listening to them I found myself wondering why that didn't happen more often.

We Italians will kill you,” a John Gotti associate once warned a potential snitch over a government wire. “But the Russians are crazy—they’ll kill your whole family.