Beautiful Monsters: Understanding the Attraction
Around the turn of the century, I worked in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, ancestral homeland of the Gambino Crime Family. I was teacher there for thirteen years from 1991 to 2004, and while it was a vibrant, multicultural place, the neighborhood vibe was decidedly Italian-American. Just up the block, at the bakery by the N-Train, you could get an espresso and a cannoli that would make you think you died and went to Neopolitan heaven. A few blocks further, on 65th St. and 18th Ave, Carmela “Mama” Sbarro still worked the counter of her family’s first restaurant — opened in 1956, long before it became a chain. She made most incredible prosciutto balls, and her chicken parm was worth the ten-block sprint, even though my lunch period was just 42 minutes long. I can still remember Mama, may God rest her soul, standing behind the glass counter, underneath a framed photograph of herself with Pope John Paul II. It was the only decoration — aside from dangling salamis — on the walls of this classic old-school Italian deli and pizza shop.
The first year I was in the neighborhood, the talk on the streets was often about the arrest and impending trial of neighborhood hero and all-around badass, John Gotti. Gotti — a murderous thug who ruled the Gambino mob family with legendary brutality and swagger — had been pulled for the third time by the FBI in 1990. He had previously slipped the net on two arrests in the 80s, and seemed immune from whatever the feds threw at him. His untouchable nature earned him the tabloid nickname “The Teflon Don,” because nothing would stick to him. It was part of his legend: John Gotti walking out of the court house in a $3000 suit, chest puffed, chin up, a mischievous glint of “fuck you” in his eye. He was some folks’ ideal of manhood. A tough alpha-dog who all those grubbing pencil pushers couldn’t lay a glove on. There was no way around it, a lot of people in Bensonhurst loved the guy. I’ll admit I was taken in a bit, too. He was one part Billy the Kid and one part Don Corleone.
But in this third case, the Feds had him dead to rights. There were tapes from wiretaps at the Ravenite Social Club, where he ordered his hits. His slick, wartime consigliere, Bruce Cutler — the attorney who had argued his cases in the past — was sidelined on fraud charges. And, of course, Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano, captain of Gotti’s murder squad, had flipped on the boss in a tell-all turnabout that earned him a stint in Witness Protection. Which, being the scumbag that he was, he subsequently blew.
Though he almost escaped prison yet again by tampering with the jury, it was pretty clear even before the trial began that ‘The Teflon Don’ was gonna go down this time around. The evidence was overwhelming. In the end he was convicted on five murders, conspiracy to commit murder, racketeering, obstruction of justice, tax evasion, illegal gambling, extortion, and loansharking. And honest to God, everyone in Bensonhurst knew he did it. Everyone knew that did all that shit and a thousand crimes more. There was no mistaking who John Gotti was, particularly on his home turf where people actually knew some of his work up close and personal. But the act where he looked directly into the camera and just fucking lied — with a straight face and an aggrieved sigh — saying, “I don’t know what these Feds are doing. I’m just an honest businessman,” made people in the neighborhood fall ever more deeply under his spell.
What balls! You had to admire the balls.
John Gotti was an antihero for the ages. And when he finally went down, when he finally fell in the Spring of 1992, many folks in the neighborhood were more than a little crestfallen. We actually kinda felt like he WAS the victim here. The way many of us squared the reality of his barbarism with the end of his run was to observe to one another, “Hey, if the Feds look at ANYONE long enough, they’re gonna find something, right? Lemme wiretap those fucking cops, and we’ll see who ends up in jail.”
It was a rationalization, of course. But it was ours. It made sense to us, within the fictive world where none of this really mattered anyway.
It wasn’t the only soothing lie we told ourselves, either. Another was to note that Gotti’s conviction wasn’t gonna make a difference anyway. It might even make life worse: “The only thing that’s gonna happen if you get rid of Gotti and the Gambinos, is that the fucking Russians are gonna move in.”
That rationalization was offered without much reflection. It was not generally accepted that, perhaps, the community would be better off without ANY corruption or organized crime. Or maybe it was, but not when we were all being loud with one another. Rather, we would argue that since it was part of the world anyway, our local brand of organized crime was probably best. If in an after-work conversation someone more rational were to make that clear, if there was an attempt to suggest law and order were better, we’d focus on how the mob had rules, and then move into a tribalist default: “Look, the Italians might be bad, but the Russians (or the Dominicans, or the Mexicans, or the Irish) are just crazy. At least La Cosa Nostra has tradition and omerta. They have honor. Gotti might be a murderer, but he only whacks other mobsters.”
Alas, that wasn’t true, either. And everyone knew it.
I remember sometime around 2001, word went around school that a former student had been killed. He was Italian. There were rumors. I feel awful that I can’t even remember his name, but he must have been only nineteen or so. I remember another one of my former students — whose name was Anthony — came back to visit that year. I’d always kinda figured he had some street-level connect with the neighborhood business, and I was right. After he graduated, Anthony made his money having insurance conversations with local shopkeepers. Hey, it’s a reality. I didn’t judge him. He was a good kid. He had a job. Anyway, Anthony came in, dressed slick, and after the teachers’ lounge cleared out, I asked him about the former student who got hit. Anthony confirmed for me that it was over a gambling debt. He’d gone in deep on the races. Something like $20,000. He’d been bailed out. But then he went in again for the same sized amount, and had been bailed out a second time by family. Then he did it again and something had to be done. A message needed to be sent to anyone else who might be this careless. And so he got killed. A dumb kid with a gambling problem. A dumb kid with an addiction. Not a soldier. Not a “made man” in someone else’s crew, or any such shit like that. Just a kid who screwed up. Now, by that time, of course, Gotti was in jail, but it was the same kinda crap his guys ordered all the time. It was their world. And it really was undeniably awful. The murder was never investigated. In the end, it was ruled a suicide. Who knows? Maybe the cops were on the take. That happens, too.
The last salty detail Anthony shared about that story is worth noting, though it is probably myth. It’s the kind of detail that makes this murder and mayhem seem somehow better than it is. It makes it seem like a movie. It has some kind of horrible panache. He said that at the funeral, two guys from the organization pulled the kid’s mother aside. They said they couldn’t say much, but they wanted her to know that it wasn’t a suicide that took her son. They said it was “something else.”
I asked Anthony why they would do that. It seemed barbaric. He said it was honor. They didn’t want her to think her son was going to hell for committing an unforgiven cardinal sin. It was better to think he was put down.
FFS, I thought. If that’s the “honor,” then you can keep it.
— — -
All this is on my mind today, because I can’t help but see similarities in how some folks talked about Gotti and the Italian mob back in Bensonhurst, and how most Republican today view Donald Trump. Trump — like Gotti — is an antihero for the ages. Some people just love that brash, fuck-you-in-the-eye style. Some people — people who work hard, aren’t perfect, aren’t rich, aren’t particularly smart or strong or powerful — look at all those tight asses in Washington, the people who get rich off their connections, who spend their lives pretending their shit doesn’t stink, and who lecture the rest of us on how to live . . . and they fucking hate them. They fucking hate them like you can hate the vice squad as a general concept.
They hate those holier-than-thou “elites.”
Then, rising from the same foul-mouthed, unschooled, rude and ugly streets that they know, comes someone who just blows it all back in their faces — and it’s beautiful in a way. It really is. It’s mythological. It’s Loki in Valhalla turning over the tables. It’s Mayhem personified. It somehow glorious.
But let’s be clear, it is also nihilistic to the core.
Still, what do we expect? We’ve turned politics into entertainment. We’ve turned it into Friday Night Fights, and that has been going on for decades. Barack Obama was the Golden Boy! He was Liberal Captain America — so good, so virtuous, so clean. But in the land of storytelling, heroes get dull, and a really good anti-hero is box-office (or ballot box) gold.
Enter: The Donald. Dick-out, pussy-grabbing, gold-toilet-shitting, Melania-sporting, McDonald’s-eating, fuck-you-in-the-eye Donald.
Just like with Gotti, Trump’s supporters KNOW who he is. They know he’s a boor. They know he’s a crook. They KNOW he is up to his eyeballs in dirty tricks. But to them, he’s just one more example of a distanced and rigged game. Obama to them wasn’t Captain America, he was a FRAUD. He was a PHONEY. He was not even American.
And so they say, as they did with Gotti, “Sure, maybe President Trump did fuck Joe Biden in the ass with this Ukraine deal. But what about Fast and Furious??? What about Benghazi? And you know what, if you dig long enough, you can find dirt on anyone. Look at Biden himself!”
With Obama, they’re wrong. But with Uncle Joe, they’re really not. Maybe it’s not him, but his kid Hunter is a nightmare of self-dealing elite corruption. He’s a drug-addict who slept with his dead brother’s wife, and knocked up another woman at the same time. Barf. Even if Joe didn’t do anything wrong from his office in DC, he damn-well should have known enough to whack the kid’s ear and tell him to go dry out in some remote Delaware rehab. Not doing so IS a problem. And the fact that no one in the Democratic Party will say that out loud only further drives home the belief for Trump’s base that they’re right: Politicians are scumbags, and at least Trump is one of ours.
Just like with Gotti, Trump’s supporters convince themselves that not only are all politicians self-serving assholes, but that if the Democrats manage to take out the President, the next bastards will only be worse. At least Donald has honor, they’ll say. Look at what he’s doing with the Courts! Look what he’s doing with the wall! Look what he’s doing with MS-13!
Sure, a lot of that is fueled by bigotry and religious zealotry, but plenty of folks in our national neighborhood are zealots and bigots. And what we see as sensible reforms, they see as more liberal bullshit that won’t help them at all. So OF COURSE you stick with the devil you know. The devil you love.
But the saddest reality in all this is the fact that people support Trump — as they supported Gotti — because nothing much ever changes. The system — the whole damn neighborhood — is rigged to someone else’s benefit. You’ve gotta pay the extortion no matter which asshole is in charge, and your life is STILL going to be hard. The system is still going to fuck you. You’re still going to drive on potholed roads, you’re still going to get gutted for healthcare, your kids’ schools are still going to be some version of suck. Meanwhile, everyone on television is still going to be a millionaire. Or a billionaire. And no one you know is ever going to catch a real break so . . . yeah . . . why the fuck not support the guy who shoots people on Fifth Avenue and gets away with it? At least then we can have a good laugh at the folks who think this all still somehow matters. If the choice is *my* Mafia or *your* Mafia, which one do you think I’m gonna choose?
So, no. The Republican Party won’t give up Donald Trump. Ever. They won’t give him up the same way many of the folks I knew back in Bensonhurst would never give up John Gotti. Maybe history predisposed them to tribalism, but the never-improving reality of their world — combined with great casting and a powerful anti-hero — have made them fundamentally nihilistic about the whole shebang. Fuck it. Burn it down and bring the popcorn.
And then there’s also the reminder — like there was for the community when that stupid kid and his gambling problem took a bullet — that if you step too far out of line, the brutality of the beast up top can snap around on you quicker than lightning. Or a Tyrant’s Tweet. But then again, the rules are simple: Pay your debts, and don’t piss off the boss. Capisce?
The whole thing is heartbreaking. But it’s not new. It’s the natural result of a fractured polity skimping on the bread while amping up the bloodlust at the political circus. Hungry, angry, frightened people can be distracted by violence against someone else. And when it’s conducted by an artist, by a slick, horrible, beautiful monster . . . oh, my. What a show.
— — -
It’s not a happy story, I know. But if you need some solace before laying down to bed tonight, recall at least that the Feds finally got their man. John Gotti was sentenced to life in prison in 1992, like he so richly deserved. He died — rage-filled and alone — ten years later after a long and painful battle with laryngeal cancer. Does it make me a bad person that the idea of him choking out his last breaths in anguish gives me a wry smile? Does it give you one to imagine such a thing happening to our current Teflon Don?
Few of us are immune from such rage. Perhaps there’s something to reflect upon in that late and terrible self-realization.
Onward.
