THE GOTTI WARS

A memoir from the federal prosecutor who took down the “Teflon Don” 30 years ago.

Gleeson recounts a youthful yearning to be an assistant U.S. attorney, a job denied him by an ambitious Rudy Giuliani in Manhattan. For his troubles, Gleeson, accepted in the jurisdiction just across the river in Brooklyn, was soon put on a case that took on the head of the Gambino crime family, John Gotti. “Even though I was a rookie, eight months earlier I’d been assigned to prosecute John Gotti on an entirely different set of charges,” Gleeson writes of one notorious hit, “so I’d already become part of the criminal world in which the murders outside Sparks were a seismic event.” That first case failed for reasons the author makes clear. Gotti’s second trial was on constantly shaky ground, built on insider informants who played both sides. “Just about everybody in Gotti’s crew had gone to jail at least once because of information Willie Boy had passed along,” writes Gleeson about one informant whose calculations didn’t play out to a happy ending. The prosecutors, working with the FBI, had to be careful not to tip off the mob lawyers to the identities of these informants or to let it be known that they were listening to their quarries’ conversations. Gleeson is a thorough writer, so much so that his chronicle drowns in detail, a boon for procedural adepts but less so for civilian true-crime buffs. Still, the author is admirably generous with credit where it’s due, especially the fact that without his successfully turning mobster Sammy Gravano into a federal witness, Gotti might well have walked a second time. Says Gravano, memorably, “I know I have to tell youse everything, and I will….I will not hold back, and I’m trusting you not to double-bang me.” Gleeson earns that trust, as this lumbering but nonetheless valuable narrative reveals.

A courtroom drama that, albeit without much drama, offers a realistic portrait of how big cases are pieced together.