Wise Guys

IN HIS SIXTH TRUE-CRIME BOOK, ANASTASIA TURNS HIS SHARP eye on John Gotti Sr., “the Dapper Don,” his inept son, John “Junior,” and the hubris and greed that fueled the family’s bloody rise and devastating fall. The book reads like a fast-paced crime thriller, full of details extracted from court documents, prosecutors and former Gotti family insider John Alite, who testified in the 2009 trial of Junior. “Alite was a murderer, drug dealer and thug,” Anastasia explains in the opening lines of the book. “Over the course of a 25-year career as a gangster he brutalized people: stabbing them, shooting them, beating them with pipes, blackjacks and baseball bats.” Alite also slipped into the Gotti family, where he served as Junior’s “babysitter” and learned Gotti Sr.’s rules (such as, whenever possible, underlings must take the weight of a crime pending against Gotti or his family). “You can’t make this stuff up any better than it is,” says Anastasia.

Anastasia had just retired from The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he covered the mafia for 30 years, when Alite called, wanting to tell his story. Armed with more than 30 interviews with Alite, as well as FBI files and other documentation, Anastasia tackled the Gotti story. “I’ve always wanted to write a New York-based mob book,” he tells DAM. “It’s a bigger stage and a broader story.” Anastasia built a career tracking the Philadelphia mafia and a reputation for telling stories from street level, informed by insights and access provided by investigators, prosecutors and the mobsters themselves. “Covering the mob became a beat,” says Anasta- sia. “The principals had better nicknames than in almost any other arena other than sports.” His ability to draw first-hand accounts of murder and corruption from wise guys-turned-witnesses also fueled his best-sellers, including Blood and Honor: Inside the Scarfo Mob—the Mafia’s Most Violent Family in 1991, dubbed the “best gangster book ever written” by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jimmy Breslin, and The Last Gangster in 2004.

Anastasia says that although the American mafia will always exist, it’s no longer the monolithic institution it was, in part because the “best and the brightest in the Italian-American community are now doctors, law- yers, educators, and the mob is scraping the bottom of the gene pool.” But there’s still plenty of organized crime to cover. This spring he’s teaching crime reporting at Rowan University, writing for magazines and websites, including Politico.com and bigtrial.net and pitching the Philadelphia mob story to Hollywood.

Gotti’s Rules: The Story of John Alite, Junior Gotti, and the Demise of the American Mafia DEY STREET BOOKS 336 PP. $28