What a really nice piece of writing. https://t.co/CMwR5rQWVH
— Matt Bai (@mattbai) March 15, 2018
I respect families that carry these traditions down through the generations https://t.co/1zSHFl9L2M
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 15, 2018
‘Quaint Folk Customs Among Neighborhood Banditti’. Feel like I should’ve noticed this sooner. For all its global-paper-of-record pretensions, the NYTimes can be a very parochial rag:
With apologies to Tolstoy, happy families may all be alike, but the Gotti family has long been unhappy in its own particular fashion. For nearly half a century, that has involved the serial ordeal of men in the Mafia clan being sent to federal prison.
On Wednesday, John J. Gotti, the grandson of the infamous Gambino family don who shares his name, was sentenced to five years in prison, following in the footsteps of two of his uncles, two great-uncles and both grandfathers. For three generations, members of the gangland dynasty have been imprisoned for crimes that have included shaking down construction sites, murdering a mob boss at a steakhouse and trying to extort the action-movie hero Steven Seagal.
The crimes that led this latest Gotti scion to be sent away were, according to the government, also entangled in the business that has occupied the family almost since the start of the Civil Rights era. Last June, Mr. Gotti, now 24, pleaded guilty to torching the car of an unwitting motorist who made the mistake of cutting off an aging Bonnano family figure on Cross Bay Boulevard in Howard Beach, Queens. Mr. Gotti also admitted that two weeks after the road-rage episode, he and two associates — presenting a note that said they had a bomb — robbed $6,000 from a bank in Maspeth, Queens.
His sentencing, in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, had the feeling of a familiar family dinner as several Gotti parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles converged on the eighth-floor courtroom, kissing each other’s cheeks and showing their support for the defendant. John A. Gotti, the son of the former boss (who was serving a life sentence for murder when he died in prison in 2002), embraced one of the court sketch artists with genuine affection, telling his younger relatives that the woman had not only covered his trials (plural), but had also covered “grandpa’s…
As long as the Gotti clan aren’t shaking down the NYTimes newsroom, shooting up hot new hipster-Brooklyn dining spots, trying to extort Lena Dunham, or torching the Uber carrying NYTimes employees from the newsroom to the latest chic outboro restaurant, it’s all fun mobster-movie escapades to the Timesmen assigning these stories.
And while Donald Trump was just another mobbed-up Queens arriviste, descending his golden escalator to brag about his vanity candidacy, the NYTimes simply could not take him seriously.
By the time Trump had broken out of his “amusing local gangster” role, either the people running the NYTimes were incapable of noticing the change… or cowed by the possibility that they’d been mistaken all along.
Of course, this puts them in the same position as the entire Republican party, so they’ve got that consolation. For what it’s worth.