KEY POINTS:
A familiar tableau is about to play out in New York City. John Gotti jnr, scion of the infamous Gambino Mafia family, will walk into a Manhattan courtroom. The prosecution will claim he is at the nexus of a web of brutal murder and crime.
Gotti, a man known for his charm and wit, will protest his innocence. The tabloid newspapers will carry every breathless detail of the murders, beatings and robberies that form the prosecution's case. A spotlight will be shone on the Mafia's shadowy world.
Cops, criminals and reporters will mix and mingle. For a while, the Mob Trial will be the best show in town.
But while the Gotti trial, which could start by April, is guaranteed to become water-cooler chatter across America, it masks a far more complex and compelling story. For the fact is the Mafia in America are in deep decline.
The once-feared mob has been overshadowed by a new wave of criminal gangs from Russia, China, Albania and Jamaica. Its numbers have been depleted by endless FBI cases, its ranks penetrated by informers and its formidable code of silence shattered.
The organisation that could once decide the fate of mayors, police chiefs and senators is almost powerless. Worse still, it has become a cultural cliche. Wise guys and "made-men" are rarely to be found on the New York streets any more; they are found in The Sopranos repeats and on reality TV.
Among the many deaths that will be wheeled out in this summer's trial will be the long, strange demise of the American Mafia themselves.
The Feds came for John Gotti jnr at 6am on August 5 last year at his modest home in Long Island. He was in court hours later as a huge case file against him was unsealed. The judge did not grant bail and Gotti headed to jail. He's been there ever since.
That was no surprise. Prosecutors say Gotti remains a senior figure in Gambino mob operations that span from drugs and extortion to illegal gambling and loan-sharking. They say he tried to extend those operations from New York to Florida and that, in his role as a mob boss, he organised the killing of three men.
Gotti was certainly born to the family business, or, rather, to the business of being Family. His father was John Gotti snr, the infamous "Dapper Don", who murdered his way to the head of the Gambino family. Gotti snr, who died in jail, became Godfather of the Gambinos with the infamous murder of the then boss, Paul Castellano, gunned down in 1985 outside Manhattan's Sparks Restaurant.
The question is: did the son really follow the father? Or is Gotti jnr - like the American Mafia - a pale shadow of what has gone before?
One man who suspects the latter is Selwyn Raab, author of the seminal Mafia history, Five Families. Raab has covered numerous Gotti trials involving both the father and son, and he believes the difference between the two men could not be more stark.
"His father was different," Raab says. "Gotti Senior had gimlet eyes. There was something in that look that was scary. Not so with Junior. He smiled ... and it did not frighten you."
Raab - and many other Mafia experts - see little of the elder Gotti in Gotti jnr. But he was undoubtedly a Gambino figure in the 1980s and 1990s, running drugs and trading on his father's name. "Gotti in his 20s was a real terror. He was always palling around these tough guys and he considered himself untouchable," says Raab.
Gotti jnr was arrested in 1999 and charged with the usual mish-mash of gambling, extortion and fraud. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 6 years in jail. When he got out, he announced he had left the Mafia life behind. Three further attempts to convict him of more Mafia crimes - the last one in 2006 - failed to stick.
So why go after Gotti at all? The reason may lie simply in his name.
The Mafia were once the most dangerous criminal organisation in America, and the Gambinos its most feared clan. Mafia activities once reached up into the highest parts of the state.
The Mafia's rise was a classic rags-to-riches American story.
The culture was born among the Italian immigrant gangs in the slums of New York in the early 20th century, and grew more organised during Prohibition. As the profits poured in on the back of illegal booze, the Mafia discovered a simple formula: their street violence, combined with strict codes imported from
Sicily, could flourish on the edges of the business world.
It also moved into legitimate businesses, such as waste management or the docks, or transport firms, often by infiltrating unions.
In the 1960s, according to one government study, Mafia families made more than US$7 billion ($1.3 trillion) in annual profit - more than the combined earnings of the country's 10 largest industrial corporations.
"The Mafia was crime organised as a business. The Mafia blurred the law between normal and acceptable and the underworld. They could walk the line," says district attorney Robin Sax, an expert on organised crime.
But it was an impossible balancing act, and eventually the Mafia were tripped up by Frank Costello's hands.
Costello, a Mafia figure of national repute, had agreed to appear before a Senate hearing on organised crime in March 1951. The New York hearings were carried live on the networks, coast to coast, and Costello was top billing. But he insisted on one condition: his face not be shown.
As a result, over the monotone sound of his gravelly voice describing the world of organised crime, an increasingly horrified American public watched Costello's hands, drumming on the desk, his thick fingers clasping and unclasping.
It was a turning point. From now on the Mafia were public enemy No 1. They were seen as a national threat, and treated accordingly. It was a long battle. Mafia cases were hard to prosecute. They took years of investigation.
The families were almost impossible to infiltrate. But the breakthrough came in 1970, with the passing of the Rico (Racketeer-influenced Organised Crime) legislation. Now, anyone "organising" or "profiting" from Mafia crimes could be prosecuted, not just the soldiers.
By the early 1980s the Mafia were effectively under police siege. That led to the second breakthrough, as the once-formidable laws of omerta - code of silence - cracked. As prosecutions mounted and bosses went to jail, more and more came forward to cut deals.
"They broke the omerta rule. The people that are the main witnesses are the American Mafia themselves. They lined up to rat each other out," says Thomas Nolan, a former police officer turned teacher of criminology at Boston University.
But the final blow to the Mafia was simply demographic. As Italian-Americans assimilated into mainstream America, the second and third generations moved to the suburbs. That cut away the supply of new recruits and slashed the Mafia's ability to extort within their own community.
Italian-Americans now had ambitions to become lawyers, accountants or bankers, not mobsters.
All of these events are summed up in the trial of John Gotti jnr. The star witness against him is expected to be John Alite, a former childhood friend and Gambino mobster, who is ready to implicate Gotti in three murders.
And finally, there is Gotti's own life story. He did not live in Little Italy, he lived on Long Island and raised his kids in leafy suburbia. He grew up wealthy. Perhaps, in Gotti's protestations of long-standing retirement, we might just be seeing a genuine cri de coeur from a man born to the mob, but who later discovered he no longer wanted anything to do with it.
Indeed, the Gottis' and the Mafia's relationship with the rest of America has mutated beyond the criminally dangerous into something surreal.
For what price is omerta when you have your own reality TV show? Gotti jnr's sister, Victoria Gotti, has been the star of the TV series Growing Up Gotti, which tried to show the tribulations of life bearing the infamous Gotti name. It was trashy, terrible, train-crash TV.
Certainly the Mafia now seem far more important as a cultural archetype than as a genuine threat to society.
Films such as The Godfather trilogy and GoodFellas are works of genuine American art. Television shows such as The Sopranos have made Americans as familiar with the language and customs of the Mafia as any made man.
The dons have come to occupy a special place in American culture - that of the venerated outlaw, a place once occupied by the wild west gunfighter.
For the cultural imagery of the Mafia was so powerful it fed upon itself. No consumer of Mafia culture was more voracious than the Mafia themselves.
They watched the Godfather movies and they watched The Sopranos. Many FBI agents and cops, listening on wiretaps, have remarked that their quarries seemed to be picking up tips on how to act and behave from Mafia TV shows and movies.
The bitter truth, long known to Gotti, is that the realities of modern Mafia life are nothing like the movies.
Take the recent case of a recently arrested New England Mafia boss, Carmen DiNunzio. An FBI sting had caught him trying to illegally sell landfill for a large Boston construction site. Known as "the Cheeseman" because his main source of income was a cheese shop, the morbidly obese DiNunzio cut a pathetic figure widely lampooned across America.
This was the Mafia as a huge joke.
"He was selling dirt," said Nolan. "He was a laughing stock. This was as far from the image of The Godfather as it is possible to get."
"There is a huge disconnect between myth and reality, especially about the glamour of the life," says district attorney Robin Sax. Gotti just had to look at his own family to see that. His father had died in jail.
Cousins, friends and associates are dead or in jail by the dozen. But is the coming Gotti trial really the last of an era? Is the long story of the American Mafia truly coming to a close?
"There is always going to be some form of crime, and the Mafia has got the ability to regenerate itself," says Mark Feldman, a former top anti-Mafia prosecutor who has put many Gambino mobsters in jail.
Since 9/11, the priorities of the FBI and the American public have changed. The Mafia have dropped off the law enforcement radar, replaced by a radical Islamic threat that few saw coming. Expert FBI agents have either retired or been redirected elsewhere. Their long years of expertise in fighting the mob have been lost.
There are hints that the trial still means more than just a grandstanding piece of criminal theatre. For at the end of last year, wardens in a Florida prison intercepted a strange parcel.
It was a piece of rag on which was written a message describing a "TOS", jailhouse slang for "terminate on sight". The note, written in broken English, urged Latino gang members to rub out a suspected witness against Gotti who was being held in prison.
"The TOS is in lockdown now... Pep in da street is payin good to get the job done. So finish that TOS ASAP," the note read. Someone, it seems, was still taking the defence of John Gotti jnr very seriously indeed. Seriously enough to try to kill a witness.
Perhaps Gotti and the Mafia will go down the old way after all: with all guns blazing.
- OBSERVER
