As the 1975 TV Baretta series theme song goes, "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time", well John Gotti seemed to have no problem doing his convicted time in prison on more than one occasion. What this (4) four hour documentary provides is a high level factual account of the early days and the eventual rise (and fall) to the head of the New York city Gambino crime family by a young, good looking, charismatic, tough as nails John Gotti.
As narrated by John Gotti Jr. he tells us the audience about his own life growing up as one of (5) five children of the head of the Gambino crime family, the boss of bosses, John Gotti. We get to witness the "in prison video recording" between father and son the disagreement between their view of a life of crime. John Gotti who was at the time dying of irreversible throat cancer while serving a life sentence in prison would not admit to his son that he was wrong in even a remote way, and he pleaded with his son John Gotti Jr. to not admit to any wrongdoing, as John Gotti Jr. continued to plead with his father to allow him to take a plea of guilty and get out of prison earlier to watch his own children grow up.
Some of the personal Gotti family pictures seemed to display a functional and prosperous New York Italian family but nothing was farther from the truth. I would have appreciated if the producers would have attempted to show a real life balance between the father and family man John Gotti (which they did) and at some point also show a chronological history of all the criminal charges John Gotti as well as John Gotti Jr. were accused of committing, then summarizing with the crimes that father and son were eventually found guilty of and served time in prison for.
The documentary touches on how John Gotti and his wife Victoria DiGiorgio tragically lost one of their sons, 12-year-old Frank Gotti, the youngest son of John Gotti, as he darted into the street on a motorized minibike from behind a dumpster where he was struck by their neighbor John Favara's car and accidentally killed. A few months later the Gotti's neighbor John Favara was witnessed being pulled from inside a restaurant by three men and he was never to be seen again. No witnesses ever came forward.
I dropped my rating from a perfect 10 to a lower 8 out of 10 rating as it is a bias account of New York crime mob boss John Gotti and his two sons describing their relationship with their father, but there is an evil side to father and son that was not reflected in this documentary which is really who John Gotti (father and mob boss) and John Gotti Jr, (son and convicted criminal) really were.
