Family Man

He says he put out the word, while in jail, that he and the venal life were parting company, and for the past couple years the only mobster to visit him was his uncle. That, Lichtman explained at trial, was solely to plan for the funeral of Gotti senior, who died of cancer in 2002.

But the feds never bought Junior's I-quit story. They say that early in his incarceration, he demanded certain loan-sharking proceeds and on another occasion asked for the return of some machine guns. So last year, as Gotti prepared for his release, prosecutors filed new charges based on a new set of mob informants, announcing that Gotti would be tried for crimes in the '90s that nobody knew about until Fappiano and three other Gambino associates turned state's evidence. Among the counts in the new indictment: the 1992 kidnapping of Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels, allegedly in retaliation for nasty things Sliwa said on the radio about the elder Gotti. (Hey, pitch yourself as a crime fighter and who else do you go after?) The statute of limitations on all this malfeasance expired years ago -- unless. If Gotti is still part of an ongoing conspiracy -- which is to say, if the man is still in the mob -- the limitations clock never started ticking. On the other hand, if the jury decides Gotti actually withdrew from the Gambinos, it could conclude that he's served his time and set him free.

How the resignation defense will sit with jurors will soon be clear. But it doesn't play well with the experts. "You don't resign from the mob. There is no such thing," says Howard Abadinsky, a professor at St. John's University and author of "Organized Crime."

"It's possible that John Gotti has decided that he doesn't want to commit any more crimes. But if whoever now runs the Gambino family says 'We've got something important for you to do' and he doesn't do it, he's a dead man."

Canaries on Steroids

The case against Gotti, as well as co-defendants Michael Yannotti and Louis Mariani, rests largely on the bulky shoulders of those four mob defectors, all of whom agreed to blab in exchange for the possibility of reduced sentences. Though composed and polite on the stand, these men acknowledged crimes that range from ghastly to petty. One said he shook down teenagers stealing $500 a week from a bagel store where they worked. Another habitually robbed drug dealers. All seem to have serious anger-management issues.

One of them, Michael DiDonato, was asked by prosecutors if he had a volatile relationship with his wife.

"It was very volatile," he replied.

You expect a tale about spousal abuse, right? But that's not what you get. In April of 1988, DiDonato's wife admitted that she'd bought her car from a man down the street, not, as she'd told her husband, from a relative. This bothered DiDonato quite a bit.

"I didn't want my wife taking favors from other men," DiDonato said. "So I went to speak to him."

Well, that conversation turned heated. "He was screaming and yelling at me. I said some words back to him and . . . I shot him."

Shot him right in the head, actually, at a distance of two inches. Miraculously, the guy lived and DiDonato ended up serving time for attempted murder.

The crumbling fortunes of the Mafia for the last few decades is usually attributed to advances in surveillance techniques, better coordination among law enforcement agencies and so on. But it's not just that the good guys are getting smarter. The bad guys are getting dumber. One informant needed a definition of the word "implied."