The Gottis' Next Label: 'Not Guilty,' They Hope

BROOKLYN, N.Y. -- It sure looks like a mob trial.

At the defense table sit two men named Gotti, wearing tailored suits and mutely trying to pass for sweethearts. On the stand are people like Jon Ragin, a former credit card fraudster now in the witness protection program and singing for the government in the hopes of shaving years off his sentence.

There's talk of semiautomatic weapons, revenge, tantrums, shooting, stabbing and bags of cash. There was some back-and-forth about whether you could actually cram 7,000 dollar bills into a shoebox. No way, argued the defense.

"I have $7,400 in my shoebox," Detective Anthony Castiglia proudly announced during Monday's proceedings, displaying a box for Adidas basketball sneakers stuffed with government-supplied greenbacks.

But this isn't a mob trial. These Gottis aren't even Italian and truth be told they're not really Gottis. They were born Irving and Christopher Lorenzo, and they are the founders of a record label called Murder Inc. -- redubbed The Inc. when all this legal trouble began -- the rap label that launched Ja Rule , Ashanti and others. When the Lorenzos' careers took off in the '90s they appropriated the Gotti name to add an aura of street cred and menace.

For the same reason, prosecutors say, the brothers also cozied up to Kenneth McGriff, aka Supreme, one of the most notorious and murderous drug dealers on the East Coast and leader of a Queens-based gang known as the Supreme Team. The feds have accused the Gottis of laundering more than $1 million in illegal profits for McGriff, much of it dragged to the Midtown offices of Murder Inc. in duffel bags.

"What the facts show is that they didn't just give themselves names like Gotti," says Sean Haran, an assistant U.S. attorney, during a pretrial hearing. "They wanted to be gangsters."

At minimum, these guys wanted to seem like gangsters. Which isn't that unusual, since much of the rap world has long nurtured a serious case of mobster envy. The weird part is just how one-sided this crush has been. It's not just that La Cosa Nostra dislikes rap. The mob is notoriously bigoted.

"Anyone who's listened to secretly recorded tapes knows that when it comes to blacks what you hear from the Mafia is nothing but bias and revulsion," says Selwyn Rabb, author of "Five Families: America's Most Popular Mafia Empires." "I've never heard them say anything complimentary. It's all prejudice."

Actually, if the Mafia were a legitimate business it would have long ago been sued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The Mafia has ushered Jews, Albanians, Russians and Hispanics into its ranks as "associates," essentially low-ranking members of a family. But not one black, says Rabb. In fact the Mafia has long taken it upon itself to keep blacks out of Italian neighborhoods. And in those areas where blacks eventually move in, the mob moves out.

Among those participating in the white flight: John J. Gotti. The namesake of the Lorenzo brothers and the former head of the Gambino crime family exited his original neighborhood in Brooklyn and relocated to Ozone Park in Queens because he didn't want to live among African Americans.

One of the lawyers for the Gottis -- Irv and Christopher, that is -- says all the mob stuff was for show.