HOODS HAVE FEELINGS TOO

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Before he was hauled away to a 9-ft. by 7-ft. cell in the Brioni-free confines of the Marion Federal Prison in Illinois, John Gotti apparently had a favorite word: parameters. It is a word he uses more than half a dozen times within the course of the two-hour HBO movie Gotti, debuting on the cable network Aug. 17 (9 p.m. EDT). In fact, he says it more often--and with more fierce passion--than he does whack or clip or even scungilli.

Based on the book Gotti: Rise and Fall by Jerry Capeci and Gene Mustain, as well as on FBI surveillance-tape transcripts and press accounts, Gotti the movie gives us the former Gambino crime-family boss as a Puzo-esque romantic, a faux plumbing-supply salesman who longs for the days when the Cosa Nostra had real structure, when family loyalty meant something, when the Mafia wasn't so enthusiastically in the business of mergers and acquisitions. "You got a worldwide crime syndicate now," the imprisoned don, played by Armand Assante, bemoans at the end of the film. "There's no rules, no parameters, no feelings."

And if John Gotti was anything, we learn, he was a man consumed by feelings. The film tracks Gotti's ascent from an impetuous Gambino soldier in the early '70s--the kind of guy who would quickly eliminate a colleague who performed poorly on a hit--to a media-worshipped don who for years remained invincible to prosecution. Assante's glamour works to his advantage as he captures Gotti's magnetic blend of arrogance and affability and thick-necked earnestness. Gotti ruled by gut and fist, and he had little tolerance for the mahogany-paneled sedateness of dons like Carlo Gambino and Paul Castellano, who derides Gotti in the film as "some throwback to our street days."

Both "Big Paul" Castellano (Richard Sarafian), famously whacked by Gotti soldiers outside a Manhattan steak house in 1985, and Salvatore ("Sammy the Bull") Gravano (William Forsythe), whose turncoat chattiness with the feds ultimately landed Gotti his life sentence, are portrayed as the real evildoers here. Why? Because they were Michael Milken greedy. While Gotti's silk-and-cashmere flamboyance may have embodied the underworld side of '80s excess, Castellano and Gravano were, in this film's view, the true moral lepers because they threw around terms like "joint venture" and "bottom line" and believed in the coldhearted notion that the whole point of the Mob--the purpose of looting pension funds, intimidating building contractors, throwing deadbeats into canals with concrete shoes--was to make its board of directors extremely wealthy.

Gotti--prone here to declarations like, "I'd rather die broke than bleed my family to death!"--may have had different ideas about the Mob's purpose in life, but the filmmakers are so entranced by the sheer myth of him that they haven't bothered to explore what those ideas might be. Nor do the filmmakers try to make sense of Gotti's many paradoxes. Here was a man obsessed with rules, yet when one of his associates breaks a pre-eminent one by dealing drugs, Gotti does not toss him out; instead he visits him in the hospital and feeds him cannoli filling with his finger. It was that kind of management style that in reality made Gotti a subpar Mob boss, a less-than-brilliant criminal who never returned the Gambinos to the profitable glory days of life under Don Carlo and Big Paul. Leave reality out of it though, and Gotti, with grand performances by Assante, Forsythe, and Anthony Quinn as the don's mentor Aniello Dellacroce, is fine portrait-of-a-thug drama.

--By Ginia Bellafante