Gotti’s Rules: The Story of John Alite, Junior Gotti, and the Demise of the American Mafia

Few readers of true crime who are familiar with La Cosa Nostra will find anything particularly new in the latest from Anastasia (Blood and Honor: Inside the Scarfo Mob, the Mafia’s Most Violent Family). The book is a straightforward and unsurprising account of the Gambino crime family since the mid-1980s, from the perspective of killer-turned-FBI cooperator John Alite. Anastasia accepts Alite’s account at face value, resulting in a simplistic rehashing of events. Anastasia even admits he made no effort to talk to “anyone in the Gotti camp,” which he justifies by stating, implausibly, that doing so would only lead to a meaningless “he said, they said” narrative. This overreliance on Alite dictates the book’s focus on Junior Gotti, rather than his father John, the Teflon Don; this is a drawback, as the story of the younger mobster is significantly less interesting and Alite’s flat perspective hardly compensates. B&w photos.[em] (Feb.) [/em]