Our Man In Pool Swims With Sharks

Having also just heard the judge liken me to a safecracker, I felt as much bond with John Gotti as I am ever likely to when I walked into a conference room yesterday and overhead Gotti discussing the First Amendment.

Brooklyn Federal Judge I. Leo Glasser had just berated me and other reporters covering the trial for disclosing last Saturday supposedly sealed documents that somehow turned up in the public court file.

The judge said that was like taking documents from a safe, or like cashing a check sent to you by mistake. Meaning we're like thieves, too.

I was certain that a convicted hijacker like John Gotti would know the sting of such accusations, and I was right.

Legal jokers
As the designated pool reporter, I arrived for a separate jury screening session and heard Gotti and a co-defendant joking that the next thing you know, the judge will make a motion to junk the First Amendment.

The judge and the lawyers were in chambers having a private chat. So I told Gotti that many documents in the files are marked sealed and that we weren't sure whether these new ones were, not that it would have stopped us.

"Forget about it, if it wasn't there, the FBI would have had it there in a half an hour--whatever you want," Gotti said.

Gotti seemed to warm up after that, and for the next 40 minutes, I had what you might call the first extended journalistic discussion with as they say, "the nation's most powerful criminal."

I'm not calling it an interview, because I never fired a tough question, knowing that would be a waste of time. Our goal here was information and anecdote, not silence.

Professional interest?
Gotti seemed to enjoy the freedom of casual chat. He asked questions about The News' former owner and why two other reporters and I had mistakenly written that Gotti received sunlamp treatments in prison.

"It's not like that (in prison)," he said. "You should take a tour. I'm eating rice three times a day."

Gotti also seemed pleased to hear that another inmate, former Irish Republican Army soldier Joseph Doherty, had recently asked me when I interviewed him to say hello to Gotti when I saw him in court.

"Ah, Joe is a nice man. And honest. You ought to get him to write for you."

With my colleague, Jerry Capeci, The News' Gang Land columnist, I co-wrote a book about Gotti a few years ago; it had that nation's-most-powerful-criminal line as its subtitle.

I'm not sure Gotti realized he was talking to a co-author of that book until the end, but when he did, he smiled like it didn't matter. First Amendment issue, you know.