Angelo, she explained, referring to her son as “John” and her husband as “Johnny.”

“Johnny had given the order not to go near Angelo. But John loved Angelo. Angelo (right) was like his surrogate father. John defied his father, and when Johnny found out, he beat him up. John still went. And that’s when I had a major major fight with Johnny. 

“He hit me, he threw something at me. I don’t remember what he threw at me. He got it right back, matter of fact, I cracked his head open. He forbid John to go see Angelo. But John was not abandoning Angelo. He went to see him almost every day in the hospital. And Angelo used to cry. And cry. Because who he really wanted to see was Johnny.”

In an angry retort, Angel Gotti told Gang Land: "My Father did NOT beat my mother! That was a figure of speech she used."

During her discussion with Kasman, Mrs. Gotti said her husband’s refusal to visit his dying friend “was not something I understood. You know, loyalty is loyalty,” she said, adding that she constantly nagged him. 

“That’s what used to bother him, that’s why I used to get hit. I used make him feel this big. He was hurt. He wanted to give in, but he couldn’t. His pride wouldn’t allow him. One time he started screaming at me. He says, ‘Do you effing understand that I was supposed to kill this guy. You understand that?’ In other words, ‘I let him live, now leave me alone, mind your business and that’s it.” 

During the nearly two-hour-long conversation, Kasman discusses his own personal problems – his anxiety, high blood pressure and then-in-motion breakup with his wife of 20 years – and is often heard recalling his long friendship with the Gotti family. In the process, he uses the one-on-one talk Mrs. Gotti

thought they were having to tape record her private thoughts about her son, John, her other children, Ruggiero’s two wiseguy sons and other mobsters, including Gambino consigliere Joseph (JoJo) Corozzo. (left)

“This is just me and you talking,” he said at one point. “You and me are talking here,” he said later. 

In one exchange, Mrs. Gotti calmly and without rancor caught the bombastic Kasman off guard, and caused him to express shock and dismay when she explained why Junior hadn’t contacted him during his three racketeering trials. 

“I just want to look you in the face, and I want you to understand my love and loyalty is right here,” said Kasman. “I ate and slept in your house. I was always around you and your husband. I don’t fall in and out of love with people. But Junior never reached, uh, Junior never said anything to me,” he said. 

Well, she replied, “he became very mistrustful of people turning on him left and right.” 

“Of me? Of me?” stammered the wired-up Kasman, who became an FBI informer in 1997. 

Well, yes, she said, noting, among other things, that Gang Land had reported that Kasman had criticized Junior’s defense

tactics for turning his trials into a “circus” that was “destroying his father’s legacy” at the same time. 

For her part, Mrs. Gotti agreed with Kasman that her son had made mistakes in his efforts to “clean the slate” and get out from under racketeering charges that stemmed from allegations he ordered the 1992 shooting of talk show host Curtis Sliwa. 

Junior never should have spoken to prosecutors in a so-called “proffer session,” she said, stressing, however, that in the end, all he gave the feds was “gibberish” and that he walked out on the feds and fought them through three trials, and “that’s not a rat.” 

At another point, she said “foolish” penny-pinching wiseguys are partly responsible for the avalanche of mob turncoats in recent years. 

“They create rats. Instead of passing the hats, getting people a good lawyer,” she said, they often “abandon” cohorts when they get arrested by the feds. “The only way out for these people is the out that the government offers them. The government takes advantage of that.” 

As for the FBI, specifically case agent Theodore Otto, she said, “I do believe that he tried to get John murdered … by spreading the rumor that he was a rat” among her son’s

former mob associates whom the FBI subpoenaed, and by leaking similar information to the news media. 

For his part, Kasman noted that he had gone to prison rather than talk to the feds, and defended his own actions as Gotti’s self-described “adopted son” over the years. During their talk, he also took a final shot at the Dapper Don for the troubles that Kasman has caused the Gambino family and the tarnished legacy of the late Mafia boss. 

“I was a civilian thrust into a life that I knew nothing about,” he said. “I loved him, but he put me in a position with people, and doing things, that I never should have been involved in. That was not my function .…that was not a Lewis Kasman function. The things he had me doing, the appointments, the taking, the going, that was for a skipper to do, not a Jewish kid.” 

As for the erstwhile Junior Don, Mrs. Gotti is hopeful, but she remains frightened about his future. 

“It’s never done,” she said. “They are so obsessed. They will never stop. They will never stop. He’s the one that got away. And it’s driving them crazy.”