Soon recognized as a bright and tough opponent, he fought members of rival gangs such as the Liberty Park Tots and New Lots Boys. Gotti’s public school education ended on June 7, 1954, when he was suspended from the eighth grade. He never returned to school.
Even as a teenager, Gotti was confident and self-assured—attributes that attracted the notice of the neighborhood’s older gangsters. Gotti’s adult criminal record began at the age of eighteen, when he was picked up for frequenting a gambling location. A favorite pupil of the local Mafia heads, Carmine and Danny Fatico, Gotti also made a favorable impression on the mob’s Gambino family before he was twenty years old.
In 1960, Gotti married Victoria DiGiorgio, the daughter of an Italian construction contractor and a Russian-Jewish woman. The couple eventually settled in Queens, in Howard Beach-Ozone Park, a blue-collar Italian-American neighborhood. Still a young struggling petty criminal, Gotti was arrested in January 1965 for bookmaking and again, two months later, for attempted burglary. (A bookmaker, or bookie, is someone who accepts and pays off bets.) He spent one year in jail.
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