If things had gone his way, John Gotti might have had an offer even he couldn`t refuse.
And it wouldn`t be from the district attorney`s office, either.
”Let me tell ya, honey, if Gotti were cleared (of murder and racketeering charges), Paramount, Universal-all the big companies-would be after him,” says veteran casting director Sylvia Fay, who cast ”GoodFellas” and ”Billy Bathgate.” ”And I can assure you, he`d like to be in the movies. I got instinct. I know this.”
Besides, ”he`s a natural at it.” A real ham, she says. Especially if you consider his nine-week act at the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse, which ended with his conviction on murder and racketeering charges last week.
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Take one day of the mobster`s trial, for instance.
As he sat beside and whispered occasionally to his attorney`s wife, Irene Krieger, Gotti often smiled and snickered; threw his arm out at a witness`
account of mob boss Paul Castellano`s murder; shook his head and exchanged laughs with a juror, and winked and nodded at his capos (call them his good friends).
This, however, is tame, compared with Gotti`s later courtroom antics. At one point, the judge threatened to ban him from the courtroom, minutes after his ”See, we`re this close to Russia” wisecrack about federal marshals not letting him shake hands with spectator Anthony Quinn.
Fay would cast Ray Liotta as Gotti but adds that ”Joe Pesci might as well (play him) because he`s doing everything else.”
Fay also says much of the hype about Gotti imitating movie mobsters is nonsense, specifically references to Gotti`s behavior being similar to Marlon Brando`s portrayal of Mafia patriarch Don Corleone in ”The Godfather.”
”Sure, Brando is good and all, but Gotti`s the real thing. Movies and real life don`t feed off each other. Absolutely not. If anything, movies get
(ideas) from him.”
Then again, it`s hard not to make comparisons, ”since gangster movies probably make up 93 percent of all the movies made in the country,” says Nicholas Pileggi, author of ”Wiseguy” (the 1985 best seller about Henry Hill, a low-level hood turned government informer) and co-screenwriter of the movie version, ”GoodFellas.”
Pileggi believes movies don`t influence how a mobster acts. He also believes most gangster movies don`t glorify the Mafia.
”There are people who think that just by making a movie about somebody, you`re glorifying that person,” he says. ”And some of these movies paint these characters as pretty horrible, loathsome and despicable people. . . . That`s their definition of glorification.”
In the meantime, HBO and CBS plan to make movies about the Gotti trial, though both are still in preproduction. And neither would comment on who would be cast as the Mafia chieftain.
But Gotti`s clearly out of the running. For the time being, he has an open-ended engagement with the U.S. Justice Department.