This Family of Mine: What It Was Like Growing Up Gotti (18 page)

It was a well-known fact that he ruled his house like a tyrant. I knew this firsthand, as I was friendly with his adopted son, Scott. There is
no doubt
in my mind that he was drinking the day he hit and killed my brother. Being intoxicated would certainly explain why neighbors who witnessed the accident had to chase down his
car and nearly jump on his hood to get him to stop. He didn’t even realize he had hit a boy and was dragging his body down the street. Favara emerged from the car looking bewildered and confused, “not right in his mind” was the way the neighbors described him to the police. And when Favara complained of chest pains at the scene, the cops, who were more concerned with my brother’s welfare, released him to his wife’s care.

His wife put her husband in her car and immediately removed him from the scene. She told the cops that she would take her husband to the emergency room. The cops, knowing at this point that the boy laying in the street was John Gotti’s son, thought this was best in an effort to keep the peace.

I talked to my father about Favara late one night shortly after the accident. I was sitting by the front bay window in my father’s den, crying for nearly an hour as I waited for Dad to return from the funeral home. He walked in and found me. The first thing he said was, “We need to be strong for Mama. You do understand that she’s suffered a great loss.” As always, he was thinking of everyone else before himself. I continued crying, hardly able to look at him as he continued.

“It was an accident,” my father said through a raspy, cracked voice, desperately trying hard to maintain his composure. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to convince me or himself. The realization that Frankie’s death was anything other than an accident would have sent him over the edge. He was displaying the stoic demeanor he preached to each of us while we were growing up. I barely spoke to him, except to say, “That man killed my brother! How can you be so forgiving? How can you be so strong?”

I remember his eyes, as black as coal and as empty as the devil without redemption, when he responded, “It was an accident, Vicki, an awful accident.” I ran crying from the room knowing what a bad man Favara was, shaking my head and screaming, “That’s a
lie. A damn lie!” But I wasn’t surprised. Even my mother expressed sorrow when rumors surfaced that Favara may have had a heart attack.

At the same time, she wanted to believe it was an accident—she didn’t want to believe that Favara was a cold monster.

I ran upstairs to my room, not wanting to push my father any further. I had my theories and he was entitled to his, as much as I didn’t agree with them. Minutes later he followed me upstairs and knocked lightly at my door, so as not to wake Mom. I let him in and he sat in a white wicker chair in the corner of my bedroom. He started to explain how one of the officers who had been at the scene of the accident told him at the hospital that the “neighbor involved had been complaining of chest pains.”

I will
never
forget my father’s face when he said this, not as long as I live. He truly believed this and even added something like, “We’ve already had one tragedy; we don’t need another. If this man has a heart attack, there will be two tragedies, two families torn apart.”

I was surprised, no, shocked, at Dad’s reaction. I wondered in silence how he could be so understanding? I was sick with grief and angry about the death of my brother, and I imagined my father was even sicker and beyond angry. I wanted revenge. I wanted someone to pay for taking my brother’s life. Anger and grief aside for the moment, Dad was a reasonable man. If someone crossed him and he knew they had, there was going to be trouble and retaliation. But if he believed the act or tragic event wasn’t deliberate or intentional, he would set aside the rage and wallow in his own pool of misery.

I put my hands over my ears in an effort to muffle his words and the sound of his voice. When he saw he wasn’t making any progress with me, he threw his hands up in the air; he was too broken up to argue. Exasperated, he left the room, quietly closing the door behind him.

A
FTER THE BURIAL
, the days and nights played out like a dream. It was a nightmare I prayed I would wake up from. Instead, I stayed home from school and continued doing the household chores and caring for my mother and youngest brother. Housekeeper, nursemaid, and cook were the three hats I wore at various times of the day, leaving little time for me to dwell on my brother’s death. One thing I thought about over and over was the blow-dryer, how Frankie wanted to use it the morning he was killed. I felt so guilty (I still have that hair dryer tucked away in a keepsake box. For obvious reasons, I could never throw it out). Then, I didn’t even have the energy to express anger that was bubbling up and about to erupt, especially when I got an unexpected knock on the door. The boy who had lent my brother the minibike was standing on my doorstep. Kevin McMahon wasn’t at my home to express sympathy or to offer his condolences. He was there to ask me, “Who is going to pay for my bike?” I couldn’t believe my ears and stepped outside so that no one inside the house could hear us. I let him know that I thought he was “utterly disgusting and unfeeling.” I told him to “beat it.” I also told Kevin that given the fact that he’d been told numerous times not to allow my brother Frankie on his minibike, he was lucky that all he was getting from me was a warning. Then I slammed the door.

A
FEW NIGHTS
later, I heard a commotion coming from John Favara’s house across the way. There was loud music and even louder laughter coming from Favara’s backyard. I glanced out the sliding-glass doors in the dining room and saw that he and his friends were sitting out back and were in the midst of some sort of party. I thought I was seeing things! A party? I decided to take a
closer look. I crept outside the door, into the backyard, and walked slowly and silently to the fence that separated our property lines where we had lived for nearly five years. Sure as I was standing there in the flesh, so was Favara. He held a bottle of beer in one hand and a hot dog in the other. There were mostly men present, and most were dressed in Members Only jackets. It was the end of March and still pretty cold outside. They were all laughing. Talking and laughing. The very sight enraged me and tore at my heart. I didn’t expect the man to be broken up beyond repair but this was a far cry from what I deemed a normal, feeling, and compassionate man who had suffered “chest pains at the scene of the accident.”

As the anger built up inside me, my heart began to race and my head started to pound. My hands were cold and clammy and within seconds my entire body broke out into a cold sweat. My mind kept flashing to the sight of my brother’s lifeless body in the wooden coffin my father had picked out. Then the images changed to the package, wrapped neatly in a brown bag with twine tied around it, filled with my brother’s clothes, the outfit he had to be cut out of before the paramedics could begin working on him. Most of the cut-up fabric was covered in blood, tissue, and bone fragments. The package had awkwardly been delivered by one of the hospital workers to my father in the waiting room, having just come up from the morgue where he had to identify his son.

Standing in the yard, not taking notice of the cool temperatures nor the slapping winds, my body and mind were burning with the quest for revenge. I was only a teenager, perhaps too young to even understand death itself, but I knew enough to know that this man felt absolutely no remorse. I knew enough to know if that were me, I could hardly get through a day without wanting to die of guilt because I had ended such a young and promising life. Yet this man was enjoying a backyard barbeque with his friends, laughing and drinking as if nothing had happened.

I crept back inside the house as quietly as I had come out, not wanting to make my presence known, especially to my mother sleeping upstairs, nearly comatose from enough medication to put down a horse. As I closed the sliding-glass door slowly, I heard my mother’s bedroom door open. Knowing my father was in the den, I went into an absolute panic. She barely made the eleven or so stairs down to the first level of the house, while grabbing tightly to the wrought-iron handrail for dear life. She walked into the kitchen and found me loading the dishwasher. I was making as much noise as I could in an attempt to drown out the noise coming from the backyard. But my actions were in vain and my mother was immediately drawn to the yard like a moth to a flame. I tried stopping her. I even stood right in front of her and took hold of her shoulders saying, “Mom, you need your rest, you need to go back to bed!”

She didn’t hear me. As far as she was concerned, I wasn’t even there. She looked crazed—her eyes were wide open and darting around the room. I’d found out later that she’d heard the noise emanating from the yard minutes earlier and when she’d stumbled out of bed to the back window and stared down and saw the neighbor and his friends having a party, she was beside herself. My mother looked as if she’d seen the devil himself. I did the only thing I could do under such circumstances. I ran and got my father. In the minute or so it took to get him awake, on his feet and into the kitchen, Mom had already made her way outside. She was standing against the fence, dressed in a flannel nightgown, her eyes filled with hate, disbelief, and grief.

Favara took notice of her. Instead of getting up and going inside his house, which would have been the smart thing to do, he shot her a smug smile. Then he grinned. If I had not been there to witness this myself, I would never have believed it. But Favara never expected my father to push through the trees and retrieve my mother. Thankfully, Dad didn’t see the smug smile and grin.
Fortunately, one of Favara’s guests had the sense to turn off the music when they spotted my mother. My father didn’t say a word; he just guided Mom back inside the house.

W
HEN
M
OM WAS
sure that my father was sound asleep beside her, she crawled out of bed and made her way back downstairs. This time she avoided the kitchen, even the backyard. Instead, carrying a baseball bat, she headed out the front door and made her way around the corner to the neighbor’s house. I heard the screen door slam shut and I knew it was Mom. I grabbed my robe and chased after her. Around the corner in Favara’s driveway was, as far as my mother was concerned, “the murder weapon”—a late-model, shit-brown-colored Oldsmobile, with a dented right fender and badly damaged quarter panel. The man didn’t even have the decency to hide or even clean the car after the accident. My mother saw blood—her son’s blood now dried and caked on the car and went crazy. She began banging the bat against the car with great force, and within minutes Favara came out of the house, looking dazed.

I found my mother standing in the driveway still wielding the bat. She was just inches from Favara. He was pointing a finger at my mother and staring at me—screaming things like, “Get this crazy woman off my property!” His remark, along with that smug look he had on his face, is something I’ve had to witness a million times in my dreams over the next thirty years. Then he looked at me, yelled, “What the hell was her son doing in the fuckin’ street?”

His last remark sent my mother into an even crazier state. She lunged at him, the bat missing Favara only by inches. Once, twice, three times. Each time she only narrowly missed him. He was quick on his feet. For a moment I froze—even I was afraid of Mom, afraid of what she might do.

“She’s fuckin’ crazy!” Favara yelled over and over. The scene was getting louder and I imagined one of the neighbors would call the police. I needed to get Mom out of there, fast!

I will admit that I, too, could have killed him with my own hands that night, that’s how much rage I felt. But my protective nature came out and my first reaction was to get hold of my mother, calm her down, and get her safely back to the house and to bed where she belonged. While we walked around the corner, my right arm wrapped around my mother and my left carrying the bat, Favara continued to rant and rave about his car and who was going to pay for the damages.

I managed to get my mother back inside the house and back to bed without disturbing anyone, including my father. The next morning when my father came downstairs to the breakfast table and found me feeding my younger brother, Peter, he said, “Did something happen last night?” I couldn’t look at him. So with my back to him I said, “No, nothing unusual.” He nodded his head and with a puzzled and mostly confused look on his face said, “I thought I heard fighting coming from down the block.” I didn’t answer—I just shrugged my shoulders.

My father did of course find out that there had been a commotion. I told him the truth, and boy, was he angry—mostly with me. He said things like, “Mama just lost a son and knows no better. You, on the other hand, should!” He told me I should have called him the minute I saw Mom leave the house. As tears rolled down the sides of my face, he weakened his stance and continued, “I know you’re suffering a loss too, he was your brother, but, the one thing
we
need to do is keep our wits about ourselves. Do you hear me?”