Going Ga-ga over Gotti   

Donald Trump, Leona Helmsley and even Mike Tyson were no match for John Gotti.

The scandals and trials of some of New York's most covered figures couldn't diminish the press's fixation with the man it has dubbed "The Teflon Don."

Gotti's sensational 10-week murder-racketeering trial in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn received intense coverage from as many as 50 reporters a day before it ended April 2. Gotti was found guilty of murder, racketeering and other charges and faces life in prison when he is sentenced June 23.

The sideshow atmosphere of the trial offered something for nearly everyone: titillating mob secrets, celebrity onlookers including actors Anthony Quinn and Mickey Rourke, even dressed-to-kill defendants. And the New York media was happy to run wild with the story.

When Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano took the stand to rat on his former boss, dozens of reporters stood in line all day for a chance to get in. Even Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin had to wait.

The New York Post opened 900 numbers to poll readers on whether they believed Gravano was telling the truth. (About 51 percent said no.)

New York Newsday assigned an artist to draw Gotti Garb, a four-day-a-week, 18-column-inch color feature on the best-dressed. One Newsday sketch, Feds' Threads, went so far as to compare a prosecutor's "WASPishness" to "the swaggering double-breasted outfits worn by Gotti and most of his backers": the prosecutor's "single-breasted (always) suit is steel gray with a subtle ribbon stripe of a slightly deeper shade. The jacket is tailored with an emphasis on the nipped waist and features flap pockets; the trousers are cuffed."

The three fiercely competing local tabloids sometimes sent as many as six staffers each: reporters, sketch artists, columnists and photographers. Other reporters not covering Gotti even borrowed courtroom passes to attend on their days off.

The Gotti saga also turned up on the networks, NPR and PBS. And Random House's Times Books is assembling a book based on the FBI's wiretaps of Gotti's conversations.

"It's a big story," says Edwin Diamond, New York magazine media critic and journalism professor at New York University. "I would only raise the question whether we romanticize this stuff and trivialize the seriousness of it with Gotti Garb and all the references to 'The Godfather.' "

Robert Snyder agrees. "Gotti fits really perfectly a well-developed image of the Mafia don American newspapers and television have disseminated for decades now," says the New York University instructor and former fellow at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center.

In Gotti, the press "finally got the don they deserved, one who looked like the Hollywood version," Diamond wrote in his 1991 book, "The Media Show," following an earlier Gotti trial.

From its editorial page the New York Times criticized the carrying-on. The trial "has turned into a crowd-pleasing melodrama," it said March 29. "This is a trial of two men charged with serious crimes... That painstaking process is 'not nearly as exciting as the other stuff,' Mr. Gleeson [the prosecutor] noted. Which may be why so many people and a slice of Hollywood, encouraged by some in the media, persist in treating a serious legal proceeding as an amusement."

Gotti Garb artist Kenol Lamour says his only regret is that he couldn't see what the judge was wearing under his robes.