Mobster John Gotti given final farewell

A decade ago, John Gotti bid farewell to his family and wiseguys to spend the rest of his life in jail. Now it’s their turn to say goodbye after the nation’s former top Mafia boss died of cancer this week in a prison hospital.

After a two-day wake that featured larger-than-life floral arrangements, Gotti family members today were to bury the man who schemed and shot his way to the top of the Gambino family.

A private service inside a funeral home in Queens, New York, was to be followed by a motorcade headed by the hearse carrying Gotti that was scheduled to drive past his family home and his mob crew’s headquarters.

Gotti’s brothers, Peter and Gene, and his son, John, would not attend the send-off. All three were in jail when the ‘‘Dapper Don’’ died on Monday.

The burial would not follow a Mass of Christian Burial, as the family had hoped. Bishop Thomas Daily, head of the Diocese of Brooklyn, ruled that Gotti was not entitled to a funeral Mass.

At issue is a church precept called ‘‘scandal’’ - the idea that the wrong message would be sent to the church faithful by granting a funeral Mass to someone who lived outside church teachings.

The denial is not a judgment on the deceased’s lifestyle, since the church believes only God can make that determination.

Daily did allow Gotti’s burial in a Roman Catholic cemetery, St John’s, where a who’s who of 20th century Mafiosi were buried. Some, like Carlo Gambino and Joseph Profaci, died of natural causes. Others, like Carmine Galante and Joe Colombo, were victims of their lifestyles - both shot to death.

Gotti’s final resting place sits inside an imposing five-storey building at St John’s Cemetery. At the bottom of the gentle hill leading up to the mausoleum sits the crypt holding the remains of Charles ‘‘Lucky’’ Luciano, the infamous mobster.

The Gotti crypt sits behind dark, wooden, cathedral-style doors; the family name is written across its wooden front in Gothic lettering. A small bit of natural light bleeds in from down the wood-panelled hallway.

Gotti will rest next to his son, Frank, who died at the age of 12 when he was struck by a neighbour’s car while riding a minibike near his home. Though ruled blameless by police, the neighbour was abducted weeks later and never seen again. No charges were ever brought.

Like the other mob bosses in St John’s, Gotti achieved notoriety through his ascension to the upper ranks of La Cosa Nostra.

Gotti was a street capo running a gang out of the Bergin Club until he orchestrated the 1985 murder of his predecessor, ‘‘Big Paul’’ Castellano. Within two years, he had captured public attention like no mobster since Al Capone.

An Andy Warhol portrait of Gotti appeared on the cover of Time magazine. He wore designer suits with hand-painted ties. He dined at fine restaurants, and thumbed his nose at the FBI agents who made him public enemy Number One.

But in 1992, Gotti was convicted of murder and racketeering, and sentenced to life in prison. He died of throat cancer in a prison hospital in Missouri a decade after leaving his native New York for the last time.