The Sporting Scene
November 20, 2017 Issue
A Mixed-Martial-Arts Fight with the Gotti Family
The former crime boss visited the Twin River Casino in Lincoln, Rhode Island, to watch his son make his professional debut on C.E.S. M.M.A. 46.
By Tim Struby
On a recent Friday night, John A. (Junior) Gotti, Jr., arrived at the Twin River Casino, in Lincoln, Rhode Island, north of Providence. The former crime boss, who led the Gambino family after his father’s conviction, in 1992, was not there to play craps or to catch the Rat Pack Christmas Show. (That’s not until later this month.) He had come for a mixed-martial-arts fight. His son, twenty-five-year-old John Gotti III, was making his professional début, on C.E.S. M.M.A. 46, a fight series sponsored by a Providence-based promoter called Classic Entertainment and Sports.
Gotti, Jr., who is fifty-three, looks like an accountant who spends most of his free time in the weight room. He wore glasses, a black tracksuit, and pristine white sneakers, and he carried a small leather briefcase. Inside the casino, swarms of fans greeted him as he made his way to the Event Center. Many well-wishers wore black T-shirts emblazoned with the Team Gotti logo—a drawing of a roaring lion devised years earlier by Gotti, Sr., who was known as the Dapper Don. “We got three busloads coming,” Junior said. “One from Queens, one from Brooklyn, and another from the Island.”
Providence and New York have had a cozy Cosa Nostra connection since the nineteen-sixties, when, on occasion, the New England mob boss Raymond L. S. Patriarca would travel south to mediate disputes among the five New York crime families. The previous afternoon, as Junior accompanied his son to the weigh-in at the casino’s Wicked Good Bar & Grill, he’d run into a trio of familiar faces: Tony Fiore, a seventy-four-year-old retired master thief and armored-car stickup man; and Kevin and Billy, whose uncle Gerard Ouimette, a.k.a. the Frenchman, ran a particularly ruthless Patriarca faction and had been close to Gotti, Sr.
“Hey, John,” Fiore said. “How do you stay in such good shape?”
“Prison,” Gotti, Jr., said, laughing, as the two men hugged. “Scoping out any banks lately?”
Fiore and Gotti, Jr., bonded while doing time, in the early two-thousands, at F.C.I. Ray Brook, a medium-security federal prison near Lake Placid, New York. “Remember how I used to make the pasta in my cell?” Fiore said. “I’d hang it from dental floss to dry it.”
“So, John,” Kevin Ouimette said. “What do we do about our tickets?”
“Big Steve’s got ’em already. I’ll make sure he finds you.”
The banter turned to Junior’s son’s impending fight. After three years on the New York amateur circuit, amassing a 5–1 record, the young welterweight felt that he was ready to take the leap.
“I’ll be right back—can you watch my Large Hadron Collider?”
“I didn’t think he should turn pro so soon,” Gotti, Jr., told his pals. “But this show came up, and he wanted to do it. They give him a choice of maybe eight opponents, and he picks the toughest one. My son! He’s got his grandfather’s balls but not his brains. I mean, if it was me making my début I’d want to fight a guy with one leg!”
On fight night, at the Event Center, Gotti, Jr., ran into Fiore and the Ouimette brothers again. But this time the vibe had darkened. It was 8:15 p.m., and one of the Gotti buses hadn’t shown up. “The driver picked them up an hour late and got lost,” Junior groused. “I’m sick, because my brother and nephews were on that ****ing bus.”
Gotti’s agitation masked fatherly concern. “He didn’t want his son to do this,” Jimmy Burchfield, Sr., the president of C.E.S., explained. Burchfield wore a dark suit, a striped shirt, and a silver tie that matched his hair. “John said, ‘I’ve been through four grand juries, and I’m more nervous watching my son fight.’ ”
The bout began at 8:35 p.m. Johnny (the Wild Child) Adams, a rangy, bearded welterweight from Rutland, Vermont, was introduced first. “Let’s go, baby!” a female Adams fan yelled. “Rip his ****ing head off!”
Gotti III entered the octagon to a frenzied chorus of “Got-ti! Got-ti!” In black-and-silver shorts, he looked the bigger fighter, a tapestry of tattoos covering his muscled hundred-and-seventy-pound frame.
The bell rang. After a long moment in a standing clinch against the cage, the two fighters landed on the canvas. Gotti III maneuvered on top of Adams and launched a barrage of right-hand jabs, until the ref stopped the contest. In just under four minutes, he’d won.
Gotti made his way ringside and embraced his father. Nearby, P. J. Centofanti, a graphic designer, looked on. “I didn’t even know he was fighting,” Centofanti said.
A friend tapped him on the arm. “You getting a selfie with John Gotti?”
Centofanti leaned over the ringside barricade and gestured toward the fighter, who was obliging. An arm around the shoulders, a click, and Centofanti raised his arms triumphantly. “I got it!” ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the November 20, 2017, issue, with the headline “Gloves Off.”
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