Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Get Gotti’ on Netflix, a Sort-of Sleazy Documentary About the Rise and Fall of a Celebrity Gangster

The last time we got a chunk of content about John Gotti, John Travolta was the object of ridicule for playing the ruthless mob boss in 2018 biopic Gotti, which is as infamously terrible as the man was infamously brutal. Now we have Get Gotti, a three-part Netflix documentary focusing on how the gang boss – who was such an object of national fascination, he once made the cover of Time magazine – was finally taken down by the feds after four high-profile trials. Four high-profile trials that pretty much made him a celebrity, earning him the nicknames The Dapper Don (because he was a snappy dresser) and The Teflon Don (because he knew how to rig a jury and intimidate a witness). Now let’s see if this series is more enamored with its amoral subject, or the good guys who brought him down. 

GET GOTTI: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: An establishing shot of Christmastime in New York City.

The Gist: THE ’80S. If you weren’t there, it was all neon, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and hair mousse, and nothing else! In Dec., 1985, Paul Castellano, head of the Gambino crime family, was gunned down in broad daylight outside a steakhouse while throngs of New Yorkers reveled in the holiday spirit. We see graphic photos of Castellano’s body, bloody and lifeless on the sidewalk. Whoever did that had bawls. Big ones. And then that guy took over the Gambinos: John Gotti. He called the hit, and now he’s da man. We cycle through a series of talking heads – the usual assemblage of journalists, lawyers and cops who populate every true crime doc – speaking in hyperbolic terms about how Gotti was as charismatic as he was remorseless. 

OK, it’s not all journos and lawyers and cops – some of these characters are former mobsters themselves, who speak openly about their deeds, possibly because they’ve done their time, or because the statute of limitations has run out. The old rule of mobsters was true for the Gambinos: commit a murder, and you’re a made man. That’s what Gotti did in the ’70s, and after he spent some time in the slammer, he worked his way up the Gambino ladder to capo status and everything was hunky-dory until Castellano picked a different guy to be his second-in-command. That didn’t sit well with Gotti, and you know what happens when you piss off a mobster – something like you just read in the previous paragraph.

The doc jumps back and forth between Gotti’s bio and the long-in-the-works attempts to take his hiney down. NYC’s Organized Crime Task Force was at odds with the FBI, because both wanted to nail the most notorious gangster out there. They routinely bumped into each other as they staked out Gotti’s haunts and employed elaborate ruses in order to plant bugs in his offices (especially amusing: a guy hid in a refrigerator box on the sidewalk for hours, moving the box little by little until he was in front of the door and could pick the lock). Investigators pored over boring recordings of dudes with heavy Noo Yawk accents talking about crime in vague terms. One guy says, “You gotta taste his wife’s stuffed peppers,” and it’s hard to tell if he’s actually talking about stuffed peppers or not.

We get some context of Life in the Mob, as some of the former gangbangers talk about how the old school guys didn’t want to peddle drugs while the younger guys knew it could make ’em a ton of dough. “You do the smack, you get the whack,” was the long-held “rule.” The wiretap warrant ran out and then Gotti called the hit on Castellano and then the feds got the old tapes back out and tried to parse something from the indistinguishable mumbles. Then, the cops had an in: A couple years prior, Gotti had been arrested for punching a guy on the street, so they prosecuted him from assault. His victim showed up with his arm in a sling and an inability to remember what happened. How strange, right? The high-profile trial only fed Gotti’s celebrity, and he had so much money and fame and power, he was dubbed the King of New York. Then we meet U.S. assistant attorney Diane Giacalone, who says they had another angle on the guy, and this time, Gotti will go down. We’ll believe it when we see it!

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Netflix’s Vendetta: Truth, Lies and the Mafia is a similarly slick summation of mob action and thirsty media. And Getting Gotti is a 1994 made-for-TV movie with Sopranos and Goodfellas Lorraine Bracco playing Diane Giacalone. But what it brings to mind the most? The hyperbolic sleaze of TV “newsmagazine” Hard Copy.

Our Take: Get Gotti is slick and sensationalist and tiptoes right up to the edge of bad taste, occasionally dipping the tip of a toe in it. It’s also tonally conflicted, glamorizing the gangster lifestyle while also making heroes out of the investigators who diligently busted ass to put him in prison. As a tick-tock of an eventual takedown, it gets the job done. As a profile of a man whose name and reputation outlive him, it’s shallow. As a portrait of life as a gangster, it’s wafer-thin.

The series has the flashy visual clutter, aggrandizing framing of its somewhat problematic interview subjects and rapid-fire edits of 20th-century tabloid TV. Gotti is a big topic to cover in a little over two hours, but the series isn’t aiming to be a deep dive – it’s more like a bantamweight summary calculated to piece together the highlights via the words of some key players. The end result is a modestly entertaining watch, but Get Gotti never seems to take its subject seriously enough to lend it any narrative heft. Despite the juicy subject matter, the definitive Gotti film or series has yet to be made, it seems.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: A series of rapid-fire images of violence and turmoil as Giacalone says, “We were unprepared for the firestorm that followed.”

Sleeper Star: This is as good a place as any to say I’m torn between being entertained by the commentary of former mobsters (and someone nebulously labeled a “Gotti associate”) and creeped out by the thought of what these guys were/are capable of doing.  

Most Pilot-y Line: Nonsensical busted-metaphor blither from WCBS reporter Barbara Nevins Taylor: “John Gotti was a Marvel superhero before there were Marvel movies.” (A superhero? You’re comparing a murderous mob boss with Captain America and Spider-Man? Did she mean supervillain maybe?)

Our Call: Get Gotti is a classic case of flash trumping substance. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.