"Junior" Gotti Arrested On Murder Charge

John A. Gotti was arrested at his Long Island home early Tuesday
morning on federal racketeering and murder conspiracy charges tying him
to three murders, including a storied mob killing authorized by his
father, according to a person briefed on the case.

Mr. Gotti, 44, was taken into custody by the F.B.I. at his Oyster Bay
home, and was expected to be arraigned in Manhattan federal court later
in the day, the person said. The charges, brought by federal
prosecutors in Tampa, Fla., accuse Mr. Gotti, whose late father was the
head of the Gambino organized-crime family, of playing a role in the
three murders, committed in the late 1980s and early ’90s.

At least two other men — Michael Finnerty and David D’Arpino — were
also arrested on Tuesday and charged with racketeering in connection
with the case, the person said. Mr. Gotti was also charged with
narcotics conspiracy, the person said.

A lawyer for Mr. Gotti, Seth Ginsberg, said, “We’re confident that
there is no strength to the allegations and that he will prevail once
again.”

Mr. Ginsberg said that his client would probably transported to Tampa
quickly for arraignment there in United States District Court.

He added, "I think Herman Melville already wrote this story,” referring
to the government’s persistent pursuit of Mr. Gotti, who has been tried
three times before, always ending in mistrials. Federal authorities say
Mr. Gotti served for a time as the acting boss of the Gambino family,
but at each of the trials, Mr. Gotti insisted that he had left the
Mafia life.

In September 2005, after a six-week federal trial that included charges
that he ordered the June 1992 kidnapping of Curtis Sliwa, the founder
of the Guardian Angels and WABC radio talk-show host, a divided jury
failed to reach verdicts on three charges — kidnapping, racketeering
and extortion and conspiracy — and voted not guilty on a fourth charge
of securities fraud.

A retrial on the three unresolved charges ended in a mistrial in March
2006 when, after hearing from more than a dozen witnesses, the jury
deadlocked for a second time.

Prosecutors made a third attempt in in September 2006, but after a
six-week trial, jurors again failed to reach a verdict, though they
said they believed Mr. Gotti was guilty of organizing the kidnapping of
Mr. Sliwa. At that point, the prosecutors, lacking any new evidence,
chose not to try him a fourth time in the case.

The latest charges, leading to the arrest on Tuesday, involve the 1990
shooting of a Gambino soldier and construction contractor, Louis
DiBono, who was found shot seven times — with four bullets to his head
— slumped in a Cadillac sedan in the parking garage of the World Trade
Center.

The elder Mr. Gotti, who was convicted of murder and racketeering in
federal court in Brooklyn in 1992 and sentenced to life in prison, was
found guilty of authorizing the killing of Mr. DiBono, along with four
others. Mr. Gotti died in prison in 2002 at age 61.

Jurors at his trial heard the elder Mr. Gotti, whose speech was often
punctuated with expletives, boasting that Mr. DiBono was killed because
he ignored orders to report to him.

“He’s going to die because he refused to come in when I called,” the elder Mr. Gotti said.