According to this Fox News report, John Gotti and other members of the Mafia in New York City discussed the idea of assassinating Rudy Giuliani when he was a U.S. Attorney in New York:
Rudy Giuliani on Thursday brushed off new reports that top mob bosses narrowly decided not to put a hit on him back in the 1980s, saying it wasn’t the first time he’d learned of such a plot.
“You get used to it,” Giuliani told syndicated radio talk-show host Mike Gallagher.
“Dapper Don” John Gotti, the late head of the Gambino crime family, and Colombo family boss Carmine Persico in 1986 mulled the idea of snuffing out then-Manhattan U.S. attorney Rudy Giuliani, according to testimony given Wednesday during the murder trial of a retired FBI agent.
Giuliani, now the Republican presidential frontrunner, at the time headed the federal government’s prosecution of the mob. But the other three chiefs of New York’s five mob families — Bonnano, Lucchese and Genovese — rejected the plan, according to an FBI agent who testified Wednesday in the murder trial against a retired agent, The New York Post reports.
A report like this works to Giuliani’s advantage, of course, because it makes him look like the tough guy staring down the mob bosses.
In reality, though, there never really was a threat that the Mob would hit Giuliani:
[T]he plot, as described, drew some skepticism from experts on the Mafia, including former law enforcement officials.
For one thing, assassinating a prosecutor would go against decades of tradition. American Mafia leaders have generally treated their organizations as businesses primarily concerned with making money. Killing law enforcement officials, in this view, would only draw unwanted scrutiny.
In fact, mobsters who kill prosecutors have a history of ending up dead themselves. Back in the 1930s, the legendary Bronx gangster Arthur S. Flegenheimer, known as Dutch Schultz, was shot dead after plotting to kill Thomas E. Dewey, a state rackets prosecutor who went on to be governor. More recently, two associates of the Luchese crime family pleaded guilty in 1997 to the 1989 murder of Costabile Farace, a prime suspect in the killing of a Drug Enforcement Administration agent.
It’s sort of like the scene in The Godfather
You can’t kill a cop, they tell him, it would be the end of the family’s political power. Of course, Michael does it anyway, making for one of the best scenes in the entire movie:
But that’s The Godfather and this is real life, and I just don’t buy it.
