Gotti's former pal testifies that he saw Jr. stab a man - and that his dad paid to make case go away
John A. (Junior) Gotti sat placidly in a nearby apartment after brutally stabbing a man to death in a wild 1983 barroom brawl, a drug-dealing ex-pal testified Tuesday.
The knife-wielding killer "showed no emotion at all" after leaving a gorespattered Daniel Silva to die on an Ozone Park barstool, career criminal Kevin Bonner told a Manhattan federal jury.
Gotti avoided prosecution for the vicious slaying in the Silver Fox when his mob boss father paid an NYPD detective $10,000 to make the case disappear, Bonner claimed.
Bonner, 45, acknowledged under cross-examination from Gotti lawyer Charles Carnesi that he kept the explosive testimony to himself for years - until he faced nearly a half-century in jail.
Bonner said he had mentioned the killing to mob murder victims George Grosso and Johnny Gebert, along with Junior's best friend-turned-informer John Alite.
"Gebert's dead. Grosso's dead. And Alite is cooperating," Carnesi noted dryly.
Bonner recounted the scene in the bar, when he said Gotti's disagreement with a pesky barfly known as Elf escalated into a glass-throwing free-for-all.
"I looked over at John, John Gotti, and saw him stab this kid," Bonner testified at Junior's federal racketeering trial. "I can see the kid get stabbed."
As members of Gotti's crew tried to hustle the mobster out of the bar, Bonner spotted a dying Silva propped up on a barstool, he said.
"He looked like he was in bad shape," Bonner testified. "Blood all over his shirt."
Bonner took the stand in Gotti's fourth federal trial in the past five years. The three previous cases ended in mistrials.
Gotti and his crew met in a Queens apartment after the slaying, where a cold-blooded Junior sat impassively before bolting for his cousin's Long Island home, Bonner said.
He returned after a payoff was made by the Dapper Don to "make it go away," Bonner said.
Bonner, who said he grew up idolizing the local mafiosi in Queens, said he wasn't surprised by Gotti's violent outburst. The second-generation gangster wanted to make his own way up the mob ladder.
"He didn't want anything given, handed to him," said Bonner, who is doing 25 years in a Florida prison for a series of armed robberies.
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