Junior Gotti Jumped $harks
It's tough in the loan-shark business when your customers move without a forwarding address.
John "Junior" Gotti says he had to give up loan-sharking because too many of his clients vanished into the federal Witness Protection Program.
"I was a loan shark. The fact that most of my customers joined WITSEC [the Witness Security program] pretty much bankrupted me," he said in a "60 Minutes" interview to air Sunday at 7 p.m. on CBS/Channel 2.
"They chased me out of the business but quick," Junior said of the feds.
Gotti, 46, also spoke about the death of his 12-year-old brother Frank, who was accidentally struck and killed by a car driven by a neighbor in 1980.
"But my bedroom . . . the vent was attached to his den and I would hear him cry."
The driver who killed Frank Gotti later vanished, and there have long been rumors that Gotti Sr. ordered him killed.
When asked if his father was involved in the disappearance, Junior answered, "Probably."
"Knowing John and how he felt about a lot of things, especially regarding his own children, he probably was," he said.
"Do I know it with certainty? No. He'd never discuss that with me."
Junior also acknowledged his father was a killer.
"I don't know if you can ever justify murder. I don't know if you can justify it, but I can make, I can make some type of argument. You want to hear it?" Junior asked.
"John was part of the streets. He swore that was his life. He swore, 'I'm gonna live by the rules and die by the rules of the streets, the code of the streets,' and everybody that John's accused of killing or may have killed or wanted to kill or tried to kill was a part of that same street.
"That was a part of the same world, the same code, and my father always said in his mind, 'You break the rules, you end up in a Dumpster' "
Junior spent nearly six years in prison, from 1999 to 2005, after pleading guilty to a raft of racketeering charges.
Once he got back home, federal probers claimed, he got back into the mob life. But the government failed to make further charges stick, and dropped the case in January after four hung juries.
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