THE Teflon had abandoned the tough old guy, and he died a painful death in a prison hospital.
But the man known as the Teflon Don died as he lived, a consummate wiseguy - and right or wrong, he was proud of it even to the last breath. "He was somebody. Me? I'm a nobody," John "Junior" Gotti was saying yesterday after the third straight mistrial in the feds' efforts to lock him up for most of his adult life.
Consider that a circular saw has been going through Junior's nerve endings since he finished a six-year stretch in Ray Brook federal prison and was immediately thrown into the hole in a federal lock-up in New York and indicted again in July 2004.
From that day, the sword of Damocles has been quivering over his head in the form of a 30-year sentence, which would have made him 72 if and when he breathed fresh air again.
What got him through three trials and the prospect of never seeing his daughters or sons get married? "For instance, my father handled these things . . . well with him, manhood got him through it," Junior said on the 15th floor of the federal court building in Manhattan. "With me, it was my children."
"Now when it came to 'the life,' if someone said to him, 'You have chosen the wrong way,' he'd say, 'What's the right way?'
"Me? Yeah, you can convert - my father, never. He was one of the old-timers, but very faithful to his code.
"Now it's over, my father is in tomb 451 at St. John's Cemetery, my brother Frankie is there - it's over. I'm looking forward to living a middle-class life as opposed to the extravagant life I led in the '90s.
"The jury saved my life."
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