When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

by John Ganz

“Gotti’s a satanic sort of authority figure.” When New York turned its lonely eyes to John Gotti, it was longing for another kind of authority than the type Giuliani had represented up to that point. It didn’t really want the law, universalism, meritocracy, rationality, bureaucracy, good government, reform, blind justice, and all that bullshit. The institutions had failed, the welfare state had failed, the markets had failed, there was no justice, just rackets and mobs: the crowd didn’t want the G-man dutifully following the rules, and it didn’t want to be part of the “gorgeous mosaic”; it wanted protection, a godfather, a boss, just like the undertaker at the beginning of The Godfather. Gotti was not really a figure of revolt and anarchy at all, he was a symbol of order, the old order that many longed for still, an order more real and deeper than the law, upheld by brute power. The papers made much of Giuliani’s use of “obscenity” in his speech. Giuliani understood that the voice of real authority was obscene. Maybe all the city’s fractious parts came together to make a mosaic, but it was in the form of an icon of John Gotti, a negative spirit of the city as a warren of rackets, mobs, and grasping, fighting individuals. And if Giuliani wanted to be mayor, he’d have to light a candle at the altar.