NY mafia don arrested by FBI

The game of cat and mouse that has been playing for years between John Gotti and the FBI has entered a new round. The former head of the Gambino crime family has been arrested and charged with crimes relating to three New York murders and cocaine trafficking. Gotti, known as Junior and a scion of one of the five great mob families of New York, is being held without bail after being taken into custody by a dozen agents in a swoop on his home in Long Island that left his family complaining bitterly.

Gotti, 44, has been the subject of FBI interest for years. He served five years in prison between 1999 and 2005 for racketeering. Then he was almost immediately put on trial for an earlier attack on the founder of the Guardian Angels, Curtis Sliwa. Three attempts to prosecute Gotti all ended in mistrials and the charges were dropped.

He claims to have renounced all mafia involvement and, after the most recent attempt last November to put him back behind bars for failure to pay taxes, he has been complaining that prosecutors have been persecuting him and putting his family's lives in danger.

"The kids were hysterical," said Angela Gotti, about her brother's children after the latest arrest. "They (the FBI) just won't leave us alone."

The new charges, the most serious he has faced in his career, accuse him of trafficking more than 5kg of cocaine and of being involved in the killings of three men – two drug dealers and a Gambino foot soldier said to have upset John Gotti Snr – between 1988 and 1991.

The indictment alleges the Gambino family publicly shot, stabbed, beat and murdered them in order to "create and maintain fear and dread in others" and that it "captures a lifetime of crime by John Gotti that has been developing over two decades". Five other men have also been charged.