Outside the New York courthouse, hundreds of angry protesters chanted, rattled barricades, and tussled with police. They believed the infamous defendant inside the courtroom was getting “a raw deal.”
One man called the legal proceedings “a travesty” and declared, “There is something dangerous going on in America.” Someone holding an American flag said, “It’s a kangaroo court.” A man who identified himself as a defense attorney said that if the government had “such a good case,” it “should have done it without intimidating everybody and pulling all sorts of dirty tricks.”
That was more than 30 years ago. Back then, the defendant was a mob boss, not a former president who has long operated like a mob boss. And like John Gotti, another no-longer “Teflon Don” has run into trouble that may finally stick to him.
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On Tuesday, Donald Trump became the first former president indicted on criminal charges. He pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts connected in part to his alleged authorization and cover-up of a $130,000 hush money payment made to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress with whom Trump reportedly had sex in 2006.
But this may only be the beginning of Trump’s indictments. His many legal problems keep mounting after a crime wave of a presidency that Gotti, Trump’s former tabloid twin, probably would have appreciated.
Gotti once led what was then the nation’s most powerful mob family. He got the headline-grabbing moniker “Teflon Don” after he was acquitted in three trials. No matter how serious the charges, none seemed to stick — until they did. In 1992, he was found guilty on multiple counts, including murder and racketeering.
Sentenced to life, Gotti died behind bars in 2002.
That left Trump as the new Teflon Don. Whether the accusations concerned the more than two dozen allegations of sexual misconduct and assault or his many scams and scandals, there were never criminal charges brought against him, though his culpability was rarely in doubt.
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And as with Gotti in his pernicious heyday, Trump always emerged unscathed even when others close to him took a fall. Of course, an indictment isn’t a conviction. And the charges that put Gotti in prison for the rest of his life were far more serious than those that Trump and his lawyers plan to vigorously fight in New York. But few could have imagined that Trump would ever be arrested for anything.
For anyone in New York in the 1980s, Gotti and Trump were unavoidable. I’ve always considered them to be brothers of other mothers under the skin, suckled by the city’s voracious tabloids. Both were born in outer boroughs — Gotti in the Bronx, Trump in Queens. Trump came from money while Gotti was raised in poverty, the son of a intermittent day laborer.
Yet they shared a particular hunger threaded into the DNA of New Yorkers a bridge or tunnel away from Manhattan. Nothing speaks more directly to that peculiar inferiority complex than hearing people in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx still refer to Manhattan as “the city,” as if everywhere else is rural farmland or a sleepy suburb.
In Trump and Gotti that hunger bred ruthlessness — not just to succeed, but to dominate and conquer by any means necessary. They craved attention and needed adulation, relishing their images as outlaws and rogues. Whenever he walked in or out of court, even when he was in handcuffs, Gotti always had an above-it-all smile or smirk on his face. In recent weeks, Trump’s inciting rhetoric was meant to evoke the same gangster bravado.
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But there was no showboating from the former president turned defendant. As he disappeared into the courtroom, all Trump offered was a brief scowl at the media assembled in a hallway.
It was a marked difference Monday as Trump’s motorcade made its way to Palm Beach International Airport to head to New York for his arraignment. He waved to cheering supporters lined up along a West Palm Beach roadway. One of them said, “I don’t think they’re going to be able to stick any charges on Donald Trump, the Teflon Don.”
Perhaps that man is too young to remember what happened to the original Teflon Don, who also behaved as if rules were for suckers and real men were unbound by any laws but their own. And maybe he doesn’t know this — when scratched, Teflon loses its efficacy and its nonstick surface becomes much stickier.
While this indictment is unprecedented, it would be even more unprecedented if these are the only charges Trump ever faces. But that’s for other days and other prosecutors. For now in a New York courtroom, a slow march toward a degree of accountability began at last when another Teflon Don was finally scratched.
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Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com. Follow her @reneeygraham.
