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“I was the chief of staff of the Gambino crime family.”
That’s how Lewis Kasman describes his role at the side of legendary Mafia boss John Gotti.
Kasman spent years with Gotti and the Gambino crime family and is now peeling back some of the secrets and revealing what that life was like at the top of the American Mafia.
“I had a big toy chest in my attic in my house in Woodbury filled with millions of dollars in it,” he says, in amounts varying from $6 to $10 million, depending on the month, saying the Gambino family earned more than $100 million a year.
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“I loved it. I loved it all. I loved the power…to have the boss’s ear, and I had unfettered access. It was amazing.”
Kasman, who is now 68 years old, opens up about his friendship and working with Gotti for a Fox Nation exclusive documentary, “Gotti’s Guy,” which can be seen on the Fox Nation streaming site and Fox One.
Throughout the late 1980s and early ’90s, as Gotti reigned over the underworld, Kasman was right there, in the inner circle. He was a familiar fixture accompanying the Don, the made men and Gotti’s lawyers. He was routinely referred to as “Gotti’s adopted son” by the news media and frequently interviewed and quoted defending Gotti during his various trials.
In the Fox Nation program, Kasman describes how he grew up as “a Jewish kid on Long Island,” who went to sleep-away camp and had a bar mitzvah, to being the trusted sidekick and sounding board to the most infamous Mafia Don since Al Capone.
“We had a brotherhood me and him,” says Lewis. “I had no agenda and he had no agendas. He just wanted my friendship and my voice to speak for him when he didn’t want to speak or couldn’t speak, because of his position.”
Lewis says Gotti needed someone like him, an objective sounding board outside the circle of mobsters, who was loyal, direct and had no ax to grind.
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“I could go in places where John didn’t want to go, and I could talk to Skippers (Capos) the way John didn’t want to. As a boss, you have to carry yourself a certain way. He would never go and ask for anything. That was not John Gotti’s way.”
“I never crossed the line. See, I knew my boundaries. I had the most boundaries that anyone in life could have with John Gotti, and I knew my place. He trusted me and I trusted him.”
“He was a man’s man,” he says. “I used to say, Grandpa, you’re a legend in life. You’re gonna be a legend when you pass, but you’re a legend in reality. You are legendary now. I used to walk around the garment center, guys in trucks would honking their air horns. How’s the boss? How’s the chief? Wherever you would go, they loved this guy.”
“He was a superstar, an A-lister celebrity. The crowds, the people, the pictures. It became surreal.”
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But with time, Kasman reassessed his life and his role. He says back then, in his 20s and 30s, he had put aside his moral issues and ignored any ethical concerns about hobnobbing with Mafia murderers but now sees the error of his ways.
“When I look back, you could disappear at any time,” he says. “He was the Mafia, and he was a killer, and he was a tough guy. Tough guy. Very tough guy.”
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“I did not lie to myself. I knew who he was, and I knew what he was capable of. But I wasn’t in fear of him. I respected him for who he was and the kind of Boss he was of that family. And if he was my father, my natural father, I couldn’t have loved him more.”
During one of Gotti’s trials, his flamboyant lawyer Bruce Culter, called Kasman “one of the finest young men I know,” and said “he has a great friendship and business relationship with John Gotti.”
But the Gotti family has had other names for their former friend.
John A. Gotti, Gotti’s son, wrote scathingly about Kasman in his bestselling book “Shadow of My Father.”
He branded Kasman “traitorous scum,” a “turncoat,” who became “the adopted confidential informant of the FBI,” who is a “perjurer, thief and traitor” who turned on his father… and the Gotti family, by slipping false information to the Feds.
After the elder Gotti died, Kasman got in trouble with the law and he became a confidential informant for the FBI, taping conversations with mobsters and at one time it turned out, Mr. Gotti’s wife as she recovered from a stroke.
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“What infuriated me about Kasman,” Gotti’s son wrote, was “that he had recorded my mother on a visit with her, shortly after her stroke. She was recovering from brain surgery, and had been sedated. As directed by the FBI, are there no limits to what these low lives will do at the behest of their government masters? No.”
Kasman admits he was directed by the FBI to secretly tape the younger Gotti, but says he wound up inadvertently wearing the wire on the visit to his mother.
“It was a mistake,” he now says and deeply regrets it.
In 1996, Kasman served six months in federal prison after pleading guilty to lying to a grand jury investigating the Gambino crime family.
In 2010, Kasman again pleaded guilty to fraud and was sentenced to time served for obstruction of justice and money laundering. Gotti’s eldest daughter Angela was quoted as calling him “a piece of s—,” saying “somebody’s got all my father’s money. He was the one holding it.”
Kasman now resides in Florida and leads a quiet life away from the streets of the city that were once Gotti’s turf.
As for missing those halcyon days and the intense public interest surrounding Gotti, he is now wistful.
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“I don’t miss it,” he says. “I miss him.”
“Gotti’s Guy” is now streaming on Fox Nation. Also, watch the second season of “Stories of the American Mafia” on Fox Nation.