John Gotti was a successful mobster, and he knew a thing or two about what it took to be a successful athlete: use steroids.
The crime boss was seen and heard on a surveillance video recorded in 1998 – the same year that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa both broke Roger Maris’ single-season home run record – during his time in the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois telling his grandson that if he wanted to be an athlete, he had to take lots and lots of steroids.
“First of all, you got to be a good liar, a good lowlife, and an imbecile,” he said from behind plexiglass on a phone to his grandson. “You gotta take steroids. You must take steroids! And anybody that takes steroids is a garbage pail.”
Fifteen years later, Gotti’s remarks about steroid use proved to be true as baseball has become tainted with numerous drug scandals. There was BALCO in the mid 2000’s, a Bay area lab which produced performance enhancing supplements for players such as Barry Bonds, who denied ever using steroids. Then the Mitchell Report of 2007 which named 89 former and current players who were tied to steroid use.
And of course, currently the Biogenesis scanal, in which Ryan Braun, Alex Rodriguez (who is appealing his 211 game suspension) and a slew of other top major leaguers were recently suspended for using performance enhancers.
After hearing his grandfather’s displeasure with him becoming an athlete, he said “Fine, then I’ll be a crook,” which didn’t go over well with the mobster, who died in 2002.