The American tv drama Your Honor, starring Bryan Cranston, is a remake of an Israeli series, Kvodo. Both centre around a judge’s teenage son who accidentally kills another child in a hit-and-run. Except that the victim is the son of a prominent crime family.
Both series are, in fact, very similar to a real-life drama that played out in the US in 1980.
John Favara, from the Queens district in New York was not a judge, but an ordinary auto worker. His back-door neighbours, however, were not so ordinary: Gambino crime family mobster John Gotti and his brood. Still, Favara got on well enough with the Gottis: apparently Favara’s son, Scott, often had sleepovers with John Gotti Jr growing up.
Everything changed on March 18, 1980.
That day, Favara finished up a day shift in Long Island, as usual, and was heading home just as the sun was setting. The glaring sun combined with a construction dumpster to create a blindspot. Unknown to Favara, 12-year-old Frank Gotti, mobster John’s son, was riding a borrowed minibike around the neighbourhood – and right into the path of Favara’s car.
The Gottis would later claim that Favara had been drunk when he struck Frank with his car. According to John Gotti’s daughter, Victoria, in her memoir This Family of Mine, Favara was initially unaware that he had hit Frank and kept speeding along, dragging the child 200 feet before neighbors banged on his windows and shouted at him to stop his car.
When Favara finally saw the boy’s mangled body, he allegedly exclaimed, “What the f—k was he doing in the street?”
You’ve just hit and killed the son of a mob boss. Three guesses what’s going to happen next.
Yet, Favara was initially (and strangely) oblivious. Local police received an anonymous call just two days later warning them that Favara would be ‘eliminated’. When they passed on the warning, he shrugged it off.
But Favara would receive several more death threats in the months that followed. Letters arrived at his door. Threatening phone calls from people who refused to identify themselves flooded in. Someone put a photo of Frank Gotti in his mailbox, and on May 22, Favara exited his home to find the word “MURDERER” spray-painted on his car.
He finally seemed to get the message 10 days later, when Gotti’s wife (also named Victoria) attacked him with a baseball. The penny dropped: time to get out of town. Fast.
The Favaras put their house up for sale, and just over a month later, they were in the process of selling it to a buyer. The deal was expected to close on July 31.
Six days before moving day, the Gottis went on a convenient family holiday to Florida. Meaning that they had a solid alibi when, three days later, a group of men grabbed Favara from outside his work and bundled him into a van. Witness accounts varied: some said he was beaten with a baseball bat, while others maintained he was shot with a silenced pistol.
Whatever happened, John Favara was never seen again.
The Gotti family returned from their trip on Aug 4, 1980 and were immediately questioned about John Favara’s abduction. Gotti’s wife, Victoria, told investigators, “I don’t know what happened to him, but I’m not sorry if something did. He never sent me a card. He never apologized. He never even got his car fixed.”
Her husband echoed this sentiment, saying, “He killed my kid” with a shrug.
Favara was officially declared dead in 1983. His body has never been found. According to the 2009 murder trial of Gambino family mobster Charles Carneglia, Carneglia shot Favara on Gotti’s orders, then dissolved his body in a vat of acid. That claim was never proven.
For his part, Favara’s son Scott remembered his father fondly, once saying, “He was a great man, more than anyone would ever know.”
Was Frank Favara’s end set in stone from the minute he ran over a mobster’s child? For her part, the dead boy’s sister, Victoria Gotti, suggests, however unlikely, that even mobsters might be inclined to mercy, circumstances permitting.
“It’s human nature to want revenge against someone that hurts those you love,” she wrote. “I only wish Favara had shown some remorse – some respect. I believe he would be alive today if he had.”
Some of us might be a little more sceptical.
