This Gotti Has Different Story To Tell Mobster’s Daughter Releases A Well-Received Novel

She is an enigma, wrapped in a mystery, wearing a very short skirt.

She’s a mobster’s daughter who grew up, married, and wrote a nonfiction book on women and heart disease that was hailed by doctors and health-care advocates alike. Then she wrote a novel - not a tell-all biography spilling the family’s secrets like so much runny marinara, but a credible thriller earning solid reviews.

She has drop-dead curves and waist-length gold hair. She looks a little like Faye Resnick, sounds a bit like Fran Drescher, and was recently hailed by no less an authority than Jimmy Breslin as one of Esquire’s Women We Love. But in private, she’s a devoted wife and mother of three sons who shuns the nightlife in favor of chaperoning school trips and cooking homemade meals.

Oh, and one other thing - Victoria Gotti, 32, author, mother, health-care fund-raiser, daughter of John Gotti - is absolutely loyal to her dad.

“He was a businessman,” she says, dismissing FBI tapes, seven years of surveillance and a verdict to the contrary with a flick of her French manicured fingertips. “My father was always a businessman.”

And Victoria Gotti, whose novel, “The Senator’s Daughter,” hit bookstores last week, was always a writer.

She was born in Brooklyn and grew up there, then lived in Queens, the second of John and Victoria Gotti’s five children, the only one in the family who was quiet and shy - so much so that Victoria remembers her mother telling her father, “I think there’s something wrong with her.”

She was a solitary child who made straight A’s in public school and poured out her heart to journals she began writing as a child. “I would write about my life, about things that were happening to me, only I’d turn them into fiction, into stories.”

Her mother - Victoria Sr., who insisted on the record that she’d never asked her husband how he made his living - was “an incredible woman … our Rock of Gibraltar.”

“Times were tough. I’ve got three children, and I look back now, and she had five children, and I don’t know how she managed.”

Victoria remembers how her mother made the children’s clothes, cut the girls’ hair, force-fed ailing kids “this awful garlic soup that I’d get sick if I ever had to eat again.”

And she remembers how glamorous her mother looked when she’d get dressed up to go out with her father.

Ask her to talk about her mother, and she’s serious, even reverential.

But ask Victoria Gotti to discuss John Gotti, and she’s more like a woman talking about a saint - or a martyr. Someone she loves passionately and believes in deeply. Her green-blue eyes light up. She smiles. She shines.

“He’s extremely charismatic, extremely generous,” she begins. “If he had $5, my mother got $4.95. He was always the most popular guy. …

“He was always such a strong character, such a strong presence.”

And this handsome, magnetic, admired father could make his skinny, quiet daughter feel like a princess.

“I remember,” says Victoria, “my 15th birthday.” She and her youngest brother shared a birthday, but that night, her father told her to be dressed and ready - “we’re going to do something special.”

He took Victoria to a restaurant called SPQR, then out to “Chicago,” which was on Broadway - “my first show,” she recalled.

“Being out with him was fun, and explosive! Everyone fussed over him. … Women sent him drinks. Men wanted to shake his hand.

“I remember once some tourists wanted to come over and just touch him. It was the most magical night of my life. He took that night and gave it to me.”

What happens to Mafia kids?

Basically, the same things that happen to the children of any other famous, or infamous, group. They become doctors and lawyers, or junkies and petty thieves.

They go into the family business, or they change their names and move far away and never speak of their past lives to anyone. They run pizza parlors, or work in bakeries, or are housewives or teachers. Sometimes, the daughters make dutiful marriages with men their fathers choose - marriages that can be loving, or abusive, or horribly cold.

Sometimes sons and nephews who aren’t part of La Cosa Nostra get killed in the crossfire.

Antoinette Giancana wrote the best-selling novel “Mafia Princess,” detailing her unhappy childhood, her battles with the bottle, her eventual recovery. At 51, she posed for Playboy, saying it was something she always wanted to do, but her father, slain Chicago mob chieftain Sam “Momo” Giancana, would never have allowed it.

Victoria Gotti says she was lucky. She started college - St. John’s in New York - at “15 going on 16,” before she could even drive. The Ivy League wasn’t an option, because leaving wasn’t an option.

“I’m very close to my parents,” she says. “I wouldn’t have left them.”

She was out of school and married to car-parts businessman Carmine Agnello by the time her father became John Gotti, the headline perennial, the Teflon don always ready with a quip, the man who epitomized the Mafia for the go-go, sound-bitten ‘80s - high greed glossed with high style; the velvet fist in a hand-sewn designer glove.

Gotti now resides in the federal penitentiary in Marion, Ill., serving a life sentence for his 1992 conviction on charges of murder and racketeering.

Victoria Gotti visits him monthly and had him read early drafts of “The Senator’s Daughter,” which features a lovely young bottle-blond lawyer named Taylor Brooke who changed her name and appearance to flee an abusive husband and a painful childhood. The love interest is Michael Sessio, who catches Taylor’s eye: “As she watched him, it became apparent that even if he never reached the level of his father’s fame, Michael Sessio commanded attention. It went beyond his good looks and his intensity, but it took her several moments to pinpoint.

“The younger Sessio believed in what he was saying. And any time a man believed something with this sort of passion, it convinced others.”

Gotti will say Taylor, her heroine, is modeled on her mother, who had the same kind of sad childhood. But is Michael Sessio modeled on John Gotti? The author answers obliquely: “There are pieces of lots of people I know in my book. … and yes, my father’s in there. His mannerisms. His ways.”

“She is the most sincere person I know.”

That’s Michael Arens, head of the Long Island region’s American Heart Association, talking about the Victoria Gotti he knows - the devoted volunteer who lends her face and form and name to raising funds for the organization.

Gotti suffers from a condition called mitral valve prolapse, which causes her heart to race uncontrollably.

Now she wears a palm-size heart monitor strapped to her back, and her doctor is considering experimental surgery.

Her first published work, “Women and Mitral Valve Prolapse,” explains the condition in readable terms. Gotti hosts regular events to raise funds and awareness about the disease.

Arens has worked with her for two years.

“She comes across as so sincere in the beginning you can’t believe it,” he gushes. “You think, ‘There’s got to be something behind this.’

“When she says something, she really, really means it. I’ve never met anybody like her in my entire life.”

Of course, that won’t stop the world from trying, or from whispering and wondering.

Gotti’s husband dropped out of high school and works in car parts. Yet he supports his family in millionaire-style splendor in a ritzy Long Island neighborhood.

And Gotti herself is well aware that if she were not Victoria Gotti, she would not have a book in every Barnes & Noble.

In an ideal world, she said, people would take the novel on its own merits and not read it just to find out secrets of the Gotti family or to see whether John Gotti’s daughter can write.

“But, realistically speaking,” she said, “that has to be expected. This book was to prove myself, to prove my credibility. The next one will be different.”