It’s supposed to look like a courtroom sketch, right?

For almost five years, the story of John Angelo Gotti III (aka “Junior“, aka “Dumbfella“) has been in development hell. Specifically, the movie version; an A-list biopic of the famous mobster/mobster’s son, titled Gotti: In The Shadow Of My Father, has regularly gained and lost stars and directors since it was first announced in 2010. If you’re like me and your mafia pop culture thirst can’t just be slaked by a rewatch of The Sopranos, then this delay is quite troublesome.

But worry not! The former head of the Gambino crime syndicate is doing the next best thing: self-publishing a Kindle book called Shadow Of My Father, because when you have a perfect title you use it all the time.  The New York Daily News intrepidly reports:

The son of the late “Dapper Don” John Gotti said he decided to write his memoir — despite the protests of his beloved mother [Victoria Gotti] — to set the record straight.

“Our privacy has been invaded more than most families’ due to the selfishness of my father and I, but I can’t keep sitting back and letting this happen,” Gotti, 50, told the Daily News. “At some time you gotta roll up your sleeves and do what’s right.”

If you’re wondering what’s in the book, the Daily News describes it as “riveting” and ran a few excerpts. However, the story of how the book came to be a book is also pretty great. Gotti describes his reluctance to write and publish the story, in which he acknowledges that he ran the Gambino family in his father’s stead, despite a claimed $750,000 offer from a publisher and the aforementioned pressure from his mother.

“The trials had taken their toll on my mother,” he said. “She had three strokes during my trials and she was very upset. So I told her once again, ‘If it makes you feel better, I’ll kibosh it.’…And so in 2010, I shredded it. I had completed 375 pages and I shredded 375 pages. I only had 70 pages more to go. So I apologized to everyone involved, but my family harmony is more important to me.”

Gotti changed his mind again while on a family vacation in August, when he learned Gambino turncoat John Alite was writing his own book about the family. “I found out that that lowlife of all lowlifes — John Alite — this miscreant dog, someone you’d send to get your scraps, this man was in collaboration, with a crime beat reporter, to write our story?” Gotti said.

Gotti, who served several years in prison for various crimes after pleading down to the larger charge of running the Gambino syndicate, has avoided further racketeering convictions during several trials over the past decade. And Alite, who testified against Gotti, has a biography published by HarperCollins imprint Dey St. Books slated to hit shelves next week. If the New York Post’s coverage is any indication, Alite’s book is mostly composed of fightin’ words.

It was Alite’s alleged relationship with Junior’s sister, Victoria — a relationship she denies — that marked the beginning of a rift between Alite and Junior.

“I was fooling around with Vicki Gotti on the sneak, nobody knew, in the late ’80s,” he testified in 2009 at the trial of hit man Charles Carneglia. “I had a problem with Carmine beating up Vicki. That turned into me, Vicki fooling around a lot, seeking each other on the sneak.”

These days, Alite is tight-lipped about the fling. “We were kids at the time — I have a lot of respect for her, but I wasn’t going to lie on the stand.”

You send one of yours to the bindery, we send one of ours to Amazon; that’s the Gotti way. Victoria Gotti, of course, published her own tell-all book, This Family Of Mine, in 2009 via Simon and Schuster. And then there was her reality show.

But this fight isn’t about sales, so much as it’s about reputation. Rushing an ebook to the market ostensibly to protect your and your family’s reputation against critics certainly looks better than other, more violent forms of retaliation. Take, for example, Roberto Saviano, who wrote about the Naples mafia in his bestselling book Gomorrah, and lives under armed guard due to the constant threats against his life. If only the Camorra exacted their revenge with ebooks instead of bullets.