The Mafia is as popular as ever with the entertainment industry, but its grip on crime is withering as supporters migrate to the suburbs, writes Seán O'Driscoll in New York

Outside the Federal District Court in Manhattan last Thursday, John Gotti jnr looked every bit like the middle-aged businessman he claims to be. Wearing a smart dark suit and striped silk tie with matching handkerchief, he shed a few tears before telling the waiting media that he just wanted to see his son play football.

The day before, ever the concerned suburban Dad, he chatted to reporters about all the animals at his house and how the pot-bellied pig had to go because he was eating the Gottis out of their home.

After three trials on the same racketeering and conspiracy charges, a jury yet again couldn't reach a decision on whether John Gotti had genuinely left the family business behind or was still the leader of America's most successful criminal enterprise.

On the footstep of the courthouse, waved on by cheering old ladies, Gotti sent out a not-so-subtle message that the Gambino crime family, over which his family has presided for two decades, was coming to a close.

"My father's dead over four years," he said of his more famous predecessor, John Gotti snr, who was known as the Teflon Don because police charges against him just wouldn't stick, but who was eventually jailed for life. "It's time to let go. It's time for us all to just move on. It's over. He's dead. That's it. It's over. Now I've got to rebuild my family."

After briefly praising his wife and kids, he repeated his mantra: "It's time for us all just to move on, just to move on." With that, he and two of his helpers climbed into his grey SUV and drove off to mobster heaven - Oyster Bay Cove on Long Island, home to Gotti's $7 million (€5.5 million) mansion and an array of equally ostentatious homes owned by his sister, Victoria, the star of the hit reality show, Growing Up Gotti, and a host of Gambino family bigwigs.

Prosecutors quietly accept that they will not be allowed to put Gotti on trial for a fourth time for allegedly ordering the near-fatal shooting of Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, and other charges. As a consolation prize, the three trials have almost demolished the Mafia legend, showing how the Gambino family has degenerated into farce since Gotti snr went to prison.

Perhaps the most striking evidence came from the bull-necked, block-headed "Little Joe" D'Angelo, the self-confessed driver in the shooting attack on Curtis Sliwa.

As is Mafia tradition, when a new member is sworn in, they must hold a burning image of a saint in their hands and swear that they will burn like the saint if they ever reveal Mafia secrets. In D'Angelo's case, Gotti jnr forgot to organise a picture of a saint, so someone wrote "Saint" on a piece of paper and drew a crude cross underneath. After the burning ceremony, D'Angelo was treated not to the traditional swearing-in banquet, but to a greasy burger at a Queens diner.

"The Mafia are much, much weaker in traditional industries than they were in the 1970s and 80s," says Prof Jim Jacobs of New York University, an organised crime expert whose most recent book, Mobsters, Unions and Feds: The Mafia and the American Labour Movement, details the mob's former tight grip on the US trade union movement.

"The weakening of Mafia's hold on the legitimate economy goes back to 1982 when the government really started to crack down. Overall, the mob's talent pool has gone way down, there is much more opportunity for young people and, of course, white ethnic groups like the Italians have moved out to the suburbs. It's all having a big effect," Jacobs says.

To witness the farcical state of the modern mob, you only have to look at last year's HBO's House Arrest reality show, in which a camera crew followed gregarious mobster Chris Colombo, (a son of murdered Colombo family don Joe Colombo), as he rushed home from nightclubs and restaurants to comply with his court-ordered curfew.

AS ENTERTAINMENT, THE mob is still huge. As organised crime, it is withering, taken over by Chinese, Russian and east European gangs who match the mob's taste for violence but lack its public allure.

Three days after Gotti jnr walked free, I visit the Society of the Citizens of Pozzallo, a Sicilian social club in the heart of traditional Gambino family territory in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. Half a dozen elderly men sit outside the club, none of them speaking English until I start up a conversation. Here, their talk is of gentrification and house prices, not of John Gotti's tabloid-splashed court case.

"We're thinking of selling this place," says Frank, a native of Pozzallo, Sicily, pointing at the dingy interior of the social club. "House prices are going crazy; we're still talking the idea through." Gentrification is wiping out the formerly Mafia-drenched Italian neighbourhoods of south Brooklyn, the ostentatious garden grottos of the Virgin Mary now sitting uneasily beside gay rainbow flags and Buddhist scrolls along Fourth Place and Smith Street.

"It's much quieter around here now," says John, a retired carpenter, also from Pozzallo, who has seen dramatic changes in the neighbourhood. "This street used to have crime. I never got involved. I see something happen; I turn the other way and walk away. It's dying away now anyway," he says.

The same conservative attitude to crime can not be said for Bobby, whom I meet through a mutual friend in the Italian neighbourhoods and who is in no way connected to the Pozzallo club. A friendly second-hand car salesman, Bobby was jailed for two and a half years for his part in a 2002 payroll scam his construction company was running through the Brooklyn School Construction Authority. Bobby's father was also arrested with a group of local associates.

"I never got involved in the mob directly. People came to my father and did things that way. That's how it's done," he said. The mob, he says, is dying across New York.

"I'm not sorry to see it go, but I am sorry to see the neighbourhoods go. Carroll Gardens is nothing but yuppies now, people there can't buy a house. Carnasie, where all the great mob leaders came from in the old days, that's all black people now. It's over."

But there are signs that the Mafia is making a comeback, at least online, where its move into internet gambling, porn and fraud is booming.

In 2004, prosecutors in Queens announced that they had uncovered a $300 million (€2.4 million) a year gambling ring based on the Mets baseball team. The operation, by the Bonanno family (of Donnie Brasco fame) was run through Costa Rica, with online links back to New York, where prominent members of the major New York ethnic groups pulled in the bets using online code words.

In the Irish community, it was run by William Harnett, a Limerick businessman and popular joint-owner of the Tír na nÓg bar in mid-Manhattan. Late last year, after Harnett admitted being involved, a district judge agreed not to put a conviction on his record as long as he stayed out of trouble. A leading Mafia historian in the US, Allan May, says that such cases are increasingly being organised by individual mob members, who do not have traditional Mafia support.

"Nobody wants to be sworn in any more, it's like painting a giant target sign on their back. What we're increasingly seeing is individual actions, with the Italians at the centre of multi-ethnic groups. These aren't coming under the control of a central Mafia family control. If the John Gotti jnr trial proves anything, it's that nobody wants to be boss anymore. The Mafia empire is collapsing. Out there now, it's more like guerilla war."