John 'Junior' Gotti agrees to movie about his life

LOS ANGELES — Hollywood has produced no shortage of movies and TV shows about the mob, but this one's coming straight from the most high-profile source imaginable: John "Junior" Gotti has sold the rights to his life story.

The 46-year-old son of the late, legendary Gambino crime family leader, "Dapper Don" John Gotti, has agreed to a deal with the independent production company Fiore Films. Financial details weren't made available because of a signed nondisclosure agreement, but a film about Gotti's life is in the works with a production budget of $15 million.

Gotti was tried four times since 2005 for racketeering, with each trial ending in a hung jury. He was released from prison in December after serving nine years in a previous racketeering case. He has said he left the life of organized crime in 1999.

These days, he's simultaneously working on a book and a screenplay with actor-writer Leo Rossi, which should be done by the end of the year. Casting should be announced around then, too, with shooting scheduled to begin in March. Fiore Films CEO Marc Fiore said Sylvester Stallone is among the people who've expressed interest in being involved both as director and star.

"I didn't realize how many fans the Gotti family had," Fiore said. "I'm getting calls from people we probably would not be able to speak to yet because of the infancy of our company."

Gotti said he chose this company because it was local and because it would let him tell his story.

"It's going to be filmed in New York, I've been working on it in New York, we can be an active player in the situation from start to finish," Gotti said Tuesday in a 30-minute, rare interview with The Associated Press. "They were willing to hear my thoughts and they assured me the script would be absolutely accurate, the script would be fair."

Gotti said previous movies about his family were mostly false because they relied on accounts from journalists or government agents. The HBO movie about his father, "Gotti" from 1996, was probably the most accurate of them all, he said, "and even that missed the mark by at least 40 percent."

"The opportunity presented itself to clear up a lot of inaccuracies," Gotti said. "Now, to do it for the big screen, which I'd never imagined, automatically it's appetizing.

"This is not a mob story. That's one misconception," he continued. "This is a father-son story."