NEWTON'S LAW: NICE SUITS AND VACATIONS ASIDE, IS BIG CITY LIFE REALLY WORTH IT?

Nice cars. Nice suits. Nice vacations. Nice lifestyle, if you regard getting rich with no visible means of support as nice.

Al Pacino spoiled the image. He was glamorous in hoodlum garb. John Gotti, the man who maintains a tan when jailed for a year, does little better in helping us sort out perceptions. His serene disposition is one more suited to a TV preacher. It belies the violent world he commanded.

This trial of Gotti (a peculiar one the accused has a cheering section that greets his arrival each day) brings a distant fascination to America's midsection. The drugs these sorts traffic may reach these remote parts, but little else in the crime families' orbit touches our daily lives.

The only way most of us would come in contact with a real-life mobster is if one were exiled into our midst as part of a witness-relocation program.

No dons are shot down on street corners in Cape Girardeau. Men who earn nicknames like "Bull" tend to be farmers around here, not enforcers. In New York, you get a degree of edgy deference by being referred to as a "made" man; in Southeast Missouri, such a reference would draw only a baffled stare.

I, for one, do not feel my rural upbringing has excluded me from any terrific urban birthright. Mobsters are essentially businessmen, and they operate a volume business. The more compact a population, the greater the capacity to cash in quickly.

As Sonny Corleone would say, it's business, not personal.

So it goes with John Gotti, who led the good life by leading a bad life. The reputed leader of the Gambino crime family now stands trial in New York for racketeering, gambling, loan-sharking, obstruction of justice, bribery and five murders.

(Not content with one province of wrong-doing, the business minds of the mob thought it best to diversify, spreading out into mixed fields of criminality.)

The cards are beginning to topple, however. Just like businesses sometimes fail due to the vanity of their managers, so does the mob fall prey from time to time of human impulses. Salvatore Gravano is a mob aberration, the guy who doesn't know a good blood oath when he sees one.

In mob parlance, there is something known as "omerta." It is a code of silence, fundamental to initiation into a crime family. It's like hell week on Greek row, only with gruesome stakes.

Gravano, once just a well-placed indictment away from the top spot in the Gambino family, violated the oath in rather dramatic style Monday, telling a jury of the savage life he lived alongside John Gotti.

Gravano admitted to 19 killings and brought Gotti along for the ride. The government loves him for his cooperative spirit. He is the highest-placed mobster ever to become a government witness. For this, he earned a plea bargain that will keep him in prison no longer than 20 years. Gotti faces a life sentence if convicted.

One can draw all sorts of allusions from this slice of mob existence. You can suggest that these men long ago lost their souls, that their deadly way of life exacted its own mocking vengeance. You might assume that Gravano is better off in prison, where the mob's code violations aren't so easily enforced. (That's not to say it can't be done.)

Gotti survived three trials previous to the current one. He walked a free man, the "Teflon Don," a career hoodlum in good standing, until government agents convinced Gravano that goodfellas really do snitch on their friends.

Is this the price of respect? Gotti wore tailored suits and power ties, commanded legions of men and controlled vast amounts of money, only to end up spending most of his days in a courtroom, handed over to prosecutors by his best friend.

Life in the big city. Being a country boy isn't all that bad.