Fans of vintage cable reality television from the 2000s undoubtedly remember the A&E program "Growing Up Gotti" which chronicled the lives of Victoria Gotti, daughter of the late notorious mobster John Gotti, and her three sons. One of the more memorable parts of the show was the family's overly-opulent mansion in Old Westbury, New York, on the North Shore of Long Island. As it turns out, this mansion has been the subject of a multi-decade legal battle that has seen it from a functional family home/reality TV setting to a dilapidated hulk that was just sold at foreclosure auction.
The four-acre property was first purchased as a vacant lot back in 1989 by Victoria and her then-husband Carmine Agnello. They paid $175,000 for the lot. Over the next several years, they built Victoria's dream mansion from scratch. The final product measured around 7,000 square feet of over-the-top, gaudy splendor.
After the couple's divorce in 2003, Gotti became the home's sole owner, and eventually managed to find herself a new calling as a reality TV star. Unfortunately, some time after the show went off the air in 2007, things took a downhill turn for her and for the mansion itself.
In 2016, Gotti was in some hot water with the FBI, and they raided the mansion reportedly in connection with an investigation into charges of fraud. To make matters worse, she had not made a payment on the home in two years at that point and was facing foreclosure, owing the bank $650,000 on the property. She attempted to sell it several times, for as much as $4.8 million, but never found a buyer. The home ended up abandoned and ultimately sold to JP Morgan Chase, the bank that held the mortgage, in a foreclosure auction for $2.65 million.
Back in September of 2021, the BigBankz YouTube channel did a tour of the mansion, finding it almost unrecognizable from its reality TV heyday. The swimming pool was filled with algae and the landscaping was both overgrown and dying, like something out of "The Addams Family." Check it out for yourself below:
