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Crimes of the Times
The Unsolved Slaying of Joe Gatto
00:38:17
When retired art teacher Joseph Gatto was shot to death inside his Silver Lake home in 2013, the LAPD theorized that a fleeing car burglar might be the killer. The victim’s son, a prominent California legislator, found that story increasingly hard to believe.
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- [00:01]
Christopher Goffard
This is an la times studios podcast. Chris Gofford here at LA Times Studios. Thanks for joining us on Crimes of the Times. Today we discuss the unsolved slaying of 78 year old retired art teacher Joseph Gatto. Tell us what you think in the comments below.
- [00:34]
Mike Gatto
I was born to two Italian parents. My dad came over from Italy in 1921 and he met my mom in Pueblo, Colorado.
- [00:48]
Christopher Goffard
That's the voice of the Los Angeles art teacher Joseph Gatto. At the age of 70, he's telling one of his grandchildren about his childhood.
- [01:00]
Mike Gatto
Our house was kind of an interesting one. It had only one tap for water and it did not have an indoor bathroom.
- [01:08]
Mariana Gatto
So it was kind of on the edge of poverty.
- [01:13]
Mike Gatto
Joe Gatto was a Renaissance man. He was somebody who was equally comfortable with, you know, painting paintings, making sculpture, knowing everything to know about art, but also fixing a Chevy engine, right?
- [01:29]
Christopher Goffard
This is his son, former California State Assemblyman Mike Gatto.
- [01:34]
Mike Gatto
My dad grew up very poor and as a consequence, you know, I think a lot of us chase our childhoods. He worked very, very hard as an adult. He had three jobs for much of my childhood.
- [01:45]
Christopher Goffard
For years, Joe Gotta would rise before dawn, teach school, come home to change clothes, then drive to Dodger Stadium to sell peanuts during home games. He had another teaching job on Saturday. In 1985, he helped to found the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. He ran the visual arts department when I was a student there. A couple years later, I remember a small man with large, strong workman's hands. He had a gruff manner in my memory and a blunt, tough love approach. I did not know him well, but classmates of mine who did spoke of him with affection. Years later, one of Gatto's two daughters, Mariana Gatto, who runs an Italian heritage museum in downtown Los Angeles, remembers her father's commitment to his students.
- [02:34]
Mariana Gatto
My dad recognized talent. He knew that oftentimes it was the kids from the wrong side of the tracks whose talent was often went unrecognized and untapped. So he was on you like a father. So he was your teacher, but he was also your father. He would go to bat for his kids. There was a kid who had got into some trouble and they were gonna prevent him from graduating. And my dad, I remember that day he came home and he just, he called up, he made some phone calls to the Department of Education to this and that. He just let him have it.
- [03:15]
Mike Gatto
So Italians from other regions of Italy refer to Italians from my dad's region of Italy as Testadura, which Means. It literally just means hard testa, head, dura, durable. Right. It means dogged and stubborn at the same time. They're very dogged and determined, and I like that. I kind of. It's. Sometimes it's meant as a pejorative, but I take it as a positive.
- [03:37]
Mariana Gatto
There were, I think, expectations of us as kids. He was very much a proponent of education.
- [03:44]
Mike Gatto
He always was kind of upset that I didn't get the artistic gene, but he was very proud that I had gotten elected to the legislature and he had worked on all my campaigns.
- [03:54]
Christopher Goffard
Joe Gatto's house in Silver Lake was crowded with art, sculpture, paintings and jewelry, much of it that he'd made himself. His children compared it to growing up in a Museum. In 2013, he was 78, divorced, retired, and living alone.
- [04:12]
Mike Gatto
I mean, I can't tell you how happy he was to have grandchildren.
- [04:17]
Mariana Gatto
My dad and I, we spoke every day. I mean, if we missed a day, it was kind of an anomaly. We had dinner together every week, a couple times a week. We always either ate at his house or mine.
- [04:29]
Christopher Goffard
November 13, 2013, was a Wednesday. Mariana was planning to have dinner at her father's house that night.
- [04:37]
Mariana Gatto
I called my dad that morning on my way to work. We always had a conversation, you know, about what he was going to make either the night before or the morning of, and if he needed me to bring anything from the store. There was no answer. I called again in the afternoon, and there was no answer. It felt strange to me.
- [05:02]
Christopher Goffard
As the day went on, her worry and anxiety mounted. She told her fiance that she feared the worst.
- [05:10]
Mariana Gatto
So I was on the phone with him, and I said, this is it. We're going to go over to my dad's house and he's. We're going to find him. I. I know he's dead. I just said, I know it.
- [05:25]
Christopher Goffard
She got to the house and found it was dark inside, which was a disquieting sign. So was the presence of her father's cars in the garage. She let herself in and tried to find him.
- [05:38]
Mariana Gatto
And I made my way upstairs, and I found my father slumped over, like, just sitting at his desk, kind of hunched over. And I ran over to him, and I could tell by the color, his color, that he was already gone. But I knelt down next to him to, you know, feel for a pulse, and he was already cold. So I called 91 1, and I was that conversation just. I don't know. It's like a spinning thing in my head. I don't even know what I said. Then I called my brother and I said, michael, Michael, something terrible has happened. Dad's dead. Dad's dead. And he said, what? You know, it can't be. You're wrong. And I said, no, I'm here. And he said, what happened? I said, I don't know. I think it must have been a heart attack. I didn't see blood. There was. It just looked like a horrifically peaceful scene. Then the paramedics in the fire department came and I was just a disaster. They asked me if my dad was on any medications. And I showed them, you know, and then I heard them talking among themselves and kind of pointing towards my father's kind of waist area, his abdomen, because they found the bullet casing. I didn't see it. And they said he had been shot. And I called my brother back and I told him that he had been murdered.
- [07:36]
Christopher Goffard
It was one of 251 homicides recorded in the city of Los Angeles that year. A year when roughly 30% of them went unsolved. The killing of Joseph Gatto is a case study in the devastating psychological damage a crime like this exacts. How unanswered questions can divide a family and how certain crimes can stymie law enforcement efforts even when the pressure to solve them is enormous. That's on today's episode of Crimes of the Times. I'm Christopher Goffard.
- [08:17]
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- [09:15]
Mike Gatto
My name is Fidel Martinez.
- [09:16]
Fidel Martinez / Susie Exposito
And I'm Susie Exposito editor at delos,
- [09:19]
Mike Gatto
the Latin culture wing of the Los Angeles Times. We'll interview genre defining artists. The reason I was attracted to hip hop was because all I needed was a pen and a paper, right? We'll center voices from our communities while
- [09:32]
Christopher Goffard
also giving you the hottest takes.
- [09:34]
Mike Gatto
La to me also feels like a
- [09:35]
Mariana Gatto
very brancho place because this isn't just another culture show.
- [09:40]
Mike Gatto
It's the Delos podcast.
- [09:44]
Fidel Martinez / Susie Exposito
To get a free gift with your journey pack, head to trifum.com that's T R Y F U-M dot com and use code crimesofthetimes to claim your free gift today.
- [09:59]
Mike Gatto
My district generated 58,000 emails a year, and me and my staff answered every single one of them. So I was focused on being the best darn lawmaker I could be. And then this, you know, this came out of nowhere.
- [10:12]
Christopher Goffard
In November 2013, Mike Gatto was a member of the California assembly, representing Glendale, Burbank and parts of Lake. He was chair of the appropriations committee, which made him one of the most powerful politicians in the state. He's talking about the night his sister called to inform him that she'd found their 78 year old father dead in his Silver Lake home. At first, the cause was not clear.
- [10:39]
Mike Gatto
My sister didn't usually call me like at, you know, 7:30, 7:45 on a weeknight. So I decided to pick it up. And my younger sister was, you know, hysterical. And my dad was in great shape. I mean, he was somebody who was tremendously strong, tremendously active, and my dad was so active with, you know, making furniture and, you know, things he did in his yard and everything like that. He really sort of looked like a blue collar worker, right? So my reaction was disbelief. I was like, come on, you know, I mean, my dad had come and visited me in Sacramento, you know, a couple weeks before, and it was like, you know, he's running around, he's riding bikes and stuff like that. I talked with the police on the scene, I talked with the paramedics, I think. But at some point they basically confirmed that my father was dead. And the likely cause of death was a gunshot wound.
- [11:24]
Christopher Goffard
Someone had fired a single bullet into his abdomen with a small caliber handgun. His son said the bullet traveled into an artery in Gatto's leg which caused him to die slowly. The home had been ransacked. It was the neighborhood's first homicide in more than a year.
- [11:44]
Mike Gatto
The experience was surreal. My phone is ringing every minute. It's Governor Brown, Kamala Harris. I mean, you know, everybody is calling and I'M driving and my wife is fielding the phone calls.
- [11:57]
Christopher Goffard
At the time, Jerry Brown was the California governor and Kamala Harris was the attorney general. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti promised an aggressive investigation. One of the first theories was that the Russian mafia might have been involved because Joe Gatto had a collection of Russian and Byzantine icons.
- [12:18]
Mike Gatto
So that was out there for like, not even half of a news cycle.
- [12:23]
Christopher Goffard
The jewelry Gatto made was easily identifiable by the initials he engraved in it. And police issued an alert asking if any of it was showing up in pawn shops or online. This went nowhere. Mike Gada wondered whether his own work as a lawmaker might have inspired the homicide.
- [12:43]
Mike Gatto
I started wondering, could this have been political? Could this have been something that I had done to piss somebody off?
- [12:50]
Christopher Goffard
Mike Otto had introduced an assembly bill preventing California cities and counties from banning the practice of circumcision. This had infuriated anti circumcision activists.
- [13:02]
Mike Gatto
I had a group of people who were following me around at that time because of a bill I had put forth. And so they were like, throwing blood at, like, my press conferences and just doing weird things. But, you know, the police quickly poo pooed that. They said they poo pooed it very harshly. I remember saying, Mike, like, everybody knows where you live. If they wanted to get you, they would have just killed you. They were very direct that they did not think it was political.
- [13:29]
Christopher Goffard
Witnesses emerged whose account would strongly influence the direction of the investigation. A local woman said that on November 12, the day before Gado's body was discovered, a young man had been trying to break into cars on Moreno Drive in the neighborhood. The man wore a hoodie and carried a tan backpack. When she confronted him, police said the man pointed a gun and threatened to kill her. He did the same to another person who confronted him. The man then ran off down a flight of public stairs. The LAPD suspected this was Gado's killer. In the scenario they envisioned, the man ran down onto Gado's street. He might have seen Gado's garage door open, slipped inside to hide, became trapped when Gadot closed the door and then went into the house and shot him. A sketch was released of a vague looking young man in a hoodie.
- [14:28]
Mike Gatto
The media picked it up and this theory has dominated, well, for the first six or seven years. Dominated the case. And going back, I feel like a complete fool for countenancing this theory.
- [14:39]
Christopher Goffard
Mike Otto is an attorney by training. His mind went to work finding implausibilities in the scenario.
- [14:48]
Mike Gatto
I said to the police, well, give Me your profile. They said, okay, well, you know, he runs down the commute stairs, and let's assume he's right handed. People who are right handed, they tend to turn right when they're being pursued. And then he's running down Kenilworth, and then he sees your dad's street. Now, he assumes it's an alley because your dad's street was so small. And he runs down your dad's street. And at that exact moment in time, a tour helicopter was dispatched taking tourists to the Hollywood sign. And your dad's house was in the flight path, but he doesn't know it's a tourist helicopter. He thinks it's an LAPD helicopter. So he's got to get inside. And at that exact time, your dad came downstairs and he had bought a printer at Costco that night. And we know this. And he figured out he could not get it out of his side door, so he had to open up his hatchback. So he had to open up the garage door again. And he opened up the garage door and, you know, he struggled with a printer inside. And at that exact moment, the guy ducked into your dad's garage, and your dad pressed the button and the garage door closed, and he sat in your dad's garage, and then he sat there for an hour. And he doesn't know if the entire Ukrainian wrestling team lives at this house, but he sits in the garage for about an hour, hour and a half, just chills. Doesn't take anything, doesn't just press the button and leave, but at some point decides to go up to the third floor of an inhabited house and just shoot your dad. This has never sat well with me, I should add, for this theory to be true, this person would have had to watch my dad die. My father was shot through the abdomen, and the bullet went into his artery in one of his legs and he bled out, but mostly internally. Okay, so it was probably a fairly slow death. And so you can imagine why this all has a lot of problems for me. Most particular is they had to explain why there was no forced entry. And this is nice and tidy.
- [16:33]
Christopher Goffard
Mike Gatto wrote a book about his father's slaying and about his experience in the aftermath. It's called Noir by Necessity. In it, he describes how interactions with with the LAPD became strained.
- [16:47]
Mike Gatto
I should first stress that the men and women who are on the crime scene, I got a sense that they were deeply caring and that they were very hard working. The initial detectives who were assigned to my dad's case, though they could have done better. When I was touring the crime scene, I mean, I. You know, I had tears streaming down my eyes, and I had not slept much. And, you know, my dad was just murdered, right? And they lectured me on the votes of Democratic lawmakers in the Capitol on a key crime bill. And they actually told me, they said, you know, your vote on AB109, which is a realignment bill, it could have been a 109er who killed your dad? And I thought that that was a little harsh, right, to say to me.
- [17:32]
Christopher Goffard
Cops despised the realignment bill. The law's intention was to let convicted criminals serve their time in county jail rather than in state pr, the better to rehabilitate them. Because of county jail overcrowding, however, many went free. Gatto had come to regret his vote in favor of it.
- [17:52]
Mike Gatto
I tried to be very mindful in my dad's case to not seek special treatment. Life is a life. It doesn't matter who's murdered if it's the father of a lawmaker or if it's somebody else out there in the community.
- [18:05]
Christopher Goffard
When the idea of a reward was raised, Mike's initial impulse was to use his influence to make it a large one.
- [18:13]
Mike Gatto
People were like, no, no, no, you can't do that. I said, why not? They said, well, you would be sending the message if the city council were to approve a special fund, if the police were to approve a special fund, if you were to do it, you would be sending a message that one life is worth more than another. So. And I paused, and that hit me hard, But I paused, and that position is absolutely right. So, you know, the reward in my dad's case was the standard 50,000 bucks.
- [18:37]
Christopher Goffard
Mike Otto says his proximity to power in Los Angeles gave some impetus to. But he sensed that the LAPD resented the perceived interference in their work.
- [18:50]
Mike Gatto
I would not be a good son to my father if I didn't try to keep his memory alive and try to push people to solve his case. But I never, like, called him up and was like, well, you should do this. I would call him up and say, hey, have you considered this? Or get back to me when you can. You know? But, yeah, I think there was tension because, you know, look at the time. Mayor Garcetti, you know, he was somebody who. His council district was Silver Lake and Echo park when he was on the city council. And so we had sort of politically grown up together. And, you know, there would be, like, groundbreakings of, like, the Atwater Village, Riverwalk, right? And we would be seated right next to each other. And as we're speeches are going on, he'd be like, hey, what's going on in your dad's case? I mean, I couldn't lie to him. I couldn't tell him, well, everything's great, you know, it's solved. It wasn't solved and everything was not great. And I got a sense that every time I had a conversation with him, he would talk with the chief, the chief would talk to the chief of the detectives, Chief of detectives would talk to these guys boss and that their boss would talk to them and they'd be like, hey Mike, talk with the mayor. Like let's. You know. And that breeded resentment. And I but you know, again, I don't know how else I could have dealt with it.
- [20:25]
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- [21:19]
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- [22:19]
Mike Gatto
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- [22:41]
Christopher Goffard
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- [23:00]
Christopher Goffard
his 78 year old father was shot to death in his Silver Lake home, the killing consumed Mike Gatto's thoughts.
- [23:08]
Mike Gatto
And I would feel like it's all a dream. And I actually kept a copy of the LA Times on my nightstand because I would wake up and I just think it was all a dream. And so that was really weird. There were six month periods in 2014 and 2015 where I just became so obsessed with the case that I think I sort of withdrew from life. Now. I tried my best, obviously my priorities be a good father and be a good legislator. But I'm sure that things fell by the wayside because I was just so obsessed with the case.
- [23:43]
Christopher Goffard
Police told him there was DNA at the crime scene that might be traceable to the shooter, but it could not be matched to anyone.
- [23:51]
Mike Gatto
So I felt like perhaps the police were just waiting for there to be a hit for the DNA.
- [23:58]
Christopher Goffard
Mike hired a private detective. He talked to his father's neighbors and friends. He put together a long list of possible leads and clues. 20 pages, single spaced. But he was reluctant to give it to detectives, which he says caused further friction with them.
- [24:16]
Mike Gatto
Let's say, you know, at some point my father's killer or killers are arrested and the defense attorney gets a hold of this public record and it's like, oh gosh, Joe Gatto's own son thought that it was so and so, or thought that so and so was involved or had this theory.
- [24:34]
Christopher Goffard
Mike Otto says that he did not want to politicize his father's murder. He said that at one point he was asked to join President Obama at a gun Control event. But he declined.
- [24:45]
Mike Gatto
There's a saying in the Capitol that anecdotes make bad law. And everybody refers to this one state senator who went to pick up her prescription at the pharmacy and couldn't read it. And she was elderly and she's like, God be Daggett, there should be a law about this. And everybody else was like, we're not going to regulate the font size on prescription drugs, are we? And she's like, yeah, we. And so everybody in the Capitol always talks about that case. And the veterans in the Capitol, the staffers and the veteran journalists and stuff, they always counsel lawmakers. Your personal experience is not the way the world works. Try to legislate based on data rather than your personal experience. And so the first principle that I tried to live by in my dad's case was not to let my dad's case skew me. Either way, I didn't want to be remembered as, oh, Mike Godo was that lawmaker whose dad was murdered. I wanted to be remembered as, hey, this guy served for seven years. And here were the good things he did for the state.
- [25:44]
Christopher Goffard
In some ways, however, he says the case did directly affect his work as a legislator. A court decision threatened to cancel the state's program of collecting DNA from arrested felons for preservation in a database, which was a useful crime solving tool. Gatto introduced a law to preserve it.
- [26:04]
Mike Gatto
That bill was killed in the legislative process. And again, I don't think they realized that it had a personal thing for me. I don't think they realized that I had to go to the speaker and another key leader at the time and say, hey, you know, like, there's a lot of families waiting for justice. And if, if this bill doesn't go forward, you know, it also is going to affect my dad's case. And so they magically resuscitated the bill.
- [26:30]
Christopher Goffard
Meanwhile, the lawmaker's thoughts circled relentlessly around his father's last hours and minutes.
- [26:38]
Mike Gatto
How did the person get in his house? He either let them in or they had a key or they ducked in the garage. In this one moment in time, I tend to think that it's more likely that he let somebody in or they had a key or they had gotten a copy of a key or something. Copy of a remote control for the garage or something. My dad never let anybody into his bedroom. Why would somebody be in his bedroom? Why would somebody be up there? My father's room was partially ransacked. Somebody had either tried to take a few things or made a big show of trying to take a few things. Somebody had rifled through a few of the jewelry things and maybe taken a few pieces of jewelry. Somebody had also, again, either was very stupid or had made a show of trying to break into one of his safes. If somebody either shot my dad and, you know, spent another hour in the room letting him die, taking their time to rifle through jewelry, taking their time to try to break into a safe, which I think is kind of surreal, or my father likely surprised somebody who was already there, in which case, we have to explain why my dad would walk into a ransacked room and not walk right out. My dad wasn't stupid. He wasn't a vigilante. He would have just walked right out and called 911 like most people. Or he knew somebody, right? He knew the person. It's entirely possible somebody just knocked on the door. It could have been an elderly friend of his. It could have been a relative. It could have been somebody who he knew in the neighborhood. It could have been a neighborhood kid. It could have been a former student. Who knows? They could have been like, oh, hey, like I was dropping by, just want to say hi. And then the minute they get inside the house, put a gun to his head.
- [28:19]
Christopher Goffard
Six years after Joseph Gaddo's death, a local newspaper, the Los Feliz Ledger, ran a series of stories exposing a bitter feud among the retired art teacher's children. The family acrimony had begun before Gadot's death and had grown uglier since in a fight to divide an estate worth about $5 million, including a number of family heirlooms. When he was killed, according to the story, Joe Gatto had been planning to change his will and disinherit one of his two daughters.
- [28:53]
Mike Gatto
My father, of course, did not expect to die when he did, and we all thought he was going to live a lot longer, and he probably did, too. He was not always great with updating his estate plan. So my dad had been writing out the ideas for his new will. He didn't sign it, didn't date it, and these were found at his desk where he was found shot. He also had ordered change of beneficiary plans, which were. They had literally been fedexed to him, and they had arrived maybe the day before, and they were sitting on his desk unopened.
- [29:32]
Christopher Goffard
Mike Otto says his father's original will divided his money and property between him and his two sisters. But he says his father's new intention was to give his estate to his grandkids.
- [29:43]
Mike Gatto
He was going to do generation skipping. He was going to make his estate skip us and go to the children.
- [29:52]
Christopher Goffard
That would mean his estate went to Mike Otto's two kids and his sister Mariana's child, but would have cut out the other sister, Nicole, a Los Angeles epidemiologist who was at the time a professor in the School of Public Health at Loma Linda University. In the will that went into effect, she kept her inheritance and was named executor of his estate. In the month before his death, Gatto's emails, which are described in court documents, revealed that he despised his daughter Nicole's current boyfriend, the Boy Toy. Gadot called him and characterized him as a man who was, quote, evidently not working, a man who slept late and did not help Nicole with the bills. In his eyes, this was no small character defect. Remember, Gado was an apostle of hard work who was raised by Depression era parents, a man who once sold peanuts at Dodger Stadium to supplement his job as a teacher. In one email described in court filings, Gatto complained to a friend that it would cost him $3,000 to update his trust. But he added, quote, just can't see me leaving anything to the pr. My daughter Nicole chooses to share her bed from time to time. End quote. Details of the tension inside the Gatto family became public in 2019 when Los Feliz Ledger publisher Allison Cohen reported on Gatto's plans to rewrite his will. The reporting drew heavily from court papers filed by Mike Gatto, who was challenging roughly $600,000 in fees that his sister Nicole, as the will's executor, had asked for. The Ledger noted that Nicole and her boyfriend, the man Gano had called the Boy Toy, married at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena in a small private ceremony on November 12, 2013. It was the day Gatto was believed to have been shot. According to the Ledger, a clergy woman there expressed outrage to a reporter there was any connection between the marriage and Gado's death. I was not able to get a hold of the man Nicole married, but I did reach her and she sent me the following text. Hi Chris, I decline participation in your podcast. I was very close with my father and his death was devastating to me and my family. I am opposed to his story being sensationalized for entertainment value. I should also note that I reached out to the LAPD for comment, but the agency did not offer one, which is not unusual for an open case.
- [32:44]
Mike Gatto
The Los Feliz Ledger did a lot of reporting on my dad's case, and at some point they reported you know, that there had been acrimony in the family, specifically acrimony between my father and my older sister. And, you know, I don't know. I mean, it's hard for me to express an opinion on a lot of this stuff. My dad, you know, a humble school teacher with a pretty straightforward estate. Because of the bickering and because of stuff. His estate took nine years to settle.
- [33:13]
Christopher Goffard
The Gado estate was eventually divided between the three children, Nicole, Mike, and Mariana. A battle over a family estate is messy during the best of times. Now imagine the horror of an unsolved murder right in the center of it. In terms of your relations, though, with your sisters, do the Gado children still talk to each other?
- [33:39]
Mike Gatto
Alas, we do not. When people ask me about my dad's case, what did it do to your family? I often say it tore my family apart. And what I mean is, when I say that, I'm referring to both the criminal case and the civil case. It is really hard, of course, to have a family member that everybody loves be murdered. And that part put a lot of stress on all of us.
- [34:05]
Mariana Gatto
And
- [34:07]
Mike Gatto
then to have civil affairs be in disorder and then to bicker about the civil case as well and the inheritance. It tore our family apart. None of us speak to one another anymore. And I'm ashamed to talk about that because I would often read about these families who don't talk to one another about inheritances. And I would say, gosh, it's so common, but it's so awful. And then here we are doing the same thing.
- [34:38]
Christopher Goffard
I asked Mariana Gatto about the possibility that the death might have had something to do with her father's will.
- [34:45]
Mariana Gatto
All evidence suggests otherwise. Well, look, I mean, most of the time, who kills somebody? Somebody they know, right? So we were all suspects. We were all investigated. You know, the police looked through our phones, through I don't know what else, but the evidence in the case seemed to suggest someone else. I felt like the markings, the behavior of this person who committed the crime. To me, it says young, inexperienced, you know, may or may not have a criminal record. To me, it smacks of probably an addict. I don't not try to criminalize all addicts, but somebody who might have been, you know, under the influence, a bit excited, agitated. And the reality of it is that, you know, he could have whatever he took from my father. You know, he could have gone out and gotten high, and he's dead, and we may never know. This is probably a bit macabre, but, you know, I don't share this with a lot of people. But to give you an idea, you know, my dad said to me, probably a year or two before his passing, he said, you know, sweetie, I keep this house locked up tight because, you know, my hearing isn't as good as it used to be. And somebody could come in downstairs and make it all the way up to my bedroom before I would hear them and they could shoot me. Those were my dad's exact words. That's exactly what happened.
- [36:31]
Christopher Goffard
Unlike her brother Mike, Mariana believes the police theory basically makes sense.
- [36:38]
Mariana Gatto
It would be a huge coincidence if something. There were two people in that neighborhood that afternoon with a gun. You know, when you're young and inexperienced and you don't know how to hold a gun, and you might be holding somebody at gunpoint, and you don't realize that, you don't put your finger on the trigger, that's how people get killed. And I have a feeling that's what happened. The sheer randomness of it is shocking. This man, this person, he destroyed, you know, he took my father's life. He impacted a lot of other people's lives. But the moment you give in, you let him win and you let him continue to devastate.
- [37:24]
Christopher Goffard
Mike Gatto quit politics after four terms as a California lawmaker. He says his father's death was no small part of it. The subtitle of his book, Noir by Necessity is How My Father's Unsolved Murder Took Me to Dark Places.
- [37:42]
Mike Gatto
I had done a lot of reflecting on the time I had spent with my father now that he was departed, and I wanted to be present for my son. Being a legislator is an 18 hour day job and it's very hard to be present.
- [37:54]
Christopher Goffard
So.
- [37:55]
Mike Gatto
So that was part of it. But, yeah, I mean, this has felt like unfinished business for me for 12 years now, and it has felt like something that. And by the way, I should stress at the time that I would have had to make a decision about whether or not to run was really when the case was occupying most of my mind and most of my time, 2014, 2015, those years were blurs because of all the stuff in my dad's case. I like to think that there, it's possible there are listeners out there who have information. There could be people out there who know something. It could be somebody who has a theory. It could be somebody who has a hunch. It could be somebody who says, yeah, you know, I remember somebody who lived a couple blocks from your dad coming home in a pool of sweat that night. They can remain anonymous, but please do step forward.
- [38:51]
California Association of Health Plans Representative
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