Mafia dons and Osama bin Laden look the same.

John Gotti's body was put in a crypt in Queens on Saturday, which means that it officially has begun to rot. One of the Mafia don's many local admirers told the newspapers, "I believe he is in heaven. He died in a state of grace." John Gotti will be lucky if he's asked to do less than about a half-million years in Purgatory, assuming the Final Judge doesn't extend Gotti's life sentence unto eternity. The Catholic Church, proving it can still get some things right, denied Gotti a last Mass, offering as a reason--his life.

All that obviousness aside, it's hard to think of many other corners of American life where mythology overwhelms manifest reality than the Mafia. The media have made mobsters mythic since the beginning of time. All the way back in 1930, Edward G. Robinson starred in "Little Caesar," about Al Capone, a well-known newspaper celebrity. Perhaps speaking for every American ever awestruck by big-time outlaws, Gotti lawyer Bruce Cutler took time at the funeral this week to catalog the don's virtues: "His strong upbeat ways . . . his courage, his perseverance, his never say-die-attitude."

A great part of the Mafia mythology derives from the belief that for all the criminality, mobsters live in conformance with an internal code of behavior that requires internal adherence to attributes seen as the virtues of a functioning society: loyalty, respect, honesty, even penalties for doing the wrong thing rather than the right thing, that is, justice.

This is false. But the fascination with the possibility that the mob's mores oddly preserve the underpinnings of social stability suggests that the depth of the falsity isn't fully understood. I want to try to illustrate that falsity by offering two biographies--John Gotti's and that of Patrick J. Fitzgerald, both Brooklyn natives.

At 16, Gotti dropped out of high school to take over the Fulton-Rockaway boys, a gang. He was arrested the next year in a gang fight. Between then and 1969, he would be arrested for stealing cars, unlawful entry, bookmaking, breaking into a tavern, petty larceny, grand larceny and federal hijacking, which sent him to federal prison for three years.

In 1974, Gotti was arrested for gunning down a guy outside a Staten Island bar, and he went to prison for attempted manslaughter. In prison he lifted weights. Out of prison, he became a capo. The U.S. indicted him in 1985 for racketeering (typically Mafia racketeering includes debauching labor unions, raising local costs for everyone). Gotti got off.

He installed a barber chair at his hangout, where his hair was washed and blow-dried daily. He was now in charge of 23 gangs with some 2,300 gang members. He was rich. In 1990 he was indicted for murder and was convicted two years later. He was flown to federal prison in Marion, Ill. He died there.

Also the son of an immigrant minority, Patrick Fitzgerald grew up in Brooklyn about 20 years after John Gotti. Instead of joining a gang, he won a scholarship and commuted to Regis, a Jesuit high school in Manhattan, and went to Amherst on a scholarship, working summers as a doorman. He graduated from Harvard Law School, and in 1988 became a U.S. attorney in New York's Southern District.

In 1993 he successfully prosecuted four members of the Gambino mob. Then in 1994, he helped prosecute Sheik Omar and nine others for conspiring to blow up the World Trade Center, the U.N. building and the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels. Two years ago, he led the successful prosecution of the four alleged associates of Osama bin Laden who blew up American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224.

One of the two men above honored only a "code." The other honored the rule of law.

John Gotti, local hero, was in fact a member of the same brotherhood inhabited by Osama bin Laden, men who glory in living outside the rule of law, all the while pretending to inhabit the culture of civilization--dressing up in fancy Italian suits or spouting Islamic poetry, and refusing to subject themselves to any law other than their own code, which is to say, barbarism.

We may still read or watch "The Godfather," or "The Sopranos," with rapt amazement at the arcane but strict rituals of behavior they display, but truly, this is the same fascination with which we watch the organized behavior on the Animal Channel. Living as we do under the protections of the rule of law, achieved painstakingly and with great loss of life across many centuries, it is sometimes hard not to be fascinated with the alternative universes created by the Gottis, Gambinos, bin Ladens and Saddams of the world.

And television, given the opportunity of a "godfather's" funeral or a bin Laden "statement," dotes on it microscopically--a 75-limousine motorcade teeming with flowers or one man squatting in a white robe. The people who control TV's cameras possess, above all else, an unerring sense that even civilizations can't avert their eyes from spectacle, and evil always makes a spectacle of itself.

The effort required to keep nihilistic psychos like John Gotti or bin Laden from imposing the jungle on the rest of us is enormous. The faceless cops who planted the eavesdropping bugs that put John Gotti in prison to die of neck cancer are in the same game as the famous Donald Rumsfeld. They are local heroes whose lives don't get put on television. Their code, fortunately, is our code.