{"id":630,"date":"2009-01-08T17:38:52","date_gmt":"2009-01-08T17:38:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/01\/drive-carefully-lest-you-end-u.html"},"modified":"2009-01-08T17:38:52","modified_gmt":"2009-01-08T17:38:52","slug":"drive-carefully-lest-you-end-u","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/01\/drive-carefully-lest-you-end-u.html","title":{"rendered":"Drive Carefully, Lest You End Up Dead in a Vat of Acid"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image\"><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/stevenwaldman\/imgs\/gotti.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"gotti.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/128\/import\/assets_c\/2009\/01\/gotti-thumb-200x269-2724.jpg\" width=\"200\" height=\"269\" class=\"mt-image-left\" style=\"float: left;margin: 0 20px 20px 0\" \/><\/a><\/span>No mobster-related story has haunted me more than the tale of John Gotti&#8217;s neighbor who was murdered after he accidentally ran over Gotti&#8217;s 12 year old son.  Briefly blinded by the sunlight, John Favara, hit the boy who was riding a minibike.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nydailynews.com\/news\/ny_crime\/2009\/01\/07\/2009-01-07_informant_says_john_gotti_srs_neighbor_j.html\">The New York Daily News reports<\/a> that a witness in a new racketeering trial gave some of the background on what happened: &#8220;Favara was forced into a van, sources said, and shot in the legs. He was taken to another location in Brooklyn where he was killed and stuffed into a 55-gallon drum, sources said.&#8221;<br \/>\nI don&#8217;t know why this story creeps me out so much.  I guess it&#8217;s the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I aspect.    Forget to put down your sun viser, lose site of the road for a fraction of a second and you could end up dissolving in a vat of acid.   Not sure there&#8217;s a big, spiritual life lesson there. Just drive carefully.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No mobster-related story has haunted me more than the tale of John Gotti&#8217;s neighbor who was murdered after he accidentally ran over Gotti&#8217;s 12 year old son. Briefly blinded by the sunlight, John Favara, hit the boy who was riding a minibike. The New York Daily News reports that a witness in a new racketeering&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Drive Carefully, Lest You End Up Dead in a Vat of Acid - Steven Waldman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2009\/01\/drive-carefully-lest-you-end-u.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Drive Carefully, Lest You End Up Dead in a Vat of Acid - Steven Waldman\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"No mobster-related story has haunted me more than the tale of John Gotti&#8217;s neighbor who was murdered after he accidentally ran over Gotti&#8217;s 12 year old son. Briefly blinded by the sunlight, John Favara, hit the boy who was riding a minibike. 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He's also the author of the Founding Faith: Politics, Providence, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America, which has been published by Random House. Before co-founding Beliefnet in 1999, Waldman was a political journalist, serving as National Editor of U.S. News & World Report and National Correspondent for Newsweek. 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