HOW THE NEWS COVERED THE NEWS

The reign of the Teflon Don started with two bullet-riddled bodies on a cold Midtown street. On Dec. 16, 1985, Mafia boss Paul Castellano and his chauffeur/bodyguard Thomas Bilotti (pictured) were gunned down outside a W. 46th St. steak house by a team of hit men. Two weeks later, an ambitious mob capo named John Gotti out of Ozone Park, Queens, became head of the powerful Gambino crime family.

It didn’t take long for authorities — and the public — to connect the dots.

Gotti, whose natty style and ability to skirt prison earned him such tabloid sobriquets as the Dapper Don and the Teflon Don, became a larger-than-life figure who was either hated or loved, but always feared.

But by December 1990, the feds had finally got their man, hitting Gotti with five counts of mob-related murders, including his former boss Castellano, and a litany of other charges that finally stuck.

Gotti began his life sentence two years later and would die in an Illinois prison in 2002, at 61, of cancer.

As the Daily News counts down to its 100th birthday next year, New York’s hometown paper – the first daily tabloid in the U.S. when it debuted on June 26, 1919 – is giving loyal readers a look into our famed archives to help celebrate the centennial.

Check in every week to see how The News covered the top stories of the day.

World War II hero Gen. George Patton dodged Nazi bullets and bombs — only to die a few months after the end of the war. The polarizing military man died in December 1945 days after being paralyzed in a car accident in Germany. In 1961, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi SS officer who was the architect of Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” resulting in the Holocaust, was condemned to death by an Israeli war crimes tribunal.

Che Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary who teamed with Fidel Castro to overthrow the Cuban government in 1959, visited New York in 1964 as Cuba’s Minister of Industry. The day before (inset), someone shot a bazooka at the United Nations building while Guevara was inside speaking.

In a dramatic shot captured by News photographer R.F. Cranston in 1935, a man comes upon the scene of a fatal car accident only to discover the victim is his wife.