In the World

by Richard Stratton

  As I observe the trial, I soon come to understand why the government is having so much trouble getting a conviction, why previous juries were unable to reach a unanimous decision: the government’s case is full of holes and based entirely on dubious cooperating witness testimony, and there is ample evidence that John did indeed quit the mob. When considered in light of the indisputable facts, the case doesn’t hold up. The rats trotted out by the prosecution are tried and true, but it’s all old history. John already pled guilty and served time for most of what the rats allege; they have no new relevant evidence that falls within the statute of limitations.

  The prosecution’s co–star witness, Michael “Mikey Scars” DiLeonardo, a turncoat Gambino captain from the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn and now a government rat, is right out of central casting. He looks like he just stepped off the set of The Sopranos. Mikey Scars walked the walk and talked the talk, and he has been flipping on his former goombata like flapjacks at the International House of Pancakes ever since. DiLeonardo was born into the mob and became a made member in the same induction ceremony as Gotti Junior. DiLeonardo’s grandfather was a wiseguy; he has Cosa Nostra bloodlines going back eighty years to when the Mafia was known as the Black Hand. A practiced stool pigeon who testified at John Junior’s three previous trials, Mikey Scars regales the jury with his machine-gun mouth, retelling first-person, insider stories in mob vernacular, of hits and “hospital beatings; a beating bad enough to put the guy in the hospital but not kill him,” such as DiLeonardo claims Junior ordered for Guardian Angel and radio talk show host Curtis Sliwa.

  “He deserved a beating,” DiLeonardo says with a shrug when prosecutor Honig asks why Sliwa was attacked. “We were infuriated with Curtis Sliwa spouting off. Junior sent some of his kids to give him a baseball bat beating.” Junior’s kids, DiLeonardo goes on to explain, comprised the young crew of wannabe mobsters who had come up with Junior from the streets of Queens. They kidnapped Sliwa from in front of his home in a taxi. Instead of adhering to the plan to beat Sliwa with baseball bats, a Gotti kid hiding on the floor in the front seat of the cab jumped up and immediately opened fire on the stunned Guardian Angel, shooting him several times in his abdomen.

  “How did John Gotti Junior react when he heard that Sliwa had been shot?” Honig asks.

  “Junior was upset,” DiLeonardo tells the jury. “He said, ‘This is a cluster-fuck.’ We could get destroyed for that. We don’t kill press.”

  Sliwa, however, survived. He jumped out the window of the cab and ran off.

  DiLeonardo describes how the Gambino Family and other “borgatas,” as the Mafia clans are known, extort legitimate businesses like construction, garbage collection, and in the garment industry; how they control labor unions; run “pump and dump” stock fraud scams; shake down strip joints and night clubs; and launder the hundreds of millions of dollars generated by crime.

  Several times during Mikey Scars’ testimony, Judge Castel has to tell the witness to slow down and translate what he means by, for example, “a piece of work for the Family” (murder); “he was on the move” (he was part of the killing crew); “get a line on someone” (follow them around, learn their habits so as to prepare to kill them); and “sneak hits” (murders not put on record with the Family’s higher-ups). “We can’t kill on our own,” DiLeonardo explains. “We’re not supposed to.”

  “Were you close to John Gotti Junior?” Honig inquires.

  “Very close,” DiLeonardo claims. “I baptized his son. Junior was learning about the life from his father. But his father got arrested too soon, just when Junior was learning the ropes.”

  Finally, DiLeonado tells of Junior Gotti’s attempt to rewrite the rules of Mafia membership, which he describes as “complete hypocrisy.”

  “Omertà means silence,” DiLeonardo explains. “Meanwhile everybody’s talking. You got Junior Persico, boss of the Colombo Family, admitting there is a Mafia in the Commission trial. John Senior called Persico a rat for saying there is a Mafia. Meanwhile Persico is doing a hundred years. There’s an edict, you would be murdered if you’re dealing drugs. I look around the table, there’s ten captains there and they’re all dealing drugs. We’re not supposed to take part in stock fraud.”

  “How often was that rule broken?” Honig asks.

  “Every day,” says DiLeonardo.

  DiLeonardo goes on to debunk Junior’s withdrawal defense. “You can’t admit there is a mob or that you are a made member of the Mafia. Junior wants to change that. As his defense, he wants to say okay, we admit there is a Mafia. Everybody knows there is a mob. But we deny the crimes. John Senior would have a great issue with that.”

  “Was that a lie?” Honig asks the witness.

  “Of course. That’s my job as a Costa Nostra member. To lie.”

  But this is all ancient history, testimony as to events that took place prior to John Junior’s previous guilty plea, his time in prison, and his alleged withdrawal from the Mafia. There is evidence in tapes of visits and telephone calls between Gotti Junior and other members of the Gambino family that supports John’s claim to have made up his mind to leave the crime family, to take his blood family, move out of New York, and “go fishing.”

  The jury has heard of no new crimes, no allegations of homicide or conspiracy to commit murder to overcome the statute of limitations, until the prosecutors introduce their star witness, John Alite.

  “He was capable,” DiLeonardo says when Honig asks him if he knows fellow rat Alite.

  “Capable meaning what?” Honig asked.

  “Oh, he was a murderer,” DiLeonardo replied.

  One can feel the tension in the courtroom ramp up as Alite saunters in and takes his place on the witness stand. Alite had fled the United States to dodge a number of serious criminal charges, including home invasions and homicide. He had reached out to the FBI with what he claimed was evidence of Gotti Junior’s participation in those same murders and murder conspiracies. Alite was willing to give up his evidence in hopes of being returned to the US from Brazil and ultimately set free by testifying against Gotti—always a reliable get-out-of-jail-free card.

  John Alite is John Gotti Junior’s Sammy Gravano. If we are to believe Alite, he was Junior’s confidante, his muscle, his best friend, and his “mad dog killer” on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week until Gotti, according to Alite, turned on him. Now Alite is getting even. Because he is of Albanian descent, Alite could not become a made member of the Mafia, and that rankled, left him feeling used but not accepted. He was told to leave the room when secret Mafia business was discussed. Junior had been best man at Alite’s wedding. The jury is shown photographs of a beaming John Junior holding Alite’s infant son. Gotti invited Alite into his home. On an FBI surveillance tape, John Junior is shown greeting several burly men in overcoats outside the Ravanite Social Club with John Alite at his side. Alite claims he killed and beat people senseless on orders from Gotti, “baseball batting them” he calls the beatings.

  “I was around John Gotti Junior,” Alite explains to the jury, meaning he became an associate of the Gambino Family under John Gotti Junior who reported directly to his father. “He, John Gotti Junior, would direct me as to what crimes we would commit each day.”

  When he testified at a previous trial against Mafia hitman Charles Carneglia, Alite claimed to have had an affair with John’s sister, Victoria Gotti, who was married at the time to Gambino soldier Carmine Agnello. At John Junior’s trial, under direct examination, Alite stops short of saying he and Victoria were intimate.

  “We started having feelings for each other,” he tells the jury. “I had feelings for her, she had feelings for me. We talked to each other. I wasn’t just fooling around with her. It wasn’t that.”

  Alite says Victoria came to him for comfort after being beaten by her husband. She had a swollen lip and a shiner, but she was afraid to tell her brother or her father for fear they would kill Agnello.

  Outside the courtroom
during a break in the trial, the striking blond erupts in outrage. “The only feelings I had for John Alite were that I despised him. Feelings?” Victoria Gotti sneers. “He flatters himself.”

  According to Victoria, Alite’s revised testimony proves he lied about the affair, and proves he is lying now about his relationship with John Junior. As for being beaten by Agnello, “Do you think my brother would have allowed that?” Victoria asks. “Is he a criminal, a thug? Or a big softy who would have allowed someone to mishandle his sister?”

  When his testimony resumes, Alite says that John Gotti Junior ordered him to murder a Gotti-protected drug dealer named George Grosso for using the Gotti name as sanction for his coke-dealing enterprise. Though Grosso paid Gotti Junior tribute for being able to deal drugs under the Gambino umbrella of protection, he was warned not to mention the Gotti name. When he defied the warning and kept running his mouth about being “with” the Gottis, Junior, according to Alite’s testimony, ordered him killed. “He pushed the issue,” Alite says on the witness stand. “John Gotti Jr. kept saying, ‘You didn’t kill this kid yet,’ trying to say I didn’t have enough balls to do it.”

  Alite and another witness, a retired corrupt New York City cop named Phillip Baroni, describe how Grosso was taken for a one-way ride. Alite sat in the rear of the car behind Grosso with Baroni beside him. Alite shot Grosso in the head, spit on him and called him a “motherfucker.” After the killing, Alite says he reported to Junior, who was having his nails done at a salon next door to Gotti Senior’s Bergin Hunt and Fish Club. Junior told Alite to leave Grosso’s body where it would be discovered. “Don’t bury him, don’t hide him. Put him out on the street so people know what you did. Send a message: Don’t use our names.” Alite claims Gotti wanted to visit the scene to “verify that the guy was dead. I watch a lot of movies, where the killer always gets caught going back to the scene of the crime. I didn’t want to go back.”

  But he did because, as Alite repeats ad nauseam in his testimony, John Gotti Junior was his boss and what the boss ordered, Alite did. “Otherwise, I go, if I don’t execute his orders.” When they drove past where the body had been dumped beside Grand Central Parkway, the scene was swarming with cops and staff from the medical examiner’s office. “He doesn’t look that good,” Gotti Junior joked after seeing Grosso’s corpse. Four days after the Grosso hit, on Christmas Eve, 1988, at the tender age of twenty-four, Junior Gotti followed in his father’s footsteps and became a made member of the Gambino Crime Family.

  In her book This Family of Mine, Victoria Gotti describes the night her brother was inducted in a secret mob ceremony that Junior likened to joining King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. “This was one of the most important days of his life,” Victoria writes, describing how proud Junior was to become a made member of Cosa Nostra. The ceremony was held in an apartment belonging to Joe Butch Corrao on Mulberry Street in the Little Italy section of Manhattan just doors away from the Ravenite Social Club, where Gotti Senior took command after usurping control of the Gambino Crime Family. Junior was given a picture of a saint stained with a drop of Gotti Senior’s blood. As the saint’s picture burned, Junior recited the ancient oath.

  “If you should betray La Cosa Nostra, your soul will burn like this saint,” Junior was warned. The other men in the room began to chant. “Now you are born over. You are a new man.”

  After the ceremony, Gotti joined his father at the Ravenite. “He was the happiest man alive,” Victoria writes. John Senior had not attended the induction to avoid the appearance of nepotism, already a persistent, though whispered, complaint in mob circles. It is also legend that a father’s presence at his son’s induction could bring bad luck to the Family. Present, however, was underboss Sammy Gravano. Another budding wiseguy who got straightened out (became a made member of the family) that night with Junior was Michael “Mikey Scars” DiLeonardo, who would later testify against him.

  In his gravelly voice, with his head cocked back on his thick, tattooed neck, dressed in a baggy gray sweatsuit, Alite rarely passes up an opportunity to belittle his former boss. He characterizes John Junior as a petty, greedy loudmouth who hid behind the Gotti name but was afraid to stand up to his despotic father. Alite says Gotti Senior ordered Alite to get a beating when Junior and his crew were called to a sit-down over the wounding of a Genovese captain’s nephew in a Queens nightclub shootout. “We wanted to hear him say, ‘Dad, I shot him,’” Alite testifies. “But, as usual, he said nothing.”

  On another occasion, according to Alite, Junior got pissed at one of his crewmembers when he called the gun Gotti was carrying, a .25 caliber automatic, a “baby gun.” Gotti grabbed a shotgun and growled, “This big enough?” then shot the guy in the hip.

  Both Alite and another government witness, Michael Finnerty, a big, ruddy Irish leg-breaker for the Gotti crew, recount how when Finnerty bested John Junior in a drinking contest, Junior ran off to the men’s room to puke, then returned with a steak knife and stabbed Finnerty in the shoulder twice. “John hated to lose,” Alite says.

  Alite goes on to tell of making tens of millions of dollars with Gotti Junior running his cocaine distribution business through dealers operating out of “forty or fifty bars that we had, moving four to eight kilos per month,” under protection of “the Gambino umbrella.” Alite claims they robbed and extorted other drug dealers, shook down bouncers and bar owners, ran book-making and loan-sharking operations, and beat and murdered anyone who did not bow to the Gotti rule. “I would do anything for this man,” Alite says.

  They traveled around the world, blew tens of thousands of dollars over a weekend gambling in Vegas. They bought lavish homes, condominiums, and businesses: a trucking company, a glass business, nightclubs and after-hours joints, a junkyard, and an auto parts outlet. “I spent money like a wild man,” Alite admits. “I was a nut.”

  Like Gotti Senior’s entourage, Junior, Alite, and the crew were ushered into the best restaurants and clubs without ever having to wait in line. They mimicked the high-profile gangster lifestyle they watched Gotti Senior take to a whole new level of public exposure. “The mob is a secret society. His [Gotti Junior’s] family changed all that. They were in the news all the time,” Alite reminds the jury. He embellishes his testimony with irrelevant details, telling the jurors he kept a derringer in his jockstrap, for whatever reason he does not say. “I was elated. I was happy. I was with the Gotti regime. . . . Yes, I was a gangster,” Alite proclaims. “I liked the attention, I liked the money. I liked everything about the life.”

  Then, in the early 1990s, it all turned ugly, “treacherous” Alite says, over his beef with Victoria Gotti’s husband, Carmine Agnello. Alite claims he wanted to “hurt” Agnello for abusing Victoria. Junior, however, according to Alite, sided with Agnello. “I believed John cared for me,” Alite said. “Then I learned I was just another guy he used to hurt people. The friendship deep in my heart changed. I was not blood.”

  Agnello, however, was blood through his marriage to Victoria and also as a made member of the Gambino Crime Family. Agnello and several of his henchmen paid a visit to Alite and threatened him. Alite retaliated by shooting one of Agnello’s men, Stevie Newell, without “going on record” or getting permission from his boss, Junior Gotti. After that, according to Alite, he became a marked man. Though their business relationship continued through intermediaries, Alite separated himself from John Junior and his immediate circle. He moved to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and reported to Gotti, who was now acting boss of the crime family, through Ronnie “One Arm” Truccio and Charles Carnesi, John Junior’s lawyer. At a meeting with Junior in a public setting at Aqueduct Raceway, Alite claims Gotti tried to lure him back into the fold so he could kill him. “He invited me to go Upstate hunting,” Alite tells the jury. “I said ‘Sure, I’ll put on a pair of Bugs Bunny ears and you can all shoot at me.’”

  On the seventh day of Alite’s testimony, as Gotti’s lawyers wrap up their cross-examination with que
stions about the strangling death of a young woman in a Queens motel room, spectators in the courtroom get to see a dramatic demonstration of the famous Gotti wrath. The jury has been removed for the lunch break. Deputies from the US Marshals WITSEC unit are escorting Alite from the room. Alite will claim later that Gotti mouthed the words, “I’ll kill you!” during Alite’s testimony that it was Gotti’s uncle, Vinnie Gotti, who murdered the woman for disrespecting him. “They were getting high,” Alite had said from the witness stand. “They had a bit of an argument, and he put her in the bathtub and strangled her.

  “That’s not the first time with that family, killing girls and raping them,” Alite added before prosecutors cut him off.

  Now, as he leaves the courtroom, Alite stops walking, he faces his former boss and demands, “You got something you want to say to me?”

  Gotti goes ballistic. “You’re a dog!” Junior shouts at Alite, insulting man’s best friend. “Did I kill little girls, you fag? You’re a punk! You’re a dog all your life—you always were. Do I strangle little girls in motels?”

  All considered, I believe Alite’s testimony does little to bolster the government’s case against John Junior. During the cross-examination by Gotti’s amiable and adroit attorney, Charlie Carnesi, I watch as the jurors turn stony and even appear exasperated, with a few shaking their heads in disbelief as Alite admits to one heinous crime after another—home invasions, murders, beatings, drug rip-offs—but claims he never acted on his own volition, that he committed these crimes always with the qualifier that “John Gotti Junior told me to do it.” Alite would have the jurors believe he never had an original idea, never made a move without Gotti to tell him what to do. By the time Alite slinks out of the courtroom after Carnesi’s bruising cross-examination and an ineffectual redirect by the government that does little to affirm the witness’s testimony, and despite John Junior’s name and his admitted position in the crime family, Gotti’s withdrawal defense is beginning to seem plausible. It is at least credible enough to cause real doubt in the jury room.