There was cash from the drug trade and the extortions. And there was money from his family, who, on his orders, had sold the properties he owned in New Jersey and wired the proceeds to his associates in Brazil.
Six months after his arrest on the Interpol warrant, Alite was still fighting extradition, still an inmate at Ary Franco. He knew that if he went back to Tampa he’d have few cards to play. It was a tough, conservative jurisdiction with no-nonsense judges and juries that had little time for New York gangsters. Life in prison or a lethal injection were his likely options if he returned. So he was toughing it out in Brazil, figuring out how to work the system and what his next move would be. Escape was a possibility, but not from Ary Franco. He’d have to arrange to be moved to a less secure facility. Money could make that happen.
While in Ary Franco, he also had lots of time to think and it might have been then that the idea of playing a final trump card surfaced. He would do whatever he had to do to survive, but whatever he did would be for himself and his family. That’s family with a small f. He had four children from two different relationships. He had a girlfriend, more than one in fact. He had his mother and father and his brother and sisters and nieces and nephews and uncles and aunts. That was who he cared about and who he thought about.
The idea of the Mafia as “Family” was no longer relevant. He had come to that conclusion a long time ago, but never really had to face up to it. As he sat in prison going over where he’d been, what he’d done, and whether he’d ever be able to do any of it again, he began to think the unthinkable. Was he just looking for some self-justification for what he might eventually decide to do? Maybe. That’s certainly how some people might interpret things after the fact. John Alite doesn’t care.
“People who know me know why I did what I did,” he said several years later as he sat in a restaurant in southern New Jersey not far from Philadelphia, sipping a coffee and playing with an English muffin. “Other people should just mind their own business.”
Other people hadn’t seen what John Alite had seen. They hadn’t experienced what he had experienced. Alite ultimately decided to become a witness for the U.S. Justice Department, testifying against Gotti Jr. and another former associate.
He got out of jail after ten years and is now putting his life back together.
That was the card he played and now he has to live with the results. He is okay with that. The money is gone, but in some circles, the status remains. He moves around the same way he had before he left New York. Still solidly built and in good shape—albeit years older and, he would say, wiser. With dark hair and piercing brown eyes, the five-foot-eight, heavily tattooed wiseguy walks with his head up and looks everyone squarely in the eye. He is not hiding, has no intention of doing so. He has been back to the old neighborhood and he has partied with old friends at popular nightspots in Queens and in Manhattan. He gets stares from some people, but others accept him for who he is.
Willie Boy Johnson, a mob associate not unlike himself, had given him one piece of advice as he moved toward the inner circle of the Gotti organization.
“Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut,” said Johnson who, like Alite, turned on the Gottis. Willie Boy ended up dead as a result. John Alite is still very much alive.
Angelo Ruggiero, a made member of the crime family and at one point Gotti Sr.’s best friend, had also laid it out for him. Ruggiero was on his deathbed, ostracized by Gotti and persona non grata in the family.
“Johnny only cares about himself,” Ruggiero had said. “Get away from him and his son.”
Alite was thousands of miles from New York as he thought about those conversations and the other events in his life that had led to Ary Franco. While he could never be formally initiated into the Mafia because he was of Albanian descent, he knew that on the streets he was a smarter and more effective mobster than Gotti Jr. and most of the crime family crew that he worked with. He also knew that the Gottis were more form than substance; that the father had developed a media persona that had little to do with reality; that the son was a screwup who, had he had different bloodlines, would have been beaten silly or killed by someone long ago; and that the daughter, Victoria, was a spoiled Mafia princess who cared only about herself.
The Gottis were a soap opera long before Vicky got her own reality TV show. Alite had had a part, a long-running and highly lucrative part, in the story. But he knew that like Willie Boy and Ruggiero, he was expendable—a piece that the Gottis would discard if and when it benefited them. So deciding to cooperate, when he thought about it in those terms, was not that difficult. It was about survival. He would have to break the rules of the underworld if he cut a deal with the feds, but the Gottis, father and son, brothers and uncles, were breaking those rules long before Alite ever thought about it.
The Mafia doesn’t deal drugs? Gotti Sr. made a fortune from the heroin trade and turned on associates who were in the business not because he opposed drug trafficking, but because they got caught. Alite knows this because Gotti Sr. used him to expand the drug business and because Ruggiero, one of those drug dealers, later confided in him.
Gotti Sr. was a man of honor? Ask Paul Castellano about that. Ask the former mob boss of the Gambino crime family if he ever trusted the flashy mob capo out of Queens who had Castellano gunned down outside of Sparks Steak House in Midtown one cold December night.
The Gottis, Alite began to realize as he sat in his Brazilian prison cell, were a dysfunctional group of Mafia misfits who wrested control of one of the biggest crime syndicates in America and tore it apart. Nepotism, greed, and treachery replaced honor and loyalty when John J. Gotti took over. Junior Gotti followed in his father’s footsteps. Manipulative like his dad, but surprisingly devoid of street smarts, “Blinkie” turned and ran on more than one occasion when he and Alite were on the streets together.
“They like to say I was his best friend,” Alite says of the media reports about his relationship with the younger Gotti. “That’s not true. I was his babysitter.”
From Alite’s perspective, Junior Gotti was a cheap-shot artist with a penchant for stabbing or gunning down unsuspecting victims, then scrambling to blame someone else when the heat came. He had a sense of entitlement that was not unlike that of other rich, spoiled sons of famous fathers.
These were some of the things that Alite thought about while he was on the run for more than a year and hearing reports that Gotti Jr. was trying to cut a deal with the government by giving up information at proffer sessions with federal prosecutors. Those same thoughts haunted him during quiet times in his Brazilian prison cell.
The guards came and got him late that afternoon. The first thing they told him to do was to strip naked. He knew that was part of the routine. Then they pulled him out of the crowded cell and led him down a hallway, through a doorway, and down a set of stairs. He tried to walk normally. He didn’t want his gait to betray the fact that he was armed.
There were four guards with guns and two prison trustees who were carrying blackjacks. He recognized one of the trustees, Bomba, a burly lifer who was usually hopped up on steroids. He was the warden’s guy. He did whatever he was told. In this case, Alite was sure, he was the one who would administer the beating.
It made sense. The guards would need deniability. There already was a lot of heat and bad publicity over a Chinese businessman who had been arrested at the airport with thirty thousand dollars stashed in his clothing. He was picked up on a currency violation. The businessman was on his way to the United States, where his wife and daughter had already relocated. Instead, he was sent to Ary Franco. Four days later he was dead. The autopsy report said he had been brutally beaten and tortured. Alite figured the businessman balked at paying off some guards. Seven of them had been charged. It had become an international incident.
This wasn’t going to be another.
Trustees were merely inmates with semiofficial status. But they were still inmates and a fight between inmates was neither unusu
al nor surprising.
The guards and trustees led him to an isolated “dry cell,” a cell without a toilet or a sink or electricity. It was under a stairwell in a remote area of the prison. They unlocked the door and pushed him in. The door was slammed shut. Alite stood in the dark, left alone to wait and wonder.
It took a while for his eyes to get acclimated. The cell was small, about ten feet by ten feet, and it had the foul smell of shit and piss and blood, the residue, he assumed, of the last session trustees had had with an inmate.
Leaving him alone was designed to instill fear. But Alite was strangely calm. He walked around the cell to get a better idea of his surroundings. It was difficult to see, but his eyes were adjusting. He moved to a corner, squatted, and pulled the knife out.
“When we wrapped the knife, we left a piece of string dangling from the tape,” he said, explaining how several Brazilian inmates with the Red Command had helped him. “It was like a tampon. I just pulled on the string and the knife came out.”
It had a small handle and blade of five or six inches that had been sharpened on stone and was almost razorlike.
Alite carefully unwrapped it. He threw the soiled rag and tape into another corner, out of the way. He didn’t want to slip on them. Then he began to exercise with the knife in his hand, shadowboxing, doing squat thrusts and some push-ups.
His adrenaline was flowing when he heard the door opening.
“Are you ready, gringo?” said Bomba, the first one through the door.
Alite pounced, slamming the door shut on the other trustee and then lashing out at Bomba, whose eyes could not adapt quickly enough to the darkness. The first thrust of the knife went for the hand in which he held the blackjack. The blackjack fell to the floor.
The trustee screamed in fear and in surprise and in anger. Alite was on him now, slashing and stabbing. Although it seemed much longer, the attack was over in minutes. Bomba lay moaning on the floor as Alite pushed open the cell door. The other trustee stared in horror as the naked, blood-soaked prisoner came toward him. He screamed for help from the guards, but they were long gone. They didn’t want to be held accountable for the beating they knew Alite was going to take from the two burly trustees. They were out of earshot. Alite slashed the second trustee across the stomach, a glancing blow, but enough to send him running.
Then it got quiet.
Alite walked alone back toward the cell block. The other prisoners looked up in surprise and then several began to cheer. One reached out his hand.
“Gringo,” he said, “the knife.”
Alite didn’t understand at first, didn’t even realize he was still holding the weapon. But then it came to him. He handed the inmate the knife and continued walking back toward his own cell. When other guards came to search, as he knew they would, they wouldn’t find it.
“You do what you have to do to survive,” John Alite said years later, sitting in a diner in South Jersey. “And unless you’ve been there, you don’t really understand what that means.”
It was impossible to tell if Alite was talking about the incident at Ary Franco or about his life as a Mafia enforcer, murderer, drug dealer, and extortionist turned government witness.
Maybe he was talking about both.
CHAPTER 2
John Gotti was livid. His son and several members of his young crew had gotten into a fight outside the Arena, a popular club on Metropolitan Avenue in Queens. It wasn’t bad enough that Junior and his guys were acting like jerks. That was a fairly common occurrence. What was more troubling was that the Arena was linked to a high-ranking member of the Genovese crime family. Acting up at a place like that was a sign of disrespect.
But Junior and his crew never thought in those terms. Punching, shoving, and shouting, a bunch of young guys were having at it. It happened more often than you’d imagine. This time someone from the Gotti crew pulled a gun and shot a kid in the thigh. Everyone scattered.
The victim happened to be the nephew of Genovese crime family capo Ciro Perrone.
“It was a punk-ass thing to do!” Gotti screamed. “You gonna shoot somebody, shoot ’em. Don’t punk-shoot ’em. Who did it?”
Gotti was talking to John Alite, one of the newer members of his son’s crew. Alite said he didn’t know. Junior Gotti sat at his father’s side, silent. Several other members of the Gotti organization, including Angelo Ruggiero, Gotti’s best friend and Junior’s godfather, and Willie Boy Johnson stood off to the side, waiting.
“Everybody in the room knew it was his fuckin’ son who had done the shooting,” Alite said as he recounted a story that defined his life with the Gottis. “I had stepped in front of Junior during the fight. I got between him and this other kid. From behind me, Junior pulls out this derringer, reaches around my body and shoots the kid. A cheap shot. His father was right. It was a punk thing to do. But I’m not gonna tell him it was his son. I’m taking the heat. I don’t say shit.”
After Gotti finished his tirade, he called Ruggiero and Johnson to the side and had a whispered conversation. They then escorted Alite across the street to the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, the family’s mob clubhouse.
“Angelo told me they were supposed to give me a beating,” said Alite, who at that point was still recovering from an assault that had left him hospitalized for nearly a month. “They told me to just take off, to not come around the clubhouse for a couple of weeks. They were gonna tell John they gave me a beatin’ and I was in the hospital. Angelo knew what had happened. ‘My fuckin’ godson’s no good,’ he said, ‘but what are we gonna do?’
“This is the kind of shit I had to deal with, day in and day out. The father was a tyrant and the son was a pussy. And I was in the middle. That’s what people don’t know about the Gottis. That’s what they were really like.”
Gotti Sr. controlled the crime family with an iron fist. There was a strict and often bizarre set of rules that Alite learned early on. But the primary rule was this: the Gottis did whatever they wanted, to whomever they wanted, whenever they wanted. The rules didn’t apply to them.
John Gotti’s Rules of Leadership: Whenever possible, underlings must take the weight of a crime pending against Gotti or his family.
It wasn’t the first time that Alite was left hanging by Junior. But it was the first time that some older members of the organization privately expressed their opinions. Alite had been around the Gottis for less than a year and was still feeling his way. This was supposed to be a special organization built around honor and loyalty. He was beginning to wonder.
The Gottis talked the talk, but their actions said something else. The father was charismatic and had a loyal group of followers, guys that Alite looked up to. The son? That was a different story.
Alite got involved with Junior sometime in 1983. He had met him before that, but it was just a casual hello, how ya doin’ kind of thing. Of course he knew who Junior was. More important, who his father was. You didn’t live in Woodhaven, Ozone Park, or Howard Beach in the 1980s without knowing who John Gotti was.
And if you were moving small amounts of cocaine, as Alite was at the time, you would come under the Gotti umbrella. Alite had been dealing with guys who were part of Junior’s crew. He also had a relationship with Sonny DiGiorgio, who worked for Angelo Ruggiero. DiGiorgio was the cousin of John Gotti’s wife, Victoria. Alite, who had his own small cocaine operation, would occasionally help DiGiorgio in low-level heroin deals. DiGiorgio had a connection at Rikers Island, a prison guard. They used the guard to smuggle smack into the prison, where there was a ready and captive market. Alite was little more than a mule, taking the drugs to the guard and the money back to DiGiorgio, but he was able to pick up some extra cash and it was another important neighborhood connection.
Later he would learn that the heroin deals at Rikers were part of Ruggiero’s bigger drug operation, an operation that Gotti claimed to know nothing about but from which he was making tens of thousands of dollars each week.
“Turns out eve
rybody in that crew was involved in drugs,” Alite said. “They were all making big money. Nobody was supposed to talk about it, but everybody knew.”
Alite wasn’t making a lot of money at this point, but hoped to. The mob, he knew, could help him get to where he wanted to be. He and the guys he was around were moving marijuana and cocaine through the bars in their neighborhood in Queens. That’s how he made the connection with Junior Gotti, according to his testimony at two different trials.
They first met around 1981. It was a casual friendship. They were around the same age—Alite was nineteen, Junior was eighteen—and moved in the same circles, hanging in bars and clubs in the neighborhood. Two years later, they started doing business together.
Johnny Gebert, a kid Alite had grown up with, set things up. It was the summer of 1983. Alite had just gotten back from California, banished there by his father, who had tried to get him away from the streets. It didn’t work. He came back to Queens and went back to dealing drugs.
Gebert told Alite that Junior wanted to see him. Alite knew right away what it was about. He also suspected that Gebert had pushed the issue, telling Junior that Alite was making money big-time. It wasn’t true. Alite might have been grossing about two grand a week, but not even half of that ended up in his pocket. When Junior said he wanted a weekly kick of five hundred dollars, Alite shook his head and laughed.
“I told him I wasn’t making that kind of money,” Alite said. “I don’t know if he believed me or if he even cared. All Junior ever cared about was his end. The point of meeting me was that he was going to get something from me.”
Junior knew Alite had been to college and used that to bust his balls, called him “College Boy,” not as a term of endearment, but as a way to belittle him. After some negotiating, it was agreed that Alite would give Gebert two hundred dollars a week to pass on to Junior. At the time, Alite wasn’t moving weight. He might grab a quarter kilo of cocaine from a source, break it down, step on it, and put together small ten-dollar packages that three or four people who worked for him would sell in selected bars along Jamaica Avenue.
Gotti's Rules Page 2