Alite would later describe Gebert as a “rabid dog” who had been “a criminal from the age of eleven.” He didn’t trust him or particularly like him, but he was happy to make the Gotti connection through him. Once Alite started kicking up, he moved closer to Junior, who would stop around the neighborhood from time to time. Alite knew how to make money and that attracted Junior.
The first job they pulled together should have been a warning to Alite that things weren’t what they seemed. Gebert had a beef with a crew of Jamaican drug dealers who had ripped him off. They set up a marijuana deal, but when he showed up, they beat him with brass knuckles and stole his cash. He was out several thousand dollars and he wanted revenge. He also wanted to establish the pecking order on the street. Gebert was with Junior. Junior was with his father. Nobody fucked with John Gotti. The fact that Gotti might not have been aware of what was going on was of no matter. His name was thrown around by all kinds of hustlers and wannabe gangsters. Gebert was a little more than a poseur, however, because he had a legitimate link to the son. That’s the way Alite saw it anyway.
“This was my first chance to make an impression on the Gottis, which was something I wanted to do,” he said. According to Alite, Junior set it up. “Gebert knew the storefront where the Jamaicans hung out. We were going to drive by and shoot ’em.”
The plan was simple. Alite would be the driver in the lead car. Gebert would be the shooter in the front passenger seat. Junior and an associate named Jerry were to follow in a blocking car, a standard mob move in any shooting. The blocking car was there to jam up traffic in the event the cops showed up. This would give the shooter a chance to get away. Not really a complicated plan and one that should have gone off without a hitch. But on the night the shooting was to go down, Gebert showed up high. He had been smoking angel dust. He apparently needed the drug to amp up his courage.
Alite just shook his head.
It was early evening. The storefront where the Jamaicans hung out was at 117th Street and Jamaica Avenue in the Richmond Hill section of Queens. Junior had his own social club at 113th Street and Liberty Avenue, which was where they met. Alite said Junior supplied a stolen car for Alite to drive and handed Gebert a .38-caliber pistol.
They made one pass of the storefront and then circled back around. Alite slowed the car as they approached the location a second time and Gebert leaned out the open window. He got off five or six shots. Alite saw three or four guys who had been standing in front of the clubhouse scatter. He wasn’t sure if anyone had been hit.
“Drive!” shouted Gebert in a panicked laugh.
Almost immediately, Alite heard police sirens. He tried to stay calm, to drive normally. The plan was to turn left at the second street past the storefront, head toward Atlantic Avenue, and then work their way back to Junior’s social club. Alite made the left, but when he looked in the rearview mirror he saw Junior, in the blocking car, continue down Jamaica Avenue, away from the shooting scene. Then, at the next stop sign, Gebert jumped out of the car and took off on foot, leaving the gun on the floor below the passenger seat.
“Son of a bitch, I’m all alone,” Alite said. “I hear the sirens. I got no blocker. I know I gotta ditch the car and the gun. What the fuck? At that point, I wanted to kill Gebert. And I wasn’t too crazy about Junior, either.”
He drove two more blocks, turned down a narrow street, and stopped. He left the car in the middle of the street, opened both front doors to block the cops from maneuvering around the vehicle, and took off on foot. He dumped the gun in a nearby trash can, stopped at a store to buy a soda, then took off his shirt and began to casually jog back toward the clubhouse.
The run gave him time to think and also allowed him to calm down. He was just a kid out for a run. Nothing unusual about that if the cops came on him. They didn’t. But no thanks to either Gebert or Junior.
The drive-by shooting of the Jamaicans gave Alite an idea of the kind of people he was dealing with. When he asked Junior what had happened (Gebert was nowhere to be found), Junior blamed Jerry for the mix-up. He said he got confused and panicked when he heard the police sirens. Alite knew it was bullshit, but he wasn’t about to challenge Junior. He had his foot in the door with the Gotti organization and he wanted to stay there. He was making decent money on the street and knew that with the Gambino organization behind him, he could make even more.
Dealing drugs and booking sports were two things he knew very well. On his own, he could make a living, but he would always have to kick up to the Gottis. But if he worked with Junior, it would be others who kicked up to him. Alite knew all of this intuitively. He didn’t sit down one day and say to himself, I’m gonna connect with Junior Gotti and make myself a fortune, but that’s what he did.
Alite had grown up in a lower-middle-class section of Woodhaven. His upbringing was hardly the same as the pampered, organized-crime-funded childhood of Junior Gotti, who grew up just a few miles away, in Howard Beach. ‘There were six of us living in a four-room apartment,” Alite said of his home. “When my sneakers wore out I had to use tape to hold them together.”
He was a product of the streets, where he learned that you took the opportunities that presented themselves. No one was going to hand you money. If you were smart and if you weren’t afraid to take chances, you could get ahead. If you had the mob behind you, you could go even further.
Alite, twenty-two years old and on the make, decided that the Gottis offered him the best opportunity for advancement. He jumped at the chance. It was a life of money, murder, and mayhem. He adapted quite easily.
One of the first benefits of the Jamaican escapade was his enhanced standing with Junior. Now he was hanging out on a regular basis with the young wiseguy. Three, four, sometimes five days a week. As Alite would later tell the FBI, they were working deals, talking about money and business ventures, setting up their own sports book, and, allegedly, according to Alite, expanding the drug business. And Junior stopped calling him “College Boy.”
Eventually word got back to the father that Alite was a new member of Junior’s crew. A few weeks later, Alite was told that John Gotti Sr. wanted to meet him. He was ordered to show up at the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club one afternoon. When he arrived, Gotti Sr. said, “Let’s take a walk.”
They hit it off.
“He told me he liked me,” Alite recalled.
John Gotti’s Rules of Leadership: No member of any crew, in the presence of the boss, may wear sunglasses.
“I knew Junior had a bunch of wannabes around him and the father knew that, too. He saw me as somebody who was different. I wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody. And I’d do anything. He liked that. We’re in the middle of a conversation, we’re walking on the street, he stops, and it’s like he’s looking at me for the first time.”
Alite didn’t know what to think. His mind raced. He was trying to determine if he had said something wrong.
“‘Hey, John,’ Gotti said, ‘take off those fuckin’ sunglasses. Only rats wear shades so you can’t look in their eyes when they’re talking.’”
Alite quickly complied and Gotti picked up the thread of his earlier conversation. He wanted Alite to look out for his son, to work with him.
“Get one thing straight,” Gotti said. “I’ve already lost one son. I’m not losing another.” (Frankie Gotti, just twelve, was killed when the motorbike he was riding was accidentally struck by a neighbor’s car.)
“I really don’t know you yet,” Gotti continued. “My son somehow always seems to pick friends who are useless junk piles. . . . So far, I don’t see you as one of the usual garbage bags, far from it, but you still need to convince me.”
Alite jumped at the chance. The son brought him to the father. The father had power and status. That’s what life in the underworld was all about.
Or so Alite thought.
Life with the Gottis was much more.
“It was a soap opera,” he says. “Nobody knows the real story. Nobody would believe
it.”
In addition to Junior, Alite met Vicky Gotti, the younger daughter of the mob boss, a Mafia princess who had an over-the-top sense of entitlement. There was also Mrs. Gotti, the elder Victoria, whom her husband referred to as “Butch.” A cigarette held between two fingers, a string of expletives spewing from her mouth, she was a mob matriarch who said whatever came into her mind, no matter the consequences.
There were also Gotti’s brothers: Pete, who was referred to as “the Garbage Man” because he had once worked in the Sanitation Department; and Richie, known as “Pea Brain” for what became obvious reasons.
Alite spent a lot of time with the Gotti family and, looking back on it now, realizes he was there mostly to clean up the mess and keep Junior Gotti out of harm’s way. If that meant Alite had to take a fall or a beating, so be it. He quickly learned to anticipate problems. And with the Gottis there were always problems. Time magazine might have had the father’s picture on its cover and the entertainment and movie business may have glorified the “Teflon Don,” but that wasn’t the man or the family that Alite came to know. Years later, Vicky’s obnoxious reality TV show Growing Up Gotti was surprisingly closer to the truth than Armand Assante’s portrayal of the Don in a television movie.
“They say it was about honor and loyalty, but it never was,” Alite said. “They only cared about money and didn’t care how you made it. They told me one of the rules was you couldn’t deal drugs. What they meant was if you got caught, you were on your own. But they wanted their end.
“The father was getting a hundred thousand dollars a month from a big-time heroin dealer named Mark Reiter. I was friends with his son Greg. And Junior had a piece of everybody’s action on the street.” Alite would tell a federal jury that Junior started setting Alite up with some suppliers.
Alite heard the same refrain from both Junior and Angelo Ruggiero—if you’re gonna deal drugs, go big-time. Don’t be a penny-ante street corner hustler. Junior told him not to be a “nickel-and-dime junk dealer.” He pointed to his uncle Gene, his godfather, Angelo Ruggiero, and Johnny Carneglia. They were big-time heroin dealers and top associates of his father. There was a ban on dealing drugs within the crime family, but those guys just ignored the rule. And Gotti Sr., who had a financial interest, didn’t seem to care.
Junior told Alite those guys lived well. They traveled. They had private jets that brought the stuff up to New York.
“He told me if you’re gonna get in, get in,” Alite would tell the jury.
The upside was obvious. The money was staggering. But the price could be significant. If you got jammed up, you were on your own. Ruggiero would learn that the hard way.
But those were things Alite would deal with later. For now he was sitting on top of the world. He had a network in place and he had the power of the mob behind him. For a kid who grew up poor, it was like hitting the lottery.
“I liked the attention,” he would tell a federal jury. “I liked the money. I liked everything about the life.”
Part of that life was built around his reputation as a brawler who would never back down. He was only five foot eight, but he worked out regularly and knew how to box. More important, he was fearless. He’d take on anyone, anytime and anyplace.
The White Castle on Rockaway Boulevard was the scene of one of his more memorable confrontations.
One summer night in 1984 Alite was driving around in his father’s Monte Carlo when he spotted Monique, a girl from the neighborhood he sometimes dated and often hung out with at O’Brother’s and the White Horse, two bars along Jamaica Avenue. It was two in the morning. He asked her if she wanted a ride. They were both bored.
“Let’s go get some burgers at the White Castle,” she said.
When they pulled up, Alite spotted a friend, Mitch Sanders. Alite stayed in the car and Monique went to get the burgers. A few minutes later, Junior pulled up in another car with Johnny Boy Ruggiero, Angelo’s son; a kid named Frankie; and Joe O’Kane. They were all part of Junior’s crew.
As they were talking, Alite looked into the White Castle and saw a group of guys hassling Monique. There were five or six of them. They were drinking beers and being obnoxious. One turned around, pulled down his jeans, and flashed his ass in her face.
Alite didn’t say anything to Junior or the others. He just got out of his car and walked into the restaurant. He approached the flasher.
“You got a problem keepin’ your pants on?” he asked.
“Fuck you” was the reply.
Alite punched the guy in the face. One of the others hit him over the head with a beer bottle and at some point he was stabbed in the face with an ice pick. Junior and the others came running and a brawl broke out inside the restaurant. The other patrons scattered and the manager called the police.
With the sirens, the fighting stopped. Alite’s face had blown up like a balloon. He and Monique got into the Monte Carlo and headed up 101st Street toward Woodhaven Boulevard. She was looking at Alite, telling him he had to get to a hospital, that there was something wrong with his face. Then she screamed, “Look out!”
Alite looked to his left and saw a monster pickup truck bearing down on him.
“It was three of the guys from the White Castle,” he said. “They rammed my car. Those big wheels went right up on the hood, drove me off the road and into a tree. We were pinned inside.”
The three brawlers got out of the truck with baseball bats and started to whale away at the windshield. Alite put Monique under him and tried to fend off the bats as he crawled out through the hole where the windshield had been. Junior pulled up with the other guys, but when another driver stopped and said he was calling the police, they took off. So did two of the guys in the truck.
Alite saw it all in a blur. He remembers Joe O’Kane, a young kid, maybe seventeen years old, staying to help him fight off the guys with the baseball bats. He remembers running after one of the guys, a burly, three-hundred-pound thug, and beating him with his own bat. Then he collapsed. He was rushed to Jamaica Hospital in an ambulance and underwent emergency surgery. He had a broken arm, his insides were caved in—his pancreas was severely damaged—and it took more than a hundred stitches to sew up the gashes on his face, head, and body. Before they wheeled him into surgery he regained consciousness. One of the last things he saw was his father and other members of his family in a fistfight in the hospital with the family members of the guy from the monster truck whom he and O’Kane had pummeled.
Alite was in intensive care for two weeks and then spent another week in recovery. Junior and the others visited him and laughed and joked about what had happened. They were pumped up about some other development as well. Junior couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
He told Alite how some friends of his father had “helped” a guy named John Cennamo commit suicide. About a year earlier Cennamo had been in the Silver Fox Bar when another brawl broke out. Junior apparently stabbed a kid named Danny Silva. Silva died.
Junior used to talk about the stabbing as if it were something to be proud of, Alite recalled. He boasted about killing Silva, saying “I put him down.” It sounded like he was talking about an animal. A federal prosecutor later told a jury that after the brawl, Junior Gotti went back to the bar where Silva lay on the floor bleeding out. Gotti, according to the prosecutor and a witness at the scene, looked down at Silva, and in a Porky Pig voice said, “That’s all folks.” He then left the murder scene for a second time.
Cennamo was the only witness who fingered Junior as the person who had stabbed Silva. Junior denied the allegation and privately said it was Mark Caputo, another member of his crew, who had committed the murder. Alite would testify that this was a typical Gotti move, but one that he was seeing for the first time. It didn’t really matter, because the murder case never went anywhere.
Cennamo wasn’t able to testify. Several months after the March 1983 murder of Danny Silva, he was found hanging by the neck from a tree behind a Laundromat in St. Albans, Queens.<
br />
The death was ruled a suicide, but Cennamo’s family never believed it. No one has ever been charged, but as he lay in the hospital bed recovering from the White Castle brawl, Alite later told a jury, he watched and listened as Junior joked about it.
“He went to the window. My room looked out over the Van Wyck Expressway, and he pretended to see something,” Alite said. “He laughed. The other guys laughed. He said something like, ‘Hey, look. Can you see him hanging from that tree?’” Alite said Junior joked about how the kid had had help getting the noose around his neck.
Alite would later tell authorities that Junior said his father had taken care of it and that Angelo Ruggiero, Willie Boy Johnson, and John Carneglia committed the “suicide.” To Alite, the lesson was simple. Everyone in the neighborhood understood—no one testified against a Gotti.
“I was in intensive care for two weeks and in and out of the hospital for the next two months,” Alite said. “I was walking with a cane. In fact, I had the cane the night we got into that fight at the Arena.” That was the night when Alite said Junior stood behind him and shot Ciro Perrone’s nephew with the derringer.
Alite didn’t bring the cane to the meeting with Gotti Sr. He didn’t want to look any more vulnerable than he was. He also knew going in that he wasn’t going to give up Junior. He didn’t want to end up like John Cennamo, with a noose around his neck, hanging from a tree.
CHAPTER 3
It was a hostile takeover, in the purest sense of that term.
On a cold night in December 1985, Paul Castellano, the boss of the Gambino crime family, was gunned down in front of Sparks Steak House, a posh Midtown restaurant. Castellano was on his way to a meeting with Frank DeCicco. He never made it to the door. Big Paulie and his bodyguard and driver, Tommy Bilotti, were executed as they got out of their Lincoln Town Car. Four gunmen, dressed in white trench coats and wearing thick, black, Russian-style winter hats, took both of them out.
Gotti's Rules Page 3