John Gotti and Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano watched it all go down from their car, which was parked about a half block away. Within two weeks, John J. Gotti, then just forty-five years old, was the new boss of the biggest crime family in New York, and, by extension, the country.
The hit was against all rules of the Mafia. No one takes down a sitting boss without the approval of the Commission, a Mafia tribunal made up of the leaders of the five New York crime families. Gotti ignored the prohibition. He couldn’t seek Commission approval because what the hit really was about was drugs.
His brother Gene, his best friend Angelo Ruggiero, and a top associate, John Carneglia, had been indicted for dealing heroin. Wiretapped conversations, which were part of the case and would eventually be made public, had sealed the deal for the feds.
On one tape, recorded in 1982, Ruggiero and Gene Gotti discussed the situation and the jeopardy they both were in. Ruggiero told Gene Gotti that Castellano and Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, the leader of the powerful Genovese crime family, were in agreement. Anyone dealing drugs would be killed, no questions asked.
The two mob bosses had “made a pact,” Ruggiero explained.
“Any friend of ours that gets pinched for junk, or that they hear of anything about junk, they kill him,” Ruggiero said as the FBI tape rolled. “No administration meetings, no nothing. Just gonna kill him. They’re not warning nobody, not telling nobody because they feel the guy is gonna rat.”
There were dozens of other tapes that clearly put all three in the “junk” business. Ruggiero was the most talkative. As the case moved toward trial, the defense attorneys, under the rules of pretrial discovery, were being given all the evidence the feds had gathered, including transcripts of the incriminating wiretapped conversations. It was just a matter of time before Castellano got access to them.
The Gotti crew had also lost an ally who might have been able to hold Castellano off. Longtime crime family underboss Aniello Dellacroce had died of cancer on December 2, 1985, two weeks before the Castellano shooting. Dellacroce was in many ways more highly regarded in the family than Castellano. He was a “gangster,” while Castellano was a “racketeer.” The perception was that Big Paulie was more interested in the business end of the underworld than in the day-in, day-out struggle to survive that was the life of most guys under him.
Castellano had taken over the family when his brother-in-law Carlo Gambino died in 1976. Guys like Ruggiero, the Gotti brothers, and Carneglia didn’t respect him as much as they did Dellacroce. They understood the pecking order and recognized Castellano as boss, but they thought he had inherited the spot. He didn’t earn it. He also had more money than anyone and his prohibition on drug dealing was based at least in part on the fact that he didn’t need the money.
It wasn’t a moral question. That was an issue built out of a romantic vision of the Mafia painted by Mario Puzo. The reality was that the prohibition was a pragmatic decision. If you were secure in your position in the underworld, dealing drugs was a high-risk proposition. You were coming in contact with low-life narcotics traffickers who would sell you out in a minute. You ran the risk of using your own product or having members of your organization use it, in which case they became undependable. And you exposed yourself to more serious law enforcement scrutiny.
Those were the real reasons for the ban on dealing drugs.
The tapes of Gene Gotti, Ruggiero, and Carneglia gave the government a solid case on which to build a drug trafficking racketeering indictment. More important, they gave Castellano what he was looking for. With the death of Dellacroce, Castellano decided to break up the Gotti crew. He was correctly suspicious of the loyalty there. With the drug charges, he had the justification for permanently eliminating some of John Gotti’s top associates.
The tapes confirmed beyond any doubt that John Gotti’s guys had been major players in the drug underworld, big-time heroin dealers. The situation left Gotti with few choices. He could take out his top three guys, or go down with them.
He decided a preemptive strike was the better course of action. He’d deal with the ramifications later. It was a risky move. Five years earlier a similar situation had existed in Philadelphia. In March 1980, Angelo Bruno, the longtime boss of the Philadelphia–South Jersey crime family and a close friend of the late Carlo Gambino and Castellano, had been shotgunned to death outside his South Philadelphia row house. The hit went down on a rainy Friday night.
It was orchestrated by Antonio “Tony Bananas” Caponigro, Bruno’s Newark-based consigliere. Like Ruggiero, Carneglia, and Gene Gotti, Caponigro had been dealing heroin and found Bruno’s stance against drug trafficking hypocritical.
One of Bruno’s top associates, Raymond “Long John” Martorano, was a major player in the meth trade in the City of Brotherly Love and the consensus was that Bruno got a piece of that action through a phony position as a “salesman” for a vending machine company that Martorano and his brother owned.
Bruno had also allowed Giuseppe and Rosario Gambino, distant Sicilian cousins of Carlo, to set up shop in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, just across the river from Philadelphia. The brothers opened a restaurant called Valentino’s, but their real business was heroin trafficking. They were part of what later became known as the Pizza Connection.
The Gambino brothers had been invited to Bruno’s home for Easter dinner. Caponigro and others around him were certain they came bearing an envelope full of cash. And they were just as certain that cash came from dealing babania.
What Caponigro hadn’t anticipated, and what Gotti would have to deal with as well, was the treachery within the underworld. Caponigro thought he had Commission approval to take out Bruno. He was led to believe this by several leaders of the Genovese organization who saw a way to remove both Bruno and Caponigro from the scene, thereby destabilizing the Philadelphia family at a time when the casino gambling boom in Atlanic City was just beginning. Philadelphia had long controlled the seaside resort, but until casinos, no one thought the city was worth much. Now there was money to be made.
Caponigro went to New York for a meeting about a week after Bruno was killed. He thought he was coming back as the new boss. Two days later his body was found in the trunk of a car abandoned in the South Bronx. He had been beaten and tortured before he was killed. Twenty-dollar bills were stuffed in his mouth and his anus, a sign, underworld watchers said, that he had been killed because he had gotten too greedy. More important, the murder of Caponigro (and three of his associates believed to have been involved in the Bruno hit) was a way to maintain underworld order. You don’t kill a boss without Commission approval.
John Gotti would have problems with that same Genovese crime family in the wake of the Castellano hit. But he managed to avoid Caponigro’s fate. Gravano later testified about the situation.
“Every family sent their blessings and they accepted it,” he said of Gotti’s ascension to the top spot, “except the Genovese family.” Instead, there was a warning. The rules had been broken and “someday somebody would have to answer for that,” Gravano said he was told.
By the time the Castellano hit went down, Alite had worked his way back into favor with Gotti Sr. The Arena shooting incident was forgotten. Alite was spending part of each day with Junior and was a regular at both the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Queens and the Ravenite, a social club on Mulberry Street that became Gotti’s Manhattan base.
One day late in November 1985, about a month before the Castellano murder, Alite was asked to take a ride with Junior and his father. The elder Gotti drove, which was unusual to begin with. And he seemed jumpy. Alite said Gotti was very talkative during the car ride, which was out of character.
“He was just acting funny,” Alite said. “He took me and Junior with him and drove out to Staten Island to Castellano’s house. He had to drop off some Christmas presents. He was trying to act casual, but he was kidding around more than he ever did. To me, he seemed uptight. I think he took us because he wante
d somebody there when he went in the house. Probably told Paul he had two kids in the car outside. We waited about an hour before he came out and drove back to the city.”
About a week later, the same scene was replayed. This time Gotti asked Bobby Boriello and Alite to drive out with him. Again they waited in the car while Gotti met with Castellano.
Whether those meetings were discussions about the drug case is open to speculation. But it would make sense. Gotti might have been trying to take Castellano’s temperature. Dellacroce was dying and it would just be a matter of time before Castellano made a move.
“After the shooting—everybody knew who was behind it—we were on call twenty-four-seven,” Alite said. “And everyone was told to bring their guns. Before that, whenever you went to one of the clubhouses, you weren’t supposed to have a gun. But for those weeks after the Castellano murder, it was high alert.”
But along with the caution came arrogance, Alite said.
“Everybody was more cocky, all of us,” he said. “It was all over the news. It was everywhere. He was the new boss of bosses.”
As he looks back on it now, Alite is still amazed that Gotti was able to pull off the coup and then survive the aftermath.
“He talked about the rules, he talked about honor, but here he was breaking the biggest rule of all, killing a boss, and nobody did nothin’,” Alite said. “We were kids. We weren’t schooled in all that stuff. But those older guys, they shoulda known. They shoulda done something. Instead, they all rolled over for him.”
It was just one more example of the Gottis talking the talk, but then doing whatever was in their own best interest. Alite had seen it on a smaller scale for more than a year. Shortly after the drive-by shooting of the Jamaicans, there was a situation with another local drug dealer, named Kevin Bonner.
Bonner was in the coke business with a guy named George Grosso, who happened to be John Gebert’s brother-in-law. They were moving product in the same general area as Alite, in the bars and pubs along Jamaica Avenue, and, according to both Kevin Bonner’s and Alite’s trial testimony, they were kicking up to Junior. But, as Alite would tell the court, that didn’t matter when Junior saw a chance to make an even bigger score.
Johnny Boy Ruggiero, Angelo’s son, was part of Junior’s crew. Since Angelo was Junior’s godfather, Junior and Johnny Boy were like cousins. The younger Ruggiero was always talking about “expanding” the business, Alite said. Alite testified that he and Junior made a connection with a supplier named Tony Kelly, who would sell them weight, a kilo or more at a time. Alite was still dealing in quarter kilos.
Junior brought up the idea, once again teasing Alite about being penny ante, then prodding him about going big. The plan was to go in as partners with Kevin Bonner. Kilos went for about forty thousand dollars at that time. Junior, Alite, and Bonner would each put up one-third.
Alite was fine with the idea, but Bonner balked.
“He didn’t want to leave George Grosso,” Alite said.
So Junior sent some friends to persuade him.
“I’m on Jamaica Avenue one day when Junior drives up with some guys from his crew, including Johnny Boy and Greg Reiter, a tough kid who was a friend of mine,” Alite said. “Junior asks if Bonner is still balking. When I tell him he is, Junior says stay on the avenue. We’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Bonner had two guys selling cocaine out of the White Horse Tavern and Nino’s Pub. A few minutes later, Alite would tell the court, he saw Junior’s car pull up on the two guys, who were standing outside the tavern. Junior got out of the car and watched as the others, armed with baseball bats, went after Bonner’s two drug dealers.
“They baseball-batted them,” Alite said. “They threw one of the kids through the window of a bridal shop on Eighty-Sixth Street. Then they got in the car and drove away. Nobody said a thing.”
That wasn’t entirely accurate. The next day, according to Alite, Kevin Bonner said, “Okay.”
The first purchase went down a few days later at Shell Bank in Howard Beach. Bonner fronted some of the money. The rest would be paid after the fact. Tony Kelly went to the trunk of his car, pulled out a package, and handed it to Alite. It was a kilo of coke. They headed back to an apartment, where they split the package. Bonner took a third and Alite kept the rest. According to Alite, he and Junior would share in the profits from the sale of the two-thirds of a kilo after he cut and packaged it.
Alite would later tell a jury that this was the start of an expansion that would eventually generate more than $100,000 a month in profits for each of them. He said they cornered the coke market up and down Jamaica Avenue and in several other neighborhoods in Queens. Anyone else who was dealing had to buy from them or kick up to them. At its high point, the business was moving up to eight kilos of coke a week, he said. It was a heady time for Alite, who couldn’t believe his good fortune. And he traced it all back to his association with John Gotti Jr.
“I grew up, my father was a taxi driver,” he would later explain to a jury. “I had no money. I wore tee-shirts and chinos. When I got to know him [Junior], it was a big thing. I would walk around, people knew who he was, who his father was, knew what the Gambino family was. Everyday people, the public like yourselves would treat us a lot different. When I went to restaurants, I didn’t wait. When I went to shows, I got the best seats. I went to tailors. Had my shirts made at David Nadler’s in Brooklyn. We went to stores and got suits custom-made. We got treated like we were celebrities. It was something I wasn’t used to when I grew up.”
Alite gave up a part of who he was in order to live that life. At first he was willing, happy even, to make the trade-off. Later he would see it for what it really was. He was being used and abused by the Gottis. Trying to explain it in simple street terms at Junior Gotti’s trial, he told a jury, “The only way to understand it was, I was a prostitute and he was a pimp.”
Today Alite looks back at some of the things he agreed to do and cringes. Not the murders and the violence per se. That was part of his character, part of the image he wanted to project. And it was part of the world in which he was living. Everyone knew that violence was part of the life. If you dealt drugs, if you associated with mobsters, if you ran cons or tried to scam and hustle someone in the underworld, you could get rich or you could get hurt. It was Willie Lomanesque. It came with the territory. Alite admits that he was “wild” and used it to his advantage.
It was the petty stuff, the “unnecessary violence,” that still bothers him.
“I always thought of myself as the good bad guy,” he said.
There was another drug supplier, a neighborhood kid, from whom Alite used to buy quarter and half kilos of cocaine. After they established the connection with Kelly, the kid was irrelevant.
“He was a decent guy, not into violence, even though he was in the drug business,” Alite recalled as he told the story from the witness stand. “I grew up with him. He was a friend of my sister’s. Junior says, ‘Let’s rob him.’”
So, according to Alite, they did. Alite said he set up what was supposed to be a buy at an apartment the kid and his partner kept on Ninety-Eighth Street off Jamaica Avenue. Alite went up first, but left the door open. Gotti and an associate came up minutes later waving guns around. The kid was pistol-whipped. Alite fell on the floor and, as they had planned, Gotti kicked him in the face. He ended up with a black eye. The move was to convince the kid that Alite had nothing to do with the robbery. They grabbed a quarter kilo of coke, which Alite cut, packaged, and put on the street. Alite testified that he and Gotti shared the revenue, which amounted to 100 percent profit. All that Alite had had to do was give up a friend.
But in the Gotti organization, friends were nothing more than pawns, interchangeable parts to be used and then discarded.
Angelo Ruggiero was John Gotti’s lifelong friend. Yet Gotti put him on the shelf. Ruggiero and Gotti used to hijack trucks together when they were first coming up. Ruggiero introduced Gotti to Dellacroce and
helped get him made. But Gotti was all about public perception, both in the media and in the underworld. Angelo Ruggiero had been picked up on dozens of FBI tapes talking about the heroin business. Never mind that Gotti’s brother Gene and John Carneglia were part of the same case. Gotti was going to make an example of Ruggiero. It was his way to establish the new administration.
“He needed a fall guy,” said Alite. “It wasn’t about dealing drugs, it was about getting caught. Gotti was making a fortune in the drug business, but no one was supposed to know it. In the beginning, I think Junior and his sister Vicky really believed their father wasn’t involved in drugs. Hell, everybody in our crew, everybody around Senior, was dealing. But he wanted to make an example of Ruggiero.”
Ruggiero was dying of cancer when Gotti banished him from the organization, ordered that no one should be around him, even considered having him killed. Alite couldn’t believe it. Despite the ban, he visited Ruggiero frequently. He remembered that Angelo had looked out for him after the Arena incident. He wasn’t going to turn his back on him.
“He sent word he wanted to see me,” Alite said. “He was staying at his mother’s house in Howard Beach. They had a bed in the living room. He was on a morphine drip and was taking all kinds of antibiotics. He was shrunken up. When he spoke it was like his throat was full of fluid. But he still was a tough son of a bitch. And he was pissed off.”
At that first meeting, Ruggiero asked Alite to help make some collections for him, money that was still owed him. But even after making those collections, Alite continued to visit. No one was supposed to associate with Ruggiero, whom Gotti had taken to calling a “junk-mouth babania dealer.” It was during those meetings that Ruggiero cautioned Alite about the Gottis.
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