Alite was moving in higher circles within the organization at this time and was able to develop a better perspective on the plays and the players. Things were not always as they seemed. And sometimes that was by design. Junior had established a new pecking order. At a meeting late in 1987 at the Our Friends Social Club, Junior told everyone that from that point on they had to go through Alite, that whatever they wanted to say to him, they should say to Alite. That’s the way it was going to be.
“He was moving up and he wanted to put a buffer between himself and some of the neighborhood guys,” Alite recalled. “His father always used to tell him, ‘You got too many of these jerkoffs around you.’ So at this meeting he says, ‘Everything goes through Johnny from now on,’ meaning me.”
Alite liked the power and the status. He would later tell a jury that at that point he was running a crew of several dozen mob associates who were working in the drug underworld and that he controlled cocaine distribution in Queens, parts of Brooklyn, and also in sections of Long Island.
Junior would occasionally tell Alite that while he couldn’t be made, he could become someone with status, someone like Jimmy “the Gent” Burke or Joe “the German” Watts. They were major players in the underworld, had their own crews and their own operations. They were like capos, maybe even better. But they weren’t made guys. Burke was with the Luchese crime family. Watts was with Gotti and the Gambino organization.
Jimmy the Gent was portrayed by Robert De Niro in the classic movie Goodfellas. He was the mastermind behind the infamous Lufthansa airline heist in 1978.
Alite saw himself on that career path. That Burke ended up dying in prison in 1996 and that Watts is currently serving a thirteen-year sentence after pleading guilty in 2011 to federal murder and assault charges was not part of the equation. Alite focused instead on the status, wealth, power, and influence that both Burke and Watts had on the streets. That’s what he wanted. And he very nearly got it.
Jimmy the Gent also played a behind-the scenes role in the first homicide that Alite was directly involved in. Alite was a friend of Frankie Burke, Jimmy the Gent’s son. The Gottis wanted nothing to do with the Burkes, but Alite ignored Junior when he told him to stay away from Frankie.
It was the same old song. “They’re scumbag drug dealers. Don’t bother with them.”
Alite would hang out with Frankie Burke at different bars and clubs when Junior wasn’t around. One night Frankie told him that from prison his father was trying to collect an old debt and that he, Frankie, was supposed to meet with two guys over in Brooklyn to settle up. He asked Alite to go along.
“Frankie told me they owed his father a couple of hundred grand,” Alite said in retelling the story years later. “I took a ride with him to meet with these guys. It was over on Linden Boulevard in Brooklyn. It was nighttime. We pull up and these two guys get out of another car and come toward us. We get out of our car. There’s a guy behind the wheel of the other car, but he just sits there.”
Alite said the two guys were Hispanic. He didn’t know many more details about them or the debt. He just knew that instead of settling up, they got confrontational. There were shouts and threats. Alite said he did what he was there for.
“I pulled out a gun and started shooting,” he said. “Frankie did the same. The two guys went down. The guy behind the wheel of their car never moved. I think he might have been there to set them up. Frankie might have wanted to kill them all along. I don’t know. We just got back in our car and drove back to Queens. I never heard any more about it after that.”
A few months later, Frankie Burke got involved in a fight in a bar with a guy named Tito from the neighborhood. Tito shot and killed him.
“This guy Tito owned a barbershop on 101st Street, near the clubhouse,” Alite said. “He and his brother were around a lot of people. The brother ran back to Italy after being involved in a murder.”
After he heard what happened to Frankie Burke, Alite went to see Tito.
“I told him, ‘Look, you better get out of here.’ I said, ‘I might be one of the guys they send to kill you,’” Alite said. “I knew Jimmy Burke would reach out to the Lucheses and they’d arrange for someone to take Tito out.”
The barber told Alite he wasn’t going anywhere.
“He just sat in his barber chair with his hands behind his head,” Alite recalled. “It was like he was waiting to die.”
A few days later, two gunmen walked into the shop and fired nine shots into Tito’s head and body. He died where he sat.
Death had simply become a part of Alite’s underworld. Over the years, so many guys he knew ended up dead that he and his friends started to refer to Woodhaven, the section of Queens where they had grown up, as Death Haven. Years later, while he was sitting in prison, Alite made a list of those he knew who had either been killed or died from a drug overdose. There were more than a hundred names on that list.
Alite knows he could easily have been one of them.
But in the late 1980s he was still young and brash and thought himself invincible. He was also very rich. Together he and Junior were grossing more than a million dollars a month in the coke business, he alleged on the witness stand. His top lieutenants were earning twenty or thirty grand a month. Lower-level guys were taking home five to ten grand. Alite estimated for the jury that he and Junior were each pocketing about a hundred grand a month, although his take was usually somewhat higher because he would play with the numbers. Junior didn’t pay that much attention, especially if you were flashing a big wad of cash in his face and telling him it was his cut.
But not everyone was happy with the new arrangements.
One afternoon Alite was walking along Jamaica Avenue not far from an apartment he was sharing with a few other guys. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a Lincoln slowly moving alongside him. The car jumped the curb. He looked up just in time to see John Gebert point a gun and open fire.
Alite took off running as three shots rang out. He made his way back to his apartment, where he got his own gun. Then he went to see Junior. This was still a turbulent time in the Gotti underworld. The feds had uncovered yet another plot by the Genovese crime family to kill Gotti Sr.
Louis “Bobby” Manna, a capo with the New Jersey branch of the Genovese organization, had been caught on tape plotting another assassination attempt. The FBI had planted bugs in Casella’s, a restaurant in Hoboken, New Jersey, where Manna hung out. The feds had wired a private back room that Manna used as an office. They also had a bug in the women’s bathroom because they heard Manna would slip in there sometimes to discuss business. Gotti and his brother Gene were the targets of the Manna plot. As they were required to do, FBI agents working the case warned Gotti. He laughed it off, but the entire crime family was again put on alert: Be careful who you’re dealing with and report in on a regular basis. Let your boss know about any unusual activity.
Alite was doing just that when he went to see Junior, who was still living at home with his father and mother on Eighty-Fifth Street and 160th Avenue in Howard Beach. He told Junior about the ambush and said he wanted permission to kill Gebert.
According to Alite, Junior said he wanted to talk to Gebert first. He told Alite to get in the car and take a ride. They headed over to Gebert’s apartment.
“I was steaming,” Alite said. “I didn’t want to go. He was making me look weak, like I had run to Junior and now Junior was going to protect me. It was bullshit.”
Alite sat in the car while Junior spoke with Gebert. When he came out, he told Alite that everything was taken care of, that it wouldn’t happen again.
“John, what’s the matter with you?” Alite asked. “He tried to kill me. I gotta kill him.”
Junior said not now. Alite would later testify that Junior told him that they would “rock him to sleep,” let him relax. Then, according to Alite’s testimony, they would kill him.
Gebert tried to stay out of Alite’s way, but the two of them crossed paths on Jamaica
Avenue a few weeks later and got into a shouting and shoving match. No guns this time, but clearly the bad blood was still there. Junior again met with Gebert and, according to Alite, again refused permission for a hit. Shortly after that, Gebert went on the lam.
He was a suspect in a rape and took off. He was hiding out in Brooklyn and wasn’t around Queens anymore. That made it easier for Junior to ignore Alite’s plea for permission to kill him. Alite also believed that Gebert was still kicking up regularly to Junior from his drug business and Junior didn’t want to eliminate a source of income. Alite would testify that Junior told him Gebert was on a hit list, that he would be killed, but the murder was temporarily on hold.
Georgie Grosso, on the other hand, wasn’t as big a source of money for Junior. Killing him would set an example. It was a way to let everyone know that using the Gotti name in the drug underworld was a capital offense.
The rules were simple, Alite said.
“Everyone knew if you got caught dealing drugs, you would be killed,” he said. “One time when I met with John Gotti, he told me, ‘I know what you’re doing, but I don’t know. And if you get caught, you’re dead.’”
What wasn’t said, but what Alite clearly understood, was that Junior had better not be implicated in any drug case. If Alite got caught dealing, Alite was going to take the fall. For some reason, Grosso never understood. He continued to throw the Gotti name around. Alite testified that this was the reason Junior wanted him dead. According to Alite, the fact that Grosso was there when Gebert ambushed Alite was used by Junior to enhance his order that Grosso had to go.
Alite told the court that he got the okay and set a plan in motion.
As with Gebert, the idea was to set Grosso up, make him comfortable, “rock him to sleep.” Alite testified that he recruited several guys who were part of his crew to help out. There was Phil Baroni, an ex–New York City police detective; another kid named Joey Dee; and two other guys who liked to hang out with wiseguys. They were basically along for the ride.
The first thing they did was “clock” Grosso, establish his routine. He was in the habit of showing up at the White Horse Tavern late each night. One Monday night, about a week before Christmas in 1988, Alite and the others were there drinking when Grosso walked in. The Monday night football game was on every big TV screen around the bar. Alite waved and called Grosso over.
“He was leery at first, but everybody made him feel comfortable,” Alite said. “I was buying drinks. Shots. I had told the bartender beforehand to just pour me water. Everyone else was getting shots of vodka. We’re drinking, laughing, joking. Kiddin’ around about how things were when we were kids. Everybody’s gettin’ a little drunk and I can see Grosso is starting to relax.”
With the football game winding down, Alite suggested they all head out to an after-hours club out by LaGuardia Airport called the Executive Suite. At first Grosso said he wanted to go home, but the others convinced him to come along.
Alite, Baroni, and Grosso got into a Chevy Blazer that Joey Dee was driving.
When Grosso started to get into the backseat, Alite told him with a smile, “No. You ride up front.” Alite and Baroni piled into the backseat, Alite sitting directly behind Grosso. Alite testified that the other two guys followed in another car.
“That was the crash car,” Alite said as he detailed the murder from the witness stand. “Originally the plan was to pull over near a park off Eighty-Eighth Street and Atlantic Avenue. I was gonna say I had to take a piss. When the car stopped, I would shoot him and we’d dump his body.”
But Alite said he worried that kids playing in the park the next day would come across the corpse. It wasn’t that he was concerned about the body being discovered—in fact Alite told a jury that Junior had made a point of telling him that the body should be left out in the open so that the murder could serve as an example for anyone else who misused or abused the Gotti name.
“Don’t bury him,” Alite said Junior told him. “Don’t put him in water. Don’t hide him. Put him out in the street so people know what you did.”
Alite just didn’t want a bunch of kids exposed to that kind of violence. It was a strange moral code, one that Alite was constantly wrestling with as he dealt with the Gotti organization. Alite understood that even in this life there was a right way and a wrong way to do something. You didn’t need to expose innocent people.
So instead of pulling off near the park, they continued to drive out toward LaGuardia on the Grand Central Parkway. They slowed off an exit at Jewel Avenue and that’s where Alite pulled out his gun and pumped three bullets into the back of Grosso’s head.
Then he spit on him, calling him a son of a bitch and a cocksucker.
The others took Grosso’s body and dumped it in some brush near the guardrail that ran along the Jewel Avenue exit. Alite threw the gun in a nearby lake. Then they all drove to the Esquire Diner in Queens and had something to eat. Alite still remembers what he ordered that night.
“A cheeseburger with extra cheese,” he said. “That’s what I always got. And a Coke.”
Before they headed home, Alite told Joey Dee to make sure he cleaned out the Blazer really well. He told him he ought to get rid of it after that.
“I told him he probably ought to sell it,” Alite said.
The next morning Alite headed over to the Bergin, where he met Junior and told him everything had been taken care of. The two walked next door to a salon, where Alite says they got manicures. It was a routine for both of them, who liked to look sharp and always got their nails done.
It was another point that the defense would use to portray Alite as a ruthless and heartless killer. Within minutes of killing Georgie Grosso, Alite was sitting in a booth at a diner having a cheeseburger. Less than five hours later, with Grosso’s remains still warm, he was in a salon getting a manicure.
While they were there, Gene Gotti walked in. Junior started to tell him what had happen. His uncle flipped out and pushed Junior outside.
“He told him, ‘Are you fuckin’ crazy talkin’ about something like that?’” Alite recalled. “The Gottis figured the feds had bugs everywhere. We all used to go to the nail salon next to the Bergin, so Genie figured there were bugs in there too.”
When Junior came back to Alite, he told him what his uncle had said. He also said Gene Gotti wanted him to make sure everything had gone down the way Alite described it.
“Junior said he wanted me to drive him back to the Jewel Avenue exit where the body was,” Alite said. “I’ve watched a lot of movies. I know you’re not supposed to go back to the scene of the crime, but that’s what Junior wanted.”
They jumped into Alite’s Corvette and headed out on the Grand Central Parkway, pulling off at the Jewel Avenue exit. The area was swarming with police. There were several patrol cars, a coroner’s van, all kinds of cops. As they drove by, Junior looked over. They were carrying Grosso’s body out.
“He don’t look good,” Alite recalled Junior saying with a laugh.
Alite just kept driving.
The murder enhanced Alite’s underworld resume. Now he was someone who had done some work, someone whom others would describe as “capable.” But it did even more for Junior Gotti.
Four days after Grosso’s body was discovered, Junior Gotti was formally initiated into the Gambino crime family. It was the first step in what a federal prosecutor would later describe as the “rise of a vicious and violent street criminal to a savvy and money-hungry business criminal and leader of the Gambino family.”
Savvy might have been a bit of an overstatement, but the point was clear. Junior had been anointed.
The ceremony took place on Christmas Eve in an apartment on Mulberry Street near the Ravenite. Sammy the Bull Gravano, who had been elevated to the position of underboss, officiated. Gotti Sr. didn’t attend, but held court later at a party at the club.
“They figured it wouldn’t look right if Gotti initiated his own son,” Alite said.
; Michael “Mikey Scars” DiLeonardo and two others guys were also made that night. DiLeonardo, like Alite, would later become a government witness and provide details about the inner workings of the Gotti crime family. But that would be years later. That Christmas Eve the Gottis, father and son, were sitting on top of their world.
Image and perception were what they were all about. Junior’s rise up the ladder was the essence of underworld nepotism. While Alite may have thought that he was using Junior to get ahead in the crime family, it was actually Junior who was using him. In Italian-American communities all over America that night, the sons and daughters of immigrants were celebrating the Feast of the Seven Fishes before heading off to Midnight Mass. The Gottis, on the other hand, were pledging their allegiance to an institution they considered even more sacred than the Catholic Church.
Vicky Gotti would later write about her brother’s formal initiation into the mob in her book This Family of Mine. She said her brother likened the ceremony to something out of the Knights of the Roundtable. She herself compared her father, brother, and the men who worked for them to Robin Hood and his band of merry men, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. The author conceded, however, that some of the money ended up in the pockets of her father and brother.
CHAPTER 8
The Robin Hood image was partially correct. The Gottis had robbed a lot of people. Gotti Sr. started out robbing trucks and brought the mind-set of a hijacker to everything that he did. It was a quick and easy way to make money. You just took from anyone who had what you wanted. That was the approach that he followed when he became boss.
Junior, on the other hand, didn’t start out targeting trucks. He went where he knew the payoff would be even bigger.
“I would say we robbed a couple dozen drug dealers while we were in the drug business,” Alite said. “Some of it was penny ante, like the time we pistol-whipped that kid. But there were also some pretty big scores.”
One of the biggest was on the Upper East Side, where a drug supplier named Hunter Adams had a posh apartment in a high-rise that included a twenty-four-hour doorman and lots of surveillance cameras. Alite would later testify that Michael Reiter, one of Mark Reiter’s sons, came to Alite with the idea. Alite said he took it to Junior and then set the robbery in motion.
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