Gotti's Rules

by George Anastasia

  Alite told himself it was nuts. He knew that he could wind up dead. There were rules to the game he was playing but they were often broken. He was aware of the treachery and deceit within the crime family. All it would have taken was for somebody to tell Gotti that Alite was fooling with his daughter. Whether it was true or not didn’t matter. If Gotti believed it, Alite would be summoned to the club one day and he’d never come back. He knew how volatile the mob boss could be.

  It was a nightmare senario and there was a time when he thought it was coming true.

  One afternoon, Alite was called to the Ravenite by Gotti. He wondered if someone had seen Vicky and him together and had tipped off her father. In a way, it was almost as bad.

  “My daughter would like you to be in her wedding,” Gotti said.

  Alite was taken aback. He wasn’t sure he had a choice, but tried to bow out, claiming that while he was honored, he was not really family and not particularly close to the bride or the groom. He said he would feel awkward.

  “I’m not asking you,” Gotti said. “I’m telling you.”

  The wedding was a lavish affair. Alite was one of nearly two dozen groomsmen. There was Vicky dressed in white. Her sister Angel, dressed in red, was the maid of honor. There were three young flower girls, also in red. The rest of the wedding party was made up of men, all in black tuxedoes, all there to pay homage to the Mafia princess.

  “No other women in the wedding,” Alite said. “She didn’t want anyone to take the spotlight away from her.”

  Vicky arrived at St. Mary Gate of Heaven Church in Ozone Park in a white Bentley. Her father wore a custom-made tux. In her book she would claim that her father told her she could still call it off, even with the church packed and with a thousand people scheduled to attend the reception that night at a posh resort out on Long Island.

  “We’ll just make it a big Christmas party,” she said her father told her. She declined the offer and went forward with the marriage, which took place on December 9, 1984.

  Alite claims that she tried to come on to him during the reception after he helped her collect some of her gifts and was storing them in a room set aside for that purpose. She has said that it was Alite who came on to her and that she rebuffed his advances. In the greater scheme of things, whether they had any kind of relationship before, during, or after the wedding is really a secondary story. But in the soap opera world of the Gottis, it was another chapter that underscored the family’s dysfunction.

  Vicky and her husband went to Las Vegas for their honeymoon. They stayed at the Mirage. A day after the wedding reception, Alite got a call from Junior.

  “Pack a bag,” he said. “We’re going to Vegas.”

  Gotti wanted his son and Alite out there. He said it was for security, that they would be bodyguards for the couple. Alite was told that Vicky had asked for him specifically. Apparently, she was bored and homesick. Her father was only too happy to fulfill her request. Alite thought the real reason that he and Junior were dispatched was that Gotti wanted to make sure Agnello didn’t abuse his daughter. The trip was uneventful, but costly.

  “We were out there gambling,” Alite said. “Junior was a big Dallas Cowboys fans. They were playing Miami. We each bet ten thousand on Dallas and lost. Then I think we dropped another thirty thousand playing blackjack and craps.”

  Before their flight back to the city, they were reduced to gambling at the nickel slot machines, he said.

  Alite said his relationship with Vicky continued after her marriage and eventually led to a confrontation with Agnello. But in the mid-1980s, there was so much else going on, so much money being made, so much maneuvering on the streets and in the underworld, that no one paid much attention.

  “During the trial I said we had feelings for each other. I’m not sure that’s true. She was just playing, seeing what she could get away with. The same way her father and brother used me, she was using me, but for different reasons. I was just trying to stay alive.”

  That’s when Alite said he decided to put some distance between himself and the madness that was life with the Gottis. He used some of the cash that was coming in from the drugs and the sports book and the robberies to invest in real estate. His money wasn’t sitting in a bank, but he had ready access to it. It was standard for him and Junior to let their drug-dealing partners hold their money, he said.

  “We knew they wouldn’t cheat us,” he said. “They knew they’d be killed if they did.”

  There were times when he might have a half million to a million dollars on call, so to speak. If he needed the cash, he would go to one of his dealers and ask for it. But he also decided that it would be smart to put some of that money in property. He bought two condos in Queens as investments and two more in Princeton, New Jersey. He bought another condo in South Brunswick, near Princeton, and bought an apartment in lower Manhattan, not far from the World Trade Center.

  But he also wanted to have someplace where he could get away from the day-in and day-out hustle of the neighborhood. There was a woman he was seeing off and on in South Jersey. She and her husband were divorcing and selling their property, a sprawling, fifteen-acre site off Route 73 in Voorhees Township. The property came with three houses. Alite paid about $600,000 for the estate and eventually moved his fiancée and other family members there. His parents moved into one of the houses, his grandmother into another. He and his soon-to-be wife settled in the third and largest. A few years later, in 1994, he would buy another home, this one on Brick Road in a residential neighborhood in Cherry Hill.

  The South Jersey properties were less than a two-hour drive down the Jersey Turnpike from the city. For a kid who grew up in a Queens neighborhood with relatives living upstairs and across the street, owning property in Voorhees and Cherry Hill was suburbia writ large. It was a different kind of status, a sign of wealth that might not have meant much to the Gottis but was a demonstration to Alite’s own family—his father and mother, his grandmother, his brother and sisters—that he was making something of himself, that he was successful.

  Alite still bristles at the notion that he was “chased” out of Queens by Junior. Their falling-out and the death threats that would follow were still several years away when he bought the first property in 1987. He was looking for a place to put some of his cash, and real estate seemed like a smart move. “Nobody chased me out of the neighborhood,” he said. “I still was there almost every day. It just was good to have someplace else where I could go.”

  On Valentine’s Day of 1989, before a justice of the peace in the Queens County courthouse, John Alite married his longtime girlfriend Carol Defgard. Junior was his best man. Johnny Ruggiero was the other witness. It was a no-nonsense civil ceremony, the total opposite of Vicky Gotti’s lavish affair. The only similarity was that neither marriage would last.

  “We had known each other since we were kids,” he said of his wife Carol. “I cheated on her before and after we got married.”

  They chose Valentine’s Day not because of the romance surrounding the date, but because February 14 was Junior’s birthday. He had suggested it as a way of showing respect and Alite went along. It really didn’t matter to him. He and Carol were living in the property in Voorhees and a few weeks later they left for Hawaii on a belated honeymoon. While they were gone, Alite had arranged with a local contractor to have some work done. He wanted a hot tub installed on the porch, a satellite dish on the roof, and a high-tech electronic security system in place so that alarms and beeps would go off inside the main house whenever anyone entered the property off Route 73, the main highway. The house was set nearly a half mile off the highway and access was along a dirt road. Alite figured it would be good to know in advance if he was getting company. Alite gave the contractor twelve thousand dollars in cash and expected that the work would be done by the time he returned.

  While he was in Hawaii he checked his phone messages from home daily. One day a friend left a confusing message telling him that he had stoppe
d by the house to see him and didn’t mean to intrude. He had looked in the bedroom window and saw who he thought was Alite making love to a woman.

  Alite called his friend up to find out what he was talking about.

  “He thought it was me and my wife,” said Alite. “It was the contractor and this girl he was fooling around with. This guy was married, but he brought his girlfriend to my house and they’re having sex in my bed.”

  When Alite and Carol returned, none of the work had been done. He told his wife to call the contractor and tell him that he had left a couple more thousand dollars for him and that he, Alite, was going to Florida. He wanted the work done before he got back in a week.

  The contractor came the next day looking for the additional cash. Instead, he got a beating.

  “I told him, ‘You think you’re gonna make an asshole out of me. I’m gonna make an asshole out of you.’”

  With that, Alite stripped the contractor, beat him with a pipe—“I broke his ribs, his jaw, and an arm, I think”—and then threw him in a small lake that was on the property.

  “I had a gun and kept shooting at him,” Alite said. “I wouldn’t let him out of the water. It was like thirty degrees out.”

  Finally, he took the contractor, tied him up naked, and put him in his garage. Outside several Rottweilers that Alite kept as watch dogs prowled back and forth.

  “I went out to dinner,” Alite said. “I left him there. But I forgot about a back window. He apparently got loose, climbed out the window, and ran naked through the woods. The cops found him on Route 73.”

  Police took a complaint from the contractor, but before moving in to arrest Alite they contacted organized crime investigators, who tried to set up a sting. They wanted the contractor to call Alite and get him to admit what he had done and, hopefully, to brag about his mob connections.

  “But before they could do that, the guy’s girlfriend called and warned me,” Alite said. “She said they were gonna try to tape me. She said she was telling me because he had screwed her. He kept telling her he was going to leave his wife, but he never did. This was her way of getting back at him.”

  The taped phone conversation went nowhere but the complaint from the clearly beaten, bruised, and terrorized contractor led to aggravated assault, kidnapping, and related charges that would hang over Alite’s head for more than a year before he worked out a plea deal and headed for prison.

  While his permanent residence was now Voorhees, New Jersey, Alite still spent almost every day and most nights in Queens. Shortly after returning from Hawaii, he was feted at a big party hosted by Junior at Altadonna, a restaurant on Cross Bay Boulevard. It was a bachelor party in reverse, held after the wedding and the honeymoon, a couple of dozen guys laughing and drinking while their wives and/or girlfriends sat at home.

  By this point, Alite was hanging out regularly at the PM Pub on 101st Avenue and Eighty-Fourth Street. He was growing closer to Ronnie Trucchio, the crime family soldier who had been part of the brothel business and whose wife had gone on the automobile rampage. Alite and Trucchio would still laugh about the incident when they shared drinks at the pub, which was one of Trucchio’s joints.

  As a child growing up in Ozone Park, Trucchio had been the victim of an automobile accident that left him with a paralyzed right arm. It earned him the nickname “Ronnie One-Arm,” but that didn’t stop him from moving up the mob ladder. A boyhood friend of John Gotti Sr., Trucchio was formally initiated into the crime family in 1990 and would later become a capo.

  Trucchio also became a partner with Alite in some businesses that he and Junior set up in Tampa. While on his honeymoon, Alite had, through an acquaintance, reconnected with an old friend from his brief stay in college, a kid named Tim Donovan, who had remained in the Tampa area and was now in the valet parking business. Alite said Donovan was fascinated with the mob life and invited him to come down when he was back on the East Coast. Alite visited Donovan and liked what he saw. He and Junior, along with Trucchio, established a base in Tampa. Alite insists that the businesses there—a valet parking service, a glass shop, and a restaurant and nightclub—were all legitimate even though they were funded by drug and gambling money.

  “For a while my sister and her husband lived down there and kept an eye on things,” Alite said. “But they eventually came back north.”

  The businesses in Tampa flourished and provided more income. But the presence of New York wiseguys in the Florida city, especially wiseguys linked to the infamous Gotti name, did not go unnoticed in law enforcement circles. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida and the FBI there began building a case against Junior, Alite, Trucchio, and several of their known associates. Donovan would testify for the prosecutin in Tampa, alleging from the witness stand that Alite, Trucchio, and others threatened him and ran him out of the valet business.

  At first, Alite was unaware that he had any problems in Florida. His more immediate concerns were much closer to home. As he later would tell a jury, Alite said he was sitting in the PM Pub one afternoon when Carmine Agnello and four others guys, all of them armed, showed up. Agnello’s entourage included his brother Mikey, a mob associate named Angelo Castelli, another kid Alite knew only as Anthony, and a guy named Ricky Red.

  “They weren’t tough guys, they were stone junkies,” Alite said. “Those were the kind of guys Carmine used to hang out with. They were always getting high. Later, a couple of them told me they had no idea what Carmine was planning.”

  They knew Alite by reputation. They had heard the stories. A few weeks earlier he had shot up a street corner after learning that a couple of guys who hung there had been robbing his drug dealers at the Flight 116 Bar.

  “I got a call that there was a problem,” Alite said. “I was going out. I’m dressed in a suit and tie. Me, Tony Kelly, and another guy were going out to Metro 700, this really nice club. They picked me up. I had a trash bag with me and inside I had a gun with one of those banana clips, fifty rounds. They don’t know it. I say to them, ‘We gotta make a stop first.’”

  They pulled up about a block from the Flight 116 Bar. Guys were hanging out all over the street in front of the bar. Alite said he got out of the car, took out the gun, and started to spray the corner. Everyone scattered. Alite said he chased down a guy who he suspected was robbing his dealers.

  “I grabbed him,” Alite said. “I knew his brother. I said, ‘The only reason I ain’t gonna kill you is I know your brother. I’m giving you a pass this time, but if you or your friends keep bothering my people, I’ll come back and then I will kill ya.’”

  With that, Alite put the gun in the trash bag and headed back for the car, where Kelly was waiting.

  “You all right?” Kelly asked.

  “Sure,” said Alite. “Let’s go.”

  “Go where?” asked Kelly.

  “Metro 700,” said Alite. “But let’s swing back by my apartment first so I can drop this off,” he added, pointing to the trash bag and the still-warm gun.

  “I never picked fights,” Alite said, returning to a theme that he repeated again and again as he told his story. “I wasn’t a bully. But if there was a problem, I would act. I guess you might say I would overreact. I just believed that if you start something you take it all the way. I was a little extreme.”

  The guys with Carmine Agnello knew of Alite’s reputation for violence when they walked into the PM Pub that afternoon. Agnello was a made guy by then, another example of nepotism in the Gotti organization. The rank gave him status and in the pecking order, it put him above Alite.

  The confrontation was a typical Agnello move, Alite said, a lot of noise and posturing, but not much action.

  “Carmine wasn’t a tough guy, but he tried to act tough,” Alite said while testifying about the incident. “He fronted. If somebody wanted to kill me, if five guys come in just shooting, there is no talking. I’m dead.”

  Instead, Alite stared at Agnello and reached behind his own back, pretend
ing to have a gun. Ronnie Trucchio, sitting at the bar nearby, also pretended to have a gun. Seeing it all going down, a kid named Mondo, a friend of Alite, took off out a back door to retrieve a pistol that Alite had stashed in a nearby apartment.

  Agnello moved in close to Alite and in a whisper said, “You and me have a problem.”

  “Yeah, we do,” Alite replied.

  The bad blood between Alite and Agnello stretched back to before the burly tow-truck operator had become a Gotti son-in-law. They genuinely didn’t like each other and that dislike had continued to build as each moved up the mob ladder. Agnello, Alite knew, had a leg up on him but that was no reason for Alite to back down.

  “Carmine and I walked out together,” Alite said. “By this point, I’ve got the gun that Mondo brought me, a nine millimeter. When we get outside, Carmine takes a swing at me, hits me in the head with his gun.”

  Alite wanted to strike back, but he hesitated. He was still playing by the rules of the underworld and in that underworld, if you strike a made guy you could be sentenced to death.

  “It was frustrating,” he said. “I knew about the rules, but I think I would have shot him anyway. At that point I’m not afraid of him or of Junior. But what’s in the back of my mind is Gotti. He’s the boss and this is his son-in-law. That’s the reason I don’t strike back. Me and Carmine are screaming at each other and I see Junior pulling up in a car. Vicky’s sitting next to him. He parks down the block and gets out. She stays behind.”

  It appeared they already knew a little of what had happened, but Alite filled in the missing details. He also told Junior that he wanted to kill Agnello.

  “You ain’t touching him,” Junior replied, stepping between the two.

  It was the Johnny Gebert scene played out with even more drama. This time it was about blood. Agnello, even though he was a punk and even though he was abusing Junior’s sister, was family. John Alite was not.

  “At that point I found out I was an outsider,” Alite said. “That’s when I really understood. He allowed this Carmine to put a gun to me, to come with four other guys to kill me, and he wouldn’t let me get retribution because it was his brother-in-law. . . . I understood. It’s blood. I’m not blood. I was just another guy he used to hurt people and to make money. And that was it.”