It was the way the Gottis operated. They always came first.
Later that year, Angelo Ruggiero died of cancer. He had remained on the shelf, persona non grata, for nearly four years, banished from the underworld by his former good friend John Gotti. Gotti, in fact, didn’t even want to attend Ruggiero’s funeral but Sammy Gravano convinced him that he should go.
Gotti appeared somber and subdued at the wake, but everyone knew he was just playing a role. He was the boss and this was an underling whose passing he would acknowledge. That was the extent of it. What Ruggiero had done for him wasn’t part of the equation. Alite was beginning to see how things really were. In fact, he was experiencing it. But he wasn’t ready to break away.
Early in 1990 Greg Reiter disappeared. The word on the street was that he had been killed in a drug dispute, but his body was never found. No one was ever charged with his suspected homicide. Alite and those around him were convinced that Tommy “Karate” Pitera, the shooter in the Willie Boy Johnson hit, had taken Reiter out.
“He had a reputation for chopping up bodies,” Alite said. “He would kill people and they would just disappear. We all figured it was him.”
Reiter and Pitera had been sometimes partners in the drug business and had made—and occasionally lost—money together. There was an ongoing dispute over twenty thousand dollars when Reiter disappeared. Alite never learned the motive for the murder but suspected that the Dennis Harrigan robbery also might have been part of the problem. Harrigan worked with Pitera in the drug business. Greg’s brother Mike had helped set up the heist. If you robbed Harrigan, you were by extension robbing Pitera.
Tommy Karate is currently serving a series of life sentences after being convicted in 1992 of six homicides. Pitera was with the Bonanno family, but often contracted out to other families who had some work that needed to be done. Whether the Reiter murder was a sanctioned mob hit or simply a drug underworld killing has never been determined. For Alite it didn’t really matter. Greg Reiter was his friend. Pitera had killed him. And now the word on the street was that Tommy Karate was looking for Alite.
A few months after they moved into the property in South Jersey, Alite got a call from his wife. Carol was panicked. She said there were armed men moving around in the woods outside the house. Alite rushed home, driving in by way of a back road on the property. Once inside the house, he grabbed an Uzi machine gun and a revolver and in the dark began stalking those who were stalking him.
“They were Spanish guys,” he said in retelling the story of a shootout that sounded like something out of a Die Hard film. “I could hear them talking. I think they were Mexican.”
Alite said they had inadvertently tripped two alarms as they made their way up a dirt road that led to the house where he and Carol lived. Their presence had also set off the dogs.
“They were chained, but they were barking like crazy,” he said of the Rottweilers.
Alite slipped out a back door, moved into the woods, and knelt down, letting his eyes adjust to the dark. Then he moved.
“I knew the grounds better than they did, which helped me,” he said. “And at first, they didn’t know I was there. They thought we were all in the house. I think they were either waiting to ambush me if I came out or were planning to storm in and open fire. I decided to go after them instead.”
Shooting as he ran, rolling in the brush for cover and coming up firing again, he engaged in a brief firefight, Alite said. He is certain that he hit two of the intruders before they ran from the property.
The next morning he and a friend went out to look around.
“There were no bodies, but lots of blood,” he said. “I was sure Pitera had sent them. He dealt with drug dealers from Mexico. It made sense.”
Alite said his suspicions were more than confirmed when a few days later he got word that Gotti wanted to see him at the Ravenite. Tommy Pitera had asked for the meeting.
“I go there not knowing what to expect,” Alite said. “This guy has killed Greg Reiter, whose father had made Gotti millions and who had taken a pinch and not given Gotti up. For that reason alone, Pitera should have been killed. But Gotti didn’t see it that way. He tells us that whatever happened happened and that now it’s over. Settled. We both have to agree.”
But outside the club, as they walked toward their cars, Alite said he told Pitera nothing had changed.
“Whaddaya mean?” Pitera asked. “The man said it was settled.”
“Nothin’s settled,” Alite said. “I’m still gonna kill ya.”
Pitera was arrested and jailed before Alite could make good on his threat.
CHAPTER 10
In any business, the guy in charge sets the tone. Some guys are good leaders. Others don’t know how to lead but love being boss. John J. Gotti was part of that second group. He had taken control of the biggest crime family in New York, but he ran it like a street gang out of Howard Beach.
He demanded respect but never worried about earning it. He required those around him to acknowledge his position through everything they said and did. He called it protocol. It was something that Junior emphasized from the very first time he met Alite. And it was something that Alite watched play out again and again as the Gottis interacted with those around them.
John Gotti’s Rules of Leadership: Always acknowledge the presence of the boss first in any public or social setting. In any social setting with members of other crime families, make them come to you to pay their respects. Going to them first is a sign of weakness.
“If you went into a room where there were a bunch of guys, you had to go up to the highest-ranking guy first,” Alite said. “You kiss him on both cheeks. Then you acknowledge the other guys. If Gotti’s in the room, he’s the one you go to.
“Whenever we were going out, you were supposed to dress nice. But you were never supposed to dress better than the boss. I remember one time I had to change my jacket because it was like the one Gotti was wearing. I thought to myself, ‘What are we, girls?’ But that’s the way he and Junior were.
“When they called, you had to come. Drop everything and come. If you weren’t at the club on the night everyone was supposed to meet, you’d get in trouble. At first, I didn’t think I had to be there. I’m home and here’s Genie Gotti at the door. ‘What the fuck’s the matter with you? Why ain’t you where you’re supposed to be?’”
Saturday night Gotti Sr. would hold court at a dinner at the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club. Everyone had to be there. A few guys would cook in the kitchen in the back of the club. Then everyone would sit down, twenty to twenty-five guys, made members and associates, for a meal. But even then there were rules.
“Nobody ate or put a fork in their food until he [Gotti] put a fork in his first,” Alite said. The same scene played out on a smaller scale on Tuesday nights at the Our Friends Social Club down the street. That’s where Junior would hold court and Alite and the rest of the crew were required to gather.
“You hadda be there,” Alite said. “It wasn’t like, ‘I’m busy. I gotta go to dinner with my wife. My son has a cold.’ That doesn’t fly.”
The meals at the Tuesday gatherings were supplied by the owner of La Villa, a restaurant in the Lindenwood section of Howard Beach, Alite said. The owner “would pay tribute to [Junior Gotti] by sending meals over to us for free.”
Some guys could ignore the protocols, but they were the rare exceptions. Charles Carneglia, with whom Alite would eventually form a shaky alliance, was one who never showed up. But he was considered a little crazy, off balance to say the least, so he got a pass.
“He had a screw loose,” Alite said of Charles Carneglia, whose brother John was a made guy and a member of the Gene Gotti–Angelo Ruggiero heroin ring. Carneglia—no one ever called him “Charlie”—eventually became a made member as well, but that was really just an attempt to keep him close. He was a stone killer, but completely unstable.
“He kind of enjoyed his work,” Alite said of the murders that Carne
glia carried out. “Some guys do it and just do it because we gotta do it. He liked doing it.”
Carneglia didn’t read much, but he had books in his apartment dealing with dissecting bodies. He once asked Alite if he wanted to borrow one. Alite politely declined. Alite would testify against Carneglia in 2009, linking him to several mob hits, including the murder of Louis DiBono.
DiBono had been marked for death by Gotti for the simplest of reasons: he didn’t come when he was called.
The sixty-three-year-old construction contractor was a longtime soldier in the Gambino family and a major moneymaker. When Castellano was alive, DiBono had clashed with Gravano over a construction job dispute and had survived. But now Big Paul was gone and Gravano still held a grudge. DiBono had a multimillion-dollar fire insulation contract at the World Trade Center at the time and was supposedly pocketing a couple of million in a scam that involved shoddy work. Gravano was stirring the pot with Gotti, whose hackles always were aroused when he thought someone wasn’t kicking up a piece of his action. He called DiBono to a meeting, but DiBono made an excuse. He was called a second time, and again he was a no-show.
At that point, Gotti ordered him killed.
According to federal prosecutors, Junior got the contract. It was a coming-out assignment of sorts.
In April 1990, Junior had married Kim Albanese in a big wedding that was part high society, part underworld royalty. The reception at the Helmsley Palace Hotel was an even more lavish affair than Vicky Gotti’s wedding six years earlier.
Later, authorities would discover a list Junior kept of the guests and the amount of cash each had given him. The list was on a bookkeeper’s ledger with names and amounts neatly written. The total from 173 guests—made members or associates of one of the five New York crime families—was $348,700.
“That is more money than most people can save in a lifetime,” a prosecutor would later tell the jury at Junior’s trial in 2009. Gotti Sr. gave his son an even more impressive gift. He promoted him to the rank of capo, much to the chagrin of many veteran members of the organization.
“John wasn’t well liked to begin with,” Alite said of Junior. “This just pissed a lot of people off. They felt he hadn’t earned it, but was made a skipper because of his father.”
Two months after the wedding, Alite and Bobby Boriello, who had been Junior’s best man, were outside the Our Friends Social Club when Junior asked them to take a walk with him. The so-called walk-talk was another device developed by his father to avoid FBI listening devices. During the walk, Alite would testify, Junior said he had gotten the DiBono contract. He didn’t say why, but he told Alite and Boriello that DiBono had to be killed. Both were to be part of the hit team. It was his first job as a capo and he wanted it to go off without a hitch.
“Bobby was concerned at that time about a guy named Preston Geritano,” Alite said. “They had this dispute over money and Geritano had threatened to kill Bobby. This Preston had connections with the Genovese family. Bobby wanted Junior to assign me to kill Geritano, but Junior blew it off.
“‘We don’t have time for that now,’ he said. ‘We’ll deal with it later. For now it’s DiBono.’ They heard Louie DiBono was spending a lot of time in Atlantic City. I had my place in South Jersey then and was spending time at the casinos. Junior asked me to check around and see if we could locate DiBono and set him up.”
The planning continued through the summer. Charles Carneglia and Boriello were going to be the shooters. Alite had no luck in Atlantic City and sometime in September Junior told him to forget about it.
“He said they had located him and it was being taken care of,” Alite told a federal jury.
On October 3, 1990, Louis DiBono’s body was discovered in his own 1987 Cadillac DeVille parked in an underground garage at the World Trade Center. He had been shot three times.
Alite was unaware of the murder when he ran into Junior that day.
“He told me I should congratulate him,” he said. “I kissed him on both cheeks, then asked him, ‘What am I congratulating you for?’ He said, ‘Because my first job as a skipper was successful.’ Then he told me to read the papers. That’s when I learned DiBono was dead.”
Louis DiBono didn’t come when he was called. It was a simple breach of protocol and it cost him his life.
Junior told Alite the murder would serve as an example for everyone else. When you’re called, you come, he said. When you’re ordered to do something, you do it. You don’t ask any questions.
Alite understood the concept, but said Junior often abused the protocol.
“One time we were out drinking,” he said. “Five or six of us and some girls. In those kinds of situations, John would also have to show everyone he was the boss. We’re sitting at a table, smoking cigars. He looks at me and says, ‘Get me an ashtray.’ I don’t move. He starts to get mad. One of the other guys reaches over to another table and gets an ashtray and puts it in front of him.”
The tension was obvious to everyone. But one of the women at the table cut to the heart of it.
“John,” she said to Gotti, “stop trying to show everyone how important you are. Nobody here needs to be impressed.”
Alite said the girl had more balls than most of the guys around Junior.
“She was a tough girl, wasn’t afraid of anything,” he said. “But it shows you that people knew him for what he was, not for what he thought he was.”
Later that night, when they were alone, Junior confronted Alite.
“What’s your problem?” Junior asked.
“I got no problem,” Alite replied.
The issue remained unresolved. Alite knew what Junior was getting at, but wasn’t about to have a discussion about it. He wasn’t ready to put it all out in the open, to tell Junior he was acting like a jerk and an asshole. More and more people were beginning to think that way, but ironically it was a woman who had the guts to say it.
“If he had asked me, ‘Hey, John, could you get me an ashtray?’ then there’s no problem,” Alite said. “Everybody understood what the protocols were. It’s just that the Gottis used them to bully people. And I wasn’t gonna be bullied.”
A similar situation occurred one night when Alite was out to dinner with Junior and Richie Gotti, Junior’s uncle. They were at a table when Alite’s young cousin Patsy Andriano walked in. At the time Patsy was dating Richie Gotti’s daughter Danielle.
Patsy came up to the table, kissed Alite on both cheeks, then kissed Richie Gotti, then kissed Junior. Junior went nuts.
“He started screaming at him about proper protocol and respect,” Alite said. “We just stood there.”
Later, Alite said, his cousin Patsy laughed it off.
It was just one example of Junior’s standing in the New York underworld. His status was built on nepotism and even though most of his associates didn’t know the meaning of that word, they grasped the concept.
Junior had the title, but he never had the respect of the rank and file. And it would get worse. Depending on your perspective, the DiBono murder was either the last hurrah or the final nail in the coffin for Gotti Sr. Time was running out for the Dapper Don. There was some indication that he might have been aware of the situation. But as always, his arrogance got in the way.
Gotti had beaten another case in February 1990, tap-dancing from charges that he had hired members of the Westies, an Irish street gang, to assault a union official. He emerged from the courthouse in an expensive topcoat over a tailored suit and tie, his fist raised in triumph. He had won again. No one knew at the time that a juror had been bribed. In the media, he was “the Teflon Don.” None of the charges thrown at him would stick.
But as a wise federal prosecutor once pointed out in a discussion about mob cases, “They have to win every time. We only have to win once.”
The feds just kept on coming.
A few months after the Castellano murder, early in 1986, Gotti was picked up on an FBI listening device laying out the future fo
r his organization.
“The law’s gonna be tough with us, okay,” he said on the now-infamous tape. “If they don’t put us away . . . if they don’t put us away for one year or two. That’s all we need. But if I can get a year run without being interrupted, get a year, gonna put this thing together where they could never break it, never destroy it. Even if we die. Be a good thing.”
“It’s a hell of a legacy to leave,” said the associate to whom Gotti was talking as the FBI listened in.
In fact, Gotti got a five-year run at the top. But the organization he left was considerably more disorganized than the one he took over after Castellano was blown away.
Making his son a capo was seen as part of the Gotti management style that destroyed the organization. In Gotti Sr.’s mind, this might have been an attempt to maintain control of the crime family in anticipation of what was coming. But to the rank and file, it was just another example of Junior being spoiled and coddled, of being given, rather than earning, a spot in the family hierarchy.
Junior tried to keep Alite happy despite the growing tension between them. Still seething over the Agnello confrontation, Alite was told he could go after Ricky Red, one of Agnello’s guys and part of the entourage that Agnello brought with him the day he confronted Alite in the PM Pub.
“Since he wouldn’t let me kill his brother-in-law, he coughed up Ricky Red,” Alite would later tell a federal jury. “He didn’t care about Ricky Red. It’s his way of satisfying my problem and it’s also his way to show other guys you don’t go after anybody, I don’t care if you’re with my brother-in-law or not, that’s around me.”
A few days later, Alite told the jury, he and Junior took Ricky Red for a ride.
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