Gotti's Rules

by George Anastasia

  “The Gottis had a connection with the owner of the limo company,” Alite said. “He was with them. So we’re in this limo driving around Ozone Park and we spot Ricky Red walking along Liberty Avenue.”

  The limo pulled over to the curb and Junior Gotti signaled for Ricky Red to get in.

  “I guess he thought Junior wanted to talk to him about something,” Alite said.

  Ricky Red climbed into the back of the limo where Gotti and Alite were already sitting. After a few minutes of small talk, Alite pushed a button, locking the back doors. With that, Ricky Red was assaulted by Gotti and Alite. According to Alite’s testimony, they punched and kicked him repeatedly. All he could do was hide his face in his arms, trying to ward off the blows. The limo driver either didn’t know or didn’t care what was going on. He just kept driving.

  “Back then they had car phones that were attached to long cords,” Alite said. “Junior took the phone cord and wrapped it around [Ricky Red’s] neck several times. I was gonna choke him to death. We’re pounding on him. I pushed the button to unlock the doors. The limo’s going about sixty miles an hour. We’re on Woodhaven Boulevard in Howard Beach by this time and we’re gonna throw him out of the car. He’s fighting to stay in, but we kept punching and pushing.”

  With the phone cord still around his neck, Ricky Red bounced out of the limo and onto the highway. He was dragged along for about a hundred feet before the cord snapped and he rolled away.

  Ricky Red survived, but the incident further enhanced Alite’s reputation as a violent maniac who wasn’t someone you wanted to cross. It was a reputation, he believes, that helped keep him alive.

  On December 11, 1990, just five days short of the fifth anniversary of the Castellano murder, John J. Gotti was arrested on federal murder and racketeering charges. The case included the allegation that he had ordered the hit on Paul Castellano in a bloody coup and had taken control of the crime family as a result. Frank Locascio, Salvatore Gravano, and Tommy Gambino, who would later be severed from the case, were also named in the indictment. Racketeering, extortion, and jury tampering—the bribing of a juror in the Westies case—were also part of the eleven-count indictment.

  The murders detailed in the indictment included the hits on Castellano and Tommy Bilotti outside Sparks Steak House in December 1985; the murder of mob capo Robert DiBernardo, often described as the porno king of America, in June 1986; the killing of mob soldier Liborio Milito in March 1988; and the hit on DiBono in October 1990.

  The case also included a murder conspiracy charge tied to a plot to kill Gaetano “Corky” Vastola, a capo in New Jersey’s DeCavalcante crime family. Gotti had spent some time in jail with Vastola in 1987. Vastola was awaiting trial in an extortion case tied to a record company scam that linked back to MCA Records in Los Angeles. For some reason, Gotti believed Vastola would never hold up in prison and figured he would eventually become a rat.

  The plot to kill Vastola was never carried out, but if Gotti was concerned about cooperators, he probably should have been looking closer to home. He, Gravano, and Locascio were picked up by a team of more than a dozen FBI agents at the Ravenite. The arrests made headlines across the country the next day.

  TEFLON DON GOTTI INDICTED IN SLAYING OF MOB BOSS was the headline on a Washington Post article that went on to describe Gotti’s “silky elegance and apparent invincibility,” noting that he had beaten four other cases in the past five years. The piece included an angry comment from Andrew Maloney, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, who said of Gotti, “He’s a murderer, not a folk hero.”

  Gotti, Gravano, and Locascio were all denied bail as the government laid out part of its case. There were, prosecutors said, dozens of secretly recorded conversations as well as testimony from informants that would tie the defendants to the crimes charged.

  Among other things, the FBI had bugged an apartment above the Ravenite where Gotti and others would often hold conversations that they believed were outside the FBI’s listening range. The informants included Philip “Crazy Phil” Leonetti, the onetime underboss of the Philadelphia mob.

  Leonetti was the nephew of Philadelphia mob boss Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo, who, from his perch in Atlantic City, launched one of the most violent eras in the history of the Philadelphia–South Jersey underworld. Taking over after the murders of mob bosses Angelo Bruno and Philip “Chicken Man” Testa (whose murder was noted in the song “Atlantic City” by Bruce Springsteen), Scarfo ruled from 1981 through 1988. During that period at least twenty-five mob members or associates were killed and two dozen more were indicted. In a crime family whose membership topped out at about seventy made members, the result was devastation.

  Scarfo and Gotti were in many ways Mafia bookends, mob bosses who rose to power through violence and whose management style was based on treachery, greed, and deceit. Convicted along with his nephew and thirteen other codefendants in a 1988 racketeering trial, Scarfo is still serving a fifty-five-year sentence. His parole date is 2033, when he will be 103 years old.

  His handsome nephew was sentenced to forty-five years but decided that cooperating with the feds would be a smarter move. Leonetti testified in a series of mob trials up and down the East Coast and appeared as a witness before the grand jury that handed up the indictment against Gotti, Gravano, and Locascio.

  Among other things, Leonetti testified that at a meeting he and Scarfo attended, Gotti had boasted about having Castellano killed. Leonetti himself admitted to his own involvement in ten murders but offered this classic comment when a defense attorney, pointing to that bloody history, sarcastically asked if he knew what it meant to be ruthless.

  “I know what it means to be ruthless,” he said as he sat on the witness stand dressed like a fraternity rush chairman in a blue blazer, tan slacks, and a crewneck sweater over a blue button-down shirt. “But I don’t remember ever doing anything, as a matter of fact I know for sure, I never did nothing ruthless besides, well, I would kill people. But that’s our life. That’s what we do.”

  Described as one of the best witnesses in a long line of cooperators who came from the Philadelphia mob, Leonetti eventually had his jail sentence reduced to five years, five months, and five days. The lesson was not lost on any of Gotti’s codefendants as they sat in a federal lockup, denied bail as the case moved slowly toward trial.

  The arrests caused a stir in the Gambino family, but given Gotti’s track record of beating cases, no one was yet ready to concede that his reign was over. In the interim, Gotti issued orders from prison and set up a committee to handle day-to-day operations. His brother Peter and his son were part of the new hierarchy.

  Alite didn’t have much time to digest what the arrest meant because in March he himself headed off to jail. The assault and kidnapping of the contractor back in South Jersey had finally been resolved. Originally Alite had been offered a plea deal that would have brought a maximum seven-year sentence in state prison. He figured he’d have to do about two or three years.

  “That was the deal they offered,” Alite said. “We took it, then rejected it. My lawyer got word that Bobby Cabert had a connection and could work out something better for us.”

  Bobby “Cabert” Bisaccia was a ruthless and well-connected Gambino crime family capo who operated out of North Jersey. He had been around for years and had connections in both law enforcement and justice circles, according to Alite, who said he was never told the hows and whys of what was negotiated.

  “The windup was I pleaded guilty and got a one-year sentence,” he said. “I ended up doing three or four months.”

  He surrendered to New Jersey prison authorities in March 1991, a day after Junior and a dozen other mobsters held a “going-away party” for him at the Our Friends Social Club. The party included a sheet cake decorated with caricatures of two prison inmates. Another Junior associate was also headed off to state prison. ALCATRAZ OR BUST was printed in big red letters across the top of the cake.

  It
was a rite of passage for Alite. He was doing time, keeping his mouth shut, and going off to prison. Never mind that the crime was something of his own making; he was a stand-up guy who was doing the right thing.

  It was all part of the life.

  A few days after Alite was jailed, Charles Carneglia was formally initiated into the crime family. Alite had been asked to set up the ceremony, which was held in the basement apartment of the home he was then living in with Claudia DiPippa, who would become his common-law wife and with whom he had two children. The house belonged to DiPippa’s parents.

  Carneglia was made that day because of his role as a shooter in the DiBono hit. Three others were also initiated at the ceremony overseen by Junior Gotti and other members of the ruling hierarchy. Alite was supposed to attend, but instead was being processed as an inmate in the Camden County Jail in Camden, New Jersey.

  He had, however, set the whole thing up, arranging for the basement to be cleaned and rearranged for the ceremony and posting different members of the crew in a four-block radius around the home in Howard Beach to ensure that there was no police or FBI presence.

  Carneglia’s brother John was already a made guy and by that time was doing time for his conviction with Genie Gotti in the heroin case. Charles Carneglia wasn’t as sharp or sophisticated as his brother. He wasn’t an “earner;” in fact, Alite said he knew very little about how to make money.

  But he was a killer and that had its own value in the organization. Alite took pride in the fact that even though he could never be made, he was entrusted with setting up a making ceremony. At that point, he was still enthralled by “the life,” even if he was becoming more disenchanted with the leadership.

  That disenchantment would grow as he sat in an orange jumpsuit and white sneakers without laces as a guest of New Jersey authorities in downtown Camden, one of the poorest and most violent cities in America.

  Alite would often joke that the Woodhaven neighborhood in Queens where he had grown up was one of the most violent sections of New York City. But that area of Queens had nothing on Camden, where drug dealers controlled dozens of corners and literally held the city’s population of eighty thousand hostage.

  Alite got to see some of the violence from his prison cell in the form of the inmates who were constantly coming through the jail. Drugs, guns, and money were what the Camden underworld was all about.

  He and his associates—Gotti was a prime offender—would often berate and belittle African Americans, referring to them as lowlifes. A common insult was to tell someone he was “acting like a nigger.” The cast of characters who passed through the Camden County Jail while Alite was housed there reinforced that stereotype in his mind. But the reality was that the guys Alite worked with in Queens weren’t any different. They operated behind the patina of organized crime, using the myth of the Mafia to justify what they did, but their actions and their arrogance were the same as those of the drug gangs that ripped Camden apart. It wasn’t about color. It was about greed, stupidity, and senseless violence.

  A month after Alite was jailed, Bobby Boriello was killed.

  Boriello, who had celebrated his forty-seventh birthday two weeks earlier, was shot seven times outside his home in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. He was gunned down as he walked toward his brand-new Lincoln Town Car. Boriello’s wife and two young children were inside the family home when the hit went down.

  The immediate reaction in the underworld—and from Gotti Sr. in prison—was that Preston Geritano had settled his beef with Boriello. Mikey “Scars” DiLeonardo would later testify that Junior met with the Genovese crime family leaders demanding that Geritano be killed. He was told it would be taken care of. It never was.

  When Alite got out of prison three months later, he confronted Junior.

  This was in July 1991. Alite remembers the date because he was at the hospital with Claudia, who had given birth to their son, John. Junior and several others visited the hospital in South Jersey, “but she wouldn’t let them in the room,” Alite told a jury.

  Claudia DiPippa, wiser than Alite, didn’t want Junior Gotti or his people around her common-law husband. She saw them for what they were and knew that things could only end badly for John.

  At the hospital, Alite confronted Junior about the Boriello murder and asked what was being done about it.

  “This guy was the best man at his wedding,” Alite said. “I told him we had to do something about it. I wanted to kill Geritano. He put me off. He said it was being taken care of. I thought that was bullshit, another typical Junior Gotti move.”

  The Boriello murder, on April 13, 1991, was an act of revenge but it had nothing to do with Geritano. Boriello had been one of the suspected shooters in the Castellano hit. Frank DeCicco, also part of the Castellano assassination team, had died in the car bomb blast five years earlier. It was no coincident that Borriello’s murder occurred on the anniversary of DiCicco’s death, April 13, 1986.

  Informant testimony from Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso provided the details several years after the fact. The Lucheses had taken out Boriello. Casso, then the Luchese underboss, had ordered the hit. It was, like the DeCicco murder, a message to Gotti Sr. that the Castellano murder would not go unavenged.

  Someone would have to be accountable; if not Gotti himself, then those around him. A few months earlier, in November 1990, Edward Lino, another Gambino soldier tied to the Sparks shooting, had been killed. Lino was shot nine times. His body was found behind the wheel of his 1990 Mercedes, which had rolled into some bushes off a service road leading to the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach. Casso also took credit for ordering that hit, which he told authorities was carried out by corrupt New York City police detectives Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, the two so-called Mafia cops who were later convicted for their roles in a series of mob-related murders.

  Gotti was out of the line of fire as he sat in the Metropolitan Correctional Center awaiting trial. But he had bigger problems. As the case moved forward, the defense was given access to the FBI tapes around which the charges were built. Gravano got to hear Gotti berate and belittle him and link him to several murders. It was all Sammy the Bull needed. Early in November 1991, he fired his lawyer, hired a different attorney, and cut a deal with the government, agreeing to cooperate.

  The move created even more tension within the Gambino crime family. Now Gravano was described as a thug and murderer who used violence to line his pockets. He was no good, a creep, a degenerate. The Gottis were in media spin mode. The potential impact of Gravano’s decision could undermine everything John J. Gotti had been trying to do.

  In a broader sense, Gravano’s decision was part of a pattern that was spreading throughout the underworld. It was something for the sociologists and, urban anthropologists to ponder. It was the death of omertà and with it, the death of the American Mafia.

  If you were paying attention, you would have seen it coming.

  You could make a legitimate argument that mobsters from the 1920s and 1930s, at least some of them, bought into the concept of the Mafia as a secret society populated by men of honor. Omertà, in a literal translation, means “to be a man.” And a man, in that world, took care of his own problems, never went to the authorities for help, and never sought the protection of the police. The Mafia, for someone like Carlo Gambino in New York or Angelo Bruno in Philadelphia, was truly a way of life. That was the real protocol to be followed.

  Two generations later, those in power had lost touch with the old ways and, more important, those who had been recruited by them were in it simply to get rich. The Mafia was no longer a way of life, but a way to make money. And when those individuals found themselves jammed up, found themselves facing RICO prosecutions built around informant testimony and devastating tape recordings, they made a business decision.

  The question they asked themselves was How do I cut my losses?

  It wasn’t about omertà, it was about survival.

  Sammy Gravano was simpl
y following in the footsteps of Phil Leonetti and dozens of others who had turned government witness. A lighter prison sentence and life with a new identity in the Witness Security Program—a really secret society—were the inducements.

  John Alite would grapple with those same issues fifteen years later. But when Gravano flipped, Alite was still very much a part of the organization. He had soured on Junior Gotti and had come to see John Gotti Sr. for what he was, but Alite was still very much a part of the life, still making lots of money, and still willing to kill in order to stay ahead of the game.

  CHAPTER 11

  There’s a great but often overlooked line in The Godfather when Michael first meets Apollonia while strolling the Sicilian countryside. His bodyguards, two hit men who have sawed-off shotguns slung over their shoulders as they walk beside him, realize the jeopardy Michael has unknowingly placed himself in by inquiring about the beautiful young girl, more Greek than Italian, whom he had encountered while out walking that day.

  One of the bodyguards comes to realize that the bar owner to whom they have made the inquiry is, in fact, the father of the beautiful young woman in question. The bodyguard urges Michael to quickly finish his drink and leave the bar. Michael, of course, refuses, and ends up putting himself at the mercy of the bar owner, who soon becomes his father-in-law.

  The incident is underscored in a piece of Sicilian wisdom uttered by one of the bodyguards when he first notices that Michael has been smitten. “In Sicily,” he says, “women are more dangerous than shotguns.”

  While not as romantically expressed, the role of women in the world of John Alite and Junior Gotti was just as dangerous and potentially as deadly. Alite’s situation with Vicky Gotti was just one example. He also found himself in the middle of another marital rift when John Gotti Sr., a few years earlier, asked him to take care of a problem Gotti’s oldest daughter, Angel, was having with her then husband, Louis Albano. In reality, it was Gotti who had the problem, not his daughter. She just wanted a divorce.