Gotti's Rules

by George Anastasia

  Albano and Angel Gotti had a young son they named Frankie, after her brother who had died in the accident that cost John Favara his life. But Alite said Albano also had a girlfriend on the side, that he was an unfaithful husband.

  Gotti Sr.’s initial reaction when he learned about this was to have Albano killed. He said as much to Alite. But his daughter interceded. She told her father the marriage was over. They were divorcing. And, according to Alite, she didn’t want Albano hurt.

  There were, of course, other ways to inflict pain. Alite said he was first ordered to go to Albano’s father, who had cornered the illegal fireworks business in Queens and Brooklyn. Gotti Sr. had a piece of that action and was the reason that Albano had no competition. Alite was told to let Albano Sr. know that he was now out of the fireworks business. What’s more, he was told that a fifty-thousand-dollar loan, money that he owed to Gotti Sr., was now due in full.

  Alite said he was also ordered to read Angel’s husband the riot act. While he wasn’t going to be hurt, Albano was told that he was on the shelf, no longer welcome in mob clubhouses, restaurants, or bars. He was also was told that he’d be wise to take his girlfriend and move to Florida. Alite said he delivered the messages, telling Albano that Gotti “never wanted to see him again.”

  Albano had been guilty of something that was commonplace in this world, according to Alite. Gotti Sr. himself had a girlfriend on the side, Alite said. Being married was never an issue.

  But Gotti Sr. cautioned Alite that he didn’t want anything about his daughter Angel’s situation to “get out.” Alite said everyone was aware of what was going on, but no one spoke of it publicly. He also said Gotti Sr.’s concern did not appear to be based on a desire to protect his daughter from any ridicule, but rather to save himself from being humiliated and made to look the fool.

  Alite, who readily conceded that he was never the model husband, acknowledged that a double standard was in play. Wiseguys had girlfriends and wives, but wives were to abide by the marriage vows. It was almost like the Taliban. Philosophically some guys would have been comfortable with their wives in a hijab, or the even more extreme burka.

  There was one mobster, Alite said, who would not let his wife address a male waiter when they were dining in a restaurant. Another refused to let his wife be treated by a male doctor. No matter what the issue, she had to find a female physician. And he knew of several wiseguys who would be upset if their wives wore the kind of revealing or tight-fitting clothes that were part of their girlfriends’ wardrobes. In a more extreme example of the double standard, authorities in New Jersey are still searching for the body of a mobster who disappeared after he began an affair with another wiseguy’s wife. That the offended mobster had been cheating on his wife with the young niece of the murder victim was of no matter.

  Guys who were serial philanderers would hold their wives to a strict standard of conduct, calling them at home during the day to ask what they were doing, who they had seen or talked with, and what they were wearing. But wives weren’t supposed to ask those same kinds of questions of their husbands. It was the way of the underworld.

  Alite and those around him were very conscious of the issue and acted accordingly. Once, he said, Junior ordered an associate to pick up some things—diapers and other supplies—that his wife needed for their baby. The mob associate got the goods but was nervous about the delivery.

  “He rang the bell, left them on the stoop, and ran away before Kim answered the door so that she wouldn’t have any contact with him,” said Alite, who twenty years later still shook his head over the twisted and paranoid relationship.

  The Gottis, in any public statement they have made about Alite, insist that he has fabricated or exaggerated details in order to make them look bad and make himself look better than he was. Junior, in particular, has denied ever cheating on his wife. Alite, who has told many of his stories under oath and in front of juries, says he had no reason to lie.

  Alite admits that in terms of being faithful, he was no better than Junior. It was more a question of style than it was a matter of conduct. As he said several times, most of the mobsters and mob associates he knew cheated on their wives with a girlfriend. Alite said many others, himself included, cheated on their girlfriends with yet another woman. It was part of that macho lifestyle that defined a wiseguy. It was sophomoric, like a neighborhood lothario bragging about his conquests. But most of the guys Alite hung around never outgrew the street corner mentality.

  They were the grown-up version of the junior high bad boy. They knew intuitively that that image was attractive to a certain kind of woman and they used it.

  At the time, Junior Gotti had access to one of the biggest sex markets then operating in New York City. Members of the Gambino organization, one crew from Westchester County and another from Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, had gotten their hooks into a “gentleman’s club” that became one of the hottest spots in the city.

  It was called Scores and it generated millions of dollars for the mob and millions more for its corrupt owners. The name was perfect. A brilliant marketing device. Scores is about sports and celebrity and, of course, sex. Did you score last night? The name is a wink and a nod and a sly smile.

  The club attracted wiseguys and wannabes, Wall Street titans and downtown hustlers, guys and dolls, freaks and geeks, cross-dressing celebrities and buttoned-down nine-to-fivers who’d spend thousands of dollars a week chasing a fantasy that appeared onstage in a G-string. The girls were beautiful. All shapes and sizes and colors.

  On a certain level, Scores was a candy story for little boys with bulging pants and wallets to match. It was not a complicated business. By the mid-1990s, Scores, which started out as a sports bar, was the number-one gentleman’s club in Manhattan. It was located on the Upper East Side, just a block, in fact, from the posh penthouse that Mark Reiter owned. You could look down from Reiter’s windows, Alite said, and see the club.

  Scores became the prototype for a multimillion-dollar industry built around the glitz and glitter of tits and ass. There was an economic bonanza that took place within the gentleman’s club business in the 1990s, a bonanza fueled by the high-flying wheeling and dealing on Wall Street that eventually brought the country to the economic brink.

  The same guys putting together hedge fund deals and bundled derivatives (does anyone know what a bundled derivative is?) during the day were using their black AmEx corporate expense account cards to wine and dine customers with two-thousand-dollar bottles of champagne and two-hundred-dollar lap dances at night. Scores was always packed. Never any downtime. But the weekends, usually Thursday through Saturday, were nuts. There’d be six to seven hundred customers jam-packed around the bar, in the main room, and in the more exclusive President’s Club and Crow’s Nest.

  Everyone had money.

  And everyone was willing to spend it.

  Professional athletes, celebrities, politicians, Wall Street power brokers, they all were attracted to what the New York Post used to refer to as the East Sixtieth Street “mammary mecca.” Howard Stern, then riding high on the popularity of his radio show, was a frequent visitor and would routinely tout the club during his broadcasts. Scores set the bar for what a gentleman’s club was supposed to be. Tom Wolfe’s “masters of the universe,” the real-life versions of the financial wheelers and dealers who populated The Bonfire of the Vanities, would come in with clients, negotiate deals over drinks, and seal the agreements with handshakes and lap dances. Dozens and dozens of dances. On any given night, they would drop thousands of dollars in cash. But who cared? It was expense account money. A cost of doing business.

  They reaped millions each day creating fictions in the financial world and at night they spent tens of thousands chasing girls with silicon breasts. Nothing was real. But it didn’t matter.

  It was about the moment.

  It was about feeling good and looking good and playing the part.

  Scores was the perfect backdrop. It was like a casi
no. Once you were inside, time stood still. You could be whoever you wanted to be. As long as you had the cash.

  So the CEO from a communications company based in St. Louis shows up one night with his AmEx card and, after several hours of exclusive dances in the President’s Club, runs up a tab of $241,000.

  Lawsuits quickly follow and the Daily News, jumping on the story with the headline GOIN’ BUST FOR LUST, reports, “In the mirrored room, popular with high rollers and celebrities, the stripper enthusiast demanded 10 dancers lavish him with attention at the eye-popping cost of $4,000 an hour.”

  That apparently did not include tips and other gratuities.

  A Bangledeshi businessman filed a similar suit after claiming he was billed $129,626 in credit card expenses. Again, the story made tabloid headlines.

  But for every complaint, there were dozens of guys who dropped astronomical amounts of cash and never said a word. Making it with beautiful women, that’s what Scores was about for the guys who could afford it. Maybe it was easier than trying to hustle a broad at a bar. You never had to worry about pickup lines or women who weren’t interested. You also didn’t have to worry about women who wanted you to call the next day or take them to dinner or talk about their feelings.

  Scores was “dating” without the hassles.

  It was a Mafia version of Animal House.

  Mob guys would “front” themselves as the owners of Scores but the real owner was Michael Blutrich. He and a partner would eventually get jammed up in a multimillion-dollar fraud case involving the Heritage Fund down in Florida. Squeezed by the feds in that case, Blutrich would agree to cooperate with authorities, giving up the mob’s role in his club.

  Alite was a friend of Blutrich’s and had helped out with a problem the bar owner had up in Westchester County even before Scores had become famous. Alite also knew and liked Steve Sergio, a mob associate who ran the club. Coincidentally, Blutrich and Alite ended up serving time together years later after they had both cut their deals with the government.

  The funny thing was, Blutrich was making so much money at Scores he didn’t care that the mob was ripping him off. He and his partner were taking in $10 million to $15 million a year. And that was just the money they were showing on the books.

  It didn’t include whatever they might have been skimming and whatever they had to kick back to the wiseguys who owned the parking valet concession, supplied the bouncers, controlled the coat-check room, and routinely shook down the dancers and the DJs. Junior Gotti would plead guilty to taking a hundred thousand dollars out of the club as his end of the mob scam.

  Alite said he never had a piece of the action at Scores, but went there on occasion as a customer. What’s more, he said, “I always paid my own way. A lot of guys just went in, ran up a tab, and never paid. I was always a gentleman.”

  That wasn’t the case in Queens, however, where Alite had hit upon another moneymaking scheme built around fear and intimidation. He later explained it all to a federal jury. The idea, he said, was to “unionize,” in an organized crime sense, the bouncers at bars and clubs throughout the neighborhood. The unionizing eventually spread out to Manhattan and Long Island as well.

  “There was a lot of money in that,” he said.

  It started, Alite said from the witness stand, when Junior took over the Harbor Club, a bar and restaurant in Middle Village, Queens. The owner was in debt to Junior and gave up the place to make up for what he owed.

  “We put two bouncers in there,” Alite said, “and then we put the word out that we were gonna be the ones to place bouncers in other places. And we told the bouncers, if you want to work, you have to go through us. . . .

  “You don’t have to have too much intelligence to really run it,” he told a federal jury at Junior’s trial in 2009. “All you have to do is come in and bully it. That’s what we were good at.”

  The math, he added, told the story. A head bouncer who was making $100 a night would now be getting $85, with Junior and Alite taking $15 off the top. A second bouncer, who might be making $75, would now be making $65, with the $10 off the top going to Junior and Alite.

  “It sounds like pennies,” he told the jury, “but when you add it up, when there’s a hundred bouncers working a night, it starts adding up to serious money each month, each year. So we were unionizing, basically, the bouncer service.”

  Most clubs and most bouncers went along.

  “They had no choice,” he said. “We let them know we were taking over. If you want to work, you go through us.” Most bar and restaurant owners also went along. But one balked and the result was what anyone around Alite and Junior Gotti at that time would come to expect.

  There was a club called Stingers on Metropolitan Avenue in Middle Village, Alite said. It was connected to a guy named Vito Guzzo, who was with the Colombo crime family. He didn’t want bouncers sent by Alite and Gotti.

  At a meeting at the Our Friends Social Club he adamantly refused. Junior told Alite to “get a little forceful” and Alite said he offered Guzzo a chance. “I told him I’d fight him right out in the street, me and him, a fair fight,” Alite recalled. “If I won, the bouncers are ours. If he wins, we leave him alone.”

  Guzzo turned down the offer to tangle with Alite, but continued to refuse to do business with him and Gotti.

  “Some of the bouncers he was using also worked for us at a club called Avanti,” Alite said. “They were told not to go to work on this Friday. That anyone who did would be shot.”

  That night, Alite said, he, Junior, and several others were hanging out at the Our Friends. Alite sent an associate out to Stingers to see what was going on and the word came back that the bouncers were there.

  “I’ll be right back,” Alite told Junior as he headed for the door. “I’m going to take care of this.”

  Alite and an associate got into his Corvette. Mike Finnerty followed in another car. They pulled up to Stingers. Alite got out of the Corvette and told his associate to get behind the wheel and drive the car to a gas station across the street.

  “I didn’t want anyone to see the license tag,” he said.

  Alite, brandishing a .32-caliber pistol, walked up to a bouncer who was standing at the door and asked, “Didn’t you get the word not to come to work today?” Before the bouncer could reply, Alite shot him in the leg.

  Three other bouncers came running out of the club. Alite shot all three. Then he walked into Stingers looking for Guzzo.

  “They told me he had gone out the back,” said Alite, who turned and walked out of the club. On the way out, he grabbed the manager by the hair, held the gun to his head, and said, “The next time I’m coming back and I’m gonna shoot you and Guzzo in the head.”

  And that’s how Alite said he and Junior Gotti “unionized” the bouncers in dozens of clubs in and around New York. The list, he told a jury, included places like “Bedrocks, Decisions, Attitudes, Avanti, the Swim Club, Northern Lights, the Harbor Club, Café Iguana, Limelight. Just off the top of my head. If I sit here and think, I could probably come up with some more.”

  He also said that after the shootings at Stingers that night, he went back to the Our Friends Social Club. Junior, in typical fashion, wanted to drive back out to the scene to see what was going on. Junior liked to feel the rush, but wasn’t that anxious to take part in the action. It was like the Grosso murder all over again.

  “We used to call him Peewee Herman,” Alite said of Junior’s obsession with returning to crime scenes. “He was like the guy who got caught jerking off in the porno movie house. That’s the way Junior was with the shootings. He liked to watch.”

  They drove back to Stingers in Junior’s car. As they passed the club on Metropolitan Avenue, they saw the place awash in law enforcement.

  “There were seven or eight police cars and two ambulances,” Alite said. “People were all over the place.”

  All four bouncers survived the shooting. Alite was never charged. But no one else balked when he moved i
n to “unionize” the bouncer service. The move, however, had created a permanent problem for him with Guzzo, who Alite knew was a “serious” individual. Guzzo might have declined to fight Alite with his fists, but that didn’t mean he was afraid of a fight. He was the leader of a loosely affiliated mob crew out of the Ridgewood section of Queens that terrorized the area. They were into bank robberies, extortions, and murders. The feds, who launched an investigation into Guzzo’s organization in the late 1990s, referred to them as the Giannini Crew because they operated out of the Caffe Giannini in Ridgewood.

  Despite their business success on the streets, Alite frankly admits that he was feeling “conflicted” about his relationship with Junior in the early 1990s. From the witness stand, he said he continued to commit acts of violence for Gotti, even though he was growing tired of Junior’s attitude and arrogance and felt that some of the things he was being asked to do made no sense and served no underworld purpose.

  The kidnapping of a kid who apparently had been mouthing off about Junior’s wife, Kim, was a case in point. The issue came to a head when Junior and the mouthy twenty-year-old drove past one another in the neighborhood. Junior returned to the clubhouse on 113th Street that day ranting and raving about “the fat motherfucker.” He told Alite he wanted him to kill the kid.

  The fact that the kid was then dating Jodi Albanese, Junior’s sister-in-law, might have been another motivation, Alite believes. “Junior always wanted to look tough in front of members of his wife’s family,” he said.

  The order to kill Jodi Albanese’s boyfriend further eroded the relationship between Alite and Junior Gotti. It was a typical Gotti move, Alite said, a senseless show of bravado that served no underworld purpose.

  It wasn’t business; it was clearly personal. What’s more, Alite said, “It was stupid.”

  About a year earlier, Alite said, Gotti sent another associate to avenge some other perceived personal slight. The particulars are not important, but the bottom line was the guy didn’t get the job done. Instead, he took a beating and ended up in an emergency room.