That may have been why Junior tapped Alite for this particular assignment. He wanted to be sure it was carried out.
The kid Alite said Junior wanted killed hung out at a bowling alley on Rockaway Boulevard. Alite, who recounted the incident in detail from the witness stand, said he was told to grab him and bring him to a mob clubhouse in Staten Island, where Junior would be playing cards. From there they would figure out how to kill him and where to dump the body.
Alite quickly found the kid outside the bowling alley and told him to get in the car. Mike Finnerty was along to help, Alite said. When the kid balked, Alite spoke quietly but forcefully.
“Either you get in the car or I’m gonna shoot you and put you in the car,” he said. “One way or the other, you’re getting in. You decide.”
The kid opted to go along for the ride. First they headed over to Staten Island, but plans quickly changed and Alite was told to bring the kid to a building on 104th Street that Junior maintained. It wasn’t a clubhouse, although he kept some weights and training equipment in the basement. He also stashed guns, ammunition, and cash there, sometimes upward of four hundred thousand dollars, Alite said.
He was told to put the kid in the basement. He sat him in a chair and tied him up with duct tape. A few minutes later, Junior showed up with Jodi, Alite said. Recounting the story to a jury, he said Junior said to Jodi, “You see your boyfriend. He’s going to die.”
At that point, Alite said, he was beating the kid, who sat helplessly tied to the chair.
Jodi, according to Alite’s testimony, acted “defiant . . . but if you saw her face, she was petrified.” She left as the beating continued. Alite said he and Pat DiPippa, who had been ordered to show up, took turns hitting the kid.
According to Alite, Junior kept insisting that he wanted him dead. Alite said Junior handed him a gun and said, “Kill him.”
Alite handed the gun back to Junior.
“You kill him,” he said.
Alite said murdering the kid made no sense and he tried to convince Junior of that. Among other things, there were “too many people” who knew they had snatched the kid from the bowling alley. He also argued that the offense didn’t warrant murder; that there “were so many other guys that did stuff to us that we need to kill,” and that murdering this kid “for something stupid” served no purpose. He also appealed to Junior’s conscience, telling him that the kid was the same age as Junior’s brother Frankie would have been and asking why he wanted to inflict the same hurt on this kid’s family that Junior and his family had suffered after Frankie had been killed.
During a break in one of these beating and arguing sessions, Alite drew close to the kid, who sat whimpering and bleeding in the chair. He whispered, “Just keep your mouth shut. Whatever he says, keep quiet. I’m gonna hurt you and send you to the hospital, but I promise I won’t kill you. . . . You’re going to get a beating, but you won’t die tonight.”
The kid, whose name Alite never learned, did take a beating that night, but Junior finally agreed that he would not be killed. DiPippa and Finnerty were told to drive him to an emergency room and drop him at the door.
Alite never saw the kid again, but he believes he saved his life.
The next person, Alite would tell a federal jury, that Junior wanted him to kill was Bruce Gotterup. Alite said he had no second thoughts about carrying out that order.
CHAPTER 12
Alite and Junior had been getting reports that Gotterup was causing problems at Jagermeister’s, a bar on Jamaica Avenue where several of Alite’s associates were dealing cocaine. Gotterup was the late George Grosso’s brother-in-law and also an associate of Johnny Gebert. They and the guys around them, Alite would tell the jury, were “like a clan of wild junkies, drug dealers, and thieves.” They often got high on their own product. But at the same time, he said, they were killers, known in the underworld as “serious guys.”
Gotterup was robbing drug dealers and shaking down the owner of Jagermeister’s even though he knew the dealers were working for Alite and the bar owner was linked to Junior Gotti. But Gotterup told everyone and anyone that he didn’t care. He showed up with a gun one night and shot up the place. He was demanding a weekly extortion payment from the owner.
Unlike his late brother-in-law, Gotterup made no attempt to hide his disdain for the crime family. “Fuck Gotti,” he said. “I’m not afraid of him or John Alite.”
Alite was living at one of his condos in Whispering Woods, a development in South Brunswick, New Jersey, about a thirty-minute ride down the New Jersey Turnpike from the city. His “legal residence” was the fifteen-acre complex in Voorhees where his estranged wife, Carol, was living with their son Jimmy. Alite was also spending time with Claudia, his common-law wife and the mother of his infant son John. It was a complicated situation, he says. He had finished his sentence for assaulting the contractor but was on probation for that Camden County case.
“Because I was on probation, I had to show a residence in Camden County,” he said. “I wasn’t really living with my wife, but I would have to spend some time there.”
One thing led to another and shortly after his release from prison in the summer of 1991, Carol was pregnant again. She would give birth to Alite’s only daughter, Chelsea. The pregnancy caused all kinds of problems for Alite with Claudia, with whom he was trying to start a new life.
“She wouldn’t talk to me, didn’t want to know anything,” said Alite. “I slept with Carol one time and she got pregnant. It just complicated everything. It became one more thing I had to deal with. I’m living in Jersey, staying mostly at the condo, and I’m in the city every day taking care of business.
“Junior is getting more and more arrogant and more and more paranoid. It was a strange time.”
Sammy the Bull Gravano’s decision to cooperate was having a ripple effect throughout the Gambino organization. While everyone talked tough and belittled Gravano, the reality was that they all realized his decision to cooperate could cripple the crime family. Everyone knew that Gravano had been one of John J. Gotti’s closest associates, that he had had a dozen people killed on Gotti’s orders, and that he was there with Gotti watching when Castellano was murdered. Those were the things he was now telling the feds, sometimes in dramatic fashion. When he finally got on the witness stand, Gravano seemed to enjoy the limelight. No longer in Gotti’s shadow, but rather center stage, he took the opportunity to enhance his own role as a cold-blooded enforcer while insisting that he was doing it all at Gotti’s behest.
“When he barked, I bit,” Gravano told the jury.
Alite says Gravano was mostly talk.
“Did he have a lot of people killed?” Alite asked. “Yes. Did he do it himself? Not very often.”
Over the course of his twenty years as Junior Gotti’s muscle, Alite has estimated that he shot between thirty and forty guys, that he piped or baseball-batted a hundred more. How many of those people died? He says he doesn’t know but admitted his own involvement in six homicides. There were probably more.
The Gotterup murder was one of the few in which he did not pull the trigger.
Working on Junior’s orders, Alite would tell the jury at Junior’s 2009 trial, he said he put a crew together. He got some of the guys he hung out with at Ronnie Trucchio’s PM Pub and set the hit in motion. A tough kid named Johnny Burke (no relation to Frankie Burke, another Alite associate) was going to be the shooter along with Burke’s brother-in-law, a guy Alite knew only as “King” because he was a member of the Latin Kings gang. Once again, the idea was to make the target comfortable and then kill him.
“He continued to shake down the bar and we told the owner to make the payments, make Gotterup think everybody was okay with what was going on,” Alite explained.
The extortion payment, a couple of hundred a week, was peanuts in relation to the drug operation that was being run out of the bar. That was generating thousands of dollars for Alite and Gotti. Jagermeister’s was one of “f
orty or fifty” spots out of which Alite and Junior were selling drugs, Alite told the jury. It was a good spot, but it wasn’t their best spot, he said. O’Brother’s and the White Horse were the top-earning locations for a cocaine network that in the late 1980s and early 1990s was generating millions in income each year. At the time of the Gotterup hit, Alite estimated they were moving four kilos of cocaine “in pieces” and four more kilos “in weight” each month from Jagermeister’s.
“Pieces” meant the coke had been broken down into small quantities, usually about a gram, and sold in individual packets that went for about twenty dollars. The “retail” deals sometimes included slightly larger quantities known as “eight balls.” An eight ball is one-eighth of an ounce, or 3.5 grams of coke.
“It was like a Stop ’n Shop,” Alite said of the drug operation. “We had all kinds of customers.”
“Weight” on the other hand, meant the coke was being sold in quarter, half, or full kilo amounts. The cash from those sales totaled in excess of $250,000 a month, Alite said, again emphasizing that Jagermeister’s was not the largest moneymaker, but a substantial one in the drug network he said he and Junior had set up.
Gotterup was just bad for business. In addition to showing disrespect to the Gotti name, he was scaring regular customers away. No one wanted to be in the bar if a juiced-up Gotterup showed up waving a gun and got off a couple of shots. There also was the issue of protection that Alite told a jury he and Junior had promised the owner in exchange for allowing them to move drugs through the bar. Finally, Alite said, there was the very real concern that Gotterup might decide to turn his gun on a member of the crew, somebody like Ronnie One-Arm or Alite.
Alite, who had already had the go-round with Gebert and Grosso that resulted in Grosso’s murder, didn’t want to be looking over his shoulder every time he went into Jagermeister’s. Neither did Trucchio.
On November 20, 1991, Bruce Gotterup showed up to make what had become his normal shakedown collection at Jagermeister’s. Then he started drinking at the bar. Frankie Burke and King, who were already there by design, started drinking with him. It was not unlike the Grosso setup. The three became good friends that night and decided to go clubbing. While they were driving toward Rockaway Beach, Gotterup said he had to take a piss. They pulled the car over and let him out along the side of the road. While he was urinating, King pumped two bullets into the back of his head.
No one disrespects the Gottis. That was the message when Gotterup’s body was found the next day. The murder fed into Junior’s growing ego. With his father in jail, he was now sitting atop the crime family, albeit as part of a ruling committee, but nevertheless a leader of the biggest Cosa Nostra organization in New York. It was the biggest, but not nearly as sophisticated or circumspect as the more powerful Genovese organization.
Like his father, Junior never understood the subtleties involved in making a crime family work. Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, on the other hand, was a master at it. The Genovese crime family boss, who by then had perfected his crazy routine, was spotted regularly walking around Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village in a bathrobe and slippers. By day, he was the “crazy” old Mafioso who mumbled and stumbled. But, as an FBI affidavit would later note, at night he would shower, shave, and be secretly driven to his mistress’s condo on the Upper East Side. Gigante was a master criminal who knew how to play the system and manipulate the mob. There was a standing order within the organization that no one was to utter his name. Wiseguys who wanted to refer to him during a conversation might say “this guy” while they were rubbing their chin. It was a clear reference to Gigante and the mobsters in the conversation knew that. But if there was a listening device in the room, the result would be a transcript with the words “this guy” and no way to determine who it was that was being referred to.
The Genovese also had a habit of putting someone else up to “front” as the boss. It was another misdirection play aimed at both the feds and at the other crime families in the city whom the Genoveses never completely trusted. Gigante, said investigators at the time, was crazy all right. Crazy like a fox. He would eventually be brought to justice, but his run was longer and more lucrative than the Teflon Don’s. The only thing the two organizations shared was a penchant for violence. But even at that, the Genovese crime family was more circumspect. They knew how to do it.
Junior Gotti, on the other hand, didn’t have a clue.
Shortly before Gotti Sr.’s trial began in federal court in Brooklyn in the winter of 1992, Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels and a radio talk show host in the city, went on a rant about the Gottis. It was a regular theme on his broadcasts. And it drove Junior nuts.
“He was bad-mouthing Senior every day,” Alite said. “One day I’m taking a walk with Junior and he says to me. ‘I wanna hit this Sliwa.’”
Alite said he couldn’t believe what he heard.
“What are you, fuckin’ nuts?” he asked Junior. “Are you out of your fuckin’ mind?”
“No one bad-mouths the chief,” Junior replied, referring to his father by the nickname that Senior had adopted after Joe Watts gave him a wooden sculpted head of an Indian warrior as a present. Gotti loved it and kept in his clubhouse. From that point on everyone referred to him as “the chief.” Unlike the physical reference to “the chin” for Gigante, there was never any question about who was being discussed when “the chief” was mentioned on an FBI tape.
Alite said he tried to talk Junior out of hitting Sliwa. It wasn’t a smart move. It was around that time, Alite said, that Junior started to develop an even more arrogant attitude. It was clear Junior liked being the boss of the entire family and realized he would benefit from his father being convicted and sent to prison for the rest of his life, Alite said.
“He thought he was gonna be in charge and I think he was looking forward to it,” Alite said. “I don’t think he really cared what happened to his father, but hitting Sliwa was a way to make people think he did.”
Perception over reality. That was the Gotti way.
“I told him even if Sliwa wasn’t that well liked by others in the media, we would get attacked by everyone,” Alite said. “I told him killing a reporter would be like killing a prosecutor.”
Junior settled on a beating. But like so much else during his brief reign as part of the Gambino family’s ruling committee, things didn’t go as planned.
Neither did the trial of John J. Gotti. The Teflon was coming off the Don. The proceeding in federal court in Brooklyn was a major media event, with newspaper and television coverage nearly every day. The Gotti organization launched its own publicity counter-offensive, convincing celebrities to show up at the trial in support.
“Mikey Scars” DiLeonardo later testified that he helped arrange for some of those supporters—including actors Mickey Rourke, John Amos, and Anthony Quinn—to attend trial sessions. Gotti Sr. came up with the idea, DiLeonardo said.
“He wanted to have some famous people in the gallery to smile at the jury,” DiLeonardo said from the witness stand.
There also was another strange ritual that played out almost every morning even before the jury was seated in federal court in Brooklyn. Each day about a half dozen Gotti associates, usually led by Jackie D’Amico, would show up early and take seats in the closest row to the defense table to which the public had access. Gotti, who was in custody, would be brought in by federal marshals before the judge or jury. He’d be dressed in one of his tailor-made, $1,500 suits, his hair still neatly coiffed, his skin tone not yet showing the signs of prison confinement. When Gotti entered the courtroom, D’Amico and the others stood and remained standing while he smiled and nodded hello. Once he was seated, the group of Mafia sycophants would sit down until the judge entered the courtroom. At that point, everyone in the room stood.
Standing was a sign of respect. Everyone was required to show it to the judge. Only a chosen few had to do it for “the chief.”
John Gotti’s R
ules of Leadership: Never talk business indoors. The government has “ears.” If you are talking business in a car, be sure the radio is turned up loud. Best to talk on the street while walking.
Gotti, of course, went down in flames along with Locascio. Gravano proved to be a highly effective witness. But just as damaging were the tapes, the secretly recorded conversations that proved beyond any doubt that Gotti was the leader of the crime family and the man who directed the racketeering operation at the heart of the case. Defense attorneys could rant and rave and attack Gravano’s credibility and his motives for testifying, claiming as they do with all mob witnesses that the government has made a deal with the devil. The same arguments would surface in 2009 when Alite testified. But what the defense lawyers couldn’t challenge were the tapes. Gotti’s own words buried him. And in that respect, it was fitting. The celebrity gangster who dominated the New York underworld for nearly a decade, the mob boss who basked in the limelight and who had perfected the thirty-second sound bite that the media loved and that old time gangsters detested, was hung out to dry by his own words.
The tapes included Gotti talking about “whacking” a business associate who had crossed him; about severing the head of another gangster suspected of horning in on a Gambino gambling operation; and about how, if he got the time, he would ensure the continuation of Cosa Nostra for another thirty years.
The jury also heard Gotti acknowledge to an associate that he was the target of a major federal investigation.
“Don’t I know they ain’t gonna rest until they put me in jail?” he said. “So I fight it tooth and nail to the end.” But if he ended up “in the can,” Gotti said on the tape, he had already designated a top associate to look out for the interests of the crime family.
“I love him,” Gotti said of his designee. “I’m gonna go to jail and leave him in charge.”
Gotti's Rules Page 17