Alite and Kevin McMahon stayed outside in the parking lot with scanners to monitor local police activity. Lopez had said the police would not be a problem.
Things went as planned until the two “agents” started to count the money in the store’s safe. One of the women working the office that day panicked or figured out what was going on. She slammed the safe shut. Alite’s two guys scrambled out of the store and ran to the parking lot where their own car was waiting. They ended up with $25,000 in cash, hardly the score that Alite had been expecting.
“I set twenty-five hundred dollars aside for Charles and another twenty-five hundred for Ronnie One-Arm,” Alite said. “They were the guys I was supposedly working for and they had the right to a piece of whatever we did.”
The rest he gave to the guys involved in the heist. Alite took nothing. As he later told the jury, “I didn’t want pennies. I wanted big money. I had money. I was doing well for myself. It didn’t mean anything to me, a couple of dollars.”
The other heist was at the Papavero Funeral Home on Long Island (the funeral parlor from which, several years later, John J. Gotti would be buried). The backstory was not unlike the robbery of the doctor down in Florida. Again, Alite explained it all to the Carneglia jury.
A woman Alite knew was married to the brother of one of the owners of the funeral parlor. She said he was abusing her and to get back at him, she told Alite about cash, upward of $400,000, and jewelry, worth about $300,000, that was kept in the safe at the funeral parlor.
Alite cleared the move with Charles Carneglia. Among other things, he was concerned about a connection the funeral parlor had with Skinny Dom Pizzonia, another Gambino capo. Carneglia told Alite not to worry about it.
Alite sent Kevin McMahon to the funeral home to scope it out. McMahon’s story was that his grandmother had passed away and he wanted to plan a funeral. He arranged for a second meeting on a Sunday night, when Alite figured there wouldn’t be any workers around. That’s when the heist was supposed to go down. That night, Alite and McMahon stayed in a car outside the funeral parlor. As they had done during the Sears heist, they were listening to police scanners.
Kevin Bonner and another guy went into the funeral parlor, accosted and tied up the owner, and demanded he open the safe.
“Somehow he got away from them and hit a fire alarm,” Alite said. “They came running out of the place and we all took off.”
Empty-handed.
It was a run of bad luck that had begun earlier that summer for Alite.
He had attended an engagement party in Mineola and afterward was sitting in the Caffé Bianco with a female cousin drinking champagne. He was already pretty drunk when John Kelly and two goons walked up to him, showed him their guns, and told him to come with them to the parking lot. Kelly was the drug dealer who was ripped off during the phony police stop that Junior and Alite had set up a few years earlier. Kelly had promised to get back at Alite and when he saw him drinking at the bar, he moved in.
Alite reached for the bottle of champagne, pretending that he was going to take another swig. Instead he swung the bottle at Kelly. Had he been sober, Alite figures, he would have knocked Kelly out. But in the state he was in, Alite couldn’t focus. The bottle just grazed Kelly’s head. Still, it was enough to catch everyone off guard and it gave Alite a chance to break away. He headed to the parking lot, got to his car, a black Nissan 300Z, and reached into the glove compartment, where he had a hammer.
“It’s the only thing I had,” he said as he recounted the incident years later. “They thought it was a gun. They jumped into their car. I got in mine.”
Kelly was driving a fancy Excalibur with the spare tire mounted outside the trunk.
“The kind of car pimps used to drive,” Alite said.
Before Kelly could get out of the parking lot, Alite rammed his Nissan into the Excalibur. Police, responding to a call for assistance from the bar, arrived within minutes. Alite, drunk and disoriented, rammed the police car, then got into a fight with two of the responding officers. He was arrested and charged with assault and related offenses.
“I took a beating that day,” he said. “Those cops piped me pretty bad. I just kept fighting them. I don’t know. That’s just the way I was back then. I try to control it now, but it was like a button got pushed and I wasn’t gonna stop.”
Free on bail, Alite went right back to the streets and the violence that had become so much a part of his life. It was all that he knew. It was how he survived. A few months earlier, Guy Peden, a drug dealing associate, had been arrested in a casino in Atlantic City. Peden had set up a drug deal but ended up caught in a federal sting. Alite was supposed to be there that night but didn’t show up.
“I told Guy not to go through with that deal,” he said. “He didn’t even know who he was selling to. Turns out it was an informant and he got pinched.”
Peden was off the streets but was still owed money from several earlier deals. Steve Newell, a friend of Junior’s, was on the hook for a kilo of coke, Alite said. That amounted to about forty grand. Alite was going to collect. Newell balked at paying.
“So I shot him,” Alite said. “I saw him walking along Cross Bay Boulevard. I got out of my car and I shot him in the butt. When he went down, I kicked him and punched him.”
Word got back to Junior, who sent word to Alite, telling him to back off.
A week later, two FBI agents showed up at the home of Alite’s mother and father in Queens. They were looking for Alite. His parents told the agents they hadn’t seen or heard from him in several days.
“My mother started crying,” he said. “She thought I was dead.”
The FBI didn’t do much to calm her fears. They said they needed to talk with her son and they had information that someone wanted to kill him. When Alite was told this by his parents, he arranged to meet with the agents. But first he called Richie Rehbock, a defense attorney who was representing him in the Mineola case. Rehbock was one of the “approved” defense lawyers that the Gotti organization wanted to represent members and associates.
“I told Rehbock the FBI wanted to talk with me,” Alite said. “I wanted to let him know, and that way let Junior know, that I wasn’t cooperating; that I was going to meet with them to find out what was going on and who they thought was trying to kill me.”
Alite already had a pretty good idea where the threats were coming from. In a way, he was playing a mind game with Junior. I know it’s you, he was saying, and you know I know. But let’s play this out as if neither one of us has a clue about what’s going on.
Alite met with the two agents at a rest stop near Exit 8A on the New Jersey Turnpike, not far from his condo in South Brunswick. They told him he had a problem. They said they were required by law to warn anyone who they believed had been targeted. They wouldn’t say who and they wouldn’t say how they knew, but they insisted that the threat was real and that Alite’s life was in danger.
He took it all in and then joked with the agents. Carmine Agnello had recently been involved in a beef with a meter maid in New York. The meter maids all wore yellow vests.
“As long as I’m not wearing yellow,” he told the agents, “I’ll be safe.”
They didn’t think it was funny. Or they didn’t get the reference. They offered him protection and suggested he come in and cooperate.
“Thank you, but no thanks,” Alite told the agents. “That’s not for me.”
At that point, Alite said, he still thought he could protect himself. He knew that he had the street smarts and the heart to beat Junior and those around him at their own game. And he wasn’t ready—yet—to stop playing.
Following the meeting with the FBI, Alite told anyone and everyone that the agents had played a tape for him and that he heard Peter Gotti, Carmine Agnello, and a third individual who he believed was Junior Gotti, though he couldn’t be certain, plotting to kill him.
It was a bogus story. There was no tape. But it was Alite’s way to flush Junior
out. It also offered, at least in the short term, some life insurance.
“I figured if they thought there was a tape with their voices talking about killing me then they wouldn’t try anything because if I were killed, they’d be the suspects,” Alite said.
A few days later, Alite’s cousin Patsy was contacted by Steve Kaplan, one of Junior’s associates. Junior wanted to meet. Alite agreed. He suggested the Aqueduct Racetrack, a public place with lots of people. No one was going to stage a hit in that setting.
Alite showed up at the Queens racetrack with two or three associates. Junior came with a party of six, including Carmine Agnello.
“I’m not talking to that pig,” Alite said when Junior approached with Agnello.
It set the tone for the face-to-face Junior and Alite had that afternoon.
“First he denied everything,” Alite said. “I mentioned the tape and he said, ‘I had nothing to do with that.’”
That told Alite two things. There was a murder plot and the three individuals he had named—Peter Gotti, Agnello, and Junior—were involved.
“Stop bullshitting me,” Alite said. “Nobody does anything like that without your okay.”
The conversation got heated after that, Alite said, with Junior threatening Alite’s brother Jim.
“My brother wasn’t a street guy,” Alite said. “He had nothing to do with this life. I told Junior, ‘You have a brother, too.’ He went nuts. He said, ‘Are you out of your fuckin’ mind? I have a thousand guys.’”
Alite just shook his head, looked Junior in the eye, and said, “You go near my brother, I only gotta kill two.” With that, Alite made it clear that Junior and Carmine Agnello were in jeopardy if anything happened.
In typical fashion, Junior tried to turn things around. When threats didn’t work, he tried to be conciliatory. He said Alite was “paranoid,” that nobody was out to get him, that they all were friends. The sit-down at the racetrack ended with them shaking hands and embracing, but Alite knew it was all for show.
Then, in a move that Alite still has trouble comprehending, Gotti suggested that Alite take a trip with him and Carmine. They were heading to a house Gotti had upstate. They were going “hunting,” Junior said, and asked if Alite wanted to join them.
“What a fuckin’ moron,” Alite said as he recounted the story. “Did he think I was stupid?”
At the time, Alite joked about the offer, telling Gotti, “‘Yeah, sure. I’ll put on Bugs Bunny ears and you two can shoot at me.’ Everybody laughed, but I wasn’t kidding. We shook hands, but I knew eventually he’d try to kill me or have someone do it.”
The game of cat-and-mouse continued for the next year. Alite and Gotti communicated through proxies. Ronnie Trucchio was one of the messengers.
“I told Ronnie, whenever Junior tells you to call me, call,” Alite said. “That way you don’t get in trouble with him. But when you call, I ain’t comin’. I’ll get back to you, or you contact my cousin Patsy. I’ll find you and roll up on you.”
Alite said he knew the game too well. There was no way he would show up at a meeting that Junior or one of his associates had set up; no way he would get in a car with any of them. He had seen, and carried out, too many shootings to put himself in that kind of jeopardy. If they met, it would be on his terms and at a location he selected.
That’s how he ended up on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City in one of his first face-to-face meetings with Junior after the confrontation at the Aqueduct. Junior was having a problem with some Albanians and wanted Alite to intercede. According to Alite, the root of the problem was a typical Gotti scam that reinforced his opinion of Junior as a petty, spineless mob boss.
“His cousin, Johnny Boy Ruggiero, had been dating this girl Janet, who was Albanian,” Alite said. “Johnny Boy had ‘borrowed’ sixty thousand dollars from her. She wanted it back. These Albanians, friends of hers or relatives, were threatening to kill Ruggiero if he didn’t return the money. A guy named George, who I knew, was one of the guys making the threats. He ended up marrying Janet.”
Alite figured Junior had gotten half of the sixty grand. That’s the way he operated. Ripping off a young woman was a typical predator-type move that Junior would either come up with or approve, Alite said. Junior and Johnny Boy probably figured the woman would have no recourse.
“I agreed to meet Junior on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City,” Alite said. “He was down there for the fights in one of the casinos. At the meeting he tells me about the problem. First he’s acting real tough, like ‘Do they know who they’re dealing with?’ I had to tell him that they didn’t care. They’d kill Johnny Boy and they’d kill him and then the next day they’d be back in Albania where no one would ever find them.”
Just as he had done at the Aqueduct meeting, Junior started out with threats, telling Alite that he would kill the Albanians first.
“I told him he didn’t even know who they were,” Alite recalled. “Then he says to me, ‘Would they take forty-five thousand instead of the sixty?’” Alite brought the request to George the Albanian, who, through Alite, sent word back to Junior Gotti.
“He told me to tell Gotti, ‘Not only won’t I take forty-five thousand, I won’t take fifty-nine thousand.’”
Janet got her sixty grand back.
CHAPTER 14
His break with Junior Gotti didn’t stop Alite from wheeling and dealing in the underworld. In fact, it opened up opportunities to expand. He already had established a presence in Tampa, where he and Ronnie Trucchio had “planted the flag” of the Gambino crime family, moving from drug dealing and extortion to legitimate interests in nightclubs and a valet parking business.
In the mid-1990s, Alite also set up shop in the Philadelphia–South Jersey area, where he already had two homes. His common-law wife, Claudia, had moved into a house he purchased in a residential neighborhood in Cherry Hill with his young son John. Another son, Matt, would be born a short time later. Alite still used the condo in South Brunswick but also spent time in one of the three homes located on the fifteen-acre tract he owned in nearby Voorhees Township. He and his wife Carol had divorced but their two children, son Jimmy and daughter Chelsea, sometimes stayed with him. Alite’s parents and, for a time, his grandmother, also lived on the property. Alite had turned the grounds into an athletic facility of sorts with an outdoor gym and boxing ring equipped to train fighters. Boxing remained a big part of his life. He never hesitated to get in the ring. And as he got older he came to realize that his fascination with the sport wasn’t just about winning. A good fighter not only knew how to throw a punch, but how to take one. Alite brought that same attitude to the streets. You might knock him down, but unless you knocked him out, he was getting back up. And if he did get back up, you had a problem.
Junior Gotti wasn’t big enough, tough enough, or smart enough to knock him down.
A few years after establishing a base in the Philadelphia suburbs, Alite was moving easily in and around the local underworld. He knew some members and associates of the Philadelphia crime family and they, in turn, introduced him to others. He quietly went about his business, never calling attention to himself or boasting about his New York connections. Guys who needed to know found out quickly enough. For most other people, it didn’t matter. Who he was was not the issue. What he was doing was what mattered.
Ironically, Junior had paved the way for Alite by making some introductions several years earlier. One of his first forays into the local underworld involved a check cashing and money laundering scheme that Gotti had set up before he and Alite had their falling-out.
“Junior had this guy who was in the kitchenware business,” Alite said. “He had this warehouse in the Bronx. I went there one time and it was empty. Couldn’t even get a frying pan for my wife.”
But the guy was making money, big money.
“He had some deal with these Colombians,” Alite said. “They were moving coke. And this guy needed to wash the money through his company. He asked Junior
for help and Junior brought me in.”
Over the course of a six- to eight-month period in about 1991, Alite said, he cashed several million dollars’ worth of checks for the businessman. They were company checks but they weren’t made out to anyone. Alite used a pawnshop and a check-cashing business in Philadelphia to clear some of the money, then made a connection with a guy he knew who owned a big construction company.
They’d take the checks, make them out to themselves or their businesses, and give Alite 80 to 90 percent of the face value in cash. Alite and Junior would take another 10 percent off the top before the businessman got his money, but even at that, he and his Colombian partners were turning a profit.
“We were just making a lot of money a lot of different ways,” Alite said.
In the middle of the check-cashing operation, Junior told Alite that two of the Colombians’ business associates, a husband and wife, had been busted. The drug traffickers had been using the couple’s home in Brooklyn as a stash house. They were nailed and there was no way out of the case, but they asked Junior if he had any influence with the courts. The couple had pleaded guilty and were going to be sentenced.
“We said we could work something out,” Alite said. “It was a lie. We had no influence. But they promised to pay us two hundred and fifty thousand dollars if we could arrange a sentence of fifteen years or less.”
Alite showed up at two court hearings to make it look like he had some clout.
“At one of them I was the only person in the courtroom,” he said. “We were just taking a chance, trying for a score. And at the sentencing hearing the judge, who had no idea, imposed a sentence of fifteen years on the husband and fifteen years on the wife.”
The Colombians forked over the quarter of a million in cash, Alite believes, although he never saw any of it.
“Junior said to me that his businessman friend was having a tough time of it and we ought to let him keep the payoff, that we had already made a lot of money with him,” Alite recalled. “I think Junior split the money with him and cut me out. But I wasn’t gonna make a big deal out of it. He was right. We had made a lot of money with the guy. This was just Junior’s way of making more.”
Gotti's Rules Page 19