Philadelphia presented lots of other opportunities for Alite once he started to look around. In the mid-1990s, bars and restaurants were sprouting up along the Delaware Avenue riverfront from Center City to South Philadelphia. The popular nightspots attracted the young and the wealthy from both the city and the suburbs. There also were more than a few wiseguys and wannabes and the beautiful young women who chased after them. Parking was always a problem and each establishment had a valet service.
Alite, who already had a big valet business in Tampa, simply muscled his way in, using threats and beatings when necessary, to push out any competitors. In less than a year he had control of the valet parking at about two dozen spots along Delaware Avenue, a few in South Jersey, and a few more in Atlantic City. He even had a few locations in upscale shopping centers. It was like the “unionizing” of the bouncers in Queens. It was a cash business and, other than paying for insurance, there was very little overhead.
Alite charged the businesses a flat fee for the valet service, arranged off-site parking, and set up two or three kids at each site to park the cars. Their biggest income came from the tips.
Several of the clubs along Delaware Avenue, places like Rock Lobster, the Eighth Floor, Egypt, and KatManDu, also attracted local celebrities and the city’s sports stars. One night Alite was checking on his businesses when he saw a Bentley parked in a VIP spot next to the entrance at one of the clubs. It was standard for whoever parked in that spot to put twenty dollars in the tip bucket. All the tips went to the guys Alite hired to park and watch the cars. This night, the tip bucket was empty. Alite asked who owned the Bentley. One of the valet workers told him it belonged to Allen Iverson, the basketball star.
Alite went in the club and found him.
“Move your car,” he said.
Iverson was taken aback.
“What?”
“Either move your car or put fifty dollars in the bucket,” Alite said. “Usually it’s twenty dollars, but for you now it’s fifty.”
Alite said Iverson tried to play the celebrity card, asking him if he knew who he was.
“I know who you are,” Alite said he replied. “I don’t give a fuck. You’re too cheap to tip. Move your car.”
Iverson said he was a friend of the owner of the club and that his presence generated business. Alite said that didn’t do him or the kids parking cars any good. Iverson walked away, but Alite later found out he had asked the owner who Alite was.
“He came out after that and put money in the bucket,” Alite said. “He apologized. Said no hard feelings. Keyshawn Johnson [a star wide receiver for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers] was the same way down in Tampa. Never tipped. Warren Sapp [an All-Pro defensive tackle for the Buccaneers], on the other hand, was generous with everybody. Maybe that’s why he ended up bankrupt.”
Valet parking became a legitimate source of income. It was a way for Alite to launder some of the cash that was flowing in from his drug dealing, gambling, and loansharking operations. And it was there for the taking.
“It was wide open and I just moved in,” he said. “I couldn’t believe the local guys hadn’t gotten into this.”
At the time Alite started making his moves in the Philadelphia area, the local mob was in turmoil. Little Nicky Scarfo’s bloody reign as mob boss had ended with his arrest and conviction on racketeering charges in 1988. He was succeeded by John Stanfa, a Sicilian-born Mafioso with ties to the old leadership of the Gambino family. Stanfa was banging heads with the sons, nephews, and cousins of members of the jailed Scarfo crew. The young group was headed by Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino, whose father had been Scarfo’s underboss. The Stanfa and Merlino factions were busy cruising the streets and shooting at one another. They didn’t have the time or the inclination to go after the valet parking businesses that Alite had targeted.
There was one incident involving a guy who claimed to be Stanfa’s nephew. He slapped around one of the valet attendants working for Alite at a Delaware Avenue nightclub. Alite got a phone call from the panicked attendant, who said these guys were trying to take over.
“I’ll be right there,” Alite said.
He got a friend to drive him over to the club.
“I was wearing a leather coat and I had an Uzi slung over my shoulder under the coat,” he said. “This guy who claimed to be Stanfa’s nephew, I’m not even sure if he was, wasn’t around, but one of his associates was still here. They were in the valet business at the time. I showed him the gun and said I was taking over their business, not the other way around.”
Alite ended up with four more spots. He saw it as simply a business opportunity, part of his foray into a new and economically fertile area. He was very comfortable moving around on the fringes of the volatile Philadelphia underworld. He and Junior had met Scarfo in Atlantic City in the early 1980s before the mob boss went to jail. He knew of Merlino and some of the younger guys around him. He also had a business connection with a second group of renegade gangsters led by a kid named Louie Turra. Turra was like Merlino, a thirty-something high-profile gangster, a John Gotti wannabe, a celebrity wiseguy but without the New York stage to play on. Turra was in the drug business. One of his suppliers was Keith Pellegrino, who worked for Alite.
“I tried to stay low-key,” Alite said. “I didn’t need a PA system to let people know who I was. But word got around. I’d say hello to guys, but not much more. I didn’t really need to get involved with any of them. I was making plenty of money on my own.”
But that didn’t stop Louie Turra from trying to hire him as a hit man.
“I hardly know these guys, right?” Alite said. “They’ve got this Christmas tree lot on Oregon Avenue and Pellegrino takes me there one day to meet with Louie Turra.”
Turra’s father, Anthony, and uncle Rocco, a legendary South Philadelphia tough guy, were in the produce business and during the holiday season they also had a lot from which they sold trees. It was there that Turra asked Alite if he would be willing to kill Joey Merlino.
“First, I don’t want to get involved in their problems,” he said. “Second, they hardly know me and they’re asking me to kill somebody. I figure I’m not the first one they’ve asked. I tell them, look, you got a problem with this guy, don’t go after him right away. Make up, get him to relax, set him up. That’s the way we do it in New York. They didn’t want to hear that. They were crazy. I stayed away from them for that reason. If something happened to Merlino, everybody would know it was them. Louie Turra couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
“I listened, but there was no way I was going to get involved. I thought these guys were all a little wild.”
Coming from someone like Alite, that assessment said all you needed to know about the South Philadelphia underworld circa 1994. Turra was moving marijuana, cocaine, and heroin and was also involved in sports betting. Merlino and members of his branch of the mob were asking Turra to pay a street tax, the underworld price for doing business. Turra refused to pay. Or, as his uncle Rocco later explained, “Who was Merlino that we should pay him? If he wants money, let him go out and steal it.”
Louie Turra was badly beaten in an after-hours club by members of Merlino’s crew. He was humiliated. During the assault, Merlino’s henchmen also took his Rolex watch. But Turra still refused to pay. Instead he intensified his efforts to have Merlino killed. Alite heard about some of the plots, which just reinforced his perception of the Turra crew. They were cowboys, he said.
The Turras and nearly a dozen associates would later be indicted on racketeering charges that included drug dealing, murder, and attempted murder. The indictment listed a series of plots to kill Merlino, plots that revolved around hand grenades, machine guns, and even, at one point, a bow and arrow. Most of the defendants in that case were convicted. The three Turras each found a different way out. Rocco, to the surprise of almost everyone in South Philadelphia, became a government witness. He had had enough of the senseless violence, he said. Louie committed suicide by hanging himsel
f in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan while awaiting the start of trial. And Anthony, Louie’s father, was shot and killed one morning in front of his home as he was on his way to court. Members of the Merlino mob have long been suspected, but never convicted, of that murder.
Alite’s name also surfaced in another notorious “hit” that generated intense media attention at the time. The wife of a prominent Cherry Hill, New Jersey, rabbi was killed in her home, bludgeoned to death by an intruder. The murder of Carol Neulander occurred on November 1, 1994. Over the next four years it would be the focus of an intense investigation by the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office. At one point word leaked out that investigators had questioned Alite, described as a notorious “mob hit man” then living in Cherry Hill.
“I remember driving home one day with Claudia,” Alite said. “She was living in the house on Brick Road. When we pulled up, there were two guys in suits and ties, a white guy and a black guy, waiting at the door.”
Alite still laughs when he recounts the story.
“Oh look, Jehovah’s Witnesses,” Claudia said when she spotted the men.
“That’s how naïve she was,” Alite said. “I knew right away they were detectives. I told them to come in. They indicated that they didn’t think I had anything to do with it, but said they had to question me. I didn’t realize it, but sometimes when I went jogging, I would jog past the Neulander house, the house where she was killed. She owned a cake shop and I used to stop in there sometimes. And I used to work out and play racquetball at the same gym where the rabbi worked out. I might have even played a game or two of racquetball with him. I don’t remember.”
Alite said he was open and honest with the detectives, telling them frankly that he was making too much money on his own to hire out as an assassin. What’s more, he said, he would never kill a woman.
“I told them it was either some junkie or it was the husband,” Alite said.
Alite was right. It was the rabbi. Fred Neulander was arrested in September 1998 and charged with hiring two men to kill his wife. Both hit men, one a recovering alcoholic whom the rabbi had befriended and was counseling, confessed and cooperated with authorities. They testified at two trials. The first ended with a hung jury, the second with Fred Neulander’s conviction for first-degree murder. Neulander is currently serving a life term.
The reason for the murder?
The rabbi was having an affair with a woman who was a prominent radio host in Philadelphia. They met when she asked him to conduct funeral services for her husband, also a radio personality. He had died of cancer. Their affair began less than two months after the husband was buried. Neulander had promised to marry her, but he thought a divorce would reflect negatively on his standing as a rabbi. Having his wife bludgeoned to death seemed like a more sensible alternative to Neulander, who literally thought he could get away with murder.
While Alite managed to avoid getting entangled in either the Merlino-Turra flap or the Neulander investigation, a traffic stop created more serious problems for him.
“There had been a shooting at one of the clubs on Delaware Avenue,” he said. “I was driving back to Jersey over the Ben Franklin Bridge when the police stopped me. They were apparently making random checks and I was driving a car similar to one at the scene.”
While he had nothing to do with the shooting, he did have a .32-caliber revolver and some hollow-nosed bullets in his car. He was arrested on weapons counts, a case that eventually was assigned to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Camden. It was a serious problem because Alite had taken a pinch in Queens a few years earlier for gun possession.
“I was in a car with Greg Reiter,” he said. “Greg was awaiting trial on drug charges at the time. When police stopped the car, Greg asked me to tell them the gun was mine, not his. He would have violated his bail and would have been sent to jail. I took the charge and ended up getting probation, but it was on my record.”
That record enhanced the potential penalties. What’s more, at the time of the car stop on the bridge, Alite was free on bail and awaiting trial for the assault on the cops in Mineola. There was little room to maneuver in either case. Alite hired a local attorney, M. W. (Mike) Pinsky, a prominent criminal defense lawyer in South Jersey whose clients included some major players in the Philadelphia crime family. A realist who understood the law and the judicial system, Pinsky counseled Alite to package the two cases, to plead out to both as long as the sentences would run concurrently. What’s more, Pinsky was smart enough to arrange for a bigger hit on the gun charge than the Mineola assault, thereby guaranteeing that Alite did his time in a federal facility.
That’s the way it played out. Alite got thirty-seven months for the gun charge and fourteen months for the assault.
At one pretrial hearing in Mineola prior to entering his guilty plea, Alite met with Junior in the parking lot outside the courthouse. “He told me John Kelly would take a beating because he had created this problem,” Alite said. “I think Junior wanted to make sure nothing would come out about how we had robbed Kelly and stolen his money and his drugs. That’s all Junior cared about but he made it sound like he was doing this for me. It was bullshit.”
Shortly before he began serving his sentence, Alite heard that Kelly had gotten into a fight at the China Club in Manhattan. He took a bad beating. The guy who tuned him up, Alite said, was Willie Marshall, a friend of Junior’s who was part of the Gambino entourage that operated out of Scores, the gentleman’s club on the Upper East Side.
Under the terms of his plea deals, Alite was required to turn himself in to federal authorities in Camden in April 1996. His first stop during what would be nearly three years as a guest of the U.S. government was a prison in Fairton, New Jersey, about sixty miles south of Philadelphia. Alite, who had spent time in several county and state facilities, didn’t know what to expect. He was pleasantly surprised.
“Most of the state joints I had been in were wild,” Alite said. “Crowded and noisy. They’re driving me to Fairton and I see the grounds are real nice. It’s quiet. They take me to the reception area. It’s air-conditioned, clean.”
Alite was processed through in a day, given the typical warnings about staying out of trouble, and told that a serious infraction would result in him being sent to the hole—solitary confinement. He was read a list of the names of some inmates and asked if he knew or had a problem with any of them. Several of the names were those of wiseguys whom he knew, but he answered no each time a name was read. He also was shown some photos. He said he didn’t recognize anyone, although he would occasionally pause over one photo or another and tell the intake officer, “He looks kind of familiar, but I’m not sure.”
Then he was issued his prison clothes.
“A jumpsuit. I asked for an extra large, they gave me a three-X,” he said with a laugh. “Sneakers. I asked for a size nine, they gave me elevens.”
Alite knew at least a dozen of the inmates in Fairton and had heard of a dozen more. But he wasn’t about to tell the prison authorities any of that. Mobsters tend to form their own groups in an institution and in the interest of maintaining order, prison officials often go along with that kind of arrangement. It’s a little like assigning college freshmen roommates. It’s a random process but one based on pairing individuals with “similar interests.” Alite’s first cellmate at Fairton was Louis Auricchio.
Within two weeks they were both in the hole.
Auricchio was a wiseguy out of North Jersey connected to the Genovese crime family. He was in his mid-thirties. His brother-in-law was John Lynch, then a prominent New Jersey state senator. Auricchio had been jailed on tax evasion charges in 1989, but that was just the start of his problems. By 1994 he was facing federal and state indictments for murder, extortion, and racketeering. He eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a ten-year federal term and a thirty-year state sentence, which, like Alite’s sentences, were to run concurrently.
Among other things, Auricchio h
ad pleaded guilty to an aggravated manslaughter charge, admitting to the 1988 murder of John DiGilio, a onetime highly regarded amateur boxer and a flamboyant Genovese crime family soldier. DiGilio had been targeted because of his outspoken, high-profile persona. The Genovese still believed in that old-school, make money not headlines philosophy.
DiGilio ended up with several bullet holes in his head, his body stuffed into a body bag later discovered in the Hackensack River. Auricchio had carried out the hit, which, according to some sources, resulted in his formal initiation into the crime family.
“I’m not even in the cell ten minutes and he starts telling me this story,” Alite says. “He’s having a problem with this kid Bobby Brooks whose dad is with the Lucheses. I said, ‘Louis, let me get settled in.’”
Once in population, several other wiseguys got Alite’s ear. There apparently was a running feud involving Auricchio and Brooks. Auricchio, a thick, muscular kid with experience as a high school wrestler, was getting the better of the situation.
Alite said he had gotten word from Charles Carneglia to look out for Brooks. Later, in a prearranged phone call, Alite spoke with Brooks’s father, who said, “Make sure he [Auricchio] doesn’t hurt my kid.” It was no different than on the street. Mobsters who were supposed to be tough guys were coming to him for help.
“There’s a big difference between a killer and a tough guy,” Alite would say several years later. “Some of these guys, they shoot somebody and that makes them a killer. But they don’t know how to handle themselves. They can’t fight. Or they’re afraid to fight. Just ’cause they’re a killer doesn’t make them a tough guy.”
And in prison, it’s the tough guy who survives.
“On the street I would try to be a gentleman,” Alite said. “If there was a problem, I’d try to reason with someone first. Then, if he didn’t listen, I’d hurt him. In prison, when you try to reason with someone, when you talk first, they take that for weakness. In prison, you have to hit first. That’s the only way to survive.”
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