The standard practice was for the hierarchy of other families to clear those names with their own members and then sign off if there were no problems. It was also standard for the lists to be destroyed. For whatever reason, Junior was saving his.
Now the feds had it and the other families were up in arms.
All of this became public knowledge when Junior Gotti was arrested in January 1998 on charges contained in a sweeping racketeering indictment. The case detailed gambling, loansharking, and extortion schemes, including the shakedown of Scores. It also identified Junior Gotti as the acting boss of the Gambino organization. The indictment and the embarrassing details that came with it effectively ended Junior’s reign. He was jailed, but had he remained on the streets, he probably would have been killed. Instead, Peter Gotti, Senior’s brother, took over the organization and the Gambinos, however tenuously, remained in the hands of a Gotti.
John Gotti’s Rules of Leadership: When charged with a crime, no matter the circumstances, do not plead guilty. It’s a sign of weakness.
It was at this time, Junior would later claim, that he decided to end his involvement with the mob. He and his father, in a prison visit that was recorded, argued over his desire to plead guilty to the racketeering charges. Junior insisted that his decision to go against his father’s wishes was a clear indication that he was breaking with the crime family.
Junior said that he had decided to plead guilty and that he wanted out. Gotti Sr. told him not to do it. The discussion centered on Junior’s desire for “closure,” which authorities later said was a coded reference to his desire to enter a guilty plea. Gotti Sr. had gotten advance warning about why his son was coming to see him and was told that closure was the issue.
He told his son it was not an option.
Gotti Sr. had taken that stance many times, even when an admission of guilt worked to his advantage. Carmine Agnello had helped the Gottis avoid prosecution for jury tampering by obtaining immunity and testifying before a grand jury. Agnello, who couldn’t be prosecuted, said he was the one who had approached jurors, not anyone else. The admission stalled the investigation in its tracks. Most defense attorneys and members of the crime family thought it was an ingenious move. Gotti Sr. didn’t agree.
At the meeting in Marion, he told Junior that he would never confess to anything. (Early in his career, however, he had entered a guilty plea in the McBratney murder case, but he had either forgotten about that or it was another example of the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do philosophy that Senior employed in running the organization.)
“I would tell them to go fuck themselves,” he said of investigators or prosecutors accusing him of a crime. “If there was a church robbed and I had the steeple stickin’ outta my ass, I wouldn’t tell them I did it.”
Junior, of course, had a different take on the situation.
“I can’t do this,” he said in a taped conversation from that prison visit that his defense lawyer later played for the jury in his 2009 case. “This is your life. This is not my life.”
He left Marion that day without his father’s blessing. He later said that he was torn but had decided to go to trial as his father wished. But shortly before the trial began, he changed his mind and told his lawyer to work out a plea. Under the terms of that agreement, he was sentenced to seventy-seven months in prison.
Alite was in a minimum security prison in Allenwood, Pennsylvania, finishing up his thirty-seven-month sentence, when he heard what Junior was saying. He said it was both preposterous and impossible. “You only get out when you die,” he said. “Or when you get killed.” Of course the Gottis had flouted every other rule and protocol, so it wouldn’t have been out of character for Junior to flout this one. But Alite said he knew Junior too well to buy the story Gotti later told to juries and repeated during an exclusive interview on the CBS News show 60 Minutes. Alite also believed the fact that Junior kept the list of names of made guys was significant.
“Why didn’t he destroy the list?” Alite asked. “Because I think he was keeping it as insurance. I think he thought he might make a deal with the feds at some time and that list would be one of the things he could offer.”
From the witness stand at Junior’s trial, Alite would refer to Junior as the New York version of James “Whitey” Bulger, the Boston mob boss who for years, while dealing drugs, running gambling operations, and committing murder, was also a confidential FBI informant. Alite believes Junior Gotti tried to play the feds the same way Bulger did.
A Philadelphia mob associate who ended up in jail with Junior would later confirm Alite’s contention that Junior was still very much a member of the Gambino crime family, Alite said.
Alite had met several members of the Philadelphia mob while he was in Allenwood. John “Johnny Gongs” Casasanto and Ronnie Turchi were both doing time for racketeering. Casasanto and Alite hit it off right away. They were about the same age and had the same approach to life in the underworld. Casasanto was fearless, a genuine tough guy who never backed away from a fight. What he lacked was the savvy and the underworld intuition that allowed Alite to advance and survive. Casasanto would later be transferred to Ray Brook, a federal prison in upstate New York near Lake Placid, where he met and befriended Junior Gotti.
Casasanto’s brother Steve would visit Ray Brook and often returned with messages, Alite said, from both his brother and from Junior Gotti. Gotti might have been telling others that he had “chased” Alite, but the messages that came from Ray Brook were warm and friendly. He told the Casasantos that Alite was his main guy and good friend and that there was nobody better on the streets.
Alite took it all in stride. He knew the move only too well. Gotti was trying to rock him to sleep.
When John Casasanto was released in 2001, he told friends and associates, including Alite, that Gotti suggested he move to New York, where Gotti would make him a member of the Gambino organization. The offer, if true, seemed to fly in the face of Junior’s claim that he was no longer involved with the crime family.
Alite would later tell the FBI that he went to Queens to check on Casasanto’s story. He met with Peter Gotti, Junior’s younger brother, in a deli that Gotti owned and operated. Pete confirmed that his brother was touting Johnny Casasanto for membership, Alite said. (The younger Gotti would deny this when he testified as a defense witness at his brother’s 2009 trial.) When he got back to Philadelphia, Alite said he cautioned Casasanto against the move to New York, telling him that it wasn’t like Philadelphia and warning him that he’d never survive up there.
Alite was surprised at how naïve some of the Philadelphia wiseguys were about the ways of the underworld. He was used to the backstabbing and treachery. They seemed oblivious. Ronnie Turchi, who was in his sixties and had been around the mob all his life, was another example. He should have known better.
After Allenwood, Alite and Turchi spent time together in a halfway house in Philadelphia before they were both released in the summer of 1999. Alite, who said he bribed several guards, came and went as he pleased, finishing his time in jail reestablishing his connections on the street. Turchi and another local mob associate, a skittish drug dealer named Roger Vella, both hung with Alite in the facility.
Turchi had been the Philadelphia crime family consigliere. Alite had already had some dealings with his son and some other young mob associates. While Turchi insisted everything was fine and that he was looking forward to going home, Alite thought things weren’t stacking up right. Turchi had been aligned with mob boss Ralph Natale, who had taken over the Philadelphia mob in 1995 along with Skinny Joey Merlino. Merlino and Natale had met in prison in 1992, when Natale was finishing up a fifteen-year sentence for drug dealing and arson. Natale was sixty-six when he got out and was anxious to make up for lost time. Three years later he was facing narcotics charges and a possible life sentence. By the summer of 1999, he had cut a deal with the feds and agreed to cooperate against Merlino and the other young members of the organization.
Natale was unt
ouchable once he flipped. The feds had him in a protected wing of a federal prison. But Turchi, who had been Natale’s top associate, was exposed. At least that’s the way Alite saw it.
“He said he was fine,” Alite recalled. “He said he had been assured that he’d be welcomed back into the organization, that what Natale had done had nothing to do with him.”
“I told him they were gonna kill him,” Alite said.
Turchi responded by explaining that guys were already giving him money and helping him get reestablished during his daytime release from the halfway house. He bragged about a new Members Only windbreaker that one of Merlino’s guys bought for him. Roger Vella, who was part of the Merlino faction at the time, watched and listened as Alite warned Turchi.
“I looked at him and I knew,” Alite said of Vella. “They were setting Turchi up. When I asked Vella about it, he just smiled. But Turchi wouldn’t listen.”
Ron Turchi was being rocked to sleep.
On October 27, 1999, a few months after he left the halfway house and two days after his wife reported him missing, Ronnie Turchi turned up dead in the trunk of a car parked on a South Philadelphia street. He was naked. He had been beaten and tortured and then shot and killed.
Alite, on the other hand, had a much smoother transition. He came out of the halfway house in July 1999 and got a welcome-home reception from two girls from the neighborhood.
“They took me to a motel,” Alite said. “We partied.”
CHAPTER 16
Alite returned to South Jersey rather than Queens when he was finally set free that summer. But he was in and out of his old neighborhood on a regular basis. Claudia had moved back to Queens. She was living in Howard Beach with their two sons, John and Matt. Alite spent time with them there. He also was flying down to Tampa at least once a month, where his nightclub, Mirage, had become one of the city’s hot spots. He owned two other bars there as well as a valet parking business. Ronnie Trucchio, who in name headed the crew that was operating in Tampa, was also in and out of Florida along with several other associates of the Gambino organization. Money was rolling in. Alite had begun to legitimize himself. He was no longer a major player in the drug game. But the money he had earned moving cocaine was now fueling his other enterprises.
In the South Jersey area, he and two associates took over a business that some local wiseguys, including the son of Ron Turchi, had been running. They had a company that installed towers for cellular phones. There was big money to be made in that business, but they weren’t taking advantage of the opportunities. At first Alite suggested that he and some of his associates handle North Jersey and New York. Eventually, he took over the entire operation.
“They weren’t very smart and I guess you could say we bought them out,” Alite said.
With Claudia back in New York, Alite’s ex-wife, Carol, moved into the house in Cherry Hill with Jimmy and Chelsea. Alite spent time with both kids and brought them out to the Voorhees homestead as often as he could. He attended Little League games and taught Jimmy—and John when he would visit—how to box at the outdoor gym and training center he had set up on the property. He usually spent the night there, staying in one of the three houses on the grounds. His parents were living in another. Life was almost “normal,” he thought, although his instincts told him otherwise.
“I had a sense that I was being watched,” he said. “When I went out, it seemed like there were cars following me. I also knew that I still had a problem with the Gottis, that that was never going to go away.”
Alite knew what he had done. There were at least four bodies, maybe more, that he could be held accountable for. And he knew that despite assurances, there were always guys looking to make a deal. It would be easier for someone to give him up than to rat out a made guy. That was the reality. He also had heard that Vito Guzzo had people who were “looking” for him. Guzzo was in jail by this point. He had pleaded guilty to federal racketeering charges in 1998, admitting his involvement in five murders. He was sentenced to thirty-eight years. But Alite knew that it wasn’t that difficult to reach out from behind bars to settle a score.
One night, in fact, he believes a team of hit men were lying in wait for him outside Library II, a nightclub on Route 73 a few miles from his property. He and some friends had gone there for dinner.
“This car was there when we went into the restaurant and a couple of hours later it was still there when we came out,” Alite said. “I told the guys I was with to get in their cars and box that car in. I didn’t know if it was the FBI or if it was someone Guzzo had sent.”
He never found out. The car, with tinted windows, skidded in reverse over a grassy lawn, jumped a curb, and sped away from the restaurant parking lot. Alite, in a Volvo, gave chase.
“They were doing a hundred miles an hour,” he said. “I chased them for about two miles. They were heading for the New Jersey Turnpike when I lost them. That’s why I think it was Guzzo’s guys, and not the feds.”
Alite’s relationship with the Gambino organization was hostile at the time. And he did little to repair the damage. While he was in Allenwood his cousin Patsy Andriano visited him and reported that the brother-in-law of Richie Gotti Jr., a guy named Louie, was shaking down an old lady in the neighborhood whose son owed about three grand in a drug debt. The debtor had, in fact, been Andriano’s customer first. Alite sent word back through his cousin, telling Louie to back off.
Instead, Alite later told the FBI, Louie threatened Andriano. He told him that his cousin, Alite, was nobody and that the Gottis had chased him out of Queens. Alite, even though he was on supervised release and prohibited from leaving New Jersey, drove up to visit the old neighborhood and to leave a message for the Gottis.
“I got in touch with a friend of mine in the Bonanno family who knew this kid Louie. They called him Tony Soprano cause he was big, about two hundred seventy pounds, and he smoked cigars. He thought he was a tough guy. I told my friend to get him to the service road off the Belt Parkway in Queens and that I would just happen by.”
As planned, Alite drove up, stopped, and got out of the car to say hello to his friend. The mobster in turn introduced him to Louie. Alite looked puzzled, then pretended that he recognized Louie’s name for the first time. With that, he turned angry and began to question him about the shakedown of the old lady and the message he had sent through Patsy Andriano while Alite was in Allenwood.
“At first he acted tough,” Alite said. “He said, ‘Do you know who I am? Do you know I’m Richie Gotti’s brother-in-law?’ I told him I didn’t give a fuck who he was and I told him that ‘Gotti’ was the worst name he could have mentioned.”
Then Alite punched him, knocked him down, and proceeded to brutalized him.
“I was gonna shoot him,” Alite said. “Patsy was with me and I told him to give me the gun he was holding, but instead he took off. He didn’t want me to kill him. I would have.”
Instead, Tony Soprano took a serious beating.
“I broke his cheek and eye socket,” Alite said. “Several of his ribs were fractured and I broke one of his arms.”
A few days later, Alite heard from Richie Gotti Sr. He wanted to meet. Alite again went to Queens, this time for what amounted to a street corner sit-down.
“I thought we were friends?” Richie Gotti asked.
“If we were friends,” Alite said, “you would have taken care of this problem and I wouldn’t have had to do what I did.”
They talked for about ten minutes, with Gotti, the brother that John Sr. used to refer to as “pea brain,” trying to act like a mob leader. Finally, Alite had had enough.
“You know what,” he said. “We ain’t friends no more.”
With that, Alite demanded a weekly payment of $750 from Louie and his drug partner and left.
“It wasn’t about the money,” he said. “I think they paid for three or four weeks. They were supposed to give the money to Patsy. I didn’t care about the money. I just wanted to make a poin
t. Nobody chased me out of the neighborhood.”
Around this time, late 1999, Alite also was subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury in Brooklyn. He took Mike Malone, one of his associates, with him because he wanted someone there who could verify what went down.
“I didn’t want anyone to think I was cooperating,” he said. “But I figured that by talking with them and from the questions they asked, I’d have an idea of what they were up to.”
Prior to his appearance before the grand jury, two FBI agents and a federal prosecutor asked to speak with him privately. He insisted that Malone stay in the room. They told him he was not a target. They asked several questions about the Gotti organization and seemed especially interested in Ronnie Trucchio and Joe O’Kane. Alite sparred with them verbally, answering some questions honestly and others with less candor. But he made it clear that he was not willing to become a witness. Alite said when he was placed under oath before a grand jury, he lied, contradicting some of the things he had said privately, then exercising his Fifth Amendment right and refusing to answer any other questions. The session ended abruptly and inconclusively, but it confirmed what Alite knew intuitively. Members of his crew and Junior Gotti and the guys around him were all under investigation. A few weeks later the feds came calling again. It was not what Alite was expecting.
While in Fairton he had become a good friend of another inmate from New York, a guy named Nino. They ended up together again in Allenwood. Nino was in his forties and his wife was in her late thirties.
“Her biological clock was ticking,” Alite said. “She wanted to get pregnant, but Nino was doing fourteen years and wouldn’t get out for a couple more. He asked if I could help them smuggle in a sperm kit. We did it three or four times after I got out.”
It was a relatively simple operation. Alite would pick up the kit from the wife and drive up to Allenwood, where he would meet a guard he had befriended—and bribed—when he was an inmate there. The guard would take the kit in at the beginning of his shift, give it to Nino, and then pick it up at the end of the shift after Nino had “made a deposit.” The guard would then turn the kit over to Alite, who remained in the Allenwood area for the day.
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