DEDICATION
FOR ANGELINA, JULIET, NICOLAS, AND GEORGE
CONTENTS
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
John Gotti’s Rules of Leadership
Photos Section
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by George Anastasia
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
John Alite was a murderer, drug dealer, and thug.
Over the course of a twenty-five-year career as a gangster he brutalized people: stabbing them, shooting them, beating them with pipes, blackjacks, and baseball bats. He’s not proud of that, but he doesn’t try to hide from it, either. It’s who he was.
But it’s not who he is.
At least that’s his position today, in 2014, as he tries to put his life back together, a fifty-year-old former mob associate and hit man trying to live a normal life, trying to figure out how he got off track, and trying to get back on.
“Sometimes I wonder what happened,” he says.
A lot of people do.
The simple answer is that he did what he did to make money, to live well and to enhance his position in the Gambino crime family. He did most of it, he says, on the orders of John A. Gotti (known as Junior) and sometimes on the orders of John J. Gotti, Junior’s father. Two federal court juries in New York heard Alite tell parts of his story. One came back with a conviction. The other couldn’t decide.
Alite’s story, from where he is sitting, is a graphic and often brutal look at organized crime. Take a step back, however, and his experiences, detailed in debriefing sessions with the FBI, in testimony from the witness stand, and in hours of interviews for this book, are part of the bloody and treacherous tapestry that describes the demise of the American Mafia. The once powerful, monolithic, and highly secretive criminal organization has lost most of its clout in the American underworld, a victim of multi-pronged federal prosecutions and the deterioration of a “value” system that held it together for decades.
Alite (pronounced Ā-Lite) took the stand in 2009 at the trials of mob soldier Charles Carneglia and mob boss Junior Gotti. Carneglia was convicted of racketeering and murder. He is serving a life term. Gotti beat the case after a jury hung, almost evenly deadlocked on all three counts. Like Alite, Junior is now a free man and putting his own spin on this story. He denies most of the allegations made by Alite, including charges that he dealt drugs and killed, or ordered the murders of, several individuals.
Junior also has denied that he ever cooperated with authorities. There is an FBI document that will be detailed later in this book that refutes that claim. Known as a “302”—the numerical designation for a memo summarizing a debriefing session—the five-page memo outlines a meeting on January 18, 2005, in which Gotti Jr. and two of his defense attorneys met with federal prosecutors and FBI agents at the U.S. Attorney’s Office on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan.
Jerry Capeci, the dean of mob reporters in America, broke the first story about Junior’s attempt to cooperate. The 302, which had never before been made public, expands and confirms Capeci’s report, which was based on sources. The meeting was described as a “proffer session,” a negotiation in which a target or potential defendant agrees to tell authorities what he knows in an attempt to work out a plea and cooperation deal. Nothing that is said during one of these sessions can be used against the target or against anyone else if an agreement is not worked out.
Junior and his lawyers apparently never completed the deal, but that didn’t keep them from trying. And, as the document indicates, it didn’t stop Junior Gotti from giving up information about murders, corrupt cops and politicians, his crime family’s influence in the Queens District Attorney’s Office, and his own wheeling and dealing, including a plan he and an associate had to turn a city garbage dump into the site for a new Bronx House of Detention, which he would sell to the city for $20 million.
Let Junior Gotti and his lawyers spin that information any way they choose. The document speaks for itself. There was no attempt while writing this book to interview anyone in the Gotti camp. To turn Alite’s story into a “he said, they said” narrative would serve no purpose.
The Gottis deny virtually everything Alite alleges. Alite, on the other hand, denies very little. His version of the events that marked his life—a version that federal authorities adopted when they put him under oath on the witness stand—is a story of murder, money, and betrayal. It’s one man’s life of crime, a seduction of sorts that made him rich, turned him terribly violent, and very nearly got him killed on a dozen different occasions.
It may also be a story of redemption, but that’s a question that can’t be answered at this point.
The backdrop is the Gotti family and the American Mafia; more accurately, the Gotti family and the demise of the American Mafia. No one individual has had more to do with the once secret society coming apart at the seams than John J. Gotti.
Gotti was a mob boss who loved the spotlight, a celebrity gangster who thumbed his nose at the conventional wisdom of the old-time wiseguys. Their idea was to make money, not headlines. Gotti thought he could do both. For a long time he did. He and his son embodied the Me generation of the mob. Junior (for the purpose of this story he’s referred to as Junior even though he and his father had different middle names) was a spoiled, self-absorbed second-generation gangster whose sense of entitlement was his undoing. He was all about status and power. He liked the idea of being a mobster, but never really understood how it worked.
Smug and arrogant, bullies in expensive suits, the Gottis played by their own set of rules, rules that allowed them to do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted.
That was part of the hypocrisy of the Gotti crime family. The image they projected didn’t mesh with the reality. Even the Dapper Don moniker was phony, according to Alite. If Gotti Sr. didn’t have an associate picking out his clothes and telling him how to dress, the former thug and hijacker would have dressed like, well, a thug and hijacker, clashing plaids and stripes and colors rather than the cool, sophisticated elegance that became his trademark.
The media, of course, helped create the image. John J. Gotti on the cover of Time magazine; in boldface on Page Six of the New York Post; a sound bite, a pithy quote, leading the evening news. John Gotti was the face of the American Mafia at the end of the twentieth century.
And his son, coming on his heels, extending the reign.
It could be argued that Cosa Nostra was on the way out even before the Gottis got onstage. Second- and third-generation Italian Americans, in fact, make lousy gangsters. The best and the brightest in that community are now doctors, lawyers, educators. The mob is scraping the bottom of the gene pool.
That’s where the Gottis were located.
Add more sophisticated law enforcement, high-tech electronic surveillance, and the RICO Act and it’s clear the deck was stacked against the American Mafia. Throw in the death of omertà, the code of silence that was the foundation for the wall of secrecy that once protected the honored society. And also consider this: the Mafia was always a front, a façade, a fugazy if you will. Mario Puzo, F
rancis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese have built stories around the life, and the public has developed a perception based on those wonderfully written, directed, and acted fictions.
The reality is that if there ever was nobility and honor—and I’m not sure there was—it disappeared two or three generations ago. The American Mafia took the value system of the Italian-American community and bastardized it for its own benefit. The concepts of honor, fierce family loyalty, and respect, concepts that were and are as common and as expected in most Italian-American homes as spaghetti and meatballs for dinner on Sunday, were twisted into a code of conduct that lent power and status to outlaws and thugs.
Gotti Sr. played those cards well. Gotti Jr. took advantage of them but never really figured out the game. Ironically Alite, born of Albanian parents, understood it better than Junior. He saw all of this as he came of age. At first he was fascinated and awestruck by the Mafia and drawn to the power and charisma that was the Gotti family. Then he was abused by it. And finally he broke away from it. Did he become a witness to save his own skin? Without question. That’s part of his story.
But there is so much more.
The everyday struggle to survive while growing up on the streets of Woodhaven, Queens. His chance to make it out by playing baseball in college. The lure of the drug trade. The money and the violence on the fringe and then at the epicenter of the mob. And finally his life on the run, a fascinating and then harrowing three-year experience that took him into and out of a dozen different countries before he settled in Brazil. First there were the sunny beaches and beautiful women of Copacabana. Then there were the rats and the dank, fetid cells of two of that country’s most notorious prisons. Alite spent two years in that hell before being extradited back to the United States to face racketeering-murder charges.
Shortly after he was returned, in March 2007, he cut a deal and agreed to cooperate. Two years later he was on the witness stand.
“I believed in something that didn’t exist,” he now says in explaining his decision to turn on the mob. It’s the same explanation he offered to two federal juries and one that he comes back to again and again in ongoing weekly sessions with a therapist.
The rules that are referred to repeatedly in this book come from Alite’s own analysis of his life with the Gambino crime family. These were the codes and protocols, enunciated by John Gotti Sr., that Alite and everyone else in the organization had to live by. They weren’t written down. There were no underworld tablets of stone. But they were hard and fast commandments nonetheless. And to violate any of them was to court death. Unless, of course, your name was Gotti.
I’ve spent most of my life working as a journalist. I’ve been taught to structure a story around the answers to four key questions, the four W’s they teach in journalism school—Who? What? Where? When? I’ve always felt the most important question, however, and the one that brings more to any story, is the fifth W—Why? Why did Alite do what he did? The question applies to both his life on the streets and his decision to cooperate.
This book may provide an answer. Or it may, like his testimony, result in a hung jury.
What it certainly will do is deconstruct the myth that is the Gotti family. Honor, loyalty, nobility? Go read The Godfather. As this is being written, there is again talk of a movie to be produced by Junior and his media-savvy sister Victoria.
In the Shadow of My Father is the working title.
John Alite lived in the shadow of both Gottis. His story is decidedly different than the fantasy that Junior and Vicky Gotti are trying to spin.
George Anastasia
June 2014
CHAPTER 1
He wrapped the blade of the knife in tape, covered it with a greasy rag, taped it again, and finally slathered the entire weapon with oil. Then he very carefully inserted it, handle first, into his rectum. He was beyond the point of thinking about how crazy that might seem. It was about survival. And at the end of the day, John Alite always did what he had to do to survive.
He figured if he was going to die, he would go out fighting. All he wanted was a chance and the knife gave him that. He had been in Presídio Ary Franco, one of the worst hellholes in the Brazilian prison system, for about six months. He had learned how to get by and even prosper. Status and money worked on the inside as well as, and sometimes better than, they did on the streets.
But now he was jammed up. The corrupt warden of the prison had targeted him as a troublemaker. Alite and some of the other prisoners had organized a boycott. They weren’t buying the contraband that the warden’s minions brought into the prison each day. What’s more, they had put out the word that any other prisoner who did would be beaten.
It was just one of the many power plays that took place every day in Ary Franco, but this one was costing the warden money, big money; maybe two or three thousand American dollars a week. So he had decided that Alite, the cocky Mafioso from New York, would be punished.
In a few hours three or four guards and inmate trustees, prisoners loyal to the warden who served as his enforcers, would be coming for him. A prison guard who was in Alite’s camp, who was a friend of both Alite and the leaders of the Commando Vermelho, had tipped him off. He knew what was coming, but there wasn’t much he or his friends in the Red Command, a prominent Brazilian criminal organization that had power both on the streets and in the prisons, could do about it. The knife was his only option.
The guards and trustees would take him to a special cell in the bowels of the prison and deal with him. It happened all the time to inmates who had fallen out of favor. At the very least, Alite figured he was in for a severe beating. There was, he knew, a real chance that he could be killed.
He had thought his notoriety as an American prisoner—and a Mafioso at that—would offer him some protection, but he may have miscalculated. If he died in this rat’s nest of a prison, the official explanation would exonerate the authorities. A knife fight among inmates? A dispute over contraband drugs? An accident? There were dozens of ways to explain the death. Who would really know? Or care?
Back in the States, the feds were continuing to target Junior Gotti and those around him. Had Alite, Gotti’s one-time enforcer and business partner, not gone on the run, he would have been sitting in an American prison. Instead, as he had done for most of his life, he had chosen to fight on his own terms, in his own way. That’s what led him to Brazil and to the prison cell where he now sat waiting.
Ary Franco had a reputation as the worst of the worst. Several years later, in 2011, a special United Nations investigation into prison problems in Brazil recommended that the prison be closed and its estimated fifteen hundred inmates relocated. When the findings of the U.N. panel were made public—stories of systemic corruption, filthy, bug-infested cells, cases of torture and abuse, wanton violence, and inmate murders—Brazil’s justice minister, José Eduardo Cardozo, had this to say: “If I had to spend many years in one of our prisons, I would rather die.”
Alite was long gone by the time that report was issued, but he didn’t need a U.N. panel to tell him how bad things were. He had experienced it all firsthand. As he waited that day for the guards to come for him, he knew that death was an option.
It’s almost impossible to describe the disconnect he was experiencing.
He was an American mobster arrested on an Interpol warrant after spending more than a year bouncing from the United States to Europe to Africa and then Central and South America. Along the way he had made three stops in Cuba. In retrospect, Alite thought as he tried to get comfortable with the foreign object stuck in his ass, he probably should have stayed in Havana. Interpol had no connections there and the chance of being extradited was minimal.
He had enough money and enough Cuban friends to make his life secure.
Instead, he had chosen Brazil. Not a bad choice when you think about it. He lived in a neighborhood in the Copacabana section of Rio, had developed friendships, taught boxing at a local gym, and had a girlfriend who
was everything any guy thought about when he fantasized about the sensual, passionate, and beautiful women of that country.
But he had stayed too long. He knew it. He sensed it in the days leading up to his arrest. John Alite had lived and worked and committed crimes in many places and he was always aware of the world around him. Whether he was on a street corner in the Queens neighborhood where he grew up or on a train from Amsterdam to Paris, he could sense trouble. And in most cases, he could do something to avoid—or confront—it.
As he sat in his prison cell, he thought about all of that. What could have been. What should have been. In the short term, he knew he should have moved on. In fact, he was planning to do so. He was heading for Venezuela or Argentina or Colombia. The pieces were all in place. And then he found himself surrounded on a street corner not far from his apartment. A heavily armed SWAT team of Brazilian military police had appeared from nowhere, popping up from behind cars and out of alleyways. A helicopter circled overhead.
The news reports said it all. A dangerous American Mafia leader, wanted for murder, extortion, and racketeering, had been arrested on a street corner in Copacabana. “King of Crime in New York Arrested in Rio,” screamed a headline in Portuguese the next day. The “king” reference was a little over-the-top, Alite knew, but it helped him once he was dumped in Ary Franco. All the inmates knew about John Alite and many wanted to befriend him. They had read or heard the stories about this top associate of John “Junior” Gotti, this high-ranking member of the Gambino crime family who had been taken into custody and was facing extradition to Tampa, Florida, where a multiple-count racketeering and murder indictment and a possible death sentence awaited him.
He was a wealthy American gangster, a gringo with cash and connections. Somebody worth knowing. That helped him make his way in the violent prison underworld.
His plan was to get bail while in Brazil, fight the extradition, and then skip the country if things didn’t work out. Getting bail proved to be nearly impossible, however, so he had settled in and plotted an escape. Life was miserable, but not unbearable. Like any prison anywhere in the world, money helped. And he had plenty of that.
Gotti's Rules Page 1
