“They’re no good,” he said. “They only care about themselves. John’s the boss? He can’t even control his own wife. How’s he gonna run a family? He’s a motherfucker. And Junior, my scumbag godson, is even worse. Get away from them.”
Ruggiero couldn’t understand why he had been put on the shelf. He was dying of liver cancer and told Alite he would have readily taken the fall for the heroin pinch. Then he went into a rant about Gotti, about how he always wanted his end from the heroin business but never wanted to get his hands dirty; about how when Gotti decided that he wanted to toughen Junior up by sending him to military school, he told Ruggiero that he had to pay Junior’s tuition.
Junior attended, but didn’t graduate from, the New York Military Academy, a private boarding school in Cornwall-on-Hudson, about sixty miles north of New York City. Tuition, room, and board at the time was more than twenty grand a year. The cost came out of Ruggiero’s end of the heroin business, not Gotti’s. Ruggiero said again that the Gottis were no good, that he had introduced Gotti into the life and that he deserved some respect.
“It would have been nice to be asked,” he said quietly as he once again said he was willing to take the fall in the drug case. “This cancer is killing me anyway, so it don’t matter. But I would have liked to be asked instead of being put on the shelf like some piece of shit.”
Loyalty was a one-way street with the Gottis. Ruggiero was reinforcing that perception. But for Alite, walking away wasn’t an option. He was in and, to be honest, he was enjoying the financial benefits. He knew he was smarter and tougher than Junior. And he was starting to see John Gotti for who he really was. The game now for Alite was to benefit from the association. And, more important, to survive.
A few months after Gotti took over as boss, he sent for Alite. He had an assignment for him. Joe Gallo, one of the old-timers in the family, was still the consigliere. He had come up under Albert Anastasia (no relation to the author of this book) and had served in the administrations of both Carlo Gambino and Paul Castellano. That’s how far back Gallo went with the crime family. He had quietly helped usher in the Gotti administration, overseeing the meetings at which all the captains elected a new boss after Big Paulie was killed.
Gallo wasn’t part of the plot to kill Castellano, but he was smart enough to realize how it went down. Gravano would later testify that Gallo had cautioned all the captains not to discuss family business with anyone from any other mob family and not to talk about the murder. The only response to give anyone who asked was that he, Gallo, and others were trying to get to the bottom of what had happened and that the captains all agreed on who their new boss should be.
A few months later, that new boss decided Gallo should “retire,” step down, give up his spot in the hierarchy. Frank DeCicco, who had helped set up the Castellano hit at Sparks, was Gotti’s underboss at the time and DeCicco’s uncle was going to be tapped as the new consigliere.
Gotti told Alite to go to Gallo and tell him what the plan was.
“I wasn’t even a made guy,” Alite said, “and he’s sending me to tell Gallo, an old-timer who knew all about this stuff. I’m supposed to tell him that he was done. It was a sign of disrespect. I went and talked to the old guy. He was a gentleman.”
Alite said he believed Gallo picked up on the fact that he was uncomfortable delivering the message.
“He looked at me and said, ‘Don’t worry about it, kid,’” Alite recalled.
Gallo quietly stepped down. Gotti was solidifying his hold on the organization.
Money continued to roll in. Now Gotti was getting a piece of everyone’s action, not just the guys in his crew. It was the financial way of the underworld. Money flowed up. Of course, there was very little in the way of bookkeeping, and finances were often fluid. As Alite would later explain to a jury, Junior Gotti was supposed to get half of everything Alite was making. Sometimes Alite would play with the numbers.
“I tell him I give him half, but I keep more than that,” he explained years later to a federal jury. It was, he said, a way of life on the street.
“Everybody does it. We cheat each other. That’s the life. It’s treacherous.”
Alite figured the guys under him were lying as well. That’s just the way things were. You weren’t going to change it. But at that point, in the mid to late 1980s, it almost didn’t matter. There was so much money coming in from so many different deals and scams and ripoffs that nobody complained.
“All Junior cared about was his end,” Alite said. “And if it was big enough, he never really questioned me. Maybe we did a score where we made a hundred thousand dollars. I’d tell him it was eighty thousand. He was happy with the forty grand I gave him. I kept sixty. This happened all the time.”
Alite figured he deserved the bigger end because more often than not he was the one putting himself at risk. Alite testified that Junior came up with another connection who had counterfeit money. According to Alite, they paid twelve cents on the dollar for a stack of hundred dollar bills, about three hundred grand in all. Now, to parlay that into an even bigger score, Alite said they decided to use some of the counterfeit money to buy cocaine from a group of Colombians.
Alite testified that he set up the deal through a contact of his. Junior and another associate waited in a car while Alite and a kid named Vinny, another of Junior’s friends, went into the house on 118th Street and Rockaway Boulevard.
Alite had two guns tucked into his waistband, one on his hip and the other in his back. Vinny, a big, 270-pound kid, also was armed.
“He was supposed to have my back while I did the deal,” Alite said. “We were buying two kilos for eighty grand. Most of the cash was counterfeit but I had mixed in some real bills just in case. The counterfeit bills were good quality, but I wanted some real money in case anyone was smart enough to really check.”
There were three Colombians in the kitchen as the deal went down. Another was standing in the doorway to a back room. They all had guns. They began to count the money while Alite examined the two kilos of coke. At that point, Vinny panicked and said, “I’m gonna wait outside.”
Alite couldn’t believe it.
“This was another one of Junior’s guys and he’s supposed to have my fuckin’ back. Instead, he’s running out on me.”
The Colombians looked at one another. Alite just nodded and told Vinny, “Go ahead. I’ll be out in a minute.” But he was steaming. He had two guns. There were four Colombians. They each had a gun. He decided to play it out. He continued to examine the cocaine. They counted out the bills. The deal went down.
As he exited the house, sweat dripping down his back, Alite saw that Vinny’s car was gone. Down the street Junior was in the second car with a kid named Jerry.
“I trotted over to the car and jumped in the backseat,” he said. “The first thing I said was, ‘I’m gonna kill that fuckin’ Vinny.’”
The next day Alite set out to do just that.
“Junior arranged to pick him up,” Alite said of Vinny. “We drove over to a friend’s house where Vinny was staying and then the three of us took a ride. Vinny was scared, but not scared enough to disobey when Junior told him to get behind the wheel and drive.”
Alite was in the backseat. Junior sat in the front passenger seat. They drove around Howard Beach, which was not unusual. As they drove, Junior tried to get Vinny to relax. He spoke in a calm, conciliatory way.
“What happened up there?” he asked. “Why’d you leave?”
Vinny offered a half-assed response. Alite could see he was nervous. He kept looking in the rearview mirror, checking Alite out. Ironically, Alite testified that it was Junior who had a gun that day, not Alite.
“I wanted to shoot him,” Alite said. “But I think Junior knew I would kill him. I’m not sure Junior had the guts or the stomach to do it. We drove around for about a half hour and ended up over near 164th Street and Howard Beach. It’s a swampy area, lots of tall grass and marshes.”
Ali
te would tell a federal jury that “it’s a known spot to shoot guys and dump them there.”
Vinny knew that as well. When Junior told him to pull over for a second, the hulking young wannabe slowed the car down, but instead of pulling over, he quickly opened his door and rolled out.
The car slowed to a stop. Alite testified that Junior pulled out a .25-caliber pistol and got off one shot.
“I heard Vinny yelp,” Alite said, “but he kept running. We never saw him around the neighborhood again.”
CHAPTER 4
The train ride from Amsterdam to Paris takes a little over three hours, a high-speed journey with a stop in Brussels before arriving at the Gare du Nord in the City of Light. It’s a comfortable, pleasant ride that for the most part goes through bucolic countryside dotted with rolling green hills and well-maintained farms and vineyards.
Alite took the train with his common-law wife, Claudia, in 2003. He was on the run at the time and had arranged for her to meet him in Europe. He was using a fake passport. He had eight different identities, with matching documentation purchased on the black market in Senegal. He financed his travels with money wired by friends back home to various cities. The cash often was funneled through banks in Canada, a system Alite had set up before he fled. Claudia brought money as well. He arranged her trip because he wanted to spend some time with her, explain what he was doing and why. And he wanted her to tell everyone that he cared about—their two sons; his son and daughter from his first marriage, to wife Carol; his parents and his grandparents—that he was okay. He wanted them to know that he was trying to work things out, trying to stay alive, trying to stay one step ahead of the mobsters who wanted him dead and the federal authorities who wanted him in jail.
It was on that train ride that Alite started to assess where he was and where he was going. It wasn’t a geographic question. It was—and the irony was not lost given that he was on his way to France—an existential one. What was the meaning of it all? It was there, in a comfortable first-class compartment, with Claudia sitting next to him, that the seeds of what would eventually follow were planted. It was there that he asked himself a basic question.
How did all this happen?
The simple answer is to say that Alite was the product of his environment, that he grew up poor in a section of Woodhaven, Queens, where the Mafia was an institution. And that he was drawn to the wealth, the status, and the power that that institution embodied. But if he was being honest with himself, and the farther he got from New York and the Gottis the easier it was to look at things honestly, he had to admit that he had made the choices that had ultimately resulted in him sitting on that train under an assumed name wondering if a bullet or a badge would be waiting for him at the next stop.
He was one of four children of Albanian-American parents who settled in Woodhaven in the 1960s. His father, Matthew, was a cabdriver who loved to gamble. His mother, Delva, worked as a secretary. His grandparents, Albanian immigrants, lived with the family, which included an older brother, Jimmy, and two sisters: Denise, who was three years older; and Marie, who was a year younger.
John was only a year younger than Jimmy, but as a kid he was decidedly smaller and less athletic. Although their father saw Jimmy as the kid who had a shot at making something of himself through athletics, it was John who became a standout high school athlete and won a baseball scholarship to the University of Tampa.
As kids growing up their father was adamant about sports. He didn’t care much for school. He was a high school dropout. But athletics were important. He instilled in both boys the need to train, to practice, and to never back down. Baseball and boxing were the two sports that he emphasized, and while Jimmy soon grew tired of the grueling training routine every day after school, John couldn’t get enough.
Sports taught you about life—that was the education Matthew Alite was giving to his sons. Sports was about preparation and opportunity. It was about always being ready because you never knew—on the baseball field or in a boxing ring—when your chance might come. You had to grab it because there might not be another. Life was like that, and while Matthew Alite might not have been a success in terms of wealth and status, he knew there was more to being a man and he wanted his boys to understand, too.
Sports would teach that lesson.
So would the streets.
John Alite remembers being eight years old and walking home from school one day when two older kids—ten-year-olds—bullied him. They were standing on a corner near his house as he headed home. They had played hooky. They were smoking cigarettes and they asked him for money. He said he didn’t have any, which was true, but they roughed him up, searched him, and then sent him on his way. As he left, one of the kids flicked a cigarette butt that hit him in the forehead.
Alite ran home and told his father what had happened.
“Did you fight them?” Matthew Alite asked.
John looked at the floor, knowing that he didn’t have the right answer.
His father lifted his head and looked him in the eyes.
“I want you to go back out there,” he said. “Find the kid who flicked the cigarette butt at you and punch him in the face.”
Alite hesitated, then argued that they were older and bigger. What’s more, he said, there were two of them. His father, anticipating what John was going to say, told him to go across the street and get his cousin Gregory, who was also ten.
“Take him with you,” he said. “He’ll make sure it’s a fair fight.”
Then his father added, “If you let it go this time, it will happen again and again. You’ll get a reputation as soft.”
Alite did as he was told. He took the first shot, hitting the bully squarely in the face. But after the surprise, the bully answered back, effectively pummeling eight-year-old John Alite. The fight ended only because the older boy got tired. Alite and his cousin trudged back home. When they told his father what had happened, Matthew smiled.
“You did the right thing. I’m proud of you,” he said. “Bullies live off fear and look for easy targets. Now everyone knows you’re no easy target.”
A week later, Alite was again walking home from school when he crossed paths with the same two ten-year-olds. The one he had punched smiled and said, “Hey, kid, if I try to take your money are you gonna fight me again?”
“Have to,” said Alite.
The older boy laughed and put his arm on Alite’s shoulder. He looked at his friend and said, “I like this little guy. He’s got guts.”
That was a memory that came back as the train sped from the Netherlands to France. His father was right. You had to stand up for yourself. No one else would. No one else could. But Mathew Alite also offered John his initial glimpse into the world of organized crime. And John Alite never forgot that, either.
“My father had a cousin who ran a card game with Charlie Luciano, a soldier in the Gambino family,” he said. “The game would go from ten at night to six in the morning. They played in the back room of this parking garage in the Bronx. Some nights my father would take me and my brother. I loved it.”
The room was filled with cigar smoke. The background noise was the clicking of chips, the rustle of decks being shuffled, the laughter of winners, and the moans and shouts of losers. Most of the players were wiseguys or mob associates.
“My father would proudly introduce us,” Alite said. “He worked the room before settling in at a table. We’d roam around, ending up in another room, a little kitchen off the main room, where there was soda and ice cream and potato chips. Most nights the guys who were winning would call us over and give us a ‘tip.’ It might be a twenty-dollar bill, big money. A few times it was a hundred-dollar bill. We couldn’t believe it.”
If he knew about the money, Matthew Alite would tell his sons to give it back, which would invariably result in mock indignation from the wiseguy benefactor, who more often than not prevailed upon the elder Alite to let his sons keep the cash. Sometimes, if their father’s luck
was not running, the boys went home with more money than he did.
But for John Alite it wasn’t about the money, it was about the life. He was fascinated with the men in that room, guys with names like Little Al, Vito, Old Man Frankie, Big Jack, and Blackie. They dressed well and acted as if they didn’t have a care in the world. More important, and this was something an eight-year-old John Alite could feel, they oozed confidence and a sense of belonging to something important and powerful.
It would be years before Alite realized that it was all a façade, that the honor and loyalty, the camaraderie and brotherhood that the mobsters preached was meaningless. As he rode in the train to Paris he could see that clearly. But as a young boy, every time he left that back room in that Bronx parking garage John Alite had one thought—he wanted to be like those guys at the poker game.
When he was in high school he got a job after school working at Dick’s Deli on the corner of Seventy-Ninth Street and Jamaica Avenue. There was a mob clubhouse across the street run by the Luchese crime family and two or three guys from that clubhouse would come into the deli every day and use the phone in the back. By that point Alite was smart enough to realize what was going on. They were taking bets for a sports book. From time to time someone would come in the deli and leave an envelope for the guys across the street. Alite eventually was assigned the job of running the envelope over to the clubhouse.
He was enrolled in Franklin K. Lane High School in Queens, the same high school that John Gotti Sr. had attended. Gotti left in his sophomore year, a constant truant who had a reputation for bullying other students.
Alite wasn’t a model student, but he got decent grades and was a standout baseball player, a second baseman who could hit. He was a starter on the varsity team all four years and captain in both his junior and senior years. But he continued to work at the deli when he had time, a situation that exposed him to the world that Gotti Sr. was so much a part of. And it was there that he got his initial lesson in the power of the organization.
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