In September, six months after the DeCicco bombing, Gotti made the cover of Time magazine. He was on trial for racketeering at the time. The cover artwork, done by Andy Warhol, was a handsome John Gotti with a full head of neatly coiffed hair. He was wearing a double-breasted, dark suit jacket. His hands were adjusting one of the jacket buttons. There was a watch on his left wrist, under a shirt cuff that peeked out from the sleeve of the jacket. He wore a dark tie and a high-collared white shirt.
Now Gotti’s name was appearing in the gossip columns almost as often as in the news sections of the papers. His appearances at clubs and restaurants were regularly chronicled. One account, a clear attempt to humanize the mob boss, was that he would occasionally show up at Regine’s, a nightclub in Manhattan, with his own entourage and that one of his minions would tip the piano player a hundred dollars every time he played Gotti’s favorite song, “Wind Beneath My Wings.” It was all part of the growing legend. This, of course, was before Facebook and Twitter. God only knows how the publicity machine would have worked if social media had been available.
Gotti loved the Time cover. He had it framed and hung in his social club. (A framed copy of the cover is now available on eBay. The asking price? Around two hundred dollars.) He would also appear on the covers of People, the New York Times Magazine, and New York magazine during his bloody run as Gambino crime family boss.
The great Jack Newfield, in an obituary written in New York magazine after Gotti died in 2002, described him this way: “John Gotti was the don-as-diva. He was in love with himself and equated his ego with all of La Cosa Nostra. He was a throwback to the first narcissistic, star struck hoodlums—Bugsy Siegel and Al Capone, who didn’t understand boundaries and were addicted to publicity.”
That was an accurate assessment, but it came after the fact. In 1986, Gotti was just beginning to build his image. The first book written about him, by Jerry Capeci and Gene Mustain, was aptly titled Mob Star. That’s who Gotti was to those on the outside. Alite saw a different Gotti, one more reflected in Newfield’s description.
“I used to spend time over [at] the house,” Alite said. “Sometimes I would sleep over on the couch. I saw and heard a lot of things that people didn’t know about.”
For example, Alite said John Gotti “was a terrible dresser.” Left to his own devices, Alite said the Dapper Don would dress like the Steve Martin character in the “Wild and Crazy Guys” skits on Saturday Night Live. After he became boss, Alite said, Gotti had an associate named Fat Bob pick out his clothes. At that point Gotti could afford the two-thousand-dollar suits and five-hundred-dollar Italian leather shoes; he just didn’t have the fashion sense to put it all together.
“Fat Bob dressed him,” Alite said.
The Gotti family dynamic also surprised Alite. He knew from Junior that there were problems at home, but being in the house, a modest two-story in the Howard Beach section of Queens, gave him a firsthand view of how everyone interacted.
He overheard shouting matches in which Victoria Gotti matched her husband expletive for expletive. Usually the argument would end with a door being slammed. Neither Gotti nor his son had an enlightened view of the role of women in society. Alite, not particularly enlightened in that regard himself, was still surprised by the attitude and the violence.
In 1984, when Alite first started to get close to the Gottis, Junior was dating Kim Albanese, whom he would eventually marry. Alite and Junior were hanging out in front of Albanese house one day when another car with two guys inside pulled up. Junior and Alite had walked down the block and were talking with a kid from the neighborhood. The guys in the car were shouting out to someone in the house, flirting. Junior went nuts. He started screaming at the two guys, who quickly pulled away.
Junior was convinced that they had come by to see Kim. In fact, it was her sister Dina whom they were after, but that didn’t matter. Junior recognized one of the guys in the car as Gene Foster and told Alite he wanted him beaten up.
“I’m still recovering from that White Castle fight at the time,” Alite said. “I hadn’t put on any weight and I was out of shape. But he tells me to give the kid a beating. For what? But that’s the way he was and it’s the way his father was.”
Alite dragged his feet and, to his surprise, he got called on the carpet by Gotti Sr.
“Did my son tell you to do something?” Gotti asked him angrily after calling him to the Bergin one day. “What’s the problem?”
Alite, who would later recount the story from the witness stand, put the word out in the neighborhood that he was looking for Gene Foster. One afternoon he was at Rockaway Beach with Joe O’Kane when Foster approached him.
“I’m carrying a folding chair,” Alite said. “I always took it to the beach so I could sit down in the sand. I was still recovering. And I had started carrying this small pipe, which I kept in the folding chair. I’m walking down the steps toward the beach when this guy approaches me.”
“You John Alite?” he said.
Alite said he was.
“I’m Gene Foster. I heard you’re looking for me?”
With that, Alite said he dropped the folding beach chair and cracked Foster over the head with the metal pipe. Foster went down and Alite continued to pound him. A crowd gathered around. Some were friends of Foster. Others, Alite said, “were just Samaritans.”
As the crowd started to press in on him, Alite handed O’Kane the keys to his car and told him to get it and bring it around. O’Kane was only seventeen at the time. He didn’t have a license and barely knew how to drive.
“Just get the car,” Alite told him.
Alite said he faced off six or seven guys who had come to Foster’s aid. Foster was moaning as he lay in the sand. Blood was pouring from the gash in his head. Several of his ribs were cracked and one of his lungs was punctured. One of the bigger guys in the crowd was urging everyone on.
“Let’s get him,” he said.
Alite said he reached into his jockstrap and pulled out a derringer, pointing the small gun at the guy who was talking tough. Someone in the crowd laughed.
“That’s not even a real gun,” the guy said.
Alite pointed it at him.
“You wanna find out?” he asked. “You’ll be the first one I shoot.”
With that the crowd backed off. When O’Kane pulled up, he put the car in park and slid over to the passenger side. Alite said he threw his beach chair in the backseat, got in behind the wheel, and drove away. When he told Junior what had happened, Alite said Junior smiled. Alite never understood Junior’s logic. Foster had come to see Dina, not Kim. Once Junior realized that, what was the point of the beating?
“He was happy that Foster took a beating,” Alite said. “I still don’t know why. That’s the kind of guy he was. He liked to give orders. Never did much himself, but he liked to be in charge.”
At the time, given the benefits, Alite was only too happy to oblige.
But being around the family also offered him a chance to see how the Gottis really operated. It wasn’t pretty.
Alite was sleeping on the couch once when John Gotti started in on his son. It was a constant refrain, the father telling the son how to act, how to treat people, really how to use people.
“Fuck all your friends,” Gotti told Junior. “Never let them forget you’re the boss. They need to be afraid of you. You use them and when you’re done with them, you throw them to the curb.”
Then he spotted Alite on the couch.
“How ya doin’, kid?” he asked, before returning to his harangue, telling Junior the guys he hung around with were “junk piles” and “garbage” and that he had better wise up and realize that.
“It didn’t even matter that I was there or that I was one of those guys,” Alite said. “Or maybe I was supposed to think I wasn’t one of those guys. Gotti never broke stride. He just went on and on.”
The only person in the house who would answer back was Gotti’s wife, Victoria. Alite said their a
rguments were classic verbal clashes that brought out the worst in both of them. Victoria Gotti had the same temperament as her husband, but with a twist. She was half Italian and half Russian-Jewish. Her aggressiveness came from both those bloodlines. She was smart and tough, but could be mean and vindictive.
While Gotti was coming up in the mob, she was the one who held the family together. They had five children, two girls and three boys: Angela and Vicky, John, Frankie, and Peter.
Gotti spent two stints in prison while moving up the mob ladder. He did time for truck hijacking in the late 1960s and then did a bit for attempted manslaughter in 1975. He was part of a hit team (Angelo Ruggiero was also involved) assigned to take out James McBratney, a member of the notorious Westies, an Irish gang from the West Side of Manhattan. McBratney was suspected of orchestrating the kidnapping and murder of a nephew of Carlo Gambino, then the crime family boss.
McBratney was drinking in Snoopy’s Bar & Grill on Staten Island in May 1973 when he was accosted by three men. He was shot and killed. Gotti was able to plead out to a lesser charge in that case and was sentenced to four years. When he returned home, he was formally initiated into the crime family.
The Gottis had established themselves in Howard Beach, living in a modest, middle-class neighborhood. Gotti was a soldier and then the capo of a crew that operated out of Queens. But there are those who say that it was his wife who was boss inside the house.
On March 18, 1980, the family was rocked when twelve-year-old Frankie was struck and killed while riding a motorized minibike around the neighborhood. Witnesses said the young boy had pulled out into the street from between two cars. A neighbor, John Favara, driving home from work, said he was blinded by the sun and never saw Frankie Gotti or the bike he was riding.
It was an accident.
It is easy to imagine the anguish felt by John and Victoria Gotti. Any parent who has lost a child knows the sorrow, anger, and bitterness that such a loss brings. But what does it say about a couple who turn that bitterness into rage and who, according to both law enforcement and underworld accounts, extract their own vengeance?
Word that Favara, himself a father and husband, had a serious problem began to circulate around the Howard Beach neighborhood. He was verbally assaulted by Victoria Gotti at one point. Others advised him that he’d be wise to move.
That summer, Favara put his house up for sale. But it was too late. On July 25, John and Victoria Gotti left for a trip to Florida. Three days later, Favara was abducted by four men who grabbed him outside a diner in Queens. He was never seen again.
“I was told they dismembered his body,” Alite said. “The Gottis wanted revenge. I never understood that. The thing about it was that it was Kevin McMahon’s minibike. He was letting Frankie use it. But John Gotti never held Kevin accountable because he was making money with Kevin. Kevin was part of the drug network. So it was okay. Everybody around the Gottis served a purpose. And as long as you were doing something for them, you got a pass. Favara was just a neighborhood guy. He wasn’t any more responsible for Frankie Gotti being killed than Kevin, but Kevin was helping John Gotti make money. That’s what it was all about.”
When he started cooperating, Alite was asked by the FBI about the Favara murder. He said Junior had told him that his father ordered the hit in an attempt to assuage the grief and anger of his wife Victoria.
“Vicky Gotti not only blamed Favarra for the accident,” the report reads in part, “she was also enraged that Favarra never offered the family an apology and didn’t attend or send flowers to the child’s wake or funeral.” (The FBI memo that summarized Alite’s comments misspelled Favara’s name, adding an extra r.)
Years later, prosecutors in the racketeering murder case of Charles Carneglia would file a pretrial motion indicating that Carneglia was part of the Favara hit team and that he had disposed of the body by dropping it in a barrel of acid.
In a strange and twisted way that put the lie to the concept of “men of honor,” the disappearance and apparent murder of John Favara gave Gotti status in certain underworld circles. “You don’t mess with John Gotti” was the takeaway message. “Look what happened to that poor fuck who hit his kid on the minibike.”
Once he became boss, Gotti was even more conscious of his image and the public’s perception of him. No one was allowed to dress better than he when they were out together. When someone approached a group at a bar or restaurant, he would have to acknowledge Gotti first before saying anything to anyone else in the crowd. When Gotti was riding in a car, someone else would have to drive. He would sit in the front passenger seat. Anyone else rode in the back. Those were some of the protocols.
Alite was being schooled in the ways of the wiseguy and even though he could never be formally made, he was required to follow those rules as he moved around the underworld as an associate of the Gambino crime family.
Another rule was that wives were to behave in public. A woman’s behavior was a direct reflection on her husband. If a man couldn’t keep his wife in line, the thinking went, how could he handle more serious business?
John Gotti’s Rules of Leadership: Wives and girlfriends are to remain low-key. They are not to speak in public or call attention to themselves.
Gotti’s wife was the exception to the rule. She was outspoken and opinionated and never tried to hide it. John Gotti may have been the boss of the biggest crime family in New York, but Victoria Gotti ruled the house in Queens. By spending time in that home, Alite had a unique view of family dynamics. Unlike the tough guys who were part of Gotti’s crew, Victoria Gotti wasn’t afraid to stand up to her husband.
It was a phenomenon that played out in more mob families than you might imagine. Alite could admire that. He liked women who had a little bit of an edge, an attitude; who weren’t afraid to say what was on their mind.
Women are always more practical and have a better understanding of the way things work. Wiseguys have to preen and posture and show how tough they are. Maybe it’s the testosterone.
In a world where death is a daily part of the equation, women are often more realistic.
There’s a classic story about a mob hit in Philadelphia and the response the daughter of a jailed mob underboss offered unknowingly on an FBI wiretap. The woman’s brother had been wounded and his best friend killed.
“What are they fighting over?” she asked as the feds listened in. Then she answered her own question. “Jail time or coffins.”
In another Philadelphia case, two wives were sitting in a restaurant a day after their husbands had been convicted in a major racketeering trial. The case had been built around the testimony of Big Ron Previte, a former Philadelphia cop turned wiseguy (under the old rules, a cop could never be a mobster, but times have changed). Previte wore a wire for the FBI for more than a year after he began cooperating.
To his former mob associates, Previte was a rat, a lowlife, descriptions the Gotti clan is now applying to Alite. But to the wives sitting over lunch that day, that wasn’t the issue.
Their husbands were convicted and headed off to federal prison for the better part of the next decade. Previte, on the other hand, was a free man, moving around at will. Like Alite, he opted not to go into the Witness Security Program. To the wives, it was simple.
“He won and we lost,” they said.
End of story.
Wives and daughters often have a different perspective on the gangsters who are close to them. Alite said repeatedly that he believes Vicky Gotti is sincere when she sings her father’s praises, describing him as a man of honor.
Alite said he knew that was a daughter’s view, clouded by love and emotion. It was not the Gotti that Alite said he knew. Emotion can distort reality.
The reality was the former Philadelphia mob wife knew too much about two murders her husband had committed. She believed he planned to kill her, so she filed for divorce and became a federal witness. While living under the feds’ protection, she fell in love and married one
of the agents who was assigned to guard her.
Years later she was asked what the difference was between the cops and the wiseguys.
Without missing a beat, she replied, “The cops have badges.”
It’s a macho world. Women have no place in it, but they very often have a better understanding of it. Alite’s view from inside the Gotti home in Howard Beach underscored that point.
Around this time, Gotti was having better luck in the courtroom than he was in his living room. In several high-profile cases, he came out a winner in battles with city and federal prosecutors. Out of that was born “the Teflon Don.”
First there was an assault case that ended abruptly when the victim couldn’t identify his assailants. The witness, a refrigerator repairman who had allegedly been beaten and robbed by Gotti and an associate in a dispute over a parking space outside a bar in 1984, later fingered both men in testimony before a grand jury. But by the time the case went to trial early in 1986, he and the rest of New York had come to know who John Gotti was.
The high-profile publicity that Gotti used as a buffer proved to have legal benefits. Now the victim was a reluctant witness from the stand; he said he couldn’t identify who had beaten him up. The judge dismissed the charges and the New York Daily News, in a classic headline, bannered the story the next day with a perfect description of what had happened. I FORGOTTI read the bold block print letters in the tabloid.
That form of witness intimidation was an outgrowth of Gotti’s celebrity. His ability to beat two other cases, a racketeering trial in 1987 and a murder-for-hire rap in 1990, was more sinister.
“Anytime there was a trial, we tried to get to the jury,” Alite said. “We did that in the first two drug trials for Genie Gotti and John Carneglia. They ended with hung juries. They were convicted at the third trial. And we did it for John’s trials.”
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