Alite played a minor but telling role. He was a spotter in an elaborate system set up to identify and tail the jurors as they left court each day.
“I’d get word that the jury was leaving or I might be in court and watch outside, looking for them,” he said. “Then I’d radio someone else who was waiting in the parking lot. If they spotted someone we had identified, they would try to follow them home.”
Once they had an address, it was merely a matter of determining how to make an approach. Was there a neighbor who might be connected and might be willing to make an offer to the juror? Or were intimidation, threats, and vandalism the way to go?
“You could bribe ’em or you could threaten ’em,” Alite said. “The idea was to get them to realize that we knew who they were and where they lived and that we wanted them to do the right thing.”
Usually, they did.
Alite saw it all for what it was. The media called Gotti “the Teflon Don” because the government couldn’t make any charges stick. Like so much else surrounding the Gotti persona, it was sizzle without the steak; an image built on hype rather than reality. The charges didn’t stick because Gotti and his associates were manipulating the system, not because he was innocent or because he and his lawyers had convinced a jury through evidence and testimony that the government didn’t have a case. Nevertheless, the results helped solidify Gotti’s image as the invincible, celebrity Mafia boss.
What’s more, they came in the wake of the feds’ big win in the Mafia Commission trial.
That case ended in November 1986 with convictions all around. The leaders of every other mob family in New York took a hit. Fat Tony Salerno of the Genovese crime family, Colombo boss Carmine “the Snake” Persico, and Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo of the Luchese organization headed the list of eight mob chiefs heading off to jail.
John Gotti, meanwhile, donned a two-thousand-dollar suit and headed off to Regine’s.
CHAPTER 6
While Gotti Sr. was solidifying his hold on the crime family in the wake of the Castellano murder, the DeCicco hit, the Mafia Commission convictions, and his own acquittals, John Alite was working his way deeper into the organization.
Despite the warnings he received about Junior, he continued to develop the relationship. It was his way in. He started almost every day at Junior’s clubhouse at 113th Street and Liberty Avenue and would routinely drop in to the Bergin and the Ravenite as well. In addition to working the drug business, he had convinced Junior that they could make big money taking sports bets. Alite knew the bookmaking business well. He had grown up around it. He was also a self-described “sports nut,” watching any game—football, baseball, basketball—on any TV that he might be near.
Bookmaking has always been one of the economic engines that drives the finances of organized crime. While state lotteries have diminished the value of the old numbers racket, sports betting continues to thrive. It’s legal in some form in only four states, Nevada being the prime location for legal sports betting parlors.
Bookies will take bets on almost any sporting event, but football is king. The Super Bowl is the pinnacle of the betting season. It is estimated that about 200 million people around the world wager about $5 billion each year on that one game. Las Vegas books take in, on average, $90 million in Super Bowl action. Another $2 billion or so finds its way to legal Internet betting services. The rest goes to illegal sports books, most tied to the mob. Do the math. There’s serious money here. And it comes without all the baggage—the violence, the treachery, the informants—that is so common in the drug business.
The money is always going to be there for a smart bookmaker. Even if other jurisdictions legalize sports gambling, it’s unlikely that competition will put a dent in the mob’s action. Legal bookmaking parlors in casinos and online won’t let you bet on credit. The mob will. A degenerate gambler who craves the action needs to know that he can place a bet even if he’s got no money in his pocket and his credit cards are maxed out. He also needs to know that if he’s getting buried on a Sunday afternoon in the one o’clock games, he can pick up the phone and get back in business before the four o’clock games kick off. Those are the services a mob bookmaking operation provides.
And when the hapless gambler gets in way over his head, the economics of the underworld offer an out—a shylock loan.
“There’s nothing better than shark money,” a former mobster, since retired, once said in explaining his loansharking business. He had connections to a mob bookmaking operation and when a gambler was swimming in debt, the bookmaker would send that gambler to the loan shark.
“Let’s say the guy needs ten grand,” he explained. “I give it to him at three points. He pays off the gambling debt and now he owes me the money. It’s a ten-week loan. That means each week he’s gotta pay me three hundred dollars in interest. That’s the three points, three percent. At the end of the ten weeks, he’s paid me three grand, but he still owes me the ten grand principal. At that point he either comes up with the cash, or we extend the loan for another ten weeks. What’s he gonna do? We’re the mob. If he don’t pay, he gets hurt. Plus he gets a reputation and he can’t bet no more. Sometimes that’s even worse for the guy than getting his face busted up or his leg broken.”
The $10,000 loan over a year’s time would generate $15,600 in interest payments at $300 a week. That’s the vig on the loan. And that $15,600—or at least a part of it—would be put back out on the street in other loans, also at three points. Not even the credit card companies, with their exorbitant interest rates, can do that well.
“There’s nothing better than shark money,” the ex-mobster said again.
Alite understood all of this. He saw his uncle wheel and deal in the gambling business and as a teenager he saw the action from behind the counter at Dick’s Deli. He knew there was money to be made and once again he knew that if he went in business with Gotti he would be protected from the hustlers and con artists who prey on low-level bookmakers.
“The worst thing for a bookmaker,” Alite said, “is the guy who bets and collects when he wins, but ducks away when he loses. That’s a guy who’s taking advantage. He’s stealing money. That’s the guy who gets hurt.”
Alite and Junior set up a small book out of the clubhouse on 113th Street. They put in some phone lines and had two or three guys working them. Business was good. Small but steady profits and with each week the customer base grew. After a few weeks, Junior took Alite to see his father. This was a business—unlike the drug trade—that they could talk about openly. It was a way for Junior to show his father that he was responsible, that he could develop something on his own, that he was savvy and street-smart, two attributes that he knew his father felt he was lacking.
“One of the reasons John Gotti wanted me around his son was that I knew the streets,” Alite said. “People would say later that we were best friends. And it’s true, for a time we were friends. But what I really was was his babysitter. I was there to make sure he didn’t get into trouble and I was there to clean up the mess if he did.”
Gotti liked the idea of the bookmaking operation that Junior and Alite had set up. And to help them expand, he told them to partner with Willie Boy Johnson, one of his top associates.
John Gotti’s Rules of Leadership: Whenever possible, use demeaning nicknames to describe underlings. It establishes who is in charge and who is subservient.
Willie Boy operated out of Brooklyn. Like Alite, he could never be made. He wasn’t a full-blooded Italian. His mother was Italian-American, but his father was part Native American, which earned Willie Boy the nickname “Half Breed.” It was a term Gotti and others used to belittle Johnson, who stood at more than six feet tall and sometimes weighed in at nearly three hundred pounds. He was nobody to mess with. He was an earner and an enforcer, someone Gotti Sr. depended on to do the work that needed to be done. But he was also someone that Gotti Sr. would mock whenever it suited him.
It was a Gotti management style,
an arrogance that was probably rooted in insecurity. Both father and son were quick to make fun of those who answered to them. Nicknames were one way to establish that pecking order.
Junior had his own quirks, but no one was making fun of him. According to Alite, Vicky Gotti used to refer to her brother as “Blinkie,” telling Alite that she could always tell when her brother was lying. If what he was saying wasn’t true, he would blink incessantly while talking.
“He couldn’t help himself,” Alite said.
Some of the guys around Alite also used to refer to Junior as Urkel, the nerd from the TV comedy series Family Matters. Junior, muscle-bound with a thick chest from lifting weights, had spindles for legs and a disconcerting habit of pulling his sweatpants up around his ribs.
“He’d also show up sometimes in black shoes and socks while he was wearing sweats,” Alite said. “When he was dressed like that and wearing his glasses, he looked like Urkel. But of course nobody called him that to his face.”
Alite understood why some of his associates made fun of Junior, but he would usually brush their comments aside. He was focused instead on business. Junior was his partner and he wasn’t about to screw up a lucrative relationship.
Willie Boy Johnson told Alite and Junior that they would set up a half-sheet book. Willie Boy would be a fifty percent partner in their operation. With that they got access to the latest sports betting lines and had the financial backing to cover larger bets. The downside was that each Tuesday, Willie Boy would have to be paid fifty percent of the winnings. If a gambler was stalling, couldn’t be found, or said he didn’t have the money to cover his losses, that was on Alite and Junior. Willie Boy had to be paid. And since Willie Boy was Gotti’s guy, Alite assumed some of that cash ended up in Gotti’s pocket as well.
Johnson operated out of a clubhouse on Avenue U in Brooklyn. He had his own crew of guys and reported directly to Gotti. In many ways, he had the kind of connection that Alite saw himself developing with Junior. On the ride over to Johnson’s clubhouse to discuss the bookmaking partnership for the first time, Alite learned something else about Willie Boy. He was allowing Mark Caputo to hide out at his apartment in Brooklyn.
Big Mark was the guy taking the fall for the Danny Silva murder at the Silver Fox. While Junior didn’t know it, Caputo and Alite had grown up in the same neighborhood and had gone to junior high school together. During the ride over to Brooklyn, Alite said, Junior provided more details about the stabbing. He again bragged about how he had put the kid down, but also told Alite that his father had arranged to bribe a cop running the investigation and that the preliminary police reports falsely identified Mark Caputo, not John Gotti Jr., as the suspect. Caputo was hiding out until the case blew over. Willie Boy Johnson, who was a father figure to Caputo, had him under wraps.
Junior joked about it all, calling Mark a stupid fat fuck and wondering about the relationship between Willie Boy and Caputo.
“Maybe there’s some fag stuff going on,” he said.
Junior also had second thoughts about how the Silva case was being handled. He understood, he said, that his father was trying to protect him, but he wondered if in underworld terms that was smart.
“How am I ever going to earn respect if my father hides my actions?” Alite said Junior asked him.
Alite was struck by two things. Junior wanted to be known as a killer. Silva was dead and Junior wanted credit for it. Junior said Silva had been mouthing off to him and his friends that night at the Silver Fox and had gotten what he deserved. Junior also bragged that killing someone with a knife was a “more manly” thing to do because it was a hands-on experience.
Mark Caputo, who was one of the guys there when the fight occurred, later told Alite that there was no reason to stab Silva. Caputo said he and the others were “winning” the fight in the club that night and that no one had to die. Caputo became collateral damage in the aftermath. If anyone was going to take a fall for what happened, it would be Mark. But that’s the way the Gottis operated. Everyone was expendable.
Alite recalled Junior’s suscint assessment of Big Mark.
“That fat bastard couldn’t kill anybody,” Junior said.
Willie Boy Johnson was all business when they got to his clubhouse. He explained how the operation was going to work. Alite was told to call in three or four times a day, every day, to get the updated betting line. Smart gamblers, Johnson said, shop around and if you’re late with the line and are off, even by a half point, you could get burned. This was big-time gambling, he said. Strictly business. You had to be smart and on top of your game. There was serious money out there and the idea was to get as much of it as possible.
Alite liked Johnson. He liked his approach, no nonsense, no bullshit. He also liked the fact that Johnson was looking out for Big Mark, his boyhood friend. Johnson took them up to the apartment where Mark was hiding out. The reunion took Junior off stride. Alite and Caputo hugged and laughed and started talking about the “old days” in the neighborhood. Junior hung around for a while, then got bored and asked Johnson to arrange for someone else to drive him back to Queens. Alite stayed to hang out with Big Mark.
With Johnson’s backing, the bookmaking business took off.
One of their first big customers was a guy named Joe DeLuca. He was betting three or four baseball games a day and putting three or four grand on each game, significant money. Alite decided that he should get a better idea of who DeLuca was. He invited him to drop by the club on 113th Street.
DeLuca was not what Alite expected. He was a tall, thin kid, in his twenties, with a thin mustache and a quick but nervous smile. After some casual conversation, Alite got to the point. He wanted DeLuca to understand the ground rules. He told him that his business was appreciated and so far things were fine. DeLuca was paying when he lost and collecting when he won. At that point, the kid was about six or seven grand up. But Alite was curious about the source of his money.
“Do you mind if I ask you what you do for a living?” he said.
“I’m the equipment manager for the Mets,” he said. “I work at Shea Stadium.”
Alite, who loved the game of baseball, was impressed.
“Man, that’s great,” he said. Then he paused. “But how are you managing to bet this way on that kind of salary? What happens if you hit a few bad days? How are you gonna cover?”
DeLuca didn’t answer at first. It looked like he was debating about whether he should say what he was thinking. Finally, he told Alite that he wasn’t betting with his own money. He said the bets were for players with the Mets. They were good for the action. DeLuca made a point of telling Alite that they never bet on games in which they were involved.
Alite, who took DeLuca at his word, was delighted. He didn’t care about the ethics of ballplayers betting. From his perspective, Pete Rose should be in the Hall of Fame instead of being barred from Major League Baseball for betting on games while playing for and managing the Cinncinnati Reds. It’s what you did on the field that mattered according to Alite’s way of thinking. If DeLuca was telling the truth, this was a money stream that might never run out. Ballplayers had all kinds of cash. He had heard of professional athletes and entertainers betting a hundred thousand dollars on a game. This really was the big leagues.
“Just be careful,” Alite told DeLuca. “Make sure you come up with the cash. You’re the only one we can go after if things go bad. Remember that. You’re the one we’ll come looking for.”
And, eventually, they did.
“We used to call him ‘Joe Baseball,’” Alite told a federal jury as he recounted the DeLuca story and his claim to be betting for Mets ballplayers. “Overall, the kid was a degenerate gambler. You can’t win when you bet the way he did. He just bet wild.”
DeLuca would later deny that he was placing bets for any ballplayers. Mets standout Keith Hernandez would be mentioned in media reports that surfaced after Alite began cooperating, but DeLuca insisted that Hernandez had merely helped him out o
nce by loaning him some money. It had nothing to do with gambling.
In fact, DeLuca took a beating from Alite when he failed to come up with cash, about fifty thousand dollars, that he owed. And Alite and Junior later had to pay a visit to DeLuca’s home. He lived with his parents. His mother and father agreed to borrow money to pay off the debt. Alite said he thought they had put up their house for a loan, got a second mortgage. It was better than borrowing from a loan shark.
DeLuca was one of several customers who took beatings over gambling debts. Another was a kid named Patsy Catalano, but there was more involved in that situation. Catalano owed about six grand and wasn’t paying. His father, also known as Patsy, was a made guy and big in the heroin business. Patsy would just tell anyone who tried to collect, “Go see my dad.”
The debt was actually owed to “Ronnie One-Arm” Trucchio, another Gambino soldier in the Gotti crew. But there was a lot of overlap in the bookmaking business and Alite was asked to help collect. He lured Catalano to the PM Pub in Queens, telling him he was going to help work out the problem and that he could cut the debt in half.
When Catalano got to the PM, negotiations took a different turn.
“I tied him up in a chair and started squirting him with lighter fluid, telling him I was going to set him on fire,” Alite said. “He was pretty scared.”
But Alite wasn’t going to follow through until he had the okay from Junior. So with Catalano knotted to a chair in the back of the pub, Alite headed over to the Bergin. Junior wasn’t there, but Genie Gotti was. When Alite told him the situation and asked for guidance, Gene Gotti smiled. He and his partner, John Carneglia, had been having problems with the senior Catalano in the heroin business. There was a dispute over territory and money. Gene Gotti saw this as a way to handle two problems at once. Alite was told to give Patsy Catalano a beating, but not to kill him.
Back at the PM he did just that. Alite took a blackjack to the helpless Catalano, who ended up with a broken nose, a fractured eye socket, and welts and bruises over the rest of his face and upper body. He left the pub a bloody, simpering mess. And with a message to deliver to his father. “Tell him Gene Gotti is waiting to hear from him.”
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