Two days later, Alite walked into the Bergin and was greeted with shouts of praise, hugs, and kisses. Patsy Catalano had paid off the gambling debt in full and his father had fallen in line with Gene Gotti and John Carneglia in the heroin dispute.
“Nice job, kid,” Gene Gotti told Alite.
Alite was getting a reputation as someone who could be depended on. He liked it. He liked having status with the wiseguys who hung at the Bergin and the Ravenite. He liked that when he walked into those clubs now, the older guys knew who he was and made a point of acknowledging him. It was a sign of respect and in a twisted way, it was as good as or better than the money that came with the business.
He got the same sense from Willie Boy Johnson, who was impressed with the way Alite was handling the bookmaking operation. Willie Boy also appreciated the fact that Alite regularly stopped by to visit Mark Caputo. He brought food, money, and, sometimes, a hooker.
“I used to go up to Hillside Avenue in Queens,” Alite said. “There were a lot of prostitutes working there. Everybody knew me because of our cocaine business. When I would pull up in my Corvette, people would come over to talk.”
Occasionally Alite would bring one of the girls with him to the apartment where Caputo was holed up.
“The first time, me and Willie Boy are in the other room and Mark can’t get it going,” Alite recalled with a laugh. “The hooker looked at me like, ‘What kind of customer is this?’ But things worked out for Big Mark and he was happy with those visits.”
He said Mark couldn’t thank him enough.
But not everyone was pleased with Alite’s hooker connections.
For a time, he and Ronnie One-Arm were in the prostitution business for the Gambino organization. They had an apartment and a stable of hookers who would service clients by appointment.
“But we never really made a lot of money,” Alite explained, “because Ronnie and the other guys were always banging the girls and I had to pay them out of our profits.”
Trucchio’s wife found out about one get-together that Alite had set up at an apartment on Ninety-First Street and 101st Avenue.
“We all have our cars parked along the block,” Alite said. “My Corvette, Ronnie’s Lincoln, several other guys’ cars. Ronnie’s wife comes by in her car. It’s the middle of the night, or early in the morning. We had been partying all night. There was booze and cocaine and girls and people were switching off and doing all kinds of crazy stuff. We’re upstairs and I hear this crashing sound over and over. I look out a window and I see Ronnie’s wife. She’s crashing her car into all the other cars.”
Alite ran downstairs.
“I wanted to get my Corvette before she hit it,” he said. “Now she’s screaming, ‘Where’s that little motherfucker John Alite?!’” I made it to my Corvette and got out of there.”
Alite shut down the brothel a short time later. It was a losing proposition. You can’t sample the merchandise if you want to run a profitable business. Bookies shouldn’t bet. Drug dealers shouldn’t snort. And if you’re going to be a pimp, you can’t be a john.
Running a sports book, on the other hand, came naturally to Alite and so did his relationship with Willie Boy Johnson. They genuinely liked one another and a few months into their business relationship, while visiting the club on Avenue U in Brooklyn, Alite was asked by Johnson to take a walk. Willie Boy started out by thanking Alite for what he was doing for Mark, telling him that Caputo was “like a son to me.” Then he paused, hesitated for a few seconds, and added, “I want to give you a piece of advice, the same kind of advice I’d give Mark if he were in your position.
“If you’re gonna stay in this life,” Johnson said, “and I really think you ought to find something else, but if you’re gonna stay, keep your eyes and your ears open and your mouth shut.
“You have no real friends. None of us do. Only jealous competitors.”
Willie Boy was fifty and had been running with gangsters since he was a teenager. It was too late for him to change. Too much had happened. Again, he told Alite the smart move was to walk away now. But then Willie Boy told Alite that if he decided to stay, he could always come to Willie Boy for help or advice.
Johnson said he had come up under Fat Andy Ruggiano, the same capo who had helped Alite in the Patsy Antiques dispute. Ruggiano was a “gentleman,” he said. Then, laughing, he showed Alite a scar on the back of his head. Fat Andy had shot him when they were kids running with different street gangs, Willie Boy said. But that was all forgotten when they lined up together in the Gambino organization. After Fat Andy went to jail, Johnson said, John Gotti Sr. took over the crew.
“Johnny’s a different type of guy,” Johnson said of Gotti Sr., whom he also had run with as a teenager. “He wants what he wants when he wants it. Nothing else matters. He’s just a classic case of pure greed.
“I know Junior is your partner and I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but your partner is pure garbage. We all tolerate him because he’s Johnny’s son. That’s the way this life works.”
Johnson went on to describe John Gotti Sr. as a degenerate and deadbeat gambler who was disliked by most members of the other crime families in the city. This was even before the Castellano murder, he said.
“Learn to keep your own counsel,” he said. “It’ll keep you alive. The glamour, money, and loyalty are all smoke and mirrors. In the end you wind up paying more than you get and you pay with things more valuable than money.”
They had walked around the block and were back in front of the clubhouse on Avenue U. Willie Boy Johnson smiled at Alite.
“We never had this conversation,” he said.
Although Alite didn’t know it at the time, Johnson had been a government informant for years. That information first surfaced during a pretrial hearing in the 1987 racketeering case that Gotti beat. Willie Boy was one of his codefendants. An overzealous and inexperienced federal prosecutor, Diane Giacalone, had exposed Johnson in an attempt to get him to cooperate. Giacalone was clashing with the FBI agents who had worked the case and was trying to show the world that she had more balls than the agents. They had pleaded with her not to go public with the information about Willie Boy, but she didn’t listen.
You could make the argument that Giacalone, in her quest for glory, had gotten Willie Boy killed.
Johnson had been promised by the FBI that he would remain a confidential informant and would never be asked to take the stand. The arrangement had been in place for nearly twenty years. Giacalone, desperate to win a conviction, threw that agreement to the curb. Johnson, however, didn’t budge. Publicly, he insisted that he was not an informant. He went on trial with Gotti and the others and after they all were acquitted, he drifted away from the crime family.
Alite was told that Johnson was promised by Gotti that no harm would come to him, but that he was being put on the shelf. The fact that Johnson remained in Brooklyn and went to work every day at a construction site would seem to indicate that Willie Boy took his boss at his word.
Shortly after six in the morning on August 29, 1988, Willie Boy Johnson left his apartment and headed off to work. Two men were waiting for him as he approached his car. They opened fire, chasing him across the street as he ran.
Johnson was hit at least six times in the head, according to news accounts. He also took two bullets to the back and one in each thigh. Eighteen shell casings were found at the crime scene on Royce Street near Avenue N, less than a block from the apartment house where Johnson was living with his wife.
There was little doubt that the hit—despite the assurance that Gotti had given Willie Boy—was in response to the disclosure that he had been a cooperator. The first shot to the head, a federal source told the New York Times, was enough to kill him.
“The rest were for effect,” the Times quoted the source as saying.
Thomas “Tommy Karate” Pitera, a member of the Bonanno crime family, was later identified as one of the shooters that day. The hit was done as a �
��favor” to John Gotti Sr.
Alite was in the dark when most of this went down. Later, he said, Junior boasted that he had been on the scene that morning driving one of the crash cars. When he learned Johnson had been killed, Alite thought back on the talk they had had as they walked along Avenue U.
He still could replay the whole conversation in his head. He remembered every word. But one thing stood out more than anything else. “You have no real friends,” Johnson said. “None of us do.”
CHAPTER 7
Drugs were the big moneymaker for the Gotti organization, despite what Gotti Sr. said. And today, after it has all come undone, Alite still finds it ironic that neither Gotti nor his son was ever convicted of drug trafficking. Though, if the federal government’s evidence and witnesses are to be believed, they both made a fortune from the drug business but went to great lengths to put a buffer between themselves and those doing the actual work.
Gotti Sr. abandoned friends and longtime associates who got jammed up, even though he had made millions with them. Alite, and others who testified against him at his trial in Manhattan, said Junior was the same way. Like his father, he would berate the “scumbag, punk drug dealer” who was indicted even though he was receiving a steady stream of cash from that “scumbag.”
The treatment that Angelo Ruggiero received at the hands of Gotti Sr. was a prime example. Mark Reiter was another. Both kicked up hundreds of thousands of dollars to the mob boss, yet he turned his back on both of them.
John Gotti’s Rules of Leadership: Drug dealing is prohibited and punishable by death. (Any member or associate dealing drugs must share his profits with the boss.)
Reiter was called “Mark the Jew” by Gotti and those around him. It was another one of those nicknames meant to belittle and mock. But Reiter let it roll off his back. He played at another level. He moved multiple kilos of heroin in New York City for years and lived life to the fullest. He had a wife and two sons on Long Island. He kept a penthouse on the Upper East Side. He had a condo in Israel. He drove a Jaguar, rode a Harley, and had a cigarette boat.
One of his partners was Thelma Grant, who the feds believed had taken over the Harlem-based drug business of the notorious Leroy “Nicky” Barnes after Barnes was jailed in 1977. Barnes, one of the biggest black drug dealers in the city, eventually testified against Reiter in a 1988 drug case.
“I was friends with Greg Reiter, Mark’s son,” Alite said. “But I got to know his father. A couple of times I was with John Gotti Sr. when he went up to Reiter’s penthouse. He had a beautiful place around Fifty-Eighth Street and Second Avenue. We’re there and he pulls out a suitcase full of cash. He gave Gotti about one hundred thousand dollars. And that was just fluff money, like a tip. It wasn’t even Gotti’s end from a deal. That’s the way Mark Reiter was. He knew how to live.”
Reiter told Alite to enjoy life. He said if you make money, don’t be afraid to spend it. Travel. See the world. Don’t be myopic. He didn’t say it outright, but Alite knew the point he was making. John Gotti thought traveling to Florida was a big deal. Mark Reiter would rather take a jet to Paris. He looked like the actor Ray Liotta and he lived like a character in a movie—the best clothes, fancy cars, and dinners at fine restaurants.
“He used to say, ‘Don’t be like these other guys, hanging in a clubhouse all day playing cards. Get out there and make something of yourself.’”
It was twisted advice, coming from someone who dealt heroin big-time, but it was a lesson in the life that Alite wanted to live.
“He was the real deal,” Alite said. “He taught us, me and his son Greg, how to dress, where to buy our clothes, how to act. He was a gentleman, or at least he gave the impression of being a gentleman. The broads loved him. He dated models, actresses, one more beautiful than the other. I think he knew Gotti and his son were full of shit, but he couldn’t do anything about it. He had no choice. He was in too deep and couldn’t get out.”
Reiter could never be a made guy, but his situation was better than most made guys that Alite knew. If Alite had a role model in the underworld, it was Mark the Jew, not Junior or the Teflon Don.
But in 1987, it all came crashing down. Reiter was named in the same case that targeted Gene Gotti, Angelo Ruggiero, and John Carneglia. He was free on bail in June 1987 when that trial started, and after learning that an associate had flipped and was cooperating, he took off. He would eventually be indicted in two other drug cases.
“Me and his son met him down in Florida, at Disney World,” Alite said. “We took him some money. Greg, his son, went back to New York but I stayed with him awhile and then went with him to California. We were in Beverly Hills, staying at a hotel. I would go back and forth to New York. Mark was making some contacts, trying to figure out how bad the case was, to get the pulse and determine what his options were.”
Alite said he cautioned Reiter to lie low, but that just wasn’t in his nature.
“He’s still going out at night with beautiful women, going to restaurants, living his life,” Alite said, shaking his head in amazement. “He’s on the run, but he’s not changing who he is.”
Reiter was toying with the idea of leaving the country, but he had to find a way out. Before he could set anything up, he was arrested in the Los Angeles area and brought back to New York.
“He had been calling guys back in New York, guys he trusted,” Alite said. “One of them gave him up.”
Mark Reiter was eventually convicted and sentenced to eighty years in prison. He was in his late forties at the time. The sentence was tantamount to life. Alite was with Gotti Sr. when he went on a rant about his heroin-dealing associate, calling him a low-life drug dealer. After Reiter was convicted, Gotti berated him again, calling him “that Jew bastard, that fuckin’ heroin dealer.” And when Reiter’s wife, Delores, was quoted in the newspaper during one of her husband’s trials, complaining about abusive government tactics, the Gottis, father and son, lambasted her for speaking out.
She was a “whore” and a “cunt,” they said. She should keep her mouth shut. Alite quietly shook his head as he thought about the abrasive, flamboyant, and outspoken Victoria Gotti and her equally arrogant daughter, Vicky. But what bothered him the most was the way Gotti Sr. so readily and easily tossed Mark Reiter aside.
“This was a guy who probably made him millions,” Alite said. “After he got arrested, he didn’t cut a deal and cooperate. He went to jail. He could have buried Gotti, but he didn’t.”
Alite believes Gotti’s rants were by design. He recalled how Gotti used to holler and scream about Sammy Gravano and different acts of violence that Gravano had carried out, usually on Gotti’s orders.
“He was always worried about listening devices,” Alite said. “So when he berated Mark Reiter or Gravano, it was like he was implicating them in crimes in case the FBI was listening. It was like he was saying, ‘It’s not me. It’s those guys.’ He was like a dry snitch.”
Loyalty was a one-way street in the Gambino crime family that Gotti was running. His son operated the same way with the crew that he headed.
The first murder Alite committed for the Gambino crime family was tied to the drug business. The victim was Georgie Grosso, the brother-in-law of Johnny Gebert. Alite had grown up with both of them and had done business with them in the drug underworld. After the incident with the Jamaicans and the drive-by shooting, Alite never trusted Gebert. Grosso was no better. They both flaunted the rules of the street. And neither knew enough to keep his mouth shut. Both would end up dead. Grosso was the first to go.
Word got back to Junior that Grosso was using the Gotti name to enhance his standing. He was letting everyone know he was “with” Gotti, in fact letting everyone know that the Gottis were benefiting from his drug dealing. Alite knew that was true. Grosso and Gebert had to kick up to the Gottis in order to stay in business. Everybody did. But Alite also knew that talking about that arrangement, bragging about it, was going to create problems.
“He wa
s telling people, ‘I work for John Gotti,’” Alite said. “You don’t do that. We heard about it and confronted him. He denied it. He said the only thing he ever said was that he was a friend of Junior Gotti’s. I didn’t believe that and I don’t think Junior did, but Junior told him don’t let it happen again.”
Grosso apparently didn’t listen. Word kept coming back to Junior and Alite that he was still using the Gotti name. He also was apparently using some of his product, smoking angel dust, snorting cocaine, and shooting heroin.
“Junior started worrying that he might become a rat,” Alite said. “There was nothing concrete, but that was always a worry. You hear about guys using drugs and the first thing you think is, ‘He’s weak. He’s getting’ high. He can’t hold up.’”
Alite was running his own crew at that time and was anxious to prove himself. He had been on the fringe of an earlier mob hit. Frank “Geeky” Boccia was shot and killed in a club in Queens by Anthony Ruggiano and Dominick “Skinny Dom” Pizzonia. Alite had been part of the conspiracy but wasn’t there when the hit went down.
The conventional wisdom was that Boccia, a hothead, had been killed because he had slapped around his wife, Francine Ruggiano, Anthony’s sister and the daughter of Fat Andy Ruggiano. And then, when Francine’s mother intervened, Boccia had slapped her as well. Alite was close to the Ruggianos and was happy to get involved. But he later learned that the real reason Boccia got killed was that he had gotten mouthy and arrogant with JoJo Corozzo, a made guy with the Gambinos.
“That’s why the hit got approved,” Alite said. “Slapping the women around was an excuse to kill him, but the Corozzos, JoJo and his brother Nicky, wanted him dead for their own reasons.”
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