By this point Alite’s reputation on the street, coupled with his connection with the Gottis, had given him power and status. He was fearless, “crazy” in the eyes of some of the people he dealt with. It was a persona that he knew kept him alive. It was an outgrowth of the lessons his father had taught him about not backing down.
“I was never a bully, but I was always the guy that friends would call when they had a problem,” he said. “They knew I would come.”
Joe O’Kane, who had stood with him during the White Castle brawl, called one night from a club in Brooklyn where he had gone with his girlfriend. Three guys in the club, the Bulkhead Bar, were hassling him.
“I’ll be right there,” Alite said.
There was a bar in the front and a dance floor with a disc jockey in the back. Alite headed for the dance floor, which was jammed with people. He spotted O’Kane and asked him to point out the guys who were creating a problem. One of them was on the dance floor with a girl.
Alite walked up to him and over the noise and the music, asked, “You got a problem with my friend?”
The guy told Alite to fuck off. Alite pulled out a gun and shot him in the hip. When he went down, Alite kicked him in the face. His girl screamed and people all around finally started to realize what was happening. Alite calmly walked out of the bar and headed toward his car. Then he heard footsteps, turned around, and saw two other guys coming for him. He couldn’t believe it.
“I said to the one kid, what are you, fuckin’ crazy? Then I shot him. He went down and the other kid took off.”
Alite kept walking, past his car and toward a corner store. From there he called Keith Pellegrino and told him to pick him up.
“I didn’t want to get in my car because somebody might get a tag number,” he said. “I left it there till the next day. Nobody in the bar identified me. That was the end of it. In those days, I just didn’t care. I thought of myself as a nice guy. I would always be a gentleman. I wouldn’t start no fights. But if something happened, or if one of my friends was in trouble, then I would take it to the extreme. My attitude was, if you were gonna hurt somebody, you hurt them real good. If not, they’d come back after you.”
It really didn’t matter who. Alite was just five foot eight, and even when he was boxing and in top shape, he never weighed more than 180 pounds. Size wasn’t the issue.
“I’m home asleep one night,” he said. “I’m still living in the basement of my parents’ home at the time. The phone rings and it’s my friend Joey Mathis. He’s just a straight kid. He was at the Old Brother Inn on Jamaica Avenue, a few blocks from where I live.”
Three bikers had come to the bar that night and were causing trouble. The bartender threatened to call the police. The bikers had gotten into it with Mathis and now they were outside with chains and baseball bats waiting for him to leave at closing time.
Alite got dressed, grabbed a bat, and headed up Jamaica Avenue.
“I go in the bar and tell Joey Mathis, ‘Come on, we’re goin’ home,’” Alite said. “When we walk out the bikers are there. One of them tells me, ‘Mind your business. This has got nuthin’ to do with you.’”
Alite hit him in the head with the bat, knocking him out cold. Then he turned on a second biker as Mathis and another guy from the bar, Kenny Nicole, grabbed the third. In the melee, Alite accidentally hit Nicole in the head and ended up taking him to a hospital out on Long Island.
“I didn’t want to go to a local hospital in case there were any police,” he said.
A few days later, Alite got word that nearly a dozen bikers were back at the bar looking for him. Alite had friends who were Hells Angels and went to see them at their clubhouse. He asked about the bikers and was told they were part of a ragtag outfit out of Kew Gardens.
“What the fuck kind of biker gang comes out of Kew Gardens?” he asked. He got the name of one of the leaders and was told the name of the bar where they hung out. He took a gun and a knife and Mike Finnerty.
“I told Mike just to stay by the door and be ready with the car,” he said. “But he came in anyway.”
Alite had been told to look for a guy named Brian, who was one of the leaders of the renegade biker group. Brian was sitting by the pool table. He was in a chair and had his thighs straddling a girl who was with him.
“I heard you got a problem with me,” Alite said.
“Who are you?” asked the biker.
“John Alite. I heard you were looking for me.”
As the girl moved away, Alite pulled out his knife and jammed it into the biker’s thigh.
“Now you found me,” he said. “Look for me again and I’ll kill ya.”
With that, he and Finnerty left the bar.
Violence was a part of who Alite was. Looking back on it now, and aided by weekly sessions with a therapist, he says he was like an alcoholic. He was drawn toward it. Sometimes he didn’t even know why. Part of it was survival. Part of it was to establish a reputation in the world in which he was operating. And part of it was a crazy, antisocial streak that even today he struggles to control.
There was an incident at another bar in the neighborhood that captures exactly who Alite was when he was running wild on the streets. The bar was owned by two New York City cops who were allowing Alite’s crew to deal drugs from the establishment. One night Alite walked into the bar wearing a suit and tie and a scarf. Two patrons started making fun of the way he was dressed, referring to him as a “pretty boy.” One reached over and flicked the scarf up in Alite’s face. Alite didn’t even think. He just reacted. He punched the first guy in the jaw, knocking him out, and then turned on the other guy, pummeling him to the ground. A friend of theirs whom Alite also knew tried to intervene and calm him down.
“What are you doing, John?” the guy screamed.
Alite pulled out a gun and shot him in the chest.
It was senseless. Totally unreasonable. He was out of control.
He knows that now. But what he also remembers while recounting the incident was the reaction of the two cops who owned the joint. They were concerned that a shooting would bring a law enforcement investigation that might result in the bar being closed for a period of time. As the victim lay bleeding and moaning on the floor, the two cops berated Alite for creating a situation that might result in a loss of business.
“I told two other guys to drag the body out onto the sidewalk,” he said. “This way it would look like the shooting occurred on the street. That made the cops happy.”
The shooting victim survived, but the incident reinforced the local perception that John Alite was not someone you wanted to fool with.
“People knew that about me,” he said. “I even shot my own cousin.”
That incident also stemmed from a bar fight. This time it was in an after-hours club that Alite had in South Ozone Park. Two of his associates had gotten into an altercation with a guy who turned out to be an off-duty transit cop. One of them shot the cop. They were arrested and charged with assault. The cop survived.
Alite had a cousin who was running the club and also happened to be the cop’s neighbor. They lived next door to one another. Alite gave his cousin sixty thousand dollars to bribe the officer, who, a few days later, said he was unable to identify his assailants when they were paraded before him at a police lineup. The case went away.
But a few years later, the cop, through some connections he had with the Genovese family, complained that he had never gotten paid. Both Junior and Charles Carneglia asked Alite to look into the problem. Alite went to see his cousin Nicky, who everyone suspected had pocketed the sixty grand.
“He got fresh with me,” Alite said. “His wife was telling him to watch how he spoke, but he kept getting in my face. I had a gun and I pistol-whipped him, hit him in the head a few times. But he wouldn’t stop.”
So Alite shot his cousin in the hip and in the leg, which later had to be amputated.
Junior Gotti’s defense attorney would bring out that shooting
and the fight and shooting involving the scarf when he cross-examined Alite during the 2009 trial. Alite didn’t try to sugarcoat any of it. That was who he was, he told the jury. And that was why the Gottis had him around.
CHAPTER 9
While he was on the run in 2003, Alite popped in and out of Albania three times. Each visit gave him a chance to catch his breath and to feel his roots. He had an uncle who operated a hotel in Tirana, the capital, and he had aunts, uncles, and cousins living in the countryside.
The trip was an easy one. He made his way to Bari, an Italian port city on the Adriatic, and then took the ferry over to Albania. His relatives treated him royally. Most were unaware of his notoriety. He was Johnny from America, an athlete of sorts, although past his prime.
“I trained a little with the Albanian Olympic boxing team while I was there,” he said. “I was still in shape and told them I had fought in America. One thing about boxing, you can’t hide. You get in the ring and you have to produce. They saw I knew how to handle myself.”
Alite also made some connections with Albanian mobsters, a violent group of gangsters who, unlike many of his relatives, knew or quickly learned about his criminal history.
“These guys all lived in mansions,” he said. “Forts really, houses with gates all around for their own protection because they all kill like crazy.”
Clannish and secretive, Albanian mobsters are major players in drug trafficking, gun running, and white slavery, supplying heroin, weapons, and young women from Eastern Europe to underworld buyers in Italy, France, and Spain.
“I took a couple of these guys to my uncle’s restaurant one night,” Alite said. “He was really angry. Afterwards he told me, ‘Don’t ever bring those kinds of people to my place again.’
“It’s different over there. A lot like Cuba, really. There’s not enough to do and there are all kinds of problems. The electricity doesn’t always work. The lights are always going out. But the women were beautiful. They dress nice, really sexy. But you have to be careful. Their fathers or brothers will kill you. It’s very hard to get laid. . . . I had to get out of there.”
Alite never had a problem connecting with women. While he was on the run he managed to hook up with a beauty in every city where he spent time: Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Havana, and Rio. In fact, when he finally settled in the Copacabana section of Rio, he started dating a young schoolteacher who introduced him to her circle of friends and helped him blend in.
Back in the States he had an ex-wife with whom he had had two children, a common-law wife with whom he had two others, and several girlfriends with whom he kept in contact. John Alite liked women. And for the most part, they liked him.
There were times, as he looks back on it now, when he realizes his macho, Mafia arrogance destroyed or undermined what could have been a good relationship. It also took a toll on his kids. Today he’s still battling, and not always successfully, to reestablish a relationship with his son Jimmy and his daughter Chelsea, the two children he had with his wife Carol. It’s easy, in retrospect, to say that he was often a jerk, that he took advantage of situations, and that, like the Gottis, he used people. Saying he was wrong and that if given a second chance he might do things differently doesn’t change the reality. Alite doesn’t kid himself about what he was or what he has done. But he’s trying to make his children, now grown and beginning lives of their own, understand that he was wrong and that there are other, better ways to deal with problems.
But while he was on the streets and riding high in the Gambino organization, Alite lived in the moment. The violence and the sex and the arrogance were all part of the world in which he did business. He readily admits that he was “a wild man.”
Sexual promiscuity was also a part of that image. Getting laid was part of the lifestyle. Being faithful was rare in the underworld. In the testosterone-laden, boys’ locker room setting in which Alite moved, being committed to just one woman was often interpreted as a sign of weakness. Guys routinely cheated on their wives with a steady girlfriend. And then they would cheat on that girlfriend with another girlfriend.
“It’s typical in the mob,” he would later tell a federal jury. “We all do it. We have wives and we have girlfriends and we have girlfriends after the girlfriends. It’s just the way it is.”
John Gotti’s Rules of Leadership: No member or associate is to fool around with the wife, girlfriend, or daughter of another member of the organization.
Alite’s introduction to the dos and don’ts of Mafia dating began shortly after he began doing business with Junior in 1983, or to be more precise, after he met Junior’s sister, Vicky. She was the second daughter in the family. Her older sister was named Angel. Smart, sassy, and good-looking, Vicky Gotti, then twenty-two, was a stylish and spoiled Mafia princess. Alite said he knew she was not someone with whom he should get involved. But a series of events revolving around both Vicky Gotti and her boyfriend and later husband, Carmine Agnello, created a set of problems for him and ultimately contributed to his falling-out with Junior and his father.
When he testified against Junior in the 2009 racketeering trial, the tabloids had a field day with the he-said, she-said story of Alite’s relationship with Vicky Gotti. She denied ever having sex with Alite. He testified that they had “feelings” for each other both before and after she married Agnello. Today he says he “softened” the story while testifying. The reality, he says, is that Vicky Gotti was a fatal attraction that he was continually trying to avoid.
Responding in the media, Vicky Gotti said nothing ever happened between her and Alite. She called him an “out-and-out liar,” claiming that he had a crush on her, but that she never responded. She also said she took a lie-detector test that proved she never had sexual intercourse with him.
Alite’s version differs but he says there’s no point in providing chapter and verse. His life inside the Gotti organization was complicated and dangerous. Vicky Gotti was just a small part of a much larger problem. He admits that he found Vicky Gotti attractive. But he says that he knew she was the boss’s daughter and that fooling around with her could have amounted to a death sentence.
Never mind that Gotti Sr. always had a girl, a commare, on the side and that at one point was said to be running around with Neil Dellacroce’s niece. Never mind that Junior, even after he was married, seemed to lust after every woman who crossed his path. The rules were always bent in the Gottis’ favor.
Alite said he was hanging at the clubhouse on 113th Street and Liberty Avenue back in 1984 when Vicky Gotti showed up looking for her brother. Junior wasn’t there. Alite asked her if he could do anything. At first she said no.
“Her lip was swollen,” he recalled. “She had big sunglasses on and she had a bit of a shiner on her eye.”
It didn’t take long for Alite to figure out what had happened or to get Vicky to provide the details. Agnello, her boyfriend, had slapped her around . . . again. This was a few months before they were to be married. Alite told Vicky that he would tell her brother or her father. She panicked.
“Don’t,” she pleaded. “They’ll kill him.”
Vicky Gotti had been dating Agnello since high school. Agnello owned a tow truck company and liked to talk tough. But Alite said he was a punk. Vicky had spent some time in college, but dropped out. Now they were engaged. When she stopped by the club that afternoon, Alite already knew the backstory, knew that Agnello had a history of abusing her. In fact, Gotti had had Agnello beaten up once before for assaulting his daughter. It was a warning. That’s why Vicky knew Agnello would be killed if Alite told her father what was going on.
While Vicky Gotti has denied the story, mob informant Peter Zuccaro, a convicted murderer, testified as a government witness at two trials and said he took part in the beating of Agnello on the orders of John Gotti Sr. Vicky Gotti, in a piece she wrote for the New York Daily News in 2009, said Zuccaro and Alite were both lying “stooges.” She added that her father despised Alite and his “disgusting a
nd despicable ways.”
Alite said that after Vicky came to him, he went to see Agnello himself and told him that “if I got to Junior or the father, ‘you’re gonna be butchered.’ Then I told him not to touch her again.”
“Mind your own business,” Agnello replied.
It was a difficult position for Alite to be in and one that got more complicated as plans for the wedding moved forward. Alite says that Vicky would come by the clubhouse and spend time with him and would ask her father to have Alite drive her places as she made preparations for the wedding.
There was an underworld code that was in place at the time. Everyone had a beeper. If you got a numerical message that read “911-98,” it meant there was an emergency and you were to go to the clubhouse on 101 Street and 98th Avenue. If the message read “911-98-38” it meant bring a gun. Alite got one of those “911-98” messages and rushed to the clubhouse. Gotti was there and when Alite arrived, he didn’t say anything. Finally, Alite asked what was up.
Gotti looked perplexed.
“I got a 911 call,” Alite said.
“Oh, yeah,” said Gotti. “My daughter has to pick up her wedding dress and I want you to drive her.”
“That’s the emergency?” Alite asked.
“She asked for you,” Gotti said. “Just go with her.”
It was one of several trips he would have to make as Vicky planned her nuptials. On these trips, Alite says, she would touch his arms, rub his shoulder, smile, and flirt. When he resisted, she would taunt him, he said, saying things like “What’s the matter? You scared of my brother? You scared of Carmine?”
The only person Alite was afraid of at that time was her father, but he wasn’t going to tell Vicky that. So he tried to bob and weave, like a boxer, avoiding her when he could, trying to make sure someone else was with them whenever possible. Alite said he felt constant pressure. He was trying to maintain his position within the crime family and observe all the protocols. He could deal with the risks that came with life on the streets, but not with the boss’s daughter.
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