Auricchio kept beating on Brooks.
“He was abusing this kid,” Alite said. “I asked him to stop. To let it go.”
Instead, Alite got word that Auricchio had approached one of the inmates who worked in the kitchen. He asked him to get him a knife. The inmate, who knew Alite from the streets, let him know what Auricchio was planning.
“I didn’t know if he had the knife,” Alite said, “but I decided to find out. He was in line one night for chow and I walked up to him. I told him to get out of the line. He wouldn’t do it. He said, ‘I’m not gonna fight you.’ I told him he didn’t have a choice. I wasn’t asking, I was telling him to get out of the line.”
Other inmates knew what was going on. They backed away and Auricchio ended up face-to-face with Alite. Alite threw a left and a right. Auricchio slid off the punches, which caught him in the face, but not full force.
“I’m boxing and he’s trying to wrestle, trying to get me on the ground,” Alite said. “I stayed out of his reach and then hit him whenever I could. He was a strong kid, but he couldn’t box. I beat him up pretty bad.”
They both ended up in solitary confinement. Alite spent about a month there and then was transferred to a federal prison in McKean, Pennsylvania, about eighty miles north of Altoona and about forty miles east of Lake Erie. It was cold and damp, but in retrospect, he says, it wasn’t a bad place to be.
While he didn’t realize it as the time, the three-year prison stint that began in 1996 was the initial round of institutionalization that would dominate his life for the next two decades. Between 1996 and 2014, an eighteen-year period, John Alite would spend fourteen years behind bars. This would include two years in prison facilities in Brazil, prisons that would make the federal institutions in Fairton, McKean, and later Allenwood, Pennsylvania, seem like four-star hotels.
CHAPTER 15
Three months after he began doing time in a federal prison, Alite got word that John Gebert had been killed. He wasn’t surprised. In fact, he had set the hit in motion. His anger and hatred for Gebert was well-known in both underworld and law enforcement circles so he thought it would be a good idea if he was in jail when the murder took place. You can’t get a better alibi than that.
Before he left for prison, he had talked about Gebert with a couple of his friends. Alite wanted him dead.
Gebert was finishing up a seven-year sentence for a rape conviction. He had abducted a woman in his car, taking her to a park and forcing her into the backseat where, while several friends looked on, he raped her and forced her to perform oral sex on him. The woman fled, according to the indictment, after Gebert had tired of abusing her. Wearing only a shirt, she ran from the park and was picked up by a passerby who drove her to her boyfriend’s home. From there she reported the assault to police. Gebert went on the lam but was eventually arrested and convicted.
He was, from Alite’s perspective, a dangerous degenerate.
“Gebert had been on The David Susskind Show when he was twelve years old,” Alite said. “The show was about juvenile delinquents. He was a criminal his whole life.”
The rape conviction only solidified that opinion. Gebert had punked out after the drive-by shooting of the Jamaicans in one of their first criminal acts together. And several years later, he and his brother-in-law, Georgie Grosso, had tried to shoot Alite.
“I wasn’t sorry he got killed,” Alite would later tell a jury when questioned about the July 12, 1996, murder.
The hit occurred inside Frankie and Johnny’s, a bar on Jamaica Avenue. Gebert had been hanging around outside the bar when a car rolled up on him and two shooters jumped out. Gebert ran into the bar and tried to hide under a pool table. The two gunmen found him there and opened fire. An innocent bystander, a mob associate named Carl Capella, was shot by accident. He survived. The two shooters, Dave D’Arpino and Alite’s young cousin Pasquale Andriano, later admitted their roles and became cooperating witnesses, helping convict Johnny Burke of murder conspiracy in the Gebert shooting. Burke was also involved in the Bruce Gotterup hit. Peter Zuccaro, another mob associate who claimed that he organized the Gebert shooting, also pleaded guilty and cooperated. Zuccaro’s account of the murder conspiracy was somewhat at odds with Alite’s version, a fact that the defense jumped on during Junior’s 2009 trial. Zuccaro, who was called as a witness for the defense, claimed that he met several times with Alite in 1988 after Ronnie Trucchio okayed the hit. Among other things, Gebert had shot up the PM Pub, which was one of Trucchio’s places.
Alite said there were several reasons Gebert got killed but he remembered meeting with Zuccaro on only one occasion where the murder was discussed. He also said that Trucchio had nothing to do with the Gebert murder.
The Gebert homicide was one of the charges Junior Gotti beat in his 2009 case. Alite never disputed the defense argument that he, Alite, had set the murder in motion and that he had his own set of reasons for wanting Gebert dead, not the least of which was to avenge Gebert’s attempt to kill him. But Alite insisted that Gebert had been “stamped” for death by Gotti back in the late 1980s and that while it was seven years or more before the hit took place, that didn’t change anything.
“Once he [Junior Gotti] said you had to go, you were gone,” Alite explained.
He also admitted from the witness stand that he had discussed killing Gebert with Andriano, D’Arpino, and Michael Malone shortly before he headed off to Fairton. Alite said he told them “when I’m in jail, that would be a nice gift.”
Alite was in McKean when he heard about the Gebert shooting. Word spreads quickly along the prison grapevine. Inmates are always calling home and anyone from New York would have been told about the shooting by a friend or family member. It was business as usual. Murder was part of the life.
Alite adapted easily to the routine at the federal prison in McKean. He worked out regularly, did some boxing, and tried to spend as much time as possible outdoors in the “yard” getting fresh air and moving around. The weather was cold and there was plenty of snow, which often forced inmates back inside, but overall, he made the best of his stay.
The Gottis, on the other hand, didn’t do well in prison.
Their name gave them some cachet, but the aura eventually wore off, particularly in a population of hardened criminals, many from the violent drug underworld. Most of those inmates, blacks and Hispanics, knew about the Mafia from watching The Godfather or from their own dealings on the street. But inside a federal institution, they played by a different set of rules. There were always inmates who figured they could enhance their own standing by taking a shot at the Don Corleones of the world.
Alite remembered John Gotti Sr. bitching about his brother Vinny, who was “punked” in prison by a black inmate who pushed him around and took a gold neck chain from him. Gotti sent Alite to visit Vinny with a crude but understandable message: “If you let a nigger push you around, you’re not gonna survive.”
“Vinny was a piece of shit anyway,” Alite said. “He had pleaded guilty to drug dealing. This was at a time [1986] when Gotti Sr. was saying that no one should plead out. But it was okay for his brother to enter a plea. He was also a predator. He had strangled a girl after getting her high on drugs.”
The incident, which occurred in the summer of 1985, was brought up when Alite testified at Junior’s trial in 2009. Gotti’s defense attorney tried to imply that Alite had raped and strangled a woman at a motel out near JFK airport. Alite told the jury that he and dozens of others in the organization knew the story.
Vinny Gotti had taken the woman, whom he was “dating” at the time, to the Kennedy Inn Airport Hotel, Alite testified. They were doing drugs together and got into an argument. Vinny Gotti strangled her and then got rid of her body. That’s what Alite said he was told by another mob associate who said he was there when the woman was killed. The woman’s body was found in a garbage pile in the East New York section of Brooklyn. No one has ever been charged in the case.
Alite said
he knew the victim’s stepbrother, a guy from the neighborhood with whom he used to play softball. Shortly after the woman disappeared, the guy came around the PM Pub asking if anyone knew what had happened to his sister.
He told Alite that she had been with Vinny Gotti on the night she disappeared.
“Did he do something?” the guy asked Alite.
Alite said he lied and told him he knew nothing about it. He also told the jury that in 2006 the New York Post ran a story speculating that Junior Gotti was the target of a cold case murder investigation involving the strangulation murder of a Queens waitress, a divorcée with a young daughter, who was last seen partying with his uncle Vinny. When the Post story appeared Junior was livid, Alite said, complaining that his scumbag uncle had killed the girl and that he wasn’t going to be blamed for it. It was just another piece of the dark and cold-blooded saga that was the Gotti family.
Vinny Gotti, with a shaved, bullet-shaped head but a strong facial resemblance to his brother John, was the black sheep of the family, which is saying more than a little about his character. His career included arrests, but not always convictions, for robbery, rape, and petty larceny. He had been banned by his brother John from mob social clubs, including the Ravenite and the Bergin, because of his drug use. He was jailed in 1986 for cocaine distribution, the charge to which he pleaded guilty. He was sent to prison again in 2012 for the attempted murder of a Queens bagel shop owner. The botched hit was allegedly tied to a loansharking operation that Vinny was then running for the organization.
Vinny was a punk who lived off his family’s reputation. And by the mid-1990s, that reputation was beginning to sour. John Gotti brought the same arrogance that he had on the street to the federal prison in Marion, Illinois, where he was serving the life sentences imposed in 1992. It didn’t play as well there.
Alite was still in Fairton when he and other inmates learned that Gotti Sr. had taken a beating from another inmate in Marion. Gotti spent most of his time locked in an eight-by-ten cell in the maximum security wing of the prison, then considered one of the toughest in the country. But during a daily walk along a corridor recreation area, according to reports, Gotti had gotten into an altercation with Walter Johnson, a black inmate from Philadelphia who was serving time for bank robbery.
Gotti angrily told Johnson to get out of his way, calling him “a nigger” and “a piece of shit.” Johnson moved away to allow Gotti to pass. But the next day they found themselves in the same prison corridor. Before anything was said, Johnson punched Gotti in the face, then jumped on top of him and pummeled him until guards were able to break them up. None of the other inmates out for recreation came to Gotti’s aid. At the prison infirmary, when Gotti was asked what happened, he said, “I fell.” But reports were that the crime boss was livid. In law enforcement circles, the word was that Gotti reached out to the Aryan Brotherhood, the white supremacist group with a strong prison presence, and offered between forty thousand and one hundred thousand dollars to have Johnson killed. Prison officials, apparently realizing the jeopardy, transferred Johnson to another institution. He completed his sentence and was released before anyone from the Brotherhood could act on the contract put out by Gotti.
The talk inside the prison system, however, painted a somewhat different version of events. Alite was told that the Brotherhood had set the whole situation up as a way to shake Gotti down.
“John had been paying them [for protection] when he first got there, but then he stopped,” Alite said. “The Aryans were pissed. They had a guard who made sure Johnson was out there when Gotti went by. They wanted to show Gotti he needed them and that he would have to pay for their protection.”
Whatever the truth, the incident took a lot of the luster off the Gotti image. A photo of the bruised and swollen face of John J. Gotti after the beating looked nothing like the handsome Dapper Don that Andy Warhol had captured and that had been plastered on the cover of Time magazine.
Alite knew that to survive in prison you had to fight. Early on at McKean he established himself as someone who would not back down if confronted. As a result he did several stints in the hole. But he also had fewer problems with other inmates. His stay also further undermined his relationship with the Gottis, if not the Gambino crime family.
Gene Gotti was serving his time for the federal drug conviction at McKean and at first Alite and he were cellmates.
“He was older and I’d help him out when I could,” Alite said. “I used to make sure he had a chair when they were showing movies, things like that. But he had gotten bitter. Angry. He belittled everybody. Used to make fun of guys who did me favors.”
Gene Gotti knew about the problems his nephew was having with Alite, but seldom talked about it. Alite understood that in McKean he was an asset, someone Gene Gotti could use. It was no different than on the streets. At that point, despite all his problems with the Gotti family, Alite was still a believer. He was part of the crime family. He also was smart enough to recognize that that affiliation was a benefit behind bars.
The problems began when Gene Gotti started to abuse Joe Gambino, a capo and part of what was then the Sicilian faction of the organization. Joe and his brothers, cousins of the late Carlo Gambino, had been arrested for heroin dealing in the Philadelphia area in the 1980s. Their presence in the Philadelphia–South Jersey area, in fact, had indirectly contributed to the murder of Philadelphia mob boss Angelo Bruno in 1980.
Joe was completing his sentence for drug dealing when Alite came to McKean. The smartest of the Gambino brothers, he was also the most Americanized. He had established himself in the crime family, eventually rising to the rank of skipper. Alite respected Joe Gambino because he never tried to hide who he was or what the life was all about. Unlike the Gottis, there was no bullshit. The Sicilians never had any compunction about dealing drugs. That’s where the money was and the Sicilians always went for the money.
“Genie was pushing Joe around and I stepped in,” Alite said. “I told him, ‘You know the rules the same as I do. You’re not supposed to put your hands on another made guy.’”
Gene blew Alite off. His attitude seemed to be, Who the hell is this Albanian telling me, a Gotti, about the rules of our life. The abuse continued.
“He did it in front of other inmates, blacks, Hispanics, the whole prison population,” Alite said. “You don’t do that kind of thing. It made Joe look weak.”
And Alite knew that in any prison situation, an inmate who was perceived as weak was easy prey for anyone.
“I stepped in for Joe Gambino, who is not a tough guy,” Alite told a jury. “He was a skipper, but not a tough guy.”
Alite slapped Gene Gotti around and told him to back off. The move helped Joe Gambino, who thanked Alite. The mob capo later gave him a gold chain with a religious medal on it. The medal was a cross and an image of the Virgin Mary. Alite, who was not particularly religious (he ended up getting baptized in prison), nevertheless saw the gift as validation. He had done the right thing.
But the incident further undermined his relationship with the Gottis. Now Gene Gotti also wanted him dead.
Junior Gotti, with assistance from his uncle Peter, continued to run the crime family on the streets while Alite sat in federal prison. Junior would occasionally visit his father, a situation that was unique, to say the least. In most instances a jailed mob boss doesn’t get to have prison visits with his successor. But the blood relationship trumped authorities’ concerns that Gotti, from prison, was using his son to run the Gambino organization.
It didn’t take long, however, for Junior to screw things up. Alite could only shake his head when the news broke about the February 1997 raid federal and local authorities staged on an apartment in Ozone Park, Queens, as part of an ongoing investigation into Junior Gotti’s operation. Alite recognized the address as the building where, in the basement, he had beaten the boyfriend of Jodi Albanese. In that same basement, according to reports about the raid, authorities found $348,700 in cash
, a handgun, a semiautomatic rifle, and a bookkeeper’s ledger with a list of nearly two hundred names. These turned out to be individuals who had attended Junior’s lavish wedding at the Helmsley Palace Hotel back in 1990. Next to each name was a dollar figure, the amount each individual had given as a wedding gift. A final tally showed that the gifts amounted to more than $350,000.
“I think I was on that list for ten grand,” Alite said. “Junior kept cash in that basement and what he would do was continually replenish the supply. Money he made from drugs, gambling, extortions, whatever, would end up in the basement. That’s why the cash they found amounted to about the same total as the money in the ledger. Junior figured he could always say the money was from his wedding.”
Whether anyone would believe that seven years later the wedding cash was still unspent was, of course, open to speculation. Junior, as Alite learned early on, was not a deep thinker. The media quickly dubbed the discovery an embarrassment and took to referring to Junior Gotti as “Dumbfella.” The wedding list and cash were what grabbed most of the attention, but the real screwup from an underworld perspective was another list of names agents found while they searched the basement. There were about a dozen individuals on this list and each was linked to one of three organized crime families in the city. The names, authorities later said, were individuals who had been proposed as mob members. It had become standard procedure for crime families to run the names of their new or potential members past the leaders of other families as a security measure. The idea was to screen members in an attempt to determine if anyone knew any reason why they shouldn’t become a member of the secret society.
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