“I’d drive it to a clinic in New York where they stored it,” he said. “I was paying the guard three hundred, four hundred dollars. No big deal. I think in total I gave him fifteen hundred.”
There was, at the time, an ongoing investigation into corruption at the prison, stemming from allegations that guards were taking bribes to smuggle in food, luxury toiletries, steroids, and other drugs. The sperm kit scam was uncovered during that same probe.
In December 2000 Alite got a visit from an FBI agent who told him he was about to be indicted. Alite thought it was the murder and racketeering case he had been anticipating. When he heard it was over the sperm kits, he laughed.
“It was ridiculous,” he said. “I never thought I’d end up back in jail for something like that.”
The indictment came down a week later. Alite, Nino, and his wife were charged. Looking to protect Nino’s wife, Alite told the couple to admit what they had done, to give him up and work out a deal that would keep her out of prison. That’s how it played out. They all pleaded guilty and the woman got a year’s probation. Alite was sentenced to three months. Nino had the same penalty tacked on to the time he was already serving.
The guard, who got jammed up in the broader probe, cut a deal and cooperated. At one point he called Alite on the phone. It was obvious to Alite that he was trying to tape him. Alite played dumb, said he didn’t know what he was talking about, then hung up on him.
The guard ended up being sentenced to two years in prison.
The “contraband” sperm that had been smuggled out became the focus of a related civil case. The feds had seized the juice after the indictment came down. Nino’s wife sued to get it back, but a judge ruled in the feds’ favor. Nino’s wife never became pregnant.
Once the indictment came down, Alite was placed on house arrest while the case worked its way through the system. And he was on house arrest again after he came out. He did the three months at a federal prison in Loretta, Pennsylvania, where he met and befriended a young Colombian who was serving time for drug dealing. The Colombian was tied to one of the big drug cartels and Alite got the names and phone numbers of several of his associates who were still active in the business in and around Bogotá and Medellín. He wasn’t thinking about going back into drug trafficking, but he was thinking about taking a trip.
“I just knew they were going to come for me,” he said. “The sperm kit thing was just a way to slow me down. Then, a few months after I’m out, they charged me with a parole violation. I was on parole when we did the sperm kit smuggling.”
The result was another three-month sentence, this one at a federal facility attached to Fort Dix, the New Jersey army base. Skinny Dom Pizzonia was there when Alite arrived and Charles Carneglia, convicted in a racketeering case, was on his way. Pizzonia told Alite that Carneglia wanted him dead.
“The day Charles arrived I was waiting for him,” Alite said. “I made sure Skinny Dom was with me because I wanted him to hear what I was going to say.”
After the usual hugs, kisses, and handshakes, Alite looked at Carneglia and said, “I heard you got a problem with me.”
Carneglia acted like he had no idea what Alite was talking about. But then he opened up. The word, he said, was that Alite was a rat, that he had talked with the feds and had been at a proffer session.
“You dumb motherfucker,” Alite said before explaining—and making sure that Pizzonia heard as well. Alite told Carneglia that the only proffer he made was for the sperm kit case and that was so that Nino’s wife wouldn’t do time.
“If I were cooperating,” he told Carneglia, “you wouldn’t be here on some half-ass racketeering charge. You’d be here for Louie DiBono’s body.”
“Don’t even go there,” Carneglia said.
But the point had been made. Everybody knew something about everybody else. Alite figured it was only a matter of time before it all came undone.
On June 10, 2002, after spending months in and out of prison hospitals battling cancer, John J. Gotti died. The obits that appeared in newspapers and the television reports detailed the infamous life of New York’s most famous gangster. Selwyn Raab, one of the premier crime reporters in the country, captured it perfectly in the opening paragraph of a lengthy obituary he wrote for the New York Times the next day.
“John J. Gotti, who seized control of the Gambino crime family in a murderous coup, flaunted his power during a flamboyant reign as a Mafia boss, and then spent the last years of his life locked away in a maximum security penitentiary, his gang in shambles, died yesterday at the federal prison hospital at Springfield, Mo. He was 61.”
Alite realized that he had been there to see it all. He was a participant in the rise of John J. Gotti and was now watching the fall of the flamboyant mob boss’s organization. He decided he didn’t want to be around for what came next.
“I started to hear that there was an investigation in Tampa,” he said. “I already knew about the one in Brooklyn because I had been subpoenaed to the grand jury there. I had the ongoing problem with Junior and Carmine Agnello and the problem with Vito Guzzo. That wasn’t going away.”
Alite figured he had very few options.
“If I stayed around, I’d probably have to kill ten or fifteen guys, starting with Junior and Carmine,” he said, “and I’d probably end up dead or in jail. That’s the way it looked.”
He also could have cut a deal then and cooperated, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
It was around this time that he became friends with an FBI agent from Philadelphia named Dave Gentile. They met at a kids’ hockey practice. Alite’s son Jimmy, who was eleven, and Gentile’s grandson, who was ten, were both playing ice hockey at the time for teams that practiced at the High Ridge Ice Arena in Gibbsboro, New Jersey, not far from Alite’s property on Route 73. Their first meeting was casual chitchat about kids and hockey as they watched the teams practice. At first neither knew who the other was. Once Alite learned that Gentile was with the FBI, he decided to tell him about his criminal record and associations. By that time, Gentile, who had done his own due diligence, knew who Alite was.
“I liked Dave,” Alite said. “I didn’t want to get him in trouble by talking to me.”
Throughout this period, as Alite wrestled with what to do and where to go, he would periodically run scenarios past Gentile, who had become a friend. The FBI agent, who had worked some of the biggest mob cases in Philadelphia in the 1980s, said Alite struck him as “looking for someone to talk to.”
Over months and during hockey practices, Gentile and Alite did just that.
Alite, in general terms, laid out his situation. Gentile said it looked to him as if Alite would eventually be indicted. That wasn’t anything Alite hadn’t considered. The FBI agent told Alite his best bet was to go in now, before charges were brought. That way he could get the best possible deal.
“I told him, and I was trying to speak to him as a friend, not an agent, that he might never see his kids again, that he might never see freedom again,” Gentile recalled. “I just told him to consider his options.”
Gentile also offered to introduce him to a well-known Philadelphia defense attorney, Nicholas Nastasi, who Gentile said might be able to help negotiate an agreement. Alite thanked Gentile, but said no thanks. He was not ready to come in.
“He reverted back to his street sense, to the shield he had used all his life,” Gentile recalled. “You know, you can’t take a person like John and see a change overnight. I like to think that some of the things we talked about stayed with him and that he ultimately decided to do the right thing and that what we had talked about played some part in that decision.”
One day late in 2002 Alite took his father aside and told him he was planning to take off. Matthew Alite told his son he was crazy, that he was paranoid, that nothing was happening. But John Alite knew the streets better than his dad. The safest, the smartest, and the boldest move, he decided, was to leave.
But before he d
id, he had to put some things in order. He quickly set up bank accounts and channels through which his money could be wired to him anywhere in the world. He used several Canadian banks, believing that it would be more difficult for federal authorities to block the cash flow. Then he spent one afternoon driving up and down Route 73 in Voorhees, stopping at public phone booths to record the numbers. The phone booths were located at a popular diner, at two supermarkets, and at a local gas station. He attached a numerical designation to each booth, numbering them one through seven. Then he met with a trusted associate and laid out his plan.
If he took off, he told his associate, he would call him on his home or cell phone and have an innocuous conversation. If the phone was tapped, there’d be nothing of significance said. But in that conversation, he would always mention a number and time.
“I’d say something like, ‘I was working out with three guys yesterday.’ Then later in the conversation I’d say. ‘I got a dentist appointment at two tomorrow.’ That would mean that at two o’clock the next day I was going to call phone number three. He’d go to the pay phone and be there when I called. That way I’d be able to have a serious conversation. That’s the way I kept tabs on what was going on.”
Some guys go on the run and wind up hiding in a shack in the Poconos or in some sand flea–infested apartment at the Jersey Shore. Alite did it with more style.
He was dating a girl named Rochine at the time and suggested they take a vacation to St. Lucia, one of the islands in the Caribbean. He gave her some cash to buy the plane tickets and told her to make the hotel reservations. They were going to spend a week in the sun. They left in March 2003. They flew out of Fort Lauderdale. It would be three years and nine months before John Alite returned to the United States.
When he came back, he would be in handcuffs.
He and Rochine spent six days on the beach in St. Lucia. As the vacation was drawing to a close, he told her he wasn’t going back. After some shouting and some tears, she got on a plane for the return trip to Florida. She had no idea where Alite was headed. And that’s the way he wanted it. In fact, he wasn’t entirely sure himself.
Looking back on it now, he says, the next six months were controlled chaos. Alite moved in and out of more than a dozen countries. He started in the Cayman Islands, hopped in and out of Cuba and Jamaica, picked up a phony passport in Venezuela, and touched based in Colombia with friends of the drug dealer he had met in the federal prison in Loretta. He lived for a while in Barranquilla, a beautiful seaside city in Colombia, and also visited Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali. A Colombian girlfriend was one of several beautiful women he spent time with while on the run.
His routine was similar no matter the country. He spoke passable Spanish, which he had picked up on the streets and through his dealings in the drug underworld. He had learned Albanian at home and would eventually pick up a little Italian and more than a little Portuguese while on the run. In big cities like Paris or Rome, if he was just passing through, he would be a tourist and blend in, staying at a good hotel and checking out the sights. If he decided to stay for several weeks, he would seek out a less traveled area of the city, a place a little rough around the edges.
He would work out in gyms, boxing and exercising. He would jog. Partly it was to stay in shape, partly it was to stay alert, to keep his mind and body fresh. He took precautions, but he also realized that he enjoyed traveling. He liked going to new places, speaking different languages, sampling foods, and soaking up the culture. He was living day to day, week to week.
“I decided to enjoy myself,” he said. “I knew I could be arrested at any time. I was cautious, but I wasn’t going to stop living.”
Establishing contacts in the local underworld helped make that possible. So did the large amounts of cash he readily spent.
“I’d go to the bars or strips clubs and meet the girls,” he said. “Strippers and prostitutes are great sources of information. And they’re usually fun to be around. I had money so that wasn’t a problem. And from them I’d get an idea of what was going on, who was running things and how I could maneuver.”
In most countries he stuck to the same routine. But in Albania jogging created a problem.
“One of the mob bosses there told me I was crazy,” Alite said. “He said it was too dangerous to go out jogging on my own. So he’d send a carload of his guys to follow me whenever I went out for run. They thought I was nuts.
“Any time I went into a country where I intended to stay for a while, I would hire a driver who spoke English. We usually became friends.”
In Cuba, he hired a guy named Gustavo to drive him around. Gustavo introduced him to his family and helped him find an apartment. At one point Gustavo’s mother offered to marry Alite so that he could stay in the country and perhaps become a citizen. He lived in Miramar, a Havana neighborhood of old stately buildings and modern hotels. He loved it. The climate was great and so were the people. It was like being back in the 1950s. The pace of life was slower and all these old, vintage American cars were on the streets. Except they weren’t vintage, they were transportation. He enjoyed walking around the city. Once he stumbled into a plaza where a crowd had gathered and armed soldiers were posted on every corner. A few minutes later, Fidel Castro arrived and proceeded to give one of his classic speeches. Alite couldn’t understand it all, but it was clear that Fidel was still touting the communist line as the salvation of the country.
Alite went in and out of Cuba several times. Whenever he got the sense that Interpol might be on his tail, he would head for Havana. It was his way of washing the slate clean, erasing his trail. There was no way for Interpol to track him there. Then, after a few weeks or a month or more, he would head back out. Once he flew out of Havana to Rome. He had been dating a woman named Keenya in Havana and she had gotten residency in Italy. She invited him to visit her there. From Italy he would bounce over to Albania. He made a stop in Greece, then headed to France and Spain. Claudia visited once and they traveled from Paris to Amsterdam and back.
In Barcelona, Spain, he met four young girls from Venezuela who invited him to share the apartment in which they were living. They knew the city and its nightlife. It was perfect. And it turned out to be serendipitous.
“They wanted to take me to this club on the beach called Baja,” he said. “We went there one night. The guy that owned it was Albanian. His name was Mojah and he had all these big Bulgarian bodyguards around. I realized right away this guy was into more than just a nightclub. Most of these guys were drug dealers. We started talking. I don’t speak Albanian that well, but I can get by.”
In typical fashion, the conversation drifted toward who do you know that I might know. George the Albanian’s name came up. Not only did Mojah know him, he told Alite, but in fact, “I got a surprise for you.”
He took him to an upstairs bar at the club. At the bar sat a somewhat familiar figure wearing a long, black leather coat. This was at the beach in the summer. Alite shook his head as he recognized the character.
“It was Benny, George’s brother,” Alite said. “Benny told me he had partners in Spain and Italy and they’re moving drugs. I think Mojah was part of the business, too.”
That night they discussed old times and new opportunities. Benny and Mojah had their eyes on a score, a big gambler, a strapping, six-foot-five Scandinavian named Klaus who was dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars at the local casino. They wanted to rob him and asked Alite to get involved.
“I said I had my own problems,” he said. “I didn’t need another headache.”
Alite passed on the robbery. About a week later he met a woman out walking her dog. They became friends. She worked in the travel industry and asked Alite if he would walk her dog during the day while she was at work. He happily jumped at the chance. It was a way to move around and blend in. Once he got to know her, Alite explained his situation. He was on the run and was looking to obtain another passport or two. The woman’s partner had a contact in t
he government in Senegal. He might be able to help.
Alite’s two visits to Dakar, the capital of that West African country, were the only times while he was on the run that he felt unsure of himself, he said.
“I was one of the few white people there,” he said. “They hate Americans. And when that horn sounds at noon, they all get down on their knees and start praying. I could disappear there and nobody would ever know what had happened to me.”
Money, however, provided a security blanket. He arranged to pay for two phony passports that were processed through an immigration office after hours. On a second trip back, using the same contacts, he got four more. Total cost was about twenty grand, big money in Senegal.
“These were good passports,” he said. “The one I got in Venezuela was junk. It might work in some third-world countries, but I was afraid to use it. These were legitimate.”
He pasted different photos of himself, different hairstyles and colors, onto the passports. He sometimes struggled to remember the name and birth date on the document that he was using, but he was seldom challenged.
“Especially in South American countries,” he said. “Either they were too lazy or they didn’t have the technology or they didn’t care. Traveling on a train in Europe was when I was most concerned. They would collect the passports. I also worried about traveling with more than one. If they searched my luggage and found a bunch of passports, it would be a problem.”
Alite would periodically touch base with people at home, trying to keep abreast of what was happening. Ronnie Trucchio had been indicted on murder and robbery charges in Fort Lauderdale in December 2003, about nine months after Alite took off. That wasn’t the case that Alite was expecting, but it confirmed that the feds were all over the Gambino operations in Florida. Junior was still in prison, but there were some strange rumblings about him reaching out to the government. If that were true, it would be a final and fitting conclusion to the Gotti legacy. And Johnny Casasanto, the Philadelphia mobster who had befriended Alite and who had later hooked up with Gotti when they both were in Ray Brook, was dead.
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