He also used the phone to call friends and have them begin lobbying for him. Through those connections he got messages home to his parents and had them make additional calls. Alite arranged for lawyers to be hired in both Tampa and Rio to begin fighting the extradition order. He also worked on having more cash sent from the States to those he trusted in Brazil. Several of those calls were made to former associates, some of whom would later claim that he threatened them and tried to extort money. Alite said he was just asking for what was his. In most cases, they were holding money he had earned through his drug dealing, gambling, or legitimate business operations. He rolls his eyes at the notion that any threat he might have made while sitting in a prison in Brazil could have been taken seriously. Alite didn’t know if he was ever going to be back on the streets. Any threat he made was a hollow one, a desperate attempt to get money in order to survive. He also instructed his parents to sell his properties in New Jersey and New York in order to generate more cash.
Alite and Santana became good friends, or at least as good friends as two could become under the circumstances. They talked about their backgrounds. Santana, like Alite, had been an athlete. And they talked about their families. Santana’s ten-year-old son had broken his leg playing soccer and it was causing the guard some concern. It was an ugly break and an operation was required to set the bone properly. He worried that his son would wind up crippled. Medical services in public hospitals weren’t the best, he explained. Alite wasn’t sure if his new friend was looking for help or merely venting about the problem. Within days, after a few phone calls, Alite arranged for a ten-thousand-dollar payment to a private hospital where the boy’s leg was properly set.
Santana couldn’t thank Alite enough. But he found a way. On two different occasions, the soft-spoken prison guard would save Alite’s life.
Around this time, Alite also befriended an inmate named Marco, who had been in the same cell bock. Marco spoke English. He had lived for a time in the Boston area, where he still had family. He was about to be released, but he had problems with some of the guards, who saw him as easy prey.
“He was always walking around reading the Bible,” Alite said of Marco. “One day I walked into our cell and saw that two guards had him bent over a bed. They were going to rape him. I chased them away. From that point on, he was my friend.”
Once he was released from prison, Marco became one of Alite’s go-to guys on the streets. Having few alternatives, Alite decided to trust him and used him as a conduit for the cash that was coming down from New York and Tampa. Marco hired a top extradition attorney and served almost as a paralegal as the lawyer fought the issue through the Brazilian courts. He also, on Alite’s orders, arranged to buy a car and a condo for Rose, Alite’s Brazilian girlfriend.
With his cell phone access, Alite was also calling former underworld associates and lawyers, including the lawyer for Ronnie Trucchio, who was preparing for the case in Tampa. Alite had been severed from the trial because he was in Brazil. Trucchio was being represented by Joseph Corozzo, the son of mobster JoJo Corozzo.
At that point, Alite was trying to help Ronnie One-Arm and was offering Corozzo advice and information that might work in the defense against the charges. During the conversation, Alite asked Corozzo if he had been in touch with Junior Gotti, who also might have some information that would help.
“We’re not sure,” Alite said Corozzo responded, “but Junior may be cooperating.”
CHAPTER 19
There is a price to be paid for everything that goes on inside a prison in Brazil. The highly successful smuggling operation that Alite and Emerson had set up had not gone unnoticed by other inmates, some of whom were only too happy to inform on them.
Word reached the warden. Some guards were transferred and reprimanded. It wasn’t the smuggling that bothered the warden and his deputy. What bothered them was that the bribes weren’t making their way into their pockets.
In the end, it always came down to money.
In this case Marcello, the errand boy and gofer for Emerson, would pay the price.
“There was no way the warden would go after Emerson, because he was with the Red Command,” Alite said. “And I think he was still uncertain about me.”
Alite realized that all the publicity and the talk about his American mob connections were benefits. His ties to Gotti were once again helping him maintain a position in the underworld, this time the chaotic underworld of Ary Franco.
One afternoon, two guards and two trustees came for Marcello. They told him to strip naked, then they marched him off to a dry cell in the bowels of the prison. There he was brutally beaten; beaten so badly, in fact, that he had to be hospitalized. The word that Alite got from Santana was that Marcello was in critical condition. Alite and Emerson agreed that they had to respond. On the street, Alite’s reaction would have been simple and direct. The warden or his trustees would have been beaten or shot. Violence for violence. But that wasn’t an option in the prison. Alite came up with a better idea. The word went out from cell block to cell block. Everyone was to stop buying products in the warden’s cantina. The warden would feel the beating of Marcello in his wallet. There was no better place to hit him.
That upped the ante considerably. The warden was enraged. And he decided, Mafioso or not, that Alite would be the next inmate taken out for some attitude adjustment. Santana was able to warn Alite in advance. Emerson came up with the idea of the knife wrapped in rags and greased with oil that was inserted in Alite’s rectum.
Bomba, the burly trustee, turned out to be the warden’s proxy in this now-escalating battle. Like Marcello, he was hospitalized in critical condition after Alite sliced him up. The knife fight led to an internal investigation. Guards loyal to the warden showed up at Alite’s cell within the hour looking for the knife. They planned to take Alite out to a place where he would be held accountable. But another contingent of guards, sent by Santana, also jammed into the cell and began to ask pointed questions.
Why was Alite taken to a dry cell to begin with?
Who had authorized it?
Why was a trustee permitted in that cell?
Who started the fight? Who had a knife? Where is the knife? Wasn’t the prisoner naked?
None of the guards sent by the warden could answer those questions and it quickly became obvious that a real investigation, which might involve the American consulate since an American inmate was one of the protagonists, would create more problems than it would solve. So the assault on the trustee Bomba was quietly ignored. Alite, as punishment, was transferred to another cell block. But within three weeks he was back with Emerson. Bribes to one of the guards who maintained the inmate rosters allowed Alite to be listed as an inmate in one section of the prison while in fact he was back in the cell block where he had started. By the time he returned, there were three more foreign prisoners in the unit: Leonardo, an Argentine with money; Camilo, a wealthy Portuguese from a prominent family; and Klaus, a tall, blond-haired international drug dealer who looked like a Viking.
Klaus’s origin was Denmark. He looked familiar to Alite. All three of the foreigners were soon part of the inner circle. All were using money to bribe guards and improve their living conditions. Now food was coming in for almost every evening meal. There was also beer, and wine, and hard liquor. Videocassettes and cassette players became part of the cell block entertainment, and on occasion, when things lined up right, some friendly guards would smuggle a few prostitutes into the unit for a party. Their fee, of course, included cash and some time alone with the ladies.
The group of inmates was making the best of a bad situation, but the talk was constantly about how to get out. Bribing officials in the court and justice departments was one option that was discussed. Klaus and Camilo were able to make some contacts on the outside and “negotiations” were under way. The foreigners, Alite, Klaus, Camilo, and Leonardo, were each willing to pay $500,000 for what would amount to an authorized escape. Prison and judicial
officials at the highest level would provide the phony paperwork that would allow each man to walk out of prison. After that, they’d be on their own. The problem was the officials were asking for $750,000 per prisoner.
So it wasn’t a question of if an escape could be arranged but rather a matter of price.
Alite got to know all three of the new inmates, but hit it off best with Klaus. There was something about him. Then one visiting day it hit him. Klaus had said his sister and his business partner were coming to see him. Alite recognized them immediately. She was the woman with the dog in Barcelona and he was the person who helped make the contact in Senegal for his passports. With that, he also remembered the first time he had seen Klaus. Klaus was the tall, blond gambler in the Spanish casino that Mojah and Benny, George the Albanian’s brother, wanted to rob.
“I couldn’t believe the two of us ended up in the same prison,” Alite said.
Ary Franco, despite the benefits that bribes could provide, remained a volatile environment. The warden or deputy warden would order periodic “shakedowns.” Guards wearing masks and carrying rifles or machine guns would come through the cell blocks, order all of the inmates to strip naked, and them march them out into the yard.
“They’d spend hours searching and turning the cells upside down,” Alite said. “And while that was going on, we had to sit in the yard, our heads down, and wait. It could be ninety degrees or it could be pouring rain. We had to stay there. Anyone who lifted his head up would get cracked. Sometimes it would begin in the morning and wouldn’t end till it was dark. If you had to shit or piss, you did it right there. Sometimes instead of the yard, they would take all of us to a room, like a warehouse. There’d be over a thousand inmates. They covered the windows, so it was pitch black and we’d have to just stand in line. Same thing. It would be hours and guys would be relieving themselves right where they stood.”
Alite said his Brazilian lawyer would visit occasionally and one time he was accompanied by a Florida attorney who had been hired by Alite’s family.
“They told me they were afraid to come into the prison,” Alite said. “They said they didn’t like it there. I say, ‘Try living here.’”
Jealousy and greed, not unlike what Alite had seen around the Gottis, was also part of this new underworld. A “riot” in another section of the prison ended with the warden being shot and killed. Alite and Emerson later learned that the deputy warden had set it all up and that the shooting was actually a hit carried out on the deputy’s orders. He apparently wanted to move up the ladder. A new warden, a former military officer, lasted just a few months. He was gunned down on the street while walking with two body guards and his young daughter. Word again came that the deputy warden, who now was placed in charge of the prison, had ordered and paid for the assassination.
The first order of business for the deputy warden, now the top dog, was to bring the foreigners in line. Guards appeared at their cell and ordered a strip search. When they found nothing, one of them threw a bag of cocaine on Camilo’s bed and another guard “discovered” the contraband. As they moved to take Camilo into custody, Alite jumped in front and punched the guard. In return, he took a rifle butt to the face. Several of his front teeth were shattered. In the fight that followed, he pummeled one of the guards and took the rifle away from another. The guards retreated, but a large contingent came back a short time later.
Emerson “negotiated” a settlement, agreeing to turn over the rifle in exchange for a promise that no one would be taken out of the cell and punished. The warden’s guards agreed, but after they left, Emerson told Alite that they would be back.
“He’s full of shit,” he said of the guard who had promised there would be no retribution.
The next day Alite and Camilo were stripped and taken to the dry cell. This time Alite had no knife with which to defend himself, but Santana and another contingent of guards were able to intervene. An uneasy peace was established, but the new warden made it clear: he wanted Alite out of his prison.
The extradition process was continuing. Alite was buoyed when his local attorney won a first round in the Brazilian courts, but was stunned to learn that that same court, in an unusual—his lawyer said unprecedented—move, had agreed to reconsider the issue when a superseding indictment was handed up in Tampa.
The case in Florida was a hybrid that made little sense. The alleged racketeering conspiracy included robberies and extortions in the Tampa area, allegations, for example, that Alite and his associates had used threats and force to take over a valet parking business that provided services for restaurants, hospitals, and strip clubs. But the case also detailed murders and attempted murders in New York and robberies in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania carried out by a Gambino crime family crew controlled by Ronnie Trucchio and Alite.
Trucchio and three codefendants went on trial in October 2006. Alite, who was still grappling with his own extradition issues, writing letters to the American consulate complaining about the corrupt prison system and planning an escape if the extradition was upheld, followed the trial as best he could from afar. He was in cell phone contact with someone at least once a week, sometimes more often. He spoke with Trucchio’s lawyer, Joseph Corozzo, as the trial drew closer. Alite told Corozzo that he should use a defense that implied that Alite was responsible. But he never expected what happened. Trucchio got permission to make his own opening statement to the jury because Corozzo was tied up in a case in New York. He threw everything on Alite, blaming him for the shakedowns, the robberies, the murders and assaults. All were carried out or orchestrated by the missing defendant, he told the jury.
“I have no idea why I’m here,” Trucchio said.
Making his own opening statement was a clever way for Ronnie One-Arm to speak directly to the jury without facing the rigors of cross-examination that would come if he testified in his own defense. Alite figured the opening statement had been cleared by Joseph Corozzo and, by extension, had been run past both JoJo and Nicky Corozzo in New York. Trucchio’s comments, looked at from where Alite was sitting, were tantamount to cooperating. He was putting all of the crimes on Alite.
That it didn’t work with the jury was of little consequence.
Borrowing a page from Gotti Sr.’s media handbook, Alite decided to fight back. He called a reporter at the Tampa Bay Times who was covering the trial. She published an exclusive interview with Alite on November 2, 2006. Alite would later acknowledge from the witness stand that he lied repeatedly to the reporter. Among other things he was quoted as saying, “I’m not the person they’re making me out to be. . . . Was I friends with John Gotti? Yes. Am I friends now? No.”
But he said he was being truthful when he told her that the extortion charge involving his valet parking company, Prestige Parking, was bogus and built around phony allegations from two business partners who were trying to steal the company from him. In fact, a civil suit filed in federal court in Tampa laid out what Alite said was his claim to ownership and detailed how his partners had conspired to rob him. But Alite was the mobster, not the men he was suing, and Alite believes that played a role in the litigation, which to this day rankles him.
“They robbed me of my company,” he said, “and the government helped them do it.”
He also told the reporter that while he might have shouted and screamed during the dispute over the valet business, he never intended to hurt anyone.
“I’ve got a big mouth,” he said in the article. “When I yell, I yell. But I’m not a violent person.”
That, of course, was a lie. Shootings, beatings with pipes and baseball bats, and stabbings were the way Alite did business. And he would later admit to all of that. But he continues to insist that that was not the way he established and expanded his valet parking operation in Florida.
As 2006 was drawing to a close, Alite was completing his second full year in Brazilian custody. His struggle to survive had shattered his faith in Cosa Nostra. He wanted to believe in the fi
ction that the Mafia was an organization built on honor and loyalty and that he was a part of it. But when he was being honest with himself, he knew that wasn’t true. That, of course, led to more troubling questions. How far would he go and how much would he give up to protect that organization?
Later in the month of November he was abruptly transferred from Ary Franco to Bangu, another federal prison on the outskirts of Rio. Still using his connections with some of the guards, he had a chance to escape during the prison transport.
“They wanted two hundred thousand dollars,” he said. “One of the guards said they were ready to stage a phony ambush and claim that I had escaped. But I had to come up with the money immediately.”
Alite used a cell phone to call Marco, but his friend didn’t answer. Marco was holding more than six hundred thousand dollars of Alite’s money at the time. In a desperate alternative, he asked the guards to drive to his lawyer’s office. One of the guards went inside to explain the situation to the lawyer. The attorney said he could only come up with fifty thousand dollars on short notice, but would write a note for the rest of the cash, which would be available the next day.
“The guards said it was now or never,” Alite said as he talked of his missed opportunity to “escape from hell.” When the cash wasn’t forthcoming, they continued the drive to Bangu, a sprawling penitentiary complex that was considered as bad, if not worse, then Ary Franco.
“Bangu was not supposed to be for foreign prisoners,” he said. “I think I was the first one sent there. The day after I left Ary Franco a riot broke out there [at Ary Franco]. This was at a time when there was all kinds of street violence and retribution. Police were killing innocent kids in the favelas and cops were being shot at on the streets. A journalist we had spoken to was killed after he wrote about the prison conditions and another American, a guy from Washington, D.C., was shot and killed during the riots inside Ary Franco. I had nothing to do with any of that, but they tried to blame me for it. When I got to Bangu, they were waiting.”
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