Alite was greeted by a warden and several guards who stripped him and administered a beating. He was then taken to the hole, solitary confinement, where he remained for several days. But Santana and the Red Command also had influence at Bangu and within forty-eight hours a guard had smuggled him a cell phone. Desperate calls followed and bribes were paid. To the warden’s surprise, an order came down within two weeks transferring the “gringo” to Campo Grande, a prison camp in Mato Grosso do Sul, a state in the southwest corner of Brazil on the border with Paraguay. Campo Grande was like the minimum security prison in Allenwood, but with better weather. The inmates, for the most part, were wealthy and politically connected. It was confinement, but with less brutality and not as much stench. The warden was happy to take Alite’s cash.
“Marco made most of the payments,” Alite said of his friend on the outside. “It cost forty thousand dollars to get me into Campo Grande. We paid another ten thousand for a private cell on the third floor and ten thousand more to have a hole cut in the wall and an air-conditioning unit installed.”
Alite also paid a thousand dollars for a conjugal visit with his girlfriend Rose.
“It wasn’t a bad place, but I didn’t intend to stay,” he said. “The air conditioner was installed because I wanted a hole in the wall. I was planning on going out that way. The idea was to get into Paraguay and then make my way to Venezuela. I was depending on Marco and the money he was holding.”
But Marco apparently decided his friendship wasn’t as valuable as the cash. After helping pave Alite’s way to Campo Grande, he effectively disappeared along with the rest of Alite’s money.
“I had no one else I could trust,” he said. “I didn’t want to put Rose in that position. Marco was loyal almost to the end. But when we didn’t win the extradition battles in court I think he just figured I’d be sent back to the States and he could pocket the money.”
Before Alite could make a break from Campo Grande, the courts in Brazil approved the extradition request of the U.S. Justice Department. On December 24, 2006, John Alite was flown back to Tampa to face the same charges that had resulted in Ronnie Trucchio’s conviction and eventual sentence of life in prison.
The trip back to Tampa was in a private jet, a Gulfstream, which Alite figured was at the service of either Interpol or the Justice Department. Once in Florida, he was informed that the U.S. Attorney’s Office there was prepared to move forward with a trial that could result in life in prison or the death sentence.
Alite, in one of several angry discussions with the lawyer his family had hired, lashed out at the attorney and the U.S. government. He said he had asked the lawyer to negotiate a deal with the prosecutors in New York. He was willing to plead out and accept a twenty-two-year sentence. But he was not going to cooperate.
Alite, based on what he had been told by his Brazilian lawyer, thought the most time he could face was thirty years. That was the maximum sentence for his charges had they been brought under Brazilian law and his understanding was that if Brazil agreed to his extradition, which it had done, he could only be sentenced to that maximum penalty. He figured twenty-two years was a strong negotiating point if thirty was the max. But he said he doesn’t believe his lawyer ever made the call to New York.
Over the next several weeks, as he was transported from one holding facility to another around the state of Florida, Alite came to realize that “everybody was out to fuck me.” What’s more, he quickly sized up his situation and saw that Tampa and New York were fighting over who had the rights to the case.
It was classic organized crime versus disorganized law enforcement. And it was one of the reasons, he believes, that Junior Gotti ultimately was able to walk away. The case, in Alite’s mind, should have been handled by New York, not Tampa. He said he was subsequently told that Tampa had reneged on an agreement to allow New York to take the case if and when Alite was extradited.
The friction between the two jurisdictions continued over the next two years.
Shortly after being brought back, Alite began to get access to the case documents and quickly realized that dozens of associates had given him up. Years later he would compile a list of those who cooperated against him. There were fifty-three names on two handwritten pages.
He wondered what he was doing and why. Meanwhile, Tampa authorities tried to keep him off balance.
“They kept moving me around,” Alite said, “giving me the diesel treatment [a prison expression used to describe a technique in which an inmate is shuttled from one facility to another, usually in an attempt to unsettle him or make him uncomfortable; the mode of transport is a bus that runs on diesel fuel]. Every three days I’m moved. I can’t settle in anywhere. I’ve got nothing to read. And I can’t find out what’s going on.”
A month into the treatment, he was transported to a lockup in Hillsborough. In the cell block was a leader of the Disciples, a Chicago street gang.
“He was a smart guy, very well-spoken,” Alite said. “And he told me I didn’t get it.”
The Chicago gangster had heard of Alite and knew some of his story. The prison grapevine in Florida had broadcast Alite’s arrival and followed up with news about who he was and what he had done.
“You’re still alive because you were smart and were able to stay ten steps ahead of the guys you were dealing with,” he told Alite. “But the game has changed. Everybody’s deserted you. They’re gonna be laughing while you sit in prison for the rest of your life. You better get with it.”
The next day, Alite said, he called his new lawyer, Caroline Tesche, and told her to make a deal. He was ready to talk. Tesche, who later was appointed a judge, set the process in place. When she was appointed to the bench, Timothy Fitzgerald, another Tampa defense attorney, took over the case.
“They were both good to me,” Alite said of Tesche and Fitzgerald. “I owe them a lot.”
In March 2007 Alite met with federal authorities at the first of what would be dozens of debriefings. This was the initial proffer session where he and his attorney laid out what he would bring to the witness stand. It was a complete package that detailed everything he had been involved in for the Gambino crime family beginning in 1983. The “highlights” included the drug trafficking and the murders of George Grosso and John Gebert.
The meetings continued as Alite was placed in a witness security unit of a local holding facility. He would be brought to meetings and asked questions by prosecutors from Tampa and, eventually, from New York. The alliance between the two jurisdictions seemed fragile at best, and on more than one occasion, Alite said, hostilities broke out. In one of those meetings, an FBI agent from New York almost got into a fight with an agent from Tampa.
“They had to be separated,” Alite said.
At several others, the New York team stayed in one room and the Tampa team stayed in another. Notes were passed back and forth, he said, with each posing different questions he was supposed to answer. Alite frankly admits he was more comfortable with the New York group and also acknowledges that he knew he had a better chance at a decent sentence if his case were moved there. But it was not to be.
Alite entered his guilty plea in federal court in Tampa on January 16, 2008. He was facing a potential life sentence. His cooperation would be noted at sentencing, authorities told the judge in the case, but no promises had been made.
On July 24, 2008, an indictment was handed up under seal charging John A. Gotti with racketeering, drug dealing, and murder. He was identified as a leader of the Gambino crime family. The indictment charged that at different times Gotti was part of a “ruling panel” that ran the organization for his jailed father and he was the crime family’s “defacto boss.”
Gotti was arrested on August 5, 2008, and brought to Tampa, where he was arraigned and ordered held without bail. Unlike Alite, he was eventually able to have the case moved to New York, where a dozen other wiseguys, including Charles Carneglia, had been indicted in a separate racketeering case based on info
rmation Alite had provided.
Everyone in the Carneglia case except Charles pleaded out. Both he and Junior Gotti decided to square off against the feds and their star witness in federal court in Brooklyn. The cases were set to begin in 2009.
Alite said he was “a little nervous” when he first testified against Carneglia but that he “couldn’t wait” to get on the stand in the Gotti case. Carneglia was convicted and is currently doing life. But in retrospect that was just a preliminary on the fight card.
Alite versus Gotti was the main event.
CHAPTER 20
The trial, which began with jury selection on September 14, 2009, was part criminal justice, part Jerry Springer. And the media was all over it.
The setting was the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan. U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel presided. The prosecution team was made up of Assistant U.S. Attorneys Elie Honig and Steven Kwok from the Southern District of New York, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Trezevant from the Tampa office, and FBI Agent Ted Otto, who was based in New York and who, much to the chagrin of his FBI counterparts in Florida, correctly was considered the lead investigator in the case.
The defense was headed by Charles F. Carnesi, who was assisted by John C. Meringolo.
After an anonymous jury panel had been chosen, opening statements by the prosecution and defense were delivered on September 21. Eight days later, after testimony from law enforcement witnesses and several other mob cooperators, Alite took the stand. He was brought into court dressed in a gray prison jumpsuit and wearing prison-issue sneakers. He wanted to appear in street clothes—a shirt and slacks, maybe a sport coat or a sweater—but the prosecutors said that wasn’t a good idea. They wanted to convey to the jury that Alite was a prisoner, that he was in custody, that he wasn’t getting some sweetheart deal for his cooperation.
Alite thought jurors came away with a different impression.
“They thought I was an animal,” he said.
It was just another in a long line of disagreements he had with the authorities as the case moved toward trial. Sometimes, during pre-trial debriefing sessions, he would shout and scream. At other times he would just roll his eyes or shake his head. From Alite’s perspective, the prosecutors had locked themselves into versions of events provided by cooperating witnesses who had come on board before Alite agreed to testify. In fact, he says he felt he had to “tailor” his story to fit theirs so that what went before the jury was consistent. As a result, Alite believes, the truth sometimes got lost in the telling. In this instance, he just wanted to get on the stand, so he accepted their argument that prison garb was the way to go.
Junior, on the other hand, appeared in court each day prepped out for the jury. On most days he’d be in a business suit, shirt, and tie. Other times it was a sport jacket, shirt, tie, and slacks. His stylish glasses added to the look. He was almost professorial. It was all part of the pitch to the jury that he wasn’t a gangster anymore, that he had left the mob in 1999, and that while, yes, he had done some bad things, he had already paid a price with a seventy-seven-month prison sentence. He had broken with his father and wasn’t part of the Gambino organization anymore. His lawyer would argue that his name was still a lighting rod that attracted both federal prosecutors looking for a big notch in their guns as well as cooperating witnesses who saw testifying against Gotti as a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Carnesi underlined all of that with a brief but pointed opening statement depicting his client’s break with La Cosa Nostra.
“As a young man he looked at his father and saw some charisma and power and was seduced by a certain type of personality,” Carnesi said. “In the mid-1990s that seduction lost its attraction to him because in the mid-1990s he was starting to grow into a man himself and he started to understand what this was really all about. And even though he was at the very top of that organization, he wanted out.
“Why?” the lawyer asked rhetorically. “Because, you will learn, it was an organization that was based on treachery. It was an organization where more often than not, your best friend suddenly became a threat to you. It was an organization where in fact there was no true loyalty.”
John A. Gotti, the defense attorney said, finally saw life in the mob for what it was. And he decided he had had enough.
Carnesi’s description of mob life may have been the only thing on which he and Alite agreed. The defense, of course, was portraying Alite and nearly a dozen other cooperating witnesses as the ones who were treacherous. Alite in particular fit the description of the “best friend” who had turned on Junior Gotti, according to the defense’s version of the story.
It was, from where Alite was sitting, yet another example of Junior Gotti taking some facts and spinning them to his advantage. The mob, especially the Gambino organization, was the treacherous viper pit described by Carnesi. But it had become that because of Gotti and his father and his uncles. They made millions as a result and Junior was still living off that money and enjoying his position as a mob leader. That was what Alite believed. Convincing a jury would be one of the keys to winning the case.
Carnesi’s comments came after Honig had blistered Gotti in his introductory address. The federal prosecutor outlined the three counts that formed the case and provided details about dozens of the allegations, including the gutting of Danny Silva and Gotti’s return to the murder scene to mock the dying man as he bled out. While the Danny Silva stabbing at the Silver Fox wasn’t a specific charge, it was included as one of the criminal acts in the broad RICO conspiracy count that topped the indictment. The drug dealing, sports betting, extortion, and the murders of Louie DiBono, George Grosso, and Bruce Gotterup were also part of that sweeping charge. Two other counts focused specifically on the drug-related murders of Grosso and Gotterup. Both murders, the indictment alleged, had been ordered by John A. Gotti. Honig painted a picture of Gotti as a “vicious and violent street criminal” who rose to the top of the Gambino crime family.
Honig also talked about the witnesses, including Alite, who would testify for the government. They were part of Gotti’s organization and they were criminals, he said. The issue with the witnesses, he told the jury, was credibility.
“I will tell you right up front, you are going to hear things about these cooperating witnesses that you don’t like,” the prosecutor said. “And you shouldn’t like. They are criminals. That is why the defendant had them around him in the first place. You will be called on to decide not whether these cooperating witnesses are likeable, but whether they are believable.”
The openings set the stage for what followed, at least what followed in the courtroom. But there was another stage, the media stage, on which the trial also played out. Headlines trumpeted the most sensational testimony on any given day and spectators and family members were often sought out for comment.
Alite spent seven days on the stand, first providing his story under questioning from Trezevant, whose involvement in the trial was part of the compromise worked out between the two warring federal jurisdictions. Everyone wanted a piece of the action and what they anticipated would be their share of the glory. Trezevant questioned Alite for the better part of five days. Then Alite spent parts of two more verbally sparring with Carnesi, Junior’s defense attorney.
Gotti’s mother, Victoria, was a regular in the courtroom every day. Other family members, including his sister, Vicky, were frequent spectators.
After Alite testified that he had had “feelings” for Vicky and said she had had the same for him, she told reporters, “The only feelings I have for John Alite were that I despised him.” Alite continues to take the high road on the Vicky issue. He says that both he and she know what really happened and that it doesn’t really matter what anyone else thinks or says. He said he opted not to go into detail about the Fatal Attraction scenario that he says is the most accurate description of their relationship. Vicky vehemently denies having any sort of relationship with Alite, fatal or otherwise.
While
Vicky Gotti was clearly upset over Alite’s testimony and publicly denied his allegations, she nevertheless saw a way to capitalize on the high-profile case. Her memoir, This Family of Mine, was published on September 29, 2009, and was in all the city’s bookstores as the headlines screamed about the trial.
Alite’s stories about corrupt cops also brought angry responses even before he got on the stand. His allegations had surfaced in an FBI report that made its way to reporters prior to the start of the trial. Among other things, Alite alleged two high-profile police officers, Joe Coffey and Bo Dietl, had at different times provided Gotti Sr. or members of his crew with tips and information. The two retired celebrity law enforcement veterans blasted away at Alite, denying the allegations. Coffey, who was considered one of the city’s top mob busters, called it “bullshit.” Dietl said Alite was a “fucking liar” and “a punk” and said he wanted to take the stand to denounce him.
Every day, it seemed, there were new revelations and accompanying headlines. When Alite testified about all the money he said he and Gotti had earned and about the lifestyle it allowed him to live, the New York Post blared: GOODFELLA LIVED LARGE. The story went on to detail Alite’s claim that he had earned between $50 million and $75 million for the Gambino organization; that about $10 million had gone into his own pocket and that another $6 million or $7 million more went to Junior Gotti. The cash, Alite said, allowed him to buy fancy cars, expensive Brioni suits, Bruno Magli shoes, and Rolex watches.
The London Observer checked in with a story a few days later that included this explanatory subhead: AMERICA IS GRIPPED BY A REAL-LIFE SOPRANOS TALE OF BRUTAL MURDERS AND HIGH LIVING. The piece went on to describe the case as “the Mafia trial to end all Mafia trials.”
Alite knew about the buzz the case was creating, but he tried to stay focused. He didn’t really care about the headlines. What mattered, he knew, was what the jury thought. He viewed taking the stand as his opportunity to publicly “out” Junior Gotti for the punk and lowlife that he was. It was his chance to put the lie to the Gotti myth. And to do that, he had to convince the jury that he was telling the truth.
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