Gambino enforcer turned rat rips John Gotti Jr in new book
Not long after John Gotti went to prison in 1992, Gambino family hit man and enforcer John Alite plotted to murder his son. John Gotti Jr. survived, but Alite still seems to want him dead.
“Gotti’s Rules: The Story of John Alite, Junior Gotti, and the Demise of the American Mafia,” by George Anastasia, is Alite’s final revenge against Junior, an attempt to assassinate him in words. Spilling family secrets to Anastasia is all Alite’s got left. He already tried to put Junior behind bars.
In 2009, Alite took the stand in the feds’ last attempt to nail Junior, this time on racketeering and murder conspiracy charges. Like the three trials that preceded it, this one ended with a hung jury.
But Alite, who has served time for a slew of crimes from two murders, eight shootings, home invasions and armed robberies, isn’t done with Junior. In his book, Gotti comes across not just as a vicious criminal but as a coward who never really got how being a mobster worked.
From the first, Gotti was never a stand-up guy. Alite, a small-time drug dealer from Woodside, worked hard to insinuate himself into Junior’s circle in 1984. That’s where the big-time money was. But, according to the book, he discovered Junior would turn and run when things got mean on the streets, vanishing from any operation at the sound of a siren.
Alite claims that Gotti boasted to him about stabbing “a kid,” Danny Silva, to death in a barroom brawl in 1983. “I put him down,” is how Gotti allegedly put it. Gotti also reportedly talked about how friends of his father “helped” a guy name John Cennamo commit suicide. Cennamo, the sole witness to finger Junior as the killer, was found hanging from a tree in St. Albans.
Mugshots of John Gotti Jr. (l.) and John Alite.
And Junior worried that he didn’t get credit for killing Silva when a bribed cop falsely named another man as a suspect in the police report, according to Alite.
“How am I ever going to earn respect if my father hides my actions?” Alite says Junior asked him.
The younger Gotti was always a figure of derisive fun to other gangsters, not that any of them would admit to sneeringly calling him “Urkel” for showing up in black sweatpants pulled up to his ribs or wearing white socks and black pants.
Alite got a laugh, too, but Junior was his partner and the money from their alleged operations was huge — sports betting, loan sharking, extortion and, of course, drugs. By the late ’80s, Alite estimates, the two grossed a million dollars a month running cocaine in Queens, parts of Brooklyn and Long Island.
Gotti Sr.’s official policy on drugs was that dealing was punishable by death even while making millions in kickbacks from the business on the down-low. Alite’s first murder for the Gambinos was George Grosso, a dealer who let it be known “I work for John Gotti.”
Carmine Agnello, seen in 2000 court appearance, pistol-whipped John Alite.
Junior, Alite says, wanted him dead and the body left “out on the street so people will know what you did.” Alite put three bullets into Grosso’s head on a ride in December 1988. The body was dumped in a bush off the Grand Central Parkway.
Gotti demanded to be taken by the crime scene as the body was being carried out. “He don’t look good,” Gotti supposedly laughed. Alite claims that Junior was in the habit of circling back on crime scenes as if to get a secondhand high from something he had ordered up.
Sometimes Gotti ordered hits that were just personal vendettas. He wanted a neighborhood punk who was mouthing off about his wife, Kim, dead. When the 20-year-old was captured and bound to a chair, Alite claims that Gotti handed him a gun and said “kill him.” Instead, Alite says he whispered a promise to the man that he was going send him to the hospital with a beating but let him survive. That’s how it went down.
Alite’s own estimation is that, as Gotti’s enforcer, he “shot between thirty and forty guys, that he piped or baseball-batted a hundred more.” Anastasia writes that Alite doesn’t know how many died but admitted to being involved in six homicides.
“There were probably more,” Anastasia writes.
John Alite's new book once again slams nemesis John Gotti Jr.
Those were the good old days.
While it seems that Alite never had a lot of respect for Gotti, fissures developed around his “fatal attraction scenario” with Victoria Gotti. She has publicly and scornfully denied any involvement with Alite, but he says it was very much otherwise.
Alite tells the story that Vicky confessed to him that her then-boyfriend, Carmine Agnello, was beating her. She couldn’t go to her father because “they’d kill him.” Alite claims he told Agnello “not to touch her again.”
Not long afterward, Gotti Sr. ordered him to accompany Victoria when she picked up her wedding dress; then he was told he was in the wedding party. Alite says he was trying to control his feelings for Victoria, very aware she was the boss’ daughter, but that she came on to him at the reception.
According to Alite, his “relationship with Vicky continued after her marriage and eventually led to a confrontation with Agnello.”
John Gotti was a tough guy, but his son was not, Alite claims.
Alite told a jury that he was sitting in a club in Queens when Agnello and four other armed guys walked in. Agnello got close to Alite and whispered, “We got a problem.” The two took it outside, where “Carmine takes a swing a me, hits me in the head with his gun.”
Alite couldn’t shoot, or even hurt, Agnello in return. He was a Gotti family member and a made man, an honor Alite couldn’t aspire to since he was Albanian.
By then Junior had pulled up in a car with Victoria in the passenger seat. Alite says he wanted permission to murder Agnello.
“You ain’t touching him,” Junior supposedly said, stepping between the two.
Alite finally understood. “I was an outsider ... not blood. I was just another guy he used to hurt people and make money.”
Alite said he had feelings for Victoria Gotti, but couldn't act on them.
It was the beginning of a long ending.
After Gotti Sr.’s conviction, Junior was made boss of the family, though he ruled under the advisement of a commission of made members. Soon enough, a plot formed to kill Junior, his uncle Pete and Agnello.
Alite was approached to make the hit on Junior, or “the half-Jew” as he was called by his haters. Junior’s mother, Victoria, was a Russian Jew.
Alite decided he was good for it, that he’d had it with the entitled, bumbling son who had no finesse as a gangster. But Gotti was smart enough to buy off the conspirators. Out in the cold, Alite says he asked to be transferred to the Lucchese family but was refused.
Not that much later, the FBI approached Alite with the information that he had been targeted. The agents wouldn’t disclose who was behind the proposed hit, but Alite had a pretty good idea.
'Gotti’s Rules: The Story of John Alite, Junior Gotti, and the Demise of the American Mafia,' by George Anastasia.
He says he even met up with Gotti at Aqueduct Racetrack to accuse him — where Junior denied it but hilariously asked Alite if he wanted to go for a ride upstate with he and Agnello.
It was an offer that Alite had no trouble refusing.
Between 1996 and 2014, Alite spent 14 years in prison, some of it in Brazil. Facing multiple federal indictments for crimes in both Florida and New York, he went on the lam. Brought back under extradition, facing life in prison, Alite turned state’s witness.
Enforcer Charles Carneglia was convicted of four murders, partly on Alite’s word. But Gotti, facing charges stemming from a drug operation and the murder of two men, walked. During the trial, Alite claims that Gotti had smirked at him and mouthed the words, “We’re going to kill you.” That led to an open courtroom confrontation.
Alite had his day in court facing Gotti down, but lost to a hung jury. Released from prison in 2012, he now claims to be a good citizen trying to earn an honest living — a remade man, so to speak.
“Gotti’s Rules,” by George Anastasia, goes on sale Jan. 27.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/mob-enforcer-new-book-rips-john-gotti-jr-article-1.2073451
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