The extraordinary story of the repentant mobster
After his release from prison, he has collaborated with a journalist on a book that tells the story of his life and that has been received with great interest by the media in New York for details and secrets about the Gambino Family, a reality that most Americans you only know him from movies like “Godfather”.
Alites was the son of a taxi driver, an Albanian immigrant in Queens, New York.
When he was very young, an uncle took him one day to one of the private gambling clubs in the Bronx, where he met Italian-American mobsters and became close friends with John Angelo Gotti. The latter was the son of one of the most notorious mobsters in New York, John J Gotti, the head of the Gambino Family.
The two young men entered the path of crime together and in the 1980s they did a number of actions together that brought them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Alite became a house boy in the Gotti family and became a very important man in the Gambino mafia organization from a young age. However, since he was of Albanian and not Italian origin, he could not officially become one of the mafia bosses.
When in 1992, John J Gotti was imprisoned, he decided that his son would take over the power of the Gambino Family. This greatly strengthened the Albanian who was friends with Gotti Junior.
Junior had been the witness at Alita’s wedding, but the latter had also chosen the wedding day on Valentine’s Day because it was Junior’s birthday.
However, the Albanian from Queens had a weak point. His friend’s sister, Victoria, the daughter of the big boss. The two had a secret love affair but they didn’t dare to make it known because she was married to another mobster, Carmine Agnello, and they didn’t know how the Family might react. Among the mobsters, family honor was very important.
But sometime in the mid-1990s, Alite attacked Victoria’s husband, accusing him of beating his wife. A serious situation was created and peace was achieved by “deporting” Alita away from New York, to Florida.
The love for the daughter of the old boss and the sister of the new boss thus ended the career of the Albanian in the Italian-American mafia.
John Alites’ life is like a movie. He was later arrested in Florida, fled to Brazil, was extradited back to the US, agreed to cooperate against his childhood friend John Angelo Gotti, and has just been released from prison after 10 years.
He now lives in New Jersey and has published a biography where he settles accounts with friends/enemies of his youth.
At the center of ridicule and criticism is his former close friend, Gotti Junior. Alite speaks with a kind of respect for the old Gotti as a master mobster who achieved everything on his own. He became a powerful millionaire even though he was born in a poor family.
Unlike him, the son had neither the intelligence nor the bravery of the father. Alite tells how his friend had the crazy habit of extinguishing cigarettes on his body. He was a man with terrible self-confidence problems.
“He is like Kim Jong-un, a pampered child who benefited from being the son of a powerful father at the expense of his friends,” Alite writes in his book.
He recounts a time when, after a fight in a club in Queens, Junior Gotti pulled out a gun and shot, wounding one of the guys he was fighting with. Alite says that it was completely unnecessary and that the work had not gone to the weapons.
But it turned out that the boy who was injured was the nephew of the capo of the Genovese Family, one of four other mafia families in New York. Their capo, Ciro Perrone, asked Gotti Senior for the name of the one who had shot so as not to open a conflict between the two families.
The junior didn’t have the heart to tell his father that he was the one who fired the gun unnecessarily. Albanian Alite, not wanting to start a war and for the sake of society, took it back as if he had done it. For this he was rewarded with an epic beating, but peace was made.
“The father was a tyrant, and the son a deacon”, he summarizes the description of the Gotti family in the book.
Gotti Jr. was a monster that took all the mafia families by the neck when the FBI found in 1997 a list of all the names of those who had gone to the wedding of the Five Families along with the positions in the respective organizations and the figure of the money of I brought a gift. The rule in the family was that these things should never be written on paper.
Alite has put an end to one of the legends of the time in the book.
According to him, Gotti Senior, who was known as the “Dapper Don” for his very expensive and tasteful clothes, in fact, had no style and class at all. He had the money to buy a $2,000 suit, but not the skill and eye to find one that suited him and how it should be put together.
What was not known was an assistant named “Fat Bob” (Bobi i Shëndoshë) who was a master of clothing and who chose a complete wardrobe
