The longtime friend of Junior Gotti had done three years on a gun rap and three months for smuggling a mobster's sperm out of the pen.Now he faced serious time in a racketeering case and was fighting extradition from Brazil while his associates were on trial.
"I've lost everything," he moaned on a smuggled cell phone to the St. Petersburg Times from a Rio lockup in 2006. "I don't get to watch my son play baseball. I don't get to watch my daughter go to school. ... Am I bitter? Yeah, I'm bitter. Who wouldn't be."
He was also afraid.
By his account, he had two choices - both of which could get him killed: Sing to the feds about Gotti or wait for trial in a U.S. prison.
In the end, sources told the Daily News, he picked the former, and Alite, 45, is poised to be a key witness in the government's latest attempt to convict Gotti.
His friendship with Junior goes back 25 years to when Gotti was the swaggering son of a mob boss and Alite was a tough college dropout basking in reflected Gambino glory.
Alite wasn't Italian - his family is from Albania - so he claims he was never taken into the fold. But others tell a different story.
One mob informant has said that in the mid-'80s Alite helped Junior rob Howard Beach, Queens, drug dealers and resell the product.
In 1989, the two were busted, along with crony Steven Kaplan, for brutalizing three people outside a Long Island nightclub.
Alite allegedly touched off the brawl by hitting on someone's wife - but the case never went to trial because the victims developed a sudden memory loss and were unable to identify their attackers. The next time Alite got into trouble, he wasn't as lucky, and notched a conviction for aggravated assault.
The felony made it illegal for him to carry a gun, so when he was stopped on a New Jersey bridge with a .38 in 1995, he went to prison for three years.
Inside, he met wiseguy Antonio Parlavecchio, who persuaded him to help smuggle out his sperm so he could impregnate his wife. Alite got three months in the pen for bringing sperm collection kits to a corrupt guard at the federal prison in Allentown, Pa. "Her biological clock was ticking," he later explained. "She wanted to have a baby. I couldn't believe I got sent to prison for something like that."
His next indictment was more conventional.
In 2004, Alite was charged with running a Florida-based crew for the Gambino family that dabbled in robbery, murder, gambling and kidnapping.
During his co-defendants' trial, he was portrayed as a ruthless thug who used his mob connections and violence to intimidate rivals of his valet-parking front. "John Alite is capable of doing some pretty nasty things," one business partner testified.
From the Rio prison, Alite denied he'd done anything worse than raise his voice and insisted he was being persecuted for ties he cut long ago. "Was I friends with John Gotti? Yes," he said. "Am I friends with him now? No."
Safe to say, that's truer today than ever.
Thanks to John Marzulli and Tracy Connor
