Alite ties Junior Gotti to another drug-related slaying
Mob turncoat John Alite tied John "Junior" Gotti to another drug-related slaying in Queens and testified about corrupt behavior from a Suffolk County cop, police chief and judge, in testimony at Gotti's murder and racketeering trial in Manhattan federal court Monday.
On his fourth day on the witness stand, Alite said the late Gambino family boss John J. Gotti hooked him up with another gangster to make a $5,000 payoff to a Suffolk County judge to fix mob traffic tickets in the late 1980s or early 1990s, using a Suffolk police chief known as "Jocko" as an intermediary.
He didn't identify either the judge or the police chief by name, but called the police chief a "degenerate gambler" who headed a small "division." The chief, he testified, took Alite with $5,000 in cash and a list of names to be helped to a Suffolk courthouse and ushered him in the back door of a judge's chambers.
"He made me hand it to the judge directly," Alite testified.
Alite, 47, was a close friend of the Gotti family and top lieutenant in Gotti Junior's crew in Queens for more than a decade. Last week, he linked Gotti to five killings, and Monday he added another to the list, telling jurors that Gotti approved the 1991 killing of Bruce Gotterup, a Queens man who was making trouble at the Jaegermeister a Gotti-protected bar in Queens.
In addition to racketeering, Gotti is charged separately with the drug-related murders of Gotterup and cocaine dealer George Grosso in 1988. Alite is awaiting sentencing on his own racketeering conviction and hoping for leniency.
He said he began turning against Gotti family members in the mid-1990s because they showed little loyalty toward underlings, turned against some of Alite's friends, and sought publicity while demanding "omerta," or silence, from underlings.
"I started seeing two laws - laws for us, and laws for the bosses," he testified.
He recalled a meeting with Gotti Junior at Aqueduct in 1994, after learning that his own life was in danger. They smoothed things over, and Gotti invited Alite to go hunting upstate with him and his brother-in-law, Carmine Agnello. Alite declined. . "I said, 'I'll put on Bugs Bunny ears and you can shoot at me,' " Alite testified. "We all laughed, but I was serious."
Alite also offered damaging new testimony about Nicholas Tobia, a Suffolk County officer who has been on leave since Alite identified him as a participant in the murder of Grosso - adding new details about his relationship with Tobia.
He said Tobia, who joined the Suffolk force in 1995, was one of more than 100 members of his and Gotti's crews in Queens in the 1980s. He said he helped Tobia get a job at UPS in New Jersey, and later gave him permission to apply for a police job.
Alite testified that Tobia later provided him with two bulletproof vests and, after an arrest in a bar rumble in Mineola in the mid-1990s, used his police status to get a car that police had seized as evidence out of an impound lot for Alite.
William Petrillo, a lawyer for Tobia who had previously denied the murder allegation, also denied Alite's new claims.
"These allegations are beyond absurd," Petrillo said.
http://www.newsday.com/news/new-york/alite-ties-junior-gotti-to-another-drug-related-slaying-1.1503106
0 comments:
Post a Comment