New photo surfaces of former President Donald Trump with turncoat Gambino hitman

New photo surfaces of former President Donald Trump with turncoat Gambino hitman

  January 25, 2023    Dapper_Don

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A photo taken during the summer of 2022 shows a grinning former president Donald Trump flashing a thumbs up gesture while posing with John Alite, a podcaster and motivational speaker who was once a hitman for the Gambino crime family.

Alite, who confirmed the authenticity of the photo in a phone interview with The Independent, described himself as a political independent who supported Mr Trump’s push for criminal justice reform, and said his support for the ex-president is well known.

Though he described himself as a media figure who “speaks out against the street” and encourages young people to refrain from engaging in crime or violence, he spent years of his life as an associate of the Gambino family, one of the famed “five families” of the American mob. He has confessed to murdering six people and assaulting many more during that period of his life, which ended when he was arrested in Brazil after several years evading capture following an indictment in federal court.

Upon his extradition to the US, he eventually made a deal with prosecutors and testified against former associates who had fingered him for a slew of crimes, including top Gambino family figures such as John Gotti Jr (whose case ended in a mistrial) and Charles Carneglia (who got a life sentence).

Alite’s help to prosecutors got him a 10-year sentence after he pleaded guilty to numerous offenses including including murder and robbery.

Since his release from prison, he says he has changed his life.

“I'm a guy that's does TV, does movies, those talk shows, does talks for kids, works with the FBI, does events and talks with the FBI against the street to save kids lives. I do things with documentaries against drugs, openly against my past. So I'm a different guy,” he said.

Asked whether he believed Mr Trump was aware of his past when he posed for a photo with him, Alite told The Independent: “I assume he knows who I am, but possibly not”.

The Independent was tipped off to the existence of the photograph after reporting that Mr Trump had recently posed for a snapshot with Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino, who ran the Philadelphia mafia in the 1990s when Mr Trump was a casino operator in nearby Atlantic City, New Jersey.



Merlino spent more than a decade in federal prison after he was convicted on extortion, bookmaking and receiving stolen property charges following a 2001 trial. After his release he moved to Florida but found himself back in the dock in 2016, when he was arrested on another racketeering indictment and tried in a New York federal court. Following a mistrial on racketeering, fraud and illegal gambling charges, he pleaded guilty to illegal gambling and received a two-year prison sentence.

Alite said Mr Trump’s photograph with Merlino is a good indicator that the ex-president doesn’t have anyone around him who can vet who he comes into contact with.

“I just think he doesn't realise all the people he's taking a picture with because he recently took a picture of someone and I guarantee he doesn’t know who that person is,” he said.

In a statement to The Independent, a spokesperson for Mr Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign denied that the ex-president has any awareness of the identity of people he is photographed with in informal settings.

“President Trump takes countless photos with people. That does not mean he knows every single person he comes into contact with,” the spokesperson said.

The existence of two photographs of the twice-impeached ex-president posing alongside people with strong connections to organised crime raises questions about whether Mr Trump is being adequately staffed as he ramps up his third campaign for the presidency.

In November, Mr Trump was photographed having dinner with antisemitic rapper Kanye West and an associate of his, notorious white nationalist podcast host Nick Fuentes.

Despite the denials from Mr Trump’s campaign, it’s possible that he knew of both Mr Alite and Mr Merlino. Both were active in organised crime circles in the 1980s and 1990s, when Mr Trump was active in New York City real estate development.

https://news.yahoo.com/trump-photo-mobster-surfaces-day-174510092.html

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Turncoat former pal of John Gotti Jr says he was a spoiled mobster

Turncoat former pal of John Gotti Jr says he was a spoiled mobster

  January 18, 2015    Dapper_Don

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He was a spoiled fella.
John “Junior” Gotti was a “self-mutilating” stunad with no street cred, according to his former best friend and mob turncoat John Alite.
“He’s like Kim Jong-un — a spoiled brat that took advantage of guys around us by his dad’s authority,” the former Gambino crime-family enforcer seethed to The Post.
“Ever since we were kids, he’s self-mutilating himself, burning himself with cigars,” Alite said in his first interview before a book by George Anastasia — “Gotti’s Rules: The Story of John Alite, Junior Gotti, and the Demise of the American Mafia” (Dey St. Books) — hits shelves on Jan. 27.
“He would play drinking games with other guys, and part of these drinking games was if you lose, you gotta burn your hands with cigars,” he continued. “These are his ideas.
“This is what made Junior an inadequate boss: his insecurities,” Alite said of the Mafia scion who was always trying, and failing, to prove his toughness to the true tough guys around him.
“He forgot about me and guys like me standing in front of him if ever someone raised their hands to him,” said Alite, 52.
Junior was 28 when he inherited the helm of the nation’s most powerful crime family in 1992 as his father, the “Teflon Don” John Gotti, went to the slammer. (He remained acting boss until at least 1999, when, Junior claims, he quit the mob.)
In the eyes of Alite and other Gambino “earners,” the new boss was thick as a slice of Sicilian pizza and about as tough as overcooked fettuccine. He was branded with insulting nicknames such as “Urkel” — for wearing chest-high sweatpants like the TV nerd — and “Kong” — because some thought he looked like an ape. Even his own sister, Victoria, had a moniker for Junior — “Blinkie,” because he blinked incessantly when he lied, which was often.
Alite’s biggest beef was his pal’s penchant for “blaming anyone close to him when something goes down.” He recalled how Junior and several members of his crew got into a scrap at a Queens club.
“From behind me, Junior pulls out this derringer, reaches around my body and shoots the kid. A cheap shot,” Alite says in the book.
Turned out the victim, who was hit in the thigh, was the nephew of Genovese capo Ciro Perrone — creating a major headache for John Gotti Sr.
The don demanded to know who the triggerman was, but Junior never confessed. Instead, he let Alite take the fall — and catch a beating for it.
“The father was a tyrant and the son was a p—y . . . that’s what people don’t know about the Gottis,” Alite says in the book.
Junior was also no Einstein. The book notes how, in 1997, Gotti Jr. was caught red-handed by the feds — twice — with documents that hurt the five families.
First was a bookkeeping ledger in an Ozone Park apartment found alongside about $350,000, listing all of Junior’s wedding guests and what they gave — a veritable who’s who of the American mob.
“Junior kept cash in that basement, and what he would do was continually replenish the supply. Money he made from drugs, gambling, extortions, whatever wound up in that basement. That’s why the cash they found amounted to about the same total as the money in the ledger,” Alite says in the book.
Second was a secret list of candidates to become “made men” that year, which the five families would circulate to weed out problematic nominees. The standard practice was to destroy the lists — but Junior decided to save his as a keepsake, enraging the other families.
His reign ended the next year when he was arrested and charged in a racketeering indictment — which clued the families in to the embarrassing detail.
Alite, a Woodhaven-born Albanian whose father drove a cab, took the stand against his pal in 2009 for the feds’ fourth and final attempt to send the mob scion to prison on racketeering and murder charges. The hung jury would later say they found Alite’s testimony less than credible, but the tough guy — who from 1996 to 2014 spent 14 years in prisons on charges and convictions that included six murders, at least 37 shootings, home invasions and countless beatdowns — is still chirping.
Alite describes how he was running with Junior by 1983, and thanks to drug, bookmaking and loan-shark operations, was living large. Some months he alone would pull in $100,000, he said.
He was so close to the Gottis that he’d crash on the couch in their two-story house in Howard Beach — where it was rarely a quiet night.
“He overheard shouting matches in which [Junior’s mother] Victoria matched her husband expletive for expletive,” the book says.
Alite also learned the secrets of the mob clan. For example, despite his nickname as the “Dapper Don,” Junior’s father was a “terrible dresser,” who, left to his own devices, would look like the Steve Martin character in the “Wild and Crazy Guy” skits on “Saturday Night Live.” When Gotti Sr. became boss, he had an associate named “Fat Bob” serve as his stylist — Gotti had the money for the $2,000 outfits, “he just didn’t have the fashion sense to put it together.”
Junior sometimes did the right thing, Alite said. The night before Alite was going to prison on an assault charge in 1991, Junior threw a party in Alite’s honor. They had a cake in the shape of an inmate, with frosting that read, “It’s up the river for you John.” “He told all the guys to make sure they bring money I was owed every week to my wife,” Alite recalled. “It was a substantial amount.”
But it was Alite’s alleged relationship with Junior’s sister, Victoria — a relationship she denies — that marked the beginning of a rift between Alite and Junior.
“I was fooling around with Vicki Gotti on the sneak, nobody knew, in the late ’80s,” he testified in 2009 at the trial of hit man Charles Carneglia. “I had a problem with Carmine beating up Vicki. That turned into me, Vicki fooling around a lot, seeking each other on the sneak.”
These days, Alite is tight-lipped about the fling. “We were kids at the time — I have a lot of respect for her, but I wasn’t going to lie on the stand.”
Junior faced four racketeering trials and walked each time after juries failed to reach a verdict.
In advance of Anastasia’s book, Junior rushed out a self-published memoir last week called “Shadow of My Father,” in which he for the first time acknowledges his leadership role inside the Gambino family — but says his father was the one ordering hits.
Alite, a free man since 2012, now lives in Freehold, NJ, and said he can’t remember the last time he served up a knuckle sandwich. For the past two years, he said, he’s going to therapy and working in real estate, overseeing the rehab of distressed homes. “I’m struggling a bit, but it’s a job.”
For better and worse, his old life as a coldblooded murderer still haunts him. “You miss hanging out with everybody and laughing, but you don’t need to be a mobster to do that.”

http://nypost.com/2015/01/18/former-mobster-calls-junior-gotti-a-pretend-tough-guy/

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Gambino enforcer turned rat rips John Gotti Jr in new book

Gambino enforcer turned rat rips John Gotti Jr in new book

  January 11, 2015    Dapper_Don

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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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Gambino associate gets time served for testifying against the crime family

Gambino associate gets time served for testifying against the crime family

  November 14, 2014    Dapper_Don

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​A veteran mob rat was rewarded with a sentence of time served — just three days — for helping to whack his own brother-in-law despite pleas for punishment Thursday from his victim’s relatives.

Calling his cooperation “historic,” prosecutors said Gambino associate Anthony Ruggiano Jr., 61, helped the feds bag capos Bartolomeo “Bobby Glasses” Vernace and Dominick “Skinny Dom” Pizzonia with his insider testimony.

His singing on the stand against former family hit man Charles Carneglia also helped solve a slew of cold gangland cases, prosecutors said.

The son of late Gambino soldier Anthony “Fat Andy” Ruggiano Sr., a busy triggerman who ran a crew out of an Ozone Park cafe, Ruggiano Jr. was sentenced for his role in the murder of his brother-in-law Frank Boccia in 1988.

The hit – sanctioned by Gambino don John Gotti – was in retaliation for Boccia’s ill-advised manhandling of Fat Andy’s wife after she refused to cough up cash for a baptism.

Boccia was lured to the old man’s wiseguy-filled social club, Cafe Liberty, where he was shot five times and then gutted to prevent his body from floating.

Groveling before the court, Ruggiano Jr. apologized to Boccia’s relatives as they seethed in the jury box during the proceeding.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry for everything.”

A former junkie, Ruggiano Jr. said that he had cleaned up his life in the witness protection program and abandoned his life of crime.

“I was born and raised in a family whose values were rooted in organized crime,” he said. “I grew up in the shadow of my father.”

But the mobster’s tearful pleas were met with disgusted glares from Boccia’s daughter, Jenna, and sister, Josephine.

Unmoved by the fruits of his cooperation, the women focused on justice for their loved one.

“It is inconceivable how Mr. Ruggiano can live with himself,” Josephine Boccia told the court before sentencing, noting that her brother’s innards had been emptied and that his body was never found.

“It is the request of my family for the maximum penalty,” she said.

Just a baby when her father was murdered, Boccia’s daughter said the specter of his slaying has left her psychologically disfigured.

“The anger you have left with me is indescribable,” she told the hoodlum, adding that her heartbroken family told her for years that her dad was still alive and had abandoned them.

“I can’t tell you what that did to me as a child,” she said. “I pray today that justice prevails.”

But the pleas for punishment were mere formalities as Judge Jack Weinstein contritely explained that even the most nauseating cooperators were given breaks in the courtroom.

“In this case the defendant has become a tool of the government to destroy the remnants of this terrible group of the mafia that has been the cause of your grief,” he explained.

Aware of the outcome beforehand, the two women hung their heads and nodded as Weinstein expressed his sorrow for their loss.

http://nypost.com/2014/11/14/mobster-who-had-in-law-killed-gets-off-with-time-served/

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The Sinatra Club: My Life Inside the New York Mafia by Sal Polisi

The Sinatra Club: My Life Inside the New York Mafia by Sal Polisi

  July 22, 2012    Dapper_Don

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John Gotti with son John Jr.

 

From the forthcoming book THE SINATRA CLUB by Sal Polisi and Steve Dougherty to be published by Gallery Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.

Johnny Dio did me a couple of favors in Lewisburg (federal penitentiary) when he got me out of the prison factory and onto the yard detail. Three years after I got out, Dio called in those favors. I don’t know if it was because I said something he didn’t like or I didn’t pay him respect or maybe he could sense that I thought he was a vicious prick. Whatever the reason, he gave me the kind of assignment you’d give your worse enemy. It made me wish I never heard of Johnny Dio.
He was inside the joint, but he still had power and influence in both the Lucchese and Gambino Families. The son of a capo in Florida was sleeping with the wife of another made guy. If the kid had been made himself, he would have been whacked for messing with the man’s wife. The old dons back in Sicily knew that’s how family feuds began. The Sicilians figured kill the guy right away and you’ll save yourself a lot of carnage. The Family involved — I don’t know if the capo’s kid and the guy whose wife he was f------ were in the same Family or not; I was never told and I knew better than to ask — they consulted Dio in prison and asked him what to do. He suggested they use the old Murder Incorporated punishment. Instead of killing the f-----, they should cut his balls off. Dio said he knew just the man for the job; an ex-con who owed him — me.
I’ll spare you and and me the details, but I did it. And after I did I wished I’d gotten the hell out of the Life before I did.
Things sicker even than that were going down that year. There was an orgy of off-the-books killings like the Mob had never seen before. Traditionally all Mob hits had to be approved by a boss, and approval was granted only if there was good reason to perform the murder. Killings to settle personal scores or those motivated purely by greed were forbidden. By the late 1970s, those rules were forgotten or ignored. Guys started doing unsanctioned hits over drugs and money left and right.

My own boss and friend Dominic Cataldo was one of the worst offenders. He’d been whacking drug business partners without permission for years. The richer he got, the more paranoid and bloodthirsty he got. Dom used to do hits on guys right in the back of his restaurant, the Villagio Italia (Ozone Park), then he put them in the trunk of his car and drove them up to Boot Hill. Now he started planting guys there faster than they could dig their own graves. Which was Dominic’s idea of a good joke.
Boot Hill was upstate off the Taconic Parkway near Beacon, New York. He told me how he got a guy to help take a body up there one day. He got the guy to dig the hole and they threw the body in. Then Dom said, Oh, s---, he forgot to see what the stiff had on him. So he got his helper to get down in the hole and see what he could find. The guy searched the body and handed a wallet, a wad of cash, a watch, a ring, and a gold chain up to Dom. Dom said, “Thanks,” and shot him in the head. Then he shoveled dirt on top of both dead guys.
Dom thought that was a f------ hoot.
He saw killing as the solution to every problem. He told me he was having trouble at home and his wife threatened to leave him. He said to her go ahead, get the f--- out, but if you do I’m going to kill your parents. That was Dom’s way to solve his domestic problems — whack the whole family.

Dom was just one of many homicidal maniacs in the Mob at the time. There was a total breakdown of order. The killings were not about power struggles between the families, weren’t turf wars, weren’t even about revenge. There was no plan or strategy. It was just a bloodbath. There was nothing like it before in the whole history of the Five Families. I guess it was the death throes of the Mob.
You had crews like Roy DeMeo’s that performed hits like Murder Incorporated, only they did them with or without contracts. DeMeo’s crew were Gambinos under Nino Gaggi. They did a lot of business with the (hit men John and Charles) Carneglias, whacking guys connected to their auto-exporting business and using Charles’s acid drums to get rid of the bodies. They also killed indiscriminately. They’d whack the guy delivering a pizza if he couldn’t break a $20.
They turned killing into some kind of blood orgy where they shot victims and drained the blood and stripped naked and cut up the bodies. They got naked so they didn’t get guts and brains and gore on their clothes. But a bunch of naked Mob guys drenched in blood? That’s some sick s---. It was during that time when the Mob was on a blood rampage that Dom started making noise that it was time I got my button. I think in his coke-eaten brain he was getting more and more paranoid and suspicious of everybody around him, counting me. He was starting to worry that I might flip on him or rip him off.
My entire career as a hoodlum, I expected that sooner or later I’d kill on order and get my button. By the time getting made became an issue, I wasn’t interested anymore. I had grown sick of the Life and sick of the death and the killing.

I think Dominic sensed that, because when he finally gave the order that would make my bones, it wasn’t to whack a guy but simply to participate in a murder. For my initiation into the Colombo Family, I was ordered to dig a grave. I drove out to the Hamptons and found a spot along a deserted stretch of beach. The soil was sandy, but it still took me most of the night to dig a hole six feet long, three feet wide, and six feet deep. I finished and went to meet Dominic back in Ozone Park. When I got there, he said the deal was off. The guy he was going to whack had won a reprieve. I drove back to the beach and filled in the hole before dawn.
Later that day I went to watch one of my sons’ Pop Warner games. I was standing on the sidelines, and I looked down and saw that I still had sand on my shoes from the grave digging. I stamped the sand off my feet. It felt like something filthy, that I had brought something from the world of death and violence there to the playing field where my son and all those other boys were playing.
It made me realize that I didn’t want any part of that world anymore. A friend had said to me that once you pull the trigger, you can’t stop the bullet, you can’t take it back. Burying a body wasn’t exactly pulling the trigger, but if I had done it, if Dominic had killed the guy and I had shoveled sand over the corpse, I wouldn’t have been able to take that back either.

I’d seen John Gotti a couple of months before at a Pop Warner football game. The coach had cut his son Frankie from the starting lineup because he was overweight. John drove out to the game and raised hell about it. It was hard to believe that the coach didn’t know who John was, but he didn’t back down. He said Frankie was a good player, but he was out of shape and huffing and puffing in practice. The coach said he’d put Frankie back in, but he needed to trim down first. The coach stuck to his guns and Frankie stayed on the bench.
John was furious. He pulled me aside and said he was going to take care of that f------ coach. He was dead serious. He wanted to whack the Pop Warner football coach. I realized he was just like Dominic. He thought whacking guys was the solution to any problem.
John was my friend, and in a way he was even my mentor. But what I learned from John in 1980 (after the neighbor who killed Frankie in a car accident disappeared, presumed murdered) was that I was finished. I was done with the madness and killing and death. I was done with the Mob.
That year I drove upstate, to a little town outside Port Jervis. I shopped around for a house and bought a big piece of property outside town. I started to fix it up so when the time was right I could move my family up there and get my kids as far away from the Life as I could go.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/mob-lost-mind-sinatra-club-psychos-killed-reason-article-1.1119280#ixzz21N086Bvu

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Government snitch says John Gotti ruined the life

Government snitch says John Gotti ruined the life

  May 24, 2012    Dapper_Don

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A mob rat took a few whacks at John Gotti on Wednesday, saying the limelight-loving Dapper Don “ruined everything” for wiseguys.
Peter "Bud" Zuccaro once thought the Gambino boss was the “best thing that walked the planet” — but he didn’t mourn when Gotti died in prison in 2002.

“There was no love lost for me,” Zuccaro testified in Brooklyn Federal Court.
Then — with Gotti unable to retaliate from his resting place in a Queens cemetery — Zuccaro boldly declared the Mafia kingpin had brought unwanted attention to the underworld.
“He publicized everything that was going on,” he said of Gotti, who seemed to love the camera as much as it loved him in his heyday.
“He brought everything that was supposed to be a secret society right out to the forefront, right into the press,” Zuccaro continued.
“He let it be a known thing, you know, flash, everybody hanging out together,” he told Assistant Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Jacquelyn Kasulis.
“Guys reporting to the (Ravenite) club while the FBI is surveilling you. Wednesday night everybody had to report to see the boss.”
Zuccaro, 56, was sprung from prison earlier this month to testify at the murder trial of reputed Gambino associate John Burke.
He’s been settling old scores since becoming a government snitch to work off a guilty plea to two gangland murders, and he seems to relish taking shots at the Gottis.
Zuccaro was once the most loyal of henchmen, reporting to Gotti’s hit man Charles Carneglia after growing up on the rough-and-tumble streets of East New York.
In 1986, he even testified as a defense witness at Gotti’s federal racketeering trial in Brooklyn, denying that he paid the gangster tribute with the infamous line, “What am I, Santa Claus?”
Gotti, who had bribed a juror, was acquitted — embellishing the legend of the Teflon Don, who was a fixture on front pages and evening newscasts.
“After that, John was very impressed with (Zuccaro) because he had been willing to perjure himself,” said a knowledgeable source.
As he recalled on the stand, Zuccaro also made himself useful in personal “family” matters.
He once shot and bat-bludgeoned Carmine Agnello because he had hit his girlfriend — the don’s daughter, Victoria.
After Gotti’s death, Zuccaro turned down the chance to become an inducted member, a made man.
He said he had once been intoxicated by the lure of “power, money and women,” but had become disillusioned by the mob life.
“I was basically trying to get away from it,” he said. “And at 48 years old, what did I need to be straightened out for?”
He said that a year after Gotti’s death, he was recruited to participate in the rubout of a Howard Beach, Queens, bagel shop owner suspected of fooling around with the wife of the late boss’ kid brother, Vincent.
He begged off the hit because he didn’t want to whack someone two blocks from St. Helen’s Church.
It was a smart move. The bagel guy survived being shot in his driveway and Vincent Gotti and nephew Richard Gotti went to prison for the plot.
But Zuccaro admitted he wasn’t always that bright. Defense lawyer Richard Jasper got him to agree he was a thug and a dope.
“I wouldn’t be sitting here in this situation if I had a lot of brains,” Zuccaro said.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/rat-sticks-teflon-don-peter-bud-zuccaro-john-gotti-ruined-wiseguys-article-1.1083586#ixzz1vlY5UBPg

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Notorious gangster not sorry for murders, but apologizes to lawyer for being pushy

Notorious gangster not sorry for murders, but apologizes to lawyer for being pushy

  March 16, 2012    Dapper_Don

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Charles Carneglia — once the most feared hitman in the late John Gotti’s mob crew — is now just a sorry gangster.
Notorious for melting corpses in barrels of acid, the convicted killer recently felt a pang of remorse for the way he treated his lawyer. So he put his mea culpa in a letter.
“I apologize for being, how can I say this, pushy, in the past,” Carneglia wrote in a letter to lawyer Beverly Van Ness. “I’m trying my best to cope with the situation. Again I apologize and I hope you forgive me.”
The convicted killer had no apologies for his victims.
Prosecutors said Carneglia, also known as “Charlie Carnig,” dissolved the body of Gotti’s doomed neighbor in acid then tossed the man’s finger bones into another gangster’s soup.
The neighbor, John Favara, was killed after he accidentally killed Gotti’s 12-year-old son Frankie in a traffic accident.
Carneglia, serving a life sentence for four gangland murders, is acting as his own lawyer in a new appeal. He was on a conference call to Brooklyn Federal Judge Jack Weinstein’s courtroom on Thursday.
“How do you feel?” Weinstein asked.
“Terrible. I can’t breathe,” Carneglia croaked, groaning that he suffers from pulmonary disease, emphysema and asthma. “I smoked for 50 years.”
Carneglia’s latest argument is that his trial attorneys did a bad job because they didn’t take his advice to put him on the witness stand. He also said they failed to object to the questioning of jurors in a small room behind the courtroom.
The questioning “reminded (Carneglia) of the ‘Star Chamber proceedings’ that he read about in school,” he wrote in court papers.
Then-lawyer Kelly Sharkey told Carneglia to “hush” because she was trying to concentrate, he wrote.
The judge told Carneglia he would rule on his motion shortly and asked him how he was being treated at the maximum security prison in Pennsylvania.
“Comfortable as can be,” he said. “There’s a lot of security.”
Evelyn Colon, the daughter of armored car guard Jose Delgado Rivera who was gunned down by Carneglia in a 1990 Kennedy Airport stickup, said she was glad to hear Carneglia is suffering.
“Poor bastard,” Colon said. “I hope they will be taking him out soon in a body bag.”

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/charles-carneglia-mr-manners-mobsters-article-1.1040148#ixzz1pImtLBZY

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