• John Alite, 52, worked with John Gotti Jr for years until he found out the mob were planning to kill him
• Father-of-four now wants to make money through inspirational talks
• He thinks he lacked an inspirational role model when he was growing up
By Jill Reilly for MailOnline
John Alite, 52, was an enforcer in the Gambino family for years, undertaking grisly crimes, including murder
John A Gotti's crew leader is now hoping to make a living giving talks to children about bullying.
John Alite, 52, was an enforcer in the Gambino family for years, undertaking grisly crimes, including murder.
But when he heard they wanted to kill him, he went on the run, until he was eventually captured and then gave evidence against Gotti Jr. at trial.
He turned rat and linked his former best friend to a series of gangland slayings, boasted that he slept with his sister, reality television graduate Victoria Gotti, and claimed two police officers were in on a mob hit.
It was Alite's decision to release a tell-all about his time in the Gambino crime family that forced Gotti to write his own recent memoir in spite of his mother's protests.
But now Alite, who was released from prison in 2012, says he wants a fresh start and says he would be good for males that need inspirational talks.
On his website he offers himself as a speaker, seeking to cash in on an activity that has already proved fruitful for him: talking. 'John offers all ages and groups a forceful message and precise tutorial on simply, how not to be a victim,' the site states.
The website states: 'Over the course of a twenty-five-year career as a gangster he brutalized people, stabbing them, shooting them, beating them with clubs, blackjacks and baseball bats. He's not proud of that, but he doesn't try to hide from it either. It's who he was.
In an interview with The Tampa Bay Times, he says: 'I feel guilty for almost all these things I did,' he said, 'except [drug dealer] John Gebert. I'd like to wake him up and kill him again. Unfortunately, I'm not past it.'
The father-of-four says said that he still sees a therapist several times a week.
'I'm a human being,' he said. 'I'm not ashamed to tell my faults and be real. Hopefully, I will help some kids, whether it's one or a hundred. It helps me to live with myself and my past.'
He says he nearly decided to pull the book by George Anastasia - 'Gotti's Rules: The Story of John Alite, Junior Gotti, and the Demise of the American Mafia' - when someone threatened his son.
He nearly pulled the plug on the book last fall, he said, after someone threatened his son.
'I started getting nervous that I miscalculated,' he said. 'In our world, you don't go near kids.
Alite and Junior were best friends - Gotti Jr was his best man at his wedding.
But because he was of Albanian descent and not Italian, Alite could never have been a made man.
After he fled to Rio de Janeiro, he spent two years in a Brazilian jail fighting extradition and then testified against Gotti Jr in 2009.
Gotti Jr. was charged with racketeering, but never convicted.
New York's Gambino family has been the subject of a steady stream of government indictments and prosecutions since the Dapper Don was sentenced to life in prison in 1992.
He died behind bars in 2002.
Gotti Jr.'s own recent prison stint ended in Demember 2009. He claims to have left the crime world behind in 1999, but recalls with great detail what the life afforded his father--like breaks from prison to visit his family and relax in freedom.
On a so-called 'dental furlough,' Gotti says his father was escorted by armed guards from Green Haven correctional facility to a 'My father would go up to the dentist's office, open his mouth, and then go out the back of the building where one of the fellows would drive him away,' Gotti writes.
The guards, paid off with hundreds of dollars, would wait patiently as Gotti went home, changed out of his prison jumpsuit and spent quality time with Gotti Jr. and the rest of the family.
'When it was time to return to the prison, my father's man would drive him back to the dentist's building, and he would emerge from the front entrance back into the custody of the marshals,' Gotti writes.
Gotti recalls a time when, at just four years old, he visited his father in jail where he told him he wanted to be a police officer for Halloween.
Gotti recalls his father saying: 'If I ever hear you let my son or any of my kids, or you for that matter, talk to that cop, or any other cop, I'll kill you.'
Despite growing up with a father in and out of prison and seeing other dark sides of crime life, Gotti Jr. would go on to follow in his dad's footsteps and join the notorious Gambinos.
In his book, he describes how he first entered into the organization, a process called getting 'made.'
'There were roughly a dozen men sitting around a table…open seats for the new inductees,' he writes. 'A pin pricked my 'trigger' finger. A drop of blood was put on a picture of a saint, which was then burned in my hand. I moved the flaming picture from hand to hand, until it was totally consumed by the fire.'
Gotti Jr. has been tried four times since 2005 for racketeering. Each trial ended in a hung jury. He said he left organized crime in 1999.
The self-published ebook, out Monday, was not Gotti's first attempt at a memoir. He told the Daily News that he had over 300 pages of a previous iteration of the tome but destroyed it all to satisfy his worried mother.
'In 2010, I shredded it. I had completed 375 pages and I shredded 375 pages. I only had 70 pages more to go. So I apologized to everyone involved, but my family harmony is more important to me.'
When he learned of Alite's tell-all, Gotti changed his mind and went to his mother to ask permission to write the book.
'If you never talk to me again, then I'm gonna have to live with it,' he said to his mother. 'That's your choice, that's your prerogative, but you're asking me to sit here and let them