John Alite has big plans for Englishtown,New Jersey, a small hamlet best known for potatoes, a drag racing strip, and the Battle of Monmouth during the revolutionary wars.
But not everyone is certain they want Alite, 62, having a say over municipal matters in the town of about 2,350 people, where he was appointed a council member earlier this year and comes up for confirmation early next month.
The reason is an unusual one: Alite’s background – about which he is open – as a former member of the Gambino crime family with a long history of violence, murder and extortion.
For Alite once served as a top “earner” for John “the Teflon Don” Gotti, and later for his son John Gotti Jr. But after getting picked up in Brazil, where he was held for two years fighting extradition, Alite turned cooperating government witness against the younger Gotti, and pleaded guilty to racketeering charges, including two murders.
But in his own telling, Alite is a changed man and plans to spend the next years helping the small New Jersey community and not, as in years past, causing mayhem. On the agenda is steering kids away from a life of crime, prettying up Englishtown with cobblestones and restaurants similar to nearby Princeton, and keeping out fentanyl dealers.
Alite’s is a compelling story. Albanian by extraction – meaning he could never be a “made man” in the Italian mob – he was nonetheless nicknamed “the Calculator” because of his financial acumen in helping to move 8kg of cocaine a month. Former FBI agent Ted Otto said Alite was “a hybrid gangster … an exception to the rule”.
Can his gangster background be applied to managing the economics, permits, zoning and construction codes of smalltown America? He certainly believes so, removing his yellow-tinted sunglasses for effect as he sat for an interview with the Guardian last week. The previous evening he was at a council meeting arguing for independent building contractors to develop a disused township building.
“Some people outside the town have had a lot to say, but the town is very supportive,” he says. Political office, he points out, is a natural for an ex-mobster. “People ask me why? I tell them I have more experience than all these politicians.
“Plus I’m not a criminal any more – I’m on a mission to do things the right way,” he adds.
After Alite was appointed to the council by Englishtown’s mayor, Daniel Francisco, following the resignation of a number of council members last year, there was a contentious meeting in which Alite was accused of welfare fraud.
But the accuser was shouted down by residents. “He’s started a new life!” one said, while another said: “We don’t want to hear any of this!” The man who brought up the accusation admitted to working for Alite’s former boss Gotti Jr,according to USA Today.
Opposite the diner where Alite likes to have lunch, a store owner advises a reporter to use Vaseline to block your ears. Alite can talk, and in the gravelly Brooklynese of his native tongue. He can talk so much, in fact, that he hosts a popular podcast, Catch Me on the Run, written several books, and appeared in numerous documentaries, including the recent Netflix series Get Gotti.
The history of Gambino members going straight is not, however, entirely promising.
Sammy “the Bull” Gravano appeared to be on the straight and narrow until he was busted for dealing ecstasy. Last year, John Jr’s wife and daughter were briefly charged after getting into a brawl at youth basketball game on Long Island, allegedly tearing the wig from the mother of an opposing team player.
But that’s not Alite’s story.
“I live in a community and I want the community to be safe, because I know about that – obviously. I want it to be drug-free as much as possible, because I lost my daughter to fentanyl.” Three years ago, 20-year-old Chelsea Alite unwittingly took a fentanyl-laced disguised Percocet, causing a fatal overdose.
But there are four cannabis dispensaries in Englishtown, with licensing for a fifth, twice as many as the number of bars. Must be a high-margin business? “I wasn’t on the council then,” he says, “but I think two would be sufficient.”
Asked if there are any fentanyl dealers in Englishtown, Alite gives a persuasive no. He’s a supporter of charging fentanyl dealers involved in fatal overdoses with murder. He points out that when he was a dealer – “I wish I wasn’t” – and was asked for dope, cocaine or mescaline, “we didn’t stick other things in it”.
It’s a style of logic that permeates Alite’s thinking: it wasn’t good to do bad things, but at least those things were done honestly, mostly to people who were also out doing bad things. He is also a Republican. He’s met Trump on several occasions and, like Trump, sees the federal government as a shakedown operation with a talent for skimming and pocket-lining.
“John Gotti Sr, who I knew as a kid, used to tell me all the time: the government is the mafia. I would laugh, and thought he was nuts, but later on I learned he was absolutely right,” he says. “But I was just young and naive.”
But what will Englishtown look like with Alite elected in it? “This doesn’t look like a beautiful, quaint Jersey town,” he says. “I want the old-style lights, cobblestone sidewalks, restaurants, a florist, a Dunkin’ Donuts. What was the old mayor and council doing all these years?”
If he is elected to the council, Englishtown can expect a major upgrade under the guidance of a man who knows both sides. “People ask me why would you want to be a politician, and I tell them: because most of them are corrupt and now I’m not, so I can see what they’re doing and I’ll fight what they’re doing.”