A brazen John “Junior” Gotti made his former top lieutenant drive back to a crime scene swarming with cops so the mob scion could verify that the hit man had properly done his job, the former No. 2 testified yesterday.
“He told me to get in the car and take a ride. He wanted to go back to the scene and make sure this guy was really dead,” mob turncoat John Alite testified at Gotti’s racketeering trial.
“I watch a lot of movies. They say the killer always goes back to the scene. I didn’t want to go back to the scene,” Alite said.
But nevertheless, he and Junior got into Alite’s Corvette and they drove past the spot off the Grand Central Parkway. It was where Alite had dumped coke dealer George Grosso after shooting him in the head three times on Dec. 20, 1988.
“It was all roped off — cops all over, coroners, trucks,” Alite testified.
Junior, he said, “was joking around. He said, ‘He doesn’t look too good.’ ”
Gotti then reported back to his uncle Gene Gotti, a Gambino family capo, that Grosso was dead.
Four days later, the son of “Dapper Don” John Gotti was inducted into the crime family.
Alite, who turned 47 yesterday, was testifying in Manhattan federal court at the fourth replay of Gotti’s racketeering trial.
Junior, who claims he has retired from the mob, is also charged in the murder of Grosso and Bruce John Gotterup, another coke dealer.
Alite, who became a mob turncoat in 2007, said that in the 1980s and ’90s, Junior ran a violent Queens gang that moved eight kilograms of coke each month, at $40,000 a kilogram — for a total of more than $300,000.
He said shootings, stabbings and robberies were rampant in the streets of the Gottis’ home borough as mobsters filled their pockets with money.
For 10 years, Alite said, he was Junior’s right-hand man, the two spending almost every day together.
But he said Junior let him take the fall with the older John Gotti when things went wrong, and the relationship soured.
In his second day on the witness stand, Alite discussed the murders of Grosso and two other men: Daniel Silva, who was killed in a bar brawl, and John Cennamo, a witness to the brutal slaying.
Alite said Grosso was killed for telling people he was dealing drugs for Junior and his father. He was warned to stop using their names.
Junior, he said, “told me if he does it again and he finds out, he wasn’t going to warn him again. He was going to kill him. He already told him once.”
Subsequently, Alite said, Junior told him “to go kill him. Get a bunch of guys together.”
“It’s got to get done now. Do it or don’t do it, I’m telling you to do it now,” Alite quoted Junior as telling him.
Alite had Grosso come to the White Horse Tavern in Queens, then persuaded him to go to another bar. At the White Horse, Alite was ordering shots for everybody, but was secretly drinking water.
After they got into the car to go to the second bar, Alite said, he shot Grosso in the head three times on the Grand Central Parkway, then spit on him.
Sitting next to him, he said, was a corrupt former detective, Phil Baroni.
A car behind them was carrying Nicholas Tobia, who would go on to join the Suffolk County Police Department. He has been suspended.
In ordering the hit, Junior told Alite he wanted the body left out in the open to send a message not to deal in drugs.
But Alite said he threw the body over a guardrail and into some brush because he didn’t want kids to find it.
“I wouldn’t leave it in the park, because of the kids,” he said.
The next morning he reported back to Junior, who met Gene Gotti in a nail salon, and told his uncle, “The kid took care of that. It was done.”
That’s when Gene Gotti told them to go back and check again.
Alite, who couldn’t be inducted into the mob because he’s Albanian, said mobsters treated him differently after the slaying.
“They treated me like I was one of them,” he said.
Junior’s mother, Victoria, and his sisters Victoria and Angel were in the courtroom and they alternately snickered and scowled at Alite’s testimony.
They snickered most loudly when the mob turncoat bragged about how much money he made and how powerful he was in Junior’s crew.
In earlier testimony, Alite said a gleeful Junior made an imaginary noose around his neck and described how Cennamo was hanged from a tree branch. The killing happened months after Cennamo declared he saw Junior stab Silva to death in the Silver Fox bar in Queens on March 12, 1983.
“Junior started joking around, saying, ‘Hey, look — he’s hanging from the tree,’ ” Alite recalled. “He was creeping like the Grinch, joking around.”
“Look, you can see him hanging. Let’s see if we can help him,” he quoted Junior as adding.
Alite repeatedly bragged that he had killed Silva.
Alite said that although he and Junior were tight, the mob scion often let him take the fall if things went wrong.
Alite recalled that the older John Gotti flew into a rage after Alite trashed a Queens bar that wasn’t giving kickbacks to the Gambinos.
“He was ranting and raving, cursing at me, telling me he would chop my head off,” Alite testified. “Who was I to wreck a bar? What are we, junkies? Pull a gun for $500 a week? John Gotti Jr. never said nothing.”
Alite said the Teflon Don “slapped me, a push-in-the-head kind of slap, [saying], ‘You’re getting close to getting killed. Get the hell out of here.’ ”
“Junior let me take the fall again,” Alite complained.
His testimony continues today.