HuffPost: Letter to Judge prompts U.S. Probation Office investigation into allegations ex-Gambino associate John Alite violated terms of his Supervised Release
By Peter Lance October 23 2015. The Huffington Post. On September 8th I sent a 14 page letter with 26 attachments to Judge Susan C. Bucklew at the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, after an investigation I’d conducted revealed probative evidence that convicted killer and one time Gambino associate John Alite, aka “Johnny Aletto,” had repeatedly violated the terms of his Supervised Release.
Judge Bucklew had sentenced Alite on April 26th, 2011 t0 100 months in prison and five years probation. Under the terms of her Amended Order Alite was required to get permission from the U.S. Probation Office each time he left his New Jersey district and he was forbidden from associating with members or associates of organized crime — a boilerplate provision in mob sentences.
But as I detailed in the letter below Alite repeatedly traveled outside the state of New Jersey to New York and made additional trips to Ohio, Florida, Pennsylania and Delaware, while in a letter to me on September 8th his attorney Doug Anton admitted “we gotta stay in Jersey.”
More disturbing were pictures found on Alite’s own Facebook account showing him associating with former wiseguys like James “Jimmy Gap” Calandra, an ex-Bonnanno associate who pled guilty to the felony murder of a 46 year-old Staten Island woman in 1993 and Pasquale “Patsy” Andriano, a former member of Alite’s crew who confessed his role in the Alite-inspired killing of rival drug dealer John Gebert in 1996.
THE U.S. PROBATION OFFICE INVESTIGATES
On September 14th, less than a week after I’d sent the package to Judge Bucklew, I was contacted by Paul Brennan, The National WITSEC Coordinator in Washington, who confirmed that the Newark headquarters of the U.S. Probation Office had mounted an investigation into my findings.
On October 6th Mr. Brennan sent word to me by email that a report with the probe’s findings would be forthcoming in 48 hours and two days later he let me know that it had been sent to Tampa for examination by Judge Bucklew and Probation officials there.
Last week, informed sources reported that Mr. Alite had been summoned to a meeting in Tampa with Jay G. Trezevant, the Assistant U.S. Attorney who used him as the so-called “star witness” in the fourth federal prosecution of John A. “Junior” Gotti which ended in a mistrial in 2009.
At that time the AP reported that the jury was unanimous that Mr. Alite was the “least credible” witness and after that defeat, in throwing in the towel on any further Gotti Jr. prosecution, the Feds never again put John Alite on the stand.
AWAITING JUDGE BUCKLEW’S CALL
It’s now up to Judge Bucklew, known as a no-nonsense magistrate, to decide whether Alite, an Albanian-American associate who was never “made” as a Gambino soldier, did, in fact, violate the terms of her order.
On October 20th I sent her a follow-up letter after I discovered that in 2002 New Jersey Federal Judge Joseph H. Rodriquez “violated” Mr. Alite; sending him back to prison for three months after the ex-Gambino associate broke the terms of his Supervised Release in a New Jersey gun case.
Whatever her disposition I’ve asked her for a copy of the U.S. Probation Office’s report so that the public can get some sense of why Federal officials in New Jersey kept the convicted murderer and home invader on such a long leash.
THE SEPTEMBER 8th LETTER
THAT PROMPTED THE PROBE
Hon. Susan C. Bucklew
U.S. District Court
Middle District of Florida (Tampa)
Sam M. Gibbons U.S. Courthouse
801 North Florida Avenue
Tampa, FL 33602
cc: Jay Trezevant, AUSA MDF Tampa
Joseph Brine (SSA); Jamie Aguirre, FBI Los Angeles
Richard Antonison U.S. Probation Office, Camden NJ
September 8th 2015
Federal Express
Judge Bucklew,
I’m writing to you after having spoken several weeks ago to your extremely able civil clerk Jennifer Deeb and later to your Courtroom Deputy Susan Saylor who confirmed for me that John E. Alite, whom you sentenced to 120 months on April 26th, 2011 (later reducing the sentence to 100 months with 60 months Supervised Release) is still on Supervised Release.
The reason that question became an issue for me as a journalist is that on April 4th, Mr. Alite sent me a defamatory and threatening email with the subject matter “Jerk off,” (Attachment A) after I’d begun researching allegations that he had repeatedly violated the terms of that release (Attachment B) by making multiple trips outside of his NJ Judicial District, without first getting the approval of his probation officer and that he had repeatedly met with convicted former organized crime associates including one Pasqual Andriano who had pled guilty to an Alite-related homicide. 
Further, I learned that in addition to the email to me, while holding himself out as a reformed “motivational speaker” Mr. Alite had engaged in a broad campaign of cyber-bullying that included threatening a woman in the U.K. who had the temerity to question one of the specious claims he made in Gotti’s Rules, a purported memoir of Mr. Alite’s life as a low-level Gambino Family associate which he had been promoting since its publication in January.
Finally, my investigation has led me to conclude that the two AUSA’s who filed 5K1 Motions; resulting in your downward release order for Mr. Alite may have misled you as to the quality and results of his alleged “substantial assistance.”
Since you are a jurist with a stellar reputation and since my efforts to inform Mr. Alite’s probation office of this evidence seem to have fallen on deaf ears, I’m writing to you in the hope that you will make sure that your Amended Judgment in U.S. vs John E. Alite & John Malone (8:04-cr-00348-SCB-TGW) is being properly enforced and that Mr. Alite, whom I believe to be a potential time bomb waiting to go off, does no physical harm as he remains on the street subject to that Judgment. As you’ll see in one of the attachments to this letter, as recently as May, 2015 Mr. Alite told a reporter that he could “kill” again and one of his possible targets could be the son of John A. “Junior” Gotti.
MY BACKGROUND & INTEREST IN JOHN ALITE
Attachment C is the brief bio from my author’s page on amazon.com, I’m a five-time Emmy winning former ABC News correspondent who wrote fiction mid-career, but returned to journalism post-9/11 to write four acclaimed investigative books for HarperCollins critical of the FBI’s performance in counter-terrorism and organized crime.
I have a J.D. from Fordham University School of Law and an M.S. from The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and I continue to write and report regularly on law enforcement/counter-terrorism related matters for The Huffington Post (Attachment D) various magazines, The Santa Barbara News-Press and my website peterlance.com. (Attachment E). I also do commentary from time to time on national cable news networks; most recently MSNBC.
I’m enclosing hardcovers of my last two HarperCollins books so that you can appreciate that I’m a journalist who strives for the truth and reports the facts.
The research in Triple Cross, was described as “meticulous” by Forbes.com and no-less an authority on Cosa Nostra than former New York Times reporter Nicholas Gage called my last work, Deal With The Devil, “the most penetrating look into the inner workins of the Mafia since The Valachi Papers.”
I didn’t know much about John Alite other than the criticism that Gotti “Junior” had for him during his hour-long interview with Steve Kroft for 60 Minutes, which I’d screened after its airing in April, 2010.
Then, last August (2014) Mr. Gotti called me to say that he was preparing his memoir Shadow of My Father for publication early in 2015. He asked me if I would write the Foreword.
Since I’m a journalist and not a gun for hire and since, while something of an expert on The Colombo Crime Family (the subject of Deal With The Devil) I knew very little about the Gambinos or his prosecutions, I told Mr. Gotti that I couldn’t commit to associating myself with his memoir until I did the research.
I told him that if he granted me full unfettered access to his files and if I came to believe his assertions that he had long ago left “the life” and that John Alite had falsely testified against him at his 4th trial, I would consider writing the Foreword.
It took me half of the fall to finish the research and I did write the Foreword (Attachment F) which I urge you to read. It was published with Shadow in mid January just prior to Gotti’s Rules. So there were now two vastly different accounts of Mr. Alite’s story in print. 
ALITE’S FALSE CLAIM THAT GOTTI JR. WAS A CI
At that point in February, 2015 I returned to paying work which included consulting on a local civil case in Santa Barbara. I let whatever battles between Mr. Gotti and Mr. Alite over the two books take their course in the media; although I kept “Google Alerts” active for both individuals and occasionally would find interviews with Mr. Alite in which he made some preposterous claims.
Principal among them was that based on an FBI 302 purportedly describing a proffer session by Mr. Gotti on January 18th, 2005 – a session that lasted 45 minutes, wasn’t memorialized until a year later and ended in no cooperation deal – Mr. Gotti had an been an FBI “confidential informant” for years.
In short, Mr. Alite was putting Gotti Jr. in the same category as the subject of Deal, Gregory Scarpa Sr., aka “The Grim Reaper” and “The Killing Machine,” a notorious Colombo capo who had “stopped counting” after 50 homicides and who worked as a Top Echelon Criminal Informant (TECI) for the Bureau for more than thirty years, getting paid more than $1 million (in 2013 dollars) and betraying all of the bosses and underbosses above him (with the help of FBI intel) as he rose to the “boss level” of the Colombos.
On my own book tour, appearing multiple times on MSNBC during the trial of James “Whitey” Bulger, I described Scarpa’s corruption of his FBI contacting agent R. Lindley DeVecchio as “The Bulger story on steroids.”
GOTTI JR.’S REFUSAL TO COOPERATE
But Alite’s false claim, characterizing that 302 memo as conferring “CI” status on Mr. Gotti was typical of his exaggerations; particularly when one considers that John “Junior” endured four (4) separate trials and a 5th parole tax prosecution as a result of his steadfast refusal to become a government CW. Why? Because the Feds made it clear to him in 2008 that if he became “a rat,” in street parlance and testified against his former Mafia cohorts, then he would be a free man.
That’s the kind of deal that sprung John Alite from an oppressive Brazilian prison and (if you read the Foreword) it’s the same deal that FBI agent Ted Otto offered Joseph O’Kane, a longtime Gambino associate and friend of Mr. Alite’s, if he would only testify as a buttressing witness to Mr. Alite at “Gotti IV.”
But in one of the most moving and revealing moments in Mr. Gotti’s fourth trial, Mr. O’Kane refused to give false testimony. He was then shipped back to prison where he was later murdered in his cell.
CLAIMING HE SERVED 20 YEARS
Anyway, because I’d written the Foreword and because I’m always exasperated when fellow journalists allow interview subjects to make false claims without challenging them, I came across a piece in late July by one Theresa Neuhoff, a local reporter in Cleveland who covered Mr. Alite’s appearance at a purported benefit for the Epilepsy Foundation (July 24th) in which he shared the stage with James “Jimmy Gap” Calandra, a former Bonnanno associate who had pled guilty to the felony murder of a 46 year-old Staten Island woman in 1993.
See NYT coverage of Mr. Calandra’s indictment (Attachment G). Even though the epilepsy benefit was for a worthy cause, when I saw it advertised, I thought it curious that Mr. Alite would be allowed by the U.S. Office of Probation to travel from NJ to Ohio, and hang our with another Mafia associate who had also been convicted of murder.
But I let it go until I read Ms. Neuhoff’s account of the event (Attachment H).
In it she reported that “Alite, who spent 20 years in prison, spoke about committing more than 40 murders.” She also wrote that Mr. Alite “also suffers from epilepsy,” a statement I found curious since that is never mentioned in the 368 pages of Gotti’s Rules. I happen to take the subject seriously because I was born with petit mal and suffered with it in my childhood. Further, my older cousin has been plagued by grand mal seizures his entire life. So I emailed Ms. Neuhoff and politely asked her if she had a tape recording or transcript of the event. 
UNLEASHING JOHN ALITE’S WRATH
Apparently Ms. Neuhoff informed Mr. Alite about my query, because she quickly amended her story from “40 murders” to “40 shootings,” keeping the epilepsy claim intact. When I politely asked her (by email) if Mr. Alite had pressed her for the change, that prompted his August 4th “Jerk off” email. (Attachment A).
That email in which he made the “heroin addict” claim and falsely suggested that I’d tried “to sleep with reporters from Daily Mail,” (sic) that I was a “lap dog,” “boy toy with no pride,” and “a joke,” also contained a revelatory challenge.
In it, Mr. Alite invited me to join him a on Mulberry Street, in New York’s Little Italy, suggesting that he was crossing the Hudson with impunity.
MY CONVERSATION WITH FBI AGENTS
Because of the threatening tone of the email, John Alite’s propensity for violence and because I have children who live in the New York area, I left a voice mail for AUSA Jay Trezevant asking him to intervene. I never heard back from him but two days later on August 6th I got a call from SSA Joseph Brine and SA Jaime Aguirre of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office.
After a lengthy conversation with them I sent them a follow-up email (Attachment I) stating that:
“My description (in the Foreword) of Alite’s testimony at Gotti Jr.’s fourth trial — particularly the account on pages XXIV-XXV of how Alite reacted so violently to an electrician who worked on his property, will give you some sense of what he’s capable of.
“On both direct examination and cross Alite proudly boasted of how he’d found this electrician sleeping in his bed and reacted by “piping” him, stripping him naked, throwing him into a pond on his property, shooting at him and leaving him tied up in his unheated garage in the middle of winter while he -Alite – went to dinner.
“I’m not a psychiatrist, but I’d say that John Alite exhibits the benchmark traits of a narcissistic sociopath. He has a grandiose vision of himself and reacts strongly and violently to any criticism.
“As I told you, I’ve covered law enforcement and organized crime for many years and given Alite’s violent and murderous background, I wanted officials in the Justice Department, who were responsible for his early release, to understand his capacity to make threats — particularly to a journalist.”
That led to a brief investigation of the letter by the FBI’s L.A. field office and on August 10th SA Aquirre responded with an email (Attachment J) in which he stated that while federal prosecutors didn’t find the “Jerk off” email actionable, a record of my complaint was created and sent to the files.
He also gave me the phone numbers of several U.S. Probation Office officials because I’d told him I wanted to contact Mr. Alite’s probation officers and relay my complaint to them regarding new evidence I’d found that he was violating your Judgement.
After, Ms. Tashika Curtis in the Tampa (DOP) office refused to even confirm if Mr. Alite was still subject to your sentencing order, I called your chambers and Ms. Saylor confirmed for me, that he was still under Supervised Release.
I finally located Richard Antonison, Duty Officer at Mr. Alite’s probation office in Camden, New Jersey near his home in Cherry Hill. I sent him the evidence I’d uncovered of Mr. Alites’s repeated meetings with ex-O.C. figures and his increasing cyber threats. (Attachment K).
I URGE YOU TO READ THAT EMAIL
Because it contains a number of pictures from John Alite’s own Twitter and Facebook pages in which he documents his recent meetings with ex-Mafia associates in defiance of your Supervised Release order. Of particular concern are his multiple appearances at Long Island bars and night clubs with Pasquale “Patsy” Andriano. See this excerpt from my email to which Mr. Antonison never responded.
“The son of a murderous Genovese member whom Alite calls his “cousin” in “Gotti’s Rules,” Andriano was the confessed shooter in the murder of John Gebert, whom he killed on July 12th, 1996 at the age of 19.
“Andriano, as you’ll see from the attached SDNY MEMORANDUM from the prosecution of Gambino killer John Burke was a government witness (CW) in that trial — and, like Alite was released from prison after his cooperation.
“In fact, Andriano was originally indicted with Alite in the alleged Gambino-related murder/racketeering prosecution in Tampa of Ronald J. “One Arm” Trucchio. This was the case in which Judge Bucklew sentenced Alite after his plea.
“By the way, when Andriano killed Gebert at Frankie & Johnny’s bar in Queens, as he hid under a pool table, an innocent bystander was shot.
“Below you’ll see multiple recent pictures from Alite’s Facebook account of him with Andriano, including them hanging out with Alite’s sons at an unidentified beach resort and an upscale Long Island nightclub.
“Understand that Andriano isn’t just some mob associate, he’s the convicted murderer of Gebert, one of the main counts in “Gotti Jr. IV” and it’s clear that John Alite is regularly crossing state lines to party with him.”
WHY I BELIEVE YOU WERE MISLED BY FEDERAL PROSECUTORS
As I continued to research Mr. Alite’s case, while many documents are under seal, what I found on the public record has caused me to conclude that you may have been misled by Mr. Trezevant and former AUSA Roger Burlingame, both of whom opined to you about Mr. Alite’s alleged “substantial assistance” to the DOJ, in various 5K.1 motions and letters urging you to grant that 20 month reduction.
Because I believe your Honor to be a respected jurist who enforces the law, I wanted you to see this evidence which raises serious questions about the viability of the Supervised Release program, managed by the DOP.
REVIEWING THE RECORD ON YOUR SENTENCING.
In a New York Daily News story April 27th, 2011 covering your initial 100 month sentence Mr. Burlingame (now in private practice in London) reportedly wrote to you that “John Alite provided information that materially contributed to the conviction of numerous members and associates of the Gambino organized crime family.” (Attachment L).
Note his use of the words “members” and “conviction.”
In a Motion to partially unseal the sentencing memos submitted by the government on behalf of defendant’s Alite and Malone filed on August 23rd, 2011, four (4) months after your initial 120 month sentence, Mr. Trezevant writes that “It is currently planned by the government that Alite and Malone will be listed, and may testify as witnesses for the government in U.S. vs. John Burke and David D’Arpino. (Attachment M).
In a Second Motion Mr. Trezevant went so far as to assure your Honor that “Alite’s substantial assistance involved an extensive series of debriefings … during which Alite provided details about his powerful role as an associate of the Gambino Crime Family dating back to the 1980’s.” (emphasis added). Later in that same Motion dated January 9th 2012 he writes, ”Alite participated in an extensive series of proffer sessions and provided truthful, substantial information used to indict more than thirty members and associates of the Gambino Crime Family. (emphasis added). (Attachment N).
And Mr. Trezvant goes so far as to write that following his transport from Tampa “Mr. Alite … continued to provide substantial assistance to the Southern and Eastern District of New York in the following cases:
1. U.S. vs. Joseph Corozzo et. al.
2. U.S. vs. John A. Burke et al.
3. U.S. vs. Peter Plaia.” (emphasis added)
EXAMINING THE TRUTH IN THOSE 5K.1 MOTIONS
If you read my Foreword your Honor, you’ll see that John Alite, aka John Aletto, aka Johnny Corvette, never had a “powerful role” in the Gambino Family.
Given the pecking order of Cosa Nostra, as a non-Italian (Albanian-American) he was a low level associate who was four steps removed from Gotti Jr. In order to do any business, he had to communicate with an Italian-American associate who talked to a “made” Member (or soldier) who communicated with a Capo (captain) who then interacted with a reputed underboss like Gotti Jr.
In blistering cross examination during Mr. Gotti’s fourth trial by defense attorney Charles Carnesi, John Alite was repeatedly caught in lies when he swore under oath that Mr. Gotti had directed him to commit murders.
After the jury hung, veteran A.P. reporter Tom Hays filed a story in which he wrote that the jurors were unanimous that Mr. Alite was the “least credible” of all the witnesses who took the stand for either the prosecution or the defense. (Attachment O).
“They were unanimous on one point,” wrote Hays “The government’s star cooperator, admitted mob enforcer and former Gotti Jr. friend John Alite bombed on the witness stand.”
And apart from a few dozen low-level associates and members of Mr. Alite’s crew who “flipped” once he’d copped a plea, what about the allegations by Mr. Burlingame that John Alite helped with the “conviction” of “members… of the Gambino Organized Crime Family?”
First, the juries were hung in the only two proceedings in which Mr. Alite testified against, “made” members. Mr. Gotti’s aforementioned fourth trial in 2009 and (earlier that same year) the trial of Gambino killer Charles Carneglia – who was convicted, but on the single count for which Mr. Alite testified – the murder of Court Office Albert Gelb – the jury was hung.
See the New York Daily News coverage of that trial on Sept. 17th, 2011. (Attachment P). The lead prosecutor was Roger Burlingame who had opined to you about Mr. Alite’s “substantial assistance,” but the jury deadlocked on the Gelb count.
THE FEDS NEVER AGAIN USED JOHN ALITE AS A CW
As to Mr. Trezevant’s prediction to you that Mr. Alite would testify for Team Fed in the John Burke trial, they ended up keeping him off the stand.
See (Attachment Q) the New York Daily News story from January 25th, 2013 reporting that “The Feds pulled out the rug on Gambino turncoat John Alite’s courtroom confrontation.”
It’s one thing, your Honor, for various AUSA’s bent on the conviction of a high profile target like Gotti Jr. to try and deceive a jury and turn a low-level Mafia wannabe like John Alite into a latter-day “Sammy The Bull” Gravano. But to get 20 months shaved off his sentence, releasing this admitted multiple murderer out into the world by deceiving a federal judge is something else.
Since some of the sentencing-related documents in Mr. Alite’s case file on Pacer are under seal, you are in the best position to go back and vet the quality of John Alite’s alleged “substantial assistance.”
WHY DOES THIS MATTER?
Take a look at the detailed email I sent to Mr. Alite on August 12th in which I called on him politely and civilly to demonstrate how he’s not violating your Supervised Release order with impunity by making trips outside NJ to Florida, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware and New York (Attachment R).
I also asked him to justify his claim that he’d spent more than 20 years in prison (as chronicled by Ms. Neuhoff in Ohio) when, per your order (with time served) he did far less, actually getting out in the Spring of 2012 (according to Gotti’s Rules).
As I wrote in my email to him, despite his puffery and boasting, John Alite is “a hyper-violent criminal who pled guilty to (his) involvement in two homicides, four murder conspiracies, at least eight shootings and two attempted shootings, not to mention a series of armed home invasions in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Florida.”
I also noted that his torture of the electrician which he boasted about on both direct and cross during “Gotti IV” was the “kind of behavior one would expect from ISIS or The Taliban, not a low-level Mafia associate.
THE LACK OF GRAPHIC EVIDENCE
Finally, I noted for Mr. Alite that “one of the most revealing discoveries in Gotti’s Rules is how, despite claiming that late in his Mafia career Gotti Jr. personally ordered him to “do hits,” the only pictures he has in the book of the two of them together are from their early 20’s, long before, as Gotti Jr. insists, he “chased ” Mr. Alite out of New York.
In that August 12th email, I asked Mr. Alite, “How was it John, if you were his ‘baby sitter’ and killed people on his direct orders, that years later, during the trial, the Feds never produced a single surveillance photo, video or audio recording of the two of you together (at the time of the crimes in the indictment) despite the fact that Gotti Jr. was under almost constant FBI surveillance for years?”
I also noted how Mr. Alite had resorted to international cyber-bullying.
“In retaliation for criticism of you by a British woman named Janine Battey who uses the screen name Janine Finch 69, you posted a picture of her showing Mrs. Finch and her husband with this comment:
“Hi everyone (sic) This is Janine finch69 the women who we need to poster all over how not to act. This is your typical bully coward who we want our children to be nothing like. She is (sic) crude individual. Next month when I come to the UK I will pass her address out for you all to know her. Please understand this is someone that hides under a different name and is the worse (sic) example of a mother adult and human being.” 
Then I asked him, “What kind of man, who has recast himself as a “motivational speaker” to help children avoid lives of crime, would resort to that kind of trans-Atlantic cyber-bullying? Having covered dozens of criminals in a 40+ year career John and having a pretty good sense of a narcissistic sociopath when I see one, it’s that kind of threat that caused me to send your “Jerk off” email to the Feds, encouraging them to rein you in.”
GETTING A SURROGATE TO RESPOND
Apparently lacking the courage to address my questions directly, Mr. Alite proceeded to ask a local Pennsylvania cable TV host named John Ricciutti to respond. On August 13th, the day after my email to Mr. Alite, Mr. Ricciutti send me this email:
From: John Ricciutti <jricciutti@comcast.net>
Subject: JOHN ALITE
Date: August 13, 2015 at 4:44:44 PM PDT
To: “netgraph@earthlink.net” <netgraph@earthlink.net>
Mr Lance, is the above your email address? I would like to respond to your mailing regarding John Alite.
John Ricciutti, producer Radnor Studio 21 Wayne Pa., 19087 610-716-9288
When I confirmed my email address and never heard back from him, I sent an email to Mr. Ricciutti Sept. 7th (Attachment S) asking why, during his interview of Mr. Alite on June 19th he simply accepted, without question, that this confessed murderer and torturer was now reformed.
He responded to me September 2nd, 2015 by saying, effectively, that he’d decided not to speak for Mr. Alite.
“Mr. Lance, upon further reflection and review of your lengthy email again, I choose not to respond. Our programs are informational, educational and entertaining. The subject matter is directed by the interviewee and we offer no opinion as to veracity as that is left to the discretion of our viewers. John Ricciutti
But shortly thereafter Mr. Ricciutti made a comment on Mr. Alite’s Facebook page calling me a “zealot,” although mistakenly from Ohio, to which John Alite jumped in with the kind of veiled threat he’s now infamous for, calling me a “stalker.” (Attachment T).
He also suggested that Ricciutti invite me on his program so I could “sit next” to him. Like his invitation for me to confront him in Little Italy (Attachment A) Alite seems bent on provoking a man a mano confrontation.
WHY YOU SHOULD BE CONCERNED
Assuming that you unleashed John Alite on an unsuspecting public 20 months early because you believed AUSA’s Trezevant and Burlingame, how will you feel, your Honor, if this ticking time bomb goes off?
Alite’s latest “stalker” allegation, his refusal to apologize or back down from his “heroin addict” and other defamatory allegations and his months’ long used of social media to promote himself as a Gravano-level mob figure, coupled with his willingness to lash out at a journalist like me or a critic like poor Ms. Finch in England, have all the earmarks of the behavior of a narcissistic sociopath:
He has a constant need for attention and admiration, a grandiose vision of himself and a tendency to act negatively – sometimes violently – when criticized or challenged.
As noted in the beginning of this letter, he’s already gone on record as predicting that now that he’s out, he could kill again. See (Attachment U) a May 7th, 2015 interview John Alite gave to celebrated New York Mafia reporter Jerry Capeci for his Gangland News column.
Claiming that Gotti Jr. allowed his son (John A. Gotti Jr.) to “cyber-stalk” him, Mr. Capeci quoted Mr. Alite as saying this about Mr. Gotti:
“How does he know that I’m not going to be a killer again? He’s ratcheting him up, putting a battery pack in him, getting him worked up. If he runs into me God forbid, and he comes after me, and I kill this kid because of this nonsense he’s telling him, what does he do then? What’s wrong with him?” 
PREVENTING ANOTHER INCIDENT LIKE THE ONE WITH JACK HENRY ABBOTT
Your Honor, you live in Tampa but I’m sure you’re aware of the most notorious example of an early release gone-wrong after the infamous Willie Horton incident.
Attachment V is an account by Sewell Chan writing in The New York Times on November 12th, 2007. In the piece he reports on how the celebrated author Norman Mailer had championed the parole of convicted killer Jack Henry Abbott in 1981 after Abbott had written (what became) a critically acclaimed prison memoir, In The Belly of The Beast. Mailer even agreed to hire Abbott as a research assistant and got him a book deal with Random House.
But just a few weeks later in an Upper East Side café, Abbott snapped during an argument with a young 22 year-old waiter (Richard Adan) and stabbed him to death. He later committed suicide after his return to prison.
The Abbott story remains a testament to what can happen when a dangerous, hyper-violent career criminal is returned to society and given a bully pulpit.
MY REQUEST TO YOU – REPORTER TO JUDGE
Your Honor, if not out of concern for the safety of the public; if not out of concern that you might have been misled by Federal prosecutors bent on “getting” Gotti Jr. who utterly overstated John Alite’s value as a cooperating witness, then I ask you to take this letter seriously if the Supervised Release program is to have any meaning.
In light of the incredibly loose leash that the U.S. Office of Probation seems to have on John Alite, I interviewed several former federal inmates (including John A. Gotti) about the nature of their release.
This is what “Junior” told me:
“My parole was so strict that if I was in a restaurant with my family and anybody from the old life walked in, not only could I not speak to them or even make eye contact, but I had to immediately call my probation officer.
“The idea that Alite is socializing with Pasty Andriano at a Long Island night club where booze is sold and drugs are used – the very guy who did the John Gebert murder at Alite’s behest – is absolutely unbelievable. That he’s running in and out of Jersey and hanging with associates and his former confederates, apparently with the advice and consent of the Feds, makes a mockery of the term ‘Supervised’ Release.”
So there it is, your Honor. In my opinion, having covered law enforcement at the local, state and federal level for more than thirty years, if any parolee deserves to be “violated” and sent back to prison, it’s John E. Alite.
I intend to write about this, so I ask you to please let me know what you think, either directly or through your clerks as soon as possible.
My email address is: pl@peterlance.com. My fax number is 805-823-4498.
Later, after you’ve digested this material, I invite you to take the time to read both of my HarperCollins books. They tell a little known story about how the obsession by the FBI to “get” John Gotti Sr. caused the New York Office of the FBI (NYO) to take their eye off the metastasizing al Qaeda cell in NYC, which I prove (in my books) was responsible for both attacks on the World Trade Center, the 1993 bombing and 9/11.
THE ULTIMATE PRICE OF THE FEDS’ MISPLACED PRIORITIES:
See Attachment W, a Huffington Post I wrote in 2006 when Triple Cross was first published in hardcover. It’s called “Al Qaeda and The Mob: How the FBI Blew It on 9/11. In it I tell the astonishing true story of “Sphinx Trading,” the New Jersey mailbox and check-cashing store run by Egyptians located right under the Al-Salaam mosque of convicted al Qaeda terrorist Omar Abdel Rahman (the blind Sheikh) and how the Bureau was onto it as early as 1991 – yet failed time and time again to put it under surveillance (as they’d done with Gotti Sr.’s Ravenite social club).
A decade later two of the “muscle hijackers” who flew AA Flight 77 into The Pentagon got their fake ID’s from that very Jersey City location, co-founded by Waleed al-Noor, one of 172 un-indicted co-conspirators in the 1994 “Day of Terror” plot to blow up the bridges & tunnels into Manhattan, the U.N.; even 26 Federal Plaza which houses the NYO.
No less a federal prosecutor than Patrick Fitzgerald, the former head of the Organized Crime and Terrorism Unit in the SDNY whom I singled out for criticism in the book and later went on to become U.S. Attorney in Chicago and Special Prosecutor in the Valerie Plama “CIA leak” case, spent twenty-two months, trying to kill Triple Cross in hardcover and prevent the paperback from seeing the light of day.
Attachment X is a New York Magazine story on Mr. Fitzgerald’s failed censorship campaign. Attachment Y is the Newsweek coverage and Attachment Z is my HuffPost challenging Mr. Fitzgerald in 2009 when Triple Cross was finally published in paperback. As recently as a few weeks earlier he had threatened to press his libel claim, but once the book was published he backed down and never responded.
But ask yourself, your Honor, if I wasn’t a substantive journalist, whether a prosecutor on Patrick Fitzgerald’s level would have taken the time to write thirty-two pages of threat letters over a 22 month period trying to pulp a book from HarperCollins, the largest English language publisher in the world.
Those letters can be accessed here:
Al QAEDA AND THE MOB – HOW THE FEDS BLEW IT
After reading my 2006 HuffPost (Attachment W) imagine if the FBI had devoted just 5% of the surveillance resources they’d spent on their 24/7 surveillance of The Ravenite social club to monitoring Sphinx Trading in Jersey City.
Since that’s the location where 9/11 hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi got their fake ID’s, the FBI could have been in the middle of the “planes as missiles” plot in July of 2001 around the time of The Phoenix Memo.
Now it’s true that I’m looking at much of this history with twenty-twenty hindsight, but the threat from John Alite is very current and very real.
Once again, seeming to flaunt the limits of his Supervised Release, Mr. Alite has been promoting a speaking engagement and book signings he plans to give September 10th at The Mob Museum in Las Vegas, a city notorious for it’s nightclubs, casinos and concentration of organized crime figures.
I urge your Honor to take this seriously and get back to me as soon as you’ve digested this material.
Someone in an official capacity in the Justice Department or the Federal court system needs to determine whether or not, as the evidence I’ve presented suggests, John Alite has repeatedly violated the terms of his Supervised Release and poses a potential threat to members of the public and the media who criticize him.
Respectfully,
Peter Lance
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