Here a Gotti, There a Gotti, Everywhere a Gotti: Fourth Time a Charm for Prosecutors?

by Stacy Dittrich

We’ll see if the fourth time is a charm for second-generation mobster John Gotti Jr., 45. As the jury began its deliberation Thursday on racketeering charges against the Gambino Family crime boss, the same circus-like atmosphere and fears of mob retaliation hung like a thick fog in the courtroom, as it had during the three previous trials involving the high-profile gangster -- trials that all resulted in a hung jury. Like his famed father before him, Gotti Jr. has managed to skirt a judicial system that has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to lock him up for the rest of his life. Facing the same fate as his father, John “Dapper Don” Gotti Sr., who died in prison in 2002, Gotti Jr. now waits quietly to see if this particular jury will convict him of racketeering or on two murder charges.

The trial to date has already shown signs of an outcome in Gotti Jr.’s favor, the same problems that plagued the previous trials. Some jurors, fearful of mob retaliation and claims of anonymous threats, have requested to be dismissed, while others are clearly staging their support for the defendant — an act that caused presiding judge Kevin Castel to send two of them packing. His decision caused Gotti Jr.’s mother, Victoria, to have a complete meltdown inside the courtroom, one of many bizarre outbursts and displays by the Gotti family.

“F****** animals!” she screamed at the judge after the jurors were dismissed.

“They’re railroading you! They’re doing to you what you did to your father!”

Even though her embarrassed son tried to calm her down, she continued.

“They’re the gangsters! Right there!” she yelled, pointing at the judge and prosecutors. “The ****** gangsters! You sons of bitches! Put your own sons in there! You ********!”

She was quickly removed from the courtroom but could still be heard yelling in the hallway. Earlier in the trial, Gotti Jr. referred loudly to a prosecution witness as a “dog” and a “punk.” Prosecutors also alleged Gotti Jr. mouthed the words “I’ll kill you” to another witness. However, prosecutors are confident that their star witness, former Gotti Jr. best friend, mobster, and recent rat, John Alite, 47, will be their smoking gun. Unfortunately, Alite’s testimony sounded like it came directly from the "Goodfellas" screenplay.

“When I went to restaurants, I didn’t wait. When I went to shows, I got the best seats,” he testified. “When we went to stores, we got suits custom-made. We got treated like celebrities.

“People looked at me differently and they knew I was somebody. I didn’t have to wait in line at the bakery.”

Alite said he bought “the best of everything,” including $500 Bruno Magli shoes, Rolex watches, gold bars, diamonds, and 24 cars.

Quite frankly, his testimony may be just slightly unbelievable, as the non-Italian son of a taxi cab driver testified in a dirty, gray, sweatshirt and looked like a two-bit street thug. Not to mention, he never testified in the prior trials because he was on the run from his own charges. He only agreed to testify against Gotti Jr. (pictured left) under promises of a lesser sentence from the prosecution.

It will be interesting to see if Gotti Jr. inherits his father’s Teflon. If so, it will even be more interesting to see just how federal prosecutors get a conviction. No matter the outcome, it’s pretty obvious that the theories of mob extinction are debunked. They’re clearly as strong and powerful as ever.

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Can Background Checks Prevent Murder?

by Michele McPhee

I have spent two decades covering crime. As a result, I never date a guy without conducting a thorough background check on him. Initially, my research was prompted after a couple of dates with a guy who wrapped his arm around his dinner plate, “Walpole-style’’ as they call it up here in Massachusetts, referring to the state’s super-max prison. Sure enough, that gruff yet buff date had spent a decade at Walpole perfecting his plate protecting. Then there was that swarthy Italian guy in New York I dated while working as the police bureau chief of the New York Daily News. He turned out to be a Gambino crime family associate with a rap sheet.

But it’s not just my own experience that provokes me to pursue criminal histories on potential mates. It’s all the women who didn’t find out who their loves really were, women who ended up dead.

On June 3rd, the same day my book Heartless: The True Story of Neil Entwistle and the Cold-Blooded Murder of his Wife and Baby will be released by St. Martin’s Press true crime division, Neil Entwistle (pictured above) will go on trial for the 2005 assassinations of his infant Lillian Rose and his bride Rachel. The motive that provoked the Brit to allegedly pump a bullet into his baby’s stomach and his wife’s head, prosecutors believe, was money. In his case, the complete lack of any.

Entwistle was one of those guys who could become whoever you wanted him to be; the master con artist. His wife Rachel had no idea that the charming raven-haired genius she met at a rowing club in England, the man who told her he had a top-secret job at an intelligence firm, was actually just an unemployed chump living off credit and trolling Internet sex sites for clandestine hookups. Even her mother and her step-father were snowed by Neil Entwistle. To them he was nothing other than a doting husband and loving dad – that is until that January 2006 day when the bodies of his wife and baby were found under a rumpled comforter in their idyllic New England home. He fled the country after finding their bodies, without calling police, and was arrested for their murders in England months later.

But Entwistle is not the only guy with a shaky past who went on to kill his lover. In fact, Massachusetts has a macabre history of providing the backdrop for infamous crime scenes where women were brutally slain by men they trusted. This week the trial of James Keown--the radio talk-show host who is charged with spiking his wife's Gatorade with anti-freeze, fatally poisoning her in 2004--ended in a mistrial. Keown is accused of killing his wife Julie in an attempt to collect on a $250,000 life insurance policy. Julie, a dedicated nurse who was 31 years old when her kidneys began to fail, had no idea that the love of her life was broke, and desperate enough to kill her - according to Massachusetts prosecutors.

Keown was transmitting his radio show from their Waltham home because he convinced his employer - and his wife - that he had been accepted to Harvard Business School. In fact, he had taken a night course on the Cambridge campus, but had flunked it. Prosecutors said they will retry Keown on June 9, meaning his murder trial will take place down the hall from Neil Entwistle's double homicide trial.

Here are just a few others:

- Christa Worthington - the fashion writer who was found bloodied and stabbed in her Cape Cod cottage with her two-year-old daughter Ava desperately trying to breastfeed from her mother’s dead body. Her alleged sometime lover, the local trash man, was convicted of raping and killing the wealthy, attractive single mom one winter afternoon in 2002. That arrest came after her other lovers' reputations were stained with accusations that they were suspects.

- Carol DiMaiti-Stuart - Carol and her unborn son Christopher were shot dead by her dashing husband Charles Stuart after they attended a Lamaze class together in 1989. Stuart, a greedy Newbury Street furrier, blamed a black man and set off a near-race war in Boston, all motivated by a half-million life insurance policy. He threw himself off the Tobin Bridge when the cops closed in. But was it really suicide? That remains a Boston mystery.

- Laura Jane Rosenthal - Laura was beaten to death with a rock by her financier husband Richard who then impaled her heart and lungs on a stake in the backyard after she burnt the ziti she was cooking for dinner in 1995. The handsome well-to-do businessman is serving life.

- Kenneth Seguin - Kenneth was a handsome, successful businessman who had never been in trouble when he drove an axe into his wife Mary Anne’s head then drugged his two children and hacked them to death in 1992. Currently, he heads a Lifers Group – a union of sorts for convicted killers in Massachusetts jail.

All of these men shared something in common: a hint in their backgrounds that something might snap. The trash man that killed Worthington had a long history of violence. Charles Stuart had taken out a massive life insurance policy on his wife before they married and she got pregnant. Richard Rosenthal had a history of mental illness. Seguin was going broke.

Credit and criminal checks work, as does some old-fashioned shoe leather reporting. Ask about old girlfriends and family trees; snoop just a little bit to make sure there are no prescriptions for psychotic episodes in the medicine cabinet. A little research could have provided that mustard seed of information that would have made these slain women just a little bit more leery.

We do background checks on used cars before we buy them, why not build workups on the men in our lives?

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Jimmy Hoffa's Bones Found in NYC Earthquake?

by Kathryn Casey

We all knew it was bound to happen, just didn’t know when.

Who could have predicted that a 3 on the Richter Scale earthquake would hit Manhattan last month, rocking Broadway harder than the Rockettes and pummeling Wall Street as soundly as rising interest rates? Then the bizarre quietly happened on the upper West Side. In a historic building, a former hotel that’s been refurbished into multimillion-dollar apartments, one of the few remaining original basement walls split open and bones were seen walled up behind it.

Whose bones? That’s where this story gets truly interesting.

A team of forensic anthropologists swarmed the site, wondering if they'd discovered the remains of an early New Yorker. When a rope was found around the skeleton's neck, NYPD summarily hung yellow tape and kicked everyone else out. It could have taken months even years to identify the victim, but one of the detectives found a stash of clothes at the skeleton's feet and noticed, “Looks to me like that stuff's from the seventies. Look at all that polyester."

“Hey, didn’t John Gotti keep a room here when it was that dump of a hotel?” asked another cop. “Seems to me that he did.”

“Wouldn’t it be a hoot if we finally found Jimmy Hoffa?” said a third, with a snort. “I always figured Gotti was involved in Hoffa’s disappearance.”

Teamster president and ex-con Hoffa, of course, vanished without a trace from outside the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, on July 30, 1975. The feds had long suspected that Hoffa’s disappearance could be tied to the Mafia. He was well known to have underworld connections. In fact the afternoon he disappeared, Hoffa was scheduled to nosh with Detroit mobster Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone and New Jersey labor leader Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano, a member of the Genovese crime family. To the officers on the scene that day, those facts made the Gotti connection plausible if not probable.

Also backing up their suspicions, this wasn't the first time NYC had been suggested as Hoffa's final resting place. In 2006, Lynda Milito, wife of Gambino crime family member Louie Milito, claimed that her husband once told her he had killed Hoffa and dumped his body near Staten Island’s Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

Rumors aside, it wasn't until police checked records and determined the clothes found with the skeleton matched those Hoffa was last seen in – a dark blue short-sleeved shirt, blue trousers, white socks and black Gucci loafers – that the possibility Hoffa's remains had finally been found seemed realistic. At that point, the FBI closed down all access to local police and secretly moved in and took over the investigation.

Now, of course, DNA can’t be processed overnight. But the FBI put a priority stamp on the request. Results came back this morning, and they were astonishing. “What we have here is April Fools Day,” said Sergeant Phil Esterhaus. “Hey, be careful out there! You could get spoofed.”

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