The champagne was on ice.
The liquor cart was fully stocked.
High-end prostitutes were checking their makeup one last time as blacked-out SUVs began to arrive, decanting Hollywood film stars, titans of industry and, of course, professional athletes.
John Alite, right-hand-man to notorious mobster John Gotti Jr, turned on the background music in the palatial New York hotel suite for the monthly poker night.
He knew how to set the scene.
Those days ended over 20 years ago, for Alite. But on Thursday, the shadowy world of his past was hurled into the spotlight, thanks to New York prosecutors announcing a stunning series of indictments.
At least two NBA coaches and one player were among more than 30 people named in multiple indictments, alleging involvement in a widespread mafia-linked gambling scandal.
Terry Rozier, a 31-year-old NBA star playing with the Miami Heat, was arrested in Orlando on Thursday morning. Chauncey Billups, 49, coach of the Portland Trail Blazers and former superstar, was detained at his Oregon home. Damon Jones, 49, who played alongside LeBron James with the Cleveland Cavaliers before also going on to coach, was also nabbed.
The arrests shocked the sports world and left many asking: why would these multimillionaires – with the world at their feet get – get involved in gangster scams?
Alite thinks he knows, because he was involved in schemes to draw in high-rollers and then blackmail them.
‘Ball players are like gangsters in many ways,’ he told the Daily Mail in an exclusive interview. ‘We’re adrenaline junkies. Everybody is mixed up in this for adrenaline, right?’
Alite himself was in deep. Growing up in the New York borough of Queens, he was childhood friends with members of the Gotti family, which led the Gambino syndicate – one of the city’s famed five families comprising La Cosa Nostra.
Alite, now 63, was particularly close to John Gotti Jr, son of the ‘Dapper Don’. By his own admission, Alite shot 30 to 40 people, baseball-batted 100 more, and murdered two. In 2011 he turned on the mob, testified, and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Alite also claims he ran the mob’s gambling games across New York and Florida.
‘Instead of going to Atlantic City, you go to private apartments or hotel suites or back rooms of restaurants where the high-end stakes are being played, and the mob takes a cut of those games,’ he said.
‘Everything that the legal industry doesn’t offer, the illegal industry does. So, you want a beautiful woman, they’ll give you a beautiful woman. You want drugs, they’re going to give you drugs. Whatever you want to make you happy and comfortable.
‘We’ll send cars for you, bring you bodyguards, introduce you to famous people, all the things that gives you the adrenaline and the excitement that going Atlantic City doesn’t give you.’
Plus, Alite said, there was the added frisson of the mob, ‘Think about, if you have all kinds of money, what’s going to excite you? So you’ve got to get outside of your world to find what excites you. To them, the criminal world’s very exciting, right?’
That allure of danger, Alite said, helps set the trap.
‘Credit is the biggest thing,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to remember everyone hides this from their spouses. But if they don’t have to put it on a credit card, she doesn’t know.’
Then, once the player starts indulging in the mob’s illicit offering or, even better, losing money, they’re caught.
‘Now the mafia owns his debt,’ explained Alite. ‘Maybe they got him a prostitute and he’s married, so they got pictures of him. Or they have videos of girls touching them while he’s playing cards. Maybe they gave him some drugs. They slowly get them where they’re trapped.
‘They get close to him, ask him for a favor. It’s a slow process, and they work them for a while.
‘They’ll ask them unassuming questions: Who do you think is going to win today? How does your team look? Is anybody sick on your team that isn’t going to play? So, they get an inside track when they’re taking bets.’
After a while, Alite said, the ‘favors’ will escalate: Asking a coach to ensure a certain player comes out to take the first shot, or telling someone to swing and miss the first pitch.
When a federal ban on sports gambling was lifted in 2018, there quickly emerged a proliferation of online outlets, offering a plethora of ways to bet.
Today, money can be waged on nearly every aspect of a game and Alite said these ‘exotic bets’ were a gift to the mafia.
He noted that Rozier, the Miami Heat player, in March 2023 is accused of telling his friends to bet that he would score below his usual average number of points.
The indictment alleges that Rozier exited that game in question early, claiming a foot injury. It was a relatively low-scoring affair for him.
Alite, who has written books about his time with the Gambino family, is now a New Jersey council member. He claims the problem with sports betting is worse than ever.
‘Now you have so much money in college sports, which it makes us even more dangerous,’ he said. ‘The younger the guys are, the wilder they are, because they haven’t developed right mentally.
‘All of a sudden, he’s making crazy money. He’s driving beautiful cars. He’s got all the girls in school, and he wants more money, and he wants more excitement, and he starts gambling. It’s very, very hard to stop the temptation.
‘It seems so glamorous but there’s a price. I don’t even like watching gangster movies now, you know? When I go out, people are like, ‘oh, wow.’ You know, they want to hear stories. It was exciting at the time, but they lose the bottom line. The bottom line: is it worth it? Obviously not. It destroys your life. It destroys other people’s lives.
‘But people don’t see that part. They see the movie, romantic side of it. And it’s the same with the gambling. It ruins lives.’
