Mob enforcer John Alite joins war against fentanyl after daughter, 30, dies from overdose

John Alite isn’t looking for sympathy and he isn’t looking for acclaim. He is looking for a fight. And, after a life during which he once embraced extreme violence as an enforcer for the mob, this time it is horribly personal.

At 8.34am on August 18, doctors switched off the life support that had been sustaining Alite’s daughter, Chelsea, since her admission to hospital three days earlier.

Chelsea Alite was 30 years old, mother to a five-year-old son, Brayden, and she died when she unwittingly took a Percocet that had been laced with fentanyl. She was the third of Alite’s four children and his only daughter.

In the weeks since her death Alite has had a crash course in what he calls the fentanyl ‘war’ being waged in this country, claiming the lives of Americans in record numbers. 

Now, in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, he is speaking for the first time about his loss and the mission he has found in it.

‘People have no control of the streets and coming from my life, being the guy that I am, and I was, I’m a fighter,’ he said. ‘There’s no way I’m not going to fight for my daughter’s life to mean something.’

Today Alite, 60, wants to use his platform as a reformed member of the mob who famously testified against John Gotti and has gone on to author books, front a podcast and head up a host of second chance programs for young offenders, to draw attention to the silent killer stalking our streets.

According to most recent statistics fentanyl has quickly and quietly become the leading cause of death in this country among adults between 18 and 45.

The CDC says there were 56,516 deaths involving synthetic opioids – ‘primarily fentanyl’ – in 2020. For adults between 18 and 45 it is the leading cause of death with around double the number of fatalities that year as Covid-19, auto accidents or suicide. 

Earlier this month federal authorities announced a record-breaking seizure of the drug when they arrested a New Jersey woman for concealing 15,000 rainbow-colored fentanyl pills in Lego blocks.

Days later, on October 9, prosecutors announced an even higher number of the pills had been found – with a seizure of roughly 300,000 rainbow-colored fentanyl pills eclipsing the previous record when it was recovered from two closets in a New York apartment.

Authorities estimated the pills had a street value of roughly $9million.

According to Alite, ‘The vast majority of this fentanyl is manufactured in China and comes into our country across the southern border.’

Alite worked for the Gambino crime family for more than 20 years. He worked for the Gottis – father and son. He was, he has said in the past, ‘top of the food chain,’ and one of the mob’s top earners and enforcers.

Jailed in Brazil for his crimes after a period on the lam, he was passed secret 302s (files kept by the FBI documenting interviews with their informants) showing that John Gotti Jr, who was his best man when he married in 1998, was a ‘super-rat.’

According to Alite that changed everything. He cut a deal. In 2008 he secretly pleaded guilty to two murders, four conspiracies to murder, at least eight shootings and two attempted shootings as well as armed home invasions and armed robberies in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Florida.

On April 26, 2011, he was sentenced to ten years in prison and was released in 2013 having served six years since his extradition.

But the court records don’t tell the whole story. He admits killing six people and shooting up to 40, as well as beating probably 100 with baseball bats.

Alite’s criminal past includes an intimate knowledge of drugs and drug trafficking. He dealt with the cartels and still considers some of their members good friends.

According to Alite that’s exactly why people should listen to what he has to say.

‘I hear politicians talking about the streets or crime or the border – things they couldn’t possibly have an education in, but when I talk about it it’s firsthand. It hits home,’ he said.

‘You become very educated in something when you lose a child, when it destroys your life like it’s destroyed mine.’

He said, ‘As a drug dealer I understand the borders. We brought drugs in through the Mexican border, so I understand how we do it. I understand that business and, not to justify our lives as drug dealers, when we were doing it, people weren’t dying every day from cocaine and marijuana the way they are from fentanyl.

‘Right now, 300 kids are dying in America every day. Fentanyl is not a drug they’re seeking out recreationally, they’re looking for something else and taking it accidentally. It’s being cut into other things and it’s killing our kids.

‘It’s 50 to 100 times stronger than heroin. Can you imagine how lethal that is if somebody inhales it or even touches it? It’s happening to police officers and first responders who’re coming into contact with it and only being saved because they have Narcan.’

Alite knows that some will find it hard to listen to a man with his history preaching against drugs when they were once so much a part of his personal economy.

He said, ‘When people judge me, I expect that. But this has nothing to do with me. This is my daughter who is an innocent mother, a young woman, her life ahead of her. 

‘She wasn’t a drug dealer. She wasn’t involved in crime. She wasn’t involved in my life.

‘I don’t expect anybody to feel bad for me. But they should be feeling bad for the community of kids and families that are losing their children, brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers with a drug that nobody in this country seems to be doing anything about.

‘Why isn’t the States pursuing sanctions against China where most of this stuff is being manufactured? And why aren’t we tightening up the borders?

‘If this was anthrax loose in the country people would be going wild, but instead, they’re doing nothing.’

According to Alite, security at the country’s southern border is ‘a joke.’

Just last week DailyMail.com reported bereaved Oregon mother Tami Garcia’s plans to sue the Biden administration for failure to secure the southern border following the death of her son Alex. The 19-year-old died of a suspected fentanyl overdose on August 26.

Today Alite agreed, ‘The border’s a disgrace. You’re giving billions of dollars to the Mexican government to police the border and they’re not doing their job.

‘Whether they want to talk or whisper about it, they’re corrupt and being paid off by the cartels who run drugs into this country.

‘People who’re coming into this country I have enormous sympathy for – my family is an immigrant family from Albania – but they’re coming in for the ‘American dream’ and it doesn’t exist.

‘They’re indebted to the cartels who force them to carry and sell drugs. They can’t get a work visa; they can’t look after their families they fall victim to it.

‘If you have private contractors on the border, you’ll see a difference overnight.’

No amount of advocating for victims or their families can bring back Alite’s own child and, when he speaks of her, the emotions that are still so raw threaten to overwhelm him.

She was a dog-groomer, he recalled, who loved art and sports and her son. But Alite also knew that she used pills recreationally and he worried about it.

He said, ‘She wasn’t an addict or habitual, but she took pills every now and then to relax. I didn’t like it.’

The last time Alite spoke to Chelsea was to wish her happy birthday just after midnight on August 14 and to tell her he loved her. A flurry of loving text messages followed.

It was the morning after her birthday, and she woke early knowing she had an afternoon flight to catch to return to New Jersey later that day. She couldn’t sleep and did what, according to Alite, she had done before.

‘She took a Percocet, what she thought was a mild sedative.

‘She was due to get a flight back that afternoon and she lay back down. But it was laced with Fentanyl. She never woke up.’

By the time her boyfriend woke and realized he couldn’t rouse her, she had slipped into a coma from which she would never wake.

In a painful irony she had told her father not long ago that she was ‘petrified’ of fentanyl having heard stories of friends of friends who had been struck down by the potent toxin.

By the time her stricken father had made the journey from New Jersey to her hospital bedside in Florida, he knew she was already gone but doctors kept her on life support long enough to allow family to say their farewells.

Alite took pictures of his daughter as she lay in her hospital bed. He said, ‘People asked me why I would want to do that.

‘I knew when I saw her that she was gone. I understand that. Doctors don’t need to tell me I’ve been on the streets my whole life. I know what it looks like.

‘I took pictures of her because I want to remember my daughter every way, through her whole life. I can’t pick and choose the good spots. I just love my daughter no matter what and I wanted to remember that.’

Chelsea had always wanted to be an organ donor and Alite takes some comfort in knowing that those wishes were honored. It played a part in the decision to switch off the life support and let her go.

He said, ‘The doctors told me that if you don’t do it her organs would slowly deteriorate and they wouldn’t be able to use them. One of the biggest things with Chelsea was she wanted to donate her organs. So, I don’t know how many lives she saved but I know that she saved some and I’m glad we could do that for her.’

John Alite’s life will never be the same, he knows that. After a life of so many second chances there is, in some way, no coming back from this, but he has to do something.

He said, ‘I’m not the guy who can sit in my house and just cry all day. I did that for the first month and then I woke up.

‘I have this podcast called Sink or Swim, it’s about adversities and people overcoming them and I thought, you can either sink and let this destroy you, or you can swim and fight for people who can’t fight for themselves, use my platform to push politicians to listen, to legislate, to bring change and put sanctions on the countries that are purposefully allowing this into our communities.

‘I chose to fight.’

Alite will be posting more information on his campaign against fentanyl on his Instagram Truejohnalite and as well as featuring it on his podcast ‘Sink or Swim.’