Victoria Gotti Defends Her Brother, Junior Gotti

Just hours after John "Junior" Gotti was indicted on charges linking him to cocaine trafficking and three slayings, Victoria Gotti is now coming to her brother's defense, speaking to CBS 2 in New York. She says the government is not just after her brother, but her entire family, and especially her father, despite his passing.

"It's obvious. If they could take my father out of the grave, and retry him and win again and again, they would," she said.

Once again, Victoria has to stand up for her brother, on the verge of yet another trial. Only this time, John A. Gotti will be tried for murder. Three murders, the government says. Two of the dead the feds say were allegedly part of drug deals with Gotti that go back 17 years ago. But a third, Louis Di Bono, was an associate of Gotti's father.

"What you have here is you have the Gambino crime family reaching out to Tampa, Florida, so you have a number of New York related gangsters and mobsters coming down to the Tampa area, and this indictment relates to their trying to get a foothold here," said Robert O'Neill of the U.S. Attorney's Office. But Victoria Gotti says there's more to the story than meets the eye.

"I don't know, I feel like saying, you know, it's this vendetta, but I'm so tired of hearing it myself from other people that you try to convince yourself its not, and you try to convince yourself these are supposed to be the good guys and it's just not working for me," she said. "If they were to come back at him, they would look like absolute fools," she said.

Victoria Gotti also said about the witnesses against her brother, like Mikey "Scars" DiLeonardo and Sammy Gravano, if they know so much, then what they were doing back then?

With charges as serious as murder, it wouldn't be surprising to find out that someone was wearing a wire and that there are tapes.

Watch the Pablo Guzman's entire video with Victoria Gotti.

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John Alite Expected to be Key Witness Against Junior Gotti

The last time John Alite was arrested, he made it clear he didn't want to go back to prison.

The longtime friend of Junior Gotti had done three years on a gun rap and three months for smuggling a mobster's sperm out of the pen.

Now he faced serious time in a racketeering case and was fighting extradition from Brazil while his associates were on trial.

"I've lost everything," he moaned on a smuggled cell phone to the St. Petersburg Times from a Rio lockup in 2006. "I don't get to watch my son play baseball. I don't get to watch my daughter go to school. ... Am I bitter? Yeah, I'm bitter. Who wouldn't be."

He was also afraid.

By his account, he had two choices - both of which could get him killed: Sing to the feds about Gotti or wait for trial in a U.S. prison.

In the end, sources told the Daily News, he picked the former, and Alite, 45, is poised to be a key witness in the government's latest attempt to convict Gotti.

His friendship with Junior goes back 25 years to when Gotti was the swaggering son of a mob boss and Alite was a tough college dropout basking in reflected Gambino glory.

Alite wasn't Italian - his family is from Albania - so he claims he was never taken into the fold. But others tell a different story.

One mob informant has said that in the mid-'80s Alite helped Junior rob Howard Beach, Queens, drug dealers and resell the product.

In 1989, the two were busted, along with crony Steven Kaplan, for brutalizing three people outside a Long Island nightclub.

Alite allegedly touched off the brawl by hitting on someone's wife - but the case never went to trial because the victims developed a sudden memory loss and were unable to identify their attackers. The next time Alite got into trouble, he wasn't as lucky, and notched a conviction for aggravated assault.

The felony made it illegal for him to carry a gun, so when he was stopped on a New Jersey bridge with a .38 in 1995, he went to prison for three years.

Inside, he met wiseguy Antonio Parlavecchio, who persuaded him to help smuggle out his sperm so he could impregnate his wife. Alite got three months in the pen for bringing sperm collection kits to a corrupt guard at the federal prison in Allentown, Pa. "Her biological clock was ticking," he later explained. "She wanted to have a baby. I couldn't believe I got sent to prison for something like that."

His next indictment was more conventional.

In 2004, Alite was charged with running a Florida-based crew for the Gambino family that dabbled in robbery, murder, gambling and kidnapping.

During his co-defendants' trial, he was portrayed as a ruthless thug who used his mob connections and violence to intimidate rivals of his valet-parking front. "John Alite is capable of doing some pretty nasty things," one business partner testified.

From the Rio prison, Alite denied he'd done anything worse than raise his voice and insisted he was being persecuted for ties he cut long ago. "Was I friends with John Gotti? Yes," he said. "Am I friends with him now? No."

Safe to say, that's truer today than ever.

Thanks to John Marzulli and Tracy Connor

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Feds Claim Outlaw Biker Ordered by Chicago Outfit to Blow Up Video Gambling Operation

The Chicago Outfit ordered an Outlaw biker to blow up a Berwyn gambling operation because it competed with the mob’s own $13 million video gambling machine business, prosecutors charge in a filing this afternoon.

Mark Polchan, 41, and Samuel Volpendesto, 84, were arrested last week in connection with the 2003 bombing.

No one was injured in the Feb. 25, 2003, explosion, but the device blew out several windows and destroyed the ceiling and wood frame above the doorway of C & S Coin Operated Amusements, 6508 W. 16th St. The business leased coin-operated vending and video machines.

In a filing that seeks to keep the two behind bars pending trial, the feds revealed a series of recordings that allegedly captured Volpendesto on tape talking about the 2003 bombing that took out part of a building. The filing also alleges an extensive and wide-ranging criminal history on the part of Polchan, purportedly a high ranking member of the lawless Outlaws biker gang, from involvement with the mob, to coercing a witness to recant his story in a murder case.

“Disturbingly, the investigation has revealed that Polchan used his connections not only (with) the Outlaws and the Outfit, but also with various corrupt police officers, to advance his and his associates’ criminal objectives,” prosecutors wrote.

Prosecutors say despite his age, Volpendesto is a risk of flight and a danger to the community. They describe him as knowledgeable about bomb-making and say he admitted on recordings he took part in previous bombings. In 1990, Volpendesto was charged after beating a suspected stool pigeon at a Cicero strip club. In 2006, he was arrested for assaulting his wife,” according to the filing.

“And a mere five years ago, (Volpendesto) set off a bomb that could have very easily killed or maimed innocent individuals,” prosecutors wrote. In a series of recorded conversations with a cooperating individual, Volpendesto was captured saying: “we blew part of that away.”

If convicted of the three counts against them, the two would face a sentence of 35 years to life in prison.

Thanks to Natasha Korecki

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