‘How many people have you killed?’ I ask, the words surreal and absurd as soon as they leave my mouth. I can’t quite believe I’m here in New York, having dinner with a Mafia hitman. With a dismissive wave of his hand, John Alite tells me he thinks he was responsible for taking well over a dozen lives in total. ‘But I’m not a computer, I didn’t know I had to keep count.’He probably shot 40 men, he says, but didn’t keep track of how many of them subsequently died. Then there were the ones he killed by other means. ‘I batted the first guy I killed with a baseball bat. He was a vegetable. They had him on life support.’It was never pretty. ‘There are some people who like to romanticise gangsters. They wouldn’t if they had come with me when I was actually killing somebody with baseball bats across the head, the screams, the blood, me covered in it.’
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