GEORGE ANASTASIA CHRONICLES THE DECLINE OF THE COSA NOSTRA

George Anastasia chronicles the decline of the Cosa Nostra

The autumn of an institution, when its legends are replaced by pretenders and its moral codes become talking points, can be as intriguing as its glory days. It may not offer rules to live by, but may teach lessons in survival.

John Alite had an inside perspective on the waning days of the New York mafia, when the strutting “Dapper Don” John Gotti Sr. shifted the secret society from the age of “The Godfather” toward the era of reality TV.

Author George Anastasia, who learned the ways of the Cosa Nostra as a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter and wrote a half-dozen books on the subject, found in Alite a window into that sad transformation. In “Gotti’s Rules: The Story of John Alite, Junior Gotti, and the Demise of the American Mafia,” Mr. Anastasia tells this story.

Alite could never become a made man in the Gambino/Gotti family, because he was ethnically Albanian. If it wasn’t for a series of chance encounters, he might have remained a small-time cocaine dealer working the bars of Queens.

Instead he became the trusted henchman to John A. “Junior” Gotti, portrayed by Mr. Anastasia as a bumbling blowhard. The younger Gotti needed someone who wasn’t hesitant to apply a baseball bat or bullet to a problem, and had a natural sense of the synergy of business and violence. That’s what he got in Alite.

Throughout much of the 1980s, John Alite was rewarded with a share of the ample flow of funds from drugs, extortion, gambling, robbery and fraud that made the Gottis one of the richest mafia dynasties. In the 1990s, law enforcement finally convicted the elder Gotti, the family failed to gel around Junior, and the code of silence gave way to a cascade of snitching.

“Gotti’s Rules” is, in part, about the erosion and perversion of the mafia’s code, its text broken here and there by unofficial laws of the underworld, in boldface. (Example: “Whenever possible, underlings must take the weight of a crime pending against Gotti or his family.”) Its driving force, though, isn’t the Gottis, but Alite.

Mr. Anastasia makes no bones about his reliance on Alite’s sometimes unverifiable accounts. It’s hard to check the facts, for instance, when Alite recounts a fight in a pitch-dark basement cell in a Brazilian prison, the outcome of which hinged on a knife wrapped in a rag, lubricated in oil and then delicately hidden in one place a strip search would not reach. But if Alite has credibility problems, he also has a vital force as a character that keeps the reader engaged.

Oh, Alite’s no hero. He testified in federal court to personally shooting around 35 men, some fatally, and committing “crimes every day of my life for 25 years,” according to the book.

But he’s a razor-sharp thug, carefully moving within the Gambino hierarchy and its Gotti nucleus, building outside alliances that allow him to slowly extricate himself from the failing family, and finally going on the run to Europe and Latin America when several nooses began to tighten.

His finely tuned survival instinct gets another challenge when he’s finally caught in Brazil, and stored in its worst prisons until his extradition to face federal charges in Tampa.

The move to nicer — but inescapable — prisons in the U.S. sets up a final test. Will Alite stick with Gotti’s rules, as well as the ancient commandment against turning on a partner in crime? Or will he look for a way out?

Mr. Anastasia doesn’t sentimentalize that decision-making process, and doesn’t make the mistake of trying to redeem Alite. He closes with Alite free in one sense, but not entirely released from the internal demons that made him so useful to the mob for so long.

We can contrast his not-entirely-fresh start with the Gotti family’s decision to live off their patriarch’s ill-gotten wealth and even submit to the short-lived reality TV show “Growing Up Gotti.”

In the end, nobody played by the rules, and nobody won the game. But was it better, Mr. Anastasia seems to ask, to cling to the fame and money, or clutch desperately to shards of dignity?

“GOTTI’S RULES: THE STORY OF JOHN ALITE, JUNIOR GOTTI, AND THE DEMISE

OF THE AMERICAN MAFIA”

By George Anastasia. Dey Street Books ($27.99).