John Alite has taken a baseball bat to countless guys. He has stabbed, shot and killed dozens more.

He has been pistol whipped, been brutally beaten, has had his life threatened and survived two years in a Brazilian jail so appalling that the President of the country has said he'd rather die than go there.

Today he is a free man, immaculately dressed and drinking a vodka Martini in Manhattan's Peninsula Hotel.

And this, he has just announced, is the hardest time he's ever had. Because according to Alite people don't change, yet change is precisely what Alite is trying to bring to his life and, he hopes, the lives of kids on the brink of making the mistakes he made decades ago. It's the reason, he believes, he's still alive.

Speaking to Daily Mail Online he said, 'Honestly I've thought about it every single day. I believe I didn't do the right thing but I believe there's a reason why I'm supposed to be here.

'When people say you baseball batted a hundred people and stabbed however many, you shot 37, I can't forget it. Let me tell you how I justified it. I didn't hurt women. I didn't rob an armored car in my life because that's a hard working guy and I would never be prepared to hurt him.

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New life: Mob enforcer John Alite has put aside a life in the Mafia to become a motivational speaker. He says: 'You can fool someone who's not a gangster. But take a street guy, a real tough guy and they can read through all his b*****t. You can't fake it. But you can learn it.'

Convicted: Just two of the mugshots Alite featured in, both taken in Brazil in 2003 and 2004 when he was arrested over a string of offenses and held in its most notorious prison

'But did I rob drug dealers? Yes, all the time. Did I hurt street guys? Yes, all the time. Did I shoot street guys? Yes, all the time. Did I shoot people who were hanging out with wise guys? Yes, all the time. But outside of that? No.

'What I did, I can't take back and when I was doing what I was doing I was proud of it. But I have enlightenment now. Whether it's because I got into trouble or whether it's because I got disheartened from them turning on me, doesn't matter how I got it, but I did get it eventually.'

Now, three years after his release from jail, he is 'reinventing' himself as a motivational speaker who hopes to 'scare kids straight,' give corporate employees an aggressive edge and consult on movies and TV shows trying to accruately portray the world in which he once live and excelled.

For more than twenty years Alite was a high ranking member of the Gambino crime family. He worked for the Gottis – both father and son. He was, he said, 'at the top of the food chain', one of their top earners and enforcers.

He could never be a 'made' man in the mafia because the grandson of Albanian immigrants was born in Tirana, Albania. But he thought he was moving in a world governed by rules; codes of honour, loyalty and respect.

Then, when he was in jail in Brazil, Alite was passed secret 302s (files kept by the FBI documenting interviews with their informants) showing that John Gotti Jr, the man who had stood by him when he married his first wife in 1998, was 'a super-rat'. And everything changed.

Boss: John Gotti, also known as The Dapper Don, who was at the head of the Gambino crime family. But Alite says that ultimately he and his son proved to be liars ad not men of honor

Friends turned enemies: John Gotti Jr (center) and John Alite (left) as friends in the mid-1980s. But they are now enemies, with Alite having given evidence against Gotti, who Alite says was himself a rat

According to Alite, he realized that he had bought into a lie – the 'seductive image' was just that, an image. The Gottis – father and son – were not men of substance but cowards, sold out by their own lawyer who, Alite said, handed over the 302s to his contact.

Alite cut his own 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.

He testified in the trial of Gambino family enforcer Charles Carneglia – now serving a life sentence for four murders. He went onto testify against Gotti but after 11 days of deliberations the jury came back deadlocked and the judge declared a mistrial.

The jury stated that they hadn't trusted prosecution witnesses – especially Alite. On April 26, 2011 he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was released in 2013 having served six since his extradition.

John Gotti Jr's role as an FBI informant has since emerged publicly but, much to Alite's, frustration it has gained fewer column inches than he feels it deserves and he rails against the fact that Gotti Jr's claim that he left the mob of his own volition is rarely publicly challenged.

He said: 'In 1999 he claims he retired. In 2001 he gets caught on tape mad that his uncle brought him down from boss to skipper. In 2005 he gets caught co-operating. They shelve him. Meaning he was thrown out of the mob.

'There is no such thing as quitting. There's no two weeks' notice and there's no pension.'

According to Alite, for whom this is all deeply personal, anything that preserves Gotti Jr's image is 'glorifying the mob.'

He said, 'If you're glorifying the mob you're killing kids. You're teaching kids to respect the wrong thing. You're teaching them to respect a coward.'

At 52 Alite still carries himself like the wise guy mobster he once was. He is physically fit, heavily tattooed and charismatic. He's the real deal and dangerously close to glamorizing the very thing against which he is speaking out by virtue of his own charm.

But he insisted, 'I'm not proud of what I did. I lived then as if I was at war. I was like an alcoholic with violence. Now I'm not like that. Now I'm a little more controlled.'

Now the services he offers are strictly cerebral. With 'Scared Straight and At Risk Youth' talks he draws on his own credibility as a mobster to dismantle any lingering delusions that there is anything glamorous or desirable about that life.

Regrets: Alite has four grown-up children and says that he regrets not being a part of their lives as much as he should have been because of time spent behind bars

Mafia presence: John Gotti was at the head of the Gambino crime family and John Alite's boss. but now that the former mob henchman has gone straight he says: ' I'm doing it the right way.'

He said, 'If I go into a juvenile center and talk to 300 kids ages 12 to 17 then I'm not going to reach all 300, but maybe I can reach one or five or 10. And I'll tell you now if I go in and talk to them or if a psychologist does this talk, they're going to listen to me, there's the difference.'

Similarly the man who once prided himself on being the consummate predator is now offering his wisdom in anti-bullying speeches. He explained, 'Being a victim or not being a victim is all about the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you carry yourself. Same thing in the prison system. And a predator in those situations, in the street or in jail, they can sense it, they can feel it.

'You can fool someone who's not a gangster. John Gotti Jr could walk into this room and fool someone who's not a street guy.

'But take a street guy, a real tough guy and they can read through all his b*****t. You can't fake it. But you can learn it.'

Once a millionaire many times over Alite was financially successful – legally and illegally – because, he said, he was 'aggressive'.

When speaking to corporate clients he can offer 'experience beyond anybody's education.' And few can lay claim to inspiring the level of respect he once held, something, he insisted that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with credibility.

For his own part Alite is not without regrets. As a father of four adult children ages 18 to 25 he admitted: 'I feel really bad for my kids because I wasn't there for them because of my crazy lifestyle.'

'But,' he said, 'at some point in your life you have to take blame for what you did: right, wrong or indifferent. When someone says they don't feel guilt I think they're a liar or a sociopath.

'Truthfully at the time I thought I was invincible. Now I don't sleep well. I go to therapy all the time and it's a constant work in progress.

'Of course I miss the money. Of course I miss that I was a big shot. I'm like everybody else. I want to get the clothes, the nice things, but it's not worth it. Before I didn't care how I got it.

'Now, I don't want to lose direction and become the person I used to be. This is the hardest time I've ever had – trying to reinvent myself but I'm doing it through hard work, I'm doing it the right way.'