by Philip Carlo
Defiance about his eyes, defiance in his body English, Andy said, “Hey, I don’t have to listen to you—you’re not my boss. I don’t take orders from you. You understand? I only listen to Frank—understand?”
This galled Pitera to no end. He demanded respect, and for the most part, people complied and acted cowed around him. Waiters fawned over him. Other wiseguys gave Pitera a wide berth, and here was this Andy guy defiantly pointing his unmanicured finger at him.
As hard as this might be to believe for a civilian, for a layperson, Andy had just killed himself. There was no way that he, Pitera, would allow Andy Jakakis to speak to him like that in front of other people. Over the coming days, Tommy Pitera talked, somewhat insistently, about killing Andy Jakakis. He told Gangi that he had to go; he told Gangi that he wouldn’t rest until he was dead.
“I’m not only going to kill him,” he said in his Minnie Mouse voice, “I’m going to torture him on the dance floor of Overstreets.”
This literally nauseated Gangi. He was fond of Andy—he was like a surrogate father to him. He knew Andy meant nothing by what he had said to Pitera. He was just a foolish old man who had said something out of line. There was no reason in the world for him to die, for him to be tortured!
Immediately, Gangi tried to talk Pitera out of the killing, but Pitera wouldn’t hear it. He wouldn’t rest until Andy was dead. More than ever Gangi began thinking of Pitera as an irrational, out-of-control, unhinged psychopath. He began thinking that Pitera should be locked up in a mental institution. Be that as it may, Pitera was free and in charge and he wanted blood. He was like a vampire who had an insatiable need, an overwhelming desire, for blood.
This drew Frank Gangi further into the numbing world of alcohol and drug abuse. His mind, his soul, couldn’t deal with the hardcore realities of what Tommy Pitera was all about…images of what he had done to Phyllis Burdi often filled the pink insides of his closed eyelids. The smell of her murder, the blood, the torn flesh came to him whether he wanted it to or not. He was haunted by what he had seen. When the images became too much, he turned to a bottle of whiskey, long, glistening lines of cocaine; the magical mystery tour of numbed oblivion that is freebasing.
Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble…
loomed large and real on the near horizon.
Gangi was stuck between a rock and a hard place. The way he saw it through his stoned eyes was like this—either he killed Pitera or he killed Andy Jakakis. Killing Pitera, he knew, would be no small task. Pitera seemed to see all things at once at a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree angle. He was as quick as a rattlesnake; he, Gangi believed, had a supernatural sixth sense that would make him not only hard to kill but near impossible to kill. He didn’t drink, Gangi knew. Gangi never saw him high, never saw him vulnerable. As he thought about killing him, he realized that Pitera always sat with his back to the wall, that when in the car, he sat in the backseat, that he never let anybody sit behind him. It was as though he was expecting someone to try to kill him and he had built an invincible wall around himself. Just the thought of trying to bring a gun up to Pitera’s head gave Gangi the willies. His hands shook—his mouth got dry; his stomach turned to knots. The only way he could escape this conundrum was more drink, whiskey, coke. Frank Gangi was no longer getting high to have fun, to socialize, to party. He was getting high to escape the realities of life as he knew it.
Andy’s gotta die, he thought. When he accepted that reality, when he bought into the steps killing Andy involved, it devastated him. He never wanted to hurt Andy. He’d kill himself before he let Andy be tortured. He ultimately resolved in his heart, in his mind, and in his soul for what he felt were the right reasons, to kill Andy, to kill his surrogate father—to kill one of the few friends he ever had.
It was now mid-June 1988. The weather that June was unseasonably warm and humid. Though Gravesend was close to Coney Island, little breeze came from the ocean and the air was thick and hot and unpleasant. A former boyfriend of Judy Haimowitz’s, Toby Profetto, a close friend of Gangi’s, accompanied Frank this night.
Gangi had told Toby about his predicament. Toby agreed to help Frank with this most difficult of tasks. Toby was a medium-size, muscular dude with curly hair, a typical Brooklyn wannabe. His idea of success in life was to be inducted into one of the five families. Toby was also a killer. He was one of those rare people who could take a human life as readily as step on an ant. That night, Profetto and Gangi went out on a mission, a mission that had little reward, a mission that would only result in the death of an old man who couldn’t really hurt a fly.
“Okay,” Gangi said. “When the right time comes, I’ll turn up the music real loud, and we’ll do it.”
“Okay,” came the answer, cold and detached, as though it came from the mouth of a dummy on a ventriloquist’s lap.
This dynamic duo picked up Andy Jakakis at a popular pizzeria called Spumoni Gardens on Eighty-sixth Street. Gangi was driving. Andy sat in the passenger seat. Toby was sitting directly behind him. Gangi took a right onto West Eleventh Street. This was a quiet, desolate street. On the right were homes and on the left were train tracks. A song by the Rolling Stones came on, “Start Me Up.”
“I like this song,” Frank said, turning up the volume louder and louder and louder still.
Moving to the beat, Andy Jakakis had no idea the grim reaper was in the backseat. Without hesitation, Toby put the gun against Andy’s head and fired. The bullet tore through his skull, hit his forehead, bounced back and zigzagged around his brain. Gangi pulled over to the curb. He could see a massive wound on Andy’s forehead. Blood came from it, but the bullet did not burst out of his flesh. Mind you, this was the middle of the day. There were few people about. Gangi took a right, a left, and made his way over to an empty lot on Bay Fiftieth Street. This part of Bay Fiftieth hadn’t been fully developed yet and Gangi got it in his head to leave the body right there in a lot in broad daylight. In his panic, in his adrenaline rush, he didn’t realize that capo Todo Marable lived just opposite this lot. Todo was a feared captain in the Bonanno family. As they hurried the body out of the car and into high grass in the lot, one of Andy’s shoes came off and fell down by the passenger seat. When they got back to the car, Gangi saw the shoe and pushed it out onto the curb.
No matter how you cut it, this would not sit well with Todo. This was a personal offense. It was like taking a dump on his front door. No mafioso anywhere in the world would stand for such a thing. His wife lived here. His children lived here.
Trouble was in the air.
In the stifling heat of that summer, it didn’t take long for the body to emit a horrific odor that was soon noticed and the body was discovered. The police were summoned. Big crowds gathered around the lot, pointing, staring, wondering, speculating.
Who the hell would do such a thing?
When Todo Marable found out a body had been left across the street from his home, that a shoe belonging to the body had been left on the curb, he wondered what it meant. Surely it was some kind of message.
But a message of what? Who, he and all members of his borgata wondered, would do such a thing?
Why would they do such a thing?
What did the shoe mean? they all wondered.
Immediately the jungle drums of the Mafia started resounding and the question was: Who left a body with one shoe near Todo’s house? What did it mean?
When Pitera got the news that Andy was dead, he was pleased. He felt that for the first time, Gangi had acted like a man, that he had stepped up to the bat and done what he was supposed to do. Inadvertently, this murder brought Pitera closer to Gangi. He felt a warmth toward Gangi he hadn’t felt for him before.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
DYNAMIC DUO
It was one of those pleasant summer nights when people sit on stoops in beach chairs in front of their houses all over Brooklyn, just before night falls, during those fifteen or so minutes called dusk, an abundance of ladybugs filling the air. It was such
a lovely evening that the patrons of the Just Us came outside and were sitting on car fenders in front of the bar. There was Tommy Pitera, the fierce war captain Eddie Lino, and Frank “Ruby” Rubino. Frank Rubino was a burly, squat, tough Italian. He drove a brand-new gray Jaguar. Up until that date, he had a good relationship with Eddie Lino; they were partners in the heroin business. Now the good days were gone. As is often the way of the Mafia, when they are about to kill someone, they are all smiling and friendly and warm, offering drinks and sumptuous dinners.
Between Tommy Pitera and Eddie Lino, you’d be hard-pressed to find a meaner pair in all of La Cosa Nostra, either in the United States or in Sicily. Though they were from two different families, they often worked together, were good personal friends, had respect for each other. Eddie Lino was the go-to guy for heroin for the Gambino crime family. But, interestingly, all of what Eddie Lino did was, of course, off the record, off the books. His drug dealing was so blatant, so amazingly profitable, that for the longest time he could not get made—officially inducted into the Gambino family. Paul Castellano outright refused to have him made because of his immersion in the selling of heroin. It was only after John Gotti had Castellano murdered in front of Sparks Steak House that Eddie Lino was finally made and soon thereafter given his own borgata…crew. Eddie Lino and John Gotti were close. They were more like brothers than friends.
Though John Gotti never had anything to do with the actual selling of drugs, never touched drugs, never saw drugs, he well knew what Lino was doing, what Lino was about, and he gave his blessings. Gotti, like everyone else in La Cosa Nostra, quietly pocketed a fortune as he silently, discreetly, looked the other way, north and south and east and west, as Lino went about the business of wholesaling large amounts of heroin. Lino and John Gotti’s bond was so great that when, a little way down the road, Anthony Gaspipe Casso was given the assignment of killing John Gotti for murdering Paul Castellano without the killing being sanctioned, the first person he took out was Eddie Lino. On November 6, 1990, Anthony Casso sent crooked NYPD detectives Stephen Caracappa and Louis Eppolito to do the job. Lino was so feared, such an adept killer himself, that Casso used cops to take him out.
Apparently, Lino had gotten wind that Frank Rubino had turned bad. Lino wanted him dead and he asked his pal Tommy to do the job. At this point, Tommy had garnered a reputation within La Cosa Nostra as an amazingly adept, efficient killer. His reputation had grown to such a degree that people were calling him—behind his back—“wacko.” This had less to do with his outward appearance than with how readily he killed and the fact that he, just as readily, cut people up and buried them; he had private burial grounds on Long Island and Staten Island.
Tall and gangly, buzzed on coke, Frank Gangi now turned the corner and began walking toward Lino, Pitera, and Rubino. Outgoing and gregarious, Gangi was about to approach them when Pitera waved him away with a curt movement of his icy blue-gray eyes.
NIXIT-SCRAM, Pitera silently said with his eyes. Gangi got the message. He walked into the bar, ignoring the three. Gangi did not know what was happening, but considering that Rubino was standing between Pitera and Lino, a lethal pair of bookends, it didn’t look good for Ruby.
Soon Lino, Pitera, and Rubino got into Rubino’s gray Jaguar and drove away. Rubino was driving. Lino was sitting in the passenger seat. They were some four blocks away from the bar when Lino told Rubino to pull over, which he readily did. The moment he put the car in park, Pitera pulled out an automatic with a silencer on it and shot Rubino in the back of the head, killing him. Even though this was Gravesend, Brooklyn, ground zero for the Mafia, what Pitera had just done was audacious. The fledgling dragon that had once been inside Pitera had grown to monstrous proportions, now had long scales…was fire-breathing, invincible. In that Pitera, somewhat obsessively, collected jewelry from his victims, he ripped a gold necklace with a fish medallion off of Rubino and he and Lino got out of the car and left Rubino there like that for all to see, know, and be horrified by.
This type of killing, so brazen and so public, would inevitably come back to haunt La Cosa Nostra. It caused intense police scrutiny, media attention, and horrified an innocent public. It was one of those times when it seemed as though these two men, Lino and Pitera, felt that they had a holy mandate to kill whom they wanted when they wanted and blatantly leave bodies wherever the hell they pleased. As a mafioso recently said, it was “in bad taste.”
Murder, successfully killing people and breaking the law on a regular basis, as all La Cosa Nostra does as a matter of course, has to do with luck. No matter how well planned, no matter how thoroughly thought out any given crime is, any given murder, without luck, it can fail—and fail miserably. Considering how often the DEA was following Pitera, it’s a wonder they didn’t see him that night, hanging out in front of the bar, drive off and kill Frank Rubino. Luck, apparently, was with Pitera and Eddie Lino that night.
Interestingly, a short time later, Pitera’s luck slowly began to turn. He now had a new girlfriend. Her name was Barbara Lambrose. She bore a distinct resemblance to Celeste. She had a fourteen-year-old son, a good-looking, athletic teenager but he was wired and destined for trouble. He didn’t do well in school; he didn’t listen to his mother; he was starting to use drugs. Pitera took a liking to the boy, whose name was Joey. Today, Pitera was driving his Oldsmobile. The feds had recently managed to bug this car. Presumably because he had Joey in the car that day, neither the radio was on nor was there static. Apparently, Joey’s behavior was giving his mother grief and she was complaining to Pitera, asking him to talk to her son.
“Joey…you know,” Pitera began, “your mother’s a very nice lady. She’s had it hard. There’s no reason for you to give her more grief. I’m from the street. I’m telling it like it is. You gotta shape up. You gotta be…you gotta stay away from drugs. Drugs will make you lose control. You never want to lose control. You see me? I never lose control. You have a mother that loves you and cares for you. You have to show her respect.”
And Pitera went on to lecture the boy on staying out of trouble, on not using drugs, on doing well in school. Then the boy said something that was inaudible to the agents and Pitera’s response shocked and stunned the listening agents:
“If you kill somebody,” he said, “you’ve got to cut the lungs and open the stomach. If you do that, the body can sink. If you don’t do that, it will float and it will be found.”
Tommy Geisel and Jim Hunt looked at each other.
This would be helpful, they knew, in a court of law, but it was not definitive evidence as such. It would bolster the contentions, the allegations, and the evidence they did have, but in reality, Pitera could have just been making this up. It wasn’t proof in and of itself, though it certainly cast Pitera in a bad light.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
STICK SHIFT
Sharks. Pitera’s crew was like a bunch of reef sharks constantly looking for prey, constantly on the move, always hungry. Always ruthless, Pitera could be readily likened to a great white shark that dominated and frightened and controlled and even ate the reef sharks. Pitera, like a great white shark, was slow moving and methodical though deadly when he made a move. He had morphed from a dragon into one of the most feared, efficient killers the Mafia has ever known—a white shark, Carcharodon carcharias, the baddest of the bad.
One of the reef sharks that was a member of Pitera’s crew was Lloyd Modell, another Mafia wannabe. He had dark hair and dark eyes and a large hook nose. He wanted to be in the Mafia with such dire need, had fantasies about it most of his adult life, loved movies about gangsters, that he actually changed his name to Lorenzo Modica, an Italian name that, he hoped, would get him inducted into one of the five crime families, though that was not about to happen. It was a rare thing for non-Italians to fool their way into being made. For the most part, in order to be made, people in La Cosa Nostra had to know you—your history, or rather, as Pitera put it, “know the cunt you came from.” Having said that, hi
s not being Italian would not dissuade Lorenzo Modica from being a gangster. He was so intent upon proving his worth that he would kill quickly and readily, without remorse or conflict.
Lorenzo Modica knew a Colombian by the name of Luis Mena, also an associate of Pitera’s…a coke dealer. Luis Mena said he could get them “all the coke they wanted.” Mena said he knew Colombians who had heavy weight, and that he’d be happy to set them up to be ripped off. The coke that the Colombians provided swiftly and without difficulty was top-notch. Lorenzo went and spoke to Tommy about ripping them off. Tommy readily agreed. Lorenzo mentioned killing them. Pitera thought that a good idea. This was right up his alley.
In July of 1988, Luis Mena called Lorenzo to tell him there was a load of coke in. The two soon met.
“How much you got?”
“Whatever you want,” Mena replied.
“We’ll take twenty keys,” Lorenzo said.
“You got it,” Mena said, and arrangements were made for the deal to go down later that day.
Lorenzo tried to find Pitera but wasn’t able to. He knew he couldn’t pull this off by himself. He went and found Frankie “Jupiter” Martini, a reef shark in Pitera’s gang, to work with him and help him facilitate the rip-off.
Contrary to common belief, the Colombians were, for the most part, businessmen. They could be ruthless killers whose cruelty knew no bounds, but if you dealt with them straight, if you kept your word, they were good people with whom to do business. They were reliable, honest, on time, and their product was always superior to all others. When you bought coke from Colombians, you were getting it directly from the source. They did not cut their product. On a regular basis, the coke the Colombians sold, when in weight—packaged in neat, hard bricks—was 98 percent pure.