The Butcher

by Philip Carlo

  “This is for you from me. It’s personal. It means something,” Pitera said, showing a rare, giving side.

  “I appreciate it. Thank you, Tommy.”

  “Don’t ever sell it!”

  “Of course not,” Joe Dish said.

  Joe Dish did not like Pitera. He felt he threw his weight around, bullylike. He knew that Pitera cut up people in tubs. He had heard that Pitera had killed a girl and cut her up. This flew against Mafia protocol. It was something a psychopath out of a B-horror movie would do, not a man of respect. The thought of doing something like that was anathema to him. Still, he’d keep his personal feelings to himself, inside. Over the years, in his life of crime, he had dealt with every type of unsavory character. He’d smile and nod when he saw Tommy, but inside he felt disdain, not warmth, not friendship, no kind of netherworld bond.

  The beginning of the end came when Pitera went to Joe Dish to get him to help set up Willie Boy Johnson. Willie Boy Johnson and Joe Dish went back. They were good friends. There was a genuine bond between the two men. No way was he about to set up Johnson for the likes of Pitera. When Joe Dish refused to help Pitera, said no, there was a sea change between the two. Joe Dish believed it was just a matter of time before Pitera killed him. The fact that he said no to such an important hit involving Eddie Lino and John Gotti himself was a death sentence. Number one—he had insulted Pitera by saying no. Number two—he knew that when Willie Boy Johnson went down, it would be Pitera’s doing.

  As if that weren’t enough, Joe had also refused to help in the rip-off of the cash stash house in Howard Beach, the murder of the two female counters. Perhaps, in days gone by, Joe Dish could have gone to somebody connected who would speak on his behalf, but the truly connected people Joe had known were either dead or in jail. He was now on the far fringes of organized crime, an old-timer who had outlived a culture that had fallen by the wayside.

  As it turned out, Joe Dish was not the old-time tough guy people perceived him to be. He had actually been a police informer for quite a few years. He was one of those individuals who adroitly played both sides of the fence. He had been sharing information with ATF special agent Billy Fredericks periodically, giving him information about crimes he was involved in, about crimes he knew of. Essentially what Joe Dish was doing was playing both ends against the middle. This was another reason why he decided to tell all, tell what he knew about not only Pitera’s crew but Pitera himself.

  He was the man Jim Hunt, Tom Geisel, and Group 33 had been looking for—the door that would open into the world of Tommy Karate Pitera. He’d become the crack in the Rock of Gibraltar that was the visage Tommy Pitera offered to the world.

  In Joe Dish’s mind, he was striking first. In Joe Dish’s mind, he would prevail over Pitera because he had the sense to pull the trigger first. Joe Dish’s idea, however, of pulling the trigger had nothing to do with a gun. There was no way in hell he would try to kill Pitera with a gun or knife or bomb. The only way he could get to Pitera, he knew, was through law enforcement, by turning the tables. Joe Dish called his contact and friend Billy Fredericks and asked for a meeting.

  Billy Fredericks was a good friend of Jim Hunt’s. They had worked together on several cases. He was a Vietnam vet, a robust man with black hair and a twitch in his right eye. He was the type of man who was naturally fearless. He didn’t like people in the Mafia. He thought they were backstabbing punks. He had little respect for them. Fact is that all he had for them was animus.

  When he heard what Joe Dish had to say, he immediately called Jim Hunt. He knew Jim Hunt had been working on the Pitera task force. When Jim Hunt received the call at DEA headquarters, he said he’d be happy to meet with Joe Dish. In fact, he had seen Joe Dish at the Just Us Bar and knew who he was. They met in the parking lot of a shopping center in Staten Island. Jim got into Billy Fredericks’s car. Joe Dish was in the back. Introductions were made. They shook hands. Shoppers passed on the left and right. Joe Dish began to tell his story. It was an interesting tale that immediately drew Jim Hunt in, but there wasn’t the kind of proof, solid and irrefutable, that would hold up in a court of law. The crimes Joe Dish described were, as such, minor. They wanted Pitera for more—for murder. They wanted him for heavy-duty drug dealing. What Joe Dish was offering up was neither of those things. Joe Dish would, however, Jim Hunt knew, be a good witness, surely bolster the case against Pitera. When Jim asked Joe Dish what crimes he was convicted of, there was a long list involving all sorts of larcenies, forgeries, etc.

  “You ever commit a murder?” Jim Hunt asked, and Joe Dish told him that he had been just recently involved in a killing. He said it was a long convoluted story, but it involved him and another guy named Jack McInerney going to rip off the partner of someone who owed them money. This individual’s name was David Braun and he ended up resisting, escaping from his bindings, and running out of the door of his house. Joe’s partner Jack McInerney shot him several times as he ran.

  “I felt terrible about it. I didn’t want the kid to die. It was just one of those things—one of those spur-of-the-moment things. I only went there to get what was due me. I swear I never thought about killing him,” Joe Dish said.

  This, Jim Hunt knew, could put a damper on Joe Dish’s viability as a witness, but he had seen far worse characters used successfully, quite brilliantly, to put mafiosi away. Immediately Jim Hunt asked Joe Dish if he’d wear a wire in order to get Tommy Pitera to start incriminating himself in different crimes. Joe Dish said Tommy was paranoid, suspicious of everyone.

  “But,” he said, “I’ll try.”

  Over the coming days and weeks and months, Joe Dish tried to get Pitera on tape talking about crime to no avail. It got to the point where he didn’t want to be around Pitera because he felt that at any moment he, Pitera, would pull a gun out and kill him. However, with the guidance of Jim and Tommy Geisel, Joe Dish was wired up and let loose on all the many players in Pitera’s mob. Dish had the gift of gab, was a consummate actor—a born con man. He was completely above reproach. Without much effort at all, Joe Dish managed to get Lorenzo Modica, the man who killed the two Colombians, Manny Maya, Frank Martini, Michael Cassesse, and Pitera associate Jimmy February, among others, talking freely and openly and incriminatingly about their crimes. More importantly, Joe Dish got them to talk about the role Pitera played in a laundry list of crimes—murders and rip-offs and drug dealing.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  THE MEATWAGON

  It is amazingly difficult for the government to bug the car of a citizen. Even if that citizen is a notorious bad guy; even if that citizen is a mafioso killer; even if that citizen is a major drug dealer. Contrary to common belief, the government does not have unlimited power to eavesdrop on the American people. There are mandates, protocols, stringent rules and regulations that must be followed. Jim and Tom and Group 33 were intent upon adding to the growing amount of evidence piling up against Pitera—Shlomo Mendelsohn and Joe Dish Senatore. They wanted to get a bug in the car that he recently started driving, a black 1984 Oldsmobile. With the help of Justice Department attorney David Shapiro, papers were drawn up to get a listening device planted in the Oldsmobile. The affidavit was over an inch thick and laid out the reasons why the government wanted the bug. In this case, what Shlomo Mendelsohn and Joe Dish had told the government and what they had learned via other informants was reason enough to demand the right to install a listening device.

  Using the VIN number of the Oldsmobile (which Pitera had dubbed “The Meatwagon,” and Group 33 had started calling it as a result), Jim went to the dealer who sold the car and was able to, with the help of court papers, get a duplicate of its key. Their plan was to take the car to a place where a listening device could be cleverly installed and return it from where they had taken it. On the night they were going to pull this off, a half-dozen agents were involved. They were tracking Pitera from early evening to well after midnight, hoping he’d park the car and finally go to sleep. While he slept they would
quickly do what needed to be done. Pitera was in his bar, the Just Us Bar, the agents patiently waiting outside in an unmarked van and in Jim’s black Cadillac. Hour after hour passed, and Pitera did not come outside. Finally, near four o’clock in the morning, he exited with a couple of cronies in tow and they continued to talk outside.

  Agent Dave Toracinta thought Pitera was so pale that he truly looked like a vampire. Toracinta was, in a sense, typical of DEA agents in that he had been in law enforcement in Dover, New Hampshire, but wanted more. He wanted to be part of the war on drugs, go up against the most cunning and dangerous criminals in the country. Like all the members of the Pitera task force, Dave was highly dedicated, highly motivated, would not rest until he knew the job was done and done well. It was Dave who was taking most of the clandestine photographs of Pitera and the Bonanno people.

  Dave and the others watched Pitera grab the lower rungs of a fire escape and effortlessly do chins. He was obviously in good shape, they noted. Finally, near dawn, Pitera left Avenue S, parked his car near where he lived, and went upstairs as Brooklynites headed to work, went from one end of the borough to the other. Moving swiftly, the DEA agents absconded with the car, parking a government car in its place. They took it to the tech people nearby and a bug was installed. They returned the Oldsmobile to the spot where Pitera parked it. A job, they thought, well done.

  Unfortunately, however, the bug malfunctioned and all their efforts were for naught. It seemed Pitera’s luck was still, to a degree, intact.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  LION’S SHARE

  Both Jim Hunt and Tommy Geisel knew that Manny Maya was a drug dealer, that he worked with Pitera. They were still looking for concrete proof, evidence—a way to turn Maya against Pitera. It was Joe Dish who revealed to Hunt and Geisel just how tight Manny and Pitera were—tight enough that Manny Maya and his garage could be used to undo Pitera. This was the garage where people from all the different crime families brought their cars to be detailed—cleaned up after a murder.

  Manny was an average-size man with short hair, dark skin, and was muscular. He was friends with a very successful, active pot dealer named Michael Harrigan from Ozone Park, Queens. Harrigan had an excellent grass contact in Texas. He and his associates would actually fly down, buy suitcases, fill them up with hundreds of pounds of pot, and audaciously check the luggage on flights bound back to New York, according to Joe Dish.

  In that this was many years before 9/11 and law enforcement were acting like wide-eyed innocents, it was an easy task to fly hundreds of pounds of marijuana from Texas to New York on domestic flights. Foreign flights, however, were another issue altogether. The luggage coming in from Italy, Turkey, Afghanistan, was as a matter of course checked for narcotics. Be that as it may, luggage on domestic flights was not scrutinized as such. Like this, Mike Harrigan and his associates were able to bring large amounts of grass in from Texas as though it were something as innocent and innocuous as clothing. They were making a fortune—hundreds of thousands of dollars every month. Harrigan had been working under the umbrella of John Gotti Jr., the son of John Gotti Sr. People in the know say that John Gotti Jr. did not have the street acumen that his father did. In that this business between John Gotti Jr. and his associates was a narcotics operation, this was all off the books. It had to be.

  Mike Harrigan did not like Gotti Jr. or any of his people; he felt they were all over-the-top, loud and vulgar, in-your-face “gangsters.” He felt that dealing with them, being associated with them, would eventually cause trouble. The trouble began when Michael Harrigan’s ill feelings toward Gotti Jr. and company spilled over. He didn’t want to be involved with them anymore. He vehemently complained to Manny Maya. Maya immediately suggested that they go to Tommy Pitera, that Pitera would welcome him with open arms, that Pitera would protect him, that Pitera wasn’t afraid of anybody, least of all John Gotti Jr.

  With that, Maya set up a sit-down between himself, Pitera, and Michael Harrigan. Pitera well knew the fortune that could be made with a good pot business. He knew, too, that because it involved drugs, he could freely co-opt the enterprise away from John Gotti Jr. with little problem. There would not be any kind of sit-down regarding this matter, particularly in light of the fact that John Gotti Sr. could not come to bat for his son over a matter that involved pot. Pitera played his cards with potent indifference to Gotti and company. Everyone knew, Pitera knew, that he was a killer. He was not just a man of respect, not just made, he was an ASSASSIN…he was the man who shot down Willie Boy Johnson; he was the man who cut up what was left of his enemies and adversaries and cleverly disposed of them somewhere out in the wilds of Staten Island and Long Island.

  Now he’d be happy to be in a pissing contest with John Gotti Jr.

  Michael Harrigan was between a rock and a hard place. He was pleased to be away from Gotti and his associates, pleased to be working with Pitera now, but John Gotti Jr. was naturally irritated and angry. Gotti Jr. felt he was being disrespected, was losing a lot of money; he felt, too, that something he set up and nurtured was arbitrarily, unfairly, being taken away from him.

  “Who the fuck does this Pitera think he is?!” were words heard frequently coming out of John Jr.’s mouth.

  John Jr. could not go to his father about this, as Pitera knew. What he could do was “demand” a sit-down with Tommy Pitera. This sit-down would be like a quivering Chihuahua sitting down with a muscular Doberman pinscher—the Doberman was Pitera.

  At the sit-down, John Gotti Jr. showed up with an Albanian associate named Johnny Alite. Pitera had Michael Harrigan with him. Harrigan was there because he had a vested interest in the outcome. Alite was an unknown guy who had no legitimate right to be there. Pitera immediately let his feelings be known—he didn’t want Alite there. Offhandedly, somewhat facetiously, Gotti bragged that Alite had killed six people. Pitera disdainfully snorted that he had killed over sixty people, in a way of qualifying him, justifying his presence. Because both John Gotti Jr. and Pitera were made, Pitera had every right to demand that Alite leave, to throw Alite the fuck out the door, which is exactly what he did. Pitera knew that no matter how you cut it, he had the upper hand, provided that he stayed within the confines and dictates of Mafia protocol. He could not, as an example, slap John Jr. He could not curse at him. He had to treat him with respect. That certainly did not hold true for Johnny Alite.

  When Pitera sat down and settled himself, calmed down somewhat, he told Gotti Jr. that Michael Harrigan now worked for him, that he was with him, and that John Jr. could go tell his father if he wanted. Pitera had outmaneuvered him with ease. Like this, the matter was resolved in favor of Pitera, and thus the pot business was wholly his. He came, he saw, he conquered.

  Naturally enough, Pitera turned to Billy Bright to unload the pot. Bright had been selling weight of marijuana for many years. With Bright’s connections, all the pot they brought up from Texas was quickly sold, turned into hard, cold cash. Pitera, Billy Bright, and Michael Harrigan made money hand over fist. Of course, no matter how you cut it, Pitera always got the lion’s share.

  Everything was going smoothly, with the precision of a fine Swiss watch, until Greg Reiter, a particularly loud and vulgar associate of Gotti Jr., came to Michael Harrigan and began making waves. Greg Reiter was a muscular tough guy who wore gold chains and drove a souped-up red Corvette. He felt that a good thing had been taken away from him unfairly, that something he developed with Michael and Gotti Jr. and Alite had been usurped, suddenly gone with the wind. He went and found Michael and said, “Look…what you’re doing here is very unfair. I know you’re with Pitera now. Everyone knows who Pitera is. Everyone is afraid of him, but there’s a basic right and wrong and what you’re doing here is wrong. This was our thing, man. We made it happen. Michael, we’re friends…how could you do this?”

  Reiter’s words fell on deaf ears. No matter how you cut it, Harrigan could not go back to the way things were. Pitera had his sharp talons deep into their business
and there would be no turning back. Harrigan well knew that if he betrayed Pitera, if he lied to him, he’d be dead. He, like everyone else, had heard about Pitera’s burial ground, that he cut people up, that he got naked and got into tubs with people and cut off their arms and legs and heads.

  NO—Michael Harrigan would not, in any shape, manner, or form, undermine Pitera’s role in their pot business. Though Greg Reiter did not say anything overtly offensive to Michael Harrigan, he had opened a Pandora’s box that would release something ugly and dreadful.

  The following evening, Michael Harrigan sought out Tommy Pitera and found him at the Just Us. They went outside and walked along Avenue S. As they walked, DEA agents surreptitiously observed them, took pictures of them. Michael explained to Pitera that Greg Reiter had come to see him, had said that what he was doing was “unfair.” With that, Pitera said, “Why don’t you do this: set up a meeting with him and I’ll come.”

  “Okay,” Harrigan replied, unsure where this would go, apprehensive. After all, Greg Reiter had a right to be unhappy. Not believing Pitera would cause Greg any harm, that he was just going to “set him straight,” perhaps warn him, Michael reached out to Greg and said he would like to talk to him further. They agreed to meet in a parking lot in Nassau County, Long Island.

  It was after eleven P.M. when they finally met. There were few people about. It was a cold night. Chilled winds with long, bony fingers tore through the wide-open expanse of the parking lot unchallenged, unbridled—mean. When Pitera arrived, he had Billy Bright with him. Bright was there as a backup gun for Pitera. In that Bright was a pot dealer, partners with Pitera in the pot business, he had a vested interest in what was about to occur. Pitera patiently, calmly, explained to Michael that Greg Reiter had to go; that sooner or later, he’d become a problem. That right now was the time to “nip it in the bud.” Considering the amount of money involved, that it was millions of dollars, Michael Harrigan knew Pitera was right. Greg could very well, as the next step, look to kill both Michael and Pitera. Pitera said, “When he pulls up, just act normal. Just act normal. Leave it all up to me.” And with that, Greg drove into the parking lot, ensconced in his red Corvette, comfortable and confident, and pulled up to where Mike Harrigan and Bright and Pitera were standing. Serious-faced, he pulled to a stop and began to get out of the car.