The Butcher

by Philip Carlo

  He said, “Is Frank in the Witness Protection Program—do you know?”

  “I don’t know…I know what I’ve told you,” she said.

  Pitera soon got up, went outside, and quickly returned with the always foreboding-menacing Kojak, thick and muscular, bald, with the face of an angry pitbull. He, Pitera, now introduced Kojak to Sophia, saying she was Gangi’s “wife.” Sophia wasn’t sure why Pitera was doing this, but she didn’t like any of it. It frightened her; she wanted to get away from them. Pitera and Kojak soon left as abruptly as they had come. Sophia didn’t want to be in Patty’s company anymore. She called for the check. Patty insisted on paying it.

  “Did you set me up, Patty?”

  “How do you mean?” Patty asked.

  “You know exactly how I mean,” Sophia said.

  And with that, Sophia turned, worried for her children, worried for herself…worried for Frank Gangi. She went straight home, concerned about being followed. At the house, Sophia reached out to the office of the DEA. Her fear, what had happened, was immediately passed on to Frank.

  Immediately, Gangi complained to Jim Hunt. Soon after, heavily armed DEA agents picked up Sophia and the children and brought them to the hotel to be with Frank.

  Jim was a hardcore, seasoned cop, not a social worker, but he came to believe that Gangi was more or less a man who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and had gotten caught up in his surroundings. Jim came to view Gangi as essentially a nice guy who made bad decisions. He believed he was not a stone-cold killer; he knew that he had a conscience, remorse. For the most part, Frank and Sophia had an on-again, off-again relationship. He had been caught up in a merry-go-round of cocaine and alcohol and women. Now that he was sober, he was…himself. Sober, he wanted to be near his family. Sober, he wanted to be with his wife. Sober…Frank Gangi was a different man. He was soft-spoken, reasonable, willing to listen. He felt like he had gotten a two-thousand-pound load off his shoulders by purging himself.

  Now Frank Gangi was becoming who he really was; slowly, he was becoming the man he should have been.

  Tommy Pitera was not a stupid man. As well as being particularly observant, street-smart, and well read, he had developed and ultimately honed a sixth sense as sharp as any scalpel. Now this sixth sense, as well as all his other senses, told him that there was trouble in the wind, that Frank Gangi had become an informer. He turned over in his mind what to do, how to combat this rat. Naturally enough, he thought about abducting Sophia. Ultimately, for now, he decided against that. He put out word to all his people to find Frank Gangi, to kill Frank Gangi. It was not just the Bonanno family that would heed this call. It was all the members in all the families as well as the associates of each of the families. Soon several thousand men were looking for Gangi, were sniffing the air, were listening to the drums that demanded Gangi’s head be brought to Pitera on a silver platter.

  Back at DEA headquarters, sitting at a large, oval-shaped table, black-and-white photographs of Pitera’s surveillance on pin boards to the right of the table, which included many soldiers and capos in the Bonanno family, photos of Overstreets and Just Us, Group 33 strategized with the help of federal prosecutor David Shapiro. They discussed when to pick up Pitera. Before they moved, they wanted to make sure all their ducks were in a row, i’s dotted, t’s crossed. They wanted to verify what Gangi had said. In short, they were intent upon putting together a rock-solid case. Toward that end, David Shapiro, smart and cagey, a man who knew his way around a courtroom as well as his own desk, put together a war plan.

  What they all agreed on was to keep Pitera off guard, that is, not let him get wind of the law enforcement firestorm slowly enveloping him. Shapiro and the agents discussed going out to the sanctuary in great detail. They knew that once they did that, Pitera would find out and be on guard, get rid of evidence, perhaps even go on the lam. Everyone there knew the Bonannos were deeply entrenched in Canada, had numerous contacts in Canada, and Bonanno star Tommy Pitera could very well disappear into the wide expanses between the Canadian borders, get lost among its various peoples, cultures, languages. This was a very realistic concern—after all, they had just picked up Bonanno fugitive Vincenzo Lore in Canada. Bonanno boss Carmine Galante had lived in Canada for many years while he set up the Sicilian-Canadian-U.S. heroin conduits.

  As the days went on and the DEA put together an airtight case against a seemingly unknowing, unaware Pitera, the crack in the Rock of Gibraltar grew deeper and wider.

  Pitera knew Frank Gangi’s drinking, his drug abuse, made him a large neon deficit.

  Again, he demanded of his people: “Find fucking Gangi!”

  To no avail. It was as though Gangi had been swallowed up by the earth, sucked into a pit of quicksand.

  Now that the DEA had a full picture of who Pitera was, names and places and times—who, what, when, where, and why—the ghoul he was, they kept a very close watch on him. They would not let him get away. Over the years, numerous mafiosi had taken it on the lam when the time came for them to face the music. They were wealthy, they were fearless, they were, for the most part, the type of men who would readily go to a foreign place and make a new life for themselves. As the evidence the DEA, NYPD, and FBI mounted against Pitera was put together, as the wheels of justice methodically turned, as the pros and cons of different witnesses and pieces of evidence were debated, it was decided that it was time to get Pitera. It was time to act. By now it was June 3, 1990. They couldn’t take the chance of him fleeing, disappearing into the wilds of Canada—its sophisticated urban cities, or secretive streets and avenues—or the hills and farms of Sicily. No…it was time to act. It was time to cut off Tommy Pitera’s legs.

  That morning, Pitera had volunteered to drive his girlfriend Barbara to visit her son. Apparently, the boy had not taken any of Pitera’s many lectures seriously. He had gotten arrested for attempted murder and was now sitting forlorn and angry in the Brooklyn House of Detention on Atlantic Avenue.

  For Tommy Karate Pitera, the clock was ticking.

  When he left his house that morning, he had no idea that there were some fifteen heavily armed law enforcement professionals trailing him, watching him, getting ready to pounce. It had been a long-drawn-out case and they were all glad it was finally coming to fruition—especially Jim Hunt and Tommy Geisel and Group 33. It was decided that Jim and Tommy would actually put the cuffs on Pitera, bring him down. After all, they had initiated the case.

  It was a hot day. The skies over Brooklyn were blue and unblemished. It was so warm that Jim and Tommy Geisel were forced to keep the air conditioner on in the car. Both Jim and Tommy had been waiting for this moment for many months now. They had come to hate Pitera, what he did, what he represented, who he was.

  After Pitera dropped Barbara off, he headed east on Atlantic Avenue. This part of Atlantic Avenue had become a Middle Eastern enclave…here, there were crowded Middle Eastern restaurants and sweet-smelling food shops on both sides of the busy street.

  The task force decided to move. It was time to break open the Rock of Gibraltar. Pitera was stuck in traffic. Car horns sounded. People walking the streets did so listlessly and slowly. Jim and Tommy pulled their car up just behind Pitera. They had decided when the moment came to arrest him, they would bang the back of his car, get out with lightning speed, guns drawn, their badges clearly visible, hanging from chains around their necks. When there was a bus in front of Pitera and he was boxed in, they made their move. Hunt accelerated—bang—and rear-ended Pitera’s car. Surprised, caught off guard, Pitera, believing a hit was about to take place, thinking he was going to get murdered, ducked, looking to avoid bullets, slamming himself down onto the car seats.

  With shocking speed, Jim Hunt burst from his car and ran to the driver’s side of Pitera’s car. The door was locked. Jim could not open it. Meanwhile, big, powerful Tommy Geisel pulled open the passenger door with such force he nearly tore it off of its hinges. Jim Hunt vaulted over the hood of the car as tho
ugh he were a champion gymnast. As he hit the ground, he grabbed Pitera. Though both Jim and Tommy had shouted, “Police! Police!” Pitera was still not sure if it was a hit or if these were really cops. He resisted. Tommy tried to get him to lie down on his stomach, to cuff him. Because he resisted, Tommy pushed him so hard that Pitera’s face slammed into the hot, black tar street, giving him a broken nose and two large black eyes, injuries that would be clearly visible in Pitera’s mug shot taken later that day. Hunt put the cuffs on him and read him his rights.

  Pitera was thrown into the back of Jim and Tommy’s unmarked car. Sirens blaring, red lights spinning, they headed toward Manhattan, DEA headquarters on West Fifty-seventh Street.

  What, Pitera wondered, over and over again, do they have against me?

  Pitera hated having been arrested. In the world that he came from, being busted was—failure; getting arrested was for miscreants and wannabes. Certainly not for the likes of him—a man with his street acumen, wherewithal; a man who could readily see trouble coming from a mile away. Immediately he suspected Gangi but had no proof yet that Gangi was the cause of it.

  When he got over the initial shock of the arrest, his mind began to work defensively. Seething inside, Pitera thought about good criminal attorneys, the best ones available—how to get out of this. He thought about making whoever the witness was disappear. He would fight this, he would win this. As he was being driven to DEA headquarters, he stared with disdain at Tommy Geisel and Jim Hunt. He had no idea of Jim Hunt’s family history in law enforcement—that Jim Hunt Sr. had arrested Carmine Galante, the Chin, and, too, Vito Genovese—but none of that mattered to him. Hunt was a cop and he represented all that Pitera disdained. Pitera thought of cops as bullies with badges. Respect—he would never show these people respect.

  Outwardly, Pitera appeared friendly, made light of the arrest, acted as though Jim and Tommy were just doing a day’s work, nothing more, little less. He, Pitera, was an omnipotent power…he’d beat them through his iron will, his guile, his power over life and death.

  At DEA headquarters, he was fingerprinted and photographed and put in the holding cell. Agents Dave Toracinta and Timmy MacDonald tried to make small talk with him. Initially, he was tight-lipped, but after a while, he said that he was not going to talk about the case in any way. They said that they understood he had been given his Miranda rights and had nothing to say. He, in turn, said that he’d be willing to talk about things in general “to pass the time.” At one point, Pitera said to Agent Dave Toracinta, “Hey, why don’t youse guys write my story and we will split profits on the movie rights? I’ll provide all the gory details,” laughing as he said it, amused. For a streetwise mafioso, Pitera was talkative. He had gotten over the initial shock of being arrested, the earthquake of it, and his mood had lightened somewhat. Offhandedly, he spoke about the Mossberg and Ithaca shotguns—how they easily take a human head “clean off” if you shoot right above the collarbone.

  As a matter of course, correct procedure, Jim Hunt brought prosecutor David Shapiro down to meet Pitera. Standing outside the cell, Jim introduced the two.

  “Are you going to be my prosecutor?” Pitera asked.

  “Yes…yes, I am.”

  “I have absolutely nothing to say to you.”

  “Fine, no problem. I understand.”

  “But if I did talk to you, what would you want to talk about?” Pitera asked, being all cagey.

  “Well…what about Willie Boy Johnson?”

  “Ah, there’s a rat for you!” Pitera said, clapping his hands, smiling; he went on to say, regarding Willie Boy Johnson, “Remember the guy who ran over Gotti’s son? Willie Boy did that for Gotti; cut him up in three pieces…Gotti would kill me if he knew I was talking to youse guys like this. Don’t get me wrong, Gotti is a gentleman and a man of honor and Willie Boy is dead. What’s the difference?”

  Pitera again withdrew into himself, became tight-lipped. Shapiro asked him another question or two about Johnson, but Pitera had nothing more to say. His attention moved to the small-screen television. Jim and Shapiro soon left. Jim had assigned Agents Dave Toracinta and Timmy MacDonald to watch Pitera round the clock. They did not feel he was a suicide risk, but he might talk, he might have more to say that could help them and hurt him.

  Several hours later, during that night, Pitera—surprisingly—began to talk about Phyllis Burdi. He asked Dave Toracinta if he had heard of Burdi.

  “Nope, I’m not familiar with that name,” the agent said.

  Pitera continued. “Wherever Phyllis is, she can come back to the city. I won’t bother her. She didn’t do the right thing by my wife, though. She gave my wife drugs that made her overdose and die. She knew my wife had overdosed and she didn’t take her to a hospital or anything. It’s like if someone’s riding in your car and you have an accident—if that person gets hurt, you take them to a doctor; Phyllis didn’t even do that.” He said this with a candid disdain that surprised them. Both the agents were startled that he’d talked about Burdi. He seemed to be trying to use some kind of reverse psychology. He brought her up before anyone else did, as though he was an innocent babe in the woods. It seemed, at face value, he was being sly, at least trying to be.

  The following day was again hot and humid. People all over New York City went about their business. The rat race that is New York City didn’t miss a beat because of the arrest of Tommy Pitera. After a particularly good night’s sleep, Jim Hunt went straight to the holding pen where Pitera was being kept since he arrived at DEA headquarters. Though he truly doubted it, Jim was going to see if Pitera would be willing to cooperate, tell what he knew, expose the inner workings of the Bonanno clan and their narcotics operation…hey, you never know. From what he had heard so far, Pitera hated rats, hated informers. He had heard about Pitera’s not allowing anyone in his crew to don mustaches because they looked like whiskers and only rats had whiskers. When Jim arrived, he asked Pitera if he’d like some breakfast. He said sure. Pitera said he’d be willing to talk about anything but information regarding the case. It seemed, Jim thought, that he wanted to come across as the right guy, as “approachable.”

  An agent named Barber returned with an Egg McMuffin. Pitera opened the bag and smiled. “How did you guys know that I liked these? You been following me?”

  “We’ve got warrants for your houses,” Jim said.

  “I figured that. How are you going to get in?”

  “Break in if we have to,” Jim said.

  Pitera offered to show him which keys belonged to which locks on his key ring. He didn’t want the agents breaking down the doors of his homes. He said, “Look, when your guys go to the house on Ovington, tell them to be careful about the floor. I dug up the basement to make the ceilings higher and we were doing work on the roof and it’s not so stable. I wouldn’t want to see any of your guys hurt.”

  “Okay,” Jim said, surprised by his seemingly sincere concern. It was in sharp contrast to the monster he knew Pitera to be.

  Jim soon went back upstairs to his desk and called the guys in the field. He wanted to let them know that he had keys to the properties at 342 Ovington Avenue and 3030 Emmons Avenue. John McKenna, the agent at the scene, replied, “It’s too late. We already broke into 3030.”

  The apartment Pitera had shared with Celeste at 3030 Emmons Avenue was, for the most part, empty, but in a large closet they found Celeste’s panties and bras neatly laid out with little signs that labeled each: FAVORITE PANTIES, FAVORITE BRA.

  “Fucking weird,” one of the agents would later comment.

  Pitera had been paying rent on it because he didn’t want to give the apartment up, lose the memories he shared; plus, he had heard that the building would go co-op and he wanted to get an insider’s price. When agents executed the warrant at his address at 2355 East Twelfth Street, they found a trove of interesting, incriminating evidence: books—hundreds of them, related to martial arts, books on how to kill, how to maim, surveillance and police interrogation
tactics, and, also, quite tellingly, books on how to dismember bodies. Titles included Mantrapping, Kill or Get Killed, Getting Started in the Illicit Drug Business, and Torture, Interrogation and Execution by infamous French revolutionary figure Maximilien Robespierre. This book was of particular note, for it was obvious that Pitera had read it with great interest; the pages were dog-eared and well worn.

  Motivated and spurred on by these findings, the agents found “every type of knife imaginable”—samurai swords, bayonets, stilettos, ice picks, razor-sharp hunting knives. There, too, was an impressive collection of shotguns, and there were different parts of pistols, automatics, and revolvers. None of these parts made a whole gun, however, and, therefore, Pitera was not charged with illegal possession of handguns. The shotguns were legal in New York State. Pitera’s “working guns,” it would later be revealed, were in a duffel bag in the ceiling of Billy Bright’s house off Bath Avenue. Here there was a wide assortment of over sixty autos and pistols. The DEA did get a warrant to search Bright’s home, but since Frank Gangi had disappeared, Pitera had the guns in Bright’s house removed to an unknown location.

  Most incriminating of all, most unsettling of all, were the autopsy kits they found in Pitera’s home—these contained razor-sharp scalpels, small handheld saws, some for large bones, some for smaller bones. There were also hack knives for cutting through sinew and tendon.

  They found a safe and were able to break into it. Inside, they found jewelry, which, as it turned out, belonged to various murdered people. There were watches and rings, necklaces and earrings, and gold chains. Included in this cache of jewelry was Sol Stern’s wedding band. Interestingly, they found women’s jewelry there, too. Again, in a classic sense, these items could very well have been perceived, thought of, as trophies, totems. There, too, were funeral cards…funeral cards that would turn out to belong to victims of Pitera’s, according to Jim Hunt. This, the government agents felt, was, “morbid, macabre, unsettling.”