Pirate Hunters

by Robert Kurson

  Mattera and John Bilotti grew closer, becoming best friends. Their money-lending business grew. If anyone accused them of stealing customers, they issued this response: I don’t give a fuck for you. If anyone pressed harder, Mattera would say, “Do something about it.” Almost no one did.

  One exception came when Mattera was twenty, after he got into a beef with a twenty-six-year-old Gambino associate, the nephew of a made guy from another of the New York crime families. A few days later, Mattera found his apartment broken into and his guns, all legally owned, stolen. He countered by breaking into the apartment of the man he’d argued with. There, he found every one of his guns, along with forty thousand dollars in cash. He took it all.

  Not long after, the man and two of his partners grabbed Mattera at gunpoint and took him to a closed-down Fine Fare Supermarket. Pushing him into a meat locker, they tied him to a chair and put a gun to his head.

  “Where is the money?”

  “What money?”

  The men began punching and kicking Mattera.

  “Where is the fucking money?

  They knocked Mattera over in his chair and began stomping his head, throwing him into walls, and kneeing his face until Mattera was sure they would kill him.

  “Where is our goddamn money?”

  “Go fuck yourselves.”

  One of the men pulled out a nine-millimeter Smith & Wesson Model 59. “I’m dead,” Mattera thought. But instead of pulling the trigger the man raised the gun in the air, then brought it down behind Mattera’s ear. Blood oozed onto the meat locker floor.

  Another man pulled out a stun gun and shocked Mattera. Then he called to his friends, “Get the bat.”

  The men left the room. Lying in a pool of his own blood, Mattera thought, “If they were going to kill me I’d be dead already. So when I get out of here they’re finished.”

  The men didn’t return. A nearby store owner came in with a bag of ice, put Mattera in a taxi, and sent the driver to the hospital. In the emergency room, doctors stitched up Mattera and told him he was lucky to be alive.

  John Bilotti picked him up a few hours later.

  “My father wants to see you,” he said.

  By now, Tommy Bilotti was acting underboss of the Gambino family, the second highest position in the organization, and running much of Staten Island, parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan, and the docks. At his front door, he stared at the turban of bandages on Mattera’s head and asked his wife to excuse them.

  “Tell me what happened and don’t fucking lie to me. Were you dealing drugs?”

  “I swear, Tommy, never.”

  “Don’t fucking lie to me.”

  “Tommy, I swear, no drugs. He broke into my house. I broke into his house.”

  “And you took one hundred fifty grand from him.”

  “No. I got forty thousand.”

  “What else did you get?”

  “My guns.”

  “You found your guns in there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. I’ll take care of it.”

  Mattera knew this was supposed to be the end of the conversation. But he couldn’t leave it there.

  “Tommy, with all due respect, this is something I need to take care of myself.”

  Bilotti thought it over.

  “Okay,” he said. “But I’m going to tell you two things. First, I want you to make a measured response—don’t go crazy, don’t kill anyone, don’t fuck up your life. Second, when you’re better, I’m going to kick the shit out of you. Because that’s what your father would do.”

  Mattera’s father, in fact, never would have hit him, but it touched Mattera that Tommy was trying to help in a fatherly way.

  Mattera got up to leave. Tommy called after him.

  “Measured response.”

  —

  ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, Mattera found out that the man who’d stolen his guns and beat him was going to be watching fireworks with his fiancée near the beach. In late afternoon, Mattera got into John Bilotti’s Cadillac and the two men drove to the site. By the time they arrived it was dusk. No one said a word as Mattera moved through the crowd carrying a baseball bat. He found the guy drinking Sambuca with friends.

  “What the—” the man said at the sight of Mattera, but before he could finish Mattera hit him in the mouth with the bat, knocking out all of his teeth, and breaking his jaw and cheekbone. Mattera reached back to hit him again but feared he’d already exceeded a measured response. He dropped the bat and walked back to the car. Police arrived a few minutes later. Though it had happened in front of hundreds of people, no one had seen a thing.

  Two weeks later, the man’s uncle contacted Tommy Bilotti and arranged for a sit-down. The meeting was set for a Staten Island pizzeria owned by the man Mattera had pummeled. That man would be represented by his uncle. Mattera would be represented by Tommy.

  The sit-down occurred a few weeks later. Mattera, John, and Tommy were led to the back of the pizzeria, which was decorated in glass and mirrors, the furniture in salmon leather.

  “Disgusting,” Tommy said. “This is Staten Island, not the inside of I Dream of Jeannie’s bottle.”

  The injured man spoke first, counting off Mattera’s offenses. Mattera did the same. Then, the made guys spoke.

  “Tommy, I think a certain amount of restitution has to be made here,” the uncle said. “This kid stole a lot of money and did a lot of damage. He needs a big-time beating. What’s right is right.”

  Bilotti thought it over.

  “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen,” he said. “This pizzeria your nephew owns? It’s closed now. That arcade he owns? I own that now. This is your relative? You like him? You take him. He goes back to New York with you. This day is the last day he’s on Staten Island. If I see him here again you can come after me because I’m going to kill him. And anything the Mattera kid took is his.”

  The uncle seethed but knew Tommy was within his rights according to the unwritten and ancient laws of organized crime. Mattera could hardly believe it. He was at the center of a quintessential mob sit-down like he’d seen in the movies. And he’d won.

  A few months later, Mattera dropped by the Bilotti house. Tommy, as always, asked him in for breakfast. In the kitchen, Tommy fried an omelet, put bread in the toaster, and then, swinging from the ground up, hit Mattera across the face with an open hand, leaving him sprawling and dazed on the floor.

  “That’s the beating I owed you,” Tommy said. “Your dad didn’t want you in trouble. Now pick yourself up and eat eggs.”

  —

  MATTERA’S BUSINESS EXPANDED RAPIDLY after that, and though he was young, single, and flush with cash, the darkness of his father’s passing still hung over him. At night, he wrote letters to Lloyd’s of London requesting copies of registries for missing ships they’d insured. His happiest days were when packages arrived, postmarked in colorful stamps from England, stuffed with pages of clues as to where some of these ships might be found.

  Not long after Mattera turned twenty-two, he roughed up a tough guy who’d stolen money from him. Word on the street was that the guy had a gun and was looking for him, so Mattera made sure he had a gun, too. They found each other on McClean Avenue. From a distance of ten yards, the man drew his weapon and started firing at Mattera, and Mattera responded in kind. Each man emptied his gun, somehow missing the other. Then they began punching, and even as he landed blows, Mattera thought, “What am I doing here? Where am I going to end up in this life?”

  But whenever he made a move to get out—by opening an auto towing company or his own butcher shop—he drifted back to his lending business. It was then that Tommy Bilotti was promoted again, from acting to full underboss, just under the big boss, Paul Castellano. If ever there was opportunity to make big money, that time was now.

  Still, neither John Mattera nor John Bilotti made a move to expand. Mattera continued to run the new butcher shop he’d opened, and it was there, in mid-December 1985, that a fri
end rushed in and told him that Tommy Bilotti had been killed in midtown Manhattan, shot in cold blood outside Sparks Steak House, along with Paul Castellano. It was an audacious assassination in front of New Yorkers doing their Christmas shopping. Newscasters were calling it the biggest mob hit since the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

  Mattera took off his apron, grabbed a Browning Hi Power nine-millimeter pistol from the meat locker, and closed shop. He drove to Tommy’s house, found John inside, and put his arm around him. For the next eight hours, he stood by the door with his weapon and waited, ready to protect his friend in case anyone had ideas about hurting another Bilotti.

  —

  SHORTLY AFTER THE MURDERS, John Bilotti was called in for a sit-down with Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, the new underboss of the Gambino family. War was breaking out and word had it that John Gotti, who had ordered the killings of Castellano and Bilotti, and was the new boss, wanted to make peace with those who might have a grudge against him. Many viewed John Bilotti as a fine mind and loyal son who was not likely to allow his father’s murder to go unavenged. The way Mattera and Bilotti saw it, there were only two potential outcomes from a sit-down with Gravano: Bilotti would be killed, or he would become a made member of the family. Bilotti could not decide which of the two he preferred least.

  So he decided not to show.

  The decision would displease Gotti, so Mattera and Bilotti went on the lam. For months, they moved between rural Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and Staten Island, never staying in one place for more than a day, never going anywhere without weapons. On the road, they discussed baseball and cars, dated girls, and drew up plans for new businesses.

  Again, Gravano urged Bilotti to come in for a sit-down. That’s when Mattera and Bilotti had a serious talk.

  A life in organized crime, or even on its fringes, rarely ended well. One after another, neighborhood guys went to jail or wound up buried in the sand flats or lived in constant fear. So, yes, if Bilotti sat down with Gravano, there was a chance he would be killed. But there was also a chance the Gambinos would listen when he said that he and Mattera wanted nothing to do with the life.

  A sit-down was scheduled. Bilotti would not swear allegiance to Gotti nor would he ask to be made. He would simply deliver his message: He wanted out.

  On the night of the meeting, Mattera and another friend armed themselves heavily in case the worst happened. They would follow Bilotti to the sit-down and wait outside. If Bilotti came out at the end of the meeting, they would all go for pizza. If he did not, Mattera and his friend would go in with guns blazing.

  A tan Cadillac picked up Bilotti and set out toward Brooklyn. Mattera and his friend followed in the distance. They lost the Caddy going over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, but picked it up again at the Ninety-Second Street exit, then followed to a small bar in Brooklyn called the 19th Hole. Bilotti and three men walked into the bar.

  A half hour passed.

  Then an hour.

  Mattera’s friend wanted to go in shooting, but Mattera held him back—maybe the men were still talking. Finally, four figures emerged and got into the tan Cadillac, but in the dark Mattera couldn’t tell whether one of them was Bilotti. So Mattera and his friend followed the car. Near Eighty-Sixth Street, the Cadillac pulled over.

  Mattera’s heart pounded. All he wanted now was to see his friend’s face, but no one was moving in that car.

  Then, he heard a click.

  Slowly, a door on the Caddy swung open and a man got out. He began walking, quickly, toward Mattera.

  Mattera reached for his gun, but he recognized the man’s gait. It was Bilotti.

  “You almost got them to shoot you,” Bilotti said. “But I love you.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Let’s get pizza.”

  Crammed around a tiny table at Spumoni Gardens in Brooklyn, Bilotti told his friends what happened. He and Gravano had talked for more than an hour. Gravano told him the family couldn’t function at war with itself—guys were getting killed and he wanted to make sure Bilotti wasn’t involved. Bilotti looked into the eyes of one of the most feared killers in organized crime and said, “I don’t want any part of this business. My father didn’t want me in this business. You leave my friends and my family out of it, and we have no intention of getting involved.” Gravano looked him up and down and said, “Well, then, it’s done between us.”

  —

  A FEW MONTHS LATER, Mattera walked into Magnum Sports on Staten Island, the largest indoor shooting range in New York. He struck up a friendship with Pat Rogers, a forty-year-old detective sergeant in the New York City Police Department, and the best shooter Mattera had seen. Rogers rarely missed—two rounds center mass almost every time—and he was smart and interesting, someone Mattera could talk to.

  Rogers began mentoring Mattera at the range, five sharp every morning, the two of them cranking off hundreds of rounds until each was standing in brass. It wasn’t long before the owner of Magnum offered Mattera a job—for less in a month than he used to make in a day—and Mattera took it.

  At the range one day, Mattera helped a customer with a broken mainspring on his .45 automatic, no charge, happy to do it. The customer asked if Mattera might be looking to become a police officer, a reasonable question given the venue. Mattera was intrigued by the idea. Of course, he presumed he’d never qualify given the life he’d led. But then he got to thinking. Despite all his capers, he’d never come under police scrutiny for anything more than a traffic violation.

  He showed up the next day at the Westhampton Beach police station on Long Island. The customer with the broken .45 turned out to be the town’s chief of police. The man took Mattera’s photo and had him sign papers, then took him across the street to a courthouse, where a judge told Mattera to raise his right hand and swear to uphold the laws of the state of New York.

  “No one back on Staten Island is going to believe this,” he thought. “Even I don’t believe this.”

  He made the pledge. They handed him a badge and a police ID card, and told him to report to the police academy in a month.

  Mattera was a natural in the classroom. By graduation, he carried a ninety-nine average and was named valedictorian. Westhampton Beach hired him on provisional status. There was a hiring freeze on full-time employees, but that wouldn’t affect his hours or pay, and he took the job. Soon, he was out on the streets working a beat.

  Other cops didn’t see what Mattera did. If there were bad guys packing guns, Mattera knew. If college kids were selling drugs, he knew. If a senior citizen out for a stroll was really casing a home in order to rob it, he knew.

  No one on Staten Island could believe he’d become a cop. Made members of the Gambino family threw friendly punches into his arm and said, “What did we do wrong with you?” The one person who seemed most happy for him was John Bilotti. “It doesn’t surprise me,” he told Mattera, who picked him up one day and took him for pastries in his police car. “You always could do whatever you wanted.”

  Mattera loved being a cop—making pinches others missed, thinking like a bad guy in order to do good—and he did it for two years until it became clear that, due to the hiring freeze, he would always be provisional. By this time, however, he was thinking bigger about law enforcement.

  He went to live in Missouri and Arizona in order to learn from Jeff Cooper and Ray Chapman, the fathers of modern combat shooting. This was the Ivy League of gunfighting, and Mattera took to it right away. And he made friends at the school. One of them, through contacts at government agencies, arranged for Mattera to do covert work overseas, the kind that required a man who wouldn’t flinch.

  Working as a contractor for the U.S. government, Mattera traveled to Nicaragua, Turkey, Montenegro, and a dozen other high-risk countries, distributing propaganda, protecting shipments, and training security details. He worked mostly in war zones, always in the shadows.

  In his early thirties, he flew to a third-world country hostile to the Un
ited States to conduct covert surveillance. A contact he trusted there betrayed him, leaving him pinned in a burned-out building and surrounded by armed insurgents eager to collect the rich bounties paid for the heads of Americans.

  His only hope for survival was to make it back on foot to the American Embassy, more than a mile away. But he didn’t dare try it in daylight, so he passed the hours running through New York Mets lineups he’d memorized as a kid, and counting off the things he’d meant to do in life but hadn’t yet made time for. When he needed to calm himself for his nighttime run—one he likely wouldn’t survive—he thought about shipwrecks, and of how beautiful it would be to find one that no one knew was there.

  After dark, Mattera walked, slowly and purposefully, to the embassy. He waited for shots to ring out but the road remained silent. Six hours later, he was on a flight back to the States. On the government airplane, he kept his hand on his gun and promised himself that no matter what, he wouldn’t put off until tomorrow what his heart told him to go for today.

  —

  AFTER MATTERA RETURNED HOME, his uncle died of lung cancer, just as Mattera’s father had a decade earlier. People at the funeral tried to console him, but no matter what anyone did, Mattera could not stop crying. It was the first time he’d cried since before his father died.

  —

  BY 1992, MATTERA HAD attended dozens of law enforcement-related specialty schools, covering everything from the operation of submachine guns to explosive room breaching to the latest in hostage negotiation. That year, he took a job with a security company in Virginia.

  He provided executive protection for CEOs, celebrities, and dignitaries, and he flourished. Soon, he was earning at the top of the pay grade, all for doing what came naturally. He did this work for years, building a reputation and protecting the kinds of people who appeared on the cover of Time magazine.