by Philip Carlo
Back in Gravesend, Brooklyn, Tommy Pitera was up and about—prowling. As was widely known, Pitera only used cocaine on occasion, and very little even then. His motto was, “I use the drug; the drug does not use me.” He never binged for days on end on cocaine. He took a toot here and there and that was it. Pitera was very concerned with staying physically fit and he worked out every day without fail. He did not smoke cigarettes. His biceps were well defined, his shoulders were round and the size of two perfectly symmetrical grapefruits. His hands, from many years of hitting heavy bags, were like two steel sledgehammers. His trapezoid muscles were overly developed. He had honed himself into a well-lubricated killing machine.
Often, as Pitera plied the Gravesend streets, he thought of Phyllis Burdi. His reptilian blue eyes would see girls walking the street and he’d pull over, ready to grab Phyllis, but it wasn’t her.
When, he wondered, would he get his hands on her? Have his revenge?
He tried to find Frank Gangi that night, left a message for him, but didn’t hear back.
Then, coincidentally, he called Moussa. Gangi answered the phone, as Moussa had gone out on a run.
“What’s up? Where you been?” asked Pitera, angry, almost seeming to know the answer, Gangi thought.
Paranoid that he knew he’d been with Phyllis, that he’d been seen leaving the club with Phyllis, Gangi told the truth.
“I’m with Phyllis. She’s here,” he said.
“You are with Phyllis?”
“Yeah.”
“Where is she?”
“Inside, sleeping.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“I was going to call you, I swear!”
“No matter what, you keep her there. You understand? Keep, her, there!
Before heading to the city, Pitera went back home and he grabbed his dismembering kit. It was carefully wrapped up in a chamois. There were scalpels, razor-sharp knives, small two-finger saws for cutting joints, bone, and sinew. He then picked up Vincent “Kojak” Giattino and Richie David and two oversize, cheap suitcases. Pitera calmly drove into the city, alongside the Narrows that separates Brooklyn from Staten Island, under the Verrazano Bridge. The sun reflected off the fast-moving water, making it appear like a sea of glistening silver coins.
Silent, his mind playing over and over what he’d do, Pitera made his way to lower Manhattan via the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and went straight to the drug dealer’s loft. He rang the bell. The buzzer sounded. He quickly made his way upstairs. He fitted a silencer on a 9mm automatic. The elevator opened directly into the apartment. Pitera walked in, carrying the gun. Ominously, Kojak was carrying two suitcases.
Wanting to get on Pitera’s good side, Gangi was standing there at attention, eager to please. He seemed older, paler, his face more lined. There were puffy circles under each eye the color of eggplants. He knew what was about to happen, was saddened by its realities. He knew, too, that he had no say in the matter. He wanted to sit down with Pitera, explain that it wasn’t Phyllis’s fault…that Celeste took the drugs all on her own, that Celeste wanted the drugs, that Celeste craved the drugs. The problem, he wanted to say, was not Phyllis but Celeste. It was a bona fide argument, but one Gangi would never make, one Pitera would never hear.
“Where is she?” Pitera growled.
Gangi pointed to the bedroom.
“There,” he said.
“She sleeping?”
“Yeah,” Gangi answered.
Pitera crossed the room, his steps quiet like the turning of a page. With a practiced hand, he chambered a bullet and opened the door. Naked, Phyllis Burdi lay there, as vulnerable as the day she was born. With no hesitation or reservation, Pitera raised the gun and pumped three shots into her thin, though shapely, body. Without ever knowing it, Phyllis Burdi was suddenly dead. There was no pain. There was no surprise.
Pitera ordered Kojak and David to pick up the lifeless Phyllis Burdi by her ankles and wrists and carry her to the bathroom. He told them to place her in the oversize Jacuzzi tub. He turned on both the hot and cold faucets and let the water run just so. When it was the right temperature, the right amount coming out of the faucet, he went back outside and retrieved his dismembering kit. Without preamble, Pitera slowly, methodically, completely undressed himself. When he was shockingly naked, he stepped into the tub with her, both of them naked now. He began making deep, expert cuts on her shoulder blades, at the top of her spine, where her hip joints met the pelvic bone, just to the left and the right of her pubic hairline. As the body bled, he used a razor-sharp, serrated hunting knife and he expertly severed her head, knowing exactly where to cut the spine, trachea, and neck muscles. He picked up the severed head and put it on the edge of the tub. It faced the entrance. He then went to work on removing her left and right arms. Within minutes, her arms and her head were detached from her body. At this point, Frank Gangi walked to the threshold of the bathroom.
“Come in. Come in here,” Pitera demanded.
Appalled, Gangi slowly walked into the bathroom. The smell of blood and death filled the air. His stomach turned at the sight of Phyllis’s head at the edge of the tub, facing him. One eye was half closed and the other eye, wide open, looked off to the left. He’d just been making love to her. She had just been giving him oral sex. Now her lifeless head was just there like some errant piece of soap. He remained speechless, mute, as quiet as stone. What could he say? Wanting to show Gangi the effect Glaser rounds had on the body, Pitera shot Phyllis in the chest three more times and explained how the many pellets encased in each shell caused massive internal damage.
Pitera now grabbed Phyllis by the legs, wrapped his hands around her Achilles tendon, pushed the leg forward, and using the hunting knife, cut the large muscles that connect the legs to the torso and soon made his way through the socket joints that hold the hips and legs together, expertly severing one then the other. He told Gangi to bring him the plastic bags. Deftly, indifferently, he placed the legs, torso, and arms in three different bags, knowing the weight of the torso would not rip through the bag. He put her head in a separate bag. When he was finished, four black plastic bags were neatly lined up in the bathroom, holding the remains of Phyllis Burdi.
He had Kojak put the bags into the two cheap suitcases. Carefully and scrupulously Pitera washed the tub then meticulously washed himself, moving slowly, as though he had just come back from a workout. When he was sure he was thoroughly clean, he dried himself, got dressed, and ordered Kojak and Richie to take the remains out to the bird sanctuary and bury Phyllis there. They left and headed out to Staten Island.
Distraught, Frank Gangi went back to Gravesend, Brooklyn, in his car. Tommy Pitera took Phyllis Burdi’s head home. There, people in the know, say he did something unspeakable with it. Satisfied, he placed the head in the freezer of his refrigerator. It would remain there until Pitera decided to get rid of it by dumping it in the nearby Atlantic Ocean, where crabs and fish would eat the flesh and brains.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
NO REMORSE, NO CONSCIENCE, NO SCRUPLES
Killing Phyllis Burdi did not bring Pitera much solace. He had loved Celeste more than he had loved anyone in his entire life. They were soul mates. He had shared things with her he had never told anyone. She had gotten to know him deep inside and she loved what she had seen and come to know. The two of them were very much alike. If ever there was a female gangster, it was Celeste LiPari. Pitera wished he could kill Phyllis over and over again.
Be that as it may, it didn’t take long for word to slowly spread throughout Bensonhurst and Gravesend and Coney Island and Dyker Heights—Mafiadom—that Tommy Pitera was burying people, killing them at will, chopping them up, and burying them as though he had been issued a permit by Lucifer himself. At first, these things were said in guarded whispers. Now they were part of normal conversation in that world. His reputation as a killer grew to monumental proportions. The people he worked for, his bosses Anthony Spero and Frankie Lino, the upper echelon of the Bonanno fami
ly, had also heard what was happening but they did nothing to rein him in. It was also no secret that he had killed Phyllis Burdi. They knew exactly the kind of woman she had been. They knew that she’d been warned to stay away from Celeste many times over. As far as all of them were concerned, she was where she belonged.
Yet the murder of Phyllis, the concept of a mafioso having his own burial ground, his own Boot Hill, as it were, was unsettling. It was unsettling to civilians as well as to people in the life—that world.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
FIRE-BREATHING DRAGON
More than ever, the DEA was working the Pitera case. Little by little they heard things through the grapevine that they had set up all throughout Brooklyn. They now had both the Just Us and the Cypress Bar and Grill bugged as well as a nightclub Pitera owned called Overstreets. They knew Pitera personally spent little time in the Cypress, but still they hoped to garner something they could use against him. He had bought Overstreets with the proceeds from his drug-dealing enterprises, showing good business acumen. Overstreets was a hot discotheque on the second floor of a building on Eighty-sixth Street and Fourth Avenue. Cash in hand, young people lined up there every night to party. It was popular, a moneymaker. Drugs were also sold at the club. By now the government also had listening devices in Pitera’s car and in his associates’ cars. The government had come to know, however, that Pitera was wily in the extreme. When he said something incriminating in any of the cars, he always had, as a matter of course, either static on the radio or the radio was so loud his words were lost. Rather than be disappointed, the task force was more motivated—more driven. They felt he was challenging them, daring them.
When they had him under surveillance and he met with different members of the Bonanno crime family, they constantly saw him covering his mouth as he talked. Mind you, this was in the street, with cars and cabs and buses passing by, but still there was Tommy Pitera concerned about surveillance, concerned about being bugged, concerned about having his words pulled out of thin air. There was equipment that could do that but not on the scale that Pitera seemed to think possible. The more the DEA watched him, the surer they became of everything they’d heard about him.
Conversely, Pitera sensed the presence of the cops. In that there were approximately nine people from Group 33 observing him, it didn’t take long for a street-savvy mafioso like Pitera to know which way the wind was blowing. He didn’t, however, know specifically what branch of law enforcement was sniffing around, but he knew he was being observed, watched, and scrutinized. They could have been NYPD Organized Crime, the FBI, or the DEA, he knew. Whoever they were really didn’t matter to him—they all wanted one thing and that was to put him away, to garner large headlines in the papers. That’s what they were after—press, not justice, he believed. Whenever there was a Mafia bust, it was always front-page news, the leadoff story on all the news channels. The government waved around mafiosi as though they were flags. It helped bolster their careers, everyone knew, and it helped bolster their budgets when it came time to divvy up money in Washington. They were, Pitera believed, selfish and self-serving, dictatorial and one-sided. It was not about the rule of law, Pitera believed, it was about headlines; it was about hanging the scalps of mafiosi out in the light of day for all to see and know and smell.
Contrary to what Pitera believed, for Jim Hunt and Tommy Geisel, it was all about the rule of law. It was about protecting society from career criminals; it was about getting killers off the streets; it was about keeping chaos at bay and the streets safe.
Back to basics—Jim and Tommy continued to cop cocaine and heroin from Angelo Favara. Angelo sometimes bought the coke from Judy Haimowitz and sometimes bought the drugs directly from Pitera. Thus, little by little, as though putting together a complicated puzzle, they were building a case against Judy Haimowitz—and against Pitera. The government knew that Judy would readily turn when confronted with serious jail time. However, she was not the kind of witness who could make or break the case against Pitera. They needed substantially more. Pitera had never been there when they’d bought drugs from Judy or Angelo nor had he personally sold the agents drugs.
They encouraged Angelo Favara to arrange a large buy with Pitera, but Pitera had come to view Angelo as trouble. He kept Angelo at bay, at arm’s length; he didn’t trust him. When Pitera looked at him, he saw a weasel or, worse still, a rat. Nevertheless, the DEA agents encouraged Angelo to talk to Tommy about arranging a big buy, if not from Tommy, from any of the people who worked for Tommy. If Angelo managed, as he did, ultimately, to cop drugs from people who worked for Pitera, conspiracy laws would kick in and they’d have Pitera by the proverbial balls. Any angle they, the DEA, could exploit, they would. If Jim Hunt had learned anything over the years, if Jim Hunt had garnered any insights from being the son of the revered Jim Hurt, it was to work as many venues, leads, and opportunities as possible, not to discount anything. The more hot pokers you had in the fire, the better.
One of the people who worked for Pitera was Andrew Miciotta. Andrew was an intricate part of the drug-dealing constellation that Pitera had created. Jim Hunt and Tommy Geisel managed to, initially, buy heroin from Andrew via Angelo. Eventually, Andrew, a short, stocky, balding man, agreed to meet with the two agents and sell them heroin directly. They were not interested in Andrew, as such—they wanted his boss. They wanted Pitera.
For Jim Hunt, bringing down Pitera was not about press or promotion or a feather in his cap. He genuinely hated bad guys—especially drug-dealing mafiosi.
He felt Pitera was contributing to the downfall of the community in which he lived; he felt that all the Piteras of the world were about chaos and disorder and the breaking of the rules and regulations that governed a well-run, civilized society. The fact that Pitera was definitely connected to the Bonanno crime family amplified their efforts one hundredfold. This was not some renegade tough guy willing to take chances and sell drugs. This was a member of an organized-mechanized, international underground society that would rape and pillage, steal and rob, suck the lifeblood from everything it got its hands on. This was a fire-breathing dragon and Jim Hunt was intent upon lopping its head off.
CHAPTER THIRTY
THE LOSS OF A TENTACLE
Tommy Pitera was open to doing business with any ethnic group that could help him prosper. He knew that to have only one source of product was not good. He readily dealt with Russian mafiosi and Israeli gangs. The Israelis in particular were tough, extremely well-trained men—all of them had been in the Israeli military—and they were remorseless killers. Pound for pound they were, by far, the toughest of all the gangs in New York City. They took what the Israeli armed forces had taught them about killing and used it on the street. They were like a paramilitary group. They knew how to use explosives, all types of firearms, poisons, etc. They had an overt arrogance about them, as though they felt they were better than anyone else, as though they were above the laws of the United States, as though they had an absolute right to break the law, to sell drugs, to steal and kill whenever they wished.
Pitera and Frank Gangi had done a lot of business with the Israelis—in particular with Moussa Aliyan, who’d long been a member of an Israeli gang in good standing. But all that changed on New Year’s Eve 1987. What occurred exactly to bring their wrath down upon Moussa’s head has never been established. Suffice it to say, on this particular blistery cold night, when Moussa arrived home after partying at the nearby Nirvana Club, he was met not only by the cold winds whipping off the Hudson River but by a fuselage of bullets fired by guns in the hands of his former gang members, led by one Johnny Attias. He went down and died on the street in front of his apartment building. It was as though this was some kind of payback for what happened to Phyllis Burdi in his home, a supernatural retribution…revenge had occurred.
Some five hours after Moussa’s body was picked up and taken to the morgue by the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office at Thirtieth Street and First Avenue, his body
was on an autopsy table. He, like Phyllis, was soon cut up into pieces. Later, when Frank Gangi found out about Moussa’s murder, he was certain that Pitera had something to do with it. When Gangi asked Pitera about this, he vehemently denied it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE BODY IN THE ALLEY
Joey Balzano was a very good-looking Italian-American with black hair and blue eyes. People in Bensonhurst often compared him to John Travolta. He had big white teeth and an ingratiating, sexy smile that warmed pretty much any woman with whom he came into contact. He was a ladies’ man, not so much because he put tremendous effort into courting women, into bedding them, but because he was so naturally attractive that women courted him.
He was also a member of the constellation of characters that rotated around Pitera. Unlike most of the characters in Pitera’s circle, Joey was not dour or introverted. He was extremely outgoing. His regular girlfriend was Renee Lombardozzi. She was the stepdaughter of Carmine Lombardozzi. Carmine was an old-school mafioso. He was one of the attendees of the famous Apalachin Conference in 1957. Many in the know liken Carmine to Meyer Lansky—that is to say, he was brilliant with numbers. He single-handedly ran all the Gambinos’ shylocking operations and their multifaceted, insidious infiltration of Wall Street. Carmine could very well have been a professor of economics at a prestigious college. Renee was brought up in the world of La Cosa Nostra. She knew the walk and the talk. She was an intricate part of its culture. As the stepdaughter of Carmine Lombardozzi, she attended all the Mafia weddings, Mafia birthday parties, Mafia deaths, and celebrations. Renee was streetwise.
Joey Balzano and Renee Lombardozzi lived in a nice one-bedroom apartment at Cropsey Avenue and Bay Fiftieth Street. The apartment had a terrace and was furnished well. There was an expensive Japanese silk partition that divided the living room. There was also a nice view of the Gravesend Bay from their terrace. Beyond the Gravesend Bay could be seen the horizon of Coney Island—the Parachute and the Wonder Wheel seeming to grow out of the ground.
