by Philip Carlo
Although Joey Balzano was gifted by nature with good looks, he was also cursed by nature, for he was a bona fide drug addict. Whatever successes his looks and charms would have gotten him went up in a puff of smoke as readily as crack from a freebase pipe. Joey was addicted to “the pipe.” When freebasing, he—like all freebase heads—would go through an astronomical amount of cocaine in a twenty-four-hour period. When Joey first started working for Pitera, he moved large quantities of drugs without problem or mishap. He was a moneymaker. All that inevitably changed when instead of giving Pitera money due on drugs taken, he gave excuses. He didn’t give the right amounts. He was short.
Pitera had no patience for people who did not keep their word; slackers. He warned Joey.
“You’ve gotta give me what’s due when it’s due, not when it’s convenient for you,” he said.
“Of course, sure, I understand. No problem,” Joey said. “I just…I fronted a bunch of people and they’re stalling me.”
“Stalling you?” Pitera repeated. “Stop them from stalling and get the money,” his blue-gray eyes menacing and reptilian.
Frank Gangi had met Joey Balzano through Pitera. He immediately took a liking to him. Joey, Gangi would later say, was a very easy guy to like. Apparently, Gangi liked Joey so much that he fronted him more drugs than he should have. Without Pitera knowing it, Gangi had fronted him a quarter pound of cocaine, cocaine that was quickly cooked up in Joey and Renee’s house and smoked. Easy come, easy go.
Not surprisingly to Gangi, Pitera began bad-mouthing Joey. He said he didn’t trust him; he said he was an out-of-control cokehead.
“Don’t front him anymore. Until he gets caught up, no more!” Pitera said.
“Okay,” Gangi said, seeing the wisdom in Pitera’s words.
Three days later, Pitera called Gangi and told him to meet him at the bar. That’s what Pitera’s phone conversations were all about; meet me here, meet me there. When Gangi arrived at the bar, Pitera was there.
“This fucking Joey…I hear he’s telling people about burying bodies. I hear he’s talking about people being cut up and buried. Has he gotten straight with you?”
“No,” Gangi replied.
“Like I’ve been saying, I don’t trust this guy. He’s gotta go,” Pitera said, looking for Gangi’s reaction.
Pitera—to a degree—was a good judge of human nature. He well knew that Gangi and Joey were friends. This, in Pitera’s mind, was another way to test Gangi—test his loyalty, his moxie.
“Whatever you think is right,” Gangi said.
Since Gangi had seen Pitera kill Phyllis, cut her up, cut her head off, get naked and into the tub with her, he’d viewed Pitera in a far different way. He came to think of him as an insidious creature from another planet—a monster from another dimension. He knew well that if Pitera was talking about killing Joey Balzano, Joey’s days were numbered. Not only had Gangi not forgotten the murder of Phyllis Burdi, but he had not been the same person since the killing. He was drinking excessively. He was using far more cocaine than he should. He was smoking four to five packs of cigarettes a day. Now his voice was rough and scratchy. When he laughed, he’d inevitably break into a coughing fit, his eyes tearing, his face bunching up.
Unlike Pitera, Gangi was not about to kill someone over money. That evening, Gangi went to visit Joey at his home on Bay Fiftieth. They talked, in whispers, about the money Joey owed Gangi and, more importantly, Pitera.
“Joey, Tommy is a real, real serious guy. You can’t fuck with him in any way. He has no sense of humor.”
“Can you fix it?” Joey said. “I just need a little time. I can get caught up.”
“Joey,” Gangi said, “it’s not a matter of getting caught up. He heard you’ve been saying things about people getting buried. His mind’s made up.”
“You can’t fix it?” Joey asked, hopeful, his eyes wide, pleading.
“Look, Joey, listen to me—I’m not that close to him. No one is that close to him. I think the person who was the closest to him was Celeste. Take my advice, as a friend—get out of town. Go make a life somewhere else.”
“Where?” Joey asked. “Where am I going to go?”
“Wherever you go, you’ll live. If you stay here, you’re dead,” Gangi whispered.
All this Gangi had said in a very low voice, not wanting Renee to know. One way or another, he didn’t trust Renee. He felt that if something happened to Joey, sooner or later, she’d turn on him. Joey now looked at Gangi beseechingly.
“I don’t know what to do…tell me what to do. Tell me the best way to deal with him.”
Gangi heard Renee move about behind the partition. Rather than say anything with her in close earshot, he wet his finger, leaned over, and wrote on the black lacquer table, LEAVE.
A few days later, Gangi called Joey and said that Tommy was willing to talk. Joey was pleased to hear this, but he was wary—on guard. By the same token, he was hopeful that with Gangi’s help, he could regain his honor. Still, when he left the house, he told Renee, “If I don’t come back, Frankie and Tommy killed me.”
When Joey got outside, he only had to wait a few minutes before Gangi pulled up in one of Pitera’s many cars. Gangi had given Joey every chance to leave, save himself. What was happening now was his own doing. They drove over to the Just Us to pick up Pitera. Gangi knew that Pitera’s intentions were not good. He knew, too, that Pitera had come to view Joey as a slacker and a rat…a liability. Whatever was going to happen, Gangi could do nothing to stop it one way or another. His association with Pitera had put him in a position in which he had to tow the line, he had to listen to Pitera or he was dead. It was that simple. Yes, he had uncles in high places, but nobody could help him with Pitera. They were dealing drugs, which was a no-no. Gangi was not made, and Pitera was. What Gangi had in his head was to make enough money and to take off, start another life in another place, maybe Florida or California, somewhere warm.
When they pulled up in front of the Just Us, Pitera saw them through the window and came outside. Respectfully, Joey got out of the car and offered the front seat to Pitera.
“No, you take it. I’ll get in the back,” Pitera said, sliding onto the leather seats.
Gangi had no idea how this would happen. He did have an ice pick with him in the inside pocket of his jacket, as Pitera had ordered. Being from the street, knowing they might be observed by the police, Gangi took U-turns, left and rights, more U-turns, and parked in a parking lot to make sure they weren’t being followed. Joey, being a drug dealer, understood the moves. Often he himself had done such things. Tommy talked about a good restaurant, the Top of the Sixes, said that there were a lot of girls there. When they were out with Joey, he was what they called a “cunt magnet.” This, however, was all a ruse…a way to relax Joey, get him to drop his guard. There would be no fancy dinner at Top of the Sixes this evening.
They next headed to the Green Lantern Bar on New Utrecht Avenue and Seventy-first Street. Pitera said he had to pick something up. He got out of the car, went inside the bar, and came out a few minutes later. He had met Richie David inside and gotten a gun from him. Now, back in the car, he said to Gangi, “Go to the corner and take a left.”
Pitera knew what he would do and where he would do it; he had mapped it all out in his head. It was a dance of death, the steps of which he knew well. Without warning, he raised the handgun, put it to the back of Joey Balzano’s head, and pulled the trigger twice. The gun was fitted with a silencer and the noise was minimal. The damage done to Joey Balzano, however, was not minimal. The bullets had ripped through his hair, skin, and skull with ease and made gray pudding out of his brain. This wasn’t enough for Pitera. He took out a six-inch hunting knife, razor sharp and shiny, and drew it quickly across Joey Balzano’s throat. He cut not only the throat but both the carotid arteries. Pitera now told Gangi to stick him with the ice pick, wanting to make Gangi part of the murder. Obeying, Gangi took out the ice pick and rammed it into Joey’s ch
est, though at this point it was a lifeless one, containing a heart that had stopped beating.
The job done, Joey Balzano dead, Pitera directed Gangi to drive to an abandoned alleyway close to New Utrecht Avenue. As they arrived there, the B train came barreling down the elevated tracks. It made a lot of noise and sparks fell from the two-story-high tracks. They dragged Joey from the car and placed him on the ground. Joey Balzano was fond of nice jewelry and diamonds and they took his Rolex watch and gold chain. He had a huge diamond pinkie ring on. Try as they might, they couldn’t pull the ring off. Tommy used his hunting knife to cut the finger off, grab the ring, and put it in his pocket.
Gangi, unsettled by the whole event, unsettled by leaving the body there like that, kept saying, “We gotta go! We gotta go!” Pitera remained as cold as ice. A more appropriate nickname for Tommy Pitera, rather than Tommy Karate, would have been Ice Man.
They got in the car and pulled away. This, the taking of victim’s jewelry, was an interesting, telling phenomenon. It is classically what conventional serial killers do—take belongings and body parts from their victims, a phenomenon known as totems. Whenever Pitera had the opportunity, he took victims’ jewelry; later, a treasure trove of jewelry would be found in his safe. Normally, a mafioso would never take the belongings of a victim. This directly ties the murder to the person holding the victim’s belongings. It is a good way to link the murder with the killer. It is obvious that Tommy Pitera knew this, yet he still took their jewelry. Those in the know say Pitera took the jewelry not for its monetary worth but to prove his…prowess—to prove that he killed when and where and how he wanted to, his omnipotence. Yet, it was tangible evidence that could hold up in any court anywhere in the world. Somehow, it seemed that Pitera was thinking with a warped aspect of his ego rather than with the street sense that he was so well endowed with.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
THE CLEANER
At any given time, Pitera was driving between six and ten different cars. Some of these cars he owned, others he borrowed from capo Frankie Lino, who had an executive car service in Brooklyn. Lino readily made cars available to Pitera, making it very difficult for the DEA to bug any of these different rotating vehicles. For Pitera, cars were as interchangeable as underwear. He often used them in crimes and so they had to be cleaned up or gotten rid of. Toward that end, Pitera tapped into La Cosa Nostra networking. Again, the five New York Mafia families all cooperate with one another, are bound together through customs, mean streets and avenues, tunnels and bridges. Through various contacts Pitera had in La Cosa Nostra, he was able to take the car in which they had killed Joey Balzano to a body shop on Flatlands Avenue where Manny Maya worked. Maya was a Cuban Jew with dark hair who did a lot of work at this shop. Maya also dealt drugs on the side for the Bonanno family.
The car Pitera brought in that day was heavily stained with blood; looked like something out of a horror movie. Pitera told Maya to clean it up. Maya tore out the entire interior of the car, hot-steam-cleaned it thoroughly, let it dry, and reupholstered it. When he was finished, it had a brand-new interior and not a trace of blood anywhere; a seasoned bloodhound couldn’t find blood in that car. The old interior was summarily burned in a fifty-gallon drum. When Tommy picked up the car, it was as though it was brand-new and he could drive it without concern.
Though Manny Maya was associated with the Bonanno family, he would readily provide his unique cleaning service to any of the other four families—Genovese, Gambino, Lucchese, and Colombo. They all brought bloodstained cars to Manny Maya. Pitera readily gave his blessings to Manny and put no restrictions on him.
Pitera was also particularly close to feared Gambino war capo Eddie Lino. Lino was John Gotti’s right-hand man, assassin extraordinaire for the Gambino family. He had also once been Phyllis Burdi’s lover. Lino had heard about Pitera killing Phyllis; he accepted it as one would the changing of the seasons. He knew that Phyllis had been warned over and over again; he knew that she had ignored the warnings. He himself had told her to stay away from Celeste. He knew no good would come of their association. When Phyllis was murdered, cut up, disposed of, Lino did not come around looking for any type of revenge.
Tommy Pitera’s reputation as a competent killer, as a man who kept his mouth shut, had grown to such proportions that he was a kind of “Billy the Kid” of La Cosa Nostra. As further proof of the intricate links binding the five families together, when John Gotti wanted a certain rat murdered, he gave the contract to Eddie Lino, who, in turn, invited Tommy Pitera to help fill the contract. An honor.
After numerous purchases of narcotics from Judy Haimowitz and Angelo Favara, the case around Pitera building inexorably, Jim Hunt and Group 33 applied for a court order to wiretap Judy Haimowitz’s home phone. The wiretap of Judy’s house proved to be an interesting—rather bizarre—source of information. The DEA rented an apartment in Bensonhurst and from this apartment they began to monitor the phones of all the players in Pitera’s circle. They would have gladly, indeed gleefully, tapped Pitera’s phones, but Pitera did not have a phone in any of the places in which he lived, at 3030 Emmons Avenue, Apartment 5A, 2355 East Twelfth Street, Apartment 4T, or the brownstone he owned and was renovating at 342 Ovington Avenue in Bay Ridge. He believed phones were nothing but potential problems, that the police could easily tap phones, and so he refused to have one in his home.
When a phone is tapped by the DEA, it is electronically monitored twenty-four hours a day. Late at night, as Judy Haimowitz’s phone was listened to, they realized she had an obsessive—addictive—penchant for dialing sex lines, 900 numbers. The agents came to believe that what Judy Haimowitz was about—who she was—was, relatively speaking, comical…not diabolical.
It was Pitera who was diabolical.
It was Pitera they wanted.
Still, Judy Haimowitz spoke freely about the selling of drugs on her phone and gave the government a treasure trove of information involving drug sales—who was buying them, when and where, and the amounts involved. What further strengthened the case against Pitera was that Angelo Favara had sold large amounts of heroin to Hunt and Geisel that he had obtained directly from Pitera, which they had quickly handed over to the government.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
“YOU’RE NOT MY BOSS”
Some people feel comfortable handling guns, some don’t. Blindfolded, some can take apart a gun and put it back together again. Without blindfolds, some can’t begin to take apart a gun.
Frank Gangi was one of those people who didn’t like guns, had no affinity for them. Though he knew them as an intricate part of his trade, a necessary tool, he did not handle them well; he wasn’t a good shot, though he coveted the power a gun had, how readily and rapidly it could steal away a human life. Though Gangi didn’t like them, he admired them from afar. Trying to overcome this impediment, he often held a gun while lounging around his house, watching television. Someone had told him, actually Tommy told him, that the gun should be an extension of his body.
“You should be as comfortable with your gun, handling it, as you should be comfortable with your own dick, handling it.”
The problem was that while doing this impromptu exercise one day at the house of one of his girlfriends, a tough, talking out of the side of her mouth guidette named Patty Scifo, known as “Patty Girl,” Frank accidentally pulled the trigger of his pistol and inadvertently shot himself in the leg. He stood up and jumped around the room, bleeding. He called a friend by the name of Andy Jakakis, then called the Just Us and asked Pitera to come over.
Andy Jakakis was an old-school tough guy who wasn’t really tough at all. He was gray and balding, thin-shouldered, though he walked with a histrionic, defiant swagger, as if he were six foot five and the baddest badass in the jungle. Gangi had first met Andy while doing time for the shooting he and Billy Bright were involved in—the murder of Arthur Guvenaro. Because Andy was in his late fifties and Frank in his mid-twenties, Andy kind of became a father figure to the yo
ung Gangi. He watched over Gangi; he advised him as to the different protocols mandated in jail—they became friends. Gangi grew so fond of Andy that when he had an opportunity to help him by making a witness in the case against Jakakis change his testimony, Gangi pulled some Mafia strings and made it so the witness never showed up in court. Upon Andy’s release, he started hanging around Gangi, stayed at his house, and became a kind of gofer-confidant. Andy was under the impression that Gangi was a big-time mafioso; he knew who Gangi’s relatives were—he knew, too, that Gangi was now hooked up with Tommy Pitera. Andy felt an unusual, somewhat unhealthy closeness to Gangi. He did not like Pitera.
He was fond of saying, “God put me on this earth to protect Frank Gangi.”
So the day Frank shot himself, Andy showed up all concerned, all worried, his brow knit. Gangi made up a story of being shot at by people who owed him money. With that, Pitera knocked on the door. Being an expert on wounds and injuries, Pitera looked at the bullet hole with a cold, clinical eye. He then called a gynecologist, the brother of a friend named Gerald Marino, who came over. Mafia members were often in contact with doctors who would tend to gunshot wounds and not report them as mandated by hospitals and the law. Marino said the bullet had not struck bone. The doctor, a small, nerdy, blond-haired man, cleaned and dressed the wound, collected some money, and left.
Andy, disturbed by the incident, dismayed by the fact that someone would shoot his idol, was walking back and forth, threatening, cursing to himself. He got on Pitera’s nerves; this was an easy thing to do. Pitera didn’t like people and most everyone annoyed him. He turned to Andy and said, “Calm down. Be quiet. You’re getting on my nerves. Sit down.” He pointed to a chair.
