by Philip Carlo
The two Colombian coke dealers Lorenzo and Frankie Jupiter would be meeting were Carlos Acosta and Fernando Aguilera. Both of them were in their early twenties, dark-skinned and thin, innocuous, would blend into any crowd anywhere. They sported short hair. Not in a million years would anyone make them as coke dealers. This was no accident. The fact that they could readily blend in so well was exactly why they were chosen in Colombia to do what they did here in Brooklyn. Unfortunately for them, they did not quite understand just how mean the mean streets of Brooklyn could truly be. They would soon learn a lesson that would be forever, indelibly seared into their brains.
Carlos and Fernando showed up on time at the rendezvous place, the shopping center at Shore Parkway and Bay Parkway. In that it was a hot day, they were both wearing T-shirts and shorts. They greeted Lorenzo, shook hands. Lorenzo assured them that he had the money. The Colombians assured him they had the drugs. He suggested they make the transfer in the garage of a nearby building. They agreed. Lorenzo got in the backseat. He had a revolver in his waistband, hidden by his shirttails. Unobserved, not knowing what lay ahead, the Colombians dutifully followed Lorenzo’s instructions to the garage in a new, red-brick apartment building at 1445 Shore Parkway. Coincidentally, the building was only a block away from Pitera, Billy Bright, and Frank Gangi’s stash house, where hundreds of pounds of pot were stored, waiting to be sold.
The cocaine was in the trunk of the Colombian’s car. Cocky, wanting desperately to prove himself, Frankie Jupiter walked up to the Colombians’ economy Ford. He was smiling. He was getting them, in his mind, to drop their guard. He said he wanted to see the coke. The Colombians said they wanted to see the money.
Lorenzo knew it was time to act. He’d been waiting for this moment for what seemed an eternity now. He had a clear shot of the back of both the Colombians’ heads. With confidence and surety, lethal, he whipped out the gun, put it just behind the driver’s head, and pulled the trigger…without hesitation, he moved right, took a bead, and fired again. Before they knew it, both the Colombians were dead, their brains destroyed.
In the garage, the gunshots were like deafening cannons, loud and resonating. Lorenzo and Frankie Jupiter wanted to get the hell out of there quickly. Now Lorenzo realized for the first time that the car was a stick shift.
“Fuck—it’s a fucking stick shift! I can’t drive a fucking stick shift…can you?” Lorenzo said.
“Fuck, no!” Frankie said.
They stood around the car with the two dead Colombians wondering what to do, scratching their asses. If it wasn’t so sad, it would’ve been funny. Ultimately, they took the drugs from the car and hurried out as though they were two miscreants stealing food from a Korean grocery. They had plans to drive the car out of the garage and set it on fire, but now that wasn’t possible, so there the Colombians stayed.
It didn’t take long for a resident of the building to discover the bodies. The police were summoned. The garage was soon filled with forensic technicians, police photographers, and hard-eyed, stone-faced Brooklyn detectives from the Sixty-second Precinct on Bath Avenue.
When Pitera heard about what had gone down, he was pissed off. He thought that what happened was stupid and sloppy, amateurish, and he did not want his name or his reputation associated with it in any way. Angry, he and Gangi went looking for Lorenzo and found him at his apartment.
“What the fuck did you do?” Pitera wanted to know.
In a rush of words, Lorenzo told Pitera that they had no idea the Colombians drove a stick shift, that neither he nor Frankie knew how to drive a stick.
“It was just one of those things. It all happened so quickly,” he said.
“Did you get the drugs?” Pitera asked.
“Yeah, yeah, I did,” Lorenzo said, all proud, sure that this would get him to become an “official” member of the Mafia—his dream come true. What he had done was show that he was a buffoon and would never get made, Pitera knew.
Rather than the twenty kilos of cocaine that had been ordered, there were twelve kilos. Still, it was a big score. Pitera, to punish them, took nearly half of what they had taken—five kilos of high-grade, pure cocaine. Sold in grams, eight balls, and ounces, these five kilos would be worth a fortune.
Satiated, Pitera, the white shark of this particular part of the ocean, this reef, moved off and did what he had to do.
Ripping off drug dealers was to career criminals like taking candy from a baby. They, the dealers, had nowhere to turn to for justice—they could not go to the cops, they could not seek help with the conventional modes of protection set up to enforce the rule of law. They therefore set up their own means of protecting themselves, their interests, their drugs, and their cash. Still, if a dealer was murdered, the trail usually ended right there. As an example, after the murder of the two Colombians, nobody came looking for Carlos Acosta or Fernando Aguilera. Their identities died when the two Colombians were murdered.
Shortly after the rip-off of the two Colombians in the garage, Luis Mena went to Pitera with another setup. He said he knew of a “cash house” in Howard Beach in which vast sums of money were counted, packed, and shipped off to Colombia. Two women worked just about all day, every day, counting money, using professional counting equipment you would find in a bank, and making sure the money was sent when it should be. Mena said, “At any given time, there’s a couple of million dollars cash there.”
Upon hearing this, Pitera’s eyes lit up. He decided to put together a lean, mean crew to facilitate this rip-off. It would include himself, Luis Mena, Joe Dish Senatore, and Richie Leone, a stocky, brash man, dark-haired, about five ten…a dedicated Pitera devotee, who would do anything to turn a buck. Joe Dish was elderly, balding, gray-haired, and looked more like a cop than most cops. He had one talent and that was posing as a policeman to give access to bad guys wanting to rob houses. Joe Dish not only looked a lot like a cop, he had the facial expressions, the voice, the physical demeanor down pat. He was proud of saying, “There’s no house I can’t get somebody into.”
Initially, the four men discussed the score at the Just Us Bar, got in Pitera’s car, and drove over to Howard Beach to actually scope out the house. It was an unremarkable two-family residence on a quiet block in a quiet neighborhood. From the outside, you’d never be able to tell what was going on inside. Images of the house, the block, and neighborhood fresh in their minds, the crew drove back to the Just Us, sat down, and started talking about the actual robbery. Here, now, Pitera put something on the table that not only startled Mena and Joe Dish but made them back off, at first slowly, and then quickly. Pitera said that he did not want to leave any witnesses, that he wanted to kill the two women, cut them up in the tub, and bury them.
Luis Mena said that he was all for robbing them, perhaps beating them over the head, but not killing them. Joe Dish parroted what Mena said. This really pissed Pitera off. He felt he was doing the right thing—what was necessary. No matter how you cut it, he reasoned, if they were dead, it was over and done there and then. Both Joe Dish and Luis Mena refused. This caused an immediate gap, an animus, to form between Pitera, Dish, and Mena. Pitera felt that they were punks, they could not be trusted. Anyone, he believed, not willing to get blood on his hands did not deserve his respect, trust, confidence. Pitera had worked with Joe Dish several times before, with Dish posing as an NYPD detective to give Pitera and company access to rip off different drug dealers. These robberies had gone smoothly. No one had been murdered. All prospered. But that was then and this was now. The comfort Pitera had felt with Dish, with Mena, was now gone. He also felt that ripping off the cash house was no longer a good idea; that ultimately he’d make himself vulnerable; that people he didn’t trust would know what had happened, which could boomerang and inevitably come back to haunt him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
WILLIE BOY
John Gotti was fit to be tied when he learned that one of his closest friends, compatriots, the man he trusted most, was a rat—a stink
ing, fetid, beady-eyed rat. The guy’s name was Willie Boy Johnson. He was a large, rugged-looking man with a big stomach. He combed his thick head of black hair straight back. He was kind of a beat-up version of Jackie Gleason except that he had a broken nose that went off to the left, received in a fight he’d had in his teens. He walked with his shoulders back and his head high, with attitude. He was six feet tall and weighed over three hundred pounds—a big, burly man. Willie Boy Johnson was a genuine, two-fisted, tough guy, half Italian and half American Indian. He had known John Gotti since they were both kids. Not only was he an adept street fighter, but he was a brutal, lethal man who danced to his own rhythm. He was known as Willie Boy because he had been hanging out with older boys since he was a kid. In that he was not fully Italian, he could not be made, though when you looked at him, he looked Italian. When John Gotti found out that he was an FBI informant, that he had been wearing a wire, that information he’d garnered would be used against him, Gotti, he nearly blew a gasket. He yelled, cursed, broke furniture.
“Dead! I want him dead! Dead, dead, dead! You hear?” he told his people.
Oh, how John Gotti wished he could kill Willie Boy himself, take his throat in his hands and squeeze. But he knew that pleasure would not be his, that the first finger pointed would be at him. Gotti turned to his most trusted assassin—Eddie Lino. It cannot be emphasized enough here what a truly dangerous man Lino was. He was sly, calculating—lethal. There was never a murder contract he was given that wasn’t fulfilled. He was feared throughout all of Mafiadom. This is no exaggeration. Eddie Lino’s partner in the drug business had been John Gotti’s brother, Gene Gotti. In fact, the two were arrested at the same time, though they would be tried separately.
At this point, free on bail, Eddie Lino was John Gotti’s grim reaper. Now John told Lino that Willie Boy Johnson had to go. For Gotti, this was not only about business. This was personal. He had loved Willie Boy Johnson. When Gotti wanted to murder the man who had accidentally run over and killed his son Frank, he sent Willie Boy Johnson and others to go grab the guy, torture him, and kill him. For John Gotti, Willie Boy Johnson had been…family. Sitting opposite each other, Lino, dark-eyed and dark-haired, with the countenance of a dangerous, poisonous snake, stared at John Gotti and listened to the order. Nothing else had to be said. Eddie Lino got up and left. Willie Boy Johnson’s days were numbered.
As an indicator of just how highly Tommy Pitera was thought of in the underground society that the Mafia is, Eddie Lino turned to Tommy Pitera to help kill Willie Boy Johnson, according to U.S. attorney David Shapiro and DEA agent Jim Hunt. Lino trusted very few people but he trusted Pitera. Lino, a natural-born killer, saw in Pitera the same traits, the same attitude he, Lino, had…it was as though they had come from the same womb. This was an extremely important hit and here, Eddie Lino was wholeheartedly involving Tommy Pitera, making him an intricate part of the hit team. That’s what Eddie Lino was good at: not necessarily doing the killing himself, but arranging the details—where and how it happened.
Pleased, gleefully, Pitera listened to Eddie giving him the job. For Pitera, this was like receiving an Oscar. John Gotti, after all, was the capo di tutti capi, the boss of bosses, one of the most famous mob bosses in history. He was on the cover of Time magazine; he was the Teflon Don; he was Superman in that world. If, Pitera knew, he did this well, it would help his career immeasurably. Everyone would look up to him, point at him. He would be an omnipotent presence in La Cosa Nostra.
“I’m honored,” Pitera said, and went about the business at hand—killing Willie Boy Johnson, a seasoned killer himself. Before, however, Pitera could do the job, he had to get permission from his boss—Bonanno capo Frankie Lino. Lino, in turn, went to the underboss of the family, Anthony Spero. Both gave permission for Pitera to fill the contract. This would, they both knew, bolster the relationship between the Bonannos and the Gambinos. It was a good thing.
At six A.M. on the morning of August 29, 1988, Willie Boy Johnson nonchalantly left his house, took a right, and began walking. He was wearing dungarees and a jean shirt. On his block, there was a two-story house being built, a construction site. As he walked, he saw Tommy Pitera suddenly step out from behind a mound of sand. He immediately knew what was up. Seemingly out of nowhere, Pitera’s trusted aide-de-camp, Kojak Giattino, and the premiere assassin in the Gambino family, Eddie Lino, appeared with guns in hand. Seemingly as one, all three shot at the large fleeing form of Willie Boy Johnson. Calmly, Pitera knelt down and positioned himself, cupped his left hand in his right hand, took careful aim, and drilled Johnson with holes. Johnson went down, shot some ten times. Pitera had used a special bullet on him, a Glaser round, the one he had used on Phyllis Burdi. Each of the Glaser rounds did horrific damage to the inside of Johnson’s body. As Johnson’s blood pooled on the hot August street, Pitera and Kojak spread a link of spikes across the street and they got in a stolen car and pulled away. The spikes would prevent anyone from following them and indicated the wide expanse of Pitera’s killing acumen.
Thus Willie Boy Johnson was killed and Tommy Pitera acquired a new twenty-four-karat-gold stature within the tight fraternity of La Cosa Nostra—an Oscar for murder.
Later, when John Gotti learned that Willie Boy Johnson was dead, he was pleased. It would be just a matter of time before he rewarded Pitera handsomely.
It didn’t take long for Jim Hunt and Tommy Geisel to hear, by way of the Brooklyn jungle drums, that Tommy Pitera had taken out Willie Boy Johnson, known on the street as “the Indian.” A rumor, Hunt knew, was one thing…proof was another.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
THE GARAGE
In that Group 33 was extremely busy and active 24/7, inevitably Jim and Tommy were called away from Gravesend. They worked cases in the Bronx, Queens, Harlem, and even Staten Island. Group 33 was, by its very nature, mobile and fluid, able to deal with the huge amount of drug dealing in a large metropolis such as New York City. They also managed to get more wiretaps on the phones of Frankie Martini, aka Frankie Jupiter, and other people who worked for Pitera. They, Jim and Tommy and Group 33, were careful to make certain that Pitera didn’t know that they had him under surveillance. They did everything they could to keep him from making them. It was obvious that Pitera suspected police scrutiny, was wary of police surveillance, but they did everything they could not to substantiate his suspicions. They knew that once he realized he was being trailed, he’d change his modus operandi, change the way he did business, and make it that much harder to put together an airtight case against him. They were absolutely not interested in arresting him and having him beat the case. What they, Jim and Tom, wanted was for the case to be foolproof.
On occasion, Jim discussed important cases with his father. For the most part, the job had not changed—it has always been about carefully putting together cases, developing informants. Interestingly, Jim Hunt Jr. was arresting the sons of bad guys his father had arrested, for the same reasons, under the same circumstances—the selling of drugs.
In February of 1989, on a blistering cold day, Jim Hunt and his partner, sitting in Jim’s black Cadillac with tinted windows, were parked near Pitera’s house on East Twelfth Street. The skies were low and thick and churning with angry gray clouds. Strong winds off the nearby Atlantic Ocean whipped through Gravesend. Pitera left the house, got in a black, Oldsmobile 98 he owned, drove over to the Belt Parkway, and headed east. The agents followed him from a distance. Pitera made his way to the garage where Manny Maya worked on Flatlands Avenue. He left his Oldsmobile there for some work to be done, took another car, and headed back toward Gravesend. This was a very interesting turn of events for the government. They might have stumbled on something important, Jim immediately knew. They put the car under surveillance, began copying the license plates of cars entering and exiting the shop, and soon realized the garage was a virtual mecca for La Cosa Nostra. They matched plate numbers to capos in different families. Over the next several days, the garage was unde
r DEA scrutiny and the government agents watched car interiors being taken out, cleaned, and reupholstered. They also watched cars put up on lifts and, apparently, checked for listening devices. Very interesting.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
B & E
In Brooklyn, as in anywhere in the world where people walked on the outside of the law, there were always people on the lookout for “scores.” Often those involved were professional thieves, rip-off artists, cat burglars—or tradesmen who, on a regular basis, were welcomed inside of people’s homes by unsuspecting innocents. If a tradesman came across something particularly valuable, he could very well pass the information on to a thief…to someone willing to do a rush—break-in.
B&E crews were made up of toughs with guns willing to knock on a door and pose as any of a dozen different people to get the home owner to open the door. Once the door was cracked a quarter of an inch, they would hard shoulder it and burst in, guns drawn, yelling, screaming, cursing—the object to scare. These crews usually consisted of two or three men, coarse, gruff, hard individuals. It was obvious they might confront women, mothers, grandmothers, young females, yet they were more than happy to break in. If there was a totem pole of crimes, B&E gangs of this nature were surely at the low end of it.
Workmen were restoring fancy kitchen cabinets in the home of wealthy Russians who lived on East 104th Street in Canarsie, a nice, residential neighborhood, solidly upper middle class. The head of the household was a successful jewelry dealer. As well as selling jewelry on the up-and-up, he sold stolen jewelry, precious stones, all types of extremely expensive watches. One of these cabinetmakers was Larry Santoro, a larceny-hearted tradesman who would steal money from a blind man. Santoro went to Manny Maya, who, in turn, went to Frank Gangi and told him about the Russian jeweler. Gangi was always up for a score. Though this kind of work was not something he liked, something he often did, something he was particularly adept at, he’d still do it. No matter how much money Gangi made, it never seemed to be enough. That was, of course, due to the fact that he was abusing alcohol and cocaine to such a degree that money passed through his fingers like water. A man who had his act together might very well have passed on this opportunity, but Frank thought it was a good idea and in turn went to his partner and friend Billy Bright.
