The Butcher (29 page)

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.”

They didn't find anything at Pitera's house on Ovington Avenue. Agents discovered that it was essentially a construction site. There were slabs of expensive marble, beautiful Italian tiles. It seemed Pitera had big plans to turn this building into an upscale town house—a place to be proud of. The DEA, in conjunction with the Justice Department, would move to confiscate the house as a result of criminal enterprise.

All during that day, the fourth of June, twenty-five other Pitera associates were arrested, including Vincent Kojak Giattino, Thomas Carbone, Lorenzo Modica, Manny Maya, Michael Cassesse, Frank Martini, Luis Mena, Angelo Favara, and Richie David.

The agents offered them deals. Anyone willing to cooperate would be treated with leniency. This had become the standard operating procedure for the government. Federal prosecutors, the United States Justice Department, had learned to manipulate and pit one defendant against the other, thus ensuring they would get the bigger of the two fish. They used Sammy the Bull Gravano to nail John Gotti and some thirty-six other mafiosi (though Gravano never testified against anyone in his own crew); they used Phil Leonnetti in Philadelphia to convict several busloads of wiseguys and send them packing off to jail, all grumbling, all fit to be tied, all swearing murder and mayhem—revenge; they would use, shockingly so, Mafia royalty Joe Masseria to unhinge the Bonanno family.

Now the person they wanted the most, the person they were focused on, was Tommy Karate Pitera. The debriefings began. The questioning of Pitera's people was long and tedious.

With Pitera and his gang safely behind bars, Jim Hunt and his people decided it was time to see if they could find the bodies, Pitera's victims, the graveyard. Finding the bodies would be the coup de grâce; finding the bodies would put everything into perspective.

 

When Gangi's partner Billy Bright got wind of what was happening, he took off. Billy was adept at leaving Brooklyn quickly and adapting to new surroundings. He had been on the lam several times before. Because the bust caused such media attention, Billy Bright ended up on
America's Most Wanted.
With his distinctive looks, dark hair, and large eyes, he was recognized and identified and quickly arrested in Las Vegas. Unlike some, including his childhood friend Frank Gangi, Bright refused to cooperate with the feds. He would, down the road, plead guilty to the murders of Solomon Stern and Richard Leone, which took place at Overstreets, as well as to drug conspiracy, and would serve a seventeen-year sentence. Had he gone to trial, he would surely have been given a much stiffer sentence. At face value, one would think that the story of Billy Bright was now over, said and done, but that proved not to be true.

Incorrectly believing that Billy Bright had murdered his son Greg, Mark Reiter wanted revenge, wanted blood. No matter how you cut it, he felt his son had been unjustly and unfairly killed. Though Greg's body would never be found, his father, Mark, knew he was dead. Greg, his brother Michael, and his father were all close. No way in hell would Greg stay away for so long and not contact his father or brother. The first to feel the wrath of the Reiters was Michael Harrigan. Michael and Mark Reiter knew that Greg was going to meet Michael Harrigan that evening and they never heard from him again. Michael Reiter stalked Mike Harrigan, and when Harrigan went to use a public phone outside of a grocery store in Howard Beach, Queens, an unknown, nameless, faceless killer walked up behind him and blew the back of his head off. The Reiters were pleased that Michael Harrigan was gone, but they were not satiated.

They believed that Billy Bright had killed Greg Reiter, and Mark Reiter—coincidentally housed in the same federal facility as Bright—took out a murder contract on Billy Bright's life. He turned to the lethal, deadly Aryan Brotherhood, paid them five thousand dollars, numbering the days Billy Bright had left on this planet. Billy felt all his troubles were behind him and that he could walk around the facility with a clear head. Unaware, innocently, a year after he had been sent to the United States Penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia, Billy Bright was making his way across the common yard when two Aryan killers approached him, one from behind and one from up front. Each of these men was a three-time loser with a life sentence who would never see freedom again. They had nothing to lose. Billy Bright, innocent of the murder of Greg Reiter, was suddenly and viciously attacked from the rear and the front. Each of the muscular, animalistic killers had homemade shivs, long metal blades sharp as razors, pointed as pins. Billy was repeatedly stabbed in the back, in his chest, mercilessly, until he was dead. These two Aryans were like bone-cracking, hysterically laughing hyenas—pets of the grim reaper himself. Like this, Billy Bright's life came to an end.