The Butcher (14 page)

“I want you to get undressed, get in the tub with him, and cut him into six pieces.”

Gangi felt like he'd been hit by a bat. Never in his life had he done such a thing. Never in his life had he even thought of such a thing. This was, he thought, right out of a fucking horror movie. He looked to Billy Bright. Billy remained mute, emotionless—stonelike. Billy knew he had to accept what was happening, that if he wanted to work with Pitera, he could show no emotion one way or the other.

“Go ahead,” Tommy prodded Frank, offering up the hacksaw.

“I can't; I don't do that; if I knew you would ask me to do that, I—I—I—”

“You what?” Pitera said.

Gangi just stared at him and shook his head. It was obvious to Pitera that hell would have to freeze over before Gangi would get naked and cut up Talal. Pitera was asking him to do this, encouraging him to do it, because he wanted to test him, see what he was made of. If, Pitera reasoned, Gangi cut the body up as he ordered, he could be trusted. He was one of them, cut from the same bloodstained cloth. Now, rather than debate the pros and cons of Gangi's actions, Pitera did what he did best: he took the bull by the horns and took care of business. He walked to the bathroom, got undressed, neatly folding his clothes as he did so. Then, without a second thought, he got in the tub with the body. He now turned on the water so it ran in a steady flow, though not too strong. He did this so the blood would be immediately washed away, washed down the drain. Gangi watched this through the door. He didn't quite believe his eyes.

Without hesitation or inhibition, Pitera proceeded to remove Talal's head, arms, and legs. He did this with the expertise of a professional
butcher. When the body was in six pieces, Shlomo brought the trunk into the bathroom and Tommy calmly proceeded to put what was left of Talal inside. The trunk was closed. With that, Pitera turned up the force of the water, washing down the remnants of the blood. He then took a long, careful shower, got out of the bathtub, and casually began to dry himself. He now turned the water hot and let it clean the last of the blood.

With Pitera freshly showered and dressed, they were ready to go. With some disdain in his odd voice, Pitera told Gangi and Sammy to go get the car. They left and made their way toward a liquor store on Kings Highway.

“I need a drink,” Frank said, and entered the store. He bought a bottle of whiskey. Outside, he took long, slow pulls on the bottle. He handed it to Shlomo. He also took long gulps.

“My God,” Gangi said. “Jesus H. Christ.”

They walked on. The warmth of the whiskey spread from Gangi's stomach outward. Gangi had not eaten and the effect was strong. He immediately felt better. He took several more long slugs on the bottle. They returned to the apartment and double-parked in front, went back upstairs and inside. They were going to use Shlomo's car to transport the trunk, but Shlomo's registration was expired and they decided not to use it.

Tommy decided that the body would be put in his car. The men picked up the trunk and made their way downstairs. It just about fit in the trunk of Pitera's car. Shlomo went and got a shovel from his car and put it in Pitera's car. With that, they all got in the car, Gangi driving. Pitera told Frank to make his way over to the Belt Parkway. Gangi knew the neighborhood well, drove to Ocean Parkway, took a left, got onto the Belt and headed west. For the most part, they stayed quiet and solemn and did not talk about what had just happened. Traffic was light. Tommy put on music. He said, “Get on the bridge. We're going to Staten Island.”

They crossed the Verrazano Bridge. Gangi quietly stared out the window and enjoyed the view of the Narrows and the grandeur
of Manhattan beyond. After going through the toll, unstopped and unchecked, they made their way to the South Avenue exit, got off, and headed toward the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge. It was a desolate place. There were no cars, houses, or people about. It was as quiet as a long forgotten crypt. Pitera told Gangi to take the car and come back in forty-five minutes. He didn't want the car there, for it might draw police suspicion. Pitera, Sammy, and Billy got out of the car. They retrieved the trunk from the back. Using a flashlight, Pitera, Shlomo, and Billy Bright made their way into the bird sanctuary. Here, there were trees and shrubs and walking was difficult. Gangi slowly turned the car around and drove back over the bridge to Brooklyn. He pulled up in front of the Just Us, went inside, and drank some more.

While Frank drank, Tommy and the others, using a flashlight, found a spot some thirty steps from the road that looked good. Here they began digging. There was a half-moon low in the sky and it laid an ominous silver light, as if cake frosting, on the still bird sanctuary. Planes on the approach to Kennedy Airport were low overhead and you could, intermittently, hear the roar of their powerful engines. The ground was soft. Digging was not difficult. They took turns, there in the pale light of the moon. Soon they dug a hole deep enough to accommodate the trunk. Pitera kicked the trunk into the hole. It landed with a meaty thud. With that, they filled the hole, stomped the dirt down, carefully covered it with leaves and brambles, and walked back toward the road. As they reached the desolate street, Gangi was just driving up. The air was stuffy, still. Shlomo and Billy and Tommy got in the car. Frank pulled away.

“You been drinking?” Tommy asked Frank accusingly.

“Yeah,” Gangi said. “Had a shot at the bar.”

Pitera had heard that Gangi had a drinking problem, that he had a drug problem, yet he was willing to accept him and make him part of his crew—mainly because Gangi came from a family filled with mafiosi…men of respect, both soldiers and capos. But what happened that night put a distance between the two, an irreversible rift that would only continue to grow.

 

Later that night, after Pitera showered and dressed, he went back to the Just Us. Gangi was there, at the bar drinking whiskey. Since he had arrived at the bar, he had done a couple of lines of coke and he was coke-lucid and didn't seem drunk at all. Cocaine can make a drunken person seem sober. It removes the drunkenness—the slurs, the walking crooked. Droopy eyes are suddenly bright and alive and all-seeing. A friend of Tommy's came in and told him that he had seen Phyllis Burdi and his girlfriend Celeste at the Esplanade. This obviously pissed him off and he, with Gangi in tow, quickly went over there. He learned that Celeste
had
been at the Esplanade earlier. Tommy drove over to Phyllis's house, but nobody was home. He began looking for them in different bars and after-hours clubs scattered around Brooklyn, without luck. Several times he was told he had just missed them. Somehow, in Pitera's mind, all of this was because of Phyllis Burdi. If it weren't for Phyllis, his girlfriend wouldn't be out and about, using drugs, causing him grief.

 

Pitera was a true creature of the night; he disdained the day, people who worked nine to five, people who were forced to do everything in life but what they wanted to do. Because he slept most of the day, Pitera took on a gray-white pallor that was reminiscent of Bela Lugosi's countenance in the original
Dracula.

The DEA task force assigned to following Pitera, assigned to bringing Pitera down, readily adapted to his hours. They, like Pitera, were not nine-to-five people. They would do whatever the job called for. Often, during surveillance, they were up twenty-four or even forty-eight hours, living on coffee and fast food, eating on the go. They were flexible, malleable, ready, willing, and able to do the job at any hour. They well knew that bad guys worked at night. They well knew, more specifically, that mafiosi came out at ten or eleven
P.M.
and did their business throughout the wee morning hours. This was coupled with
the fact that many mob guys these days were using drugs—powerful stimulants that made it easy for them to stay up all night long.

Because Pitera was so difficult to get evidence on, the DEA expanded the program to record him. They put bugs in his cars. The problem was that he never spoke in cars. When he did, he would put static on the radio or blast music. Everyone knew, both the good guys and the bad guys, that bugging cars had become very popular with law enforcement. The good guys had gotten Tony “Ducks” Corallo—head of the Lucchese family—talking endlessly while in his Jaguar being driven around Manhattan.

Making things more difficult was the fact that Pitera drove not only his own cars but those of his crew as well. Pitera would suddenly be at the Just Us, at this corner or that corner, the DEA having no idea how he got there. At times, it seemed like he had some kind of diabolical, supernatural powers and the task force starting calling him “the vampire.” They still did not know that Pitera donned disguises.

A weak link—they, Jim, Tommy, and the task force, looked for the weak link. They didn't know when and where they'd find it, but they knew sooner or later they would. Meanwhile, it was obvious that Pitera believed he was being tailed. It was obvious that he knew he was under some kind of police scrutiny, yet still, he was not going to stop. Still, the DEA bought drugs from Angelo Favara and Judy Haimowitz that were ultimately supplied by Pitera and, in a larger sense, the Bonanno crime family. Judy Haimowitz was a small fry, but still, they knew, sooner or later, they'd be able to turn her, but that time had not yet come. They wanted a stronger case with witnesses who would be far more harmful than Judy Haimowitz.

Hunt and Geisel and Group 33 became more and more motivated, more and more driven, more and more sure that something big was just over the horizon.

F
rank Gangi, tall, thin, and broad-shouldered, was having nightmares. As he slept, the horror of what he'd seen Pitera do plagued him. While he was awake, during the day, in the early evening, before he went to sleep at night, he still thought about what he'd seen—the methodical, cold dismemberment of a human being. There was a diabolical, macabre finality not only to what Pitera had done, but the way he had done it. Gangi had heard, over and over again, that Pitera had killed a lot of people. He started asking questions, and he came to believe that Pitera had murdered dozens of people. When he thought back and saw in his mind what Pitera had done, he readily thought that Pitera could have indeed killed a hundred people. Not only did he shoot Talal Siksik in the head in front of three people, but he had a burial ground all ready. He had a private cemetery. It was scary, unsettling. Who the fuck could do such a thing? he wondered. What was he made of? He didn't seem—human. He wondered if he got some kind of sexual excitement, some kind of diabolical, sadistic charge…kick.

These were disconcerting questions he could not pose to anyone. He was supposed to be part of the ultimate machismo society—the Mafia. His father, cousins, uncles were dedicated mafiosi. The answer, for Frank Gangi, became more drinking and more drugs. He
also chain-smoked and coughed incessantly. At the rate he was going, the way in which he treated himself, it didn't seem as if he had too much time left on the planet.

Be that as it may, Gangi continued to work for and associate with Tommy Pitera. However, the fact that Gangi would not cut up the body, would not do what he was told, did not sit well with Pitera. He wanted submissive loyalty, given blindly and without question. What he asked of Gangi was unusual, he knew. However, with time, he hoped, Gangi would come around and do what he was told when he was told.

 

Marek Kucharsky was a piece of work. He had been a professional boxer, was tough and irrationally fearless. He came from the mean streets of Poland, a place where might was always right. Because he was a boxer, because he was tough, he could knock out anyone who faced him, anyone who challenged him. Still, as tough as he was, as stand-up as he was, he was struggling to make ends meet. He was, essentially, another nobody wanting to be a somebody.

Kucharsky had managed to steal sixty valuable Oriental rugs. The problem was he had no contacts for selling the rugs and turning them into cash. Marek knew Moussa Aliyan well. Moussa was an Israeli drug dealer, part of an Israeli cabal of dealers. He was a former member of, a lieutenant in, the Israeli army. He was fearless, highly motivated, arrogant to a fault, lived in a large, spacious loft on West Thirty-eighth Street in Manhattan. He and Pitera had a reasonably good working relationship. Pitera sold heroin to him; he in turn provided Pitera with large quantities of high-grade cocaine. Moussa and Gangi sometimes hung out together. They got high together.

Marek did not know that Moussa was having sex with his girlfriend. Moussa had lots of coke, and Marek's girlfriend was a coke whore. It seemed that in the eighties every other woman you met was a coke whore. If you had coke, regardless of how you looked, you got pussy. Moussa agreed to see what he could do with the rugs. Moussa was not
really planning on paying for the rugs. He knew they were valuable. He knew that sooner or later they could very well be cash money in his pocket. Meanwhile, he'd stall Marek—and hopefully never pay him.

In that Frank Gangi had become more and more friendly with Moussa as he sold more and more drugs for Pitera, Moussa ended up giving Gangi a dozen of the rugs. “If you can sell them, sell them. If you want to keep them, keep them,” he said. Not knowing anything about Persian carpets, Frank took them back to Brooklyn. He put them on the floors of his house. He liked the way they looked. He had no idea they were worth so much money.

Subsequently, Marek kept showing up at Moussa's house looking for money, asking for money. Moussa stalled him, wouldn't answer the door. He figured sooner or later the Polish boxer would go away. Moussa had grown fond of the rugs. He wanted to keep them. He had already sent some back to Israel so his mother and father could enjoy them. This all came to boil with a brutal murder. It was unplanned and happenstance. Pitera, Moussa, and Gangi were at Moussa's apartment on the evening of October 6, 1987, drinking and talking. It was a warm night, though fall was in the air. Both Moussa and Gangi were doing lines of coke. Pitera did not do coke like that. When he did coke, he did it in the privacy of his own moment and he did very little. He was fond of saying, “I control it. It doesn't control me.”

Suddenly Marek showed up. By now he had become aggressive and demanding. He wanted the rugs back or he wanted his money. He was yelling, pointing, and being disrespectful. Inevitably, Pitera and he started arguing. Gangi got up and tried to throw him out. That was a mistake. Gangi was suddenly fighting with a professional boxer. Though he had an unusual, wiry strength about him, he could not hold his own against a professional fighter. It was obvious that Gangi not only was losing the fight, but was going to get his ass kicked. This was something Pitera would never allow. Had he had a gun on him, he would have shot Kucharsky in the head. What he did have on him was a knife—a razor-sharp folding knife. He opened the knife and stabbed
Marek in the side with tremendous force. The knife bit into the boxer like a rabid dog. Marek managed to get the knife out and close the blade on Tommy Pitera's finger. The cut was so deep, his finger was almost severed. With that, the three of them got the boxer down on to the floor. Gangi got hold of the knife. Pitera demanded, yelled, that he cut the boxer's throat. Without hesitation, Frank Gangi drew the blade across Marek's throat. Blood squirted all over the place. He not only cut his throat but he cut one of the major arteries. As Marek lay in the throes of death, Moussa, Gangi, and Pitera stood over him. Pitera kicked the prostrate boxer several times—he was soon dead.

Immediately Pitera started talking about dismembering the body.

Again, Frank Gangi was confronted with this scenario—being told to cut up a body. This time, he would not punk out. This time, he thought, he would show Pitera exactly what he was made of, that he was tough, that he had what it took. The bleeding from Pitera's cut had become so bad that he left to go get it stitched. Moussa and Gangi carried the boxer to the hot tub. They undressed him. Moussa produced a hacksaw. Leaning over, in an odd position, Gangi proceeded to cut off one of Marek's legs. He had no knowledge of the joints, major muscles, and tendons and it was difficult. Not only that, but he just wasn't up to the task. He thought it barbaric and cannibalistic.

“It was disgusting,” he would later tell a confidant.

Moussa finished the job. It was obvious that Moussa had cut up bodies before. He did it quickly and efficiently, with a savage vengeance that left Gangi somewhat speechless. Gangi wondered if he was a “pussy” Gangi wondered if he was weak. They finished, took what was left of the boxer, wrapped him in the rugs about which he had come, and placed his remains in large suitcases. Not only did he not get the money for his rugs, but they ended up becoming his death shroud.

Again, Frank Gangi found solace in coke and whiskey. Whiskey and coke. They were the answer to all problems.

Pitera returned with a large white bandage on his hand. He also
had Joey Balzano in tow. Joey was another Brooklyn guy, rough around the edges, loyal to Pitera, a wannabe mafioso. He had not been made. Without preamble, they took the suitcases containing the remains of Marek and placed him in the trunk of the car that Marek had arrived in—his girlfriend's car. The four men returned to Brooklyn and went to Joey's house, where he grabbed shovels. They then proceeded to go back to the Belt Parkway and over the Verrazano Bridge. Gangi could not help but marvel at the efficient, ghastly ingenuity of Pitera's little burying ritual. You had a body to get rid of—no problem.

They quickly arrived at the bird sanctuary. Tommy told Moussa and Gangi to bury the suitcases. They followed him to the spot where he wanted Marek placed. Leaving them with two flashlights, he returned to Marek's girlfriend's car and left. He wanted Gangi to be part and parcel of all that was done. He felt that if Gangi buried the body, he would always be as culpable and responsible as he, Pitera, was.

The bird sanctuary at night was shockingly quiet. There were no sounds. They began to dig the hole. Moussa then Gangi would dig. They made some ghoulish jokes. When they had gone down about three feet, they kicked and pushed the remains of Marek, the Polish boxer, into the hole. They closed the grave with excess dirt. A pair of bandit-eyed raccoons skulked about in the darkness. Gangi and Moussa made a half-assed effort to cover the spot. They both knew, however, no one would find his body. No one would find this place. Though it was smack-dab in the middle of New York, this sanctuary on Staten Island was a dark, secretive place with no human beings anywhere in sight.

“How many bodies you think he has buried here?” Gangi asked Moussa.

“A lot,” he responded, raising his eyebrows.

Within several minutes, Pitera pulled up, as if on cue.