The Butcher (15 page)

O
ne would think, considering how quickly Pitera killed, that he was invincible, that all his troubles could be solved with murder. Murder was like a coat of armor that Pitera constantly wore.

Surely, nothing could hurt him.

If Pitera had a weakness, though, it was Celeste LiPari. No matter how many times he confronted her, she continued to do drugs. No matter how many fights they had, she did drugs. Still, he did not believe in hitting women. She caused him pain. She caused him turmoil. He felt, sooner or later, that her drug use would cause her to get involved with other men, other women, scenarios that would embarrass him. After all, he had an image, a profile to maintain. He was a man of respect. What kind of man of respect had a girlfriend who was abusing drugs in after-hours clubs and being put upon and hit on by every coked-up, horny Tom, Dick, and Harry, every guido in Brooklyn? He knew for a fact that Phyllis Burdi was a loose woman—a whore. He knew she was having sexual relations with half the New York Mafia. He knew, too, that one of her lovers was Eddie Lino. Eddie and Tommy were friends. They genuinely liked each other. They did business together. And here was Phyllis Burdi, the biggest
puttana
in all of Brooklyn, hanging out with his beloved Celeste.

By way of Frank Gangi, Tommy sent word to Phyllis over and
over—stay away from Celeste; stop hanging out with Celeste; stop getting high with Celeste! It did no good. He kept hearing that the two were seen here and there and everywhere.

Murder…Pitera's remedy for all problems, became a possible solution. Pitera had a meeting with Gangi in the Just Us Bar.

“Look,” Pitera said, “you have to try to understand this situation. I do not, do NOT want Phyllis hanging out with Celeste. It's bad. I'm hearing things. Everyone knows.” He shook his head from side to side, dismayed, disgusted.

Frank wanted to tell him he should be talking to Celeste, not him. It was Celeste who was doing the drugs. It was Celeste, he knew, who often asked him if he had some coke on him. He'd run into her at different bars and after-hours clubs and the first thing out of Celeste's mouth was, “You got any blow?” Gangi knew that Phyllis Burdi was promiscuous, but she was also a coke whore. She not only did coke, she did heroin, too. What Gangi would have liked to say to Pitera and what he did say were two radically different things. He had come to believe that Pitera was an out-of-control psychopath. The last thing he wanted to do was insult him, to get him angry.

“I'll find her,” Frank said. “I'll talk to her again.”

With that, Gangi called Phyllis and met her at a bar near her house. They sat on stools at the bar and ordered drinks.

“Phyllis…how do I say this? I've said this so many times to you already. You have to stop hanging out with Celeste. Tommy knows. He's got people all over Brooklyn telling him things; he's got spies everywhere.”

Phyllis raised her eyes. She had heard this before.

“Look,” she said, “I don't force Celeste to do anything. She calls me, she wants to come by, she wants to go out. She's my girlfriend. What am I supposed to do? Say, ‘I can't hang out with you because your boyfriend doesn't like me'? She knows a lot of guys. They give her drugs.”

Gangi shook his head back and forth. He saw no good coming from this. He tried another tactic.

“Look, Pitera is a dangerous dude. You get this guy mad at you—it'll be very bad. There's no telling what he'll do. I'm talking to you as a friend now. I care about you. I don't want to see you get hurt.”

“Get hurt for what? I haven't done anything. Celeste is a strong-willed woman. Nobody can make this girl do anything.” She laughed. “If he can't make her stop getting high, how am I supposed to stop her from getting high? The problem is with her. It's not with me,” she said.

Gangi knew she was right, but that didn't necessarily matter. If Pitera got it in his head that she was corrupting the woman he loved, it would be catastrophic for her. This he knew. This everyone in Brooklyn knew.

Brooklyn, as large a borough as it was, was really a cluster of small communities and neighborhoods in which everyone knew one another. People from different hoods, many of whom were La Cosa Nostra associated, were mobile and traveled to clubs all across the borough. Not only legitimate clubs but after-hours ones as well. All the after-hours clubs were mob run. The cops knew about them; they were paid off to look the other way. In all the after-hours clubs, the use of cocaine and other drugs was the norm, not the exception. After all, who would be up at four or five in the morning, dancing and partying up a storm, other than those on various stimulants? There were after-hours clubs in Coney Island, Bensonhurst, South Brooklyn, Flatbush, Gravesend, and they were all frequented by LCN.

After several drinks that night, Gangi and Phyllis did a few lines of cocaine, went back to his apartment, and had sex. In some strange way, in the back of his mind, Gangi felt guilty for being intimate with her. He felt in his bones, somewhere deep inside, that something horrible could happen, something he, if he knew better, could stop. He saw the dark skies. He remembered Pitera's burial grounds, the macabre solitude, the cryptlike silence, the eerie stillness of the sanctuary in the middle of the night. He heard the sound of the shovels cutting the earth; he heard the meaty thump of the bodies being thrown into the holes. No matter how hard he tried to forget about it, he couldn't. Unlike Pitera, Frank Gangi was not made of stone.

W
hatever demons were plaguing Celeste LiPari inside could not be frightened off by even Tommy Pitera. Celeste knew what Pitera was capable of. She heard the rumors. She saw blood on his clothes. She heard the things that came out of his mouth that told her, in no uncertain terms, that he would kill with ease and indifference. Celeste also saw the genuine fear that lived in people's faces when Pitera walked in a room, a restaurant, or a bar. Even made men, she knew, averted their gazes when Pitera entered a room—a restaurant, a wedding, a funeral parlor. She knew, too, that he had gone to Japan to learn how to fight, to learn how to kill, and that he read voraciously about violence, war, killing, dismemberment, and anarchy. Knowing all this, Celeste continued to use drugs. Celeste continued to party indiscreetly. True, Phyllis Burdi could not make Celeste use drugs, but Phyllis was surely a negative influence. The two of them, in a sense, were like two peas in a pod. They were attractive, sexual, and addicted to drugs.

On September 10, 1987, Phyllis and Celeste, all dressed up, makeup on their faces, their nails painted bright red, five-inch heels on their shoes, went out to have a good time. They went from club to club, people's homes, back to club hopping. They ended up at an
after-hours joint called the Wrong Number on Avenue T, not knowing the grim reaper had joined them. They repelled the entreaties of various men. They snorted coke in the bathroom. Fearful that Tommy might show up, the two women left and went back to Phyllis's house at 20–22 West Fifth Street. They were not alone. Several men and two more women came with them. They would have a party. What would fuel the party would be high-grade cocaine and heroin.

Heroin had become popular again. Wired cokeheads all over the country were using it to come down, to calm themselves. It was also popular to mix heroin and cocaine together and shoot them up at the same time. This was known as a “speedball.” John Belushi and a long list of others died by shooting speedballs. Both Phyllis and Celeste mainlined heroin. Of the three ways to use heroin—snort it, skin-pop it, and mainline it—mainlining was the most dangerous. The drug was injected directly into a main artery and quickly, in the bat of an eye, moved throughout the body. Phyllis's apartment was small and unkempt—a mess. Because she was often up all night and all day, she had its dirty windows covered with shades and dust-laden curtains. The curtains drawn and the shades down, one could barely discern night from day. In that, when on drugs, one's perception of time is completely turned upside down, Phyllis and her friends had no idea what time it was and didn't give a flying fuck. Fueled by the cocaine, they rapidly discussed nonsense. There was a couple there and they began to have sex. Celeste wanted to come down and would do it with heroin.

At any given time, it is difficult to discern the purity of heroin on the street. It could be as high as 85 percent or as low as 5 percent. Heroin that is 85 percent pure is…lethal. One could readily liken it to cyanide. Celeste had no idea what the exact purity of the heroin she was using that morning was; all she knew was that she wanted to come down, and she mainlined the drug.

She, like the others there, lay back, her eyes hung at half-mast. Her facial muscles became lax, her mouth slowly opened, spittle ran from her lower lip. She soon drifted away on a silky, opium-laden cloud.
It was warm and soothing and took her away from all her problems. Whatever pains, whatever turmoil, Celeste had suffered was soon forgotten—left behind. As she drifted further and further into the fatal embrace of opium, her heart slowed, her breathing became shallow. Oblivious to those around her, to Brooklyn, to the world, Celeste soon stopped breathing. The weak beat of her heart became fainter and fainter and soon it stopped. Quickly, surprisingly so, her face took on a waxy, pale hue.

Those there that morning, all high on heroin, had no idea what had just happened, knew nothing of their friend's death. By the time it was discovered that Celeste had OD'd, that Celeste had died, that the grim reaper had stolen her away, it was hours later.

 

With friends throughout Gravesend and Bensonhurst and Coney Island—both within organized crime and within the police department—it didn't take long for Tommy Pitera to hear that Celeste had died. That Celeste had died at Phyllis Burdi's house.

He'd been home sleeping when there was a knock on the door. Frank Gangi and another Pitera associate, Joey Tekulve, known as “Joey Pizza,” were standing there, all gloom and doom, obviously something deeply troubling them both.

Earlier, when Phyllis found Celeste, she called up Judy Haimowitz in a panic, hysterical, wanting to know what to do. Joey had been at Judy Haimowitz's house and advised her to call the cops. Joey then phoned around looking for Gangi and found him at Moussa's apartment. When Gangi heard the news, he sped back to Brooklyn and picked up Joey Pizza at the Just Us. They both knew Pitera would take this very badly. They both knew that Celeste was probably the only person in the world Tommy loved. This would not be good. They didn't want to be the ones to tell Pitera about Celeste's death, but they knew if they didn't give him the information and he found out, he'd be fit to be tied.

Now they were standing at Pitera's door and he was looking at them with questions, his brow furrowed. Frank Gangi told him what they'd heard, that Celeste had died at Phyllis Burdi's house.

Tommy reacted to these words like he'd been hit by a bolt of electricity. He cursed Phyllis, paced the room, the thin lips of his mouth twisting into an angry snarl. He quickly got dressed and they made their way over to Phyllis's apartment on Avenue T. When they arrived, there were police cars and an ambulance out front. Stoic and angry, seething, Tommy Pitera got out of the car and quickly walked inside. When they arrived at the apartment, the door was ajar. A rookie cop Pitera knew was there. Celeste's body hadn't been removed yet, and when Tommy saw it, he broke down—began crying into his cupped hands—distraught. It was an odd, unsettling sight to see a man like him, so cold, so indifferent, break down and cry like a baby. Phyllis came out of the bedroom. She looked worn and haggard, worried and frightened.

“I told you to stay the fuck away from her,” Tommy said, moving toward her quickly, looking as if he would kill her, take her neck in his hands and throttle her to death, take her head in his hands and break it off her shoulders, bend her over his knee and break her back. Surely, if the cop hadn't been there, he would have killed her on the spot. The pain and hurt he felt was replaced by a fiery anger that bordered on insanity. Pitera slapped her hard across the face. The rookie cop got between Phyllis and Tommy.

“Please, Tommy, you can't do that. You gotta leave. Tommy, please,” the cop said.

“I'm going to get you; I'm going to get you,” he told Phyllis as he made his way toward the door and was suddenly gone. His anger, his hatred, his words seemed to hang in the air behind him.

Already, Celeste's body had begun to rot and the smell of her corpse filled the air. Downstairs, Gangi, Pitera, and Joey Pizza walked around the block. Over and over again, Tommy said he wanted her dead. He wanted Frank to kill her. He knew Frank had a relationship with her and he felt Frank could get close to her and do the job. It was
a wonder that he didn't want to kill her himself, torture her. Exact his own revenge in his own way. Be that as it may, he told Frank he wanted her dead and he wanted him to carry out the contract.

This was a dilemma for Frank Gangi. He wasn't the killer that Pitera was. He could never kill a woman. He certainly didn't want to kill Phyllis Burdi. She was his friend and she was his lover. Just the day before, she had been over at his house along with Celeste and another woman named Michelle. They had cleaned his apartment and he had paid them with cocaine. Frank often had more cocaine than he had cash money. Now he was confronted with this life-altering, life-changing dilemma. Rather than debate this killing with Pitera now, knowing Pitera was upset beyond words, Frank said nothing. He listened to Tommy's pain. He listened to Tommy rant and rage about Phyllis Burdi.

F
or several days, Phyllis lay low, knowing there was danger in the air. Had she had more sense, if she wasn't so attached to that neighborhood, she might have left town, gone to Florida, perhaps out to the West Coast, and let things cool down. Yes, Phyllis Burdi was street savvy, but because her whole life revolved around the mean streets of Brooklyn, she did not have the wherewithal, the worldliness, to go to another place and make a life for herself. She stayed in Gravesend, looking over her shoulder as she went; she still got high, but she was more on guard. More on guard but still there; still in the jungle—a jungle prowled by Pitera.

Over the coming days and weeks, Pitera badgered Gangi about Phyllis—“when are you going to take her for that ride?” Gangi did what he could to stall him. He hoped that with time, Pitera's anger would abate, but just the opposite happened. It seemed that every hour that went by, Pitera became angrier and angrier. He was like some wrathful god who would not have peace, who would not rest, until he had revenge.

Still, Pitera was Frank's boss, and as much as it pained him to think about it, he knew he'd eventually have to do what Pitera said. In the meantime, he stayed away from Phyllis. Gangi figured if he didn't see her, Pitera couldn't get mad at him for not setting her up…killing her. He purposely avoided clubs she went to, bars she hung out in. In the back of his mind somewhere, he hoped Pitera would get caught
up in something else, but that didn't occur and every time Pitera saw Gangi, the first thing he asked was, “What about Burdi?”

“I haven't seen her,” he said. “I call her, she doesn't call me back.”

With that, Pitera stared at Gangi in the faint light of the Just Us Bar.

“You lying to me?” Pitera asked Gangi.

“No. Why would I lie to you? I know what Burdi is. She's a whore,” he said.

“Find her. Toast her,” Pitera whispered in that strange voice.

Then, when Gangi next saw Pitera at the Just Us, he gave him an ice pick. Gangi said he couldn't kill Phyllis that way. This didn't please Pitera, though he seemed to accept it. He took the ice pick back and, in turn, gave Gangi an automatic with a silencer.

“Use this,” he said. “You understand?”

“I understand.”

 

By pure happenstance, Frank Gangi ran into Phyllis Burdi early that morning at an after-hours club. She told him she missed him. She kissed him and hugged him. The familiar though foreign smell of her aroused him. She was one of the hottest women he'd ever known. She had taken sex to new heights for him. She had done things to him that he'd never heard of before. No doubt fueled by cocaine, Phyllis Burdi knew much about the perverse, dark world of sex in its more macabre-kinky forms. Though she had an angelic face, she demanded and needed more than simple intercourse or oral sex. She liked to have sex with more than one man at a time. It was also rumored that Celeste and Phyllis had been lovers.

As Frank looked at Phyllis that night, he felt a heavy heart, for he knew her days were numbered, though he wouldn't be her killer. He just couldn't do it. He warned her, told her to leave town—to go away. He said he'd be willing to give her money to get out of town for a while. She didn't seem to be interested in any of that, and before he knew it, they were heading back to his place, kissing in the car as they
went, groping each other, snorting coke. The thought of killing her, calling Tommy Pitera and giving her up, was as distant to him as the moon. Gangi could not, he decided, kill her or give her up. He'd get her out of town; he'd make sure she left. But first, he wanted her; he had to have her.

At his apartment, they had hot, lustful sex. It was raw and nasty. On tables, the couch, the floor, in chairs, near the windows. Spurred on by the octane fuel that cocaine is to the human libido, it went on for hours.

Suddenly the coke was gone. So was his erection. They both wanted more. It was five in the morning, slowly getting light outside. Gangi began making phone calls, looking to cop. After several attempts, he got lucky and Moussa Aliyan said that he had coke and they could come over.

Yes!

With alacrity, they got dressed, donned sunglasses, were quickly out the door and speeding toward Manhattan on Brooklyn's Belt Parkway. There was little traffic. As they made their way through the Wall Street area, they watched the stiffs in suits heading to work. They were like two creatures from another planet…cocaine aliens; the Bonnie and Clyde of the after-hours set—up all night on drugs and hurrying for a new supply. They arrived at the desolate West Side street. The sun was still low in the sky. Long shadows skulked along the quiet cobblestone street. Like two fugitives, they got out of the car and quickly made their way up to the loft building, rang the bell, and were let in.

Cocaine—the devil's dandruff—to people who have been up all night on the drug and suddenly run out of it is like food to a starving man, water to someone who is dying of thirst.

Quickly, Gangi copped an eight ball (3.5 grams). It was high-grade cocaine, a glistening, pink/pearly-white color commonly known as bubblegum. Using a bank card, Gangi crushed up one of the rocks. He took a long, satisfying toot. He passed it to Phyllis and she, in turn, took an even longer line of the pearly-pinkish powder.

Ahhhhhh: the nervous anxiety they both felt from the sudden coming down was quickly replaced by a euphoric warmth. They took more and more and still more. They stayed up that whole day snorting coke and intermittently having sex. Finally, with the help of alcohol and heroin, sleep enveloped them and took them to another place.

 

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.