The Butcher (22 page)

“I got it—I know who this is!”

H
is name was Vinnie Lore. He was an associate of the Gambino crime family. Coincidentally, quite amazingly so, his uncle was Frankie Tuminaro, who was murdered alongside Frank Gangi's father. His other uncle was named Angelo Tuminaro. Both were principals in the French Connection case; Angelo had been a fugitive for over twenty years now. Vinnie Lore had been indicted in the same case as Eddie Lino, Gene Gotti, Angelo Ruggerio, and John Carniglia and fled while on bail. In that Eddie Lino was very close to Tommy Pitera, Jim Hunt learned that Pitera and the Bonannos had supplied the Gambinos with heroin. This, Jim Hunt knew, clearly put Pitera in the drama on the stage he was now watching.

The Bonannos and the Gambinos were close.

The plot thickens,
Jim thought.

Jim knew what had to be done. He sat Maria down and looked her in the eye.

“Maria,” he said, “I want you to get tough. I want you to yell and curse and show this Vincenzo guy no respect. You tell him you're not separating the drugs and you tell him it's the whole load or nothing. You understand?”

“Si,
I understand,” she said, seeming to enjoy the role she was about to play, her face taking on a histrionic demeanor.

Jim said, “Tell them the drugs are sealed in a trap in the van you
drove up in and that you're not giving them up until the deal is carried out. You tell them that when they show up with the money, you'll give them the van and they can get the drugs.”

“Okay, James,” she said, resolute, confident in James's words, confident that he'd protect her.

Word came that Vincenzo was on his way back. He seemed somewhat wobbly, came the report. No wonder, Jim thought, as he had been drinking since late morning. Everyone took his or her position. There was a knock on their door and Maria opened it. Vincenzo walked in. He began with the same old rap.

Maria interrupted him and said, “Listen to me, you spaghetti-bending, guinea motherfucker. I'm not doing it the way you said. I'm not doing anything that isn't what we agreed on. You give me the money and I give you the van and I'm not doing anything until that happens that way, you got it?”

Vincenzo Lore, a Gambino family associate, a killer, was obviously cowed by this fat, colorful Brazilian lady. When he began to protest, she let loose a string of obscenities and swore she would leave if they didn't live up to their end of the bargain.

“I ain't,” she reiterated, “breaking open the seal to give you twenty keys. That's bullshit. No one ever said I had to do that. Fuck that. I'm not doing it. My people know where I am and will have a hit team come up here and wipe you the fuck off the map.” She pulled her cantaloupe-size tit and violently shook it at him, saying, “Here's my tit! Why don't you grow some balls?”

They looked at each other long and hard. Jim Hunt was ready to burst through the door for fear Vinnie would attack her. Everyone was tense. Vincenzo brought his hand to his forehead as if he had a sudden headache, obviously shocked by the appearance of her head-size breast menancingly pointed at him like some kind of bazooka. Maria had a pair of balls and they both knew it.

“I gotta go, I gotta do some thinking,” he said, rubbing his forehead. He got up and left.

Jim Hunt entered Maria's room and gave her a big bear hug.

“You were marvelous,” he said. “Fantastic! Brilliant! The best performance I've ever seen anyone give.”

They all hugged her and shook her hand, all ten cynical Canadian cops and Tommy Geisel, too. She had been nominated for an Oscar and she won hands down.

 

Now Hector and Yves the cop killer were under twenty-four-hour surveillance. The Canadian authorities would not let these men out of their sight come hell or high water. Later that day, a very interesting turn of events came about illustrating just how deep La Cosa Nostra had their razor talons in the Canadian underworld. The authorities followed Vincenzo Lore to a popular diner. When he went inside, he met with Guy Mirot, who was a major French-Canadian drug dealer. If there was a
capo di tutti capi
in Canada, his name was Guy Mirot. He was heavy into drugs and deeply attached to the Bonanno family. Things were really heating up now, beginning to bubble.

Vinnie and Guy Mirot sat for an hour and Vinnie did most of the talking. Guy listened intently. He seemed to be agreeing with what Vinnie was saying. The meeting broke up. Vinnie went one way and Guy went another. Maria soon received a phone call from Vinnie. He told her that they would do it just like she wanted, that everything could be “taken care of” the following day.

 

V-day was here. Early that morning, Jim Hunt and Tommy Geisel were at Mountie headquarters. In that they were “guests” and there only because of the goodwill of the Canadian authorities, they could only make suggestions. A task force was rapidly put together. There was no reason to believe that Vinnie Lore was lying. The fact that Vinnie had met with Guy told them all, without a shadow of a doubt, that Guy would be putting up money to facilitate the deal. They laid
down how the bust would happen on a map of the area surrounding the hotel. There would be over a dozen police vehicles, twenty-five police personnel, and additionally, helicopters would hover overhead.

Later that morning, crime boss Guy Mirot left his house, went to a second home and retrieved two suitcases, placed them in the trunk of his car, and drove on. There were no clouds in the Canadian sky. The sun shone. An unusually large flock of Canadian geese passed low overhead. Guy Mirot went back to the diner and, lo and behold, met with Vinnie Lore. Mirot put the suitcases directly into the trunk of Vinnie's car. In the suitcases, they all knew, was the balance of the money, some $1.6 million Canadian. Soon Yves and Hector showed up at the diner. There was another man with them, a man no one could ID. It would later be revealed that it was Gilles Mallete, a particularly tough, old-school Montreal gangster. Tension was in the air. A nervous kind of static. Cops checked their guns. They had every reason in the world to believe that Yves would immediately start shooting when he saw the detectives. They were sure he'd go down in a hail of bullets before being captured.

It was a warm, muggy day. Rubbery waves of heat rose from the ground. As the bad guys made their way over to the hotel, surveillance cars were following them, switching places as they went. They, the bad guys, seemed to be oblivious to what was happening. They pulled into the hotel parking lot. The Mounties had a parked minivan ready with Florida plates, thanks to an agent who had recently been transferred from Florida. Vinnie Lore went upstairs first by himself. He knocked on the door and Maria let him in. He wasn't that friendly.

“You've been a very bad signora…a very bad signora,” he said. “I don't know why I'm doing what I'm doing, but I'm bringing the money up here and you can hold it until my guys get the van. If everything is okay, you can keep it and we go.”

“Okay,” she said.

“You've been a very bad signora,” he said again, half jokingly, and
went downstairs to get the others and the money. Quickly, Jim entered the room.

“Look, Maria,” he said. “When we go to make a move, I'm going to call you on the phone and then you go to the bathroom. When the phone rings, pick it up, talk to me a second, and then go straight to the bathroom. Got it?”

“Got it, James,” she said. Jim Hunt left. Maria stood there, tough and jaded, cynical and street-smart.

Within minutes, Vinnie returned, the other three in tow. They put down the bags of money. Smiling, Maria told them they were doing the right thing, complimented them, and gave them the keys to the van. She said, “We had the material stashed in the chassis and welded over. All you have to do is open the seal and you'll have it.”

Yves, Hector, and the third man left to retrieve the coke. Vinnie stayed behind. Calm and self-assured, his Glock sticking out of his waistband, Jim Hunt knew it was time to act; he called Maria's room. The others got ready, drew their guns, put themselves in the right frame of mind. They knew Vinnie Lore was a dangerous man, that he had killed people—that he had a lot to lose. They all wanted to go home that day to their wives and families and none of them were about to let this mafioso miscreant take them down.

“Maria,” Jim said into the phone, “go to the bathroom.”

“Okay, okay, Jaime,” she said, and hung up. She excused herself and went to the restroom. As soon as she was out of the room, out of harm's way, the hard-jawed Mounties, Jim, and Tom burst into the room. Vinnie Lore barely had time to blink his eyes, let alone to react. Within split seconds he was up in the air and slammed to the ground and handcuffed. His rights were read.

Jim said, “What's your name?”

“Vinnie Mancino,” Vinnie said.

“That's bullshit,” Jim said. “The game's up. You're Vincenzo Lore, and your boys Carniglia and Gotti each got fifty years today.”

Vinnie's face was the color of the underside of a flounder, pale and bloodless. He knew he could not argue and didn't try.

Outside, Yves, Hector, and Canadian gangster Gilles Malette moved toward the car. The day was very hot. They were totally unaware. As Yves opened the trunk of the vehicle, suddenly, out of nowhere, an army of police surrounded them, were on top of them, demanding they put down their weapons and get on the ground. Neither Yves nor the other two had any time to react. They were hit with such lightning speed. It was over. The bad guys had lost. No blood had been spilled.

The job done, it was time to go back to New York, to Gravesend. It was time to tighten the screws on the Pitera case.

O
ver the underworld jungle drums of La Cosa Nostra, word quickly spread from Montreal to Brooklyn, Gravesend, Bensonhurst, and Dyker Heights—that Vincent Lore had been busted; the Canadian godfather, Guy Mirot, took it on the lam and disappeared with the wind. Some $2 million was lost. It didn't take long for the Bonanno family to also hear the news, which soon passed to Tommy Pitera. It was the kind of bust he dreaded. It involved organized crime figures, obviously good police work, infiltration, duplicity, informers, and wiretaps; it too involved the loss of a lot of money. Pitera knew, felt in his bones, that it also involved a rat.

In his mind, it always boiled down to rats. Oh, how he hated rats. The thought of them made his skin crawl. He resolved to run his crew tightly. He'd be more watchful, wary, and on guard of everybody around him; he would trust nobody, he vowed.

Pitera felt that Frank Gangi was becoming a concern. He felt that Gangi was “good people” he knew the womb he came from; he knew that Gangi's blood was mafioso, but what worried him about Gangi was his drug use. His drinking. He would talk to him; he would straighten him out.

Meanwhile, Pitera applied good, sound business sense to the money
he was making. He had this dream of building a spectacular, fantastic, palatial home for himself, and to that end, he had bought a town house in a nice residential area of Brooklyn known as Bay Ridge. It was on Ovington Avenue. From the corner it was a stone's throw from the Narrows and the Verrazano Bridge, the bridge that connected Brooklyn to Pitera's cemetery. It was a three-story, limestone property. He had the building completely gutted and was going to renovate it from the beams on up. He bought the best of everything for his home. He had marble brought in from Carrara, Italy. Pitera planned to buy more property that he could rent and make money off.

 

After the bust of Vincent Lore and Yves LaSalle in Canada, Jim Hunt and Tom Geisel's reputation grew by leaps and bounds. They had brought down particularly bad, heinous fugitives, one a cop killer, one a made man, in addition to Guy Mirot,
the bad guy
in Canada. They had also managed to recover $2 million in cash. What was also startling and unusual was that they had managed to do all this in a matter of days. No long-drawn-out listening to wiretaps, no endless surveillance.

Now, on the ground again in Brooklyn, Hunt and Geisel were back to the raw basics. They wanted Pitera. They focused their energy on Pitera. Whatever they asked for, whatever they wanted, was quickly given to them. A task force of some thirteen agents would soon be trailing Pitera. Pitera sensed their presence. Once in a while he spotted a pair of the agents, but for the most part, they stayed out of sight. He had no idea from where they hailed, but he knew they were cops. He smelled the smoke, but he didn't see the fire that was slowly surrounding him, slowly enveloping him.

By listening carefully to the jungle drums resonating through LCN, the DEA had come to believe that Pitera was not only selling large amounts of narcotics, but that he was killing people at random on a regular basis and chopping up their bodies for ready disposal.

Because of Pitera's intimate involvement with LCN, the DEA
decided to bring in the FBI. Normally, the DEA does not involve other agencies. They want to work cases the way they see them. They didn't want to argue or debate or fight over jurisdictional issues and, most importantly, the most important, who got the limelight.

Likewise, Jim Hunt thought it would be a good idea to bring in the NYPD's Organized Crime Unit. Perhaps more than any other governmental agency, they knew exactly what was going on in each family, who was who, what role everyone played. In that the task force now had two other agencies working hand in hand with the DEA, a virtual army was looking to nail Tommy Pitera to the cross. However, even with all this manpower, even with all the technical assistance, it was very hard to put together an airtight case against Pitera. Stymied, they watched Pitera meet with Frankie Lino, Anthony Spero, and other members of the upper echelon of the Bonanno family and go on walk-and-talks around Gravesend, speaking softly, Tommy most often covering his mouth as he spoke, making it impossible to record what he was saying. As one agent put it, “The fucking guy looks like he's always playing a harmonica.”

The weak link—Jim kept wondering about the weak link. Judy Haimowitz, of course, would be helpful, but a good lawyer could minimize the impact she had on the case. They needed more. They wanted blood, bodies, large amounts of cocaine in Pitera's hands.