The Butcher (28 page)

T
he thin line between nightmares while sleeping and nightmares while awake, for Frank Gangi, had become blurred…indistinguishable. Tall and thin and beak-faced, Gangi was inexorably, inevitably, speeding toward a granite wall. The murder of Phyllis Burdi and how Pitera had cut her up in front of him, the smell of her blood, the purple, rancid odor of her exposed organs, had never left him, particularly the sight of her head on the edge of the tub, her hair stiff with drying blood, her lips askew, frozen in a perpetual scream. One eye had been open and the eyeball stared off to the left, unseeing and unknowing. The images stayed inside his brain and soul and had grown and grown like a particularly vicious, malignant cancer, becoming more and more grotesque, to the point that he felt as if he were living in a nightmare, a Coney Island house of horrors that, for him, had become a tangible reality.

Frank Gangi had never been cut out for “the life.” He didn't have the heart, fortitude, necessary calluses. True, he had come from the streets, knew the streets, but he was not cut out to be a true mafioso—like his father, his cousins, and uncles. The only way Frank was able to get through the day, the night, was with the help of cocaine and alcohol. They became his best friends. The alcohol he used to come
down, to be able to sleep. He was now drinking an average of two bottles of whiskey a day. He lost track of how much coke he was doing.

On the night of April 10, 1990, as Joe Dish tried, with Jim Hunt and Tommy Geisel encouraging him, advising him, to find a way to set up Tommy Pitera, unsuccessfully, Frank Gangi was in his car driving on Bay Fiftieth Street, stoned out of his mind. More than high on coke, he was drunk. In that Frank was comfortable around women and women were comfortable around him, he was often in the company of different females, as well as the woman with whom he was living—Sophia. This night was no exception. He had two guidettes with him. One talked like Rocky Balboa and the other like a Brooklyn dockworker. This night, Gangi was so stoned he was weaving back and forth as he went. His driving was so bad, erratic and sloppy, that it was patently obvious to anyone who saw him that he was drunk. When he went through a red light at Bay Fiftieth and Cropsey, a squad car was suddenly behind him, red lights spinning. Two cops were soon beside him asking for his license and registration, unfriendly, unhappy, obviously aware that he was inebriated. They made him get out of the car. He reeked of alcohol. He tried to talk his way out of a ticket; he offered them money. Before he knew it, he was under arrest, handcuffed, and in the back of a police car headed toward the Sixtieth Precinct near Coney Island. He was booked and put in a stinking, graffiti-covered holding pen.

When Gangi was again confronted with the hardcore reality of steel bars, the smells and sights of jail, something in him began to change, morph, slowly evolve. He paced back and forth. He hated his life. He hated what he had become. He hated what had happened to Phyllis Burdi.

I could have stopped it. I could have done something. Instead what I did is I brought him to her.

There, in the bullpen at Coney Island, Frank Gangi made up his mind to make a life change. He was going to purge himself, wholly and irreversibly.

The detective who arrested him for the Guvenaro murder, Billy Tomasulo, had been kind and professional. Gangi now reached out to him, asked the desk sergeant to call Detective Tomasulo. He said he had a lot to say and he had to talk to Detective Tomasulo. At first, the desk sergeant took it lightly.

“Yeah, okay, I'll see what I can do,” he said dismissively.

“No, I'm serious. This is about murders, about terrible murders. About people being cut up. Get him here,” Gangi said.

Gangi's demeanor, the imperativeness of his words, the urgency of his tone, told the desk sergeant that something serious was afoot. He walked away, began making phone calls.

 

NYPD detective Billy Tomasulo was a hard-boiled cop from the mean streets of Brooklyn. He was smart, tough, though he was always a gentleman, courteous, and polite. When he first arrested Gangi, in connection with the murder of Guvenaro, he was fair. He treated him so fairly that Gangi came away liking him even though he had locked him up. Tomasulo had pretty much seen it all. Murders, rapes, mutilations—you name it, he saw it, experienced it, was a part of it. This being said, Billy Tomasulo was not ready for what was about to come out of Frank Gangi's mouth.

By the time Tomasulo reached the cell Gangi was being kept in, Gangi had sobered up quite a bit; he was more resolute than ever about what he was going to do.

When Gangi said the name Tommy Pitera, Tomasulo immediately knew whom he was talking about. He, like most everyone else in law enforcement, had his ear to the ground and had heard about Pitera and what he'd been doing. His interest was piqued. He was tired, had had a long day, but suddenly was wide-awake. In that Gangi was a consummate storyteller with a very good memory for details, times, names, places, he painted a thorough picture of what Pitera was about, not only of the crimes he had committed but ones Gangi had committed with him.

Gangi was readily admitting to murder and the role he played in the killing of Phyllis Burdi. Of course, Detective Tomasulo knew about Phyllis Burdi. Her family had been in the Coney Island precinct numerous times over the last several years. He was so familiar with her case, her disappearance, that he had a clear picture of what she looked like in his mind from the photographs the family had given him.

Gangi became visibly unhinged when he talked about Phyllis. The tough-guy exterior melted away. He began to cry. His hands shook. He stared off into the distance, seeing images so horrible his mind tried to deny them, push them away, bury them deeper than they already were buried—an impossibility. Gangi was branded for life. He told Detective Tomasulo about the night Phyllis died: meeting at the after-hours club, going to his house, blowing coke and partying, running out of coke. He explained that he had called Moussa Aliyan and that he and Phyllis had headed into the city for more drugs. There they began to smoke cocaine and minutes quickly slipped into hours. Time, when high on cocaine, moves with shocking celerity. He explained how Pitera called, how he answered the phone, how Pitera came rushing over with Richie David and Kojak Giattino.

Gangi said, “When Pitera walked in, he said—where is she? I indicated the bedroom. He walked into the room carrying a gun with a silencer on it, opened the door, and shot her a couple of times. Then he took her in the bathtub and got his knives and things and he slowly cut her up.”

As Gangi spoke, he chain-smoked. His hands shook more and more, as though he was freezing. He unsuccessfully fought back tears. He went on to describe how Phyllis's head was left on the edge of the tub, how the lifeless eye stared at him.

“This is all too much for me. This is something I never wanted to get involved in or see. This guy is a fucking monster. A fucking monster,” Gangi repeated, as though talking to himself, again seeing the horror before him.

Now, at this point, other detectives were there quietly listening
to Gangi's cathartic cleansing of his soul, purging himself of his guilt. Now he described the killings of Talal Siksik, Marek Kucharsky, and Joey Balzano, how he had gone out to the burial site in Staten Island and buried Marek Kucharsky at the behest of Pitera.

“Could you find it?” Detective Tomasulo asked. “Could you find it again?”

“Yeah…yeah, I could find it again,” Gangi said.

Detective Tomasulo knew this was big. He had known the DEA and FBI were trailing Pitera, that they were very interested in him, though they were having difficulty securing viable evidence that would hold up in a court of law, substantial and irreversible. Detective Tomasulo would have bet his house that Gangi was telling the truth. Every nuance, the way his face moved, the tears in his eyes, all spoke of truth. Detective Tomasulo knew what he had to do next and that was contact Jim Hunt and the DEA. He went to a phone, took out Jim Hunt's card, and dialed his number. Thus the crack in the Rock of Gibraltar widened a bit more. Jim answered the phone.

“Boy, do I have news for you, Jim!” Detective Tomasulo said.

W
hen Jim Hunt heard that Pitera confidant Frank Gangi was telling all, spilling the beans, crying as he did so, he was elated. This is what he, Tommy Geisel, and David Shapiro had been waiting for. This is what some of the agents involved in the task force had been praying for. They all knew Gangi was not only close to Pitera but involved with Pitera on numerous levels. They had seen him go in and out of the Just Us; they had seen him in Pitera's company many times over; they knew he had lived with Judy Haimowitz for a while. They had often seen him riding around Gravesend and Bensonhurst and Coney Island and Dyker Heights—Mafiadom. They also knew who his uncle, father, and cousins were.

Hunt and Shapiro got in the car and sped over to the Sixtieth Precinct in Coney Island. Gangi was in sorry shape. He was pale, with dark circles under his eyes. His hair was a mess. He was smoking a cigarette and coughing all the while. A strange odor came from him. It was not BO—it was something else.

Open-minded, willing to let Gangi talk to his heart's content, Hunt and Shapiro and Detective Tomasulo sat down in a quiet corner of the squad room and listened as he systematically and succinctly laid it out. What he had to say had been bottled up so long that he was
like a pressure cooker—words poured out of him, names, dates, times, places, sights, sounds in a kinetic, well-informed stream of crimes and murders and larcenies. Again, he talked about the murder of Phyllis Burdi. He then discussed, in detail, the other killings he had been a part of, privy to, committed himself.

Of all the things that Gangi spoke about, what interested the agents the most, unquestionably, was Pitera's burial grounds. Gangi said that he knew where the one in Staten Island was. This was the one Jim had been looking for with Israeli drug dealer Shlomo almost a year earlier. Gangi went on to say, however, that he believed there were more burial grounds than the one he knew of—that there was one out on the flatlands in Brooklyn and another on Long Island, in Nassau County. Wanting to see if Gangi would put his money where his mouth was, if he was really telling the truth, Jim asked for him to take them—take them all to the bird sanctuary.

“Yeah, I'll take you,” Gangi said, more relaxed, now a man with a mission.

 

Under the auspices of the federal prosecutor's office, the DEA took physical control of Frank Gangi. They next hustled him out to a hotel near LaGuardia Airport. He was on the verge of being placed in the federal Witness Protection Program. At the hotel, as per agreements between the DEA and the Brooklyn D.A.'s office, Frank Gangi began to be thoroughly debriefed by the government.
*
Over and over again, he reiterated about how “truly, honestly dangerous” Tommy Pitera was. They, the DEA, Jim Hunt and Tommy Geisel, promised they'd put him in the Witness Protection Program.

“My concern,” Gangi said, “is my family. Sophia, the kids. You gotta protect them.”

“We will,” Jim said. “I promise you.”

Gangi had every right in the world to be worried about his wife, Sophia.

 

After Gangi had been gone several days, Tommy Pitera became…concerned. He kept calling Gangi without response. He sent people to Gangi's house to no avail. Pitera's concern grew. Word spread around the Pitera camp that Gangi might have turned. Others said that he had been murdered and dumped somewhere. People all over Gravesend and Bensonhurst scratched their heads and wondered where Frank Gangi was.

On the morning of May 7, Gangi's common-law wife, Sophia Abbia, was in a diner on Cropsey Avenue. Earlier, a mutual friend of hers and Frank's, Patty Scifo, had called the house and asked Sophia to meet at the Shorehaven Luncheonette. “Patty Girl” was also intimately close to Tommy Pitera. As much as Frank could love anyone, considering his alcohol and drug abuse, he loved Sophia Abbia; he had made her children his children, though he had not officially adopted them. At the time of his arrest, he had several different apartments that he used to stash drugs and bed other women, but, for the most part, he lived with Sophia. Theirs was a strange relationship because of his drug abuse. He didn't come home for days at a time. When he did come home, he was in sorry shape. With him, life was a roller coaster, but Sophia loved him for better or worse and was dedicated to him. Sophia had once been a vivacious, attractive woman, but the trials and tribulations of life as she had known it, of being married to Frank Gangi, had taken a toll on her. She was now overweight, worn, and weathered beyond her years.

The luncheonette was crowded. Sophia and Patty Girl took a table toward the back of the place. As they began eating, the door opened and in walked Tommy Pitera, all gloom and doom. He moved straight to their table. Without being invited, he sat down. Sophia's stomach knotted. She paled somewhat. Like most everyone in Brooklyn,
Sophia was frightened of Tommy. Immediately Pitera asked about Gangi. Had she heard from him? Did she know where he was? When was the last time she spoke to him? Sophia, knowing what was in the wind, knowing Frank was talking to the government, cooperating with law enforcement, said she had not heard from him in quite a while, that the last she heard from him, he was going to California.

“California?” Pitera asked, incredulous, his icy-cold blue-gray eyes cutting into her.

“Yes…California,” she repeated.

She ate a bit of her lunch, thinking that Patty Girl had set her up, thinking that Patty Girl had put her in a precarious situation. At that moment, Pitera was paged. He used a pay phone in the luncheonette. He came back to the table and asked more questions about Gangi and, without rhyme or reason, began discussing the pros and cons of the federal Witness Protection Program—particularly disconcerting for Sophia. He seemed to know exactly what was going on. This unsettled and frightened Sophia even more.

He said, “Is Frank in the Witness Protection Program—do you know?”

“I don't know…I know what I've told you,” she said.

Pitera soon got up, went outside, and quickly returned with the always foreboding-menacing Kojak, thick and muscular, bald, with the face of an angry pitbull. He, Pitera, now introduced Kojak to Sophia, saying she was Gangi's “wife.” Sophia wasn't sure why Pitera was doing this, but she didn't like any of it. It frightened her; she wanted to get away from them. Pitera and Kojak soon left as abruptly as they had come. Sophia didn't want to be in Patty's company anymore. She called for the check. Patty insisted on paying it.

“Did you set me up, Patty?”

“How do you mean?” Patty asked.

“You know exactly how I mean,” Sophia said.

And with that, Sophia turned, worried for her children, worried for herself…worried for Frank Gangi. She went straight home, con
cerned about being followed. At the house, Sophia reached out to the office of the DEA. Her fear, what had happened, was immediately passed on to Frank.

 

Immediately, Gangi complained to Jim Hunt. Soon after, heavily armed DEA agents picked up Sophia and the children and brought them to the hotel to be with Frank.

Jim was a hardcore, seasoned cop, not a social worker, but he came to believe that Gangi was more or less a man who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and had gotten caught up in his surroundings. Jim came to view Gangi as essentially a nice guy who made bad decisions. He believed he was not a stone-cold killer; he knew that he had a conscience, remorse. For the most part, Frank and Sophia had an on-again, off-again relationship. He had been caught up in a merry-go-round of cocaine and alcohol and women. Now that he was sober, he was…
himself.
Sober, he wanted to be near his family. Sober, he wanted to be with his wife. Sober…Frank Gangi was a different man. He was soft-spoken, reasonable, willing to listen. He felt like he had gotten a two-thousand-pound load off his shoulders by purging himself.

Now Frank Gangi was becoming who he really was; slowly, he was becoming the man he should have been.

 

Tommy Pitera was not a stupid man. As well as being particularly observant, street-smart, and well read, he had developed and ultimately honed a sixth sense as sharp as any scalpel. Now this sixth sense, as well as all his other senses, told him that there was trouble in the wind, that Frank Gangi had become an informer. He turned over in his mind what to do, how to combat this
rat.
Naturally enough, he thought about abducting Sophia. Ultimately, for now, he decided against that. He put out word to all his people to find Frank Gangi, to kill Frank Gangi. It was not just the Bonanno family that would heed this call. It was
all the members in all the families as well as the associates of each of the families. Soon several thousand men were looking for Gangi, were sniffing the air, were listening to the drums that demanded Gangi's head be brought to Pitera on a silver platter.

 

Back at DEA headquarters, sitting at a large, oval-shaped table, black-and-white photographs of Pitera's surveillance on pin boards to the right of the table, which included many soldiers and capos in the Bonanno family, photos of Overstreets and Just Us, Group 33 strategized with the help of federal prosecutor David Shapiro. They discussed when to pick up Pitera. Before they moved, they wanted to make sure all their ducks were in a row,
i
's dotted,
t
's crossed. They wanted to verify what Gangi had said. In short, they were intent upon putting together a rock-solid case. Toward that end, David Shapiro, smart and cagey, a man who knew his way around a courtroom as well as his own desk, put together a war plan.

What they all agreed on was to keep Pitera off guard, that is, not let him get wind of the law enforcement firestorm slowly enveloping him. Shapiro and the agents discussed going out to the sanctuary in great detail. They knew that once they did that, Pitera would find out and be on guard, get rid of evidence, perhaps even go on the lam. Everyone there knew the Bonannos were deeply entrenched in Canada, had numerous contacts in Canada, and Bonanno star Tommy Pitera could very well disappear into the wide expanses between the Canadian borders, get lost among its various peoples, cultures, languages. This was a very realistic concern—after all, they had just picked up Bonanno fugitive Vincenzo Lore in Canada. Bonanno boss Carmine Galante had lived in Canada for many years while he set up the Sicilian-Canadian-U.S. heroin conduits.

As the days went on and the DEA put together an airtight case against a seemingly unknowing, unaware Pitera, the crack in the Rock of Gibraltar grew deeper and wider.

 

Pitera knew Frank Gangi's drinking, his drug abuse, made him a large neon deficit.

Again, he demanded of his people: “Find fucking Gangi!”

To no avail. It was as though Gangi had been swallowed up by the earth, sucked into a pit of quicksand.

Now that the DEA had a full picture of who Pitera was, names and places and times—who, what, when, where, and why—the ghoul he was, they kept a very close watch on him. They would not let him get away. Over the years, numerous mafiosi had taken it on the lam when the time came for them to face the music. They were wealthy, they were fearless, they were, for the most part, the type of men who would readily go to a foreign place and make a new life for themselves. As the evidence the DEA, NYPD, and FBI mounted against Pitera was put together, as the wheels of justice methodically turned, as the pros and cons of different witnesses and pieces of evidence were debated, it was decided that it was time to get Pitera. It was time to act. By now it was June 3, 1990. They couldn't take the chance of him fleeing, disappearing into the wilds of Canada—its sophisticated urban cities, or secretive streets and avenues—or the hills and farms of Sicily. No…it was time to act. It was time to cut off Tommy Pitera's legs.

That morning, Pitera had volunteered to drive his girlfriend Barbara to visit her son. Apparently, the boy had not taken any of Pitera's many lectures seriously. He had gotten arrested for attempted murder and was now sitting forlorn and angry in the Brooklyn House of Detention on Atlantic Avenue.

For Tommy Karate Pitera, the clock was ticking.

When he left his house that morning, he had no idea that there were some fifteen heavily armed law enforcement professionals trailing him, watching him, getting ready to pounce. It had been a long-drawn-out case and they were all glad it was finally coming to fruition—especially Jim Hunt and Tommy Geisel and Group 33. It was decided that Jim and Tommy would actually put the cuffs on Pitera, bring him down. After all, they had initiated the case.

It was a hot day. The skies over Brooklyn were blue and unblemished. It was so warm that Jim and Tommy Geisel were forced to keep the air conditioner on in the car. Both Jim and Tommy had been waiting for this moment for many months now. They had come to hate Pitera, what he did, what he represented, who he was.

After Pitera dropped Barbara off, he headed east on Atlantic Avenue. This part of Atlantic Avenue had become a Middle Eastern enclave…here, there were crowded Middle Eastern restaurants and sweet-smelling food shops on both sides of the busy street.

The task force decided to move. It was time to break open the Rock of Gibraltar. Pitera was stuck in traffic. Car horns sounded. People walking the streets did so listlessly and slowly. Jim and Tommy pulled their car up just behind Pitera. They had decided when the moment came to arrest him, they would bang the back of his car, get out with lightning speed, guns drawn, their badges clearly visible, hanging from chains around their necks. When there was a bus in front of Pitera and he was boxed in, they made their move. Hunt accelerated—
bang
—and rear-ended Pitera's car. Surprised, caught off guard, Pitera, believing a hit was about to take place, thinking he was going to get murdered, ducked, looking to avoid bullets, slamming himself down onto the car seats.

With shocking speed, Jim Hunt burst from his car and ran to the driver's side of Pitera's car. The door was locked. Jim could not open it. Meanwhile, big, powerful Tommy Geisel pulled open the passenger door with such force he nearly tore it off of its hinges. Jim Hunt vaulted over the hood of the car as though he were a champion gymnast. As he hit the ground, he grabbed Pitera. Though both Jim and Tommy had shouted, “Police! Police!” Pitera was still not sure if it was a hit or if these were really cops. He resisted. Tommy tried to get him to lie down on his stomach, to cuff him. Because he resisted, Tommy pushed him so hard that Pitera's face slammed into the hot, black tar street, giving him a broken nose and two large black eyes, injuries that would be clearly visible in Pitera's mug shot taken later that day. Hunt put the cuffs on him and read him his rights.