The Butcher (18 page)

I
t was one of those pleasant summer nights when people sit on stoops in beach chairs in front of their houses all over Brooklyn, just before night falls, during those fifteen or so minutes called dusk, an abundance of ladybugs filling the air. It was such a lovely evening that the patrons of the Just Us came outside and were sitting on car fenders in front of the bar. There was Tommy Pitera, the fierce war captain Eddie Lino, and Frank “Ruby” Rubino. Frank Rubino was a burly, squat, tough Italian. He drove a brand-new gray Jaguar. Up until that date, he had a good relationship with Eddie Lino; they were partners in the heroin business. Now the good days were gone. As is often the way of the Mafia, when they are about to kill someone, they are all smiling and friendly and warm, offering drinks and sumptuous dinners.

Between Tommy Pitera and Eddie Lino, you'd be hard-pressed to find a meaner pair in all of La Cosa Nostra, either in the United States or in Sicily. Though they were from two different families, they often worked together, were good personal friends, had respect for each other. Eddie Lino was the go-to guy for heroin for the Gambino crime family. But, interestingly, all of what Eddie Lino did was, of course, off the record, off the books. His drug dealing was so blatant, so amazingly profitable, that for the longest time he could not get
made—
officially inducted into the Gambino family. Paul Castellano outright refused to
have him made because of his immersion in the selling of heroin. It was only after John Gotti had Castellano murdered in front of Sparks Steak House that Eddie Lino was finally made and soon thereafter given his own
borgata…
crew. Eddie Lino and John Gotti were close. They were more like brothers than friends.

Though John Gotti never had anything to do with the actual selling of drugs, never touched drugs, never saw drugs, he well knew what Lino was doing, what Lino was about, and he gave his blessings. Gotti, like everyone else in La Cosa Nostra, quietly pocketed a fortune as he silently, discreetly, looked the other way, north and south and east and west, as Lino went about the business of wholesaling large amounts of heroin. Lino and John Gotti's bond was so great that when, a little way down the road, Anthony Gaspipe Casso was given the assignment of killing John Gotti for murdering Paul Castellano without the killing being sanctioned, the first person he took out was Eddie Lino. On November 6, 1990, Anthony Casso sent crooked NYPD detectives Stephen Caracappa and Louis Eppolito to do the job. Lino was so feared, such an adept killer himself, that Casso used cops to take him out.

Apparently, Lino had gotten wind that Frank Rubino had turned bad. Lino wanted him dead and he asked his pal Tommy to do the job. At this point, Tommy had garnered a reputation within La Cosa Nostra as an amazingly adept, efficient killer. His reputation had grown to such a degree that people were calling him—behind his back—“wacko.” This had less to do with his outward appearance than with how readily he killed and the fact that he, just as readily, cut people up and buried them; he had private burial grounds on Long Island and Staten Island.

Tall and gangly, buzzed on coke, Frank Gangi now turned the corner and began walking toward Lino, Pitera, and Rubino. Outgoing and gregarious, Gangi was about to approach them when Pitera waved him away with a curt movement of his icy blue-gray eyes.

NIXIT-SCRAM, Pitera silently said with his eyes. Gangi got the message. He walked into the bar, ignoring the three. Gangi did not
know what was happening, but considering that Rubino was standing between Pitera and Lino, a lethal pair of bookends, it didn't look good for Ruby.

Soon Lino, Pitera, and Rubino got into Rubino's gray Jaguar and drove away. Rubino was driving. Lino was sitting in the passenger seat. They were some four blocks away from the bar when Lino told Rubino to pull over, which he readily did. The moment he put the car in park, Pitera pulled out an automatic with a silencer on it and shot Rubino in the back of the head, killing him. Even though this was Gravesend, Brooklyn, ground zero for the Mafia, what Pitera had just done was audacious. The fledgling dragon that had once been inside Pitera had grown to monstrous proportions, now had long scales…was fire-breathing, invincible. In that Pitera, somewhat obsessively, collected jewelry from his victims, he ripped a gold necklace with a fish medallion off of Rubino and he and Lino got out of the car and left Rubino there like that for all to see, know, and be horrified by.

This type of killing, so brazen and so public, would inevitably come back to haunt La Cosa Nostra. It caused intense police scrutiny, media attention, and horrified an innocent public. It was one of those times when it seemed as though these two men, Lino and Pitera, felt that they had a holy mandate to kill whom they wanted when they wanted and blatantly leave bodies wherever the hell they pleased. As a mafioso recently said, it was “in bad taste.”

 

Murder, successfully killing people and breaking the law on a regular basis, as all La Cosa Nostra does as a matter of course, has to do with luck. No matter how well planned, no matter how thoroughly thought out any given crime is, any given murder, without luck, it can fail—and fail miserably. Considering how often the DEA was following Pitera, it's a wonder they didn't see him that night, hanging out in front of the bar, drive off and kill Frank Rubino. Luck, apparently, was with Pitera and Eddie Lino that night.

Interestingly, a short time later, Pitera's luck slowly began to turn. He now had a new girlfriend. Her name was Barbara Lambrose. She bore a distinct resemblance to Celeste. She had a fourteen-year-old son, a good-looking, athletic teenager but he was wired and destined for trouble. He didn't do well in school; he didn't listen to his mother; he was starting to use drugs. Pitera took a liking to the boy, whose name was Joey. Today, Pitera was driving his Oldsmobile. The feds had recently managed to bug this car. Presumably because he had Joey in the car that day, neither the radio was on nor was there static. Apparently, Joey's behavior was giving his mother grief and she was complaining to Pitera, asking him to talk to her son.

“Joey…you know,” Pitera began, “your mother's a very nice lady. She's had it hard. There's no reason for you to give her more grief. I'm from the street. I'm telling it like it is. You gotta shape up. You gotta be…you gotta stay away from drugs. Drugs will make you lose control. You never want to lose control. You see me? I never lose control. You have a mother that loves you and cares for you. You have to show her respect.”

And Pitera went on to lecture the boy on staying out of trouble, on not using drugs, on doing well in school. Then the boy said something that was inaudible to the agents and Pitera's response shocked and stunned the listening agents:

“If you kill somebody,” he said, “you've got to cut the lungs and open the stomach. If you do that, the body can sink. If you don't do that, it will float and it will be found.”

Tommy Geisel and Jim Hunt looked at each other.

This would be helpful, they knew, in a court of law, but it was not definitive evidence as such. It would bolster the contentions, the allegations, and the evidence they did have, but in reality, Pitera could have just been making this up. It wasn't proof in and of itself, though it certainly cast Pitera in a bad light.

S
harks. Pitera's crew was like a bunch of reef sharks constantly looking for prey, constantly on the move, always hungry. Always ruthless, Pitera could be readily likened to a great white shark that dominated and frightened and controlled and even ate the reef sharks. Pitera, like a great white shark, was slow moving and methodical though deadly when he made a move. He had morphed from a dragon into one of the most feared, efficient killers the Mafia has ever known—a white shark,
Carcharodon carcharias,
the baddest of the bad.

One of the reef sharks that was a member of Pitera's crew was Lloyd Modell, another Mafia wannabe. He had dark hair and dark eyes and a large hook nose. He wanted to be in the Mafia with such dire need, had fantasies about it most of his adult life, loved movies about gangsters, that he actually changed his name to Lorenzo Modica, an Italian name that, he hoped, would get him inducted into one of the five crime families, though that was not about to happen. It was a rare thing for non-Italians to fool their way into being made. For the most part, in order to be made, people in La Cosa Nostra had to know you—your history, or rather, as Pitera put it, “know the cunt you came from.” Having said that, his not being Italian would not dissuade Lorenzo Modica from being a gangster. He was so intent upon prov
ing his worth that he would kill quickly and readily, without remorse or conflict.

Lorenzo Modica knew a Colombian by the name of Luis Mena, also an associate of Pitera's…a coke dealer. Luis Mena said he could get them “all the coke they wanted.” Mena said he knew Colombians who had heavy weight, and that he'd be happy to set them up to be ripped off. The coke that the Colombians provided swiftly and without difficulty was top-notch. Lorenzo went and spoke to Tommy about ripping them off. Tommy readily agreed. Lorenzo mentioned killing them. Pitera thought that a good idea. This was right up his alley.

In July of 1988, Luis Mena called Lorenzo to tell him there was a load of coke in. The two soon met.

“How much you got?”

“Whatever you want,” Mena replied.

“We'll take twenty keys,” Lorenzo said.

“You got it,” Mena said, and arrangements were made for the deal to go down later that day.

Lorenzo tried to find Pitera but wasn't able to. He knew he couldn't pull this off by himself. He went and found Frankie “Jupiter” Martini, a reef shark in Pitera's gang, to work with him and help him facilitate the rip-off.

Contrary to common belief, the Colombians were, for the most part, businessmen. They could be ruthless killers whose cruelty knew no bounds, but if you dealt with them straight, if you kept your word, they were good people with whom to do business. They were reliable, honest, on time, and their product was always superior to all others. When you bought coke from Colombians, you were getting it directly from the source. They did not cut their product. On a regular basis, the coke the Colombians sold, when in weight—packaged in neat, hard bricks—was 98 percent pure.

The two Colombian coke dealers Lorenzo and Frankie Jupiter would be meeting were Carlos Acosta and Fernando Aguilera. Both of them were in their early twenties, dark-skinned and thin, innocu
ous, would blend into any crowd anywhere. They sported short hair. Not in a million years would anyone make them as coke dealers. This was no accident. The fact that they could readily blend in so well was exactly why they were chosen in Colombia to do what they did here in Brooklyn. Unfortunately for them, they did not quite understand just how mean the mean streets of Brooklyn could truly be. They would soon learn a lesson that would be forever, indelibly seared into their brains.

Carlos and Fernando showed up on time at the rendezvous place, the shopping center at Shore Parkway and Bay Parkway. In that it was a hot day, they were both wearing T-shirts and shorts. They greeted Lorenzo, shook hands. Lorenzo assured them that he had the money. The Colombians assured him they had the drugs. He suggested they make the transfer in the garage of a nearby building. They agreed. Lorenzo got in the backseat. He had a revolver in his waistband, hidden by his shirttails. Unobserved, not knowing what lay ahead, the Colombians dutifully followed Lorenzo's instructions to the garage in a new, red-brick apartment building at 1445 Shore Parkway. Coincidentally, the building was only a block away from Pitera, Billy Bright, and Frank Gangi's stash house, where hundreds of pounds of pot were stored, waiting to be sold.

The cocaine was in the trunk of the Colombian's car. Cocky, wanting desperately to prove himself, Frankie Jupiter walked up to the Colombians' economy Ford. He was smiling. He was getting them, in his mind, to drop their guard. He said he wanted to see the coke. The Colombians said they wanted to see the money.

Lorenzo knew it was time to act. He'd been waiting for this moment for what seemed an eternity now. He had a clear shot of the back of both the Colombians' heads. With confidence and surety, lethal, he whipped out the gun, put it just behind the driver's head, and pulled the trigger…without hesitation, he moved right, took a bead, and fired again. Before they knew it, both the Colombians were dead, their brains destroyed.

In the garage, the gunshots were like deafening cannons, loud and resonating. Lorenzo and Frankie Jupiter wanted to get the hell out of there quickly. Now Lorenzo realized for the first time that the car was a stick shift.

“Fuck—it's a fucking stick shift! I can't drive a fucking stick shift…can you?” Lorenzo said.

“Fuck, no!” Frankie said.

They stood around the car with the two dead Colombians wondering what to do, scratching their asses. If it wasn't so sad, it would've been funny. Ultimately, they took the drugs from the car and hurried out as though they were two miscreants stealing food from a Korean grocery. They had plans to drive the car out of the garage and set it on fire, but now that wasn't possible, so there the Colombians stayed.

It didn't take long for a resident of the building to discover the bodies. The police were summoned. The garage was soon filled with forensic technicians, police photographers, and hard-eyed, stone-faced Brooklyn detectives from the Sixty-second Precinct on Bath Avenue.

When Pitera heard about what had gone down, he was pissed off. He thought that what happened was stupid and sloppy, amateurish, and he did not want his name or his reputation associated with it in any way. Angry, he and Gangi went looking for Lorenzo and found him at his apartment.

“What the fuck did you do?” Pitera wanted to know.

In a rush of words, Lorenzo told Pitera that they had no idea the Colombians drove a stick shift, that neither he nor Frankie knew how to drive a stick.

“It was just one of those things. It all happened so quickly,” he said.

“Did you get the drugs?” Pitera asked.

“Yeah, yeah, I did,” Lorenzo said, all proud, sure that this would get him to become an “official” member of the Mafia—his dream come true. What he had done was show that he was a buffoon and would never get made, Pitera knew.

Rather than the twenty kilos of cocaine that had been ordered, there were twelve kilos. Still, it was a big score. Pitera, to punish them, took nearly half of what they had taken—five kilos of high-grade, pure cocaine. Sold in grams, eight balls, and ounces, these five kilos would be worth a fortune.

Satiated, Pitera, the white shark of this particular part of the ocean, this reef, moved off and did what he had to do.

 

Ripping off drug dealers was to career criminals like taking candy from a baby. They, the dealers, had nowhere to turn to for justice—they could not go to the cops, they could not seek help with the conventional modes of protection set up to enforce the rule of law. They therefore set up their own means of protecting themselves, their interests, their drugs, and their cash. Still, if a dealer was murdered, the trail usually ended right there. As an example, after the murder of the two Colombians, nobody came looking for Carlos Acosta or Fernando Aguilera. Their identities died when the two Colombians were murdered.

Shortly after the rip-off of the two Colombians in the garage, Luis Mena went to Pitera with another setup. He said he knew of a “cash house” in Howard Beach in which vast sums of money were counted, packed, and shipped off to Colombia. Two women worked just about all day, every day, counting money, using professional counting equipment you would find in a bank, and making sure the money was sent when it should be. Mena said, “At any given time, there's a couple of million dollars cash there.”

Upon hearing this, Pitera's eyes lit up. He decided to put together a lean, mean crew to facilitate this rip-off. It would include himself, Luis Mena, Joe Dish Senatore, and Richie Leone, a stocky, brash man, dark-haired, about five ten…a dedicated Pitera devotee, who would do anything to turn a buck. Joe Dish was elderly, balding, gray-haired, and looked more like a cop than most cops. He had one talent and that was posing as a policeman to give access to bad guys wanting to
rob houses. Joe Dish not only looked a lot like a cop, he had the facial expressions, the voice, the physical demeanor down pat. He was proud of saying, “There's no house I can't get somebody into.”

Initially, the four men discussed the score at the Just Us Bar, got in Pitera's car, and drove over to Howard Beach to actually scope out the house. It was an unremarkable two-family residence on a quiet block in a quiet neighborhood. From the outside, you'd never be able to tell what was going on inside. Images of the house, the block, and neighborhood fresh in their minds, the crew drove back to the Just Us, sat down, and started talking about the actual robbery. Here, now, Pitera put something on the table that not only startled Mena and Joe Dish but made them back off, at first slowly, and then quickly. Pitera said that he did not want to leave any witnesses, that he wanted to kill the two women, cut them up in the tub, and bury them.

Luis Mena said that he was all for robbing them, perhaps beating them over the head, but not killing them. Joe Dish parroted what Mena said. This really pissed Pitera off. He felt he was doing the right thing—what was necessary. No matter how you cut it, he reasoned, if they were dead, it was over and done there and then. Both Joe Dish and Luis Mena refused. This caused an immediate gap, an animus, to form between Pitera, Dish, and Mena. Pitera felt that they were punks, they could not be trusted. Anyone, he believed, not willing to get blood on his hands did not deserve his respect, trust, confidence. Pitera had worked with Joe Dish several times before, with Dish posing as an NYPD detective to give Pitera and company access to rip off different drug dealers. These robberies had gone smoothly. No one had been murdered. All prospered. But that was then and this was now. The comfort Pitera had felt with Dish, with Mena, was now gone. He also felt that ripping off the cash house was no longer a good idea; that ultimately he'd make himself vulnerable; that people he didn't trust would know what had happened, which could boomerang and inevitably come back to haunt him.