Mechanized, organized, as succinct as a well-run military operation, the Pitera task force gathered at eight A.M. the following morning.
Again, the skies were clear. The birds that dwelt in the sanctuary made a racket. They were used to peace and quiet. They did not like the hurly-burly gathering around their homes. Above, a pair of red-tailed hawks circled over the sanctuary, hunting for prey, hunting the abundance of food they knew lived below.
It was decided that the first thing the strike force would do was bring in cadaver dogs. Given the circumstances, this seemed logical. When the dogs arrived, unremarkable mutts anxious to please, anxious to find the rotting bodies they would receive rewards for, they made their way into the sanctuary. They moved north and south and east and west in prearranged grids. This went on all that day to no avail. Everyone there was sure that if there were bodies, these dogs would find them; they had proven themselves in the past.
Nothing.
Not willing to accept defeat, the task force brought the dogs in a second day. They worked slower but still found nothing.
How, the task force members wondered, could the dogs miss the scent? Some of the victims here were buried several months ago. Some of the victims one year, some two or even three years ago. Surely, the stench of death, the stench of putrid meat, organs, should still have been real and tangible—outright offensive—but the cadaver dogs seemed oblivious.
Later, at a meeting back in Manhattan at the DEA’s office on West Fifty-seventh Street, the task force members sat down and brainstormed some more. They questioned the informer’s validity. They discussed the probability of his being mistaken about the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge. They consulted maps to see if there were other bird sanctuaries nearby, to see if there was another logical explanation. There wasn’t.
One of the task force members talked about a machine a man in California had developed that could find bodies. His name was George Reynolds. They kicked the idea around of bringing him out, and then contacted Reynolds. He assured them seven ways from Sunday that the machine worked. It had proven itself over and over again, he said. Colleagues attested to the machine’s working. At great expense, Reynolds and his machine were brought to New York and driven out to the bird sanctuary. There was excitement in the air. Finally they’d have the proof, finally they’d have the sorrowful remnants of Pitera’s handiwork. As some thirty members of the Pitera task force looked on, the man and his machine searched for bodies. It was hot and humid. Everyone was sweating. The crows were back and they made an awful racket. All that day, the man diligently searched and he, too, found nothing. Jim Hunt soon gave him the boot and sent him back to California.
This, combined with the heat, combined with the failure of the informer and the dogs, was discouraging. Was the informer pulling their legs; would he try to cut himself a deal for crimes he committed that they, at this point, knew nothing about?
These were not, however, the type of people who gave up easily. They were all alpha males and females, tenacious investigators, the type that would not let go. They were experienced—the best of the best.
Often with police work, it’s more than facts and figures, names and places, the who, what, when, where, and why. Often it’s just a gut feeling, something deep inside, that points the way, that has voice and direction of its own. And almost all of them there, working the sanctuary, the Pitera case, felt in their gut that they were on the right trail; felt in their gut that they had discovered the Jeffrey Dahmer of the Mafia—that they had discovered a serial killer who was a capo in a Mafia family, and they would work this case tirelessly, to the very end, wherever it took them.
The following day, each of the task force members, wearing a white jumpsuit, was back at the sanctuary. They were now doing it the old-fashioned way, the way their fathers and grandfathers had looked for bodies. They secured four-foot-long metal probes pointed at one end and with a five-inch handle at the other that would enable the task force to literally probe the ground.
Again, going back to basics, they drew precise, neat grids on different sections of the sanctuary, and working two and a half feet from one another’s shoulders, they began to walk in a straight line, every foot or so jabbing the probes into the ground. Luckily for them the dirt was soft and readily accepted the probes. For all that day, back and forth, quiet and solemn, a joke now and then—mostly macabre ones—the strike force moved. Toward the end of the day, as the fiery June sun began to set, the strike force prepared to break for the night. They had come across rabbits and raccoons, skunks and weasels, but no bodies.
An NYPD detective out of the Brooklyn Racket Squad named Bobby Pavone made his way away from the group, sat down on a rock, and lit up a cigarette. He, like most of the law enforcement there that day, believed that there were bodies buried here. He had been hearing for years rumors about the Mafia burying victims out on Staten Island. Why not here? It seemed the perfect place. There wasn’t a house or human being anywhere nearby. It struck him as ironic that the federal government had created, in a very real sense, a place where the Mafia was able to hide bodies, bodies that would never be found because the EPA—Environmental Protection Agency—wouldn’t allow the birds to be disturbed.
Slowly, reservedly, Bobby moved back toward the group, a tall, wiry, resolute individual. He kind of haphazardly, though pensively, probed as he went, pushed down, found nothing, withdrew the probe. He moved some twenty feet when the probe suddenly struck something hard but giving. He pulled out the probe, pushed it back down, pulled it out, pushed it back in still again…something was there; something not indigenous to the ground.
“Hey! Hey! Over here!” He signaled to the others. They moved toward him. “Yo! I think I’ve got one.”