With Pitera’s bar under surveillance and the DEA aware of his links to the Bonannos, Hunt’s boss Ken Feldman saw the potential for a big bust that would get some serious bad guys off the street. This combined with Jim Hunt’s impeccable reputation pretty much guaranteed Hunt would get whatever he asked for. One of the first things he requested was a nimble, quick-moving strike force made up of agents from Group 33 to bring down Pitera. His boss gave him the green light and soon he was using rotating shifts divided between sharp, highly experienced agents who would eventually monitor all of Pitera’s moves, who was going in and out of the Just Us Bar. The strike force also managed to get warrants to listen in on Pitera’s phone conversations. The team of DEA agents, each of whom Hunt had given a nickname, was made up of Tom “El Gordo” Geisel, Eric “Eric the Red” Stangeby, Bruce “Spike” Travers, Mike “Nunzio” Agrifolio, John “Big John” McKenna, Mike “Big Mike” Grabowski, John “Little John” Welch, John “Jethro” Wilson, and Violet Szeleczky. They quickly noticed Frank Gangi show up on the scene. Frank was hard not to notice. At six three, with his long beak of a nose and black fedora, he was easy to spot in the crowd.
Always suspicious and paranoid, Pitera was indeed a hard man to pin something on. As it turned out, he very rarely talked on the phone, let alone said anything incriminating. He drove many different cars, so, at that point, it would have been exceedingly difficult to install a listening device.
In that Pitera had been born and raised in Gravesend, he knew its streets, avenues, and alleyways, lots, and dead ends like the back of his hand. Pitera, as most made guys, could smell a cop a mile away. He noted the DEA agents, but he didn’t know who exactly they were—FBI, NYPD Organized Crime, DEA, or ATF. To continue going about his business, Pitera again took to donning disguises. He was a natural-born actor and could bend and twist his body any which way he wanted to. Like this, he often managed to slip away from his pursuers. On several occasions—while agents were sitting in front of his house, he’d leave the building dressed in his Hasidic disguise, moving slowly, bent over like a pretzel, and they did not know it was him. He also dressed as a woman and, so disguised, would boldly strut out of his house, take a left or right, and soon disappear. At this juncture, Pitera was not under surveillance 24/7, though as the case unfolded, as facts and names and details became known to the government, the DEA would become like white on rice to Tommy Pitera. Because Group 33 was the most active, aggressive of all DEA groups in the entire country, they were all always very busy—were working numerous cases with different ethnic groups at any given time. Cases at different stages of development had to be nurtured; witnesses and snitches, new evidence and new leads, would fall out of the sky and have to be tended to immediately. For Jim Hunt, however, the Pitera case was important.