Frank Gangi, tall, thin, and broad-shouldered, was having nightmares. As he slept, the horror of what he’d seen Pitera do plagued him. While he was awake, during the day, in the early evening, before he went to sleep at night, he still thought about what he’d seen—the methodical, cold dismemberment of a human being. There was a diabolical, macabre finality not only to what Pitera had done, but the way he had done it. Gangi had heard, over and over again, that Pitera had killed a lot of people. He started asking questions, and he came to believe that Pitera had murdered dozens of people. When he thought back and saw in his mind what Pitera had done, he readily thought that Pitera could have indeed killed a hundred people. Not only did he shoot Talal Siksik in the head in front of three people, but he had a burial ground all ready. He had a private cemetery. It was scary, unsettling. Who the fuck could do such a thing? he wondered. What was he made of? He didn’t seem—human. He wondered if he got some kind of sexual excitement, some kind of diabolical, sadistic charge…kick.
These were disconcerting questions he could not pose to anyone. He was supposed to be part of the ultimate machismo society—the Mafia. His father, cousins, uncles were dedicated mafiosi. The answer, for Frank Gangi, became more drinking and more drugs. He also chain-smoked and coughed incessantly. At the rate he was going, the way in which he treated himself, it didn’t seem as if he had too much time left on the planet.
Be that as it may, Gangi continued to work for and associate with Tommy Pitera. However, the fact that Gangi would not cut up the body, would not do what he was told, did not sit well with Pitera. He wanted submissive loyalty, given blindly and without question. What he asked of Gangi was unusual, he knew. However, with time, he hoped, Gangi would come around and do what he was told when he was told.
Marek Kucharsky was a piece of work. He had been a professional boxer, was tough and irrationally fearless. He came from the mean streets of Poland, a place where might was always right. Because he was a boxer, because he was tough, he could knock out anyone who faced him, anyone who challenged him. Still, as tough as he was, as stand-up as he was, he was struggling to make ends meet. He was, essentially, another nobody wanting to be a somebody.
Kucharsky had managed to steal sixty valuable Oriental rugs. The problem was he had no contacts for selling the rugs and turning them into cash. Marek knew Moussa Aliyan well. Moussa was an Israeli drug dealer, part of an Israeli cabal of dealers. He was a former member of, a lieutenant in, the Israeli army. He was fearless, highly motivated, arrogant to a fault, lived in a large, spacious loft on West Thirty-eighth Street in Manhattan. He and Pitera had a reasonably good working relationship. Pitera sold heroin to him; he in turn provided Pitera with large quantities of high-grade cocaine. Moussa and Gangi sometimes hung out together. They got high together.
Marek did not know that Moussa was having sex with his girlfriend. Moussa had lots of coke, and Marek’s girlfriend was a coke whore. It seemed that in the eighties every other woman you met was a coke whore. If you had coke, regardless of how you looked, you got pussy. Moussa agreed to see what he could do with the rugs. Moussa was not really planning on paying for the rugs. He knew they were valuable. He knew that sooner or later they could very well be cash money in his pocket. Meanwhile, he’d stall Marek—and hopefully never pay him.
In that Frank Gangi had become more and more friendly with Moussa as he sold more and more drugs for Pitera, Moussa ended up giving Gangi a dozen of the rugs. “If you can sell them, sell them. If you want to keep them, keep them,” he said. Not knowing anything about Persian carpets, Frank took them back to Brooklyn. He put them on the floors of his house. He liked the way they looked. He had no idea they were worth so much money.
Subsequently, Marek kept showing up at Moussa’s house looking for money, asking for money. Moussa stalled him, wouldn’t answer the door. He figured sooner or later the Polish boxer would go away. Moussa had grown fond of the rugs. He wanted to keep them. He had already sent some back to Israel so his mother and father could enjoy them. This all came to boil with a brutal murder. It was unplanned and happenstance. Pitera, Moussa, and Gangi were at Moussa’s apartment on the evening of October 6, 1987, drinking and talking. It was a warm night, though fall was in the air. Both Moussa and Gangi were doing lines of coke. Pitera did not do coke like that. When he did coke, he did it in the privacy of his own moment and he did very little. He was fond of saying, “I control it. It doesn’t control me.”
Suddenly Marek showed up. By now he had become aggressive and demanding. He wanted the rugs back or he wanted his money. He was yelling, pointing, and being disrespectful. Inevitably, Pitera and he started arguing. Gangi got up and tried to throw him out. That was a mistake. Gangi was suddenly fighting with a professional boxer. Though he had an unusual, wiry strength about him, he could not hold his own against a professional fighter. It was obvious that Gangi not only was losing the fight, but was going to get his ass kicked. This was something Pitera would never allow. Had he had a gun on him, he would have shot Kucharsky in the head. What he did have on him was a knife—a razor-sharp folding knife. He opened the knife and stabbed Marek in the side with tremendous force. The knife bit into the boxer like a rabid dog. Marek managed to get the knife out and close the blade on Tommy Pitera’s finger. The cut was so deep, his finger was almost severed. With that, the three of them got the boxer down on to the floor. Gangi got hold of the knife. Pitera demanded, yelled, that he cut the boxer’s throat. Without hesitation, Frank Gangi drew the blade across Marek’s throat. Blood squirted all over the place. He not only cut his throat but he cut one of the major arteries. As Marek lay in the throes of death, Moussa, Gangi, and Pitera stood over him. Pitera kicked the prostrate boxer several times—he was soon dead.
Immediately Pitera started talking about dismembering the body.
Again, Frank Gangi was confronted with this scenario—being told to cut up a body. This time, he would not punk out. This time, he thought, he would show Pitera exactly what he was made of, that he was tough, that he had what it took. The bleeding from Pitera’s cut had become so bad that he left to go get it stitched. Moussa and Gangi carried the boxer to the hot tub. They undressed him. Moussa produced a hacksaw. Leaning over, in an odd position, Gangi proceeded to cut off one of Marek’s legs. He had no knowledge of the joints, major muscles, and tendons and it was difficult. Not only that, but he just wasn’t up to the task. He thought it barbaric and cannibalistic.
“It was disgusting,” he would later tell a confidant.
Moussa finished the job. It was obvious that Moussa had cut up bodies before. He did it quickly and efficiently, with a savage vengeance that left Gangi somewhat speechless. Gangi wondered if he was a “pussy” Gangi wondered if he was weak. They finished, took what was left of the boxer, wrapped him in the rugs about which he had come, and placed his remains in large suitcases. Not only did he not get the money for his rugs, but they ended up becoming his death shroud.
Again, Frank Gangi found solace in coke and whiskey. Whiskey and coke. They were the answer to all problems.
Pitera returned with a large white bandage on his hand. He also had Joey Balzano in tow. Joey was another Brooklyn guy, rough around the edges, loyal to Pitera, a wannabe mafioso. He had not been made. Without preamble, they took the suitcases containing the remains of Marek and placed him in the trunk of the car that Marek had arrived in—his girlfriend’s car. The four men returned to Brooklyn and went to Joey’s house, where he grabbed shovels. They then proceeded to go back to the Belt Parkway and over the Verrazano Bridge. Gangi could not help but marvel at the efficient, ghastly ingenuity of Pitera’s little burying ritual. You had a body to get rid of—no problem.
They quickly arrived at the bird sanctuary. Tommy told Moussa and Gangi to bury the suitcases. They followed him to the spot where he wanted Marek placed. Leaving them with two flashlights, he returned to Marek’s girlfriend’s car and left. He wanted Gangi to be part and parcel of all that was done. He felt that if Gangi buried the body, he would always be as culpable and responsible as he, Pitera, was.
The bird sanctuary at night was shockingly quiet. There were no sounds. They began to dig the hole. Moussa then Gangi would dig. They made some ghoulish jokes. When they had gone down about three feet, they kicked and pushed the remains of Marek, the Polish boxer, into the hole. They closed the grave with excess dirt. A pair of bandit-eyed raccoons skulked about in the darkness. Gangi and Moussa made a half-assed effort to cover the spot. They both knew, however, no one would find his body. No one would find this place. Though it was smack-dab in the middle of New York, this sanctuary on Staten Island was a dark, secretive place with no human beings anywhere in sight.
“How many bodies you think he has buried here?” Gangi asked Moussa.
“A lot,” he responded, raising his eyebrows.
Within several minutes, Pitera pulled up, as if on cue.