One would think, considering how quickly Pitera killed, that he was invincible, that all his troubles could be solved with murder. Murder was like a coat of armor that Pitera constantly wore.
Surely, nothing could hurt him.
If Pitera had a weakness, though, it was Celeste LiPari. No matter how many times he confronted her, she continued to do drugs. No matter how many fights they had, she did drugs. Still, he did not believe in hitting women. She caused him pain. She caused him turmoil. He felt, sooner or later, that her drug use would cause her to get involved with other men, other women, scenarios that would embarrass him. After all, he had an image, a profile to maintain. He was a man of respect. What kind of man of respect had a girlfriend who was abusing drugs in after-hours clubs and being put upon and hit on by every coked-up, horny Tom, Dick, and Harry, every guido in Brooklyn? He knew for a fact that Phyllis Burdi was a loose woman—a whore. He knew she was having sexual relations with half the New York Mafia. He knew, too, that one of her lovers was Eddie Lino. Eddie and Tommy were friends. They genuinely liked each other. They did business together. And here was Phyllis Burdi, the biggest puttana in all of Brooklyn, hanging out with his beloved Celeste.
By way of Frank Gangi, Tommy sent word to Phyllis over and over—stay away from Celeste; stop hanging out with Celeste; stop getting high with Celeste! It did no good. He kept hearing that the two were seen here and there and everywhere.
Murder…Pitera’s remedy for all problems, became a possible solution. Pitera had a meeting with Gangi in the Just Us Bar.
“Look,” Pitera said, “you have to try to understand this situation. I do not, do NOT want Phyllis hanging out with Celeste. It’s bad. I’m hearing things. Everyone knows.” He shook his head from side to side, dismayed, disgusted.
Frank wanted to tell him he should be talking to Celeste, not him. It was Celeste who was doing the drugs. It was Celeste, he knew, who often asked him if he had some coke on him. He’d run into her at different bars and after-hours clubs and the first thing out of Celeste’s mouth was, “You got any blow?” Gangi knew that Phyllis Burdi was promiscuous, but she was also a coke whore. She not only did coke, she did heroin, too. What Gangi would have liked to say to Pitera and what he did say were two radically different things. He had come to believe that Pitera was an out-of-control psychopath. The last thing he wanted to do was insult him, to get him angry.
“I’ll find her,” Frank said. “I’ll talk to her again.”
With that, Gangi called Phyllis and met her at a bar near her house. They sat on stools at the bar and ordered drinks.
“Phyllis…how do I say this? I’ve said this so many times to you already. You have to stop hanging out with Celeste. Tommy knows. He’s got people all over Brooklyn telling him things; he’s got spies everywhere.”
Phyllis raised her eyes. She had heard this before.
“Look,” she said, “I don’t force Celeste to do anything. She calls me, she wants to come by, she wants to go out. She’s my girlfriend. What am I supposed to do? Say, ‘I can’t hang out with you because your boyfriend doesn’t like me’? She knows a lot of guys. They give her drugs.”
Gangi shook his head back and forth. He saw no good coming from this. He tried another tactic.
“Look, Pitera is a dangerous dude. You get this guy mad at you—it’ll be very bad. There’s no telling what he’ll do. I’m talking to you as a friend now. I care about you. I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
“Get hurt for what? I haven’t done anything. Celeste is a strong-willed woman. Nobody can make this girl do anything.” She laughed. “If he can’t make her stop getting high, how am I supposed to stop her from getting high? The problem is with her. It’s not with me,” she said.
Gangi knew she was right, but that didn’t necessarily matter. If Pitera got it in his head that she was corrupting the woman he loved, it would be catastrophic for her. This he knew. This everyone in Brooklyn knew.
Brooklyn, as large a borough as it was, was really a cluster of small communities and neighborhoods in which everyone knew one another. People from different hoods, many of whom were La Cosa Nostra associated, were mobile and traveled to clubs all across the borough. Not only legitimate clubs but after-hours ones as well. All the after-hours clubs were mob run. The cops knew about them; they were paid off to look the other way. In all the after-hours clubs, the use of cocaine and other drugs was the norm, not the exception. After all, who would be up at four or five in the morning, dancing and partying up a storm, other than those on various stimulants? There were after-hours clubs in Coney Island, Bensonhurst, South Brooklyn, Flatbush, Gravesend, and they were all frequented by LCN.
After several drinks that night, Gangi and Phyllis did a few lines of cocaine, went back to his apartment, and had sex. In some strange way, in the back of his mind, Gangi felt guilty for being intimate with her. He felt in his bones, somewhere deep inside, that something horrible could happen, something he, if he knew better, could stop. He saw the dark skies. He remembered Pitera’s burial grounds, the macabre solitude, the cryptlike silence, the eerie stillness of the sanctuary in the middle of the night. He heard the sound of the shovels cutting the earth; he heard the meaty thump of the bodies being thrown into the holes. No matter how hard he tried to forget about it, he couldn’t. Unlike Pitera, Frank Gangi was not made of stone.