Some people feel comfortable handling guns, some don’t. Blindfolded, some can take apart a gun and put it back together again. Without blindfolds, some can’t begin to take apart a gun.
Frank Gangi was one of those people who didn’t like guns, had no affinity for them. Though he knew them as an intricate part of his trade, a necessary tool, he did not handle them well; he wasn’t a good shot, though he coveted the power a gun had, how readily and rapidly it could steal away a human life. Though Gangi didn’t like them, he admired them from afar. Trying to overcome this impediment, he often held a gun while lounging around his house, watching television. Someone had told him, actually Tommy told him, that the gun should be an extension of his body.
“You should be as comfortable with your gun, handling it, as you should be comfortable with your own dick, handling it.”
The problem was that while doing this impromptu exercise one day at the house of one of his girlfriends, a tough, talking out of the side of her mouth guidette named Patty Scifo, known as “Patty Girl,” Frank accidentally pulled the trigger of his pistol and inadvertently shot himself in the leg. He stood up and jumped around the room, bleeding. He called a friend by the name of Andy Jakakis, then called the Just Us and asked Pitera to come over.
Andy Jakakis was an old-school tough guy who wasn’t really tough at all. He was gray and balding, thin-shouldered, though he walked with a histrionic, defiant swagger, as if he were six foot five and the baddest badass in the jungle. Gangi had first met Andy while doing time for the shooting he and Billy Bright were involved in—the murder of Arthur Guvenaro. Because Andy was in his late fifties and Frank in his mid-twenties, Andy kind of became a father figure to the young Gangi. He watched over Gangi; he advised him as to the different protocols mandated in jail—they became friends. Gangi grew so fond of Andy that when he had an opportunity to help him by making a witness in the case against Jakakis change his testimony, Gangi pulled some Mafia strings and made it so the witness never showed up in court. Upon Andy’s release, he started hanging around Gangi, stayed at his house, and became a kind of gofer-confidant. Andy was under the impression that Gangi was a big-time mafioso; he knew who Gangi’s relatives were—he knew, too, that Gangi was now hooked up with Tommy Pitera. Andy felt an unusual, somewhat unhealthy closeness to Gangi. He did not like Pitera.
He was fond of saying, “God put me on this earth to protect Frank Gangi.”
So the day Frank shot himself, Andy showed up all concerned, all worried, his brow knit. Gangi made up a story of being shot at by people who owed him money. With that, Pitera knocked on the door. Being an expert on wounds and injuries, Pitera looked at the bullet hole with a cold, clinical eye. He then called a gynecologist, the brother of a friend named Gerald Marino, who came over. Mafia members were often in contact with doctors who would tend to gunshot wounds and not report them as mandated by hospitals and the law. Marino said the bullet had not struck bone. The doctor, a small, nerdy, blond-haired man, cleaned and dressed the wound, collected some money, and left.
Andy, disturbed by the incident, dismayed by the fact that someone would shoot his idol, was walking back and forth, threatening, cursing to himself. He got on Pitera’s nerves; this was an easy thing to do. Pitera didn’t like people and most everyone annoyed him. He turned to Andy and said, “Calm down. Be quiet. You’re getting on my nerves. Sit down.” He pointed to a chair.
Defiance about his eyes, defiance in his body English, Andy said, “Hey, I don’t have to listen to you—you’re not my boss. I don’t take orders from you. You understand? I only listen to Frank—understand?”
This galled Pitera to no end. He demanded respect, and for the most part, people complied and acted cowed around him. Waiters fawned over him. Other wiseguys gave Pitera a wide berth, and here was this Andy guy defiantly pointing his unmanicured finger at him.
As hard as this might be to believe for a civilian, for a layperson, Andy had just killed himself. There was no way that he, Pitera, would allow Andy Jakakis to speak to him like that in front of other people. Over the coming days, Tommy Pitera talked, somewhat insistently, about killing Andy Jakakis. He told Gangi that he had to go; he told Gangi that he wouldn’t rest until he was dead.
“I’m not only going to kill him,” he said in his Minnie Mouse voice, “I’m going to torture him on the dance floor of Overstreets.”
This literally nauseated Gangi. He was fond of Andy—he was like a surrogate father to him. He knew Andy meant nothing by what he had said to Pitera. He was just a foolish old man who had said something out of line. There was no reason in the world for him to die, for him to be tortured!
Immediately, Gangi tried to talk Pitera out of the killing, but Pitera wouldn’t hear it. He wouldn’t rest until Andy was dead. More than ever Gangi began thinking of Pitera as an irrational, out-of-control, unhinged psychopath. He began thinking that Pitera should be locked up in a mental institution. Be that as it may, Pitera was free and in charge and he wanted blood. He was like a vampire who had an insatiable need, an overwhelming desire, for blood.
This drew Frank Gangi further into the numbing world of alcohol and drug abuse. His mind, his soul, couldn’t deal with the hardcore realities of what Tommy Pitera was all about…images of what he had done to Phyllis Burdi often filled the pink insides of his closed eyelids. The smell of her murder, the blood, the torn flesh came to him whether he wanted it to or not. He was haunted by what he had seen. When the images became too much, he turned to a bottle of whiskey, long, glistening lines of cocaine; the magical mystery tour of numbed oblivion that is freebasing.
Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble…
loomed large and real on the near horizon.
Gangi was stuck between a rock and a hard place. The way he saw it through his stoned eyes was like this—either he killed Pitera or he killed Andy Jakakis. Killing Pitera, he knew, would be no small task. Pitera seemed to see all things at once at a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree angle. He was as quick as a rattlesnake; he, Gangi believed, had a supernatural sixth sense that would make him not only hard to kill but near impossible to kill. He didn’t drink, Gangi knew. Gangi never saw him high, never saw him vulnerable. As he thought about killing him, he realized that Pitera always sat with his back to the wall, that when in the car, he sat in the backseat, that he never let anybody sit behind him. It was as though he was expecting someone to try to kill him and he had built an invincible wall around himself. Just the thought of trying to bring a gun up to Pitera’s head gave Gangi the willies. His hands shook—his mouth got dry; his stomach turned to knots. The only way he could escape this conundrum was more drink, whiskey, coke. Frank Gangi was no longer getting high to have fun, to socialize, to party. He was getting high to escape the realities of life as he knew it.
Andy’s gotta die, he thought. When he accepted that reality, when he bought into the steps killing Andy involved, it devastated him. He never wanted to hurt Andy. He’d kill himself before he let Andy be tortured. He ultimately resolved in his heart, in his mind, and in his soul for what he felt were the right reasons, to kill Andy, to kill his surrogate father—to kill one of the few friends he ever had.
It was now mid-June 1988. The weather that June was unseasonably warm and humid. Though Gravesend was close to Coney Island, little breeze came from the ocean and the air was thick and hot and unpleasant. A former boyfriend of Judy Haimowitz’s, Toby Profetto, a close friend of Gangi’s, accompanied Frank this night.
Gangi had told Toby about his predicament. Toby agreed to help Frank with this most difficult of tasks. Toby was a medium-size, muscular dude with curly hair, a typical Brooklyn wannabe. His idea of success in life was to be inducted into one of the five families. Toby was also a killer. He was one of those rare people who could take a human life as readily as step on an ant. That night, Profetto and Gangi went out on a mission, a mission that had little reward, a mission that would only result in the death of an old man who couldn’t really hurt a fly.
“Okay,” Gangi said. “When the right time comes, I’ll turn up the music real loud, and we’ll do it.”
“Okay,” came the answer, cold and detached, as though it came from the mouth of a dummy on a ventriloquist’s lap.
This dynamic duo picked up Andy Jakakis at a popular pizzeria called Spumoni Gardens on Eighty-sixth Street. Gangi was driving. Andy sat in the passenger seat. Toby was sitting directly behind him. Gangi took a right onto West Eleventh Street. This was a quiet, desolate street. On the right were homes and on the left were train tracks. A song by the Rolling Stones came on, “Start Me Up.”
“I like this song,” Frank said, turning up the volume louder and louder and louder still.
Moving to the beat, Andy Jakakis had no idea the grim reaper was in the backseat. Without hesitation, Toby put the gun against Andy’s head and fired. The bullet tore through his skull, hit his forehead, bounced back and zigzagged around his brain. Gangi pulled over to the curb. He could see a massive wound on Andy’s forehead. Blood came from it, but the bullet did not burst out of his flesh. Mind you, this was the middle of the day. There were few people about. Gangi took a right, a left, and made his way over to an empty lot on Bay Fiftieth Street. This part of Bay Fiftieth hadn’t been fully developed yet and Gangi got it in his head to leave the body right there in a lot in broad daylight. In his panic, in his adrenaline rush, he didn’t realize that capo Todo Marable lived just opposite this lot. Todo was a feared captain in the Bonanno family. As they hurried the body out of the car and into high grass in the lot, one of Andy’s shoes came off and fell down by the passenger seat. When they got back to the car, Gangi saw the shoe and pushed it out onto the curb.
No matter how you cut it, this would not sit well with Todo. This was a personal offense. It was like taking a dump on his front door. No mafioso anywhere in the world would stand for such a thing. His wife lived here. His children lived here.
Trouble was in the air.
In the stifling heat of that summer, it didn’t take long for the body to emit a horrific odor that was soon noticed and the body was discovered. The police were summoned. Big crowds gathered around the lot, pointing, staring, wondering, speculating.
Who the hell would do such a thing?
When Todo Marable found out a body had been left across the street from his home, that a shoe belonging to the body had been left on the curb, he wondered what it meant. Surely it was some kind of message.
But a message of what? Who, he and all members of his borgata wondered, would do such a thing?
Why would they do such a thing?
What did the shoe mean? they all wondered.
Immediately the jungle drums of the Mafia started resounding and the question was: Who left a body with one shoe near Todo’s house? What did it mean?
When Pitera got the news that Andy was dead, he was pleased. He felt that for the first time, Gangi had acted like a man, that he had stepped up to the bat and done what he was supposed to do. Inadvertently, this murder brought Pitera closer to Gangi. He felt a warmth toward Gangi he hadn’t felt for him before.