It was one of those pleasant summer nights when people sit on stoops in beach chairs in front of their houses all over Brooklyn, just before night falls, during those fifteen or so minutes called dusk, an abundance of ladybugs filling the air. It was such a lovely evening that the patrons of the Just Us came outside and were sitting on car fenders in front of the bar. There was Tommy Pitera, the fierce war captain Eddie Lino, and Frank “Ruby” Rubino. Frank Rubino was a burly, squat, tough Italian. He drove a brand-new gray Jaguar. Up until that date, he had a good relationship with Eddie Lino; they were partners in the heroin business. Now the good days were gone. As is often the way of the Mafia, when they are about to kill someone, they are all smiling and friendly and warm, offering drinks and sumptuous dinners.
Between Tommy Pitera and Eddie Lino, you’d be hard-pressed to find a meaner pair in all of La Cosa Nostra, either in the United States or in Sicily. Though they were from two different families, they often worked together, were good personal friends, had respect for each other. Eddie Lino was the go-to guy for heroin for the Gambino crime family. But, interestingly, all of what Eddie Lino did was, of course, off the record, off the books. His drug dealing was so blatant, so amazingly profitable, that for the longest time he could not get made—officially inducted into the Gambino family. Paul Castellano outright refused to have him made because of his immersion in the selling of heroin. It was only after John Gotti had Castellano murdered in front of Sparks Steak House that Eddie Lino was finally made and soon thereafter given his own borgata…crew. Eddie Lino and John Gotti were close. They were more like brothers than friends.
Though John Gotti never had anything to do with the actual selling of drugs, never touched drugs, never saw drugs, he well knew what Lino was doing, what Lino was about, and he gave his blessings. Gotti, like everyone else in La Cosa Nostra, quietly pocketed a fortune as he silently, discreetly, looked the other way, north and south and east and west, as Lino went about the business of wholesaling large amounts of heroin. Lino and John Gotti’s bond was so great that when, a little way down the road, Anthony Gaspipe Casso was given the assignment of killing John Gotti for murdering Paul Castellano without the killing being sanctioned, the first person he took out was Eddie Lino. On November 6, 1990, Anthony Casso sent crooked NYPD detectives Stephen Caracappa and Louis Eppolito to do the job. Lino was so feared, such an adept killer himself, that Casso used cops to take him out.
Apparently, Lino had gotten wind that Frank Rubino had turned bad. Lino wanted him dead and he asked his pal Tommy to do the job. At this point, Tommy had garnered a reputation within La Cosa Nostra as an amazingly adept, efficient killer. His reputation had grown to such a degree that people were calling him—behind his back—“wacko.” This had less to do with his outward appearance than with how readily he killed and the fact that he, just as readily, cut people up and buried them; he had private burial grounds on Long Island and Staten Island.
Tall and gangly, buzzed on coke, Frank Gangi now turned the corner and began walking toward Lino, Pitera, and Rubino. Outgoing and gregarious, Gangi was about to approach them when Pitera waved him away with a curt movement of his icy blue-gray eyes.
NIXIT-SCRAM, Pitera silently said with his eyes. Gangi got the message. He walked into the bar, ignoring the three. Gangi did not know what was happening, but considering that Rubino was standing between Pitera and Lino, a lethal pair of bookends, it didn’t look good for Ruby.
Soon Lino, Pitera, and Rubino got into Rubino’s gray Jaguar and drove away. Rubino was driving. Lino was sitting in the passenger seat. They were some four blocks away from the bar when Lino told Rubino to pull over, which he readily did. The moment he put the car in park, Pitera pulled out an automatic with a silencer on it and shot Rubino in the back of the head, killing him. Even though this was Gravesend, Brooklyn, ground zero for the Mafia, what Pitera had just done was audacious. The fledgling dragon that had once been inside Pitera had grown to monstrous proportions, now had long scales…was fire-breathing, invincible. In that Pitera, somewhat obsessively, collected jewelry from his victims, he ripped a gold necklace with a fish medallion off of Rubino and he and Lino got out of the car and left Rubino there like that for all to see, know, and be horrified by.
This type of killing, so brazen and so public, would inevitably come back to haunt La Cosa Nostra. It caused intense police scrutiny, media attention, and horrified an innocent public. It was one of those times when it seemed as though these two men, Lino and Pitera, felt that they had a holy mandate to kill whom they wanted when they wanted and blatantly leave bodies wherever the hell they pleased. As a mafioso recently said, it was “in bad taste.”
Murder, successfully killing people and breaking the law on a regular basis, as all La Cosa Nostra does as a matter of course, has to do with luck. No matter how well planned, no matter how thoroughly thought out any given crime is, any given murder, without luck, it can fail—and fail miserably. Considering how often the DEA was following Pitera, it’s a wonder they didn’t see him that night, hanging out in front of the bar, drive off and kill Frank Rubino. Luck, apparently, was with Pitera and Eddie Lino that night.
Interestingly, a short time later, Pitera’s luck slowly began to turn. He now had a new girlfriend. Her name was Barbara Lambrose. She bore a distinct resemblance to Celeste. She had a fourteen-year-old son, a good-looking, athletic teenager but he was wired and destined for trouble. He didn’t do well in school; he didn’t listen to his mother; he was starting to use drugs. Pitera took a liking to the boy, whose name was Joey. Today, Pitera was driving his Oldsmobile. The feds had recently managed to bug this car. Presumably because he had Joey in the car that day, neither the radio was on nor was there static. Apparently, Joey’s behavior was giving his mother grief and she was complaining to Pitera, asking him to talk to her son.
“Joey…you know,” Pitera began, “your mother’s a very nice lady. She’s had it hard. There’s no reason for you to give her more grief. I’m from the street. I’m telling it like it is. You gotta shape up. You gotta be…you gotta stay away from drugs. Drugs will make you lose control. You never want to lose control. You see me? I never lose control. You have a mother that loves you and cares for you. You have to show her respect.”
And Pitera went on to lecture the boy on staying out of trouble, on not using drugs, on doing well in school. Then the boy said something that was inaudible to the agents and Pitera’s response shocked and stunned the listening agents:
“If you kill somebody,” he said, “you’ve got to cut the lungs and open the stomach. If you do that, the body can sink. If you don’t do that, it will float and it will be found.”
Tommy Geisel and Jim Hunt looked at each other.
This would be helpful, they knew, in a court of law, but it was not definitive evidence as such. It would bolster the contentions, the allegations, and the evidence they did have, but in reality, Pitera could have just been making this up. It wasn’t proof in and of itself, though it certainly cast Pitera in a bad light.