John Gotti was fit to be tied when he learned that one of his closest friends, compatriots, the man he trusted most, was a rat—a stinking, fetid, beady-eyed rat. The guy’s name was Willie Boy Johnson. He was a large, rugged-looking man with a big stomach. He combed his thick head of black hair straight back. He was kind of a beat-up version of Jackie Gleason except that he had a broken nose that went off to the left, received in a fight he’d had in his teens. He walked with his shoulders back and his head high, with attitude. He was six feet tall and weighed over three hundred pounds—a big, burly man. Willie Boy Johnson was a genuine, two-fisted, tough guy, half Italian and half American Indian. He had known John Gotti since they were both kids. Not only was he an adept street fighter, but he was a brutal, lethal man who danced to his own rhythm. He was known as Willie Boy because he had been hanging out with older boys since he was a kid. In that he was not fully Italian, he could not be made, though when you looked at him, he looked Italian. When John Gotti found out that he was an FBI informant, that he had been wearing a wire, that information he’d garnered would be used against him, Gotti, he nearly blew a gasket. He yelled, cursed, broke furniture.
“Dead! I want him dead! Dead, dead, dead! You hear?” he told his people.
Oh, how John Gotti wished he could kill Willie Boy himself, take his throat in his hands and squeeze. But he knew that pleasure would not be his, that the first finger pointed would be at him. Gotti turned to his most trusted assassin—Eddie Lino. It cannot be emphasized enough here what a truly dangerous man Lino was. He was sly, calculating—lethal. There was never a murder contract he was given that wasn’t fulfilled. He was feared throughout all of Mafiadom. This is no exaggeration. Eddie Lino’s partner in the drug business had been John Gotti’s brother, Gene Gotti. In fact, the two were arrested at the same time, though they would be tried separately.
At this point, free on bail, Eddie Lino was John Gotti’s grim reaper. Now John told Lino that Willie Boy Johnson had to go. For Gotti, this was not only about business. This was personal. He had loved Willie Boy Johnson. When Gotti wanted to murder the man who had accidentally run over and killed his son Frank, he sent Willie Boy Johnson and others to go grab the guy, torture him, and kill him. For John Gotti, Willie Boy Johnson had been…family. Sitting opposite each other, Lino, dark-eyed and dark-haired, with the countenance of a dangerous, poisonous snake, stared at John Gotti and listened to the order. Nothing else had to be said. Eddie Lino got up and left. Willie Boy Johnson’s days were numbered.
As an indicator of just how highly Tommy Pitera was thought of in the underground society that the Mafia is, Eddie Lino turned to Tommy Pitera to help kill Willie Boy Johnson, according to U.S. attorney David Shapiro and DEA agent Jim Hunt. Lino trusted very few people but he trusted Pitera. Lino, a natural-born killer, saw in Pitera the same traits, the same attitude he, Lino, had…it was as though they had come from the same womb. This was an extremely important hit and here, Eddie Lino was wholeheartedly involving Tommy Pitera, making him an intricate part of the hit team. That’s what Eddie Lino was good at: not necessarily doing the killing himself, but arranging the details—where and how it happened.
Pleased, gleefully, Pitera listened to Eddie giving him the job. For Pitera, this was like receiving an Oscar. John Gotti, after all, was the capo di tutti capi, the boss of bosses, one of the most famous mob bosses in history. He was on the cover of Time magazine; he was the Teflon Don; he was Superman in that world. If, Pitera knew, he did this well, it would help his career immeasurably. Everyone would look up to him, point at him. He would be an omnipotent presence in La Cosa Nostra.
“I’m honored,” Pitera said, and went about the business at hand—killing Willie Boy Johnson, a seasoned killer himself. Before, however, Pitera could do the job, he had to get permission from his boss—Bonanno capo Frankie Lino. Lino, in turn, went to the underboss of the family, Anthony Spero. Both gave permission for Pitera to fill the contract. This would, they both knew, bolster the relationship between the Bonannos and the Gambinos. It was a good thing.
At six A.M. on the morning of August 29, 1988, Willie Boy Johnson nonchalantly left his house, took a right, and began walking. He was wearing dungarees and a jean shirt. On his block, there was a two-story house being built, a construction site. As he walked, he saw Tommy Pitera suddenly step out from behind a mound of sand. He immediately knew what was up. Seemingly out of nowhere, Pitera’s trusted aide-de-camp, Kojak Giattino, and the premiere assassin in the Gambino family, Eddie Lino, appeared with guns in hand. Seemingly as one, all three shot at the large fleeing form of Willie Boy Johnson. Calmly, Pitera knelt down and positioned himself, cupped his left hand in his right hand, took careful aim, and drilled Johnson with holes. Johnson went down, shot some ten times. Pitera had used a special bullet on him, a Glaser round, the one he had used on Phyllis Burdi. Each of the Glaser rounds did horrific damage to the inside of Johnson’s body. As Johnson’s blood pooled on the hot August street, Pitera and Kojak spread a link of spikes across the street and they got in a stolen car and pulled away. The spikes would prevent anyone from following them and indicated the wide expanse of Pitera’s killing acumen.
Thus Willie Boy Johnson was killed and Tommy Pitera acquired a new twenty-four-karat-gold stature within the tight fraternity of La Cosa Nostra—an Oscar for murder.
Later, when John Gotti learned that Willie Boy Johnson was dead, he was pleased. It would be just a matter of time before he rewarded Pitera handsomely.
It didn’t take long for Jim Hunt and Tommy Geisel to hear, by way of the Brooklyn jungle drums, that Tommy Pitera had taken out Willie Boy Johnson, known on the street as “the Indian.” A rumor, Hunt knew, was one thing…proof was another.