Over the underworld jungle drums of La Cosa Nostra, word quickly spread from Montreal to Brooklyn, Gravesend, Bensonhurst, and Dyker Heights—that Vincent Lore had been busted; the Canadian godfather, Guy Mirot, took it on the lam and disappeared with the wind. Some $2 million was lost. It didn’t take long for the Bonanno family to also hear the news, which soon passed to Tommy Pitera. It was the kind of bust he dreaded. It involved organized crime figures, obviously good police work, infiltration, duplicity, informers, and wiretaps; it too involved the loss of a lot of money. Pitera knew, felt in his bones, that it also involved a rat.
In his mind, it always boiled down to rats. Oh, how he hated rats. The thought of them made his skin crawl. He resolved to run his crew tightly. He’d be more watchful, wary, and on guard of everybody around him; he would trust nobody, he vowed.
Pitera felt that Frank Gangi was becoming a concern. He felt that Gangi was “good people” he knew the womb he came from; he knew that Gangi’s blood was mafioso, but what worried him about Gangi was his drug use. His drinking. He would talk to him; he would straighten him out.
Meanwhile, Pitera applied good, sound business sense to the money he was making. He had this dream of building a spectacular, fantastic, palatial home for himself, and to that end, he had bought a town house in a nice residential area of Brooklyn known as Bay Ridge. It was on Ovington Avenue. From the corner it was a stone’s throw from the Narrows and the Verrazano Bridge, the bridge that connected Brooklyn to Pitera’s cemetery. It was a three-story, limestone property. He had the building completely gutted and was going to renovate it from the beams on up. He bought the best of everything for his home. He had marble brought in from Carrara, Italy. Pitera planned to buy more property that he could rent and make money off.
After the bust of Vincent Lore and Yves LaSalle in Canada, Jim Hunt and Tom Geisel’s reputation grew by leaps and bounds. They had brought down particularly bad, heinous fugitives, one a cop killer, one a made man, in addition to Guy Mirot, the bad guy in Canada. They had also managed to recover $2 million in cash. What was also startling and unusual was that they had managed to do all this in a matter of days. No long-drawn-out listening to wiretaps, no endless surveillance.
Now, on the ground again in Brooklyn, Hunt and Geisel were back to the raw basics. They wanted Pitera. They focused their energy on Pitera. Whatever they asked for, whatever they wanted, was quickly given to them. A task force of some thirteen agents would soon be trailing Pitera. Pitera sensed their presence. Once in a while he spotted a pair of the agents, but for the most part, they stayed out of sight. He had no idea from where they hailed, but he knew they were cops. He smelled the smoke, but he didn’t see the fire that was slowly surrounding him, slowly enveloping him.
By listening carefully to the jungle drums resonating through LCN, the DEA had come to believe that Pitera was not only selling large amounts of narcotics, but that he was killing people at random on a regular basis and chopping up their bodies for ready disposal.
Because of Pitera’s intimate involvement with LCN, the DEA decided to bring in the FBI. Normally, the DEA does not involve other agencies. They want to work cases the way they see them. They didn’t want to argue or debate or fight over jurisdictional issues and, most importantly, the most important, who got the limelight.
Likewise, Jim Hunt thought it would be a good idea to bring in the NYPD’s Organized Crime Unit. Perhaps more than any other governmental agency, they knew exactly what was going on in each family, who was who, what role everyone played. In that the task force now had two other agencies working hand in hand with the DEA, a virtual army was looking to nail Tommy Pitera to the cross. However, even with all this manpower, even with all the technical assistance, it was very hard to put together an airtight case against Pitera. Stymied, they watched Pitera meet with Frankie Lino, Anthony Spero, and other members of the upper echelon of the Bonanno family and go on walk-and-talks around Gravesend, speaking softly, Tommy most often covering his mouth as he spoke, making it impossible to record what he was saying. As one agent put it, “The fucking guy looks like he’s always playing a harmonica.”
The weak link—Jim kept wondering about the weak link. Judy Haimowitz, of course, would be helpful, but a good lawyer could minimize the impact she had on the case. They needed more. They wanted blood, bodies, large amounts of cocaine in Pitera’s hands.