Shlomo Mendelsohn, also known as Sammy, was your basic lowlife, drug-dealing, hustling wannabe gangster. He was hooked up with the Israeli drug cartel that operated, for the most part, out of a slew of different lofts they owned in the West Thirties in Manhattan in the flower district. He was tall with high cheekbones, a strong jawline, and a thick head of straight, black hair. He was so good-looking that he could have readily been a model or a leading man. He had stupidly gotten busted selling several ounces of cocaine to an undercover DEA agent and was now stewing in jail, pacing, mad at the world. Jail wasn’t for him. He’d find a way to get out of this trouble. He’d be clever, not like all the other fools around him. Shlomo Mendelsohn would find a way to get out of this mess.
Shlomo was one of those people on the outside of the war on drugs, an on-again, off-again player who, apparently, never heard—if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.
WHAT, he racked his brain, could he give up? WHO could he give up to get out of jail? His mind kept going back to one person and one person only—the worst criminal he knew of. The Israelis he knew were drug dealers and weren’t even in the same category as the person he was thinking of. He paced his cell like a caged rat. He knew if he could get his freedom, he’d ultimately be able to leave the country, go back to Israel, and there he would be insulated and protected…he was a Jew. The Jews protected their own. In Israel, he would blend in, become one of many.
Having made up his mind that he would become an informer, he reached out to law enforcement. What Shlomo knew, what Shlomo had to say, was passed along and ended up on the desk of Jim Hunt. Hunt and federal prosecutor David Shapiro went to visit Shlomo in the Metropolitan Correction Center (MCC.) David Shapiro was a thin athletic man who stood about five nine, a magna cum laude graduate of the State University of New York at Buffalo. He was thorough, likable, and had a profound understanding of the law and all its intricate nuances and shadings. Shapiro was regarded by Hunt and Geisel and most other agents and prosecutors as the best trial attorney in the Eastern District of New York. Neither Jim nor David Shapiro was impressed with Shlomo. Often Jim came into contact with people who had gotten themselves into trouble and were now offering up information. Often, they were, in plain English, full of shit, so whenever Jim met a person in prison looking to give up something, he was wary, skeptical.
Doubtful, Jim Hunt listened to what Shlomo had to say: “I know a real important guy in the Mafia who kills people. He’s also a big drug dealer. I’ll tell you everything I know; I’ll testify in court…but I want to go home. I want to go back to Israel. If you do that for me, I’ll give you this guy.”
Jim stared at him and he stared back. Shlomo added conspiratorially, as though he knew where the Holy Grail was hidden, “He buries people. He kills them, cuts them up, and then buries them,” he said.
Alarms went off inside Jim’s head. Red lights began spinning.
“What’s his name?” Jim asked.
“You’ve got to first guarantee me—”
“Hold on a minute. Nobody can guarantee you anything. If what you say is true, if you help us from the beginning to the end, we can recommend that you’ll get a good deal. We can recommend that you be extradited to Israel. We don’t make guarantees.”
Shlomo thought this over. He stared at the two government men. Resolutely, Jim stared back. He was not playing poker. What he said was true.
“His name is Tommy Pitera,” Shlomo said, and Jim felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Jim knew cases were frequently broken by information coming from the most unlikely of places, suddenly falling from the sky. Just the fact that Shlomo knew Pitera’s name was very interesting. Jim already knew that people in Pitera’s crew, Pitera himself, were dealing with the Israeli Mafia, buying drugs from them. They, both the DEA and the U.S. Justice Department, were interested. They reached out to Shlomo’s attorneys and a tentative deal was struck.
Shlomo was allowed out of MCC, placed in the Federal Witness Protection Program. During debriefings, he told members of Group 33, Jim Hunt, and Tommy Geisel what he knew about Tommy Pitera. He said he had been in the home of Moussa Aliyan when drug transactions went down during which Pitera bought big amounts of cocaine from Aliyan. He said, more importantly, more shockingly, that he was there when Tommy Pitera killed Talal Siksik. Pitera not only killed him, he said, but he then “put the body in the bathtub, got undressed, stepped into the bathtub naked, and methodically cut the body into pieces. Sick fucking stuff. I never saw a thing like it,” he said, shaking his head in sincere dismay.
These words fit together like the last pieces of an intricate puzzle. Not only did Jim believe what Shlomo had just said, but it so fit the modus operandi of Pitera that Jim suddenly realized he was sitting with a man who had actually seen Pitera cut a body into six pieces. This was not only shocking and eye-opening, but it might very well be the weak link, the Achilles’ heel they’d been looking for. With his intelligent, icy blue-green eyes, Jim stared at Shlomo; he believed every word Shlomo said. Jim was an astute judge of character—especially characters coming from the street. He was so perceptive and adept at reading people, informers, that he could tell the truth from bullshit as readily as a lie detector. Jim had heard through the jungle grapevine that ran throughout all of Brooklyn that Pitera was, in fact, cutting up people he killed.
“So, you were there?” Jim asked.
“I was there,” Shlomo confessed. “Most horrible fucking thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life. And he did it with such…ease. It didn’t bother him at all. It was like he was just taking a…a shower.”
“Step-by-step, I want you to tell me everything you saw,” Jim said. And Shlomo ran down the whole evening he spent at Siksik’s house.
When Shlomo finished, Jim said, “This place you went to bury the body…where…was it?”
“Staten Island,” Shlomo said, fear of Pitera creasing his brow, tightening the mini-muscles on his handsome face as he went on to explain how they wrapped Talal Siksik in plastic and put him in suitcases and brought him out to some desolate place in Staten Island. “Like in a forest,” Shlomo said.
“Do you think you could bring us to this place?” Jim asked.
“I could sure try,” Shlomo said.