It was a hot day in late July. The humidity was 90 percent. There were no clouds to offer any reprieve from the searing July sun. Jim Hunt, Tommy Geisel, and Shlomo Mendelsohn were on a field trip of the most macabre, morbid kind. They were in search of a body farm, a Mafia burial ground. Under the best of circumstances, had Shlomo known Staten Island, been reasonably familiar with it, he still would have had a hard time finding the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge. When he had been there previously, it was nighttime. When he had been there before, adrenaline had been filling his body and he wasn’t paying attention to exactly how they got there and where they went. He had disconcerting, horrible images seared into his brain, as though they had been branded, but they were a series of disjointed images that had neither rhyme nor reason.
That whole day, Jim and Tommy drove Shlomo all over Staten Island. They checked out most every forest, the places that would be good for burying a body. The more they looked, the more frustrated, anxious, and out of sorts Shlomo became. He had only seen Staten Island that one time. To him, it was a foreign and distant place. He had no point of reference, did not know east from west or south from north. Both Jim and Tommy were becoming restless, tired. Though they didn’t think Shlomo was lying, fabricating, looking to get himself out of trouble—they were disappointed by his lack of understanding of the area. At one point he said, “Maybe…maybe it was in New Jersey,” which really frustrated the two agents. It not only frustrated them but it pissed them off.
Be that as it may, all Shlomo did was lead them up one blind alley after another that whole day and night.
However, just because Shlomo couldn’t find this burial ground didn’t mean it wasn’t there, both Jim and Tommy believed. Hearing about the burial ground and seeing the fear that lived inside Shlomo motivated and drove the two agents on. They would not rest until Pitera was nailed to the wall with long, sharp spikes.
Luck…it seemed that Tommy Pitera of Gravesend, Brooklyn, had an inordinate amount of luck. He had been getting away with all kinds of crimes, murder, dismemberment. Jim Hunt and Tom Geisel were going to make sure that Pitera’s luck changed.