The thin line between nightmares while sleeping and nightmares while awake, for Frank Gangi, had become blurred…indistinguishable. Tall and thin and beak-faced, Gangi was inexorably, inevitably, speeding toward a granite wall. The murder of Phyllis Burdi and how Pitera had cut her up in front of him, the smell of her blood, the purple, rancid odor of her exposed organs, had never left him, particularly the sight of her head on the edge of the tub, her hair stiff with drying blood, her lips askew, frozen in a perpetual scream. One eye had been open and the eyeball stared off to the left, unseeing and unknowing. The images stayed inside his brain and soul and had grown and grown like a particularly vicious, malignant cancer, becoming more and more grotesque, to the point that he felt as if he were living in a nightmare, a Coney Island house of horrors that, for him, had become a tangible reality.
Frank Gangi had never been cut out for “the life.” He didn’t have the heart, fortitude, necessary calluses. True, he had come from the streets, knew the streets, but he was not cut out to be a true mafioso—like his father, his cousins, and uncles. The only way Frank was able to get through the day, the night, was with the help of cocaine and alcohol. They became his best friends. The alcohol he used to come down, to be able to sleep. He was now drinking an average of two bottles of whiskey a day. He lost track of how much coke he was doing.
On the night of April 10, 1990, as Joe Dish tried, with Jim Hunt and Tommy Geisel encouraging him, advising him, to find a way to set up Tommy Pitera, unsuccessfully, Frank Gangi was in his car driving on Bay Fiftieth Street, stoned out of his mind. More than high on coke, he was drunk. In that Frank was comfortable around women and women were comfortable around him, he was often in the company of different females, as well as the woman with whom he was living—Sophia. This night was no exception. He had two guidettes with him. One talked like Rocky Balboa and the other like a Brooklyn dockworker. This night, Gangi was so stoned he was weaving back and forth as he went. His driving was so bad, erratic and sloppy, that it was patently obvious to anyone who saw him that he was drunk. When he went through a red light at Bay Fiftieth and Cropsey, a squad car was suddenly behind him, red lights spinning. Two cops were soon beside him asking for his license and registration, unfriendly, unhappy, obviously aware that he was inebriated. They made him get out of the car. He reeked of alcohol. He tried to talk his way out of a ticket; he offered them money. Before he knew it, he was under arrest, handcuffed, and in the back of a police car headed toward the Sixtieth Precinct near Coney Island. He was booked and put in a stinking, graffiti-covered holding pen.
When Gangi was again confronted with the hardcore reality of steel bars, the smells and sights of jail, something in him began to change, morph, slowly evolve. He paced back and forth. He hated his life. He hated what he had become. He hated what had happened to Phyllis Burdi.
I could have stopped it. I could have done something. Instead what I did is I brought him to her.
There, in the bullpen at Coney Island, Frank Gangi made up his mind to make a life change. He was going to purge himself, wholly and irreversibly.
The detective who arrested him for the Guvenaro murder, Billy Tomasulo, had been kind and professional. Gangi now reached out to him, asked the desk sergeant to call Detective Tomasulo. He said he had a lot to say and he had to talk to Detective Tomasulo. At first, the desk sergeant took it lightly.
“Yeah, okay, I’ll see what I can do,” he said dismissively.
“No, I’m serious. This is about murders, about terrible murders. About people being cut up. Get him here,” Gangi said.
Gangi’s demeanor, the imperativeness of his words, the urgency of his tone, told the desk sergeant that something serious was afoot. He walked away, began making phone calls.
NYPD detective Billy Tomasulo was a hard-boiled cop from the mean streets of Brooklyn. He was smart, tough, though he was always a gentleman, courteous, and polite. When he first arrested Gangi, in connection with the murder of Guvenaro, he was fair. He treated him so fairly that Gangi came away liking him even though he had locked him up. Tomasulo had pretty much seen it all. Murders, rapes, mutilations—you name it, he saw it, experienced it, was a part of it. This being said, Billy Tomasulo was not ready for what was about to come out of Frank Gangi’s mouth.
By the time Tomasulo reached the cell Gangi was being kept in, Gangi had sobered up quite a bit; he was more resolute than ever about what he was going to do.
When Gangi said the name Tommy Pitera, Tomasulo immediately knew whom he was talking about. He, like most everyone else in law enforcement, had his ear to the ground and had heard about Pitera and what he’d been doing. His interest was piqued. He was tired, had had a long day, but suddenly was wide-awake. In that Gangi was a consummate storyteller with a very good memory for details, times, names, places, he painted a thorough picture of what Pitera was about, not only of the crimes he had committed but ones Gangi had committed with him.
Gangi was readily admitting to murder and the role he played in the killing of Phyllis Burdi. Of course, Detective Tomasulo knew about Phyllis Burdi. Her family had been in the Coney Island precinct numerous times over the last several years. He was so familiar with her case, her disappearance, that he had a clear picture of what she looked like in his mind from the photographs the family had given him.
Gangi became visibly unhinged when he talked about Phyllis. The tough-guy exterior melted away. He began to cry. His hands shook. He stared off into the distance, seeing images so horrible his mind tried to deny them, push them away, bury them deeper than they already were buried—an impossibility. Gangi was branded for life. He told Detective Tomasulo about the night Phyllis died: meeting at the after-hours club, going to his house, blowing coke and partying, running out of coke. He explained that he had called Moussa Aliyan and that he and Phyllis had headed into the city for more drugs. There they began to smoke cocaine and minutes quickly slipped into hours. Time, when high on cocaine, moves with shocking celerity. He explained how Pitera called, how he answered the phone, how Pitera came rushing over with Richie David and Kojak Giattino.
Gangi said, “When Pitera walked in, he said—where is she? I indicated the bedroom. He walked into the room carrying a gun with a silencer on it, opened the door, and shot her a couple of times. Then he took her in the bathtub and got his knives and things and he slowly cut her up.”
As Gangi spoke, he chain-smoked. His hands shook more and more, as though he was freezing. He unsuccessfully fought back tears. He went on to describe how Phyllis’s head was left on the edge of the tub, how the lifeless eye stared at him.
“This is all too much for me. This is something I never wanted to get involved in or see. This guy is a fucking monster. A fucking monster,” Gangi repeated, as though talking to himself, again seeing the horror before him.
Now, at this point, other detectives were there quietly listening to Gangi’s cathartic cleansing of his soul, purging himself of his guilt. Now he described the killings of Talal Siksik, Marek Kucharsky, and Joey Balzano, how he had gone out to the burial site in Staten Island and buried Marek Kucharsky at the behest of Pitera.
“Could you find it?” Detective Tomasulo asked. “Could you find it again?”
“Yeah…yeah, I could find it again,” Gangi said.
Detective Tomasulo knew this was big. He had known the DEA and FBI were trailing Pitera, that they were very interested in him, though they were having difficulty securing viable evidence that would hold up in a court of law, substantial and irreversible. Detective Tomasulo would have bet his house that Gangi was telling the truth. Every nuance, the way his face moved, the tears in his eyes, all spoke of truth. Detective Tomasulo knew what he had to do next and that was contact Jim Hunt and the DEA. He went to a phone, took out Jim Hunt’s card, and dialed his number. Thus the crack in the Rock of Gibraltar widened a bit more. Jim answered the phone.
“Boy, do I have news for you, Jim!” Detective Tomasulo said.