Using oval-shaped, long-handled shovels, the agents slowly, carefully, uncovered the object Bobby had found. In the nascent, all-telling light of June 9, the task force regarded a large, checkered suitcase, the cheap kind that you could buy on Fourteenth Street; the kind that people filled with jeans and camera equipment, contraband, to bring back to their third-world countries. The agents gingerly lifted the suitcase out of the hole. Everything about it seemed normal except for the horrific smell that issued from it…unmistakably, the stink of human death, they all knew. The medical examiner’s office had been contacted. An ME and a morgue wagon had been dispatched by the New York City mortuary on First Avenue and Thirtieth Street. As the gloved hand of the medical examiner struggled with the rusted zipper, slowly opening the case, the smell became worse and worse still. Surrounding the suitcase in a neat circle stood the members of the task force, engaged and curious, quiet and solemn—as though in a church, engrossed in prayer—so very pleased that their efforts had worked out. Because of the thick summer foliage, they stood in a solemn, dappled light. They were looking at what was left of Marek Kucharsky. Off to the left, the crows returned and incessantly cawed, distracting everyone, annoying everyone.
“Wish I had my shotgun,” one of the agents mumbled.
This was the boxer with the rugs whom Pitera, Gangi, and Moussa Aliyan had murdered in Moussa’s loft. By pure happenstance, he was found first. Kucharsky had been put in the ground some thirty-four months earlier. In the suitcase were his severed head, trunk, arms, and legs wrapped in one of his nice Oriental rugs…the rugs he had died for. In that he’d been in the ground now for so long, the flesh had dried and shriveled up. The once thick muscular arms were mere remnants of what they had been. Now they were brown and wrinkled, parchmentlike, and the bones were clearly visible.
Now that they had struck pay dirt, that they knew bodies were truly here, a newfound energy, a pump of high-grade adrenaline, affected the task force. They, again, made lines and again started probing the ground, invigorated by the hardcore, horrible, homicidal reality of Marek’s body. It didn’t take long for more bodies to be found off to the left, off to the right, all some thirty steps from the road. They seemed dispersed without rhyme or reason, here, there, and everywhere. The only placement they had in common was the distance from the road. The roar of jet engines from planes passed overhead.
The fifth body found at the sanctuary was that of a woman. It was Phyllis Burdi. Finally, Phyllis had been found…Phyllis would have justice. Phyllis, of course, was the main reason Frank Gangi had turned on Pitera. She had been cut into six neat pieces. Now, as her remnants were filmed by the task force for evidence, as Jim Hunt described who she was and what had happened to her to the camera, there were only five pieces in the suitcase…two arms, two legs, and a torso. In that she had died almost three years earlier, her breasts were shrunken, barely discernible. Even though the flesh was as dry as a raisin, bullet holes in her chest, between her shrunken breasts, were still visible. Though Phyllis Burdi was barely recognizable as a female, a woman, the fact that she was a woman had a clear effect on all the detectives and agents that day. She could have been any one of their daughters or sisters, they all knew. She was helpless and defenseless— and the thought of her in the hands of Tommy Pitera was unsettling and disconcerting and affected them in a way the bodies of the men did not. Silently, privately, a few of the men there that day said prayers for Phyllis.
Next Sol Stern and Richie Leone, the two men who were tortured and killed at Pitera’s club, Overstreets, were found. As the body of Sol Stern was laid out in the field by the medical examiner, it was obvious that he had shat in his pants, no doubt because he was terrified, they all knew.
This little observation, insight, gave all the agents and medical examiners, forensic people, pause. They had come to despise Pitera. They had come to view his crimes as being particularly frightful and heinous; they now realized he had a mean-spirited, sadistic audacity that they grew to loathe. He killed at will, tortured, stole from people, sold drugs, and on top of everything, he was a woman-killer. They worked cohesively, as silently as though they were in a mortuary. The branches and leaves that canopied the area where they worked gave the whole scene the ambience of a funeral parlor—a funeral parlor designed, built, and decorated by nature herself.
Even though there had been no official announcement yet to the media, reporters got wind of chopped-up bodies, a Mafia burial ground. As though vultures zeroing in on the smell of carrion, curious, nosy reporters showed up at the dig. The streets leading to the spot had been cordoned off with yellow police tape and reporters learned little. However, over the ensuing hours and days, press releases were given out and detailed feature stories appeared in all the major New York papers. Newsday ran a two-page feature story. All the local television stations covered the event extensively. Tommy Pitera was suddenly famous—infamous.
At the autopsy, in the medical examiner’s office in Manhattan, Phyllis Burdi’s remains were laid out on a gleaming aluminum table. Giant fluorescent lights illuminated what was left of her. As her chest cavity was cut open and peeled back, the medical examiner noted for the autopsy report that she had been shot with Glaser rounds—bullets that contained small BB-like pellets that caused horrific wounds inside her chest. The medical examiner noted with interest that all the cuts severing the limbs from the torso were neat and precise—professional-looking. He would later comment that whoever did this had experience; whoever did this knew what he was doing.