Saint Pizzi

Even as a student at John Jay, a school with a liberal political bent, Pizzi went against conventional wisdom. He was an ardent Ronald Reagan supporter at a time when the president proposed slashing student loans and government grants. "I wasn't exactly the most popular guy on campus," Pizzi says nonchalantly. "I formed the first conservative student group on campus, the James Madison Society. And I started inviting people like Walter Williams, the black economist who was involved in developing Reaganomics. The students and the faculty were pretty rough on me."

After graduation, Pizzi was hired by the U.S. Eastern District of New York's probation office. At age 21, he was the youngest probie on the payroll, and was assigned to South Jamaica, where lawlessness reigned. People were known to throw garbage cans at cops from the tops of buildings. Other assignments had Pizzi keeping tabs on Colombian drug smugglers and former members of John Gotti's crew.

On Pizzi's first day on the job, a hand-numbing, teeth-chattering snowy December afternoon in 1984, a group of drug cowboys blew off the head of New York parole officer Brian Rooney. They used a shotgun. Reportedly, Rooney was being too tough on the ex-cons he was supervising.

Pizzi wasn't intimidated. And he wasn't the social worker type. More like Wyatt Earp. One day Pizzi paid a visit to ex-con John Gilbert, a neighborhood dope dealer supposedly involved with the crew that killed Rooney. "You're asking a lot of questions, Mr. Pizzi," Gilbert allegedly told him, glaring at Mike from the stoop of his brownstone apartment building. "There are a lot of shootings in this neighborhood. A lot of stray bullets fly around. If you keep coming here, one of those bullets might hit you between the eyes by accident."

Pizzi responded by harassing Gilbert three days later. Taking advantage of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that allowed federal probation officers to search ex-cons' homes without a warrant, Mike went in with some New York cops and tossed Gilbert's home at 3:00 a.m. The next day, then-U.S. Judge Edward Korman removed Pizzi from the case after Gilbert's public defender complained. But two weeks later, the NYPD took Gilbert down for conspiracy to commit murder of a local police officer. "I told Mike, 'It looks like you've been vindicated,'" Korman remembers. "He tells me, 'Judge, I don't need any vindication.'"

In 1987 Pizzi's New York superiors sent him to Miami, where he would testify against former Gambino crime family associate and smut boss Andrew D'Apice. Pizzi's testimony helped convict D'Apice on child pornography charges. "Mike had done a thoroughly detailed investigation," comments Marcella Cohen, the former assistant U.S. prosecutor. "With his information, we built a solid case." Pizzi's work also caught the attention of Carlos Jeunke, chief probation officer for the Southern District of Florida from 1983 to 1994, who eventually offered Pizzi a job. In 1989, Pizzi packed his belongings into a Chevrolet Cavalier and moved to Miami.

"I thought I was going to conduct cases from the beach, get a suntan, and look at pretty girls all day," Pizzi jokes. "When I got here, I was assigned to Opa-locka and Liberty City. I didn't see a beach for six months."

"Mike wasn't the type of guy who sat in the bleachers," recalls Jeunke, a stoic with piercing blue eyes and a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache, who is now the office manager for a Miami law firm, Hunton & Williams. "He was an aggressive, hard-working officer who put his heart and soul into the job. He worked the streets, day and night. Of course, I had to slap him around a few times, but in those days, U.S. Probation needed a Mike Pizzi."

Doug Hughes, director of the South Florida HIDTA from 1990 through 2000, remembers Pizzi as a tenacious lawman who commanded the respect of officers from other local, state, and federal agencies. Hughes, a retired eighteen-year veteran of the Miami-Dade Police Department and former state drug czar, was enlisted by former U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen to head up the task force and recruit agents who would be involved in bringing down drug traffickers, money launderers, and violent crime offenders. "This guy Pizzi would keep calling me," Hughes recalls. "He'd phone every week, telling me that U.S. Probation had to be in on the task force. I was so impressed."

Once he came on board, Hughes says, "Mike, because of his contacts around the country, became our clearinghouse of information. "

A federal agent who worked on the task force and asked to remain anonymous recalls Pizzi as a dogged investigator who would not sleep until the team nabbed the perp. One case involved an ex-con named Steven Jackson, a suspect in a number of drive-by drug-related shootings in Perrine, a predominantly black neighborhood. "He was on probation and serving time at a halfway house," the agent says. "He was released during the day to go to work. In fact, he was running a heroin operation with shipments to Tampa and other points north."