Pete Giaquinto (r.) and Cubo
Photo by George Contino
Pete was gone.
It was the news to which Cubo, one of his closest friends and business partners, awoke last Thursday morning—the news that jabs, hard, like a cold tattoo needle on goose-bumped skin.
“I love him,” said Cubo. “And I miss him.”
Pete Giaquinto, the legendary Ozone Park tattoo artist who co-owned and operated Pete & Cubo’s Tattoos & Piercing, died on Sept. 11, 2014. He was 68 years old.
“He was my best friend,” Billy Altstatt, Giaquinto’s cousin, said quietly as he sat in a waiting area inside the 101st Avenue shop. “We grew up together, we did everything together. Anyone that knew him loved him.”
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Giaquinto originally was a tin knocker, or sheet metal worker, by trade; he worked on his passion—body art—every night, tattooing friends and friends of friends out of his home on 80th Street near Liberty Avenue.
“That was him—‘Pete from 80th Street!’” Cubo recalled with a laugh. “If you were getting tattooed back then, you were going to his basement.”
Cubo, who bought his first tattoo from Giaquinto at 15, badgered the artist to teach him the craft that Cubo felt even back then Giaquinto had already mastered.
“He was phenomenal,” he said as friend, roommate and business partner George Contino, puffing on a cigar, nodded in approval.
The friends “kind of went all in with the tattooing” in the early to mid ‘90’s, Cubo remembered. One of their earliest traditions involved visiting famous tattoo parlors across the five boroughs and New Jersey every Monday.
In early 1997, Cubo and Contino wanted to open their own place on the second floor of a small building on 101st Avenue near 88th Street. At first, Cubo recalled with a wry smile, Giaquinto wasn’t on board; but at the urging of his wife, Margaret, and friend, Ronnie, he reluctantly agreed to help establish Pete & Cubo’s Tattoo & Piercing. After hiring contractor friends to build it out, the doors opened officially on June 2, 1997.
“And we’ve been playing that number [6297] religiously every day for more than 17 years,” Cubo said.
The shop was wildly popular, quickly becoming a destination for Big Apple body art. But the success and smiles didn’t last long, as Pete & Cubo’s was rocked by tragedy after tragedy the following year. Margaret Giaquinto, Pete’s wife of 29 years, the mother of his two daughters and grandmother of his four grandchildren, succumbed to lung cancer; Contino’s fiancée died in a car accident; and Cubo’s beloved Uncle Carl died in a car wreck as well. The three friends, more like brothers at that point, closed the shop that year for a week and headed down to Florida.
“To get that stink off us,” Cubo said, adding that Giaquinto took the loss of his wife especially hard.
“She never got a chance to enjoy the success of the business. Till the day Pete died he always missed her.”
From the outpouring of grief and support, through social media, phone calls or simple words of encouragement on the streets of Ozone Park, it is obvious that his friends and family already miss Giaquinto tremendously. Contino said he’s really going to miss the advice his friend and mentor dispensed daily.
“He helped shape me into the man I am today,” he said, in between tokes of the dimly lit stogie.
“He’d give you the shirt off his back,” said Harry Satin, who worked with Giaquinto for nearly two years.
Cubo took a few brief moments and said, “You know what I’m going to miss? The knowledge, the friendship, the love—like a brother.” After another pause, he added, “He kept me grounded. He kept me from being a maniac.”
Contino and Cubo revealed that neither had picked up their tattoo machine since last Wednesday. Cubo said that after 40 years of friendship and 20 years in business together, it hit him especially hard the first time he went back to work and realized that the man he called his brother would not be coming in that day, or any day after that.
Pete was gone.
By Michael V. Cusenza
