by Gordon Kerr
By the early 1980s, however, drugs were beginning to play an increasing role in Spilotro’s life. He had also been having an affair with Frank Rosenthal’s wife, Geri. In addition to the troubles piling up around him, testimony by Aladena ‘Jimmy The Weasel’ Fratianno, following his arrest in 1977, ensured that the name of Anthony Spilotro was registered in the Black Book. This was the list of people who were legally banned from casinos, either because they were known to be associated with organised crime or because they were known gambling cheats. When Spilotro’s name was put in the book and he was no longer able to set foot in any of Vegas’s casinos, he was furious. Not as furious, however, as the new boss of the Chicago crime family, Joe Ferriola. The blacklisting from the casinos he was supposed to be supervising, the high profile jewel robberies, the drugs, sleeping with an associate’s wife – these were not the type of activities the Mob condoned.
Ferriola decided that it was time that Tony ‘the Ant’ was taken care of.
Sam ‘Wings’ Carlisito called Spilotro and his brother Michael to a meeting at a hunting lodge in Indiana, owned by Joey Aiuppa. There, the Spilotros were savagely beaten and buried in a cornfield.
In September 2007, after a trial lasting three months, Joey ‘the Clown’ Lombardo, 78, James ‘Little Jimmy’ Marcello, 65, Frank Calabrese Sr, 70, and Paul ‘The Indian’ Schiro, 70, were found guilty of the murder of Anthony Spilotro. The convictions, which also included racketeering, loan sharking, extortion and 17 other murders, followed the admission of Nicholas Calabrese that he had helped to kill Spilotro 30 years previously.
In the film Casino, the Spilotro brothers are buried alive after being severely beaten. In reality, said Calabrese, the brothers were killed before being buried. He told the trial about Spilotro’s demise: ‘He came into the basement and there were a whole bunch of guys who grabbed him and strangled him and beat him to death . . . Tony put up a fight. He kept saying, “You guys are going to get in trouble, you guys are going to get in trouble”.’
Roy Demeo And The Gemini Crew
A recipe for murder:
First take your victim. Make him feel relaxed by plying him with booze in the Gemini Lounge. Then lure him through the side door – game of poker, bit of food, women; anything will do, most people are weak for something – and into the apartment that joins on to the building out back. Approach victim from behind with a gun fitted with a silencer in one hand and a towel in the other. Add one bullet to victim’s head, quickly wrapping your towel round the head like a turban to staunch the flow of blood. As you hold the towel around the head, another person stabs the victim through the heart, severing arteries and stopping blood from pumping around the body and out of the head-wound. Make sure your victim is dead and then remove all his clothing and leave him hanging like a game bird over the bath to drain all remaining blood out of the body. Return the body to the living room and place on large swimming pool liner. Remove arms, legs and head and then seal all parts in separate bags that are then placed in boxes and sent to the Fountain Avenue Dump in Brooklyn.
That was the preferred method – the Gemini Method as it was known – of Roy DeMeo and his crew, although they did use other methods as the situation demanded. Want to send a message out to everyone to say ‘don’t mess with us’? Leave the body on a street. Victim could not be lured to the Gemini Lounge? There were lots of other places the dismemberment could be carried out – on a yacht, in a hideout, in the meat department of a supermarket, anywhere.
The head killer of this murderous crew, Roy DeMeo, was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1940 to working-class Italian immigrants. He learned about loan-sharking as a teenager from the sons of his neighbour, Mafia boss Joe Profaci. By the age of 17 it had become almost a full-time occupation for him. He was good at it too, mainly because he had no qualms about using violence to ‘persuade’ his debtors to pay up in time. He graduated High School in 1959, marrying not long after, and carried on with his criminal activities. He prospered so well through them, in fact, especially through loan sharking, that he gave up his day job at the Banner Dairy Supermarket in the early 1960s, focusing instead on making money in any way he could.
DeMeo’s place of business was Phil’s Bar, later to become the Gemini Lounge, which occupied the front half of a two-storey building located on a street corner in Flatlands, Brooklyn. Here he would pursue his loan-sharking activities and fence stolen goods and, in 1965, he bought a chunk of the bar.
He had hovered around the edges of the Lucchese Crime Family for a number of years, but in 1966 he befriended Anthony ‘Nino’ Gaggi, a high-ranking member of the Gambinos who had been inducted into the Family after taking part in the 1960 hit on Vincent Squillante, the killer of Frank and Joseph Scalise. Much of Gaggi’s money also came from loan sharking, but he also dipped his toes in a number of legitimate businesses in which he had become a silent partner. DeMeo saw a better future for himself with the Gambinos than the Luccheses and cultivated his friendship and business relationship with Gaggi.
He diversified his interests throughout the sixties, assembling a crew of young crooks and moving into car theft and drug trafficking. Among his gang were Harvey ‘Chris’ Rosenberg, a friend whom DeMeo had met when they were both teenagers. Rosenberg had been dealing drugs and the young DeMeo had provided funds for him so that he could deal in larger quantities. Joey ‘Dracula’ Gugliemo, DeMeo’s cousin, was a pornographer and killer whose strange rituals with the blood of victims in the rooms behind the Gemini Lounge earned him his nickname. Other members included Joseph Testa and Anthony Senter who were known as the Gemini Twins because they were inseparable and could always be found in the Gemini Lounge, and Joey’s younger brother, Patrick Testa.
The Brooklyn Credit Union, of which DeMeo became a director, offered ample opportunity for laundering the proceeds of his loan-sharking activities and he stole funds from the Credit Union reserves which he used in his business.
It was not until 1972 when he was aged 32, that DeMeo carried out his first murder. Like Gaggi, he had become a silent partner in a number of businesses, one of which was a pornography film lab owned by a man called Paul Rothenberg. The lab had been raided by the police and Gaggi was concerned that Rothenberg was about to cooperate with the cops, a fear that was confirmed when Rothenberg informed the authorities that he was being extorted by two men called DeMeo and ‘Nino’. DeMeo arranged a meeting with Rothenberg for Sunday, 29 July, at a local diner. As soon as he arrived outside the diner, DeMeo approached him, ordering him out of the car and into a nearby alleyway at gunpoint. He shot him twice in the head.
Rothenberg’s murder paid off for DeMeo in several ways. Firstly, of course, he had divested himself of the problem that was Rothenberg. Secondly, and much more importantly, Gaggi and the Gambino Family were impressed.
A couple of years later, in 1972, Andrei Katz, a young Jewish Rumanian immigrant who ran a bodyshop known as Veribest Foreign Car Services in Flatlands, Brooklyn, became DeMeo’s next victim. Katz had become involved with the DeMeo crew in some drug business as well as in a deal involving a number of stolen vans. He rented one of these vans out, but the customer to whom it was rented was stopped by police who discovered the van was stolen. Katz was arrested and offered a deal to cooperate by telling them where he had got the van. He refused, but when he was out on bail, he was threatened by members of the DeMeo crew and was then beaten up by two masked men whom he recognised as Joey Testa and Tony Senter. Foolishly, Katz tried to take revenge on Rosenberg, taking a shot at him with an automatic rifle. Rosenberg was wounded, but survived.
By this time, Henry Borelli, a Gambino man who was an expert marksman, had joined the crew. They wanted to take care of Katz once and for all, but he was careful, never going anywhere alone. Borelli dreamed up a plan whereby a female acquaintance of his would lure Katz to a place where he could be dealt with by the crew.
In June Katz met the woman at her apartment, but the Gemini Crew was waiting for him. He was abducted and driven t
o the meat department of a supermarket where he was stabbed in the heart and back with a butcher’s knife. DeMeo and Joey Testa, who had both in their youth worked as butcher’s apprentices, dismembered the body. He was decapitated and his head was crushed in a machine used for compacting cardboard. The remainder of the body was then put in bags and thrown into a skip behind the store. A few days later, a woman walking her dog was horrified to find one of Katz’s legs lying on the pavement close to the supermarket. The body was identified through his dental records.
They had carried out their first murder as a team, but it may not have been their first dismemberment. In 2003, Salvatore Vitale, a former Bonanno underboss, claimed that in 1974 he had had to drive a body to a garage in Queens where Roy DeMeo and a few others waited. Vitale claimed he saw DeMeo with a large knife, presumably to be used in the dismemberment and disposal.
In 1975, DeMeo began to transgress against customary Mafia rules, involving himself in a peep show and prostitution establishment in New Jersey. He was also dealing in pornography of the most graphic kind, including bestiality. Nino Gaggi warned him about this and even threatened him if he persisted with it. But DeMeo carried on and, luckily, Gaggi ignored it, presumably happy to continue receiving his increased weekly payment.
DeMeo was also heavily involved in drug trafficking, another area that was taboo for the Mafia, but only if you were caught. The profits were huge and DeMeo was dealing cocaine out of the Gemini Lounge and importing marijuana from Colombia in 25-pound bails. The money rolled in and as long as Nino got his share, he was prepared to turn a blind eye to its source.
In May 1976, Joseph Brocchini, a made man in the Mafia, made the mistake of punching DeMeo in the face when an argument they were having about a pornography business in which they were both involved got out of hand. DeMeo was prevented from killing Brocchini by Mob protocol, but swore revenge anyway at a meeting about it with Gaggi. On 26 May, he and Borelli cold-bloodedly shot Brocchini five times in the back of the head in the office of his used car dealership, making it look like an armed robbery gone wrong, blindfolding the employees and ransacking the office. DeMeo was on a roll. Next month, a young man, Vincent Governara, with whom Gaggi was in dispute, was shot several times by DeMeo and Gaggi and died in hospital a week later.
In July, DeMeo and Gaggi flew to Florida to kill another enemy, George Byrum, who had stupidly given burglars information to help them rob Gaggi’s house. He was lured to DeMeo’s hotel room and shot as soon as he walked in. The plan had been to dismember him in the hotel room with the help of a local Gambino man, but there was construction work going on and they fled the scene leaving the body in the bath, its head half-sawn off.
The body count rose. An informer who had described DeMeo to the FBI as a ‘ruthless killer’ who had killed at least a dozen people and dismembered their bodies, had this fact confirmed for himself not long after when he was murdered. Nino’s nephew, who was acting as DeMeo’s driver, said that DeMeo had pointed out a newly built gas station and told him that he and the boys had buried two people under its foundations.
In 1976, when Carlo Gambino, head of the Family, died, Paul Castellano took over and Nino was promoted to capo. But Castellano was a different kind of boss. He behaved more like a businessman than a gangster and was contemptuous of the type of street crime that DeMeo specialised in – car theft and hijacking. Besides, DeMeo was a violent and unpredictable individual. For these reasons he opposed DeMeo ever becoming a made member of the Family. DeMeo was devastated, but continued to try to impress by finding more ways to bring cash into the Family.
He finally managed it with a bold plan to broker a partnership between the Westies, an alliance of Irish-American gangs, and the Gambinos. This alliance brought in a lot of money, and he was finally inducted in 1977 and made responsible for all the business the Family did with the Westies. But he still ignored the customary Family rules regarding drug trafficking and persisted in selling large quantities of coke and marijuana, as well as pills. However, he was not the only one who flaunted this rule.
Neither did he bother too much about the rule that said members should seek permission before killing anyone. In June 1977, the crew took care of Johnathan Quinn, a car thief suspected of informing, and Cherie Golden, his 19-year-old girlfriend who just happened to be there at the wrong time.
By 1978, DeMeo was claiming to have committed 100 murders and he let it be known that he and his crew were open to contracts. They carried some out for as little as $5,000. Some were even done for free – ‘personal favour’, he would say.
They also killed their own. Edward ‘Danny’ Grillo had joined the team, but was heavily in debt to DeMeo. DeMeo and Gaggi suspected he would cooperate with police and so he was disposed of. Chris Rosenberg, original Gemini Crew member, was next. He had done a drug deal down in Florida, but had murdered the people he was buying from, a Cuban and his associates, and walked off with the money as well as the drugs. The Cuban had connections with a Colombian drug cartel and they insisted that Rosenberg be killed. DeMeo was given the contract, but weeks passed and he failed to carry it out.
In the meantime, he made a tragic mistake when he killed Dominick Ragucci, a college student who was working part time as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. When DeMeo saw Ragucci’s car outside his house one night, he thought he was an assassin from the Colombian cartel and shot him to death after a car chase. This killing irritated Gaggi and he ordered DeMeo to get on with killing Rosenberg. He finally summoned him to a meeting and after Rosenberg had kissed him on the cheek, he shot him in the head. It was a killing that affected DeMeo deeply, probably the only one that ever did.
The money continued to pour in through his numerous enterprises. He now controlled the biggest car theft operation in New York’s history. Hundreds of cars stolen on the streets of New York were being shipped from ports in New Jersey to Kuwait and Puerto Rico. The profits were huge and the Family benefited as much as he did.
He was still not liked, however, even within his own organisation. Gambino man James Eppolito went to Paul Castellano in 1980, claiming that DeMeo and Gaggi were involved with drugs. But Castellano liked Gaggi and chose not to believe Eppolito. He gave Gaggi permission to kill him which he and DeMeo duly did, shooting him and his son to death in their car. A witness was able to alert a nearby policeman and Gaggi was shot and arrested after a shoot-out. Meanwhile, DeMeo got away without being seen. Nino was charged with murder, but only sentenced to 5–15 years for assault after the jury was got at. Needless to say, shortly after the trial, DeMeo murdered the witness.
In 1981, the car operation began to fall apart when Henry Borelli and another crew member, Frederick DiNome, were arrested. But luckily for the rest of them, there was not enough evidence to make further arrests. DeMeo ordered the two men to plead guilty and he hoped that their convictions might bring an end to the FBI’s investigations into his affairs.
It did not, however. The FBI became curious about the number of people who had disappeared after last being seen entering the Gemini Lounge. To make matters worse for DeMeo, Paul Castellano, fed up with DeMeo’s activities, put out a contract on him. However, he could not find anyone willing to carry it out. Eventually, it was handed to Frank DeCicco but he passed it on to DeMeo’s own crew.
DeMeo, aware of what was going on, began wearing a leather jacket with a shotgun hidden under it. It wasn’t enough, however, and on 10 January 1983, he went to a meeting at Patrick Testa’s bodyshop and disappeared. Eight days later, police responded to a call saying that a car appeared to have been abandoned in the car park of the Varnas Boat Club in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. When they opened the boot, they were surprised to find a large chandelier and underneath it Roy DeMeo, his hand frozen in rigor mortis with a bullet hole right through it, as if he had raised it to protect himself. His leather jacket was wrapped around his head and he had been shot a number of times in the head and in the hand. At least they did not dismember him.
Alt
hough the government had lost Roy DeMeo, they were not to be defeated and continued to look for evidence against the remainder of the Gemini Crew. Anthony Gaggi was suspected of having personally carried out DeMeo’s murder, but although he was charged with a number of other murders, that was not one of them. He died of a heart attack during his trial in 1988.
Henry Borelli, Joseph Testa and Anthony Senter (the Gemini twins) were sentenced to life for a collective total of 25 murders. Paul Castellano was indicted for ordering the killing of DeMeo, but was gunned down before the case came to trial.
The FBI and New York Police Department estimate that DeMeo and his crew were responsible for at least 70 murders, although the true total could be closer to 200. Most were never found.
Nicodemo Domenico Scarfo
Nicodemo Domenico Scarfo’s family had Mafia blood running through their veins and within a couple of decades of his birth, ‘Little Nicky’ had it running in the streets of Philadelphia.
His father was a made member of the New York-based Genovese Crime Family and his son, Nicky Jr. became a made member of the Lucchese family, while Nicky himself was boss of the Bruno or Scarfo Crime Family which ruled the roost, in organised crime terms, in Philadelphia and parts of southern New Jersey, including Newark. This makes them probably the only men to have the distinction of being made members of three entirely different families.
Nicky was born into this Mafia dynasty in 1929 in Brooklyn and before long had attracted the sobriquet ‘Little Nicky’ on account of his diminutive stature; fully grown, he stood a mere five feet six inches tall. While a young man, he made a living as a car valet, parking cars at clubs, but was introduced into the Bruno Family by his uncle, ‘Nicky Buck’ Piccolo, known as one of the last of the ‘gentlemen gangsters’. This contrasted with his nephew Nicky, who was anything but a gentleman and was, instead, renowned for his volatile temper and violent ways.
