by Gene Mustain
That same year, 1965, Dominick graduated from MacArthur High School in Levittown. Frustrated by the dead end of his musical career, he wanted something new and dramatic but had no idea what. Angry at Nino and sour on New York, he wanted to run off but had no idea where. He had the ability for college but not the desire or discipline. Bitterly, he declined Nino’s offer to help him get a job. Adrift, he found work on his own, an assembly-line job at the Grumman Aircraft Corporation.
Meanwhile, a friend joined the Army Reserves and began telling Dominick about an elite unit, the Green Berets, the Army had recently formed. The Berets were superstar warriors; at the time, in Vietnam, they were helping put down a Communist revolution.
It sounded exciting to Dominick, daring and unique. He also had a heroic self-image and was genuinely if naively patriotic; moreover, he was spontaneous. On Valentine’s Day, 1966, he left Grumman in a defiant mood after arguing with the foreman. On his way home he saw a recruiting center. He stopped and went inside. He walked past the Coast Guard and the Marines before locating the Army. The Four Directions breakup had not completely shattered his confidence. “I want to be a Green Beret,” he said.
The recruiter thought he was joking and started to laugh.
“Just because you want it doesn’t mean you get it. It ain’t that easy.”
“Didn’t ask if it was easy.”
“Okay. I can’t guarantee you Green Beret. All I can guarantee you is basic training. After that, if you want to be a Green Beret, you must volunteer and be accepted for advanced infantry, then Airborne Ranger school, then Special Forces school—that’s Green Beret—but only if they want you.”
“Great! Where do I sign?”
That night the new recruit told his stunned mother, “If you’re going to go to war, you might as well go all the way.”
His mother did not like the bravado; it reminded her he had some Anthony Gaggi qualities. But as the shock wore off, Anthony Gaggi was the reason she became supportive. She feared her restless son might eventually turn toward Nino’s world. The Army put him on a different path. “Just remember to stay alive,” she said.
Puffed up, Dominick went to Brooklyn to tell Nino, and got a reaction only partially expected. “People are getting killed over there, you idiot! And for what? To prop up a bunch of rice farmers? It’s insane!”
“I know it sounds corny to you, but I am going to fight for my country.” Dominick paused. “Like my dad did, and my stepdad.”
“They were stupid too. Don’t fight for generals, fight for us. If you want to die, die for your family.”
Dominick was startled by Nino’s last words. For the first time, it sounded as though he was referring to the Gambino family, not the Gaggi or Montiglio. He felt anger, surprise, fear, and pride all at the same time and was momentarily speechless.
“I ain’t going to die,” he finally said, then marched away.
CHAPTER 2
Bully Boy
Not long after Dominick left for the Army, Nino became acquainted with a young man with neither the looks nor the talent for the music business. Roy Albert DeMeo had a lot of other qualities that impressed Nino, however—intelligence, energy, resourcefulness, and by age twenty-five, a lot of experience with the things that interested Nino—cars, loans, and money.
Roy did not wear this completely on his sleeve—not yet, anyway—but down deep he also had a mean and bitter streak, a bully’s heart capable of beating even more ruthlessly than Nino’s.
They met when Roy came to Bath Beach one day to visit his mother, a widow who had recently moved into the home of a widowed friend who lived a few blocks from the bunker. Nino already knew of Roy, because Roy was already a minor criminal legend in certain parts of adjoining working-class neighborhoods east of Bath Beach—Flatlands and Canarsie. Nino heard about him from friends in the much smaller Lucchese Mafia family, which controlled tow truck companies, junkyards, and car theft operations in that part of Brooklyn and which was historically close to the Gambino family because children of the two bosses had gotten married.
Always on the alert for new business partners, as was Roy, Nino sent a message through mutual acquaintances for Roy to stop by the next time he was in Bath Beach. Roy did not need a second invitation. Anthony Gaggi was a made man in the Gambino family, the city’s most important, and Roy was nothing if not ambitious and opportunistic. He did not intend to spend his life hanging out at junkyards, the horizon he saw with the Lucchese family.
Roy also was a man who liked to keep up with the Joneses, and he made enough illegal money to afford it. In 1966, he left Brooklyn and settled in the suburban haven of Massapequa Park on Long Island, moving into a substantial home he custom-built on three adjacent lots on Park Place. He did a lot of the work himself, because among all his other still-developing qualities Roy was adroit with tools. He lived there with his wife Gladys, who was already regretting having married Roy six years before but was also accommodating to it, and their children, who were about to number three.
It was quite a feat for Roy to raise the necessary couple of hundred thousand to buy into exclusive Massapequa Park; even if the house was not in the absolute best part of town, Massapequa Park was still where Carlo Gambino himself owned a country manor, to go along with his Brooklyn apartment. Roy drove by the old legend’s house many times through the years, but as ambitious as he was, he never dared to drop in without an invitation—which never came because Roy was not even on the bottom of the totem pole yet.
With his egg-shaped face, slicked-back hair, and lumpy build, Roy looked more like an indifferent civil servant than a prosperous young gangster. But as many people already knew, it was hard to be indifferent about Roy; they either liked him, or kept their distance, usually out of fear. Though overweight, Roy was incredibly strong and a wicked sucker-puncher in a bar fight.
He was also a criminal anomaly in that he was raised in an ordinary middle class family—an extraordinary one once you went beyond his parents; his mother never worked, but his father, who died when Roy was nineteen, was a sternly law-abiding laundry company deliveryman whom Roy stopped getting along with once he hit his teenage years and set much higher financial goals for himself.
Other relatives of Roy, however, were distinguished professional men. One uncle, a former top prosecutor for the Brooklyn District Attorney, was a professor at Brooklyn Law School. Another uncle ran a Buick dealership. His father’s cousin was the medical examiner for New York City, a big job. Roy’s mother, who he did get along with, always wanted him to be a doctor too, he always said.
“Ya know somethin’?” Roy would say later in life, “I am just my family’s black sheep.” Ya know some-thin’? was a phrase he put at the front of many sentences, as if he wanted people to concentrate on the unique statement he was about to make.
From Massapequa Park, Roy still drove his new Cadillac in to Brooklyn each day, back to his base of operations and his roots. His office was a blue-collar bar, Phil’s Lounge, that was just a few blocks from his childhood home in Flatlands. He rarely had a drink at the bar, though Roy did like a drink at home after the day’s scheming was done. He also was a familiar sight at neighborhood hangouts like Benny’s Candy Store, Jimmy’s Restaurant, and a bowling alley for nostalgic Brooklyn Dodgers’ fans, Gil Hodges Lanes. Roy may have gone to live next door to the Joneses, but since high school and for the rest of his life he worked among the Profacis, the DiNomes, the Foronjys, the Dohertys—all friends and acquaintances from his below-twenty years.
Flatlands was a historic neighborhood. Roy’s childhood home was five blocks from where the first Dutch settlers in Brooklyn built their village square. Saluting a town in Holland, the explorers christened the settlement New Amersfoort, but that name eventually gave way to one descriptive of what attracted them—flat land. The treeless plains of that far western section of mid-seventeenth-century Long Island suited the Dutch, who were inexperienced at clearing forests.
The land was occupied by Del
aware Valley Indians known as the Canarsee, meaning “fort” in their language. The main encampment of the Canarsee was across a narrow inlet of the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and so the area across the inlet from Flatlands became known, with a variant spelling, as Canarsie.
At the start of the twentieth century, nonfarm families began moving into Flatlands. The first subdivisions were built in the 1920s; by 1941, when Roy’s family arrived, most of the community was paved over. From Bath Beach, Flatlands was seven miles northeast along the Brooklyn coastline and connected by roads built on original Canarsee trails.
Roy’s family moved into a very bunker-like red-brick house on Avenue P when he was just a month old and the fourth baby of Anthony and Eleanor DeMeo. Their other children were a girl two years older than Roy and two boys, one ten years older, the other seven. As in Nino Gaggi’s case, and as was common then, a few of Roy’s relatives, an uncle, aunt, and two cousins, also lived in the house, on the top floor. Everyone had been residing in Williamsburg, an older Brooklyn neighborhood directly across the East River from Manhattan that had been settled by their Neapolitan ancestors.
Because of Roy’s father’s steady delivery job, the family was no better or worse off than most of their similarly employed and hard-working neighbors—mostly second-generation immigrants of Italian and Irish background. Still, like everyone else, the family watched its pennies, especially after Eleanor gave birth to her fifth and final child, another boy, in 1950. As Roy would, all the DeMeo kids took after-school jobs as soon as they were old enough.
As Roy approached his tenth year, his second-oldest brother, who was named after his father Anthony, took a job as a soda jerk at a popular local fountain. Anthony was nicknamed Chubby; he was short but very broad and muscular in the upper body from working out with weights. Everyone on the block loved Chubby and thought he was the most promising DeMeo kid. Roy’s mother actually dreamed of Chubby becoming a doctor before Roy. Roy’s father was putting away all his overtime so his namesake could attend college, a first in their branch of the family. They could only help one, and it was going to be Chubby.
Sixteen-year-old Chubby slipped Roy a free chocolate shake now and then, but not too often because Roy was already grossly overweight. Other kids taunted him about it. “Hey little fat boy, why don’t you roll on over here,” some of the older brats in the Foronjy house one door away or the Duddy house across the street would yell out at Roy as he left for parish school a few blocks away.
Because of his weight, Roy was so slow afoot that sooner or later most of the neighborhood’s jerks got around to terrorizing him; a favorite game, especially if some girl was within sight, involved three or more morons sneaking up on Roy from behind; while two held his arms, a third pulled his britches down.
None of this ever happened, however, when Chubby DeMeo was on the block. And even if he was off mixing shakes, some jerks were made to pay the price later. The more bulky Chubby got from lifting weights, the less Roy was bothered. Naturally, Roy began to idolize his powerful, popular brother.
Roy’s Roman Catholic parish school, Saint Thomas Aquinas, was only four blocks from home. All the DeMeo kids went there until they were old enough for public high school. Roy was an inquisitive student, if a bit too talkative in class, and he got good marks. The school also tried to hammer home the values of religious devotion and patriotism; “For God and Country” was carved into the school’s cornerstone.
Like Chubby, Roy was more patriotic than devout. In 1951, after war broke out in Korea, seventeen-year-old Chubby caused his parents worry by volunteering for the Marine Corps. Still, they were proud, and he was a dashing sight in his dress blues. Roy told friends of his plans to enlist too, but this changed when only a few months after Chubby set sail for Korea, two Marines in dress blues knocked on the door of the house on Avenue P and said Chubby DeMeo had been killed in action.
The neighbors always talked about how there never was another happy day in the DeMeo home after that. Roy’s mother stopped talking and sat weeping in her bedroom for three months. No one ever saw a smile on Roy’s father’s face again either. Roy was devastated too but began to express his hurt in ways that surprised neighbors.
At Saint Thomas Aquinas, Roy began picking on the younger, smaller kids for no reason but the anger inside. He continued to get good grades, but he became a fat little bully boy. At home, neighbors began to hear violent shouting between Roy and his father Anthony.
Roy’s new ways were not the only problem. His father had instructed Roy to avoid all contact with three boys about his age who lived two doors away, the Profaci brothers. Their uncle was Joseph Profaci, a well-known Mafia boss; on Friday nights a lot of well-known gangsters came in Cadillacs to the Profaci home on Avenue P to play poker. Anthony DeMeo knew well of the Profaci crowd because one of his brothers, Albert, was a top prosecutor for the Brooklyn District Attorney and had tried to send many of them to jail. Roy owed his middle name to Uncle Albert.
Roy, however, liked the Profaci boys and liked to sit on the stoop with them as all the gangsters arrived in their big shiny cars. They looked as dashing to Roy as Marines in dress blues once did.
“That was my brother Chubby’s mistake,” Roy would say later on, “believing all that Marine bullshit.”
Roy’s father slapped him a few times for violating his order not to hang out with the Profaci brothers, but the slaps were no match for the thrill Roy got watching the gangsters come and go. Besides, Roy’s mother did not feel the same about the situation as her husband; she was good friends with the mother of the Profaci boys. The boys were not gangsters, she tried pointing out to him; in fact, all were smart students headed for college.
In 1955, Roy graduated eighth grade and enrolled in James Madison High School, one of the city’s best. Its graduates, determined to fulfill the dreams of their immigrant grandparents and parents, included two Nobel Prize winners, environmentalist Barry Commoner, writer Irwin Shaw, writer-producer Garson Kanin, and many other notables in their fields—including popular New York deejay Bruce Morrow and several more writers and reporters, lawyers, politicians, and actors. The singer Carole King was one class ahead of Roy.
Roy was slimmer now, but hardly svelte. His anger was more under control, but when unleashed in a street fight, it was something few classmates wanted to see. Roy scratched, gouged, kicked, did anything possible to get the advantage. All of that occurred outside school, however. In school, Roy earned good conduct, punctuality, and perfect attendance awards many times. Except for his father, he seemed to respect people with power; on his report cards, his teachers wrote that Roy was “dependable,” “well-behaved,” and “cooperative.”
Some teachers even thought Roy was a bit of a brown-noser. Throughout high school, he was a room assistant and lunchroom guard—“stoolpigeon” jobs similar to the one that, in 1957 in Bath Beach, had gotten newly elected class president Dominick Santamaria/Montiglio in such trouble with his Uncle Nino.
Disappointing his mother, who wanted him to try and become the doctor Chubby was supposed to be, Roy elected to concentrate on manual arts in high school. His impatience to get out of his father’s house and begin making money was too strong for him to think about committing himself to eight or more years of study. It certainly was not because he could not cut it academically. Competing against some of the city’s ablest college-bound students in mandatory academic classes, he scored well above average.
With students in shop classes, Roy talked about the Profaci crowd; with students in biology class, he talked about his Uncle Albert, the prominent prosecutor and a man who had power. Uncle Albert’s name was frequently in the newspapers, most notably for putting away some brainy boys from Williamsburg who murdered a vagrant, apparently on a lark. In what was known as the “Thrill-Kill Case,” Albert DeMeo defeated the bigtime Manhattan defense lawyers hired by the boys’ wealthy parents.
One irony of Albert’s work, of course, was that he prosecuted friends and relatives of
Roy’s friends, the Profaci boys, including Joseph Profaci, their uncle. Albert, however, lost more of these cases than he won. A characteristic of Mafia cases, he complained often enough for Roy to hear, was that witnesses “get up on the stand and don’t say what they said to the grand jury.”
Roy never forgot that indirect lesson or its implication: The witnesses had been intimidated, and the technique worked.
At James Madison, Roy was an honor student in manual arts. The curriculum plan permitted him to leave school early in the afternoon to work, so at age fifteen he found a part-time job stocking shelves and delivering groceries on a three-wheeled bicycle for Banner Dairy, a local grocery store.
The store manager, Charles Healey, a young Marine just home from Korea, did not understand why Roy sneered about this until he learned about Chubby from other teenagers. Roy also impressed Healey as one of the hardest workers he ever met. When Roy made deliveries, he loaded the bike with twice as many orders as anyone else. Soon, he was making up to one hundred dollars a week—great money for a teenager in 1956.
Working in the store, Roy slimmed down further; like Chubby, when he was that age, he also put on muscle. In the basement of Banner Dairy, he began weightlifting one-hundred-pound cartons of Ivory Snow detergent boxes, the heaviest in the store. He called it “working out with Ivory large,” and it became a ritual. The store manager and others gathered to watch him work out.
“Okay, Roy,” Healey would say, “that’s eleven, one more and you break your record.”
Roy broke his record many times, but eventually lost interest in weightlifting. Gradually, he put on weight again, but retained his Ivory-large upper body strength.
Healey, who became a cop and then a United States marshal in Brooklyn after his days at Banner Dairy, once teased Roy about a much larger kid he also employed there: “You better not fool around with Dave, he’ll knock you on your ass.”
