Murder Machine

by Gene Mustain

  One day, Roy and Dave started teasing each other; it got out of hand and Roy attacked his opponent so ferociously—scratching, gouging, kicking—that Healey became frightened. He and some of his other stockboys managed to pull Roy away but not before Dave was a pulpy mess.

  “Roy is scary,” Healey said after he sent Roy home and Dave was carted away.

  While still in high school, and with delivery money to burn, Roy started loaning money to friends and eventually to anyone who asked. His reputation as a dirty fighter—newly reinforced by accounts of his attack on Dave—assured prompt payment of principal and vig. Loansharking was just the sort of contaminant Roy’s father had in mind when he ordered Roy to avoid the Profaci boys, and one day not long after it began, neighbors saw Roy and his father slugging it out in the middle of Avenue P.

  By his senior year, Roy was carrying cash around in brown paper bags and driving a not-too-used Cadillac. He was the star of the manual arts crowd at James Madison and would pick up the tab for beer bashes, which he enjoyed. He loved showing off his money; it made him feel powerful. More and more teens short of cash on date night borrowed money, and by the time he graduated in 1959, Roy was, for someone eighteen, fairly prosperous. He told the yearbook editors that his career goal was business.

  Because he was overweight and not the most handsome guy in Flatlands, Roy was not successful with neighborhood girls. Soon after graduating, he married one of the first who ever said yes to a date. Her name was Gladys Brittain; she was petite, quiet, two years older, and cute. She also was a good person and out of a respectable family, so Roy’s parents were happy for him and her. As his oldest brother and older sister had, Roy left the house on Avenue P, leaving only a younger brother at home.

  Between his job and the loansharking, Roy was able to rent a nice apartment not far away; at Banner Dairy, he became assistant manager and occasional apprentice to the man who ran the butcher shop. The man taught Roy how to slice apart whole steers quickly and efficiently.

  Roy was just marking time at Banner Dairy, however. By now, he fully intended to make his living as a loanshark. There were just too many suckers out there, and he kept putting more money “on the street,” as he described it.

  On the night of December 12, 1960, Anthony DeMeo, Roy’s fifty-five-year-old father, was found dead in a subway car, felled by a heart attack as he went to work. Roy did not wish his old man ill, but he got over the death more quickly than he did Chubby’s. And when his mother took her youngest son and went to Italy for a few years, to grieve and live with relatives near Naples, Roy suddenly had no immediate family members around.

  Roy and Gladys, however, had already started building their own family, and in five weeks time, Gladys gave birth to a baby girl, the first of three children she had during the next eight years. Roy was wild about his kids—less so, over time, his wife. They got married before they really knew one another well, a particular problem for her because, while she knew about Roy’s loan business, she never meant to marry a fullfledged criminal, which is what Roy became during this time. She shut her eyes to it, however, and stayed married for the kids’ sake and her own. Roy did provide, copiously.

  Roy began launching his career in crime from Phil’s Lounge, the neighborhood bar a few blocks from his old home in Flatlands. With an eclectic assortment of friends, acquaintances, loanshark customers, and even some of the jerks who taunted him when he was just a slow little fat boy, Roy had been hanging out at the bar since graduating from high school. At one time or another, the crowd included the three Profaci brothers, the five Foronjy brothers, the three Doherty brothers, and the three DiNome brothers—all except the DiNomes were from Avenue P.

  Some in the crowd, such as the Profaci boys, were actually college students and not around as often. Others, such as one of the Doherty boys, had joined the police force, but John Doherty still came around. His brother Charles tended bar once in a while. The group also included a future burglar, an electrical contractor, a tailor, a sportswear retailer, and in the case of one of the older Foronjy brothers, Richard, a Hollywood actor in such films as Prince of the City and Serpico, but only after he got out of prison for an armed robbery conviction.

  Roy’s best friend at the time was Frank Foronjy, the future electrical contractor. Frank was interested in guns, and had begun to collect them. He taught Roy about various weapons, and Roy would eventually become a collector too, in a more elaborate way and for different purposes of course. Once he became interested in guns, Roy practiced firing them and became good and fast, especially after John Doherty, who was police-trained, showed him the finer points of the combat-firing position.

  One of Roy’s friendships showed that he was capable of sympathy for people who had been tormented as he was when he was young. He had gone out of his way to befriend one of the DiNome brothers, Frederick, who came from the wrong side of the tracks in Canarsie, an area known as Pigtown because even in the early 1960s swine farms were still prevalent there. Freddy was a mechanic at a Canarsie gasoline station where Roy and others from Phil’s Lounge bought their gas cheap.

  Freddy never made it past fourth grade because school doctors failed to diagnose a dyslexic condition that made it difficult for him to understand letters and numbers. Instead, they classified him as a slow learner and threw him in with students who were actually retarded. Some people, but not Roy, made fun of the lean and gawky mechanic because he never did learn to read or write and because he sometimes acted like his synapses were not firing, the way some mentally disabled kids do. He was, however, a genius with cars; unable to make sense of manuals, he still made engines purr and built new ones out of others’ junk.

  Freddy was twelve days younger than Roy; his mother had died about the same time as Chubby DeMeo. Roy invited him and his brother Richard, who was not much of a genius about anything, to stop by Phil’s Lounge anytime. Roy’s benevolence made Freddy a fiercely loyal friend. “Roy is the smartest guy I know,” he would tell everyone. “I would do anything for Roy.”

  The friendship had its rewards. Freddy had already done two years in jail for stealing a truckload of batteries. And he was not just a mechanic when Roy met him; he was a car thief working for the Lucchese Mafia men who ran the Canarsie junkyards. Freddy specialized in Volkswagens—parts were scarce, therefore valuable. Freddy also stole motorcycles whenever he or any of a group of motorcycle hounds he rode with needed a spare part. The motorcyclists were known as the Aliens of Pigtown.

  Through Freddy, Roy began meeting a vast new array of possible loanshark customers—thieves, robbers, hijackers, all manner of lowlifes. Through Freddy, Roy even met some of the Lucchese Mafia gangsters who ran the junkyards. He was not that impressed.

  Eventually, all these people made their way to Phil’s Lounge, joining the cops, firemen, and other city workers from the neighborhood who came to socialize and make a bet with the bar’s bookmakers. For Roy, working this crowd was like shooting ducks in a pond. Soon he had so much money on the street and so much coming back on a regular basis that he quit Banner Dairy.

  From age twenty-two on he never worked another legitimate day. He began stealing cars with Freddy not because he needed the money but to learn the business; same thing with the break-ins he committed with a friend from the Avenue P crowd. Working the bar crowd, he also fenced stolen cars and other property. In time he became a kind of concierge of crime in Flatlands and Canarsie, the person to see for this or that.

  Making his deals, Roy emphasized the making of relationships just as much. Relationships produced benefits beyond the immediate deal, he always said. “My business is just buying and selling,” Roy began to say to Gladys and everyone else—including his mother, after she returned from Italy and moved into the home of her good friend Mrs. Profaci, who was a widow now too and living in Bath Beach.

  In 1965, Roy began demonstrating what was to be a lifelong paranoia about the Internal Revenue Service—the only arm of the law that really scared him. He could no
t just fail to file, as many criminals do, because he had already demonstrated a filing history while working at Banner Dairy. So Roy, through his relationships, worked out deals with a couple of friends who owned small businesses to carry him on their books as an employee. The trick was deciding how much salary to claim; the more salary, the more taxes, and naturally he wanted to pay the smallest possible tax. This became a trickier equation as Roy made plans to build a house in Massapequa Park—how to avoid IRS suspicion that his lifestyle exceeded his income while still chiseling every dime he could.

  At Gil Hodges Lanes one day, before the move to Massapequa Park, Roy sought out a former Saint Thomas Aquinas classmate who was now an IRS agent. He asked how the IRS conducted “net-worth” cases—how it proved someone spent more than they reported as income. “How would you make such a case against a guy who said he made his money gambling?”

  The agent put Roy off—one of the rare times Roy was unable to develop a relationship—and it angered him. When he later ran into the agent at a wake for a mutual acquaintance, he loudly and sarcastically proclaimed to a group of mourners that “stoolpigeons” were in the room and he was leaving.

  After building his house in Massapequa Park, and despite his worries about his fictional returns, Roy was the most successful twenty-five-year-old that he knew—with the possible exception of Freddy DiNome. With money made from stolen Volkswagens, Freddy had built a race car and become a star on the professional drag-racing circuit. Late-night television commercials promoted the appearances of “Broadway Freddy” at local and national race tracks; he was making one hundred thousand dollars a year.

  In 1966, after his first get-acquainted meeting with Anthony Gaggi, Roy set his sights on becoming a member of the Gambino Mafia family; from his Uncle Albert’s old stories and his contacts in the Luchese family, he already knew a lot about its history.

  After winning the power struggle that followed the assassination of Albert Anastasia, Carlo Gambino had inherited an army of some two hundred fifty made men and at least that many collaborators. They controlled a network of gambling, fencing, and prostitution operations and held key positions with labor unions and trade groups in the garment, construction, food, and private sanitation industries. Men dealing drugs were ordered to stop—or be killed. Carlo believed that the severe penalties attached to drug crimes pressured defendants to become informers.

  Since Carlo’s takeover, the family’s influence had spread like a virus. Carlo orchestrated schemes affecting everyday life in many ways: from monopolistic practices that added a few dollars to the cost of clothes and food to the bid-rigging, bribes, and threats that added many thousands to the cost of unloading ships and building skyscrapers. The racketeering produced cash for loansharking; the family became an underground Citibank for people unable to get legitimate loans. Carlo’s men borrowed from him at low interest, then loaned the money out at high interest; their books yielded regular income—and business opportunities that fed the virus.

  Nino Gaggi was a good example. By 1966, he received hundreds of dollars a week in interest from loans to jewelry shops, truck companies, and many clients in the car world—repair shops, used-car lots, gas stations, and automobile dealerships. The customers knew that if they failed to meet their obligations they had to invite their unforgiving banker into their businesses, and thus Nino had become a secret owner of a restaurant in Manhattan, a film-processing lab in Brooklyn, and another Manhattan operation that made and distributed counterfeit copies of X-rated films.

  Although doing well, Nino wanted more. That’s what the game was about. And that’s why he wanted to meet the dynamo from Flatlands who was making so much he had already built a fancy home, whereas Nino was just beginning to scout out property in Florida on which he intended to build a deluxe getaway for himself, Rose, and their children.

  It increased Nino’s status in the family if he also earned more for Carlo and Paul. By Mafia tradition, a soldier was obligated to give his capo a negotiable percentage of his earnings, just as the capo was expected to do the same with his boss. Predictably, nearly everyone cheated, but the more money one earned, the less it hurt to give some up.

  To test a possible relationship, Nino proposed that he and Roy co-make a loan to one of Nino’s customers, a used-car dealer who wanted to expand. Roy jumped at the chance and promised to pick up the man’s payments and faithfully bring Nino’s share to him. That way, dependable Roy would get to see Nino more.

  That same year, 1966, Roy began building another relationship that eventually led him to the business Carlo Gambino had banned—drug dealing. Like the one he had with the pitiable mechanic who became a successful drag-racer, Freddy DiNome, this relationship was with a person he felt sympathy for—a sixteen-year-old kid with a huge chip on his shoulder because he was short and Jewish, when he wanted to be tall and Italian like all his friends.

  Just as with Freddy, Roy met Chris Rosenberg at a gas station in Canarsie, and he could see that underneath the chip the kid was ambitious and smart—for one thing, he knew who Roy was. Chris was making a few bucks dealing marijuana, and Roy loaned him some money so he could deal in larger amounts.

  Through the late 1960s, Roy continued to nurture his relationship with Nino. They made more loans together and Roy found new markets for Nino’s counterfeit X-rated film operation. Roy and Nino each had what the other wanted. Roy was a moneymaker; Nino had influence. Working for Nino, Roy would have Gambino family cachet, which would enhance his moneymaking, especially if he too ever became a made man. So, by 1970, Roy was working for Nino—and giving him hundreds a week just for being his boss.

  During that time Roy also brought Chris Rosenberg along, loaning him money for more drug deals and selling off the cars that Chris and his friends stole to his connections in the Canarsie junkyards. Chris introduced his friends to Roy, and by 1972, Roy was the Fagin of Flatlands, with his own loyal crew of young drug dealers and car thieves.

  It was not all business, however. Roy and his young friends got together socially. They went to watch “Broadway Freddy” race and to Frank Foronjy’s farm, where they learned to shoot the guns Roy had begun collecting. His collection, which was more like an arsenal, included machine guns, automatic rifles, shotguns, and silencers for the handguns. Roy also invited them to Massapequa Park for barbecues—generally, the only time Roy let people see him get drunk. None had ever seen a house like Roy’s, at least not from the inside, where all the floors were marble. Roy now even employed a gardener and a maid, and the food and drink he offered were always top shelf.

  Like diminutive Chris, the young men closest to Roy were all good-looking characters, if in a dangerous sort of way. The contrast between them and Roy was actually remarkable. Where he was dowdy and lumpy, they were chiseled and sleek. Some years later, someone videotaped one of the elaborate barbecues, which were by then a DeMeo crew tradition. No one ever said Roy ever made amorous moves on his crew, but in the videotape—as he ate, drank, and swapped stories with his crew—he looked like a man who might pay handsome young men to hang around—not for actual sex necessarily but for the hint and scent of it.

  Roy had begun cheating on Gladys with some of the barmaids who worked at his office in Flatlands. It began happening after Phil’s Lounge came up short of cash and Roy stepped in with six thousand dollars and became the secret owner as the bar was reborn the Gemini Lounge. On paper, the bar was owned by one of the Doherty brothers from Avenue P, Charles, the one Roy was closest to. It was incorporated as Charley D’s, but before it opened, Doherty, a horoscope fan, decided his astrological sign provided a better name. Another Doherty brother, Daniel, helped out with the bartending, and so did another one of the Foronjy brothers, also named Charles.

  Roy’s new friends knew he was unfaithful because he bragged about it. Success with women was something Roy never experienced as a teenager, but now that he had money and status (at least in the Gemini Lounge context) Roy discovered that some plain Janes would jump into
bed with him. Because his marriage was more one of convenience anyway, he never lost a guilty moment over these one-hour stands in an apartment next to the Gemini. Even if his marriage was a good one, he probably would not have felt guilt, given the gross remarks he would make about his tawdry conquests. “I made her do things you wouldn’t believe and then I fucked her in the ass,” Roy would tell his young friends. With Roy, sex was money; it was a way to show how strong he was.

  Roy’s neighbors did not fail to notice that a lot of young men were always pulling into Roy’s driveway in fancy sportscars. But they were too discreet to comment on it in front of Roy and accommodating Gladys, who were actually a popular couple on Park Place. If Roy noticed his neighbors raking leaves, he offered extra trash bags. When he cleaned his garage, he invited them to take what they wanted before tossing anything away.

  The front porch of the DeMeos’ two-story, bay-windowed house offered a lovely view of a sloping tree-lined yard, around which strong-armed Roy personally erected a corral-type fence. During holidays, the house was decorated inside and out, and an outdoor speaker system played seasonal music. Gladys, who loved being a mother if not Roy’s wife, marked every holiday with special batches of cookies for all the Park Place kids.

  The neighbors were also too polite to comment on the house’s sophisticated alarm system, or the iron bars across the windows, or the irony of Roy saying he was going to his office when everyone else was coming home from theirs. His neighbors only saw the jovial, helpful side of dependable, cooperative, and well-behaved Roy.

  When the Hanes boy was struck by a car in the middle of the block, Roy was the first adult on the scene. He comforted the injured boy and took him to a hospital in nearby Amityville. Gladys told neighbors that Roy was still shaking when he came home because the Hanes boy was a playmate of their son Albert, who had inherited Roy’s middle name (Roy’s prominent lawyer-uncle’s first name).