Murder Machine

by Gene Mustain

  “Roy kept saying he did what he did because that could have been Albert out there bleeding on the street,” Gladys said.

  When some older boys began parking their cars around the corner from Park Place at all hours of the night and using the woods in a state park behind Roy’s house for pot parties, Roy swung into action. With his German shepherd watchdog Champ at his side one night, he went into the woods and confronted the teenagers.

  “I don’t want any drugs in my neighborhood! Get the hell out and don’t come back! Never!”

  The neighbors figured the rumors about Roy, that he was a “big racketeer” in Brooklyn, must have reached the teenagers because they never did come back.

  Occasionally, Roy and Gladys hosted parties for everyone on the block. The biggest party every year was on the Fourth of July and always featured an illegal fireworks display—which always drew a wink from the local cops. The next day Roy would be out in the street, sweeping up Roman Candle fragments. One year, a neighbor complained that some large rockets landed on his roof, and Roy promised to eliminate them the following year, which he did.

  Roy had to swindle a lot of money to support this life, but that was no problem. In partnership with Nino, or his crew, or sometimes on his own, he was constantly panning the landscape for opportunity. For instance, in 1972, he joined the Boro of Brooklyn Credit Union and within months had talked his way onto the board of directors; he soon showed some of his colleagues how they could earn something on the side by using the credit union as a laundering service for drug dealers Roy had met; with the others’ connivance, Roy also dipped into credit union reserves to finance loans in his mushrooming book. Roy’s book was still anchored in the car business, but it was soon to include a dentist, an abortion clinic, a flea market, and two restaurants.

  Unknown to Roy, someone in the credit union complained about what was going on there, and for the first time Roy’s name entered an official police file. That same year, an informant caused an FBI agent to place a sparse note in bureau files: Two men known only as Nino and Roy had muscled their way into a company that processed X-rated films. It was the first time the name “Nino” appeared in any official file too.

  Viewed from another angle, the note was even more significant. This newest scheme of Nino’s and Roy’s would lead Roy over the bridge separating those who merely steal from those who kill. Nino had already crossed it; once Roy did, removing the last barrier to unrestrained criminality, the bully in him would surface again, in new monstrous ways.

  * * *

  Paul Rothenberg’s X-rated business was a natural extension of the counterfeit film business Nino already had, for which Roy had been finding new markets. It was also a perfect extortion target; it was lucrative, yet small, uncomplicated, and only semilegitimate.

  With a partner, Rothenberg owned two film processing labs. The labs served commercial clients, but also producers of X-rated and in some cases clearly pornographic movies, by the standards of New York’s obscenity laws.

  Rothenberg, age forty-three, had been arrested four times, pleading guilty in one case to possessing what a judge described as “the worst type of hardcore pornography.” He was believed to be the largest processor of blue movies in New York and charged as much as thirty dollars per film. He lived with his wife and three children in a swank community on Long Island.

  One of Roy’s loanshark customers told him about Rothenberg’s business. On a spring day in 1972, Nino and Roy visited Rothenberg at his companies’ Manhattan headquarters. In the meeting, Nino would be the good cop, Roy the bad.

  Nino suggested to Rothenberg that with his and Roy’s connections they could help improve his business, if only he would make them silent partners. Rothenberg said no thanks and laughed. Roy then slapped him across the face like Rothenberg was just a kid at Saint Thomas Aquinas who had been disrespectful. In his hand, Roy also had a pistol, from his collection.

  Rothenberg could hardly complain to the police, so he and his partner began paying Nino and Roy several hundred dollars a week, the amount depending on the number of films they processed each week.

  Rothenberg hated being squeezed. A woman friend later told police she heard him arguing on the telephone once with someone he described as a partner who was taking too much money from him.

  “I just finished paying this guy off and he wants more,” Rothenberg said to her.

  The arrangement lasted a year, until the labs were raided and Rothenberg and his partner, Anthony Argila, were arrested. The police took films they valued at two hundred fifty thousand dollars, films with titles like Deep Throat—Number Five.

  “We don’t think we’re doing anything wrong,” Argila told police. “We’re just making a living.”

  Wrong or not, both faced several felony charges—and heavy prison time. Nino and Roy instantly realized that they too were in serious trouble, if either Rothenberg or Argila decided to reveal how they were extorted.

  The day after the raid, Roy met Rothenberg at a diner and gave him twenty-five hundred dollars toward his legal defense. It hardly seemed appropriate under the circumstances, but Roy also gave him a gold ladies’ wristwatch festooned with diamonds and asked him to try and fence it. The watch had been stolen in a one million dollar hijacking at Kennedy Airport a few months before.

  In a few days, after sifting records confiscated in the raid, the police came back to Rothenberg and Argila and asked about checks made out to Roy DeMeo and cashed at the Boro of Brooklyn Credit Union.

  “Business expenses,” Argila said.

  “Extortion payments,” Rothenberg said.

  Rothenberg then refused to say any more. Over the next few days, a Manhattan assistant district attorney called Rothenberg’s lawyer to urge him to urge his client to cooperate. Rothenberg might help his own case if he gave information about a Mafia extortion scheme. Several meetings to discuss the proposal were scheduled, then canceled—the last on Friday, July 27, 1973.

  That night, Roy called Rothenberg and scheduled a meeting on Sunday morning at a diner near both their houses. Roy told him he wanted his hot ladies’ watch back, but in reality Nino had decided Rothenberg had to be killed and had ordered Roy to do the job. Roy had already demonstrated he was an earner; it was time to see if he possessed the other necessary made-man trait, the murdering one.

  Roy was more than ready to oblige. The murder would seal his alliance with Nino and put him on the Gambino fast track. So, in Roy’s mind, murder, like sex and money, became just a way to show power.

  At the diner, Roy sat in his car and waited until Rothenberg arrived in his. Getting straight to the task, he ordered Rothenberg out of his car at silencer-equipped gunpoint, marched him into an alleyway and fired two bullets into his head with the calm of an executioner. No muss, no fuss. No mistakes, no guilt.

  Rothenberg’s partner, Anthony Argila, was boating when the murder occurred. In interviews with detectives, he made statements that were proven to be lies. He denied even knowing Roy, but detectives tailing Roy after the murder saw them meet twice. Argila knew his partner was thinking of cooperating, but Argila had decided it was safer to keep quiet, which he continued to do.

  When police questioned Roy, he told them only his name and address. With Argila afraid for his life, Roy was confident the case would go no further, and it never did. Roy’s partner, the man known only as “Nino,” was not even identified.

  For thirty-two-year-old Roy, the murder was an epiphanous moment. He tried explaining it to his young followers. “Ya know somethin’? After you kill someone, anything is possible.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Hill 875

  The first time Dominick Montiglio was ever in an airplane, he jumped out—and what a glorious feeling it was when his parachute popped and he was just a kid’s balloon floating in the pillowy sky above Fort Benning, Georgia. He yelled like he was back on Coney Island: “Airborne! Airrrborrrne!”

  Beside him other recruits floated down too. He had passed basic and
advanced infantry training and was in Airborne Ranger school, the third leg of his quest for a Green Beret. The spontaneity of his enlistment aside, he was on a mission to prove himself right and Nino wrong.

  He was immune to the era’s budding antiwar movement. His new buddies were the same. Soldiers in other units had begun greeting each other with the word “Peace.” Not Rangers. They said, “War!” When they sang Ranger songs on long humps across Georgia’s clay plains, it was with fervor generals dream about. “I wanna be an Airborne Ranger! I wanna live the life of danger!”

  The reward at the end of those humps was having to recite the Ranger Creed while bellying through a trench a hundred yards long and full of excrement, mud, and garbage. “I accept the fact that as a Ranger my country expects me to move farther, faster, and fight harder than any other soldier. Readily will I display the intestinal fortitude required to fight on to the Ranger objective and complete the mission, though I be the lone survivor.”

  Though I be the lone survivor was the phrase Dominick began quoting to people back home.

  After seventy-seven days of physical torture and mental abuse, the formerly chunky boy from Brooklyn by way of Levittown graduated Ranger School with a lean, hard body, a supremely confident attitude, and a two-pack-a-day Camel habit; his buddies nicknamed him “Stubby” because he was only five-feet-eight but strong as a tree trunk.

  Next came the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina. He learned how to throw a hatchet and to use two hundred sixty-seven other instruments of death, from garrotes to .50 caliber machine guns. He was cross-trained in two specialties—light weapons and silent warfare. When he finally got his Green Beret, he was a land-based stealth fighter.

  Unaccompanied by any members of the Gaggi family, the Montiglio family saw him off at an airport in New Jersey the day he left for South Vietnam. The goodbye had a double-edged poignancy because his mother Marie had recently been diagnosed as having Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer for which treatment was then limited. Her doctors had told her she might live several more years, or only a few—it was impossible to tell.

  “You can’t die before I do,” she told her son.

  “Though I be the lone survivor, Mom,” he said. “Promise.”

  At the time, counterinsurgency was the primary Green Beret mission. They parachuted into enemy territory to blow up convoys, capture prisoners and spread disinformation. On one such mission two months after he arrived, Dominick saved a life and, so far as he knew, took one for the first time. As he ran to a helicopter extraction, a Beret behind him was wounded by a sniper; he turned and saw the sniper racing toward the man to finish him off. He ran back, shot the enemy dead, and carried his comrade away. The man survived, and Dominick won his first medal, a Silver Star.

  Later, he won a Bronze Star for saving a patrol from an ambush and helping to destroy a machine gun nest while under heavy fire. A writer heard about it and called him a “rawhide rough” hero in a magazine story picked up by a newspaper back home. The more combat he saw, however, the less the medals meant. The only medal he wore without unease was his Combat Infantryman’s Badge because it was awarded for being under fire thirty straight days; to him, it was a greater measure of bravery than a single feat.

  He survived his tour, then volunteered for special patrol duty with the 173d Airborne Brigade, his home unit. Patrol members were known as LURPs, a twist on the acronym for their specialty, Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol. As a Green Beret, he had done the same kind of hide-and-seek soldiering as the LURPs.

  He became close to his LURP team’s five other members, and after surviving a second tour, volunteered for a third to be with them. Home on leave, he broke the news to his mother, but she did not complain because he also said he intended to make a career of the Army and stay in at least twenty years. In the shadow of her terminal illness, she found more peace of mind in him going back to war than worrying about him drifting toward Nino’s world once Hodgkin’s disease finally claimed her.

  Nino, of course, was appalled. “You really are an idiot,” he told his nephew, “but a lucky one.”

  Nino’s barbs did not sting like before because Dominick was certain he had won his respect. Nino might not have answered any of the six letters he wrote to him from Vietnam, but Dominick detected admiration in his uncle’s voice when Nino probed for details about the medals and how he survived combat.

  Dominick would cite training, prudence, teamwork, preparation, and luck—never the secret survival mantra he had adopted. In times of stress, when he was buried in some foxhole, hiding from the enemy or hoping the next mortar shell would land elsewhere, he would pull his poncho around like a boy hiding under the covers and, adapting an old story from Uncle Carlo, would repeat to himself, over and over, “I am the lion and fox. I am the lion and the fox.”

  In the summer of 1967, the twenty-year-old sergeant left for Vietnam again. His unit was now in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. In the jungle hills west of Dak To, some twelve thousand North Vietnamese Army regulars had massed in order to seduce the U. S. forces into a fight, and late that summer the NVA got its wish.

  It was the worst fighting of the war so far. The NVA had rigged the hills with tunnels and bunkers enabling them to withstand superior American firepower and mount a series of wicked artillery assaults and ground attacks. A one-hundred-sixty-four-man company of the 173d Airborne was reduced to forty-four. Many dead were dismembered during the artillery barrages; after one, Dominick and others who knew their friends’ tattoos were ordered into mobile morgues and asked to identify body parts.

  The experience haunted him for days. He could not erase the images, nor his guilt for feeling relieved his arms and legs were not on display. After more skirmishes, he was awarded the Army’s second-highest medal, the Distinguished Service Cross, which was pinned on him during a battlefield ceremony that included a symbolic tribute to the dead—one hundred twenty-six empty pairs of Ranger boots in neat eerie rows.

  By fall, the U. S. command was certain the NVA had retreated to sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. In November, Dominick’s six-man LURP team was ordered to scout a hill where commanders felt an NVA remnant was protecting the retreat. The hill was on the western edge of Cambodia and since it rose eight hundred seventy-five meters above sea level, was known by the Army as Hill 875.

  LURP teams often stayed in the jungle up to two weeks before being helicoptered out. Their job was to get information and, if feasible, ambush enemy patrols. LURP warfare was constant tension spiced by moments of total terror, forgetting the one hundred degree temperatures, the ants, leeches, and mosquitoes, and the jungle’s one hundred thirty-one varieties of poisonous snake, harmless until they sensed movement.

  Dominick was his team’s point man, the one who surveyed the landscape ahead for signs of life and death. He carried a shotgun because of its wide shot pattern at close range; he looked for bushes leaning the wrong way, rocks recently overturned, trees with suspicious branches. To his teammates, he had described his skill on point as “reading between the lines,” a gift from his Uncle Nino, about whom little else was ever said.

  On November 18, 1967, the patrol’s tenth day on Hill 875, Dominick came around a bend in a trail and saw a series of manmade steps—short stalks of bamboo tied together with vines—running up and away from the trail, then vanishing in the bush; they appeared freshly made, and were the enemy’s way of moving men and firepower up and down the hill in a hurry.

  Following the steps, the team soon found an empty bunker. It appeared connected to a tunnel, which probably led to caves where the enemy had hid during American bomb attacks. Dominick decided the enemy was hiding now, letting the LURPs up the hill. He said to Uncle Ben, the LURPs’ team leader, “They’re not gonna hit us. They don’t fucking want to.”

  “Not yet,” Uncle Ben agreed.

  “Bad vibes here,” said Bones, the team’s radio man.

  Moving up, the LURPs found more empty bunker
s, tunnels, and finally, an enemy base camp, recently abandoned, judging by campfire ashes. Evaluating the findings, commanders at Dak To decided the enemy had indeed kept a force on—or under—the hill to cover a retreat across the border. They ordered the 2d Battalion of the 503d Infantry, a thousand men, to the foot of the hill. They were to move up in the morning and look for a fight. The LURPs were told to spend the night where they were, halfway up.

  At dawn, the jungle began to vibrate as preparatory shelling of bunkers pinpointed by the LURPs signaled the start of the assault. At 9:43 A.M., about five hundred men—Companies C and D of the 2d Battalion—began moving up. The LURPs were to monitor the action from above. It was their eleventh consecutive day in the bush; Dominick noticed he was running low on food and water.

  Bones’s radio soon crackled with urgent voices. A point man for one of the assault companies had been shredded at point blank range. When his friends went to get him, enemy gunners popped up and shot them down. Others tried advancing in greater numbers, but were pinned down and suffered heavy casualties. Company A of the 2d Battalion, protecting the rear, was then decimated by an NVA unit that circled in behind.

  On Bones’s radio, the LURPs heard the doomed Company A commander frantically shout that he was under fire from all sides and in danger of being overrun. They heard the stutter of automatic fire, swearing, screaming, then only static.

  “Holy fuck,” Dominick said. “They’re wasted.”

  Down the hill, the rest of the 2d Battalion was surrounded. Each time troops tried moving in any direction they were mowed down. In much larger numbers than Dak To commanders anticipated, the enemy was everywhere, racing up and down steps, dashing through tunnels, and popping out of bunkers to prevent escape. They had avoided contact with the LURPs until they had something to risk dying for: hundreds of Americans in an ambush.

  The 2d Battalion was squeezed into a shrinking perimeter and exposed to a mortar rain. Bodies piled up in craters. The living tried hiding under the dead. Forty-man platoons became ten-man squads; eleven of thirteen medics died; all sixteen officers went down, eight permanently. Ten helicopters trying to deliver ammo and evacuate the wounded were shot out of the smoky sky.