Murder Machine

by Gene Mustain

  The shadowy figure of a man, too slim for Roy, suddenly appeared on the sidewalk. He was just a passerby, approaching the car from behind. Nino began to move forward, to tap on the hood and warn the man inside to duck down, but saw he was going to be too late. The man in the car, his work over, was sliding across the front seat toward the passenger door; he opened it and stepped out just as the passerby strolled by.

  For an instant, the men were face to face, but the passerby quickly averted his eyes and moved on, a wise way to be in Brooklyn, according to legend. If called as a witness, he would not have been able to identify the man he saw leaving the car—Dominick Montiglio.

  Dominick had told his wife it was possible to work for Nino without getting too deep into “that life,” but here he was, at age twenty-seven, hitting bottom. This time he was helping blow up a person, not a porch. In the minds of Nino and Roy, however, he was merely opening the door to the clubhouse, making his debut. Murder was just his final rite of passage.

  Heart racing, he joined Nino on the corner and angrily whispered, “Where the fuck was Roy? The fucking guy dogged it!”

  On the heel of these words, Roy emerged from the restaurant.

  “Where the fuck you been?” Nino demanded.

  “Makin’ sure the kid wasn’t in there.”

  “Fuck you, the guy eats at White Castle. He ain’t anywhere but the crap game. Some guy got up in Dom’s face ’cause of you.”

  Roy offered to make amends, show power. “All right, so let’s go get that guy.”

  “Fuck you, let’s get outta here.”

  Roy resented the implication that he had been cowardly. He thought he had acted smartly. It was dumb to stand behind a car while someone inside it played around with a grenade. Here he was trying to help Nino get his revenge and all he got was grief. “Nobody was gonna bother that car. This is Brooklyn.”

  The men walked to Nino’s house and waited on the front stoop for an explosion.

  Dominick had inserted toothpicks in the locks of the car’s other doors so Governara would have only one to open, and on the inside pull-up lock of that he had tied string connected by fish hooks to the grenade’s pin. He was certain of an explosion, but not a fatal one. It was a concussion grenade, meaning it did not spew shrapnel like a fragmentation grenade. The plastic housing of its black-powder charge melted on detonation. To accomplish its purpose, the shattering of brains, a concussion grenade was ideally used in a confined area, like a Hill 875 tunnel.

  “When the guy opens the door, the energy has a way out,” he had told Nino and Roy. “He might break his neck against the ceiling, but he might just get knocked out.”

  The grenade came from Roy’s arsenal of weapons, now hidden in the Gemini Lounge basement. Roy, saying he knew just as much about weapons as Dominick, insisted it would work; since meeting him eighteen months earlier, Roy also had frequently ridiculed Dominick’s combat experience and all his “Green Beret bullshit.” Once, he broke into a mocking singsong, “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli . . .”

  “Roy,” Dominick pointed out, “that’s the Marines, not the Army.” Roy had never mentioned Chubby DeMeo to Dominick.

  About the grenade, Roy had bitingly said, “It’ll work, this ain’t no Vietnam, this ain’t like over there in Veeat-nam.”

  About one o’clock in the morning, with all still quiet, Roy left for his Massapequa Park home, his Valium, and a stiff Cutty. If IRS investigators had interviewed his neighbors, they might have learned that at various times he told them he worked in the used-car business, the construction field, and food retailing. He never mentioned the Boro of Brooklyn Credit Union, where he was now president of the board of directors, or the S & C Sportswear Corporation, a Brooklyn company that listed him as an employee. Naturally, he never mentioned the Gambino Mafia family, where much to his chagrin he was still an associate, not a made man.

  Alone with Dominick, Nino said, “Don’t ever forget what Roy did tonight.”

  “How could I? He left me in a bad spot.”

  “Like they say in the Army, he left his post, don’t ever forget that.”

  Dominick felt a chill, not from the words, but an uninvited thought: What if Governara did not leave the game until morning? Public School 200 was a block away. Kids would be passing by, like he and Governara were twenty years ago when they were classmates waving to Six-Two cops. In their haste to kill, the plotters had been insanely reckless.

  The former LURP braced himself because he knew what thought would come next. More regularly now, violent images from Vietnam darted equally uninvited into his consciousness. One particular flashback kept recurring. In it, he saw himself picking up heads, arms, legs and intestines that slipped through his fingers as he sought to piece soldiers together, and now in the dark with Nino he flashed on little heads, arms and legs, and sank down on the stoop before he fainted.

  “Everything okay?” Nino said.

  “Just a little tired.”

  “Me too. I’m going in.”

  Alone now, Dominick decided to stay up and, if no explosion occurred by daybreak, remove the grenade. He had four seconds to re-pin it once he opened the door; more time could be bought by breaking a window and entering the car that way; somehow, it could be done.

  He was growing accustomed to sleepless nights because he had also begun having nightmares. A recurring picture from these had been that of an artillery shell drilling a basketball-size hole through his chest. One night he awoke with such pain that he went to a hospital certain he was dying of a heart attack. The nightmares had gotten worse over the last year, and a few months ago he had finally sought help from the Veterans Administration.

  A doctor prescribed the same drug Roy was taking, Valium, then wrote:

  This veteran is suffering moderate to severe emotional reactions from his battle experiences in Vietnam. . . . Since his separation from the Army, he has functioned significantly below the level of a person of his intelligence and previous performance. . . . This pattern is quite the opposite of that which prevailed prior to combat, when he was active in sports, led his own musical group, and had an active social life. . . . His nightmares duplicate actual events he was involved in.

  “Delayed stress syndrome” was the term used to describe the emotional turmoil many veterans experienced after coming home to a divided country whose politics reduced them to pawns, losers, or savages. Dominick did not see a connection between his stress and working for Nino. Veterans who led Boy Scout troops suffered similarly. It was just another way his life had changed since he began managing Nino’s car service.

  * * *

  The Plaza Car Service took part of its name from the shopping center where it was located. Kings Plaza, the first suburban-style mall in Brooklyn, was on the southern edge of Flatlands and was that community’s, and Canarsie’s, principal shopping district. At the car service office in 1973, Dominick met Roy DeMeo for the first time.

  Roy arrived with Nino, who came by twice a day to count his dollars. Nino introduced Roy as a friend, but Dominick knew that if Roy was truly Nino’s friend he would have met him earlier. Roy was clearly younger than Nino and also plainly deferential. Reading between the lines, he sized Roy up as a Gambino family partner of some kind. Where Uncle Nino was disciplined in speech and appearance, Roy was an immediate gabber, and his knit shirt also hung outside his trousers in a still-failing attempt to downplay an abdominal tire.

  Relationship-conscious Roy chattered away. In a few minutes, Dominick knew where Roy grew up, where he lived, his kids’ names, and that he had recently survived an automobile accident in which a woman was killed. And that on another occasion, driving home, he saw another accident and had stopped his car and assisted one of the injured drivers. “That guy turned out to be an FBI agent. Can you believe it? Me helping an FBI agent? If it had been an IRS guy, I would’ve let ’im bleed to death.”

  Roy also asked Dominick many questions about Vietnam—not so much the war but th
e weapons. “Do they really have ’scopes that see in the night now?” Roy asked.

  “Sure,” Dominick said. “I used ’em on point.”

  Roy invited Dominick to visit the Gemini Lounge, the renamed bar he secretly owned in Flatlands. “Good people there,” he said, using code words Dominick well knew.

  “Roy has a bunch of kids around him,” Nino said later. “Real sleepers.”

  “Sleepers?”

  “They look about twelve years old, but they’re tough guys.”

  In a few weeks, when Nino took him to the Gemini Lounge for the first time, Dominick met the first of Roy’s sleepers—but at five-feet-five, long-haired Chris Rosenberg did not appear that tough. Roy introduced him as “a friend in the car business” and while Roy and Nino huddled, the younger men talked.

  Chris was cocky and ebullient. He said he had been “with Roy” since he was sixteen; he was now twenty-three; his “man” Roy was a major loanshark, although not as big as “your man” Nino. He borrowed money from Roy at three quarters of one percent interest and loaned it out to his own customers at three to five “points” a week. His customers were mechanics and body-and-fender men in Canarsie and Flatlands, where he owned an auto-repair shop.

  “Need a car?” he asked Dominick. “I can get you a good deal on a Lincoln. 1973. Great shape.”

  At the time, Dominick owned a Jeep he bought in California. On the way home, he mentioned Chris’s proposal to Nino.

  “I don’t want you to buy a car from Chris. It might be stolen. Chris and his friends deal in stolen cars.”

  Because Chris was with Roy and Roy was with Nino, Dominick concluded that Nino profited from stolen cars too, if only as a shareholder in Roy’s operation. He took silent satisfaction in remembering that as a child he had suspected that Nino, when he owned a used-car lot, was somehow making money off stolen cars.

  Nino, driving his third new Cadillac since Dominick came home from California, told Dominick a friend of his would give him a good price and favorable financing on a new car. The friend was a loan customer who owned a General Motors dealership in Brooklyn. Soon, Dominick was driving a new Oldsmobile Cutlass.

  In a few weeks, Nino gave Dominick a fifty-dollar raise on the condition he start picking up the weekly payment of a loan customer in Manhattan. So, on Friday afternoons, Dominick began taking a few hours off from the car service and going to a familiar place, the 21 Club, to see Chuck Anderson, “Mr. New York.” Anderson greeted him at a new level of respect, but never said why he owed Mr. Bath Beach twenty-five thousand dollars.

  In 1974, Nino folded Plaza Car Service because the profit was not worth the bother. Staying on Nino’s payroll, Dominick agreed to pick up his other loans, but not for any additional salary—“It’s easy work,” Nino said. Nino’s customers were not repairmen or unreliable junkies, gamblers, and street criminals. Mostly, they were otherwise legitimate businessmen who had found themselves with too many accounts payable.

  The developer of a dinner theater in suburban Westchester County, a few miles north of the Bronx, was a good example. He failed in a public offering of stock shares to raise the cash to complete construction of the Westchester Premier Theater in Tarrytown. For their agreements to perform, the developer then sold bargain shares with options to several entertainers, including Steve Lawrence, Eydie Gormé, and Alan King. Still, construction overruns at the thirty-five-hundred seat theater left him short.

  A major investor, a connected Californian, contacted Carlo Gambino, who agreed to loan one hundred thousand dollars, which still was not enough. Another investor, the nephew of a Gambino captain who lived in Westchester County, then asked Nino to meet him at the theater to discuss another loan. Exposing Dominick to his first big Gambino family business deal, Nino asked Dominick to accompany him.

  The second investor, Gregory DePalma, asked for a quarter-million-dollar loan. “A little steep,” Nino said, “but I’ll talk it over with Paul.” A week later, he called Dominick downstairs to his basement office in the bunker and handed him a brown paper bag. “There is a hundred and twenty-five grand in there. Half of what they wanted. Take it to Greg DePalma. And you’ll be goin’ up there every week now to get the vig. Fifteen hundred. Make sure they don’t try and cheat.”

  Collecting the weekly interest, Dominick learned that Nino and Paul were equal partners in the loan and were gambling that the entertainers scheduled to appear would keep the house packed, enabling the developer to meet his weekly payments and pay off his loans with them and Carlo. The theater opened in 1974 with Diana Ross as the attraction, but the week ended as a loss because the Dreamgirl had cost too much—two hundred fifty thousand dollars.

  “We’re right back in a hole,” DePalma told Dominick.

  The theater’s California investor contacted a friend who was a childhood friend of Frank Sinatra, who agreed to a week of concerts for one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. Sinatra grew up across the Hudson River from New York in Hoboken, New Jersey, then a community much like the Lower East Side when Nino was growing up. He developed his act in New York clubs and like Rocky Graziano and Jake LaMotta was a cultural hero to Italian-Americans; a Sinatra performance in New York was a special event.

  Carlo, Paul, Nino, Dominick, and their wives—and many other Mafia-connected men—attended Sinatra’s opening night. Nino also brought his willful mother Mary, and all ate a pre-show dinner in the theater’s VIP room. With their connections, they were assured the best stagefront seats; New York Governor Hugh Carey occupied their adjoining table and backstage everyone had their picture taken with Sinatra.

  Ominously, however, even Sinatra’s concerts were unprofitable. Even so, wanting to protect his, Paul’s, and Nino’s investments, Carlo approved another seventy-five-thousand-dollar loan. Nino gave the cash to Dominick, who took it to DePalma. “The vig’s gonna be two grand a week now,” Nino said.

  In the meantime, when the new models came out, Dominick got another Cutlass because Nino got another Cadillac. He kept the car—and himself now—washed and waxed at all times; he was meeting substantial people and representing Nino. So he tried to look substantial; he had shorn his long hair and tossed all the ridiculous hippie outfits he owned. He was now a more manly rendition of his old Four Directions look—polished, swarthy, and with his high strong cheekbones and wide powerful jaw-line, handsome in a rugged way. Once again, he had demonstrated, as his high school friends once noted, an uncanny knack for completely changing his outward appearance; inside, he was feeling special again too. He was getting into the swing of things as a top assistant to one of the important men. Denise liked the new Dominick. She did not want to know any details, however, and he did not tell her many.

  As the months went by, Nino kept opening the window on his world. Despite all he saw and heard growing up with Nino, despite the dynamite beneath the dentist’s porch, Dominick only now began to appreciate what a dangerous man his uncle was. A telling moment came when Nino recalled his encounter with Dominick’s former classmate, Vincent Governara, the teenage boxer who left Nino in the middle of Eighty-sixth Street with a broken nose.

  Even telling the story, Nino seethed. “The day that happened, I promised myself, ‘I will get that punk some day. I will kill that little motherfucker.”’

  “Why not just give him a good beatin’?”

  “Some things cost a little more.”

  When Nino and Rose left for a long stay at their now-complete luxurious Florida getaway, Dominick needed a place to stash all the cash he was collecting. Beneath a chest of drawers in his bunker apartment, he made a trap. In a few weeks, it contained sixty thousand dollars.

  One night, Nino called and told him to fly to Florida with twenty thousand. Two robbers had accosted Nino and Rose in their retreat and taken all their cash. The robbers got away, but not without another demonstration of Nino’s raging-bull nature.

  The robbers believed the house was unoccupied, but rang the bell to be sure. When Rose opened the door, o
ne wanted to leave, but the other pulled a gun and pushed his way inside. When Nino came to investigate, the robber without the gun yelled to the other, “Let’s get the fuck out of here!”

  “Who the fuck are you assholes!” Nino screamed.

  “Shut the fuck up!” the gunman shouted back.

  “Fuck you! Get the fuck out of my house!”

  Unarmed, Nino rushed forward, but the gunman smacked him in the face with the pistol, then hammered the top of his head. Nino keeled over, incapacitated and bleeding; Rose tended to him while the robbers rifled the house.

  Hearing Nino tell the story, and seeing his eyes as cold and focused as they were when he spoke of Governara (“Judge a man by his eyes,” Nino liked to say. “The eyes don’t lie.”), Dominick was certain the robbers were dead men if Nino ever learned who they were.

  Back in Brooklyn, in 1974, the bond between Nino and Dominick grew stronger. The more Nino talked about the past, especially about Frank Scalise, the more Dominick began to feel like a descendant of a royal, if renegade, family. “Frank Scalise was the finest man I ever met,” Nino said. “He was there with Luciano at the beginning of all this. Him and his brother Joe, they were two of the shooters on the St. Valentine’s hits in Chicago. Capone used out-of-town talent on that, you know.”

  For the first time, Dominick thought of his lineage this way: Luciano, Scalise, Gaggi, Montiglio. “Didn’t know our family was so famous,” he said.

  Nino’s response betrayed his own romantic notions. “Growing up, all I ever wanted was to be like Frank Scalise and to die on the street with a gun in my hand.”

  “Like Frank did.”

  “Frank wasn’t carrying. He didn’t have a gun. But we took care of the guy who got Frank and Joe.”

  “Oh yeah?” Dominick probed a little further. Nino had come to the edge of a confession, a milestone in their relationship.

  “The guy’s name was Vincent Squillante. We surprised him in the Bronx. We shot him in the head, stuffed him in the trunk, drove to Tenth Street, and threw him in a furnace.”