by Gene Mustain
The statement was so casually matter-of-fact that Dominick saw that in Nino’s mind the killing was not about murder—but evening the score, tying up a loose end. It became that way in his mind too. Squillante had killed two members of his family. Taking revenge was normal. Taking no revenge was abnormal.
“I’m glad you got the cocksucker,” Dominick said.
While continuing to pick up Nino’s loans, Dominick, at his uncle’s suggestion, began working occasional days at a used-car lot on Long Island. The owner had a loan with Nino and Roy. “It’s a good business for you to learn,” said Nino, the proprietor of a used-car lot when he was twenty-seven, Dominick’s age.
With the owner of the Long Island lot and one of the employees, Dominick began attending automobile auctions in New Jersey. The cars came from new-car dealers who wanted to move trade-ins off their lot. After one auction, he accompanied the owner’s employee to a car repair shop in Canarsie; the shop, it turned out, was owned by a friend of Roy’s protégé, Chris Rosenberg. The man from the used-car lot handed over blank forms as Chris’s friend gave him a wad of bills.
Dominick suspected Chris’s friend was buying papers he could use to make phony titles and registrations. Chris confirmed this when he invited Dominick to take a look at “my car collection.” The collection—five virtually new Porsches and Mercedes—was stored on the second floor of another friend’s warehouse.
“They’re tag jobs,” Chris said.
“Tag what?”
“A tag job. We steal ’em, then change the vehicle identification number and sell ’em as clean cars, with clean titles.”
“How do you get the titles?”
“There’s a hundred ways,” Chris said.
Nino and Dominick began stopping by the Gemini Lounge early on each Friday evening. Fridays, Nino said, “Roy and his crew get together and slice up the money.”
The Gemini occupied the front half of the first floor of a dreary two-story, rectangular brick building on a corner lot in Flatlands; in a feeble attempt to mimic a chalet, a contractor had placed a slanted wooden structure over the second floor and dropped in an A-frame cutout on each side. Whoever designed the outside of the bar tried to carry out the chalet theme by painting the bricks white and choosing Bavarian-style letters for the bar’s logo. The rest of the building stayed two shades of brown.
Inside, the Gemini was like a thousand other neighborhood bars in Brooklyn: It had a jukebox, a pinball machine, ten worn stools by the bar, and maybe another ten tables with red-and-white vinyl checkerboard coverings arrayed around a tiny platform where a small band could perform. Hanging by the bar was the famous New York Daily News front page announcing the Brooklyn Dodgers’ first and only World Series victory, in 1955.
Roy and his crew were seated around two adjoining tables like a board of directors. Dominick recognized Chris and a few other of Chris’s body-shop friends, including the one who paid cash for blank car documents. Other faces were new and so young they appeared to belong to teenagers. Dominick was introduced to a Joey, an Anthony, a Patty, and some others he forgot.
Being with Nino, Dominick was greeted respectfully. As Nino and Roy stepped away to talk, he joined the others for a drink. It became clear that Chris, Joey, Anthony, Patty, and the rest had known each other most of their lives—they seemed to communicate with grunts, glances, and hand signals, as if they were part of some secret society.
“But they don’t look so tough to me,” Sergeant Montiglio told Nino on the way home.
“Well, they are and I don’t want you hanging out with them. They’re punks and drug-users. Any contact is on a business level only.”
“What’s their business?”
“Cars and drugs. Roy backs ’em.”
Dominick already knew Nino was profiting from stolen cars, but drugs was new. Nino had railed against people who used drugs—he had recently walked out of a movie theater when a kid across the aisle lit a joint—but here he was in business with a man who bankrolled drug dealers.
Of course, Dominick had never told Nino that he had taken LSD, that he sometimes smoked marijuana and that while in California he had on a few occasions used a drug he really liked, if only he could afford it: cocaine.
Nino’s admission was another example of the incremental way he raised the window on his world. He was preparing Dominick for a specific role. He wanted to spend more time in Florida, where he had his elegant home in Golden Isles, near Hallendale, plus a new issue of loans that had already caused a launderette to fall into his hands. While away, he needed someone to collect his New York loans and, just as important, be his eyes and ears. It explained why he introduced Dominick to Roy and his crew, but did not want him to become too friendly.
One day, Nino asked Dominick if he knew Anthony Santamaria had died.
“I heard they found him in an empty lot somewhere.”
“It’s a good thing because I always meant to pop him someday. He treated your mom like a dog.”
Though now aware that Nino aggravated some of his father’s problems when they lived together long ago, Dominick did not make a reply. Any attempt to disturb Nino’s facts invited tension, unwise now that he was living under the same roof and had spent the last two years accepting the trust Nino placed in him.
He was never able to fully decide whether this was a matter of inevitability, convenience, lack of character, or—even as ridiculous as it seemed—seeing himself as if he was in a fictional romantic movie. He did think himself a good case study for the question, What in his life does a man control and what is beyond him?—but his answers always got too complicated and lost to daily routine and finally ceased to matter. It was now a simple fact—Nino’s life was his life, and it was a strangely good sign that Nino was so sure of his faith that in his presence Nino could discuss killing his father like the man was some sick animal.
“That’s all in the past now,” Nino added. “You’ll be carrying the torch for me someday.”
Near the end of 1974, Dominick spotted Vincent Governara’s car, tried following it, but lost it in traffic. Lying to his stepdad Anthony Montiglio, still employed at the Department of Motor Vehicles, he asked him to run a license plate check on a car that sideswiped his and took off. The plate checked to an address from which Governara had moved, but Dominick, after checking it out, told Nino he was on the case.
“Good, I want to get the guy.”
All the time Dominick was marching toward this bend in the trail, the delayed stress of Vietnam grew worse. Some nights he would bolt out of bed with images so vivid—intestines slipping through his fingers, shells burrowing into his chest—he was afraid to close his eyes again. It became impossible for Denise to sleep with him, and finally she urged him to see a Veterans Administration doctor, which he did on December 20, 1974.
In a report, Dr. James J. Canty wrote that his patient had delayed seeking help because Green Berets were not supposed to complain. Dr. Canty wrote: “I believe this veteran underwent extensive emotional trauma during his combat duty in Vietnam and that his life is still being very much disturbed by these experiences.”
Believing the nightmares unrelated to “that life,” even believing, as he told Denise, that the “action of ‘that life”’ might make the dreams go away, Dominick plunged on. On March 2, 1975, he saw Governara’s car by the craps game next to the Villa Borghese Restaurant and went home to tell Nino, who called Roy, who came by with the concussion grenade, which, Dominick warned, might not do the job because its energy might escape when Governara opened the door to his car.
“If this is gonna bother you, let me know now,” Nino said as the three men made their plan. “You don’t have to help.”
“No, I’ll do it.”
“Hey Dom, this ain’t no Vietnam,” Roy said.
“Gimme the fuckin’ grenade.”
* * *
Vincent Governara left the craps game about two o’clock in the morning, nearly two hours after Dominick booby-trapped his
car. Roy was en route home, Nino had gone to bed, and Dominick was sitting on Nino’s porch, wondering how to remove the grenade if it did not explode by morning, when Public School 200 kids would be all around.
Governara opened the driver’s-side door of his car and sat directly over the grenade. The fish hooks had already pulled the pin. But while inserting the key into the ignition, the intended victim left the door open.
The explosion was tremendous and knocked Governara out immediately. Glass flew everywhere and the car collapsed on itself. A gush of air threw the victim up and out of the car, and across the street, where he landed, breaking a leg, but otherwise all right when he came to. Dominick had been right about the concussion grenade. And he was spared dismemberment dreams featuring children.
II
“That Life”
CHAPTER 5
Night of Knives
Roy DeMeo’s young followers thought more highly of Dominick as Roy circulated the story of the attempt on Vincent Governara’s life. Until then, Dominick was someone who rode his uncle’s coattails. He might have been a Green Beret once upon a time, but he was an errand boy now; they on the other hand were active criminals, taking chances with the law. But booby-trapping a car on a busy street two blocks from a cop shop was a daring feat, even if the result was unimpressive. Roy’s boys also admired the intensity of Nino’s desire for revenge. They were the same way and, as they would soon show, capable of settling their scores with savage fury.
All of them grew up in Canarsie, a neighborhood with a chip on its shoulder. Prior to World War II, like Bath Beach, it was a resort area, but not for the wealthy. Its bawdy oceanfront amusement park, Golden City, was a playground for the most downtrodden immigrants, who carried on against the backdrop of a giant flaming dump where Brooklyn deposited most of its garbage. In marshlands near the water, squatters from Sicily and southern Italy lived in tin and tarpaper shacks and survived by fishing clams and raising chickens.
A trolley line from Manhattan, an hour away, made its final stop in Canarsie. It was the city’s last frontier, its last open space, until the same postwar housing shortage that spawned instant-mix suburbs like Levittown ignited a building boom. Developers, however, coated Canarsie with the more urban look of adjacent Flatlands, creating a grid of mostly attached brick homes and boxlike apartment buildings. By 1970, about eighty thousand people lived there. Mostly, they were Sicilian, southern Italian, and eastern European Jewish immigrants, or their descendants—the clerks, mail carriers, bakers, tailors, and factory hands of New York.
Many had fled “changing” neighborhoods to the north and northeast—Brownsville and East New York. Immigrants from the southern United States and Puerto Rico had turned those communities darker in color and many violent clashes between old and new groups had occurred. It was especially true in Brownsville, where the Mafia had great sway. In time, however, even the most diehard Italians bailed out and relocated in Canarsie. In 1972, a good example was John Gotti, an up-and-coming member of the Gambino family’s Manhattan faction, even though he lived in Brooklyn.
Like the Lower East Side in the early part of the century and Brownsville around midcentury, Canarsie in the 1970s incubated recruits for “that life.” Some residents still resented any authority but the family, still distrusted governments, cops, even schools. They resisted the unreality of these notions in an urban, democratic society. And so, even by 1970, fewer than half of Canarsie’s Italian male students had graduated from high school.
The lackluster achievement of its young did not stop Canarsians from caring about their schools when the Board of Education revealed plans in 1972 to bus thirty-two black grammar school students into all-white Canarsie. The Italian-American Civil Rights League, founded two years earlier by the boss of the Colombo Mafia family, helped lead a raucous but ultimately unsuccessful boycott. With the Arab-invader blood of Sicily in their veins, some of the protesters were only a shade whiter than some of the six- and seven-year-old black children.
The protesters screamed that busing was the beginning of the end of another neighborhood for them—and this time they had nowhere to flee. The Atlantic Ocean was at their back, and blacks and Puerto Ricans were bearing down from two directions; to the west was Flatlands, but it was built up and more expensive. Canarsians felt cut off; then, their hastily built neighborhood began falling apart. While most of their homes were built on concrete supports driven into bedrock below porous topsoil, sidewalks and streets were not—and these quickly became so buckled and lacking in repair that Canarsie, though new, appeared badly used.
The building boom unearthed evidence showing Canarsie to be unique in another way. Its dumps and marshlands were ideal sites for killers to dispose of their victims’ bodies. Throughout the boom, so many remains were found at construction locations that it became an old story and the newspapers stopped writing it.
Canarsie also was a graveyard for junked cars, buses, and trucks. Whole blocks were given over to scrap metal dealers and salvage operators attracted by the comparatively favorable cost of commercial real estate. In Canarsie and to a lesser extent in Flatlands, main streets also featured, one after the other, businesses catering to every automobile need—transmission, brake, and muffler installers; engine rebuilders; custom paint and upholstery specialists; and body shops for foreign and domestic models.
In the early 1970s, a fever began to sweep through this culture of cars. Because of inflation, the price of even an ordinary new car shot up several thousand dollars, creating a black-market demand for stolen vehicles many sought to fill. A stolen car with counterfeit papers or an altered VIN (vehicle identification number) fetched a wondrous profit—given that it cost nothing to steal.
The era’s economy, combined with the nature of the auto-repair industry, created another black market in replacement doors, hoods, fenders, trunks, and grilles. The prices that distributors charged for such parts were increasing at a faster rate than the price of new cars. By 1974, a ten-thousand-dollar automobile was actually worth twenty thousand in parts. This paradox, and two-hundred-forty-percent higher salaries for union auto-body men in just four years, made a routine fender-bender an expensive accident. Some insurance companies, trying to contain costs, urged auto-body shops to buy used parts—and, seeking to contain costs further, some of the shops began buying their parts from illegitimate suppliers, no questions asked.
So-called “chop shops” sprouted everywhere. In garages and shops throughout Canarsie and Flatlands, men with acetylene torches turned stolen cars into profitable piles of parts. The difference between new and chopped parts was substantial. A “nose clip”—grille, lights, and bumpers—might cost eight hundred dollars when ordered from a distributor, two hundred if purchased from a chop shop.
Auto theft became the fastest-growing crime in New York City and the nation. Besides the appeal of high profit, it was a low-risk crime requiring modest nerve and simple skills easily acquired in a body shop or gas station. New York’s dense housing patterns also worked in the thief’s favor; many drivers did not have garages, and cars left on the street or in open lots and driveways were easy pickings. The city’s weak fiscal condition at the time was yet another advantage: With several thousand police officers laid off, the criminal justice system focused on violent crime; when a car thief was arrested, prosecutors and judges normally plea-bargained the case away to keep courthouse doors turning.
Seventy-seven thousand cars, a record number and eight percent of the national total, were reported stolen in the city in 1974. The young men gathered around Roy DeMeo, mostly high school dropouts from Canarsie, accounted for many dozen. The key member of the group, the one closest to Roy, was Chris Rosenberg.
Chris was five-feet-five and would try to gouge the eyes of anyone foolish enough to remark on it. He owned many pairs of platform shoes, not only because they were fashionable in the early 1970s, but because wearing them he walked with an obvious bounce, springing off his toes with each step, feeling
as if he was elevating himself. Though short, he was wiry and strong and would attack bigger foes wildly and suddenly after lulling them with peaceful words—a Roy DeMeo–type trick.
In 1974, at twenty-three years, with his brown stringy shoulder-length hair, slightly droopy mustache, flowered shirts and bellbottom jeans, he looked like a heavy-metal guitarist. In appearance, he fit into the landscape when he cruised for female company in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, a mecca for the city’s young. Two things, however, separated him from the crowd—his white Corvette and the .38 caliber revolver hidden inside.
Chris was not really his first name; it was Harvey. But he hated “Harvey,” and for that matter, “Rosenberg.” Calling him Harvey or Rosenberg was just as much an offense as commenting on his size. He hated being Jewish and was estranged from his parents because of it. Growing up on a Canarsie block dominated by Italians, he came to believe that Jews were weak and timid like his father. While a boy, he asked friends and family to start calling him “Chris”—a clean-cut, heroic name not in use on his block—and because he was such a tortured and volatile little guy, they did.
It improved his self-image but not his temperament. He was in constant trouble in school and at home, where his mother tried in vain to coax him into showing respect for his heritage. His parents were not particularly observant Jews, but did enjoy taking family vacations at Jewish resorts in the Catskills, where Chris always acted up and picked on other Jewish kids. His parents eventually gave up on Chris, their eldest child, and let him go his way. They felt blameless; Chris’s younger brother was well adjusted and a top student on his way to becoming a doctor.
Chris was as smart, if not as wise, and had an enterprising, entrepreneurial streak. At age thirteen, he was buying and selling marijuana among an older crowd that hung out at a gas station. He also had mechanical ability and learned how to repair cars inside and out. Then, at age sixteen, at the gas station in Canarsie, he met a friendly, tough-talking man who became a father figure to him, Roy DeMeo.
