Murder Machine

by Gene Mustain

  Roy was then only twenty-six, living well on Long Island but working hard on the underside of Canarsie and Flatlands, his old neighborhood. Chris knew Roy by reputation, especially as someone connected to the Lucchese Mafia men who owned Canarsie’s junkyards and scrap-metal lots. Chris had dreams that someday he would be in the Mafia; he knew the notion was farfetched, because only full-blooded Italians, preferably Sicilians, were admitted. Still—“You never know,” he would tell friends.

  Idling at the station, Roy got to know Chris, who had moved from dealing in joints of marijuana to ounces. Roy liked Chris’s ambition and how he bounced around with his chin out. He saw himself in Chris—a go-getter, confident of his effect on people, one way or the other. Eventually, Roy offered to loan Chris money so Chris could deal pounds of marijuana and grams of a more potent drug, hashish. Roy had tried both, but thought they were for stupid people; Roy stuck to his favorite drug, alcohol.

  Over the next several years, Chris became a success, by the underside standards of Canarsie. Combining his car expertise with the money made from drug dealing backed by Roy, he opened his own business, a body shop. The name he chose was baffling to most of his friends, but showed that somewhere he absorbed something about psychological dysfunction: He called it Car Phobia Repairs.

  Gradually, the body shop became a waystation for stolen and chopped cars. Roy provided Chris customers and connections to the junkyards—which were the illegal parts centers for the auto-body shops. Roy was paternal toward Chris, and although their ten-year age difference made big brother a more likely type of bond, he nurtured Chris like a son and took credit for his development. Chris was the first young man to be invited out to Roy’s for a barbecue, the first to go to Roy’s old friend Frank Foronjy’s farm and practice shooting handguns and rifles.

  “I made Chris what he is, but the kid’s got a knack,” Roy would boast to Nino.

  “Why don’t he get a haircut?” Nino would reply. “He looks like a fuckin’ hippie.”

  By 1974, to strangers, Chris was sometimes introducing himself as “Chris DeMeo.” He had moved into an upscale apartment in Flatlands, and was buying whatever gadgets and clothes he wanted and hiring kids to wash and wax his personal cars—the Corvette plus a Porsche. Many young thieves stole cars for him, including two full-blooded Italians who had become his closest friends, Joseph Testa and Anthony Senter. Chris met them when he was living in Canarsie and dealing joints. They were nineteen years old in 1974, four years younger than he. To strangers, he sometimes introduced them as “my brothers.”

  Joey, as he was known, and Anthony were like brothers—like twins—in some ways: Joey would start a sentence, Anthony would finish. They were fanatically loyal to each other; an insult to one provoked a payback from the other. They were always together and had grown up on the same Canarsie block, each in a turbulent home with a contemptuous view of the outside world’s ways.

  Anthony dropped out of high school before Joey did, but for the most part, Joey led and Anthony followed. Joey was two months older and quicker on his feet, one of nine kids born to a truck driver and his wife; he had five brothers—six counting Anthony. Joey also was more handsome. As he blossomed, he resembled the singer Frankie Avalon—except when he opened his eyes wide and broke into a wide mocking smile chilling to behold.

  As with Chris, Joey’s smile came when he wanted to smash someone’s face, a frequent occurrence beginning when he turned thirteen and his mother died of a blood clot, leaving his father unable to cope with his brood.

  Growing up, mutual friends liked Anthony more than Joey, but always ran to Joey when problems arose. When Joey was fifteen, a thirteen-year-old neighbor was mugged by a knife-wielding Puerto Rican kid from East New York. The victim complained to Joey, who rounded up Anthony, and a group led by Joey borrowed someone’s car and spent the day searching for the assailant.

  “No fucking spic can come on this block with a knife,” Joey screamed as the car sped away. “I’ll stick the knife up his ass!”

  A year later, after Joey dropped out and began dealing dope and stealing cars, another kid on Joey’s block complained that his teacher had too unfairly smacked him for smarting off in class. Joey went to the school, waited for the teacher to leave, and beat the daylights out of him.

  Before completely casting his lot with Chris and Roy, Joey worked now and then as a carpenter’s helper and, as Roy once had, as an apprentice butcher. He became skilled with knives, but almost died in 1973 in a knife fight in a bar with another Puerto Rican opponent. He was stabbed in the chest and suffered a collapsed lung that gave him respiratory problems for the rest of his life.

  Anthony, more likable than Joey but equally vicious when provoked, hunted down the Puerto Rican and nearly beat him to death with his fists. Anthony was five-feet-eleven, two inches taller than Joey, and a lot more powerful physically. Before following Joey into Chris’s and Roy’s world, he worked for his father’s small debris-removal business and his uncle’s sanitation company. He had only one sibling, a sister. His parents were divorced when he was eight, then remarried one another when he was fourteen, but by then Anthony had been left to his own devices too, like Chris and Joey.

  Anthony dazzled many neighborhood girls. Where Joey was conventionally good-looking in a Frankie Avalon way, Anthony was exotic and sensual. With his darker skin, thicker lips, and blacker hair swept back, he would have stood out less in Rome than in Canarsie. Though Joey was more dangerous, Anthony looked the part, and a few of the girls knew that he wore a tattoo of the devil on his right shoulder.

  Because they were together so much, frequently at the Gemini Lounge, Joey and Anthony became known as the Gemini twins; it was a more apt nickname than people knew because, in Greek mythology, Zeus the Thunderer fathered two warrior sons, Castor and Pollux, and sent them on missions; their namesakes were the twin stars of Gemini, the third sign of the Zodiac. As time would tell, it was not much of a stretch to think of Roy as an ill-tempered Zeus and Joey and Anthony as his equally surly twin stars.

  One of Joey’s younger brothers, seventeen-year-old Patrick, known as Patty, sometimes tagged along with Joey and Anthony. He was a dropout too, but a wizard with cars, knowing more than his brother, or Anthony, or even Chris. At fourteen, with money made from a deli job, he had bought a junk car, repaired and rebuilt it, and sold it for a big profit.

  The young Canarsie men did not fear the law, or respect it. Chris had picked up his first car-theft arrest in 1970. Joey got two the same year. Anthony already had three, the first when he was twelve years old. Chris’s case started as a felony, but was knocked down to misdemeanor with only a fine. Another case, in 1971, for hashish possession, was flat-out dismissed, as was a case in 1972, when he was caught swiping a snowplow out of a garage. Joey and Anthony beat all their cases because they were juveniles at the time. So far, Patty had only been charged with assault, but that too had been dismissed.

  By the time they all assembled under Roy’s wing, they were by nature and experience primed for bigger and worse things. In 1974, backed by Roy, Chris began dealing two recent products in the street drug market—cocaine and methaqualone, known in tablet form as Quāalude. His connection was a young pharmacist who stole the drugs, including a potent form of pure cocaine then available for medical purposes, from his drug store. One night, the pharmacist arranged a fateful meeting; he introduced Chris to his car repairman, a young Rumanian immigrant named Andrei Katz.

  Andrei Katz was twenty-two years old. In Flatlands, he ran the Veribest Foreign Car Service, a small shop near Chris’s, for his father, a mechanic who did not speak English well. His father and mother, survivors of a World War II concentration camp, had come to Brooklyn in 1956.

  Andrei was not a humble, straightlaced immigrants’ son. He permitted customers to pay him with drugs and boasted that women instantly fell for him because his Gypsy features and accent were irresistible. He swaggered as much as any native son of Brooklyn, and when Chris said he could
provide spare parts for Veribest, he knew the parts were stolen. He and Chris and the Gemini twins became friends and were soon snorting cocaine together. Once, they got so rowdy at Andrei’s apartment that his neighbors called police and much pharmaceutical powder went down the toilet.

  In the next two months, Andrei bought cocaine and a Porsche engine from Chris, Joey, and Anthony. In August, he bought a .38 caliber revolver from Chris and paid him seventy-one hundred dollars for a half-interest in eleven stolen Volkswagen vans—“tag jobs”—according to Chris. With Chris, Joey, and Anthony as his suppliers, Andrei also began dealing cocaine himself. They all became vulnerable to one another because of the knowledge each had of the others’ crimes.

  In September, a friend of Andrei’s who had bought one of the tag jobs was stopped by police, who discovered the van was stolen. The friend led police to Andrei, who was arrested in October, but Auto Crime Unit detectives were less interested in a single case than a possible pattern. Andrei was told he might help himself if he provided information about an organized ring. After making bail, Andrei went home and fumed. Chris had done a lousy job retagging the van, the VIN plate was an obvious phony.

  As soon as he learned Andrei was out on bail, Chris came by Veribest Foreign Car Service with Joey and Patty Testa. Andrei was with his younger brother Victor; Chris got straight to the heart of their dilemma.

  “You better think about what you’re going to say or do, or else you’re going to get hurt.”

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

  “I’m just telling you, watch yourself.”

  “Fuck you! I’ll take care of you!”

  The next day, Chris confronted Andrei at a Canarsie stable where Andrei boarded a horse. Andrei, his back against a wall of pride now, refused to bend. The problem was Chris’s fault. Chris punched him in the mouth and took off. In a few more days, Andrei was pulled from his pride-and-joy dark green Mercedes by two men, then brutally pistol-whipped, blackjacked, and left in the street.

  In a hospital, Andrei was incoherent for three days; part of his right ear was nearly severed. His face was so badly swollen, his brother and father would not let his mother see him. When finally able to speak, he told his brother that Joey and Anthony were his attackers.

  “I will deal with it myself,” he added. “And I am going to testify someday against Chris.”

  Out of the hospital, Andrei began carrying the gun he bought from Chris. He stopped dating and going anywhere alone. One night a woman he did not know called him and said a friend had told her about him and she wished to meet him. Andrei the self-anointed ladies’ man was tempted but smelled a trap and backed out.

  On November 13, 1974, shortly after Andrei’s release, Chris was opening his garage door when a sniper opened up with an automatic rifle; Chris was hit three times, but luck was with him; a bullet bound for his chest became just a glancing wound when he spun around from the impact of one that struck his lower jaw and another that ripped into his right arm. He spent only a few days in a hospital, but his face was badly disfigured. Eventually, he underwent reconstructive surgery, but was not happy with the outcome. For the rest of his life he was bitter that he had to wear a beard.

  The sniper fled without detection, but Chris was certain it was Andrei and he was right. Warily, the Canarsians began traveling in groups and always with weapons. Six days after the attack, a city jail guard walking by a car parked near the Gemini Lounge noticed a pistol in the waistband of one of three males seated inside—Joey, Anthony, and Patty. The Six-Three precinct sent police officer Alvin Root to investigate and he arrested Joey and Anthony, for possessing both loaded pistols and other weapons—Joey a knife, Anthony a blackjack.

  At this point, another hardboiled product of Canarsie entered the drama: His name was Henry Borelli. The backyard of his home abutted the backyard of Joey’s, and when Joey contacted him from jail, Henry ran right to court and got Joey and Anthony out on bail. At age twenty-six, Henry was practically an old man compared to them; he was also married and the father of two girls, but the boys liked him, and he was always a guest when Joey fired up the backyard barbecue. To a lesser extent, Henry was friendly with Chris, his more immediate contemporary; Henry had actually met Roy before Chris did and was quietly jealous of the way Chris had over the years become so close to Roy. Still, Henry had kept up relations with Chris and was one of his marijuana and hashish suppliers.

  What impressed Joey and Anthony about Henry was that on occasion he traveled to Morocco to score the hashish. During his last trip to Casablanca, however, Henry had been arrested, fortunately while in possession of only a test amount. But the experience was so unsettling—he was released with a warning that if he came back and tried again, he would never leave—he was looking for another line of work. He was now indifferently employed at his father-in-law’s car-service company; once, he had wanted to be a cop, and he had taken and passed the entrance exam, but when the city froze the hiring list during a budget crisis, he ruined any future chance with two arrests for petty burglary.

  After Joey and Anthony got out of jail and Chris got out of the hospital, they all sat down with Roy and Henry to discuss the Andrei Katz situation and the weapons charges against Joey and Anthony.

  Roy told the boys not to worry about the latter problem—his lawyer would (and did) get them off with just another slap on the wrist: probation. But Andrei was another matter. Having already told his boys that “anything is possible after you kill someone,” Roy did not shock them when he said: “With what he knows about the cars, he can hurt you. Just kill the fucking guy. What’re ya afraid of? Just whack ’im and get rid of the body. No body, no crime.”

  “I ain’t afraid!” Chris said. “The asshole ruined my face!”

  Joey and Anthony were not afraid either. Neither was Henry. Andrei had tried to kill Chris. It was all the motive they needed. Revenge was normal; taking no revenge was abnormal.

  Chris said they needed a way to entice Andrei into the open. Andrei was still limiting himself to his home and to his father’s body shop and traveling back and forth always with his brother. Henry, a ladies’ man despite being married, said he knew an ideal lure, a pretty young woman who lived in Manhattan. They had been lovers and were still friends.

  Henry called the woman and asked her to visit Andrei at the shop and flirt with him until the Rumanian asked her out. The woman halfheartedly agreed, then backed out, and the idea was dropped, for a while.

  Meanwhile, in January 1975, at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, Andrei identified Chris as a major car thief. Chris learned of it within days from Roy, who was tipped off by someone who came to the Gemini Lounge one evening; without saying a word, the man stood in the shadows outside and waited for Roy—who was talking to Dominick Montiglio—to come over. Dominick was there on a collection for Nino. The men spoke about five minutes, then the stranger, who had curly hair and acne scars, left.

  “That’s my hook in the district attorney’s office,” Roy told Dominick. “He’s a cop; he gets us information on anyone we need.”

  The hook was actually an auto crimes detective from Queens; his partner’s brother was a bartender at the Gemini. He typified why Roy constantly sought relationships and why he always tried to exploit others’ weaknesses. The cop liked to gamble on sports contests; Roy hooked him by telling a cousin, who now ran a bookmaking operation at the Gemini, to overlook the man’s losses. It was not unusual for cops and firemen to come to the Gemini to place bets, sometimes while on duty; on the day of a big game, before betting closed, it was not unusual to see squad cars and fire trucks parked outside the Gemini.

  After the cop in Roy’s pocket left, the proposal that Henry Borelli made—to get a pretty woman he knew to lure Andrei into the open—was revived. Henry agreed to contact her again.

  * * *

  At age twelve, Babette Judith Questal had asked her friends to start calling her “Judy” because of a new television cartoon show starring a
monkey named Babette. She was born upper middle class in Manhattan, but grew up in Long Island suburbs; she returned to Manhattan in 1970, to put a broken engagement behind her.

  After first living on Twenty-seventh Street, she and a girlfriend moved to a ninth-floor apartment on Thirty-seventh Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, in well-to-do Murray Hill. Her building was on the same dense block as the Polish mission to the United Nations, around a corner from the West German consulate in New York and a few doors from the city home of writer William F. Buckley. Judy and her friend bought an old plaid couch and a Tiffany lamp, put candles and wicker all around, hung a poster from the musical Hair! and set about having a good time.

  One rainy night in 1972, Judy happened to hail one of Henry’s father-in-law’s car-service cars. She struck up a friendship with the driver, who later introduced her to Henry, who was as casual about cheating on his wife as she was dating a married man. Judy by now had long forgotten her fiancé; at age twenty-five, she was a club-hopping party girl with a coquettish vibrancy and a Nancy Sinatra go-go boots look. After work, she and her roommate would sleep until ten o’clock, hit the discos until four in the morning, sleep a few hours, go to work, and then do it all over again. At the time, she was a secretary for the Katz Underwear Company.

  Like Joey and Anthony, tall, dark, and handsome Henry presented an attractive image to the world. He was well built and fastidious about his grooming and clothes—a natural candidate for the door of the 21 Club—and Judy jumped out of her go-go boots at the sight of him. Years later, she did not recall if they made love on their first or second date, only that it was soon after they met.

  Since breaking off her engagement, Judy had been daring in her choice of companions, who included some Hell’s Angels, but Henry was something new and vaguely mysterious. He told her he had been imprisoned in Turkey for smuggling jewels and once asked if she would be interested in helping him smuggle stolen emeralds from Venezuela.