by Gene Mustain
Henry, who had a fanciful side, was just making the most of his arrest in Casablanca, and Judy dismissed his comments as malarkey. She thought he was a harmless dreamer until one night he showed off a pistol he was carrying. Even so, she continued seeing him, but only a few months more. Between his marriage and her club life, the affair had no place to go. They agreed, however, to remain friends.
Their friendship was three years old when Henry dropped by her apartment in March 1975 to explain in further detail what he had proposed over the telephone months earlier. Judy noticed that Agatha, her Chinese pug who usually sat in visitors’ laps, was frightened by Henry and had fled the room—but she listened to what he had to say anyway. A man named Andrei owed him money, Henry said, but whenever Henry tried talking to him, Andrei ran away or threatened to call the police.
“So I just want you to go and meet this guy and make a date with him. Then I can talk to the guy about making payment.”
“Are you sure all you want to do is talk to him?”
“I wouldn’t involve you in anything.”
Judy drew what she regarded as a respectable line. “If you want to talk to him, I don’t want to hear what you have to talk to him about—and I don’t want it done in my house.”
No problem, Henry said, offering to buy her a gift.
“No. If this is a favor, it’s a favor, as long as you promise you’re not going to hurt him.”
Henry promised.
Two months and the attempted murder of Vincent Governara went by. Judy got telephone calls from Henry saying the matter was pending and to stay available. Then, in May of 1975, Andrei upped the ante by testifying before a Brooklyn grand jury and spilling secrets about not only Chris, but Roy as well.
As with all grand jury testimony, it was supposed to stay a secret, but Roy got another visit from his hook, and Dominick arrived just as the crooked detective left.
When it came to the process of law, Roy liked to make it appear he knew as much as his famous lawyer uncle, and so Dominick heard Roy tell Chris that a grand jury investigation added up to nothing. However, if the case proceeded to trial and Andrei testified again, they had problems.
“We’ve got to take this guy out,” Roy added. “He’s got to go right away.”
In the first week of June, Henry called Judy to say he needed his favor now.
“Do I really have to do this?” she asked.
“Yes, you really do.”
Judy put down the phone and went shopping for a new outfit. She selected snug orange bellbottom pants and an orange and yellow plaid shirt—she thought she looked best in hot colors.
A plan emerged for Henry to pick her up at lunchtime on June 12 at her new secretarial job at the Bulgarian Tourist Office on East Forty-second Street in Manhattan—and drive her to Andrei’s shop in Flatlands. On that morning, she donned her new clothes, added a brown wig with bangs and a white plastic umbrella with matching handbag. Although it was raining, she straddled sunglasses across the top of her head.
In Brooklyn, Henry and Judy picked up Joey. Henry and Joey then dropped her off near Andrei’s shop; she was to walk in and ask about a nonexistent car.
“How will I know who Andrei is?”
“He has a mustache,” Joey said.
“He’ll have his name on his shirt,” Henry said. “He’s a good-looking guy.”
“How do we know he’ll ask me out?”
Henry and Joey smiled. “He will,” they said, as a chorus.
A few blocks away, Judy left Henry’s car and sashayed toward Veribest Foreign Car Service. Just inside, she saw Andrei on the phone and a young woman behind a desk. The woman, Judy learned later, was Andrei’s fiancée. Opposed to sex before marriage, the fiancée had reached an understanding with Andrei: He could date other women until he and she were married.
“I’m looking for a white Porsche that my girlfriend left here to be fixed,” Judy announced.
“We don’t have a car like that,” the woman replied. Judy affected dismay, insisted they must. This caused Andrei to put down the phone—here was a walk-in requiring personal attention.
“Could I help you?”
“It’s my friend’s car, a white Porsche. I’m supposed to pick it up.”
“Let me look in the back.” Andrei smiled. Judy smiled back, pleased her effect was working so soon. “Come with me,” he said.
The garage was small and had only a few cars, none to be mistaken for a white Porsche. “Here’s my car,” Andrei said, beaming beside his Mercedes, which she appraised as “very nice.”
He said, “Maybe the car you’re looking for is somewhere else.”
“No, I was told it was here.”
Well, it obviously isn’t, he said, and Well, damn, some other friends dropped me off and I’ll have to take a cab, she said.
Andrei took the bait. “Can I drive you home?”
“It isn’t any problem. I’ll find my way.”
“Well, why don’t we get together sometime?”
Pause. “All right, I guess.”
“Do you like to dance?”
“You bet.”
“Well, when?”
“How about tomorrow night?”
Andrei said great. Judy thought he looked like he had just won the lottery. She gave him a phone number a couple of digits off hers and said her name was Barbara. They made plans to meet outside her apartment building on Thirty-seventh Street.
In a strange whirl of shame and triumph, she left the garage and walked to where Henry and Joey waited. “He seems like a nice guy and he’s good looking,” she wanly said. “I hope you’re just going to talk to him.”
“That’s all,” Henry said.
Judy took the rest of the afternoon off and the men drove her to her apartment, where Henry took out a vial and laid lines of cocaine, which he and Joey snorted. It was the first time she saw Henry take cocaine.
* * *
The next day, a Friday the 13th, Henry telephoned Judy and said he would come by her apartment about seven o’clock that evening and wait outside for Andrei. She telephoned Andrei to confirm he would meet her in front of her building about half-past-eight.
Excited about his date, Andrei left Veribest early that day. He showered the day’s grease off and put on brown platform shoes, a white shirt with beige geometric designs, and maroon bellbottom pants. He topped off the ensemble with a white and red neck scarf and a light pink sweater. Underneath, he was wearing what was described later by a doctor as silk, yellow ladies panties.
Traffic into Manhattan was slow and it was not until fifteen minutes after Andrei was due that Judy, surveying the street from her ninth-floor window, saw Andrei’s dark green Mercedes moving slowly east along Thirty-seventh Street and then after a righthand turn disappearing onto Madison Avenue. In minutes, the car reappeared; probably believing Judy had gone inside because he was late, Andrei began to maneuver his car into the only available parking space, an illegal one by a fire hydrant.
Suddenly, a white Lincoln owned by Henry Borelli’s father appeared and blocked Andrei’s car at the curb. Three men jumped out, surrounded the Mercedes and flung open its doors. Judy recognized Joey Testa. She also recognized a smaller, wiry man she had seen with Henry once, but knew only as Chris. She did not recognize Anthony Senter, whom she had never seen before.
Andrei got out, but did not try to run.
From inside the Lincoln, Judy thought she heard a voice she recognized as Henry’s say, “We just want to talk.”
On the street, she saw Andrei hunch his shoulders and extend his arms as if in a shrug. She saw a rope come out and one of the men lift Andrei’s arms above his shoulders. In another instant, Andrei was violently shoved into the Lincoln, which sped away.
A wave of guilt knocked Judy Questal onto her couch. She felt jolts of self-hate for her teasing manipulation of Andrei and her naiveté in trusting Henry. She remained by her window through the night to see if Andrei or anyone came for the Mercedes. S
he was afraid—and in too deep—to do much else.
In the morning, police officer Lewis Feirberg came upon a mysterious sight: an expensive car parked at an odd angle by a fire hydrant, sun roof up, doors open, leather jacket in plain view in the backseat. In the afternoon, as Judy watched, Andrei’s beloved car was towed. Her thoughts ran wild, but the truth of his demise was beyond her ken.
The four kidnappers had driven Andrei to Queens. Andrei must have begun begging them to kill him as soon as they dragged him into the meat department of a Pantry Pride supermarket, where Roy was waiting. A friend of Roy’s had given him access; Roy had told his crew they had to make sure Andrei was not seen again. As they all later described it, they had to make him “disappear.” If his body was found, the police would naturally suspect them.
Nino’s method had been incineration; the method that former butcher’s apprentice Roy was going to use was dismemberment.
Dismemberment was not unheard of in the underworld, but even in the Mafia it was considered radical, and few had the stomach for it. For Roy, it was going to be just another way to show his power, and so it became that for Chris and Joey and Anthony too.
Only Henry had expressed any unease. “I’d shoot anybody for ya, Roy, but that, no thanks.”
“It’s just like takin’ apart a deer,” Roy said. “It’s only a little weird if you do it while the guy’s still alive.”
The kidnappers had already decided to give Chris his revenge and let him prepare the victim for dismemberment. So as his would-be brothers Joey and Anthony held the quaking victim, and as Roy and Henry watched, Chris furiously drove a long butcher knife into Andrei’s heart six times. The target area was deliberate—the quicker the heart stops pumping, the less bloody mess a victim makes.
As Andrei slumped to the floor, already dead, Chris maniacally stabbed him fifteen times more in the back. Roy and Joey, the second former butcher’s apprentice on hand, would now show the others how to dismember a corpse. Out came the boning knives and on went the white butcher coats and orange and yellow rubber gloves.
“We have to wait a little bit,” Roy said, “until the blood gets hard.”
Roy and Joey began stripping the body of its clothes; Chris and Anthony laid out some green plastic garbage bags and twine. Feeling nauseous, Henry went outside, ostensibly to guard a rear exit.
Violating his practice of never drinking while working, Roy took occasional shots from a quart bottle of whisky; so did the others as Roy sliced off the victim’s head and he and Joey began sawing the torso apart limb by limb. Chris and Anthony wrapped the body parts in the garbage bags and secured them with the twine.
At one point, crazy with personal revenge for the gunshot damage to his face, the bearded Chris took the victim’s head and ran it through a machine for compacting cardboard.
After the sawing and packaging was over, Henry came back in and everyone methodically cleaned the Pantry Pride meat department. They swept and mopped the floor, scrubbed the sinks and knives, wiped extruded brain matter off the cardboard compactor. They then took the body parts, Andrei’s clothes, and the empty whisky bottle and buried them under some rotten vegetables in a garbage bin behind the store.
The night of knives marked the real beginning of the DeMeo crew, a union of five killing spirits stepping across a wicked threshold. Roy had and would show the way, closely followed by devoted Chris and his loyal brothers, Joey and Anthony. Henry’s queasiness hardly exempted him from having become a full partner, and as he would show, he was not at all queasy with guns.
It was the coming-together of a gang that other gangs would come to fear, and it might have passed officially unrecorded if the killers had not overlooked a detail: the garbage at the supermarket was not picked up on weekends.
On Sunday, two days later, a bum foraging the garbage bin for food walked off with one of the packages, believing it was a discarded side of beef. Not far away, unwrapping it, he realized his mistake, dropped it and ran off; in moments, when his dog began barking wildly, a passerby found it and telephoned police.
Salvatore Napolitano, the first officer to arrive, went to the garbage bin, unwrapped another package, then quickly summoned a medical examiner, who unwrapped eight more. At the scene, she laid the body parts on a tarpaulin and pieced them together like a puzzle. The body’s genitals were missing and never found.
“A butcher or someone with knowledge of the anatomy of the human being did this,” Detective Michael Walsh told other cops after conferring with the medical examiner. A top police official, Gerald Kerins, told the media there had been a “frenzied, wild, vicious type of attack.”
At the city morgue, chief medical examiner Dr. Dominick DiMaio spoke into a microphone as he began conducting an autopsy, “Head is decapitated and flattened into a pancake appearance. . . .” Years ago, a branch of the DiMaio family began spelling the name differently. Dr. DiMaio had no reason to know that this horror show it was his duty to review had been directed by his cousin Anthony’s son, Roy DeMeo.
CHAPTER 6
Map of Murder
Coaxed by Henry, Judy Questal had wandered onto a landscape she knew nothing about, territory that was about to become a lot more violent. Had she known how Andrei Katz died, she would have never dialed the number of the Veribest Foreign Car Service on the day before his remains were discovered and, innocently as possible, asked the woman who answered if Andrei was there.
“Isn’t he with you?” replied Andrei’s accommodating and now irritated fiancée, believing she was talking to the flashy “Barbara” of two days before.
“He never showed up for our date, I never saw him.”
“That’s strange.”
Judy did not know what else to say and hung up. On Monday, she called again; a man who said his name was George got on the phone and spoke sharply to her. “You better tell everything you know because the police are going to make it very hard for you.”
George asked for her last name and real phone number. Judy told a series of lies, the last being that she had only arranged to meet Andrei on Thirty-seventh Street; she really lived farther uptown, on Fifty-eighth Street. Then she hung up.
On Tuesday, she received a call from a man who always began telephone conversations the same way, with his name: “Henry.” He apologized for not calling earlier. “I know you must have been nervous.”
Judy was distant, and now concerned about sounding angry—maybe she was in jeopardy. “What happened? His car was there until the next day. What did you do to him?”
“He just got a beating and he’s in a hospital someplace.”
“I hope he’s not dead because I can’t handle that.”
“Don’t worry, he’s not.”
On Wednesday, from her desk at the Bulgarian Tourist Office, Judy called Veribest again, but got no answer. She called a business next to the shop. “There has been a death in the family over there,” a man said. “Andrei died. He was in an accident.”
The words took Judy’s breath away. If her telephone had not immediately started to ring, she might have fainted.
“Henry.”
Judy cringed and tried reclaiming her composure. She recalled that someone in her office had said the FBI tapped all the telephones of foreign businesses, especially tourist offices. She took Henry’s number and hurried out to East Forty-second Street and onto a pay telephone. “He’s dead,” she began, “isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
Tumultuous Forty-second Street, one of the busiest in the world, forces people to notice what is happening around them. Beginning to grieve for her own neck now, Judy said, “The police are gonna be looking for me.”
“Don’t worry, whenever they find you, you just say that you don’t know anything.”
“Henry, I saw everything from my window. I saw somebody put something around Andrei’s neck. I saw Joey. I saw the other guy—that Jewish guy, whatever his name is, Chris?—who else knows everything I know?”
“Only you.”<
br />
“Are you going to try to do away with me, too?”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you.”
“What about your friends?”
“I’m the boss,” Henry lied.
“How did you kill him?”
“I don’t want to say anything about that.”
The next day, after Andrei’s remains were identified through dental records and the story made the newspapers, the doorman for Judy’s building told her that detectives had come with questions for “a hooker named Barbara.” Henry also called to say someone he knew in the police department had assured him that the cops would ask their questions a while, then forget about it. Even if they picked her up for questioning, all she had to do was say she did not know anything; no one in Andrei’s shop could identify her.
In a few days, feeling she might skate free because the police had not come back, Judy left on a previously planned vacation to San Francisco. Beforehand, Anthony Senter visited her office and dropped off two hundred dollars and a have-fun message, courtesy of Henry. In San Francisco, she threw her Andrei-baiting outfit in the garbage.
Relief was short-lived. A girlfriend who had been visited by detectives called Judy at her hotel and said they wanted her for questioning. Finally realizing Henry was more than she bargained for—and that, as she had said, if Andrei was dead, “I can’t handle that”—Judy came home. After confessing her role, she led police to the homes of Henry and Joey Testa, who were arrested. They identified themselves as unemployed carpenters and were jailed without bail.
Judy’s story did not contain enough evidence to arrest either Chris or Anthony. Afraid he would be killed, Victor Katz kept quiet about Chris’s threats against his brother. Checking out Henry and Joey, police learned about Roy, but found nothing linking him to the murder. Roy arranged for his lawyer, Frederick Abrams, to advise Henry and Joey. Abrams had ample political connections; his father was a judge and both were active in the local Democratic club that produced incumbent mayor Abe Beame.
