by Gene Mustain
Worried about police surveillance, Anthony Gaggi stopped going to the Gemini Lounge. Dominick, however, continued to go, to pick up cash for Nino from Roy. One night outside the bar, Chris discussed the murder with him as they admired Chris’s Corvette. Chris was comfortable implicating himself because he knew Dominick had tried to kill Vincent Governara.
“Two of my guys are in jail because we killed some guy who shot me.” Chris smiled. “Then we took him apart. Bit by bit.”
Chris’s boast was startling, but Dominick remained poised. Having adopted Nino’s logic as his own, he believed that just as Nino’s revenge was normal, it was normal for criminals to kill other criminals. This was how they maintained their own law and order. But was dismemberment normal? He did not think so, but he did not argue the point with Chris. “Who got whacked?” he said.
“Some old drug partner of mine. He was gonna squeal on us. So we had to get rid of him.”
“Because he broke the rules of engagement, right?”
“You got it. And after I got shot, we made a pact we weren’t gonna get in any more fights, and we weren’t just gonna kill the guy. We were gonna make ’im disappear.”
“I’m glad you guys are on our side,” Dominick said, then got in Chris’s Corvette and went for a ride.
* * *
As the plot to murder Andrei Katz unfolded during the first half of 1975, Paul Castellano—like Nino, he learned of the murder after the fact—walked into some legal trouble of his own.
Although Paul’s true power in the Gambino family was still unknown to federal authorities, they had learned he was a major loanshark. In March, they persuaded a stock swindler facing fraud charges, who was married to one of Paul’s nieces, to wear a secret recording device and tape Paul talking about his loans. In June, Paul was indicted, accused of charging a usurious one hundred fifty percent interest on one hundred fifty thousand dollars in loans over six years.
The swindler’s name was Arthur Berardelli, and for a while Paul contemplated having him killed. He told Nino the job would be his but to try intimidation first. Accompanied by Dominick, Nino followed Berardelli into a restaurant one day and made a point of saying hello. Berardelli, of course, turned gray.
A few days later, however, Nino told Dominick that “Paulie’s called it off. He thinks Artie boy will listen to reason.”
Dominick began to see that the power of men such as Nino and uncles Carlo and Paul lay in how others perceived them as much as their actual use of power. Though Paul faced prison if convicted, he seemed confident he had been perceived correctly and that the case would fall apart at the end.
Nino began taking Dominick to regular Wednesday afternoon luncheons with Carlo, Paul, and a changing cast of other family members. This was a heady privilege for Dominick, but he was a beneficiary of the personal connections between Carlo and Paul and between Paul and Nino. Roy was never invited to these meetings, which were largely social; Carlo did not even know who he was; Paul knew him only a little and was not especially taken because, the few times they had met, Roy had come on like too much of a brown-noser. In Paul’s mind, another problem with Roy was that his ancestors came from Naples, not Sicily. Naples was the crime capital of southern Italy, but Sicilians came to America with chauvinistic baggage—they considered Neapolitans showy, coarse, and unreliable.
Listening to Carlo’s stories, Dominick further understood Paul’s confidence in the outcome of his loanshark case. Carlo, now seventy-three, had beaten the government so often any new case against him or his men was just a nettlesome fly to swat—the odd loss was just the vig the family had to pay society on occasion. Having failed to convict Carlo, the government was trying to deport him as an undesirable alien, as it had Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Frank Scalise’s mentor. He had resisted so far on grounds he was too ill to travel because of a recent heart attack; the government considered its stated effects exaggerated, but Carlo did look like a frail old man in the summer of 1975.
Though he had his country home near Roy’s, Carlo lived most of the time in an apartment near Bensonhurst. Shopping in corner stores, he portrayed himself as merely a humble Sicilian whose fate it was to protect and provide for his people. From his men, he demanded unequivocal fealty, as befitting a man of his tradition.
His tradition was tied to Sicily’s tortured past. The island was exploited by generations of conquerors. Unable to rule their own land, abused by the fickle laws of other cultures, Sicilians developed the anti-authority attitudes that even law-abiding men like Nino’s father, Angelo Gaggi, brought to America. The flip side was belief in family as the only source of protection and justice. The word “mafia” derived from Sicilian and Arabic expressions for these concepts.
In Sicily, plundering and feuding over depleted resources caused groups of peasant families to form large families led by uomini di rispettu (“men of respect”)—the first Mafia bosses. By the twentieth century, these men ruled Sicily, and some became as lawless and tyrannical as their former oppressors. Some bosses and their disciples, like Carlo, fled to the United States when Italian dictator Benito Mussolini ordered his army to eliminate them.
In New York at that time, the large numbers of Sicilian and Italian immigrants—cut off from English-speaking society, segregated in ghettos and denied all but the most menial jobs—created ready-made conditions for men like Carlo. Although all that had changed by 1975, Carlo had his Machiavellian justification—a leader must do what he has to do to hold onto power.
“A lion scares away the wolves; a fox recognizes traps,” Carlo was still fond of saying to Dominick.
Paul’s contempt for his daughter Connie’s husband was another frequent topic at the luncheons. After Dominick came home from Vietnam, Paul had hoped he and Connie would hit it off, but when it failed to happen, she wound up marrying a burly Guido Rinaldo–type whose name was Frank Amato.
Paul had set Amato up in the Italian ices business Nino had offered Dominick about the same time. The venture failed, however, and Paul made Amato manager of his butcher shop chain, known as the Meat Palace. It was a make-work job because two of Paul’s three sons already managed the chain profitably.
Amato was unhappily married and unhappy living with Connie in her parents’ home on Staten Island. For all the material advantages of marriage to an important man’s daughter—Connie showered Amato with jewelry and clothes—there was a price to pay. “I’m a prisoner,” he told a friend. “I have to kowtow to her. I have to kowtow to him. I have to be available all the time.”
With Nino one day at the main Meat Palace office, Dominick saw Amato being overly friendly with one of the female employees. “He’s already been warned,” Nino said when Dominick mentioned it later. “Paul’s gettin’ tired of him foolin’ around.”
In a few weeks, the female employee was fired and Amato was transferred to Paul’s wholesale meat company, Dial Poultry. In a few months, Amato was caught cheating on his wife. He was lucky Paul only ordered him out of the house and fired him. Amato then took a job in a clothing store, but Paul’s estranged son-in-law also became a lowly burglar.
“The thing that bothers me most is the thought of that fat bastard on top of my daughter,” Paul told Dominick.
“I don’t know why Paul’s acting so crazy about this, the guy’s goin’ out of his mind,” Nino said, after Dominick relayed the remark. “Our life, it’s a cuckoo’s nest sometimes.”
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was another of Nino’s favorite movies. Stuck in Manhattan between appointments recently, he and Dominick had gone to see it. Nino loved the story of a free spirit taking over a mental ward.
* * *
When Roy acted friendly, Dominick reciprocated, though he felt every move Roy made was political. An emerging politician himself, however, Dominick went along, so when Roy occasionally asked him to drive him around on errands because he was “tired,” he did. This was how he learned, in the fall of 1975, that Roy was involved in a new business—films depict
ing children, and women and animals, in sexual situations.
Roy directed Dominick to a Bensonhurst bar, where a man came out and transferred several cartons of films from his car to the trunk of Roy’s Cadillac. Roy showed Dominick the titles. “It’s eleven-year-old kids and people with dogs,” he said.
Dominick knew that through a loan Roy had become a partner in a combination peep show and whorehouse in Bricktown, New Jersey, but the child pornography, and the films depicting bestiality, were new. Roy cheerfully said he was buying the “sick shit” for the sex emporium in Bricktown as well as “asshole” customers in Rhode Island, where he had a good connection.
Dominick drove Roy to the Gemini Lounge. The films in the trunk made him feel dirty, but he was learning to justify anything. If anyone should have felt shame for trafficking in such material, it was Roy, the father of three children—two of them were about the age of those in the films—but Roy explained, “My business is just buying and selling.” The dollar made everything fair game, or so it seemed until Roy told Nino about the films, and Nino exploded.
“I don’t want you selling that shit!”
While shaking down the Manhattan film processor Paul Rothenberg, Nino was in the pornography business himself; currently he profited from Roy’s role in the Bricktown whorehouse; his counterfeit movie operation in Manhattan was now distributing copies of X-rated films such as Behind the Green Door, so he had no objection to conventional sex films or prostitution.
“But there’s a lot of money in this,” Roy protested. “It’s the way the industry is going. We can’t stay competitive if we don’t deal in it.”
Nino, the father of four children under fourteen, told Roy the subject was closed.
“But Nino . . .”
“I’m telling you, if you don’t stop, you’re gonna die.”
At the time, the ever-industrious Roy also was beginning to deal in larger quantities of drugs, conduct from which Nino was barred under a penalty of death because Carlo feared that the harsh sentences at stake in drug cases might cause a made man to crack and turn informer, which would be ruinous for the family. Ideally, a made man also was not supposed to accept drug profits from an “unmade” associate, but Nino and many others winked at this rule because it was unrealistic given the money to be made. Carlo and Paul must have known what was going on, but their reaction awaited a test case—someone getting arrested.
Roy was financing a major operation that imported Colombian marijuana by the twenty-five-pound bale. The marijuana was unloaded from an offshore freighter and sold out of a body shop in Canarsie.
Roy himself was also selling multiple ounces of cocaine out of the Gemini Lounge. He got into the cocaine business as he got out of the credit union business—after helping push the Boro of Brooklyn Credit Union into insolvency by approving too many uncollected and uncollectible loans. The credit union was merged into another, but the merger drew such scrutiny from police and state banking officials that Roy walked away.
Just in time, Roy also made an indictment-avoiding settlement with his dreaded enemy, the IRS. The deal was based on false affidavits from business friends that helped Roy account for some of his income. One affidavit was filed by Freddy DiNome, Roy’s old buddy from his immediate post–high school days. Although he would have done it for friendship, Freddy told people: “It was either lie or die.”
* * *
Early in 1976, Roy turned his attention to the murder trial of Henry Borelli and Joey Testa, which got underway in Queens on January 5. Roy did not attend the trial, but was spotted outside the courthouse one day having an animated discussion with one of the defense attorneys, his politically connected lawyer, Fred Abrams.
The case was hardly open and shut. Victor Katz was still too terrified to talk. There was no physical evidence linking either Henry or Joey to the devilry inside the Pantry Pride. The main witness was Judy Questal, who had been in protective custody since agreeing to tell her story.
The defense strategy was to put Judy in the dock by poking holes in her credibility, and it worked to perfection. Testifying in disguise, she was destroyed on the stand. Badgering her about her sex life, occasional drug use, and treatment for anxiety, the defense made her seem wanton and unstable. With not much else to go on but her, and she was not at the Pantry Pride, the jury was left with ample reasonable doubt that Henry and Joey, such handsome young men, could commit such a horrible crime. The defendants also benefited from the inability of prosecutors in Queens County to add a kidnapping charge to the indictment; that crime had occurred in a different jurisdiction—New York County (Manhattan). The jury had no lesser charge to fall back on; on January 23, the verdict came in: not guilty.
A celebration was held at the Gemini Lounge. The only mourning was for the six months that Henry and Joey had spent in jail. Andrei Katz had cooperated with the police and gotten what he deserved. Nino, who had avoided the Gemini, returned with Dominick, who saw that the circle of young men orbiting Roy now included a bearded stocky fellow named Peter LaFroscia, whom Chris introduced as “one of the top car guys in New York.”
Dominick was also introduced to Henry for the first time; it was the start of his closest friendship with anyone in the DeMeo crew. Dominick was twenty-eight now, Henry twenty-seven; they were fathers and husbands; both had once wanted to be cops. Like Dominick, Henry had traveled to an exotic country—though Henry’s trips to Morocco involved drug deals, not army service, at least he knew a little of life beyond Canarsie.
“I got pinched in Casablanca once,” Henry said, “but a few times I didn’t.”
In the weeks following the party, Dominick and Henry began meeting for drinks. Dominick thought Henry was the only one from the Canarsie crowd whose friendliness was genuine—he suspected the others were courteous only because they wanted him to speak well of them to Nino. Because Nino did not want him around the Gemini unless it was to conduct Nino’s business, Dominick began meeting Henry in Manhattan, usually at Pear Tree, a bar and restaurant in midtown on the affluent East Side.
One day, Dominick got a call—“Henry,” a voice he recognized said. “Let’s go to the Pear Tree. I wanna talk about a little problem that’s come up.”
The budding friends were familiar faces to the restaurant staff by now. Henry’s good looks turned a few female heads—in fact, he drew quite a few male stares too, but he had told Dominick that if a man ever made the wrong approach, he would shoot him. Of course, Dominick had always believed he cut a good figure entering a room; bouncing on the East Side with runaround Henry, he met many attractive women, but out of loyalty to Denise he resisted trying to romance them. Nevertheless, he was struck by how some women were excited by the idea of talking to two cocky young men rumored to be “connected.”
Henry’s problem was not little. He had dramatically misread the depth of Roy’s affection for Chris. “I went to Roy and asked him if I could kill Chris,” he began.
“Are you crazy? Why didn’t you just ask him if you could kill his son?”
Henry acknowledged his blunder and said Roy had exploded. “Now Roy says even if Chris drops dead of a heart attack, he’s going to hold me responsible.”
The reason Henry wanted to kill Chris—money—was hardly a surprise. The more Dominick saw of Nino’s world, the more cynical he became. Despite Nino’s outburst, Roy was still trafficking in repulsive pornography, and Nino was taking money from it. Nino just did not want to know details. Looking back on it, Dominick thought money, as much as revenge, was the lesson of the attempt on Vincent Governara’s life. If anyone but Roy abandoned his post during a job they would have been disciplined, if not killed. But Roy made too much money; money rationalized everything and was worth more than loyalty.
“I spent all that time in jail for Chris,” Henry said. “We killed that guy for him and I sat in the can all that time and Chris didn’t take care of my family. He didn’t give my wife or kids any money.”
Logically, Henry should have also been an
gry at Roy—Andrei Katz was killed for Roy as much as Chris—but Henry did not dare suggest that Roy was cheap. He was trying to regain his position in the crew’s reactivated stolen-car operation. While Henry was away, Roy had moved Patty Testa and one of Patty’s friends ahead of him.
Dominick urged Henry to make peace with Chris. With Chris’s temperament, it was certain Chris would do something impulsive and thus dig his own grave someday. “Bide your time,” the former point man said.
Because of his vantage point, Dominick became a witness to many intrigues. The next came in a few months when Roy, wearing sunglasses though it was nighttime, arrived at Nino’s house.
“What the fuck are you wearing those for?” Dominick asked as he led Roy into Nino’s basement meeting room.
Roy removed the glasses; his left eye was swollen and black, the result of a dispute with Joseph Brocchini, a pornographer who was a made member of another Mafia family. “Some schmuck sucker-punched me,” he said, “but it’s the last important thing he ever did, I’ll tell you that. It’ll be a little tricky, that’s all.” Under explicit Mafia rules, a made man was not supposed to be killed without his boss’s permission.
Roy said to Nino, “We’ll never get permission, right?”
Nino’s reply indicated how selectively he observed rules: “No, but just make it look like something else.”
In a few weeks, on May 20, 1976, Joseph Brocchini, who was identified as a used-car dealer with interests in three X-rated magazine and film stores in Manhattan’s Times Square, was shot to death in the office of his used-car dealership. The police said robbery appeared to be the motive because two of Brocchini’s employees had first been blindfolded and handcuffed and the office appeared to have been rifled. But in Bath Beach and Canarsie, insiders knew that Roy had accomplished his trick.
In the process, Henry won his way closer to Roy’s heart and established that, although he was queasy about dismemberment, he had no qualms about an ordinary murder. “I did that one,” he crowed to Dominick a few days later. “I mean, me and Roy did. The other guys took care of the employees, then me and Roy surprised the guy and plugged him five times in the back of the head.”
