by Gene Mustain
“Does Roy believe he’d get hurt?” he asked.
“He doesn’t believe it. He’s still pressin’. He wants it.”
“What’s Paulie say?”
“Paulie doesn’t like the way Roy does business; he says he’s unpredictable and, you know, Roy is—but Roy still wants it.”
At the Bath Beach bunker on another night, Roy kept pressing Nino. “I am bringing a lot of money in every week for the family. I have a real good crew put together. My people do a lot for the family. There are guys straightened out who don’t do what I do.”
Nino tried a little psychology. Roy actually had more “freedom” as an unmade man. “If you become a member, there are certain restrictions. You have to be more disciplined.”
“Nobody turns away the money I bring in.”
“Hey, you don’t need a button. With me, you don’t need it. Any problems you have, I straighten them out.”
Owing much of his wealth to Roy, Nino promised to keep talking to Paul on Roy’s behalf, which he did again the next time he and Dominick saw Paul at the Meat Palace.
Roy was not just a thief and hijacker, Nino reminded Paul. He had constructed his own sizable loan portfolio, had finagled a credit union right out of business and had assembled a loyal crew of followers who might be useful when any dirty work was necessary.
“Okay, but I just don’t trust the guy to do what he is supposed to do,” Paul said.
“I’ll calm him down, make him do only what I tell him.”
“I’m still against it.”
On the other hand, Paul was solidly behind the new family social club he ordered Nino to open. Paul wished to consolidate his base of power and establish a presence among the other crews. With his businessman’s approach, it made sense to have a sort of conference center, where he could confer with the capos and they with their soldiers and unmade associates. Because it was cheap and available, Nino chose a storefront in Bensonhurst on Eighty-sixth Street, a main thoroughfare.
From a distance, the club appeared to be the Genovese Tile Company, the former tenant. The company’s twenty-foot-wide yellow and black marquee, which separated the storefront from the apartments above it, was never removed—just as Venetian blinds covering the all-glass facade were rarely opened. Stenciled onto the glass, however, was the club’s name, “Veterans and Friends.”
Nino enlisted Dominick and other young men to renovate the club. They painted the inside, built a bar, cleaned a kitchen in the back, installed coffee, espresso, and cappuccino machines and brought in tables for card games and meals. Dominick hung a few old moviestar posters—W. C. Fields, Jean Harlow, and Nino’s favorite, George Raft. “Your grandmother grew up with him,” Nino was always boasting.
Because it would serve drinks and food, a state license was required to operate the club legally. “We’re gonna put it in your name because you’re the only vet we got that doesn’t have a criminal record,” Nino told Dominick, who signed the official papers.
The club was wedged between Liberty Post 1073 of the American Legion and Tommaso’s Restaurant, which club members came to treat as their private dining room—in fact, off the main floor, they eventually did get a private room, where the restaurant’s owner, an opera buff, sang arias for them. Paul and Nino conducted meetings there; so did Roy, but not at the same time.
Mafia etiquette prohibited Roy from making his own approach to Paul. An unmade associate had to seek a meeting with the boss through his capo. Roy did that and was turned down. Among his own crew, he began referring to Paul as “Waterhead,” a play on Paul’s prominent cranium and a reflection of his growing contempt. “Paul ain’t a street guy,” Roy would say. “He’s just a meat salesman.”
Made and unmade members of each crew in the Brooklyn faction were required to “shape up” at the Veterans and Friends on a particular night. Monday was Nino’s crew’s night. Roy loyally attended the shapeups, to keep on Nino’s good side, but he thought they were a waste of his time. None of the others made the money he did and he was never going to do much business with people who sat around complaining about their deadbeat loanshark customers without taking action. If he was not cooking a new deal, Roy preferred to socialize by his pool in Massapequa Park, with Chris, Henry, and Joey and Anthony gathered around, or at the Gemini, where he was the undeniable star of the show.
Nino was not that fond of the club either. It invited surveillance by authorities. With schemes always afoot, several men were certain to be under surveillance at any given time and that meant cops and agents would be hovering around, taking photographs and license plate numbers and trying to figure out who was what. Nino cherished his privacy; he was fifty-two years old now, a potent force, but still practically unknown to the FBI’s Mafia experts. There was that notation in a file about “Nino and Roy” shaking down an X-rated distributor and that was it.
The New York City Police Department did not know much more. In 1973, Kenny McCabe, the Brooklyn detective whom Carlo had always offered a cup of coffee, was told by an informant—a woman who patronized the Gemini—that “a guy named Roy DeMeo” was “with a guy named Nino.” Kenny’s files also contained a notation that a man seen leaving a social club in 1969 in the company of a Genovese Mafia capo had been identified as a loanshark whose name was Anthony Gaggi. In countless surveillances of Mafia hangouts, including the Brooklyn club of the late Carlo’s driver, Kenny and other cops had not seen Anthony Gaggi again; only people in certain circles knew that Anthony and Nino were one and the same.
Nino had stayed in the background because he was spending a lot more time in Florida and because, when in Brooklyn, he rarely had to leave the bunker for anything but mundane errands. Most of his illegal business, in the form of Roy, came to him. Otherwise, Nino doted on Rose and their children. As much as possible for someone whom the neighbors never saw working, Nino, as Roy did, tried presenting a civic face. He donated money to the American Legion—though not to the post next to the club—and purchased the uniforms for a local church-sponsored Little League. In his mind, the Veterans and Friends social club threatened to nullify these efforts to keep a low and respectable profile. In a rare moment of misgiving, he told Dominick, “The club’s gonna put me in jail someday. It might even be the death of me someday.”
Sunday at the club made Nino cringe. Sundays were when Paul considered it good form for everyone in all the crews to shape up and pay homage to their leaders. The club was too small to accommodate so many and inevitably the men spilled onto the main drag of Eighty-sixth Street to find elbowroom, and this created a scene.
It was impossible for passersby to not see that the wiseguys and “good fellows”—as they were also known—were having a meeting. Though Nino stuck to his conservative suits and Roy to his knit shirts and chinos, Roy’s crew and Dominick always turned up in their flashiest clothes. They favored flared suits and sportscoats and bright contrasting silk shirts with collars wide enough to cover jacket lapels. The shirts were unbuttoned to mid-chest to show off gold chains. It was a style recently described in a magazine article on the culture of Eighty-sixth Street; the article had led to a movie deal and scenes from Saturday Night Fever—the story of Tony Manero, white-suited king of the Brooklyn discos—were being shot in a pizzeria near the club and at other locations in Bensonhurst.
At the time, a familiar topic at the club was all the newspaper stories quoting law enforcement officials as saying Aniello Dellacroce was now boss of what they continued to refer to as the Gambino crime family. The men mocked authorities for their faulty intelligence and ridiculed “Gambino crime family” as a law enforcement invention for the media. The men referred to their organization as simply “the family” or “the outfit.” Older traditionalists spoke of “our thing”—cosa nostra in Italian.
In the beginning, Paul, the traditionalist boss, came to the club almost every day. Smoking a cigar, he enjoyed holding court in the kitchen; paranoid about government listening devices since being secretly taped by hi
s nephew the stock swindler, he ran tap water and played a radio when discussing business. Early in 1977, not long after the club opened, the men began noticing suspicious cars passing the club or parked nearby. They began telling each other to smile for the “cop cameras” when coming and going. Nino and Roy figured they had already been captured on film, so they kept going to the club. Paul, however, was alarmed and began avoiding his innovation, the family conference center.
* * *
One of the surveillance cars outside Veterans and Friends social club in the early days was unforgettable—a dinky, beat-up blue Ford Pinto with a yellow hood. Detective Kenny McCabe took pride in his private car, which resembled a wounded parakeet. He did not mind that it made him conspicuous—sometimes that was the idea. If he wanted to avoid detection, he used a government car, but if he wanted to be seen, in the hope it might ruin a wiseguy’s day, he used the patchwork Pinto. The sight of Kenny in such a car was just as remarkable. A former college basketball player stocky enough to play the line in football, he overwhelmed the driver’s seat.
Kenny happened onto the club after he and Anthony Nelson, an FBI special agent who frequently joined him on surveillance, tailed some men from the West Side Civic Center, the social club of Carlo’s former driver. Since becoming a detective in 1969, Kenny had conducted much surveillance on his own time—sometimes with other motivated cops or his FBI friend, many times alone. Detecting was his vocation and avocation. Usually, he acquired only bits of information—a new name, or an old face in a new place—but cases were made in bits, so all observable details about a subject—his mannerisms, routine, car, his girlfriend or wife—were recorded. In fact, in 1973, after he was told about a Roy DeMeo who owned a bar in Flatlands, Kenny had driven to the Gemini and waited outside until a man fitting Roy’s description got into a Cadillac matching the informant’s tip.
The Cadillac, it turned out, was registered to an Eleanor DeMeo, a sixty-six-year-old woman who lived in Massapequa Park, according to a license plate check. Thus, Roy’s name, and his mother’s, went into a report placed in a stack of files accumulating in the basement of Kenny’s home. In truth of course, the widowed Eleanor did not live with her son, but with her friend Mrs. Profaci.
Kenny McCabe’s files contained hundreds of names and photographs. By 1977, when it came to “the mob,” Kenny was the institutional data bank of the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office. It was a fitting accomplishment because Kenneth McCabe, Sr., his father, was the office’s former chief deputy—second in power only to the elected district attorney.
Until 1963, Kenneth McCabe, Sr., supervised the office’s investigations and its prosecutors, including a better-known lawyer in the office—“Thrill-Kill Case” prosecutor Albert DeMeo—whose blacksheep nephew Roy was then just four years out of James Madison High School. Kenny, Sr., devoted his life to law enforcement until 1963, when he died at the office of a heart attack. Chip-off-the-old-block Kenny, Jr., was a promising fourteen-year-old basketball player at the time.
In 1969, one year after Kenny, Jr., left Loyola University in Maryland and joined the police department, some eyebrows—including his—were raised when he was plucked out of ordinary patrol duty and promoted to detective by officials who admired his father. Fairly soon his ability prevented comment on the favoritism from growing past the raised-eyebrow stage.
When the West Side Civic Center crowd unwittingly led them to the Veterans and Friends, Kenny and FBI Special Agent Tony Nelson were pleased. Surveillance rarely yielded something as important as a new Mafia clubhouse. Returning now and then, on and off duty, they saw soldiers from several different crews—dozens of them; except at funerals and weddings, such congregations were rare. Watching from the Pinto or Tony Nelson’s FBI car, they concluded that a new power had risen in the Gambino family.
At the time, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and the New York offices of the FBI got along like a pair of unmatched shoes. The two crime-fighting agencies stumbled onto each other’s investigations with regular acrimony because they rarely shared information. An institutional rivalry was aggravated by differences in style. Most FBI agents—until the recent death of founding patriarch J. Edgar Hoover, they had been required to wear suits while on surveillance—had grown up elsewhere and were more buttoned-up than the average homegrown NYPD detective, who was brash like the city and disdainful of by-the-book federal style.
Tony Nelson was an atypical FBI agent because he was born and raised in Brooklyn; he was the son of an ex-military man who instilled in him the same loathing for lowlifes and wiseguys as Kenny’s father had in him. He was twenty-five, of medium height and frame, wore a mustache, and had short black hair. As part of the FBI’s Brooklyn-Queens organized crime squad, he had met Kenny the year before when both arrived simultaneously at a hijacking drop. Each was tipped to the stash by an informant trying to collect reward money two ways. It was the kind of situation that historically ruffled feathers, but not those of the Brooklyn natives.
At the scene, Kenny and Tony realized they had the same informant; they agreed to stiff him and stay in touch. Comparing notes the next few months, they saw their interests were mutual. They began going on surveillance together, becoming friends—and unknown to their bosses, unofficial partners.
Among other bits, Tony told Kenny that an informant had told him that a man named Roy DeMeo who hung out at a bar in Flatlands was a ruthless killer. The informant said Roy had killed “a dozen or so” people and “chopped up” bodies. Undercover, Tony went to the Gemini, got a glance at Roy, and typed a report which did not get much attention. Tony even doubted its legitimacy: A trait of the underworld was the hyperbole of its informants.
It was true, however, that several more car thieves and drug dealers had disappeared in Canarsie. In the wake of Andrei Katz’s demise, people in Canarsie credited Roy and his crew anytime anyone in either line of work disappeared without a trace. Short of making admissions, Roy did little to dissuade such rumors.
“I haven’t seen that guy and don’t expect to,” he would say, with a look that discouraged further questions, when someone came to the Gemini inquiring about an acquaintance.
Another time, while with Dominick in a car, he was more direct. “They ought to put a tombstone over there,” he said, pointing to a newly constructed gas station. “Two tombstones, because we buried two bodies there.”
Tony told Kenny about his trip to the Gemini. “I’ve heard of Roy,” Kenny said. “He’s supposed to be with a guy named Nino. Might be a Gambino.”
“Who’s Nino?”
“That one I don’t know.”
One day, outside the Veterans and Friends, Kenny and Tony saw Roy go inside. This suggested Roy was a Gambino and raised the possibility he was visiting the mysterious Nino.
Later, they saw Roy and others walk out with an older man who became the center of attention as he strolled along Eighty-sixth Street like he owned the sidewalk beneath his shiny loafers. The man stopped beside a Cadillac and waited until someone opened the door. In Kenny’s and Tony’s experience, this was respect only a capo or boss was accorded. They called in the license plate. The number came back to R&A Sales.
In a few days, a check on R&A Sales revealed it to be a food brokerage, and the name, Anthony Gaggi. Kenny went to his files. Bingo. He could hardly wait, in his low-key way, to telephone Tony. “Nino is Anthony Gaggi, a loanshark; take it to the bank he is the guy we saw and the guy Roy is with.”
“All right!”
Kenny and Tony resumed their surveillance of the Veterans and Friends. One night, they spotted Roy across the street from the club, talking to a Gambino soldier who helped run a catering hall when he was not running errands for Nino. Roy spotted them back, and grabbed his crotch and thrust his hips forward—the Brooklyn gesture for “Suck my cock!”
The cop and the agent smiled back at Roy, and Kenny said, “Suck yourself. Asshole.”
Continual surveillance of Nino and Roy was impossible and,
with no open case against them, unjustifiable. Still, when time allowed, Kenny, Tony, and others picked up their trail frequently enough that they began to disturb Roy.
Outside the Gemini one afternoon, Roy decided to confront Kenny, parked nearby with two other detectives in his battered Pinto, now minus a headlight.
“What are you breakin’ my balls for? Can I help you with something?”
“You could help with a lot,” Kenny said.
“Every place I go, I see you! I look up and you’re there! Why are you wasting your time with me? I don’t bother anybody.”
“That’s not what I hear.”
“You’re not hearing right. You’ve never seen me do anything wrong. Why are you wasting your time with me? You know everybody, but nobody knows you.”
“Yeah, I’m a big fucking secret, especially in my car.”
“I can’t believe anyone tells you bad things about me.”
“Poor Roy, nobody loves you, that’s for sure.”
* * *
The surveillance annoyed Roy, but not as much as Paul’s ill regard and continuing refusal to make him a made man. He simmered over Paul’s complaints about his unpredictability. He thought he was predictable as a sunrise, and highly disciplined. He commanded an efficient crew and worked hard; his “discipline” of informants like Andrei Katz was what kept money flowing to Nino and “Waterhead.”
In the spring of 1977, he grudgingly concluded that the only way to win Paul over was to make him even more money. That called for a new scheme of some kind, and just as he began casting about, one fell into his lap courtesy of Danny Grillo, the fifty-year-old Smith & Wesson hijacker he had invited into his crew on the belief that a hard-boiled ex-con with no options might come in handy someday.
At one time, Danny had worked as a “sandhog”—a laborer on underground tunnel excavations that typically employed many Irish-Americans. While drinking with coworkers, he had met several members of a gang that plied the underside of Hell’s Kitchen, the old neighborhood of Mary Gaggi and George Raft on the West Side of Manhattan. It was an area of tenements, warehouses and small factories stretching from Thirty-fourth to Fifty-seventh Streets and from Eighth Avenue to the Hudson River. The West Side gang was dominated by men of Irish descent—through the years, their ancestors had clashed violently with the Gambino family and other Mafia gangs with gambling, loansharking, and shakedown interests in the area. Among their kind, the West Side gang was called the “Irish Mob,” but then a media-wise homicide detective, Joseph Coffey, coined another name that stuck—“Westies.”
