by Gene Mustain
In prison, Danny Grillo met James Coonan, an ambitious young Westie with a lingering grudge against the long-time boss of the gang. After Danny and Coonan were paroled, they had regular reunions in Gemini Lounge–type bars on the West Side. This was how Danny learned that Coonan and some followers had dreams of becoming the most important Westies. He told Roy the group was ruthless but underfunded.
Where Danny just saw intrigue, Roy saw opportunity; if he bankrolled Coonan and helped him take over, Coonan would have to share underworld power on the West Side with the Gambino family. Roy saw a new vein of riches for Paul—and a button for himself.
“Let’s meet this kid,” he said. “Maybe we got business.”
Several meetings were held in a trailer near a sewage treatment plant on Wards Island, an outcrop in the East River where New York had also placed the Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane. A Westie employed at the plant told Roy that the underwater currents swirling around the island were so swift that if a body was properly “opened up”—stomach and lungs punctured—it would sink and sail past the southern tip of Manhattan and then on out to sea without ever popping to the surface—perpetually and deeply asleep “with the fishes.”
Unlike his followers, but like Roy, thirty-year-old Jimmy Coonan came from a respectable middle-class family; his father was a Hell’s Kitchen tax accountant. He told Roy that the Westie leadership was in shambles because of the semiretirement of one Mickey Spillane; besides having the same name as the Brooklyn-born writer of cops-and-robbers books, Mickey Spillane was the Irish equivalent of Carlo Gambino in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Coonan hated Spillane because Mickey had slapped his father around when Coonan was nineteen years old. He had vowed to kill Spillane but got caught trying to murder someone else and went to prison. In the interlude, Spillane began slowing down; at age fifty-three, he even moved out of Hell’s Kitchen. Many former associates began going their own way; nobody was steering the ship.
Roy saw that it was going to be easy to strike a deal with Coonan. Coonan was still unsure of himself and plainly awed just to be having meetings with associates of the Gambino family. In prison, Coonan was friendly with many Italian inmates and came to the notion that Irish criminals would be a lot more effective if they had a tradition like the Mafia, with its secret oaths, rules, and rituals. With embarrassing reverence, he told his little band that they could dominate the West Side by making an alliance with “the Italians from Brooklyn.”
Roy loaned Coonan fifty thousand dollars so Coonan could make some impressive loans in West Side bars. Then they and a few others from each of their crews hijacked a tractor trailer load of newfangled machines—videocassette recorders, at the time worth about a thousand dollars each—and split the profit.
Money paved the way for the alliance; blood sealed it. Just as Roy bound himself to Nino by murdering blue-movie distributor Paul Rothenberg, Roy would bind Coonan to him by murdering the man who slapped the young Westie’s father around years before—Mickey Spillane.
The ambush-murder occurred at night on a Friday the 13th in May. Roy hid behind a first-floor staircase in a Queens apartment building and waited for the old Westie to come down from the second floor to talk to an acquaintance—Danny Grillo, who had just rung Spillane’s doorbell. As the victim walked out the door, Roy came from behind and both he and Danny opened up with silencer-equipped pistols. Spillane started running, but they followed him into the street and shot him several more times. Chris and Henry were parked in a nearby car, the Gemini twins in another, in case they were needed, but the second volley did the job.
Spillane was left on the street so everyone would know he was dead and believe that Jimmy Coonan had taken his revenge.
Danny called Coonan. “Congratulations,” Danny said, “we got you your birthday present a little early this year.”
The present emboldened Coonan; it was now time to make his move. In a West Side bar two days later, he and a few others, including Danny, laid a trap for an elderly loanshark, Ruby Stein, whose expansive book funded discos, restaurants, peepshows and X-rated magazine shops; he also operated a West Side gambling parlor. Several Westies, including Coonan, owed him money; so did Danny, a gambling addict who had kept his addiction a secret from Roy. By murdering Stein, Coonan hoped to make more Westies indebted to him. It was a Roy DeMeo–style move, but Roy—much to his later anger, particularly at Danny—was not consulted.
As soon as Coonan led Stein into the deserted bar, Danny came out of a bathroom and shot him dead. Effectively wiping out several hundred thousand dollars of debt, they confiscated a notebook Stein used to record the status of his loans and which he was known always to carry with him. While Danny sat at the bar and drank, Coonan and some of his most devoted followers took a page out of Roy’s Pantry Pride book and dismembered the victim. The body parts were packaged in garbage bags, which were then tossed into the swift East River currents that swirled around Wards Island and the Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane.
In ensuing weeks, Coonan recruited more West Side misfits into “my Mafia” and began dressing in the Saturday Night Fever style of the Veterans and Friends social club. He became the undisputed leader of the Westies and let potential rivals know he was backed by the heavy firepower of the Italians from Brooklyn.
“We got this kid on the West Side who will give us ten percent of his action and do whatever we tell him,” Roy told Nino, who took the news to Paul.
While Roy was romancing Coonan, Paul had decided to “open the books” and expand the family roster. He had chosen ten men endorsed by his capos, but not Roy, the choice of his top capo, Nino. Given the deal Roy had arranged with the Westies, however, he decided he could no longer credibly dismiss him as an unpredictable blue-collar car thief and hijacker; Roy had brought a historically troublesome gang, an entire new field of plunder, right into the family tent. And so finally, at age thirty-seven, Roy the former weightlifter of Ivory Snow boxes got his button.
For all its meaning for the men involved, the ceremony by which associates became made men was simple. By tradition, the inductees and incumbent made men would have become brothers by pricking each other’s fingers and drawing blood. Then Paul would have spoken about how the inductees were now members of a family whose interests were paramount to personal concerns. They would have to unequivocally obey him and the capos and pledge allegiance to omerta, a code of noncooperation with all authority that originated in the hills of Sicily. Anyone violating omerta would be killed. One never left the family, not while alive.
Apart from the severity of the sanctions, the ritual was not much different from a fraternity initiation or a night at the local Moose Lodge. Only outsiders would say it was a lot of hokum.
A rambunctious dinner in the private family dining room in Tommaso’s Restaurant next to the Veterans and Friends followed the ceremony. Sipping wine, Nino toasted Roy, then put salt on his triumph. He said Roy was now part of a great tradition, but would never go higher in the family: “Only Sicilians get to be capos in our family.”
Nino’s romantic view was not quite accurate. In the Manhattan faction, Aniello Dellacroce was about to name John Gotti, a Neapolitan like Roy, to be the capo of his tough Queens crew.
“I’m happy with what I got,” Roy said.
* * *
Jimmy Coonan was more struck by Mafia oaths and rules than Roy was: For Roy, his button was pure ego gratification. The moment he was made he was in direct violation of one of the rules that Carlo initiated and which Paul had reaffirmed—no drug dealing. Roy was still backing an operation that imported Colombian marijuana by the twenty-five pound bale and was still selling multiple ounces of cocaine out of the Gemini. He had no intention of stopping; he would just be more secretive, more alert to potential threats.
One of Roy’s frequent cocaine customers was a very successful car thief and chop shop operator named John Quinn, who was yet another graduate of the Canarsie junkyard school. Quinn had a cop in hi
s pocket who tipped him to neighborhood patrol patterns and used police computers to learn, via license plate checks, the addresses of people owning cars Quinn had seen and coveted. Quinn employed two expert thieves who cruised for cars every night. It took them about forty-five seconds to “pop” a locked car, disable its alarm, remove the ignition lock, and drive it away. They stole up to fifteen a night.
The real key to Quinn’s success was his ability to “wash” the cars. From break-ins of state offices, he acquired stacks of blank title and registration forms; he also possessed stamping equipment for punching out vehicle identification numbers. This enabled him to replace the dashboard VIN plate with a realistic phony, using serial numbers he knew from cop computers were not already in use in New York State. The numbers were then typed or engraved onto the state documents—presto! the car was “clean.”
Quinn’s operation was much more sophisticated than the one Anthony Gaggi once had. In Nino’s era state-issued titles were not required to show ownership, just a dealer-issued registration. By comparison, the Rosenberg-Katz operation also was amateurish. Chris’s VIN plates appeared to be made by a hand-held label-making device of the type commonly sold in Woolworth’s.
Quinn was making more money in cars than the DeMeo crew. In fact, for three thousand to thirty-five hundred dollars each, Roy was buying tag jobs from Quinn, mostly luxury Lincolns and Cadillacs; tacking on another thousand or two, he was selling them to customers lined up by him or by Joey Testa’s younger brother Patty. At age twenty, Patty, the former boy-wonder mechanic, was owner of his own dealership, Patty Testa Motorcars. Flush with cash like his brother, who had moved out of Canarsie (but only physically), Patty had purchased his father’s Canarsie home, and was storing many stolen cars in a lot next door—a situation about which his see-no-evil neighbors were deaf, dumb, and blind.
One reason Quinn and Roy did business was that one of Roy’s men, Peter LaFroscia, the bearded lumberjack type whom Chris had introduced to Dominick as “one of the top car guys in New York,” actually worked more for Quinn than Roy. LaFroscia was one of the two men who cruised the streets for Quinn each night. He and the other thief, a freelancer more loyal to Quinn, always cruised in a Jaguar because they believed it made them appear more respectable. In the last eighteen months, they had stolen nearly two thousand cars.
Between the DeMeo crew and John Quinn, it had gotten so a new-car customer in Canarsie or Flatlands with no qualms and an informed ear to the ground would never think of paying retail at a legitimate dealer. Quinn also served customers who sought to “steal” their own cars. For fifteen hundred dollars, he sold “kits” containing a VIN plate and the necessary phony paper. The kits, also available through the crew, were known as “Quinn Paper.”
Roy and the crew viewed the independent-minded Quinn as an outsider but also as a “stand-up guy.” For the last year, pending appeals, he had been awaiting sentencing in an FBI-made case in which he pleaded guilty to conspiring to transport a stolen car across state lines. As cases go, it was not much of a bother; he might have to “go away,” but only for a couple of months. When convicted of hijacking years before, he had served his sentence quietly, so the pending sentence did not cause too much worry. What did alarm Roy, however, was that Quinn, a married, thirty-five-year-old father of six children, was having an affair with a nineteen-year-old woman—and had exposed her to details of his operations.
The woman was Cherie Golden, a perky waitress in a Brooklyn restaurant known as The Butcher Shop when she met Quinn. She was a pretty teenager, the winner of a beauty contest in which competitors were judged by their resemblance to a superslim Cockney fashion model Leslie Hornby, otherwise known as Twiggy. Unlike blond, close-cropped Twiggy, Cherie had brown cascading hair, but her willowy profile, big brown eyes, and cherubic smile did evoke Twiggy’s “adolescent angel” look. A year out of high school, she lived with her parents in Flatbush, west of Flatlands.
Quinn dazzled Cherie. His luxury oceanfront apartment was not far from her job; he drove two cars, a Cadillac El Dorado and a Lincoln Continental with a then innovative, retractable “moon roof”; he had money, clothes, jewelry, and a charming way. Cherie learned later that he also had a house, wife, and half-dozen kids on Long Island—but by then, she told girlfriends, she was in love and having the time of her life.
Quinn showed Cherie off at restaurants in Little Italy and let her use one of his cars—whichever one he did not want that day. Soon she was sleeping overnight in his city apartment. If her parents knew of his other life, only unsuccessful attempts were made to warn her away.
To his peers’ amazement, Quinn began bringing Cherie along when he was conducting business—buying hot cars off freelance thieves, monitoring his chop shops, or settling accounts with his “Jaguar squad.” He usually paid LaFroscia and the other thief one hundred fifty dollars for an ordinary car destined for a chop shop, two-fifty for a taggable Cadillac or Lincoln. Quinn added a fifty-dollar bonus if they stole cars with popular colors.
Through LaFroscia, Roy heard about Cherie Golden right away, and told Quinn: “You’re nuts.” Cherie could not stand up to pressure if the police went after her. Quinn ought to get rid of her. “She’s a liability,” Roy said.
Quinn viewed Cherie as a rare asset, someone absolutely trustworthy. He had installed a telephone line in her bedroom at her parents’ house so she could take his messages and make appointments. He had hidden a handgun there and given her an IBM Selectric typewriter so she could type his bogus titles and registrations.
As the summer of 1977 began, Quinn was socked by consecutive legal problems that made his pending federal sentence potentially ominous. Police raided one of his chop shops; then his name surfaced in an investigation on Long Island into the sale of stolen bonds, and he was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury.
Quinn’s new problems meant the judge about to sentence him in his pending stolen-car case was likely to give him more time in prison. Suddenly, he did not feel like standing up to prison anymore. He saw only one way out: He was just the go-between in the bond sale; if he cooperated, he might impress the sentencing judge. Cooperating might even make his chop shop problem vanish. He decided to testify before the grand jury rather than invoke his right to remain silent. He of all people should have feared the secret would not last long, not with the eyes and ears Roy had in official places.
A few days after Quinn’s testimony, Peter LaFroscia called a cousin of Quinn’s, Joseph Bennett, an employee of Quinn’s retagging division, and asked him to meet Roy. Potentially, this was a disastrous mistake because Bennett—with Quinn headed for prison—had recently become an informer for the FBI, which was still investigating Quinn’s interstate reach. Being from Canarsie, however, Bennett was well aware that many men in his business were no longer around. He, like FBI agent Tony Nelson, had heard that Roy “chopped up” bodies; he, unlike Tony, believed it absolutely. So he would not tell the FBI what he was about to hear.
“Johnny went before the grand jury and we know it,” Roy told Bennett. “He was told to get rid of Cherie. I told him personally and he didn’t do it.” Roy offered Bennett ten thousand dollars to lure his cousin Quinn into a trap: “We’ll put the bullets in his head, you don’t have to worry about that.”
Showing he was growing ever more murderous, Roy the newly made man also said he would pay a ten-thousand-dollar bonus if Bennett lured Cherie Golden into the same trap. He had, he said, come to a decision: “We’re going to get rid of both of them.” He emphasized the urgency of the situation: “You don’t have too much time to make a decision. It’s a rush deal here.”
Bennett, however, neither set up his cousin nor told him of the plot. He was unsure if he was being set up. He continued associating with Quinn as though Roy had not said a word and even accompanied Quinn to the Gemini to inspect a Porsche that Quinn was considering buying for Cherie.
Using “Quinn Paper,” the DeMeo crew had begun stealing and retagging foreign luxury cars,
Porsches and Mercedes mainly; each member kept one or more for personal use. When they shaped up at the Gemini on Friday nights, the nearby streets came as close as they ever would to Rodeo Drive during a boutique opening.
While Quinn inspected the Porsche, Peter LaFroscia pulled Bennett aside and asked if was going to pass up the twenty thousand dollars Roy had offered for Quinn and his lover.
“I’m not so sure I like it,” Bennett said.
“Don’t miss a good opportunity,” LaFroscia said. Showing he had become more than a car thief since joining the crew, he pulled a pistol from a brown paper bag and added: “Look, we’re always ready to take care of this on our own, you know. Don’t sleep on this. Decide.”
Once again, leaving the Gemini, Bennett did not say anything to Quinn. Ignoring LaFroscia, he kept sleeping on it.
Three days later, on the afternoon of July 20, 1977, Cherie Golden came home in an agitated huff and stayed in her room for several hours. Quinn had told her that he was due to be sentenced the next day and was likely to go to jail for a while, but not as long as he might have if he had not gone before the grand jury.
Near twilight, as Quinn’s silver Lincoln with the moon roof pulled up on her street, Cherie came out of her room dressed in an adolescent angel outfit—a white and yellow halter top, blue short shorts, and open-toe sandals revealing toenails painted pink. Her face was not as carefree.
