Murder Machine

by Gene Mustain

  “What’s wrong, honey?” her grandmother asked.

  “He’s going away!” Cherie said angrily. Without another word, she steamed out of the house and got into Quinn’s car.

  At twenty minutes past eight o’clock in the evening, Quinn picked up a telephone message from the answering service he used in addition to Cherie. The message was from “Pete.” “You know the number, it’s important.” Quinn and Cherie went to the Gemini soon afterward. Quinn still wanted to buy the Porsche for Cherie; he also was made to think that the crew wanted to buy more of his phony paper and VIN-making tools. With Cherie along, Quinn must have felt safe, the last of his many recent miscalculations.

  These days, business at the Gemini Lounge was conducted in an apartment immediately to the rear of the tavern, on the first floor in the same building. A cousin of Roy’s, an older man with a deep voice and silver mane whom the younger men called “Dracula,” had recently moved in after getting out of jail for bank robbery. The telephone in his apartment was an extension of the telephone in the bar. He cooked Friday night shapeup meals for crew members, and they had begun using his home as a sort of clubhouse. Nowadays, when crew members or associates said they were headed for the Gemini, they meant the apartment more than the bar.

  About an hour after picking up the message, Quinn went inside the crew’s clubhouse while Cherie stayed in the Lincoln. Because a silencer was used, she did not hear the single shot fired into the back of her lover’s head, killing him instantly. In an account of the murder he gave to an acquaintance, Henry Borelli neglected to say who shot Quinn, but said he, Roy, Chris, and LaFroscia were inside and that outside, in the car, Cherie was distracted by Joey Testa and Anthony Senter, standing on either side and leaning through the windows talking to her. When she turned toward Joey, his inseparable buddy Anthony shot her twice in the head, and when her head whipped around from the bullets tearing through her brain, Anthony shot her again in the face.

  Neither Quinn nor Cherie would disappear because Roy wanted their bodies found—to send a message about the price of cooperating with official authority when the DeMeo crew was involved.

  One team of killers bundled up Quinn’s body, drove to Staten Island and dumped it along a desolate road. Another squad, after rifling Quinn’s car and taking away stacks of blank titles, registrations, birth certificates, and the VIN-making equipment, took care of Cherie, whose body was pushed up toward the underside of the dashboard, contorted like a ragdoll, and covered with clothes taken from the car’s trunk. Someone pulled down her halter top, just to throw a sexual curve into the police investigation. The Lincoln was then driven to the Gerritsen Beach section of Brooklyn, near Coney Island, and left on a residential block.

  Quinn’s body was found that night; Cherie’s body lay in the sealed-up Lincoln for three sweltering days. On the fourth, Sunday, July 24, 1977, a resident of the block called police to report a possibly stolen car. An officer came and detected the unmistakable rotten-egg odor of human decomposition. Beneath the body, on the floorboard, Detective Joseph Polizzi was intrigued to discover, of all things, a blood-stained set of blank documents for transferring ownership of a car.

  Within days, LaFroscia met Joseph Bennett, Quinn’s tongue-tied cousin, in a coffee shop. “See, we weren’t kidding,” he said. “You missed out on an easy twenty thousand. It was easy, although with Cherie it was a little squeemy, a little squirmy.”

  What he meant, he added, was that Cherie was so young and so pretty it was a shame she had to die.

  * * *

  The night before Cherie’s body was found, the police had also been called to break up a fight in a catering hall a short distance away. The fight began when a waiter set a plate a little too carelessly in front of Roy.

  “What’s wrong with you, don’t you know how to serve people?”

  “Doin’ the best I can, pal.”

  The catering hall’s waiters were as insolent as Roy’s crew because many were aspiring soldiers for their boss, who owned the hall and was a captain in another family.

  “Do you know who you’re talkin’ to!”

  “Don’t know, don’t care, buddy.”

  It was now a situation where Roy wanted to show power and be perceived correctly. He stood and smacked the waiter hard in the face. Other waiters came to their co-worker’s aid, and before long the catering hall was turned into a Dodge City saloon. Danny Grillo tossed a waiter through a window. Henry Borelli, however, was badly beaten; his pal Dominick—a few days before, the son of the former Army Air Corps boxing champ had become the father of a baby boy, Dominick, Jr.—came to his aid and punched a waiter so hard, awestruck Roy later told Nino, “I felt the force go by.”

  The crew had gathered at the catering hall because earlier that day, as Cherie’s body waited to be found, the man Henry said shot her in the head and the face—Anthony Senter, the Roman-looking favorite of all the Canarsie women—got married to a Canarsie woman about Cherie’s age.

  When the case hit the newspapers, Nino instantly suspected Roy and furiously called him to a sitdown at the bunker, where Roy confessed and pleaded his case—just as Cherie’s distraught parents offered a ten thousand dollar reward for information.

  All too clearly Nino recognized that the murder of Cherie went straight to the core of Paul’s concerns about Roy’s unpredictability. Cherie was not even given a chance to show that she could stand up to police pressure. The murder made Nino look bad; he could not, as he had promised Paul, control Roy.

  “You just can’t be runnin’ around doin’ this cowboy stuff!” he screamed.

  To Roy, the murders were just another example of how the underworld had to maintain its law and order. “Quinn already talked, she knew it, she had to go too.”

  “But you can’t go around killing everybody you feel you have to kill without talkin’ to me!”

  “I’m telling you, she was part of his operation. She could have hurt us bad as him.”

  “Paulie ain’t going to like this.”

  The next day, accompanied by Dominick, who learned about the murders the same time as Nino, Nino visited Paul at the Meat Palace to give Roy’s explanation. Paul also had suspected Roy as he read the newspapers and saw Quinn identified as a leader of a car-theft ring.

  “Why did the girl have to be killed?” he asked.

  “She was part of his operation,” Nino said. “She might have been talking. She had to go.”

  Dominick was amazed to hear Nino defend Roy, until he mulled the politics of the situation: Nino had vouched for Roy; he had to make it look as though Roy had no choice; otherwise, he would be admitting he was unable to control him.

  Paul’s low-key reaction would also surprise, but then Paul had no one but himself to blame. Despite all his misgivings, he had second-guessed himself, partly because of Nino’s urging and partly because of Roy’s success with the Westies, and initiated Roy into the family. “Just talk to Roy,” he said wearily. “Make sure people just don’t start going who don’t have to go.”

  By the standard of Carlo Gambino, it was a very weak reply. Now a half-year into his reign, Paul was having trouble managing the reins of power. His naive managerial idea for a central club had been proven to be a reckless security risk, and now a man he had personally anointed had murdered a teenage girl without his bosses’ permission.

  Things could not get much worse, but they would.

  CHAPTER 9

  Killing Spree

  Happy with the Westies alliance Roy conceived and executed, Paul never called him on the carpet for the Cherie Golden murder and eventually even adopted Roy’s and Nino’s spin on it—“Twiggy” was a threat who had to go. Happy with the thousands a week Roy funneled to the bunker, Nino granted Roy a long leash and never seriously demanded that he clear all murders in advance. Unrebuked and unrestrained, and now with full Gambino cachet, Roy began adding to his barony and expanding his crew, who grew even more quick to kill, feeding a reputation for merciless brutality that
led to a new sideline—murder for hire.

  Seven victims linked to the crew were found during the next eighteen months. Undoubtedly, some more wound up in a vast landfill the crew began using when they wanted someone to disappear for one reason or another. These would have been dismembered and tossed in with seven thousand tons of garbage deposited daily in the Fountain Avenue dump; the dump was just west of Canarsie at the edge of Jamaica Bay and was then the subject of a neighborhood furor over contaminants leeching into the local water supply. Anthony Senter tipped Roy to the dump’s possibilities; his uncle’s sanitation company was one of the landfill’s principal dumpers.

  Proof that Roy and the crew used it was only circumstantial during this period, but incriminating. “I don’t know where that guy is,” Roy would say now, when people came to the Gemini with questions about their friends or drug connections. “Did you look in Fountain Avenue?” Roy also presented Chris and his would-be brothers, Joey and Anthony, with sets of carving knives that Roy called “tool kits.” The boys—all were using more and more cocaine, though not in front of Roy, who only sold it—kept the knives in gym bags they hid in the trunks of their Rodeo Drive tag jobs, in case a quick assignment arose.

  While Chris and Joey and Anthony improved their dismemberment skills, Henry emerged as Roy’s number-one sharpshooter. The others also grew proficient with guns, because victims slated for dismemberment were always shot first, but they were never as accurate and fast as “Dirty Henry” (as they began to call him, inspired by Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry character). Henry managed to get along with Chris, and forget Chris’s ingratitude for the half-year he spent in jail waiting for the Andrei Katz case to come to trial, but he and Chris were too competitive about Roy’s attention to ever be as close as Chris and the Gemini twins were. Henry’s friendship with Dominick also set him apart from Chris, still peeved about Dominick’s “Napoleon-complex” remark.

  After meeting a man with no scruples and a machine shop in his basement, Roy bought several more custom-made silencers and presented one to each crew member. The crew held regular practice sessions with the silencers and their handguns, which Roy told them to be sure always to destroy and toss away after a “piece of work,” so they would never get caught with a gun whose barrel matched the rifling marks on a bullet found in a body. “You don’t want to get stopped for some stupid fucking speeding ticket and have some cop find a hot piece in your car,” Roy explained.

  Throughout the rest of 1977 and 1978, the murders came fast and furious. Anyone posing a threat, or foolish enough to get in the crew’s way or to try and cheat it, was eliminated.

  And so John Costello and Daniel Conti, two men hired to assist in a hijacking, were found shot to death after the hijacking went awry. They were judged to be weak links who could not stand up to the resulting police investigation. Conti was Peter LaFroscia’s brother-in-law. He went first, Costello two weeks later.

  Patrick Presinzano was next. He made the mistake of stealing jewelry from someone who knew Roy. He proclaimed his innocence to Roy, refused to return the jewelry, and continued wearing it. Roy shot him dead, slit his throat and—as either he or a crew member did in the Cherie Golden murder—threw the police a sexual curve by leaving the victim in the backseat of a car with his trousers and underwear down to his ankles.

  Then came Michael Mantellino and Nino Martini. Mantellino was suspected of tipping two robbers that Peter LaFroscia always had a lot of money, jewelry, and cocaine around. After LaFroscia was robbed, the crew caught up with Mantellino at a body shop he operated. They shot him and Martini, a friend who just happened along, then stuffed the bodies into a car and set fire to the body shop.

  Kevin Guelli was next. He had bragged to Chris that he knew many people to whom he could sell cocaine, so Chris gave him ten thousand dollars worth on consignment. When Chris came to collect, Guelli said the darndest thing had happened. Someone had broken into his house and stolen the cocaine. Sure, Chris said, shooting him dead.

  That anyone in Canarsie would try to cheat Chris “DeMeo” was incredible by now, but Gary Gardine tried. He took three pounds of marijuana and never paid, except with his life. He was shot and stuffed in the trunk of his car, which was then torched.

  If mentioned at all, such murders were invariably described in the few paragraphs of newspaper copy they generated as “apparently the work of professional hit men”—words that always tickled Roy and the crew. “Hello and how are you today, Mr. Professional Hit Man?” they would tease each other on the telephone.

  In the middle of this killing spree, the deal that Roy made between the Westies and the Gambinos almost blew up in his face, but as before, Paul and Nino were blinded by the color green and Roy would be able to convert trouble to triumph.

  The trouble began when the torso of a body washed ashore on a south Brooklyn beach after several months in the water. It was identified by a scar from a recent heart operation as that of Ruby Stein, the elderly loanshark shot by Danny Grillo and dismembered by Jimmy Coonan and a couple of Westies as a way of writing off some loans, theirs and others’.

  Coonan had tried to make Stein disappear so there would be no proof he was dead or credible suspicion that he was involved, but young Jimmy forgot to heed the Westies’ own grisly folklore when he deposited Stein’s packaged remains into the East River. He forgot to puncture the torso’s stomach and lungs—so rather than sinking and sailing out to sea with the river’s swift underwater currents, the torso stayed afloat and came to rest on a finger of Brooklyn jutting into the sea southeast of Manhattan.

  Danny had admitted the murder to Roy soon after the fact. The news angered Roy because he knew that another Mafia family boss was a major investor in Stein’s loanshark book. If it got out that the Westies and a member of the DeMeo crew had killed Stein, the other Mafia boss would complain to Paul and demand that the Gambinos reimburse his financial loss.

  That is exactly what happened after Stein’s body was identified. With good reasons—West Side, dismemberment—the other boss suspected the Irish Italophile, and one or more of his new Gambino friends and complained to Paul. As a new member of the “Commission”—a board of directors–like group composed of the bosses of the city’s five families—Paul was obliged to conduct an inquiry and try and resolve the issue equitably.

  Paul ordered Nino to tell Roy to summon Coonan to a sitdown at Tommaso’s. If the “Irish kids” and Roy or someone in his crew were behind such a reckless murder, he would order them to reimburse the Mafia boss and then end the alliance; the ten percent of the Westie action that he now got was not worth such bother.

  Though perturbed at Danny and Coonan, Roy resolved to save the alliance. Before the sitdown, he told Coonan to deny any involvement, to just show deference and talk about other money the Westies and Gambinos might make together. Eventually that would mollify Paul, Roy was sure, even though Paul hardly needed more money. With all the cash pouring in from his legitimate and illegitimate enterprises, Paul had just moved into a palatial new house on Staten Island; neighbors had dubbed it “The White House” because of its resemblance to the real one.

  Meanwhile of course, Roy did not admit to Paul or Nino that Danny fired the shots that killed Stein; he did say Coonan had insisted he was not involved and he believed him. But no matter who killed Stein, Roy added, it was a blessing in disguise because the Westies would now get all the big loan action on the West Side, which meant more money for the Gambino family.

  The thing to do, Roy proposed, was to take up a collection and compensate the Mafia boss who backed Stein—even though innocent, Coonan would contribute and so would he, in hopes of avoiding trouble and locking up the West Side. With the fifty thousand dollars Roy gave to build a book, Coonan had won some union contacts along the docks and in the sprawling trade-show convention halls on the West Side.

  Paul and Nino doubted Roy’s proclamations and denials, but were swayed by the potential of greater profit. They liked his plan, so the sitdown be
tween the Westies and the Gambinos became less a forum for the truth than a meeting to strengthen the alliance.

  Playing bad cop to Paul’s good, Nino did work up a temper and tell Coonan that even if he was not responsible for Stein’s death, he could never kill anyone again without authorization: “Anytime there is a problem with somebody, before anybody gets killed, you’ve got to get our okay so we can make sure it isn’t one of our people.” Resorting to language he used a year before, when he yelled at Roy for killing Cherie Golden, he added, “You can’t go around actin’ like cowboys.”

  In return for Westie influence on the docks and in convention centers, Paul gave the Westies access to Gambino money at one percent interest a week—the same rate charged family members. The ten-percent rule stayed in effect and Paul said that from now on, Roy was the Westies’ “official contact” in the Gambino family. Roy reported to Nino, of course, but because Nino was in Florida a lot, Roy was their day-to-day “supervisor.”

  Dominick, who attended the sitdown as Nino’s aide-de-camp, thought that when Roy left the room with Chris he was feeling ten feet tall. Dominick felt tall himself. He said to Coonan’s aide-de-camp, Mickey Featherstone, who also was a former Green Beret, “With our families together like this, we will fucking take over New York!”

  * * *

  On a typical day, Roy usually departed to Brooklyn from his home in Massapequa Park in the middle of the afternoon. The drive took most people about forty-five minutes; it took heavy-footed Roy about ten minutes less. Frequently, one of his first stops was at a gas station run by an old and devoted pal from teenage days, the oddball dyslexic kid he befriended when no one else would, “Broadway Freddy” DiNome.

  After a near fatal accident during a race, Freddy’s drag-racing career had floundered during the early 1970s; though he had bought a home with a pool on Long Island, and owned, besides a gas station, a body shop and repair business known as Broadway Freddy’s Diagnostic Center, he had frittered away most of his big racetrack paydays and was usually broke. Desperate for cash, he had for insurance purposes falsely reported the theft of his race car, set fire to two stores for friends who wanted to break their leases, and begun dabbling in the stolen-car business again.