Murder Machine

by Gene Mustain

  Roy had been loaning him money since 1971, when Freddy, then in the midst of a divorce and custody battle over his son Freddy, Jr., needed three thousand dollars to pay his gasoline supplier. Freddy, who subsequently married another woman and became the father of a second child he named Freddy, Jr., now owed Roy seventy-five thousand dollars. He was still loosely associated with the junkyard bosses of the Lucchese family, but with his reputation for erratic and infantile behavior, he would never get a button, not from any family.

  In Canarsie, Broadway Freddy was now known as “Crazy Freddy.” With a similarly inclined friend at the wheel of his Cadillac, he liked to speed up and down streets with his naked posterior hanging out the window. After some dispute with the owner of a live-chicken market next to his station, he broke into the market, opened the cages, and sent eight hundred birds madly squawking into the streets. At his gas station, he also kept a pet monkey, “Susie,” that he trained to pump gas. When a dice game he ran there was busted, he took Susie to court and caused a scene when a judge refused to let her take the stand in his defense.

  At age thirty-five, with his gullied face and droopy eyes, Freddy looked like a bottomed-out, burned-out pot-head. In fact, he was frequently stoned on marijuana, but he never smoked it in front of Roy, who he knew disapproved.

  Freddy was even in more awe of Roy now than when they were teenagers. Roy had made it on his brains—muscle too, but anybody could use muscle. It was an honor just to fill Roy’s tank. When Roy arrived for a fill-up, it was the highlight of Freddy’s dismal day. “That Roy is the smartest man I know,” he told anyone appropriate. “I would do anything for Roy.”

  So naturally Freddy was elated when Roy asked him to become his chauffeur. Roy hardly needed a chauffeur, but Paul employed one, and Nino used Dominick a lot—a chauffeur was a decoration befitting Roy’s new status. He told Freddy he had been promoted by “Mr. Gaggi, my sponsor” and had so many responsibilities he needed the time normally spent driving to relax and concentrate on his business. This service would be necessary only after Roy arrived in Brooklyn from Massapequa Park.

  To employ Freddy, Roy had to obtain his “release” from the Luchese family, to which Freddy was nominally responsible. Roy’s new stature made this normally delicate negotiation a simple formality.

  Roy also told Freddy that occasionally he might be asked to help out in a hijacking and that, if things worked out, Roy might set him up in a money-making venture of his own that would enable him to knock down his seventy-five-thousand debt to Roy. Seeking to improve the impression Freddy made, Roy also gave him cash for clothes and much-needed dental work—Freddy’s incisors were all rotted. “Ya know somethin’? Ya gotta stop smoking so much dope too,” Roy added.

  Freddy never gave up dope, but he did go to a dentist and begin dressing better. “Roy is making a gentleman out of me,” he said to his younger stumblebum brother Richard, who was somehow earning a living stealing cars for a chop shop in Staten Island.

  Unable to read street signs and other highway information because his dyslexia had gone unnoticed and untreated as a child, illiterate Freddy was nonetheless a capable chauffeur because he never forgot how to get someplace once someone led him there. “I have a good sense of direction,” is how he explained it.

  As with anyone in the car business in Canarsie, he was well aware of Roy’s reputation for violence, but personally had never seen Bad Roy in action. In fact, as Freddy began eating occasional dinners at Roy’s house, he was struck by how much of a softie Roy was around his kids and was amazed to hear him recite grace before the meals. Roy, of course, as a few hardeyed waitresses at the Gemini knew, was only a family man at home.

  “I think Roy is two people, you know, like Jekyll and Hyde,” Freddy later told acquaintances, who were struck by his ability to mount even a trite analogy.

  In truth, though it was hardly on the same scale, Freddy had a violent streak of his own. On Long Island, angry at some neighbor, he dognapped the man’s pet, chopped off its head, and left it on the porch. His neighbors left Freddy alone after that.

  As he was acquiring a chauffeur and new crew member, Roy was also searching for a new home. In February of 1978, he found one. With his famous lawyer uncle, Albert DeMeo, doing the legal chores, Roy and his wife Gladys bought a white house to rival Paul’s new home on Staten Island. The new house was also located in Massapequa Park, but on a grander site a mile and a half away on Whitewood Drive, in the part of town where Carlo Gambino once had his country manor. The backyard of Roy’s exquisite homestead abutted Jones Creek, a deep inlet offering nautical passage to South Oyster Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, one thousand yards away. The international statesman U Thant had lived in the house next door, when he was secretary-general of the United Nations.

  The property and the two-story house with its large columned portico cost nearly a half million dollars. Thirty-eight-year-old Roy immediately commenced a wholesale renovation and hired a uniformed guard to watch the property while workmen installed marble hallways and floors, new lighting, and a security system that included, in the front of the house, a large pole with a rotating camera. Outside, he built a wide terraced walkway of marble leading to the street and added new trees and shrubs; in the backyard, which was adjacent to Jones Creek and the boat dock that came with the house, he rebuilt the pool, patio, and barbecue area.

  Soon a speedboat Roy bought more for son Albert than himself was hanging from the dock’s twin hoists. Roy’s reputation for leaving for his “office” in the middle of the afternoon and carrying his money in a brown paper bag followed him over to the new house, so his family continued to be the subject of neighborhood chatter. Unlike Nino’s four children, whose more secretive father had succeeded in minimizing gossip, Roy’s son and two daughters were known in their suburban schools as “the gangster’s kids.”

  Although he adored his daughters, both bright and talented, Roy particularly enjoyed twelve-year-old Albert. Once, he brought him to the Little Italy social club of Aniello Dellacroce, leader of the family’s Manhattan faction. In front of several men, Roy teasingly asked Albert to tell them what he would do if a bully picked on him. Everyone fell over laughing when little Albert said, “I’d shoot him and cut his fucking head off!”

  “That’s my boy!” Roy beamed.

  * * *

  Chris Rosenberg, who sometimes passed himself off as Roy’s son, was displaying a new level of prosperity in 1978 too. More than other crew members, and only from a business point of view, Chris’s relationship to Roy was more like Roy’s to Nino. He was answerable to Roy, but did not sit around waiting for orders or ideas. Chris developed schemes on his own and made money for Roy and himself. His partnership with Roy and the qualities they shared—resourcefulness, intelligence, and viciousness—was beginning to make the twenty-nine-year-old dropout fairly wealthy.

  He now owned a popular pizzeria and a second body shop and had recently purchased two homes in Florida, one for his parents—not that he wanted to be Jewish any more than before, but it was a way of saying he was sorry for the way he treated them while growing up. He now lived in a plush apartment in Belle Harbor, an exclusive seaside community in Queens, and he and his girlfriend, a college student he would soon marry, frequently jetted off to various Club Meds. When he was not working on his deals, which increasingly involved drugs more than cars, he was taking flying lessons and studying for his pilot’s license.

  Many times, with Dominick, Chris boasted that he was as valuable an earner and as tough an enforcer as any Sicilian ever made by the family; he still believed that by the sheer force of criminal will, he could overcome the obstacle to being made that his Jewish ancestry presented.

  “I don’t know, Chris, they never even made Meyer Lansky,” Dominick would say.

  “Yeah, but he never took people out like I have,” Chris would reply. After he married his Italian-American girlfriend, Chris began using her last name, Rosalia, on personal identifications such as his driver�
��s license.

  One night at the Gemini, Chris bragged to Dominick that he and Roy were making fifty thousand dollars a week dealing drugs—cocaine, marijuana, and methaqualone. They were making so much it did not even hurt that a ship containing bales of marijuana destined for an offshore unloading by the crew had sunk at sea. “We’d just unloaded another one a few days before, about five minutes before the fucking Coast Guard showed up!”

  Because drug-dealing was an infraction of Paul’s made-man rules, Roy avoided the topic in front of Dominick, just as Nino did. The hypocrisy was too embarrassing. When Dominick collected Roy’s weekly cash testimonials to Nino and Paul on Friday nights at the Gemini, the money was described by category—“This is for the cars,” Roy would say, “and this is for porno and this is the loans.” Drugs were never mentioned in the boxscore, although Roy would always hand over several thousand more and say, “Tell Nino this is something extra.” Roy knew that Dominick knew what Nino knew about the origin of the money, but no one talked for fear Paul might know.

  This is why Roy astonished Dominick one Friday night by suggesting that he ask Nino for permission to join the crew’s “drug thing.” Dominick had been complaining that he was finding it difficult to live on the same two hundred fifty dollars a week—his starting salary in 1973—that Nino was still paying him.

  “That’s five years without a raise,” Dominick said.

  In a conspiratorial whisper, Roy said, “If your uncle would go for it, you know, there’s our drug thing.”

  Also perturbed that Nino had not made good on a promise to give him something to do besides loan pickups, Dominick decided to needle Nino and float Roy’s idea. Sparing Nino some distress, however, he described “drug thing” as “Roy’s action with Chris.”

  “You stay out of that, no way!”

  Emphasizing his objection, Nino also angrily reordered Dominick to stop associating with anyone in the crew and to stay out of the Gemini. Except on Friday nights of course.

  With Nino in Florida so much, and with the way the crew used his nephew to communicate with him, this was an impractical order that Dominick violated out of necessity and spite—even though he did not particularly enjoy the company of Chris, or Peter LaFroscia, or Joey Testa and Anthony Senter. Despite what he said about Chris to Matty Rega, Dominick grudgingly respected him, and Joey too; he was indifferent about Peter and thought Anthony was just an appendage to Joey.

  “Anthony is Joey’s robot,” he would snicker to Henry.

  “Don’t ever say that to Joey,” Henry would warn.

  Dominick did enjoy the company of murderous, but righteous and engaging Henry, who posted him on crew goings-on, and fifty-year-old Danny Grillo, because opportunistic Danny was a grizzly Sergeant Major type who, unlike Chris, or Joey and Anthony, showed some respect for his Army background. At this point, Dominick had only heard goofy stories about new crew member Freddy DiNome.

  Despite the emerging cliques, the crew, and Nino’s point man Dominick, rambled together outside the Gemini. Dominick, for instance, rode Jet-Skis with Chris and Joey in the surf off Belle Harbor, and there were regular paddleball tournaments with crew members from both sides—as well as another new, but familiar, recruit, Joseph Guglielmo.

  Guglielmo was the man whom they first knew as tenant and superintendent of the clubhouse-apartment next to the Gemini, the gravel-voiced, silver-maned cousin of Roy’s that they had nicknamed “Dracula.” Roy, however, had recently decided to give Guglielmo crew status so that the ex-convict and bankrobber could keep an eye on Roy’s small bookmaking business and generally on goings-on at the Gemini.

  No one in the crew knew how old Guglielmo was, but it was somewhere over fifty-five. Some crew members regarded him as a kind of mascot. They teased him for being the only man ever imprisoned because he could not drive a standard-shift car. It happened after a team of robbers changed plans in the midst of a job and made him wheelman; he was too embarrassed to admit his shortcoming, and after his confederates came out with the money, all were caught as the car lurched down the street.

  Like the rest of the crew, Dominick thought Guglielmo was a docile man until he saw him, during one of the crew’s paddleball tournaments, pull a knife and threaten to stab some teenagers who would not relinquish a court.

  “What the fuck are you doing, there’s three other courts open!” Dominick snapped.

  “Someone’s gotta teach these little cocksuckers a lesson.”

  “Don’t be fucking ridiculous. Put it away.”

  Pulling Henry aside, Dominick said, “Dracula’s been hanging around Roy too much.”

  On the night of May 16, 1978, when no one was around to stop Dracula from pulling out his knife, the crew stopped thinking of him as a mascot. He was one of the lead participants when the DeMeo crew—entering a new business—sent their first murder-for-hire victim to the Fountain Avenue dump.

  The victim was Michael DiCarlo, a champion bodybuilder known as “Mikey Muscles.” He also was a gopher for a Lucchese capo, and—it turned out—a secret pederast who, according to the Lucchese capo, had made the mistake of molesting a boy whose parents knew whom to see for justice. Mikey Muscles was made to disappear because the capo, acting as prosecutor, jury, and judge, decided the crime demanded it. The dismemberment was carried out in an after-hours club in Flatlands that the crew briefly operated. “I shoved a broomstick up his ass!” Dracula Guglielmo boasted many times.

  When Roy came to the bunker and admitted the murder, he was like a cat who deposits his mouse on the kitchen floor and then sits there and gloats about it. Telling the story with ghoulish glee, he said, “We thought the guy was dead, but when we went to take off his fucking head, he reaches up and grabs me by the fucking neck, but Anthony finished him off with a hammer.”

  “Was Henry there?” Dominick asked.

  “He got a little sick and left.”

  Now that his nightmares had ceased, Dominick frequently boasted to Henry that after what he saw in Vietnam nothing bothered him—but this was not altogether true. Shortly after the murder, he was present at the after-hours club where the bodybuilder was slaughtered, when Chris, Joey, and Anthony began teasing Henry about his “weak stomach” and “lack of balls.”

  “Fuck you!” Henry finally protested, “I’d kill just about anyone, but I just don’t like taking ’em apart.”

  “You never went hunting before? It’s just like taking apart a deer,” Anthony said, mouthing Roy’s philosophy. “Ain’t no difference.”

  “It is different,” Dominick said sharply. “That is a person, not an animal, and you’re not killin’ him for food. It’s a lot fucking different. It’s sicker than anything I saw in ’Nam.”

  Dominick warily noted the betrayed looks he saw on the faces of Chris and the Gemini twins. Thereafter, he always felt an anxious twinge each time he went to the Gemini or entered Dracula’s clubhouse apartment.

  Given their own brutal predilections and the reputation they steeped in the blood of Andrei Katz and Cherie Golden, among many others, a murder-for-hire sideline was a logical step for Roy and the crew. Filled with a new air of invincibility, Roy had recently informed other made men, in the Gambinos and other families, that he and his ferocious followers were available for “work.”

  Roy and his crew had killed so many by now none were going to lose sleep killing for no motive but money. The proof was in how cheaply they would do work—five thousand dollars for Mikey Muscles.

  CHAPTER 10

  Thin Blue Line

  With all their diverse and widespread interests, Paul, Nino, Roy, and all their crews were always playing with fire, but so far they had stayed several steps ahead of the disparate law enforcement groups arrayed against them. Because of continuing surveillance by Detective Kenny McCabe and Special Agent Tony Nelson, it was now known that Paul, not Aniello Dellacroce of the Manhattan faction, was the true boss of the Gambino family, but little else had been accomplished. Slowly and often haphazardly, however,
the authorities began making some headway. To his furious dismay, Anthony Gaggi was first to feel the heat.

  Nino had taken great pains to insulate himself. He used Dominick to collect his loans and never went to the Gemini anymore. Although he still went to the Veterans and Friends, he was afraid the club was bugged and never discussed business there. Afraid of wiretaps, he never discussed business on the telephone either. He had ordered all of his crew members to be as supercautious. Roy shared Nino’s caution and as usual took action. From some of his police contacts, he acquired electronic detectors that he regularly used to sweep the bunker, the club, and the Gemini for the presence of bugs and wiretaps. Nino did not have as much faith in gadgets as Roy and still watched what he said and where.

  A new member of Nino’s crew, however, was not so prudent. His name was Gregory DePalma; he was the nephew of a retired Gambino capo and the man who four years earlier had talked the late Carlo and Paul and Nino into loaning the Westchester Premier Theater three hundred thousand dollars. All that time, the theater had met its weekly vig, but never made progress on the principal.

  The nonperforming loan was a constant worry to Nino. He had already tried and failed to get a bank to loan the theater money so it could pay back him and Paul. “That place has been nothing but a problem for me,” he complained to a crooked union contact who was to broker the failed deal. “They paid Diana Ross two hundred and fifty grand a week just to open up. They built a parking lot, and every time it rains it’s ninety-five percent under water. It’s gettin’ to be a bigger and bigger problem.”

  Besides having led the theater’s developers into a financial arrangement with the Mafia, DePalma owned a secret stake in the theater and was involved in day-to-day management. Against Nino’s better judgment, Paul had given DePalma a button and assigned him to Nino’s crew on the belief that it guaranteed he and Nino would get their money back.