Murder Machine

by Gene Mustain

  Nino thought DePalma was untrustworthy and inept: DePalma had overseen construction of the underwater parking lot. Nino also suspected that he was skimming too much profit—a little would have been understandable.

  Nino was not alone in his suspicion. The FBI had become interested in the theater after an informant displayed pictures of Frank Sinatra backstage with Carlo and Paul and said the theater was being operated like a Havana casino before Castro. A wiretap was placed on DePalma’s telephone at the theater just as he began discussing another scheme for getting the Mafia money out of the theater: By filing for bankruptcy, the theater could stop paying its bills, and thus increase the potential skim from concerts.

  The wiretap picked up Nino discussing only subjects as innocent as lunch, and then not very often because, as he had told Dominick, “If Gregory DePalma calls, I’m not home. The guy is always shootin’ his mouth off all over the lot.” Nino the erstwhile used-car salesman attached “all over the lot” to the end of many of his sentences.

  From DePalma’s mouth, however, the wiretap recorded incriminating evidence about the plot to raise cash to pay off Paul and Nino by the intentional and fraudulent filing of a bankruptcy petition.

  On June 6, 1978, a federal grand jury in New York indicted Nino, DePalma, and nine others on charges that they conspired to drive the theater into bankruptcy, thus temporarily shielding it from creditors, and that while it was under a trustee’s supervision they skimmed proceeds from concerts and concessions, thus depriving legitimate creditors and shareholders of a chance to recoup some of their losses. Paul escaped indictment because he had turned over to Nino all matters related to the theater, and consequently DePalma never mentioned Paul on the telephone.

  Nino was enraged. “That fuckin’ DePalma and his cocksucking big fat mouth!” he ranted to Dominick after his arraignment and release on bail. “That fucker! I told him not to talk on the fucking phone! I should whack ’im! The fucking scumbag!”

  Nino’s prominent neck vein was pulsing more than expected because now, very much against his will, he was about to become a celebrity gangster; he knew that the concerts that Frank Sinatra gave to try and pull the theater out of red ink ensured substantial media coverage of the trial.

  In fact, Assistant United States Attorney Nick Akerman intended to allege that DePalma skimmed five thousand dollars from the last of Sinatra’s three concerts and gave it to a California gangster who used it to bribe an official of a Catholic fraternal society, the Knights of Malta, into admitting the singer into the group. The government had not accused Sinatra of any wrongdoing, but planned to introduce photographs of him backstage with Carlo, Paul, DePalma, and other gangsters.

  Trying to be upbeat, Dominick observed that the indictment did not accuse Nino of loansharking—his uncle’s main role all the while. “You didn’t have anything to do with the skim—I mean, maybe you did, but you sure as fuck didn’t talk about it on the phone. Did you?”

  “What am I—stupido?”

  “Then they ain’t got ya.”

  “Where did you get your law degree? If I had a nickel for every guy in the can who shouldn’t be, I could buy a fuckin’ federal judge. What a pisser this is. Fuckin’ DePalma, that scum.”

  Though Nino’s lawyers also assured him he had a good chance of beating the case, it was a ceaseless pain over the next half year of pretrial motions and hearings. At times, he was untypically melancholy. The families of Paul Rothenberg, George Byrum, Vincent Governara, and others would never muster much sympathy for him, but family man Nino dreaded the prospect of leaving his wife and children and entering prison at age fifty-three; he could not imagine himself living in a cage either.

  “I don’t know if I can handle prison,” he told Dominick’s stepfather during a family gathering after returning from Florida that fall. “Some guys can do time. I don’t think I’m one of ’em.”

  * * *

  So far, in the car business, Roy and the crew were the beneficiaries of a legal system that did not take car theft seriously. Despite rampant activity, they had enjoyed virtual impunity, but that situation would begin to change.

  The NYPD had mounted only a weak effort against auto theft for many years. In 1976, ninety thousand cars had been stolen, the worst year yet, but that year the NYPD citywide Auto Crime Unit was reduced from sixty to forty officers because of the city’s near financial collapse.

  The Auto Crime Unit was headquartered in Queens. In two-man teams, officers conducted patrols of high-theft areas or responded to service calls from the city’s seventy-five precincts, typically when a patrol officer arrested a driver whose license, registration, or title appeared suspicious. Often, only two officers were available per shift to cover sprawling boroughs like Queens and Brooklyn, each with more than two million residents.

  The unit was formed only a few years before, after the sudden surge in new-car and replacement-part prices caused the boom in auto theft. Many officers bored with routine patrol volunteered for the new unit, including John Murphy, a Bronx-born and -bred Irish-American who spoke in such a muffled rumble he was hard to hear sometimes. The voice matched his personality, low-key. A devout family man in private life, he was a hard-nosed cynic on the job. Despite feeling the opposition held all the cards, he liked the work. No shift was ever dull; the entire city was his beat.

  Murphy joined the NYPD comparatively late, at age thirty-four, after serving in the 1st Marine Division in Korea and with an Air Force civilian security unit in Vietnam. A medium-size man with fair features, he was forty-three by 1977, a mature, steady sort ready to take on an important job. His opportunity came that year, when he was asked to become the Auto Crime Unit’s first intelligence officer. His commanding officer, Frank Hubert, wanted to determine if the auto thieves who were caught now and then were connected to each other, and if they worked for the same chop shops and junkyards.

  “I’ve been saying for years that the Gambinos and Luccheses control all these mutts,” Murphy reminded his boss.

  Murphy began reviewing arrest records and visiting precinct stationhouses and jails to interview officers, suspects, and informants. He was already familiar with the late John Quinn’s operations and the phenomenon of “Quinn Paper” and began connecting Quinn to other names. The name that turned up most was Patty Testa. Joey’s younger brother was only twenty-one, but most auto thieves who talked to Murphy said Patty had been Quinn’s biggest customer, and Murphy’s surveillance of Patty Testa Motorcars did indicate a lot of traffic in late-model luxury cars.

  The more he looked, the more Murphy became convinced that Patty was the common denominator of a network of thieves, chop shops, and junkyards. He diagramed charts whose lines came back to Patty from many directions. Some officers thought he was becoming obsessed. They joked that when they called him for advice on a case, he always replied, “Patty Testa. Have you thought of Patty Testa yet? He was moving all of Quinn’s cars.” Early on Murphy did not know about Patty’s connection to Roy.

  Two other auto crime officers stopped by Murphy’s desk almost every day. John Doherty and Peter Calabro always expressed interest in what patterns Murphy was finding and what chop shops and junkyards he was recommending for raids. Murphy thought they were just being curious cops; of the two, he knew Doherty better. They were assigned to be partners three years earlier, but then Doherty’s wife fell ill, and he was temporarily given a desk job, and Murphy was teamed with another officer.

  Murphy never got to know Doherty well, however. He did not know the cop was one of the Doherty brothers of Avenue P in Flatlands or that he grew up three blocks from Roy DeMeo’s childhood home and was a Saint Thomas Aquinas School classmate. Murphy did not know that another Doherty brother, Daniel, was a bartender at the Gemini and that yet another, Charles, fronted Roy’s ownership of the bar. He did not know John Doherty’s current partner, Peter Calabro, became Roy’s friend after Doherty made the introduction. He especially did not know that in 1974, Calabro was the cop who appea
red in the shadows outside the Gemini and told Roy that Andrei Katz was cooperating against Chris Rosenberg.

  * * *

  With some twenty-six thousand officers, the NYPD is larger than the armies of most countries—and, cops like to say, as bureaucratic as the Pentagon. In addition to the seventy-five individual precincts, the department has dozens of special citywide divisions and units (like the auto unit) and other special squads that investigate specific crimes like robbery and murder and operate according to precinct, borough, or other geographic boundaries.

  As Murphy was beginning to penetrate the Canarsie car jungle, a squad of homicide detectives responsible for a “zone” of the city including Flatlands and Canarsie was assigned to investigate the murders of John Costello and Daniel Conti, the part-time hijackers who had been killed because the crew feared they could not stand up to an investigation of a bungled hijacking. The squad did not make much headway, other than turning up the fact Conti was the brother-in-law of Peter LaFroscia.

  In the meantime, an informant telephoned an investigator for another special NYPD squad, the one that worked for the Brooklyn District Attorney and included Mafia expert Kenny McCabe. “You ought to check out what’s going on in Canarsie,” the informant told investigator Joseph Wendling. “People are dropping like flies and nobody’s getting locked up for it.”

  Wendling was the opposite of the Auto Crime Unit’s John Murphy. He was high-key, hefty, brash and cocky, and only twenty-seven when chosen for the prestigious District Attorney’s squad (he was now thirty-one). He came to departmental notice while assigned to one of the city’s most violent and angry precincts, the Seven-Three, a ghetto outpost in central Brooklyn nicknamed Fort Zinderneuf after a French fort in Algiers whose soldiers fought to the end. Wendling was promoted after a homicide squad asked him to help find two murder suspects, and he found them—as he liked to say—one by lunchtime, the other by the next morning.

  Wendling met with his Canarsie informant, who said that Peter LaFroscia had discussed the John Quinn murder in a way indicating more than secondhand knowledge and that he hung out with a young but lethal crowd rumored to be involved in many homicides. The informant did not mention Cherie Golden’s murder, because LaFroscia was silent about it, but Wendling checked the man’s story about other homicides against unsolved murder files and became convinced some were connected.

  He then spoke to Inspector John Nevins, commander of the DA’s squad: “Except for Cherie Golden, no one cares about these cases; the victims are dirtbags, and the homicide squads have too many good victims. But there’s a new kind of group out there.”

  In time, persuaded that several of the murders were linked, Nevins formed a special task force based out of his office. The homicide squads, whose toes were being stepped on, were reluctant to give up their cases until Nevins arranged to have members of the squads attached to the task force.

  Wendling, alone or with different partners also attached to the task force, began surveilling LaFroscia. He learned that he was one of the two thieves who cruised around in a Jaguar while stealing cars for Quinn; he saw him meeting with Patty Testa, then followed him and Patty to the Gemini Lounge.

  “Jesus, that’s Roy DeMeo’s place,” Wendling told his partner that day, “and some people will tell you Roy is the most dangerous man in Brooklyn.”

  Wendling first heard of Roy when he and Kenny McCabe investigated the merger of the Boro of Brooklyn Credit Union into another and saw Roy, other Mafia gangsters, and men they later identified as major drug dealers from Harlem in Manhattan going into the offices of both credit unions. It was the heat of that investigation that caused Roy to get out of the credit union business.

  Following LaFroscia and Patty, Wendling and his partner saw them meeting with a young and lethal-looking crowd; Patty was the only one who appeared to have a seemingly legitimate occupation. With the help of Kenny and others, they identified them as Chris Rosenberg, Joey Testa, Anthony Senter, and Henry Borelli.

  “Look at the fucking Porsches and Mercedes these guys have!” Wendling said to Kenny one day. “And they’re just fucking kids! What is going on with these guys?”

  Kenny had a few ideas: “Cars, drugs, murder. They work for Roy and he works for a guy named Nino.”

  Meanwhile, in Nassau County, which abuts the borough of Queens, the county police department began an investigation that linked several car thefts in suburban areas to Patty Testa and LaFroscia. On November 18, 1977, a Nassau squad raided LaFroscia’s home and found some of John Quinn’s record books.

  The next day, Norman Blau, an NYPD officer from the Six-Nine precinct in Canarsie, telephoned a Nassau detective and offered to help in the investigation. He invited him to come to his home and meet Willie Kampf, whom Blau identified as an informer well grounded in the car-theft world.

  That much was true. Willie Kampf was an adept and prolific car thief. It took him only thirty seconds to enter a locked car, extract the ignition assembly, and start the engine. All he needed was a “slim-jim” to slide into a door to pop the lock and a “slap hammer” to break and extract the ignition. He had developed his technique over ten years, since he was thirteen years old. Chop shops and junkyards often used juvenile thieves because, if caught, they were just sent home to their parents.

  Joseph Wendling had heard of Kampf and was trying to locate him. Kampf, Wendling’s sources said, was LaFroscia’s freelance partner—the second, and more expert, thief in the Jaguar. Soon Wendling also got a telephone call from Norman Blau, offering to produce Kampf.

  Wendling then spoke to Kampf by telephone, but Kampf was reluctant to say much. “You have no idea how these guys are,” he said. “They’re crazy; they’ll kill anybody.” After a few conversations with Wendling, Kampf fled New York.

  Wendling became convinced that Kampf knew LaFroscia killed, or helped to kill, Quinn and maybe Cherie Golden. What he did not know—just as John Murphy did not know of the rogue cops in the Auto Crime Unit—was that Norman Blau was more interested in discovering what Wendling knew about Kampf and LaFroscia than solving two murders. For years Blau had been giving inside information about police patrol patterns to Kampf and LaFroscia and had used NYPD computers to tell them where to find popular makes and models.

  Meanwhile, because their informants told them too many troubling stories about some NYPD officers, agents from the Brooklyn-Queens office of the FBI were not telling outsiders anything too substantial about their continuing investigation of the murdered Quinn and his interstate retagging operation. In a raid at the home of a girlfriend of a minor DeMeo crew functionary, agents had recovered the stacks of blank car documents and VIN-making tools stolen when Quinn and his young lover were murdered.

  The corruption was an obvious asset, but the overlapping and uncoordinated rivalries of the city’s law enforcement groups were another important part of the reason Paul, Nino, Roy, and the crew had been so successful for so long.

  * * *

  The more Roy turned up in informants’ stories, the more Kenny McCabe paid attention, and it intrigued him when he began seeing Freddy DiNome loitering outside the Gemini Lounge during his customary drive-bys on the way home from work—not that the Gemini was directly on Kenny’s way home.

  Kenny knew Freddy from 1969, his rookie year as a detective, when the NYPD was making a lot of nuisance arrests to inflate its statistics during another periodic crackdown on illegal gambling. The arrests rarely caused much inconvenience, but they did have some intelligence value. Kenny and others from the DA’s squad had descended on Freddy’s gas station and arrested him and nine others as they stood around a mechanic’s bay tossing dice.

  This was the arrest that caused Freddy to take his pet monkey Susie to court. Though outwardly treating it as a joke, Freddy had carried a grudge against the detectives for making such a fuss of something so trivial. When Kenny, nine years later, made a pass of the Gemini, and then parked directly opposite, Freddy, whose memory recorded landmarks and large detecti
ves, remembered him immediately.

  “You’re Kenny McCabe, right?” Freddy yelled from across the street.

  “You got a fuckin’ good memory, Freddy Boy.”

  “You’re the bastard who arrested me. Why don’t you go have an accident!”

  Baiting Freddy, Kenny stuck his arm out the window of his battered Pinto and asked, “Come here and say that!”

  “Kiss my ass!” Freddy said, walking into the Gemini.

  In a few weeks, on another pass-and-park of the Gemini, Kenny was surprised to see Roy come out and approach his car in what appeared to be a friendly manner.

  After they exchanged coy hellos, Kenny said to Roy, “You ought to straighten out that friend of yours, Freddy. He’s a little excitable. You better watch him.”

  “What can I do? Freddy is crazy.”

  Roy seemed in a talkative, easy mood, and Kenny came to believe that as long as Nino and others were not around, Roy actually enjoyed playing Kenny’s cat-and-mouse game.

  “I went to watch Freddy race once,” Roy continued, “and he crashed. He climbs out of the car and he’s on fire. He looks like an astronaut who’s crash-landed. The firemen are hosin’ him down, but he looks up at me in the stands and begins to smile and wave like some kids were just squirtin’ him by the pool. Don’t tell me Freddy is crazy. I know he’s fuckin’ nuts.”

  * * *

  Armed with a pistol, Freddy sat and waited in Roy’s Cadillac when Roy had meetings with Nino or anyone else important. Roy had given him only one standing instruction: “If anyone comes out of a meet and says they want you inside, don’t go. Instead, I want you to shoot them and run because I’ll already be dead. If I want you, I’ll come get you.”

  After the sun set on his racing career, Freddy had done some stolen-car business with both John Quinn and Peter LaFroscia, the crew member whom investigator Joseph Wendling of the Brooklyn District Attorney’s homicide task force had targeted in the Quinn murder.