Murder Machine

by Gene Mustain

  Without any help from the FBI’s informant, Quinn’s cousin Joseph Bennett, Wendling was having some success; he had traced master car thief Willie Kampf, LaFroscia’s former partner, to a relative’s home in Florida and had gone there to interview him. He was accompanied by Norman Blau, the cop who unknown to him had used NYPD computers to help Kampf and LaFroscia steal cars.

  Blau had told Wendling and Steven Samuel, an assistant district attorney working on the case, that he might be able to get Kampf to talk. Wendling and Samuel had no reason yet not to trust Blau—and Kampf did talk: LaFroscia, he said, told him days after the murder that he killed Quinn.

  “We did it because he was a rat,” Kampf quoted LaFroscia.

  Kampf could not link LaFroscia nor anyone to Cherie Golden’s murder, but hoping to find her killers and make the case against LaFroscia stronger, Wendling and Samuel decided to delay arresting him. Instead, they informed his federal probation officer (LaFroscia was on probation for conspiring to attempt to import marijuana) that LaFroscia was violating his probationary status by “consorting with known criminals.” Subsequently, a hearing was held and a judge sent LaFroscia away to prison for a year.

  Meanwhile, in a matter that was still departmentally unrelated, NYPD auto crime intelligence officer John Murphy began urging his superiors to authorize an all-out investigation of Mafia domination of the city’s stolen-car trade.

  Like Wendling with Blau, Murphy was still unaware that fellow auto crime officers John Doherty and Peter Calabro were double agents, but he had learned, without FBI aid, about Roy DeMeo; he told his bosses that Patty Testa and other thieves worked for Roy and were responsible for seven murders, maybe more.

  Some of Murphy’s information came from a twenty-nine-year-old Nassau County police officer, Charles Meade, whom Murphy had befriended early in 1978. Meade had come to Queens and asked Murphy to brief him about auto crime. He was preparing himself for a new assignment—responding to an epidemic of thefts, Nassau brass had tripled the size of their auto squad—from three to nine officers.

  “We believe we’re just victims in Nassau,” Meade told Murphy. “We believe our cars are stolen and brought to the city.”

  “Canarsie,” Murphy said. “I can show you the places.”

  Since that first meeting, almost each time Meade made an arrest or recovered a stolen car, Canarsie had figured in the case somehow. Frequently, Meade found the hulks of Nassau cars on the streets of Canarsie, stripped of all valuable parts.

  Murphy also began comparing notes with Joseph Wendling and Kenny McCabe, after meeting Wendling while standing in line for admission to a classroom where the department’s test for promotion to sergeant was being given. Wendling was as obsessed with John Quinn’s murder as Murphy was with Patty Testa. Both passed the test and with McCabe began conducting surveillance of the Flatlands-Canarsie area on their own time.

  With help from Meade, Wendling, and McCabe, Murphy believed he had done what his bosses wanted when they made him the auto crime intelligence officer: show that dozens of chop shops and thieves were linked to made members of the Gambino and Lucchese families. Even so, no boss would commit the resources and manpower—the twenty-four-hour surveillance teams and cash for informants—a serious investigation would require. The city’s fiscal crisis, which had frozen budget and personnel levels, was a factor, as was the revolving door to the unit commander’s office: There had been three in a year, and each new boss wanted to get comfortable before committing to an effort that would test his ability to provide routine patrol and investigative services.

  A sympathetic sergeant pulled Murphy aside one day and suggested he turn his files over to the homicide squads. “The case is gettin’ too big, give it to the detectives,” he said.

  “Fuck that,” said Murphy, who believed the files would then just gather dust. “I’d throw ’em away before I give ’em away.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Pet of the Year

  Nino’s promotion to capo and the drama over Roy’s elevation to made man understandably caused Dominick Montiglio to dwell on his future. With his uncle now de facto underboss of the Brooklyn faction, it was hardly unreasonable to imagine Nino succeeding sixty-two-year-old Paul some day. And hardly unreasonable for the ex–Green Beret to see himself becoming a made man, a capo, and like Michael Corleone, even the—Who knew what the future held? At the very party celebrating Roy’s button, Nino had fueled such thoughts: “I put you up for a button, but Paulie knocked it down because you’re too young. You’ll have to wait a while.” In the glow of high status derived from his relationships to Nino and Paul, Dominick waited and began living it up.

  Picking up Nino’s loans and his offerings from Roy, Dominick at age thirty had already spent a lot of time in bars, nightclubs, and restaurants; he had a hard time turning a drink down, and some days it seemed like everyone wanted to buy him one. He was still buying cars at auction for Matty Rega, the auto dealer in debt to both Nino and Roy, and still on friendly terms, unaware that Rega had passed along his private and disparaging remarks about Chris. Rega had been generous with his cocaine before, and after Nino’s promotion to capo, he began laying more white lines on the table when Dominick, frequently joined by Henry, came by to pick up a payment—nowadays at the Bottom of the Barrel, a restaurant Rega had since acquired in New Jersey. Between the coke and the drinking, Denise Montiglio had grown accustomed to her husband coming home a bit unsteady sometimes.

  Though Dominick had introduced Denise to Henry and to Danny Grillo and their wives, the rest of the DeMeo crew and most other people he met working for Nino never become part of their social whirl. She did not, for example, attend Anthony Senter’s wedding, or Chris’s, or Joey’s when he got married a few years later. She never asked questions about his separate life because it was supposed to be business, not social.

  So far, he had not given her a reason to distrust him. But he was contracting an acute case of roving eye, and had told Henry: “Some women, soon as they figure you’re a half-assed wiseguy, they’re throwing themselves at you.”

  Dominick had begun using cocaine regularly by the summer of 1977; it was partly why he had begun pestering Nino for a raise—not that he wasn’t entitled to one, based purely on inflation. If Rega did not have any cocaine, Henry did, hardly a surprise since Henry’s boss, Roy, sold it out of the Gemini. Henry rarely went anywhere anymore without a black leather men’s purse, in which he carried a clean handgun and a coke kit—vial, mirror, and straw, all with gold trim.

  Dominick loved cocaine. It was so different from the other drugs he had sampled before—marijuana, LSD, mescaline—and so enjoyable compared to Thorazine, the prescription drug he had briefly taken to combat the psychological terrors of Vietnam.

  Where Thorazine numbed his mind, cocaine overstimulated it, enhancing his sense of personal well-being and power and making him feel excited when there was no reason to. He quickly discovered these emotions soon went away, and to maintain the high, more coke was needed. Still, like most users at the time, he believed it was not a dangerous drug and was not physically addicting—only expensive because people who did not know much about it controlled drug policy and made it illegal.

  In New York, cocaine was wildly popular. The euphoric burst of energy it gave users had even changed the nature of nightlife—clubs where marijuana-mellow crowds listened to live rock bands became discos where coked-up patrons danced to repetitive recorded music. At Studio 54, the Manhattan disco of the moment, dancers snorted cocaine openly against a backdrop that included a large caricature of the man in the moon with a coke spoon up his nose.

  Dominick began going to Studio 54 with Rega and Henry. The club controlled the composition of its nightly crowd by a selective admittance policy at the door, but Rega guaranteed that he, Dominick, and Henry never had a problem getting in by giving the doorman a new Mercedes. They might have been waved past the velvet ropes anyway; swarthy and dandy young men were a part of the club’s crowd formula, w
hich also was weighted toward celebrities, rich degenerates, and any attractive woman in a particularly daring outfit.

  In time, the three men were regulars. Dominick began drinking heavily; his usual drink—double Jack Daniel’s, no ice—tempered the speedy effect of cocaine. One night at the bar, he bumped into a woman he had met while a member of the Four Directions—a singer-actress now known simply as Cher. She remembered appearing on the same television show with the group, but not him—at least that was what he recalled about their hazy conversation the following day.

  On another night, after Paul Castellano expressed curiosity about all the publicity the club was receiving, Dominick arranged to escort him past the velvet ropes. Paul took a look at the man in the moon and the couples practically fornicating on the dance floor and was gone in five minutes.

  Sliding into cocaine and the hedonistic nightlife that went with it, Dominick violated his look-but-don’t-touch rule and began cheating on Denise—“the best woman a man ever had,” he had frequently boasted to Henry and others. His infidelity began not at Studio 54, but at another place where drugs and women in daring outfits came together—his former 21 Club co-worker Chuck Anderson’s penthouse apartment next to the Park Lane Hotel in Manhattan.

  On one occasion, when making his weekly pickup, Dominick went to Anderson’s apartment rather than the club because “Mr. New York” had been fired earlier that evening. The management disapproved of Anderson, who described himself as a friend of Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione, attempting to bring three Penthouse “Pets”—as the magazine’s monthly centerfold models were known—into the club. The Pets’ slinky attire violated the 21 Club’s idea of good taste.

  At Anderson’s penthouse, Anderson introduced the three Pets, all accompanied by much older men, to Dominick. One of the women was twenty-four-year-old “Anneka di Lorenzo”—Marjorie Lee Thoreson to friends and family in St. Paul, Minnesota. Aggressive Anneka, however, had left St. Paul behind long ago; at fifteen, she was a topless dancer in Hollywood, and she came to New York after seeing publisher Guccione on the Merv Griffin Show talking about his idea of beauty. “I want to become the sexiest woman in the world,” she told Guccione, after contacting the magazine.

  When Dominick met her, she said she hoped to capitalize on her election the previous year as Penthouse Pet of the Year and return to Hollywood and get her star on Sunset Boulevard. However, as Dominick left with Anderson’s payment, blond and tan Anneka, wearing not much of a white dress, had more immediate conquests in mind. She followed him out the door.

  “Do you like to do cocaine?” she asked.

  “Sure, once in a while.”

  “Come with me. I like to do lines the size of my finger.”

  Dominick went back into the penthouse and did not make it to Brooklyn until the following afternoon. Hung over and burned out, he was spared having to tell lies because Denise did not even ask where he was—he had stayed out all night before playing cards at the Veterans and Friends and other social clubs.

  Short of making an accusation, loyal husband Nino did not let Dominick off the hook so easy. “Where were you last night?” he asked when his haggard nephew hauled himself out of bed and wandered into the bunker’s common kitchen. “You were supposed to come to the club and you never showed up.”

  “I had to make so many pickups, it just got late. I slept over at Matty’s place.”

  “If you can’t make it, you call,” Nino said. “You got to learn to treat people with respect.”

  Trying to extricate himself from further lies and criticism, Dominick said, walking out of the kitchen: “We’re still short on a couple pickups, but I’m getting the rest today. I’ll definitely bring them to the club tonight. See you there.”

  Later, trying to rationalize his behavior while talking to Henry, he quoted a passage in a book he had recently read about Lucky Luciano, Frank Scalise’s mentor. “Lucky said that people in our life should never get married. He was right.”

  In the fall of 1977, Dominick became close friends with another man who told him about another book—The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli. Like Dominick, Emil “Buzzy” Scioli was thirty years old; he was affiliated with another Gambino crew. He was clever, flamboyant, and athletic—and also a college graduate.

  Dominick met Buzzy at the Veterans and Friends, but they became friends after both were asked by their bosses to work at a “Las Vegas Night”—one of a series of gambling events sponsored by a consortium of Mafia families and staged at a Brooklyn synagogue. For a thousand dollars each, two orthodox rabbis had acted as fronts and applied for a special waiver allowing tax-exempt organizations to hold gambling events for fund-raising purposes.

  Dominick and Buzzy were selected to supervise the action at the dozen or so crap, blackjack, and poker tables arrayed in the synagogue because the event’s sponsors were certain they would never cheat the house. Reminiscing about Carlo Gambino, Dominick told Buzzy that Carlo used to lecture him about the importance of being like a lion and a fox.

  “That’s right out of The Prince, you know,” Buzzy said.

  “Right,” Dominick said, so unconvincingly that Buzzy knew his new friend was unaware that for all those years Uncle Carlo was cribbing from Machiavelli.

  But Buzzy did not lord his Fordham University degree over Dominick, one of the reasons the pair got along so well. In a few days, however, Buzzy gave Dominick a copy of the book, which he immediately read. For Dominick, who began carrying it around in the Thunderbird he now drove, The Prince was an epiphany.

  “What’s that?” Nino asked when Dominick drove him on an errand one day.

  “That is our life.”

  Nino thumbed a few pages. If he had given the watchdog at his old used-car lot the name “Prince” because Carlo Gambino had once given him a Machiavellian lecture, he never admitted it.

  “Read it,” Dominick said. “It helps justify everything. Whatever you have to do to hold onto power, you do.”

  “Who needs to justify anything? We are what we are.”

  “Read it, you’ll see.” Nino took the book and later claimed to have lost it. He promised to buy another copy but never did.

  For more than the obvious reasons, Dominick dared not admit his cocaine use or his infidelity to Nino. Because he was trying to get Nino to raise his salary and deliver on a promise made after Paul became boss—a pledge to set Dominick up in some venture of his own—it was no time to give Nino more excuses than he so far had proved capable of producing.

  “Just be patient,” Nino would say. “I told you I was gonna pass the torch to you some day. Ain’t that enough?”

  “Yeah, but my family and me, we have to eat now.”

  “Don’t be a smartass.”

  The more he dwelled on it, the more it infuriated Dominick that, even though he watched over Nino’s affairs, including his R&A Sales food brokerage, during the five months a year Nino was in Florida, Nino was still paying him the same salary—two hundred fifty dollars a week—that he had in 1973. There were occasional bonuses—a hundred or so off the bottom of a week’s worth of pickups—but he thought he was being cheated, and one evening he used that word when he confronted Nino again.

  Nino’s reaction to such an insult was to play a family card. “Cheat? Dom, you’re like a son to me. You’re godfather to one of my sons.”

  “Give me a break. I have a wife and two kids. I go everywhere for you; you don’t have to worry about anything. I really need the money. I deserve five hundred a week.”

  Nino, although not as much with Rose or their children, was tight with a dollar because he had grown up during the Depression. He genuinely meant it when he replied, “I don’t understand why two-fifty isn’t enough. I buy the food in this house. You’re still only payin’ one-sixty-five a month in rent.”

  “There are chumps working for Roy makin’ a thousand a week.”

  “They may be making it, but nobody in Roy’s crew is going anywhere. You are. Someday. Chri
s will never be made because he’s Jewish. Henry will never be made because he took the test to be a cop once. Joey Testa has a little on the ball, but the rest are lightweights.”

  That same evening, Roy came by Nino’s house and was drawn into the argument. He took Dominick’s side.

  “Nino, a guy can’t live on two-fifty a week with two kids and a wife. Tell you what: Let’s let Dom take care of our New Jersey porno thing—that’ll get him some more money.”

  That suggestion set Nino off. “No way! If his grandmother ever saw him arrested with porno, it would kill her. No way!”

  “What would she say,” Dominick said, “if she saw me arrested for helping shoot someone down in the street?”

  “It’s not the same thing! End of discussion!”

  Nino’s contorted distinction arose from a desire to shield his family, except for Dominick, from the grimy world that provided them a comfortable life. He did not want his own sons—one was in college and on his way to becoming an optometrist—to take the road he did. He also did not want his daughter dating anyone remotely like his nephew, who was mostly his creation.

  Dominick discovered this after Buzzy confided that he was smitten by Nino’s nineteen-year-old daughter Regina. He had met her at Nino’s house while visiting Dominick and Denise; she was the type of woman he wanted to marry some day, Buzzy said.

  “Regina is terrific,” Dominick replied, “and that would be great if you two ever got together because that would bring you to our faction of the family. But I’m not sure Nino would think it’s a good thing. Since you’re my friend, he probably thinks you’re a fuckin’ wacko.”

  “What if I asked him if I could ask her out?”

  “Do so at your peril.”

  Thirty-year-old Buzzy put on a coat and tie and made an appointment with Nino at the Veterans and Friends. Nino, to Dominick’s amazement, said yes. Buzzy could ask Regina out. Nino soon began to complain, however, that Buzzy had caught him off-guard; as the day of the date neared, he became frantically opposed.