by Gene Mustain
“Maybe you ought to back out,” Dominick told Buzzy. “The man is flippin’ out. He’s saying it’s my fault, I didn’t warn him.”
Buzzy went ahead with his date with Regina, but Nino dispatched one of his sons and several other relatives and friends to accompany them. Buzzy deemed the relationship doomed and never asked her out again.
“You wouldn’t have wanted him as a father-in-law anyway,” Dominick said. “Believe me.”
* * *
By the spring of 1978, Dominick was getting more restless being around so much money, none of it his. On occasion, during Nino’s longer stays in Florida, the trap in the bedroom where he stored Nino’s cash approached a quarter-million dollars, augmented as it was with the ten, twenty, or thirty thousand dollars a week he collected from Roy, plus all Nino’s loan pickups.
It began to aggravate him that the clannish Canarsie trio, twenty-nine-year-old Chris and twenty-four-year-old Joey and Anthony were making comparative fortunes. Their successes were due less to ability than freedom from Nino’s hypocritical rules, he believed. Ruthlessness aside, he was at least as capable as any; he was particularly aggravated by Chris, who was doing a lot better at Roy’s knee than he was at Nino’s, and who had a sarcastic habit of reminding him that if only he worked for Roy, and not Nino, he would be doing well too.
It also was irksome that his status with Paul carried no financial reward. When Nino was away, anytime Roy wanted to talk to Paul or send a message or money, he had to go through Dominick. It was galling that the importance of this role was worth nothing extra, as galling for him as it was for Roy to have to communicate with “Waterhead” that way.
A few times, Dominick had made a few dollars buying a few grams of cocaine from Rega and selling it to nightlifers he met in Studio 54. Now, to finance his own consumption and make more money, he began buying and selling larger amounts of Rega’s coke and developing a convenient use-and-be-used relationship.
He and Buzzy told Rega, whose thousand-dollar-a-week habit was making him paranoid, that Henry, who sometimes collected for Roy, and Chris were going to hurt him the next time he was late with the vig on the one hundred thousand dollars Rega owed Nino and Roy.
Rega, for more reasons than paranoia and fear, began paying Dominick a couple of hundred dollars just to hang around as installments came due on Roy’s half-interest in the loan. He knew Dominick would never side with him against Henry, but felt that investing in Dominick strengthened his relations with Nino and Roy; their loans kept his car business and restaurant afloat and supported his big-spender lifestyle. Of course, with such emergency bankers available, he also never had to worry about funding his coke deals and abuse, which began as soon as he awoke.
The son of a connected New Jersey bookmaker, Rega lived from week to week. He was not as concerned about retiring the principal of his debt as much as meeting the weekly vig and keeping his index card free of dashes. Nino would have appreciated his logic: “As long as I owe money, I will stay alive,” Rega told Dominick.
Rega had access to all the cocaine he wanted because he had fostered a relationship with a busy New York cocaine dealer named Pedro Rodriguez, who did business as “Paz.” Creating a customer, Paz introduced Rega to cocaine a few years earlier, after buying a car from him on Jerome Avenue in the South Bronx.
Through Rega, Dominick met Paz and got what he needed least: a direct pipeline to an even cheaper source of cocaine. The much-decorated former war hero also began earning a few hundred dollars more as an armed bodyguard during drug deals at Paz’s apartment in Queens.
He began staying away from home for more than overnight. All Denise asked was that he telephone each night and let her know he was alive, which he did. A husband who was occasionally away from home a few days at a time became part of her natural order, like that of a traveling salesman’s wife. If not always the instant he walked in the door, they usually made love when he returned, and the spark was still there.
While away from home, Dominick always made sure to collect Nino’s loans and conduct his business at the Gemini, but after these errands, he went with Buzzy or Henry or Rega or his new Westie friend Mickey Featherstone—sometimes all four—to Studio 54, or to a new Manhattan disco called Xenon. There they became friendly with the owner, whose late father was Ruby Stein, the loanshark murdered by Danny Grillo and the Westies.
“If they’re not from Brooklyn, they’re farmers!” Dominick would shout to his coked-up pals as beefcake waiters in silver lame hot pants replenished his and the other connected guests’ drinks.
“I’ll make us all millions!” Rega would scream beneath the pulsating music.
Sliding downhill fast, Dominick cheated on Denise again with a waitress he met at the Bottom of the Barrel. “I told myself I wasn’t going to do that again, but, you know, I got loaded,” he said to Henry.
“Stop making excuses and admit you’re just as much a prick as the rest of us.”
“You’re right.”
In a few days more, on July 17, his thirty-first birthday, he accepted a gift from Danny Grillo—a “session” at an elegant Manhattan massage parlor. It was operated by a former Swedish beauty queen, his companion for the evening.
By the end of the summer, moving from a vile life to a vile and degenerate one, Dominick was snorting a gram of cocaine and drinking a fifth of Jack Daniel’s over the course of an ordinary day. Such abuse required a prodigious constitution, of which the former Airborne Ranger and Green Beret was confident and proud.
During college, and with Dominick in California, Denise had seen a lot of casual drug use. She knew of his increasing taste for cocaine—he, Henry and Danny laid out lines for everyone at dinner parties—but did not know to what extent because he was away so much, purportedly on business. “Coke ain’t like LSD,” he told her, “it’s a social drug. I can do coke all day and still function. I’m under control.”
Dominick, however, had begun to lose weight in his face and upper body. Having also cut his hair short and begun combing the top forward, he was demonstrating a familiar talent for physical metamorphosis. Oddly, the less imposing his chest and shoulders became, the more dangerous he appeared because of the Nero-style hair and the harder, slimmer lines of his face; with the mostly all-black clothes he now wore, it was a look that caused people to whisper, after he entered a restaurant, “There goes a gangster.”
After Anthony Gaggi returned to Bath Beach in the fall of 1978, and was unable to track his nephew down when he wanted, he accused Dominick of becoming more punk than gangster. He did not know enough about cocaine to detect signs of regular use—runny nose, loss of appetite, abrupt mood swings. He was more alarmed by Dominick’s drinking and that he no longer shaped up each day at the Veterans and Friends social club.
“If you keep drinking like you are, you’re going to fucking kill yourself,” Nino would scream during what became a recurring argument. “Don’t be the fucking idiot your old man was!”
“He drank, but he was champ of the Army Air Corps!”
“He was a chump!”
“Everybody don’t see things the way you do.”
“I ain’t everybody—but you better start shaping up at the club. You gotta go there every day.”
“So fucking McCabe can take my picture? I thought you said that club was going to be the end of you someday? If I ain’t gettin’ anything for it, I don’t want it to be the end of me.”
“Fuck the cops, they don’t know shit.”
After such a confrontation, Dominick would shape up for a few days, then do what he wanted, which was to run with his own friends, his own “crew.” After all the years under Nino’s thumb, he decided that his uncle’s bark was worse than his bite. Since Nino was not making room for him on even the handle of the torch, he had no right to control his life. However, he would still do what Nino paid him to do: keep an eye on the DeMeo crew and collect Nino’s money. That was business; unprofitable as it was, at least it kept his foot in the door. Hi
s relationship with Nino was also becoming more of a use-and-be-used arrangement.
These days, however, he did not worry much about the ethics of the situation—or traditional family values, for that matter. One day, as his downward spiral accelerated, he met a woman who actually came to mean something to him, bizarre as the relationship would become.
The affair began as he, Buzzy and Henry were about to leave the apartment of a cocaine dealer they had met in Studio 54. As he walked toward the door, he saw a woman lounging on a bed in another room reading a copy of Cosmopolitan magazine.
Feeling enhanced, he said, “Do you want to stay with the scumbag or come with us?”
“Let me get my things,” she said.
Cheryl Anderson, it turned out, had seen Dominick and the boys club-hopping before. She was twenty-five years old and the daughter of a wealthy Long Island building contractor; she was slim, attractive, had pale green eyes and long straight hair the color of autumn wheat, and had come to the city to sow her oats. In the process, she became a major dealer of Quāaludes, a prescription drug whose sedating, dreamy effects helped cocaine users decelerate from their highs more comfortably. She obtained thousands of “ludes” from Frank Elman, a seventy-one-year-old Greenwich Village pharmacist with a crush on her, and soon she, Dominick and the rest were selling them at Studio 54, Xenon, and many other clubs and bars. In appreciation, the boys gave her a gold replica of the most popular Quāalude, “Lemon 714.”
With Cheryl, Dominick began deceiving himself into believing that it was possible to love two women at once. Where Denise was the perfect wife and mother, Cheryl was the perfect moll. She was an outrageous anomaly, having grown up with every seeming benefit of upper middle-class WASP respectability, yet turning out every bit as self-destructive as he. She was a renegade, a broad and a pal, and she had balls.
In time, so certain of Denise’s trust, he introduced Cheryl to her and they and the others went out together. “Cheryl’s one of the guys,” he told Denise, “our secret weapon. If anyone ever tried to get the drop on us, she’d shoot them.” If Denise ever suspected anything, she never said so.
Cheryl tried to talk Dominick and the others into burglarizing Elman’s country home in Connecticut—she said he had hidden a million dollars in the basement or under his driveway—but they laughed her off. “You jerks are blowing a big score,” she insisted.
“Whatever you say, Ma Barker,” teased Dominick.
The nickname stuck, and Ma Barker became a fullfledged member of the Montiglio crew. High on cocaine, and low on ludes and alcohol, the group binged days at a time. Matty Rega, a married man like Dominick and Henry, decided they needed a crash pad and rented a penthouse aerie in a highrise building in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan. Like children with secret passwords, hideouts, and outlaw fantasies, they nicknamed it “Hole in the Wall” and dubbed themselves “Ma Barker and the Hole in the Wall Gang.”
As always, Dominick made sure to telephone Denise each day. “Nino’s throwing a fit,” she would report. “He keeps asking me when you’re coming home.”
“Tell him you haven’t heard from me.”
“When are you coming home?”
“I don’t know. Soon. I’m making us some money.”
As far as it went, the statement was true, because he was beginning to make more than he spent on drugs. The man known as Stubby in Vietnam now became known as “Cape,” thanks to Henry who said Dominick moved in and out of a place where drugs were being bought and sold so quietly and so fast that he was like “Batman, the caped crusader.” Batman’s creators would find the comparison offensive, but the nickname Cape stuck like Ma Barker.
Eventually, Dominick always made it home, but not always in the best condition. Once, after a weekend of alcohol and cocaine, he came home intoxicated and plopped in front of the television in Nino’s den to watch Monday Night Football and drink a beer. In a few minutes, reaching across a table for the bottle, he fell out of his chair and, biting deeply into his tongue as he hit the floor, passed out.
At the sight of blood pouring out of Dominick’s mouth, Nino thought he had suffered a convulsion and was in danger of choking to death. He began slapping him on the back, and yelled to Rose Gaggi to call for an ambulance. Just as panic filled the room, Dominick regained consciousness.
“I guess my body was just giving me a warning,” he said.
“You’re an asshole,” Nino said.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
For years, Nino would say he saved Dominick from dying that night. For his part, after a few hours sleep, Dominick got up, went straight to New Jersey and began living it up again with Matty Rega at the Bottom of the Barrel—just to show Uncle Nino who was responsible for his life, such as it was.
Between binges, Matty Rega still did automobile business with the DeMeo crew. One deal involving five cars—three Cadillacs and two Corvettes—that he bought from Patrick Testa Motorcars for five thousand dollars each in the fall of 1978 further eroded Dominick’s relations with what he regarded—ever since Henry was teased for his aversion to dismemberment—as the DeMeo crew’s Chris-Joey-Anthony faction.
One of the Cadillacs was confiscated by the FBI from the man in New Jersey who bought it from Rega; the man had tried to obtain license plates for the car and a clerk had become suspicious of what the FBI eventually determined to be a phony title. The bureau linked the car’s equally bogus VIN plate to the same tools used to manufacture the counterfeit VINs of several other cars it had recovered in its investigation of the remains of the murdered John Quinn’s retagging operation.
Because a fictitious name was originally used on the title, Rega slithered out of trouble with the FBI by claiming he bought the car from someone who walked in off the street. The man Rega sold it to, however, was out six thousand dollars and demanded a refund. Rega thought Patty should pay it, but Patty refused.
Rega tried to get Roy involved, but Roy did not care if Rega lost money. At another family-sponsored Las Vegas Night, Roy ordered Henry to wave a gun in his Hole in the Wall friend’s face, to emphasize how important it was that Rega continued to lie to the FBI about the car. After several fruitless attempts to get Patty to pay, Rega complained to Dominick, who called Patty, who agreed to a sitdown at a Flatlands diner.
“You’re not standing behind your work,” Dominick began.
“A deal’s a deal,” Patty said. “Forget about it.”
The discussion grew more heated until Patty abruptly got up and left Dominick in midsentence. That afternoon, he telephoned Dominick at home, but only Denise was there. Breaking crew etiquette that wives were to be told nothing, Patty told Denise that her husband had come on like a bully about a car that Rega knew was stolen and was “a fucking asshole.”
When Denise relayed the remark, Dominick angrily complained to Nino and wondered aloud how he should respond.
“Clip ’im—what the fuck do I care?” said Nino. “We can do without ’im.” He was in a more irascible mood than usual because the Westchester Premier Theater bankruptcy fraud case had finally gone to trial and his name had appeared in The New York Times. In the government’s opening argument, prosecutor Nick Akerman portrayed him as a major Mafia loanshark. Accompanied by the always groomed Rose, who looked like an investment banker’s wife, Nino tried giving jurors another impression as he sauntered into the courtroom. Normally a Daily News reader, Nino carried a copy of the Wall Street Journal under his arm.
Dominick was so angry that Nino’s casual prescription for Patty’s disrespectful behavior made momentary sense. He went to the trap in his bedroom and retrieved the Smith & Wesson handgun that Danny Grillo gave him, got into his car, collected Buzzy and Henry, and tailed Patty from his home to a girlfriend’s house in Canarsie. The drive, however, cooled him off. Finally, he said to Henry, “This is stupid, let’s go.”
“You want me to do it?” said ever-accommodating Dirty Henry, uneasy with knives but otherwise
a stone-cold killer now.
“Forget it. It’s just too fucking minor. He ain’t worth it. It’d only get you in deep shit. I’m the one with the okay to do it, not you.”
Sometimes, coming down hard from “toot,” Dominick did dimly appraise his life; it pained him to recall he was once so naive he regarded himself and Nino as real-life Corleones. During these fitful times, mired in the blue maw of cocaine meltdown, the only positive thing he could say about the way his life turned out was that, when by the perverse rules of Nino’s and his world he was entitled to kill Patty, he could not squeeze the trigger. On the other hand, if he remained where he was, someday he would have to kill—not just stand on the sidelines as in the Governara case—but kill, up close where blood got into your eyes, where it really was not like war—or else he would be killed. And for what? Another high? The clever soldier had strayed too far into the jungle, and no one like Uncle Ben was around to lead him back out.
“This life of ours is a losing proposition,” he said to Henry one day. “No matter what we do, we can’t win.”
“Maybe so, but it beats workin’.”
“I guess you got a point.”
“Here, Cape, have some toot.”
CHAPTER 12
The Car Deal
Unaware that the NYPD and the FBI were in their own separate ways beginning to pry loose some secrets in the stolen-car world, Roy still thought it was a no-lose business and had big ideas for expansion. Laying these plans, and feeling ever more invincible, he became less attentive to quality-control, in terms of the recruits he admitted to his expanding crew, and even more violent about people who displeased him, even those in his crew.
“I’m working on something so fuckin’ big, you’ll be able to get your own driver,” Roy told Freddy DiNome, his new boy Friday one day.
