Murder Machine

by Gene Mustain

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Can’t say too much right now, but it has to do with cars, lots of cars. Lots. You’ll see, and I’m goin’ give you a piece.”

  With this idea planted in his dyslexic but more-astute-than-people-imagined mind and therefore suddenly optimistic, Freddy, when he was not driving Roy there and about in Brooklyn, continued to mind his gas station and his tune-up shop, Broadway Freddy’s Diagnostic Center, with a few young helpers.

  One day in 1978, at the tune-up shop, an old acquaintance of Freddy’s named Vito Arena stopped by to say hello. Vito was a recent parolee and a former car thief for John Quinn. Until the early 1970s—when he grew too fat to slide beneath dashboards and disable steering-wheel locks and alarms—Vito had by his probably exaggerated but nonetheless revealing count stolen six thousand cars.

  He became an armed robber next, specializing in doctors’ and dentists’ offices but was caught and jailed after the last of a dozen or so ripoffs. Foolishly let out early by his parole board as a good bet for rehabilitation, he began hanging out at his old Brooklyn hangouts, which included Freddy’s high-performance tune-up shop in Canarsie.

  Vito, who was raised in a foster home, was a rarity in “that life” in that he was openly homosexual. This caused some to keep their distance, but not Freddy, who was heterosexual but adventurously so; Freddy frequently made references to unusual sexual customs and his enjoyment of the deviant films he got from Roy.

  Vito’s current lover was a boy half his age and weight, a drug-damaged waif who, like Freddy before Roy more or less adopted him, needed dental work badly. Vito would eventually provide the same peridontal service Roy had for Freddy for wandering Joey Lee. Joey, like Vito a product of a broken home, had been picked up by Vito on the Coney Island boardwalk, a formerly popular and elegant esplanade gone to seed.

  At the tune-up shop, Freddy asked Vito what he planned to do now.

  “I’m looking for something legitimate.”

  The comment struck Freddy as so preposterous he did not even acknowledge it. “Why don’t you get back into cars? You were so good at it.”

  “I don’t want any more problems. I’m tired of jail. I want to go straight.”

  Freddy must have thought Vito’s desire to go straight was a clever pun because he burst out laughing, then added, “Cars are easy for you. There’s good money in it now.”

  Freddy added that he was broke at the moment, but the future looked promising because he was now employed by “a powerful person” who was involved in big deals. Someday, he might introduce Vito to this person, but in the meantime his brother Richie and another man were making decent money stealing cars for a chop shop in Staten Island and might need a hand.

  Freddy’s brother Richie was not dyslexic, but was considerably less acute. Nevertheless, Richie somehow managed to run a Flatlands body shop around the corner from Freddy’s diagnostic center.

  Vito was surprised to hear that Richie was apparently doing well. Where Freddy was offbeat but still competent in the clutch, Richie was a whining bumbler. In Vito’s mind it was nonsensical that Richie would be doing better than Freddy until Freddy said that the man stealing cars with Richie was someone who had learned the trade several years before—from Vito.

  “You remember Joey Scorney,” Freddy told Vito. “He says you taught him everything he knows. He talks about you all the time.”

  As Vito beamed, Freddy said that Joseph Scorney was the one who slim-jimmed and slap-hammered the cars; Richie merely drove them away.

  Vito went around the corner to Richie’s shop to see Richie and Joey Scorney, whom Vito remembered as just a kid who liked to joy-ride and hang out at gas stations. Now, however, Scorney was another Willie Kampf; he overcame the typical car’s security system and drove it away within thirty to forty seconds. Like Kampf, he was a freelancer for whatever chop shop paid the best price. He had told Richie he would never work for “the Mafia guys” that Freddy knew in the Canarsie junkyards.

  Scorney welcomed ex-con Vito home, but left the impression that Freddy had exaggerated the extent to which he credited Vito for his criminal knowhow. Scorney, a foster-home graduate like Vito, acted like he owed nobody any favors.

  At twenty-five, even without Mafia sponsorship, Scorney was prosperous beyond his dreams. He and Richie were making between fifteen and twenty-five hundred dollars per week. He drove a new thirty-five-thousand-dollar Porsche Turbo Carrera, owned two more new cars, and lived in a newly furnished, highrise Bensonhurst apartment, where he had hidden twenty-five thousand dollars in the base of an artificial plant—“in case I have to pay a cop off,” he had said; in a bank across the street, he kept fifty-five thousand more in a safe-deposit box, which he often visited just to fan the bills.

  A month after running into Freddy and becoming reacquainted with Scorney, Vito joined Richie’s and Scorney’s operation—as a driver only, because of his weight problem. Richie was more enthusiastic about adding a new partner than Scorney was because Richie wanted to please his brother by helping out Freddy’s old friend. Freddy had told Richie that Roy was working on “a big car deal” that would make everyone who was part of it very rich. Unlike Scorney, Richie wanted to keep his Mafia option open.

  With two helpers now available to drive away the cars, Scorney became more productive. Through the summer of 1978, the trio took between four and seven cars a night. Though Richie occasionally grumbled that Scorney should let him be the break-and-enter man once in a while, all was well—until late in August, when Roy told Freddy that he was finally ready to launch the car deal and would need Freddy’s help.

  Roy’s plan was as big as promised. As Freddy stood in admiring awe, Roy said he had reached an agreement with “some Arab” who wanted to buy all the cars the crew could steal—“hundreds, thousands, whatever”—and ship them to Kuwait, which was somewhere in the desert in the Middle East.

  The scheme, Roy said, was perfect. They would get five thousand dollars per car—the Arab wanted late-model gas-guzzlers—and their only expense would be the cost of new ignitions and door and trunk locks and keys. Because the FBI had confiscated most of John Quinn’s blank documents and VIN-making tools, the crew would have to find its own phony paperwork and tools, but Roy anticipated no problem because he knew so many people in the car business; besides, making the cars appear legitimate was not as big a worry now because the cars were going half-a-world away. Even so, his police “hooks” would give him “good” VIN numbers to use.

  Roy’s plan was to start small, with just five cars a month, then expand to a hundred cars a week once the Arab saw how efficient the crew was and was satisfied that they could ship stolen cars past federal customs agents without detection.

  “Can you get five a month?” Roy asked Freddy.

  Freddy said his brother and his partner were taking that many a night, so of course he could.

  Richie was happy to serve Roy; Vito said okay as long as they did not have to take Cadillacs, Lincolns, or other “exotic cars” that attracted more police interest; Scorney said no way. “I told you I ain’t working for any Mafia guys,” he told Richie.

  Eventually, Richie and Vito would give five different motives for what happened next—ranging from Richie’s charge that Scorney refused Vito’s request for a loan to Vito’s charge that Scorney threatened to harm Richie’s children if Richie ever laid a hand on his beloved Porsche. The only constant was that at the end of each story Joseph Scorney was dead.

  Vito and Richie did agree on some of the facts. Although a few details were overlooked, the murder was a preplanned execution. It began when Vito fired a shot at Scorney’s back as Scorney leaned over a workbench in Richie’s shop, fine-tuning a slap-hammer on the evening of Thursday, September 28, 1978.

  The bullet, however, was a dud. It looped in against Scorney’s dungaree jacket and bounced harmlessly away. Startled by the noise, Scorney turned in time to see Vito firing a second shot. This one ripped into his chest, above the heart, and caus
ed him to drop to one knee, too wounded to run. He lifted his head up toward the gun in Vito’s hand like a man taking communion.

  “Vito, what are you doing?” were his forlorn last words.

  Vito lumbered toward the hapless victim and put the pistol into his mouth. “I am killing you, Joey.”

  Vito squeezed the trigger, but for the second time drew a dud. Scorney was dazed and choking on smoke, but not dead. Vito squeezed again, but now the gun jammed up. Richie then came out of the shadows and now that Scorney was on the floor, incapable of fighting back, picked up a hammer and with a wild show of fury drove it into Scorney’s skull.

  The killers then removed jewelry and apartment keys—but not a wallet with identification—from the body. Aided by a friend of Richie’s, they stuffed the corpse into a fifty-gallon oil barrel and filled it with cement. They had not planned what to do with the barrel, however. But because the cement would not harden for several hours they decided to mull it over the weekend and take care of it Monday morning. They then left and drove into Manhattan and ate dinner in Chinatown.

  After a boisterous meal, Vito collected his boyfriend Joey Lee and they ransacked Scorney’s apartment. They found the stash of cash hidden in the artificial plant and scavenged about everything of value the pitiful little thief ever owned: more jewelry, clothes—eventually even the fifty-five thousand dollars he kept in a bank vault because they found his safe-deposit key and arranged for a friend to successfully impersonate him at the bank.

  On Friday morning, Richie woke in a panic and called Freddy, who was at his home on Long Island preparing for his wedding anniversary party. Richie confessed the murder and said he had just awoke from a dream in which he saw one of Scorney’s hands sticking out of the barrel and could not now wait until the weekend was over to remove the barrel—except that he did not know where to put it. Freddy told him to dump it in the ocean, then hung up.

  The ocean Richie was most familiar with was near Freddy’s house, so in a few hours he and the friend who helped pour the cement surprised Freddy by showing up at his house in a van with the barrel. Agitated, Freddy gave them directions to a fishing pier, but Richie complained that they might get lost, so Freddy sneaked away from his anniversary party, led them to the pier, and—becoming an accomplice to murder—helped roll the barrel out of the van just as they noticed a couple making love in the grass a short distance away. The couple never even looked up.

  In a few weeks, Freddy told Vito that he had described the murder to his powerful employer, Roy DeMeo. “But you don’t have to worry about him. He’s a wiseguy, a connected guy. He’s not going to repeat anything. He wants to meet you.”

  The meeting took place at Freddy’s shop, as Roy was updating Freddy on preparations for the Kuwait car deal.

  “I have heard a lot about you,” Roy told Vito. “Freddy told me about the thing with Joe Scorney. He says that you handled it very well.” Freddy did not tell Roy that the killers had gone on a hit with cheap ammunition and a defective weapon, and had not even thought of what to do with the body in the barrel.

  “That was something Richie wanted done,” Vito said, more than a little self-servingly.

  “Well, you and Richie are going to work with us now. We’ve got a pretty big deal coming up here.”

  Vito said that sounded good to him. “You are with the most powerful crew in Brooklyn now!” added Freddy, bursting with new self-esteem.

  Roy was now selling pornography in New Jersey and Rhode Island, running an Irish gang on the West Side, buying drugs from Central America, arranging to sell stolen cars to Kuwait, loansharking all over New York, and contracting himself and his crew out for murder. He was casting his net farther and farther, and confident that under his direction even people like Vito Arena and the DiNome brothers were worthy additions to his crew.

  He began to embroider his reputation too. “I’ve killed more than fifty guys,” he boasted to Dominick during a party held to show off his big new white house in Massapequa Park. The statement was not accurate—yet.

  * * *

  The newest additions to his crew were not the first to cause Roy aggravation. That frightful distinction went to Danny Grillo.

  Roy did not know yet that Danny was an addicted gambler and that his addiction was really at the root of his participation in the Ruby Stein murder. Few others in Brooklyn were aware of his addiction either, not until early in November of 1978, when the two Brooklyn rabbis on the Gambino payroll turned over their synagogue for another installment of Las Vegas Night.

  The nights were now bigger than ever. Paul, Nino, and capos from different families provided the cash for hot food and complimentary liquor, valet parking, and a half-million dollars in “house” money for thirty-odd gaming tables. Despite the fractious relationships each had with their boss, Dominick and his close buddy Buzzy retained his trust so far as money goes, and so they were in charge of the house the night Danny began losing heavily at craps.

  Taking advantage of his friendly relations with Dominick, Danny asked him to “take a few markers”—allow him to continue playing on credit.

  “Danny, I can’t, this ain’t my money.”

  “Come on, come on, don’t worry about it,” said Danny, who had given Dominick the degenerate birthday gift of an all-expenses paid night in a whorehouse four months before.

  “Dammit, okay, just a few, but don’t go crazy.”

  While Dominick attended to other matters, Danny returned to the craps table and notified the man running the game that “Dom has approved my markers,” slips of paper by which Danny promised to pay the face amount. Danny promptly chased the dice down into a deep hole—one hundred thousand dollars. He then pleaded with his friend to make the markers “disappear.”

  Grudgingly, Dominick talked to Buzzy and, playing with fire, they destroyed half of the markers so that Danny, on paper, owed only fifty thousand.

  “You can’t do this to me any more because I’m really puttin’ my neck out,” Dominick said. “You’re gonna get me killed. If they find out, they’re gonna come after me.”

  Danny, who survived on the scores Roy cut him in on, was unable to pay even the fifty thousand in markers Dominick and Buzzy did not destroy. The game’s benefactors passed the problem on to Roy: As a made man, he was responsible for his crew members’ actions. Roy paid the debt and made Danny promise to quit gambling.

  A week later, Danny went to a crap game in Manhattan run by a different house and lost one hundred fifty thousand dollars in markers, none of which were made to disappear. In a meeting at the Veterans and Friends, Nino and Roy sought to keep their able hijacker in the fold. They yelled and threatened him, but loaned him the money to pay his newest debt. Danny made another promise to quit gambling, then contacted his old Westies friend Jimmy Coonan and asked him to borrow money for him from Roy, but not tell Roy the money was really for him—a deception so dangerous and desperate Coonan knew Danny was off the deep end.

  In a few days more, in the middle of the afternoon, Danny’s wife telephoned the bunker in a panic and asked her social friend Dominick to quickly come to the Grillo house. “Danny is locked up in the garage with the car running!”

  When Dominick arrived, Danny, in the face of his wife’s panic, had left the car and gone into his house. He was wearing a blue bathrobe and trying to shake a black mood with white powder.

  “I’ve reached the end of my rope,” he sniffed, inhaling another line. “I lost another fifty grand last night. I am in big trouble with Nino and Roy.”

  “Hey, Danny,” Dominick said. “This ain’t the end of the world. We’re gonna figure out some way to break the news.”

  “I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I feel like I should just end it. I would’ve if my wife hadn’t seen me.”

  “Danny, stop being so fucking extreme.”

  After Danny artificially brightened his mood, Dominick told him and his wife not to tell anyone what happened. He was afraid that if Nino or Roy found out Danny
tried to kill himself, they might kill him. They would see that in his condition, Danny was “weak” and thus vulnerable to police pressure.

  “If they kill me,” Danny replied, “just make sure they find my body because if it ain’t found, my wife and kids don’t get my insurance money. They get a half-million if my body’s found.”

  “I ain’t going to be able to do that because I’m not going to be there. Just shut up about this.”

  In two days, Roy found out about Danny—rushing out the door of his house, Dominick had told Nino that there was some kind of problem at the Grillo house. Roy questioned Dominick, who said he thought Danny had just had a fight with his wife.

  Roy already knew better and had already decided what to do. “Nah, he’s cryin’ like a baby about his debts. He’s gettin’ paranoid. We’ll have to clip him.”

  Dominick pretended to be indifferent. Feeling paranoid himself because he had given away fifty thousand dollars belonging to Paul, Nino, and others, he knew that to maintain Nino’s and Roy’s confidence, he could not show weakness or sympathy.

  “That’s your business, not mine,” he said.

  Roy told Nino that Danny was “cracking up.” He said that if Danny was arrested, even for running a stop sign, he was bound “to fall apart” and begin making deals with the likes of the nagging Kenny McCabe and Tony Nelson. “We have to do something about it.”

  “Do what you have to do,” said Nino, still more concerned about his fate in the Westchester Premier Theater trial, which was still requiring his presence in a federal courtroom in Manhattan each day.

  Dominick considered telling Danny to run away, but if Nino and Roy ever learned he violated their confidence, and had in effect helped steal fifty thousand dollars, he by tradition could be killed—even if he was spared, he would have been branded a thief who stole from his own family. Dominick was unsure what the future held for him, but stealing from the family meant no future at all.