Murder Machine

by Gene Mustain

  Nino was scornful when Dominick finally made it home that morning. “That’s what you get for stayin’ out all night boozin’. Your luck’s gonna run out.”

  “I didn’t have that much to drink.”

  “Sure, Dom.”

  Having only spent a few hours in jail, despite a criminal career spanning three decades, Nino had quite a lucky streak of his own going. A few days after the accident, he learned he would no longer have to buy a Wall Street Journal before walking into court each day. Before the Westchester Premier Theater case went to the jury, United States District Court Judge Robert Sweet said that the government had failed to prove Anthony Gaggi had sufficient knowledge of the theater’s pending bankruptcy and therefore he could not be convicted of fraud.

  Nino’s voice was on a few recordings played at the trial, but never in a way that proved he knew what was going on. The directed verdict of acquittal (the judge ruled that the ten other defendants did have knowledge) enabled Nino to portray himself as a victim of government oppression. Zealous prosecutors had tried to frame him twice—once for stolen Cadillacs in Brooklyn, then for fraud in Westchester County—but against great odds he had triumphed both times.

  “I told you that you’d beat it!” crowed an inebriated Dominick, who momentarily returned to Nino’s good graces by showing up for a celebration dinner with Paul and the family’s capos at Tommaso’s.

  “Yeah, okay meathead, so you were right—once. Now we gotta get back to normal, right? You’ll come to the club every day and we’ll get along, right?”

  “Right.”

  To make Nino feel even better and to demonstrate his respect for tradition, waning as it was, Dominick offered Nino some money from one of his Bronx scores. He had continued to make only vague remarks about his own things; Nino, who had insisted his nephew learn about their life by reading between the lines, did not need details to know Dominick was in his own erratic fashion trying to fashion his own criminal identity, the way Nino himself once had done to demonstrate his ability to his mentor, Frank Scalise. It was a development he welcomed. Even so, locked into his generational framework and personality, he still did not grasp the full destructive degree of Dominick’s use of drugs, or women.

  “No, no, you keep that, I don’t want it, you keep that, you earned it,” he said when Dominick offered him the money.

  Nino’s magnanimity was touching. Dominick and his uncle were on opposites sides of a tug rope, and the younger man was winning the match, he thought. But here was a pull in the opposite direction. “Well, I got a few things goin’ on,” Dominick said, “if you ever need a little.”

  “Forget about it, I want you to watch Roy a little closer, that’s all. I’m worried about him. I’m wonderin’ how much money he’s really making.”

  “I’ve wondered the same.”

  “He’s got something new and big going with cars, we’re gonna have to keep an eye on him.”

  “Whatever you say, boss.”

  In a few days of course, Dominick was up and away again, but this time he would bring back business for Nino and Roy; his coke pals Matty Rega and Queens-based Pedro “Paz” Rodriguez asked him if he knew anyone who could loan them ninety-six thousand dollars in a hurry.

  “I might,” he enjoyed replying. “But, Paz, since my contacts in Brooklyn don’t know you, they might want some collateral.”

  Paz scoured his apartment and began tossing dozens of gold and diamond baubles—rings, watches, bracelets—into a gym bag. Dominick took the bag to Nino, an informed appraiser of jewelry because an old friend and loan customer was a jeweler.

  “This gaudy shit is actually worth some money,” Nino said. He went to the cash trap he kept in his mother’s apartment and gave Dominick half of the ninety-six thousand. “Go see Roy, tell him to give you the other half, but we gotta have a hundred and two grand back tomorrow.”

  Dominick did not tell his uncle that Rega and Paz wanted the money for a cocaine deal and he never told Paz the names of those who had agreed to front the money. He also stayed shacked up with Cheryl Anderson at the Hole in the Wall for four days because Paz was unable to get the hundred and two thousand together until he sold off the cocaine.

  When Paz did collect the money, Dominick said, “I can’t go back to Brooklyn with only this because you’re late. But if I go back with more, everything will be fine. I guarantee it.”

  Paz added another six thousand and Dominick caught up with Nino at Tommaso’s. Nino glared and refused to speak until Dominick said, “I made ya a little extra, here’s one-o-eight.”

  Dominick savored how the anger melted away from Nino’s face, just as he expected.

  “Where were ya?” Nino said warmly. “I didn’t know if somethin’ happened to ya. I was really worried.”

  In January, 1979, the Westchester trial that the judge had severed Nino from ended in a hung jury, thanks to a single holdout. The government, however, quickly mounted a retrial in which all defendants who did not plead guilty beforehand, such as the talkative Gregory DePalma, were convicted.

  After all was said and done, Paul and Nino wound up taking a bath on their investment in the theater—and DePalma was sent away to do the prison time Nino dreaded: three years.

  “That’s what he gets for shootin’ his mouth off all over the lot,” Nino said.

  CHAPTER 14

  Bay of Pigs

  As murderous as it already was, the DeMeo crew’s worst days lay ahead. As its tentacles spread far beyond the Gemini, as it began to make fantastic sums, it began weaving a story of infamy not seen in the United States since the era of another Brooklyn-based gang, Murder, Incorporated, four decades before. With more to lose, the crew murdered even more, and as its knife-happy and hair-trigger reputation grew, so did its contract work. In 1979, the DeMeo crew became a murder machine; no one who ran afoul was safe, including, once again, one of its own.

  “Those are a favor for someone in Manhattan,” Roy casually remarked to new crew member Vito Arena after Vito walked into the Gemini clubhouse one day and pretended not to be startled by the sight of two naked corpses hanging upside down from a shower bar in the bathroom. As with others before and some yet to come, the victims were never identified because they were never found.

  With each new murder adding to the foul aura of invincibility Roy already gave off, a collective derangement took hold—and the former little bully fat boy from Flatlands stayed at the feverish center. Young crew members began comparing murder to “getting high,” Roy to “having the power of God.” Perversely, he was like God now—in charge of death.

  The Danny Grillo murder had shown Roy and three of his longest-serving crew members—Chris and the Gemini twins—to be capable of using their tool kits to eliminate problems in the crew itself. But it also showed that over time, and through much experimentation, a ritualistic style of killing had evolved.

  From now on, the ritual would be followed whenever possible. Attempts would be made to lure anyone slated for dismemberment to the clubhouse-apartment of Joseph Guglielmo, the man the crew had nicknamed Dracula. The victim would be shot in the head, stabbed in the heart to stop it from pumping blood, then hung upside down over the bathtub to allow the blood to drain and congeal, then laid on a tarpaulin, sawed apart, packaged and dumped.

  Roy or Henry normally did the shooting, Chris the stabbing, the others the grisly aftermath—although Roy, Chris, and Dracula always helped with that too. Chris always worked in his underwear so as not to stain the fine and expensive clothes he always wore now. The others thought it was funny, but kept their clothes on and just never rubbed the surgical gloves they wore onto their trousers. The ritual became known as the “Gemini method.”

  As requested by Nino, Dominick began keeping a closer eye on Roy. And so, early in February of 1979, he witnessed the onset of the rampage. The instigating event occurred in the Gemini Lounge, not the clubhouse beyond its back wall.

  That night, as was customary on Fridays, the bar featured a
live rock band that drew in ordinary neighborhood residents, including a young, smallish male patron with dirty blond hair who, for reasons Dominick never learned, told a Gemini barmaid that Roy was a “motherfucker.”

  Most barmaids who worked at the Gemini over the years were as loyal to the secret owner of the bar, Roy, as his crew. More than one had groped with him in the clubhouse, which was a crew lovenest too. The slur was promptly relayed to Roy, who promptly and drunkenly confronted the offender. Departing from his normal practice of never drinking at the Gemini, closet-drinker Roy had been hoisting several Cutty Sarks.

  “Come on outside and get in my car,” he said, “I want to talk to you.”

  When the young man hesitated, Roy gently laid an arm on his shoulder. “Come on, what’re ya afraid of? The worst that’s gonna happen is, you’re gonna get smacked.”

  Concluding his manhood was at stake, the young man stepped outside with Roy. Dominick followed and watched him get into the passenger seat of Roy’s Cadillac. He was thinking even Roy would not dare kill someone for and under these circumstances when from about thirty feet, he saw a flash of blue-orange light and a head bounce against the passenger window, and in an amazed moment more Roy driving by, waving and smiling like the slumped body beside him was a drunk buddy to be taken home. The young man was never seen again.

  “Roy is fucking out of control,” Dominick told Nino.

  “You should talk. Anybody else see it?”

  “Don’t think so.” Dominick now had little faith in Nino’s desire, even ability, to discipline Roy unless Roy’s behavior directly affected Nino or, indirectly, Paul. So Nino’s casual reaction did not really surprise: “Okay, I’ll talk to him.”

  Within a week, Peter Waring, a young cocaine dealer who grew up on the same Canarsie street as Joey and Anthony and did business with the crew, was released from jail after a second arrest. His release was too sudden for crew members: They suspected, correctly, that he had agreed to cooperate with narcotics cops—and he too was never seen again by anyone who loved him, such as his wife and child.

  Twelve days later, a sixty-year-old man, Frederick Todaro, stepped out of his car and into a wet stinging snow. He walked into the clubhouse, and he too was never seen again. Todaro’s misfortune was that while in divorce court, he had placed his film-processing businesses in his nephew’s name. The nephew, a patron of the Gemini Lounge, decided he wanted to retain ownership of the companies and enter the pornography business with Roy, whom he had sold some sick films to. So he hired Roy to eliminate the now-divorced uncle who stood in his double-crossing way.

  He believed Roy and the crew were available for the job because a story going around in the Gemini Lounge involved a man charged with rape. He beat the case, but lost to Roy and the crew, which was hired by the victim’s connected father to ensure that justice denied by the legal system was achieved somehow. That body, Scott Carfaro’s, was left to be found, to prove the justice and to illustrate the effectiveness of Roy’s court-for-hire.

  Freddy DiNome witnessed Todaro’s murder—a horrifying demonstration of the Gemini method. Todaro was in the market for a car, and Roy had told Freddy to lure him to the clubhouse on the pretense Roy had a good used one for sale. Freddy knew Todaro’s days were numbered, but not how they were to end.

  As he walked in behind Todaro, Freddy was dumbfounded to see Chris in his underwear and in possession of a large butcher knife jumping out from behind a door, and then in a scene right out of Psycho, Roy gliding in from the kitchen and shooting Todaro in the head and with his other hand wrapping a towel turban-like around the wound as Chris in a frenzy jammed the blade into the old man’s heart several times.

  Joey and Anthony materialized out of the clubhouse shadows and helped Roy and Chris drag the body to the bathroom. They all waited a while, then laid it on the floor on a blue tarpaulin of the type to cover swimming pools, dismembered it and packaged it in green plastic garbage bags. Freddy was struck by the carefree manner in which Roy and the others went at the work—but he had duped Todaro to his death and did find enough resolve to help them take the packages to the Fountain Avenue dump.

  Sometime afterward, Vito Arena visited the clubhouse again to huddle with Roy on the Kuwait stolen-car operation, currently on hold until a way to ship the cars overseas was devised; Vito noticed that the floor by the bathroom had been freshly painted—despite the crew’s precautions, some blood always made it to the floor.

  “There’s a lot of history in that floor,” said Dracula.

  “What’d ya mean?”

  “That floor has had to be painted many times.”

  The killing went on unabated. A month after Todaro’s murder, four more people died, no doubt by the Gemini method. One of the victims was a woman, and perhaps the first female the crew ever sent to the dump. These treacherous murders prompted more treachery and killing, none of it planned, as the crew began careening out of control and running over innocent bystanders. The spectacle, which led to a big command change in the crew, became known as the “Cuban crisis.”

  The origin of the crisis lay in familiar terrain—cars and loans. In the early 1970s, Roy befriended and loaned money to the owner of a Flatlands body shop, Charles Padnick, whom he hired to install bulletproof windows in one of his Cadillacs. Until 1973, when Padnick left Brooklyn and opened a similar business in Miami Beach, Roy regularly visited his shop. Roy and wife Gladys also attended the bar mitzvah of Padnick’s son, Jamie.

  Padnick and his wife Muriel also knew Chris, but not as “Christopher Rosalia,” as Chris, using his wife’s maiden name, had identified himself on his driver’s license. The Padnicks knew him as “Harvey Rosenberg” because they had met him and his parents at a Catskill resort years earlier, when six-year-old Harvey was just beginning to hate his name and his Jewishness.

  By 1978, Padnick’s shop in Florida was floundering; he flew to New York and borrowed twenty thousand dollars from Roy. Business did not get any better, however, and he borrowed ten thousand more from others just to pay the vig on the loan with Roy.

  One night in January of 1979, Muriel Padnick was surprised to see Harvey Rosenberg standing in the driveway of her Florida home, talking to her husband. Concluding Harvey was visiting his nearby relatives and had just come by to say hello, she greeted him warmly and gave him a macrame hanging that she had knitted and asked him to give it to his aunt, a friend of hers. She was unaware that to pay Roy off, her husband and her son Jamie, now age twenty and working in his father’s shop, had gone into the cocaine business; though amateurs, they began at a professional level—that week, they sold Chris one kilogram (somewhat over two pounds) of cocaine.

  Cocaine was so abundant in the Miami area that many otherwise lawful people, tempted by dreams of a score to retire on, became drug dealers. The Padnicks’ connection to this white-gold rush was an otherwise legitimate body- and fender-man who worked for them—William Serrano, a Cuban immigrant who saw a chance to help his bosses while making some easy money for himself and his family.

  In a former job at a liquor store, Serrano became friendly with a man he introduced to his family only as “Pepon.” Pepon was friendly with a dark-skinned Cuban cocaine merchant who permitted himself to be known only as “El Negro”—the black one. Pepon told El Negro that people Serrano worked with, Charles and Jamie Padnick, knew a group of “wealthy Italians” from New York who wanted to buy a lot of cocaine, and thus the one-kilo deal—a dry run to see if everyone involved could be trusted—was arranged. Importantly, Serrano handled the negotiations; Pepon and El Negro remained in the background.

  Fresh from the Todaro murder, Chris and Anthony traveled to Florida in February and proposed a large deal—twelve kilos. The amount they agreed to pay never came out, but was likely five to six hundred thousand dollars; whatever the figure promised, they never intended to pay it.

  The transaction was set for Saturday, March 17, St. Patrick’s Day. The plan was for Charles Padnick and William Serrano to fly
to New York with two companions who were actually allied with El Negro: his girlfriend, who had borne him a son, and a cousin, who was his bodyguard. Traveling as a married couple, they would transport the cocaine in a suitcase and turn it over after the “wealthy Italians” paid Padnick and Serrano.

  The unlikely quartet made it to New York, and then to the Fountain Avenue dump. At least one of them, probably El Negro’s cousin, must have smelled a rip-off and was able to get off some shots before he succumbed to superior firepower, because Chris went to a hospital that night with a superficial bullet wound on the side of his head and another in his left hand—and a bogus story about having been shot by a motorist during a traffic dispute.

  The alarm bells sounded in Miami right away because El Negro did not get a reassuring telephone call from his girlfriend. At one o’clock in the morning, Muriel Padnick received the first of many panicky calls from a man she had never spoken to—Pepon. He asked to speak to Jamie Padnick, but she refused to wake him.

  The next day, Muriel told Jamie about the calls. He went to a newsstand and returned home with a national edition of the Daily News. Without explaining to his mother that he was looking for news of a big cocaine bust in New York, he perused it front-to-back, then made his own phone calls. In a few hours, she left for an errand. When she came back, Jamie was gone—forever, because he flew to New York to investigate what happened to his father and the others and was subjected to the Gemini method too.

  Two days later, Muriel Padnick telephoned Roy at the Gemini Lounge; her husband had given her the number and instructions to call his good friend Roy if she ever needed anything.

  “Something is happening, I don’t know what it is,” she told Roy. “Jamie is missing and Charlie is missing and I don’t know what to do. Charlie went to New York; I think Jamie did too.”

  “I’ll try my best to find out what’s goin’ on,” Roy lied. “Don’t worry.”

  In Florida, meanwhile, another of El Negro’s men informed the relatives that everyone who went to New York was probably dead. El Negro himself called Serrano’s brother to a furtive meeting in a darkened room full of bodyguards and, keeping his face in shadow, vowed: “I promise you, I will take care of it.”