by Gene Mustain
After also obtaining Penny’s record of arrests, Sobota was even less concerned about providing it and the mug shot to Roy. Penny had been arrested fourteen times in two years; the persistent burglar was, in cop slang, a “skel”—a derivative of skellum, an archaic synonym for “rascal.”
Unlike the federal government, and like other states, New York did not have a program for protecting and relocating witnesses who risked their lives by testifying. The Brooklyn District Attorney, employing an option that would discourage any witness, tried to keep Penny in protective custody after Nino was convicted—but Penny’s Legal Aid lawyer, at his client’s urging, filed a motion, and a judge ruled the state did not have authority to detain Penny any longer.
A month passed, then came Nino’s sentencing. That day, Detective Roland Cadieux made an urgent visit to Penny’s home and delivered a blunt warning. “Up to this point, Patrick, they were not going to kill you, it would have looked bad at Nino’s sentencing. But now there’s no reason to keep you alive. You have to get out of New York; otherwise, you are a dead man.”
“I’m a street guy. I’ve been around. I can handle myself.”
Penny managed to survive two assassination plots: once when Roy and his bookmaking cousin, Dracula, could not find a parking place in time to get him before he got on a bus, and again when he passed himself off to Vito as his brother Robert. He ran away to Florida, but he was soon back—packing a gun—because he missed his girlfriend, the one who urged him to keep on driving the night his sorry fate was entwined with Nino’s and Roy’s.
Upon his return, police caught him with the loaded gun he was packing, but he was released on a small cash bail after he told the judge: “The mob is looking for me. I needed it for my own protection.”
Kenny McCabe told Penny he knew a friendly sheriff in California who would let him hide out in his county, but Penny said, “No thanks. I can handle it.”
Though everyone in the crew was carrying mug shots of Penny, Roy assigned Vito to be the principal pursuer. This was because Joey and Anthony—they had already paid an intimidating visit to Penny’s brother—had to be careful about the number of times they were seen asking about Penny and because the otherwise gaudy Kuwait stolen-car deal had run into some problems that were keeping Henry and Freddy occupied. In a happy coincidence, Vito’s lover, Joey Lee, had attended junior high school with Penny and knew the most about his friends and likely hangouts.
“I spoke with Nino,” Roy said, “and Nino says that if you can, take this kid alive and bring him to the clubhouse.”
Vito felt especially obliged to accept responsibility; recently, he had complained to Roy that he was worth more to the car deal than the hundred dollars he was receiving for each car he helped Richie DiNome steal. Roy, saying he had so much money it did not matter to him, gave Vito half of his new, expanded weekly share, fifteen thousand. Vito praised Roy’s generosity to the crew, but Freddy, among others, thought Roy charged it to everyone else by taking more off the top for expenses, and in truth, Roy the dealmaker did.
Increasingly uncautious Roy had also welcomed Vito into his home, and at a Christmas party there five months before, gave him a Santa Claus outfit and gifts to pass out to crew members’ children.
Vito and Joey searched for Penny every night and finally spotted him at a gas station and learned where he was hiding out by following him. The information was passed to Roy. In another fit of recklessness, Roy decided to kill Penny on the evening of May 12, 1980, a night he could not track down the most loyal and able of his gang, Dirty Henry and the Gemini twins.
The only crew members he was able to reach on short notice were Vito and, pathetically, Richie DiNome. In the aftermath of this, Roy would buy new gadgets, telephone-beepers, for his crew.
The trio waited for Penny outside his hideout and saw him get into a Jeep Scout, then followed him to a bar he stopped at in Sheepshead Bay, near Bensonhurst. They decided to wait until he came back out. They were parked two cars behind his in a black Volkswagen that Richie and Vito had begun using in their Kuwait-deal raids, after deciding it was as inconspicuous as Richie’s homely station wagon.
A man walking his dog thought the three men sitting in the Volkswagen were manifestly conspicuous. He telephoned police; two patrol cars responded and parked in front and back of the car; an officer then approached the driver’s seat, where Richie was.
“Just be calm,” knowing Vito told Richie.
The officer asked for Richie’s registration and driver’s license. Richie could not find his registration right away and began fumbling papers from the glove compartment and muttering that his wife must have lost it.
Vito asked the officer what the problem was. “Well, you’re making somebody nervous,” the cop said. “Somebody thinks you’re going to break into one of these stores around here.”
As Roy, armed and explosively dangerous, sat silently in the backseat, Vito said they were waiting for another friend, who was due to get off a bus at a nearby bus stop; then they all would be going to a card game.
Meanwhile, Richie stumbled onto his registration; the officer called it in, then returned with a smile. “Listen, do me a favor. Wait ten more minutes and if your friend doesn’t show, go to the game yourself because the next shift is just going to get called too.”
“No problem,” Vito said, and the two patrol cars left.
After an encounter with police outside the potential murder scene, prudence dictated that the work be abandoned for another time—but not in the increasingly addled mind of someone anxious to avenge a setback and reclaim his invincible aura.
So Roy told his accomplices they would just have to change their game plan. He told Richie to park the Volkswagen a couple of blocks away and go steal a car—“something that looks good so it doesn’t look suspicious, and something with some speed.” He and Vito then waited by some telephone booths near a newsstand until Joey Scorney–taught Richie showed up with a sporty blue Chevrolet Malibu.
They parked it in the same spot behind Penny’s car, which Roy disabled by disconnecting the battery cables. This time they waited for Penny by stalking the area near the bar on foot. Mildly drunk, Penny came out two hours later and swore when his car would not start. With jolly Vito backing him up, Roy approached, asked Penny if he needed booster cables, and as the baby-faced burglar shouted “Get the fuck away from me!” shot him dead.
The same person who telephoned police once before heard the commotion and called again. From his window, he saw a pudgy man, Roy, getting into a blue Malibu. An even pudgier man, Vito, was behind the wheel as the car roared away. Richie had scooted around a corner to retrieve his Volkswagen.
Later that night, the stolen Malibu was set afire and abandoned. Two days later, after reading about the murder, Detective Thomas Sobota shouted at Roy at the Gemini Lounge: “How the hell could you do this to me! You’ve really put me in a jackpot!” Roy said, “Tommy, I swear to God on my kids, I had nothing to do with that kid Penny! A thousand guys had to be looking for the kid!” At that week’s shapeup, outside the clubhouse, Freddy gave Joey Lee forty-five hundred dollars. Roy later said the money was a gift to Joey and Vito—“It’s from Nino for Patrick Penny.”
That same day, Detective Roland Cadieux had begun a new job in another branch of the NYPD. A detective from his old precinct telephoned him at home with the news. “Damn it!” was about all Cadieux could say.
Prosecutor Steven Samuel, now in private practice, learned about it the following day, as he walked to a subway stop in Manhattan and saw the front page of a New York Post on display at a newsstand: “MOB WITNESS RUBBED OUT.” He was stricken with dread as he opened it to an inside page and saw the victim’s mug shot. “Holy shit!” he said to himself. “They can get anyone they want.”
In Penny’s case, the NYPD made it easy. The patrol officers who were outside the bar before Penny was shot, checking Richie DiNome’s license and registration, gave the detectives assigned to the murder an addre
ss in Washingtonville, New York, where for the lower insurance rates, his Volkswagen was registered in his wife’s name.
The detectives never linked her to him, a simple investigative chore, and so the patrol officers were not shown any photographs of DeMeo crew members. If they had, the officer who spoke to Richie could have placed him—and maybe Roy—at the murder scene, in suspicious circumstances, a couple of hours beforehand. So, as it was, the case went nowhere.
CHAPTER 18
Empire Boulevard
The reckless fury Roy showed the night he murdered Patrick Penny was partly due to recent setbacks in the Kuwait car deal—problems that were worse than he knew. Along with the arrest and conviction of his patron, these troubles showed that at last he and his crew were losing some of their vaunted invulnerability. In 1980, the winds of decline gathered strength, though by no means were Roy or the crew any less vicious when some poor soul got in their monstrous way, stupidly or otherwise.
All the while Nino was awaiting trial, the car deal had hummed along extravagantly well, but with some adjustments, minor and major. Because Ronald Ustica grew paranoid when a Nassau County missing-persons detective questioned him about Khaled Daoud and Ronald Falcaro, he asked Roy to insulate him from the paperwork involved in the Kuwait shipping arrangements. So the stolen cars were now being shipped through Big A Exporters, a company incorporated by Henry Borelli under a phony name.
The major adjustment involved a move to a still larger warehouse, located next to the Seven-One Precinct on an appropriately named street in Brooklyn—Empire Boulevard. Officers on duty outside the precinct would help direct traffic on those days when the crew was loading the car carrier it rented to transport the cars to the Newark pier. One day, an officer complained to the workers of what he thought was a firm that repossessed automobiles for finance companies that they were leaving too many cars double-parked on the street in front.
“We’re short-handed today,” Henry responded. “We’ll move ’em soon as we can. We’re doing the best we can.”
On three floors, the warehouse had room for about five hundred cars. Abdullah Hassan flew in from Kuwait to inspect the facility and was so impressed he ordered more “rentals”; he was expanding into Iraq and Iran, but would continue shipping the cars to Kuwait first because it had the lowest import tax. Each partnership share was now worth thirty thousand dollars a week, and so the partners could afford to employ additional salaried help, such as the back-in-circulation Peter LaFroscia and another Testa brother, Dennis.
Tellingly, however, no one was paying too much attention to quality control. On April 22, four days after Nino was sentenced, a federal customs inspector poking around Pier 292 in Newark saw that the trunk lock was missing on a car destined for shipment to Kuwait.
It was not Joseph Tedeschi’s job to determine if cars awaiting shipment were stolen—he was more interested in whether they contained weapons or other contraband—but he had gone to insurance industry seminars on the stolen-car industry, and a missing trunk lock was a flagrant clue that a car was hot. He checked the car further and noticed that a rubber washer was missing from the lock on the driver’s door and that the style of lettering on the car’s emission sticker was different from what he had seen on a General Motors sticker before. Moreover, the VIN plate numbers were unevenly aligned.
Because the car and others in the same shipment were not to be shipped for several days, Tedeschi delayed checking the others until he could get an expert to help. Two days later, he returned with Anthony Ciardi, an employee of the privately funded National Auto Theft Bureau. In the interim, the Kuwait-bound shipment had swelled to seventy-six cars, mostly Caprices. The dashboard VIN plates of many were checked against a national computer list; no cars with those numbers had been reported stolen.
Tedeschi and Ciardi next began searching for so-called “confidential” VIN plates that as an antitheft device manufacturers emboss on more remote parts of their cars, on engine firewalls or transmissions. When decoded, the numbers and letters on the confidential plates should match the numbers on the “public” dashboard VIN plate. Of the cars Tedeschi and Ciardi checked, none did.
The next day, the cars were confiscated, and in a day more, following a paper trail, FBI agents from Newark, joined by agents from the Brooklyn-Queens office in New York, took up surveillance positions outside the Empire Boulevard warehouse. They took photographs as men they did not know—Henry, Freddy, and some hired help—loaded two car carriers. Aboard one carrier was an undercover agent.
After loading the carriers, everyone from the crew departed. The agents let them go. They had their photographs and license plate numbers; at the moment, the evidence inside the warehouse was more important. They waited until another agent arrived with a search warrant and then raided the warehouse. They confiscated twelve cars, dozens of discarded license plates, and boxes of material the crew had found in the cars and foolishly, arrogantly, not yet thrown away—strollers, umbrellas, music tapes, and (because many cars came from the mainly Jewish Borough Park area of Brooklyn) Torahs, scrolls, and other religious artifacts. Of all people, Henry Borelli had particularly insisted on not throwing the religious items in the garbage because he thought it would bring bad luck.
After the raid, the warehouse’s owner telephoned Henry and said it was best not to come back to work that day, or the next. Henry spread the word to all interested parties. “The joint got busted!” he said to Freddy.
The situation would soon become worse than Freddy and Henry knew. Four days after the Empire Boulevard raid, a man who identified himself only as “Harry” called the FBI in Newark and identified them as the key men in the operation. Furthermore, a year before, they had murdered two people—Ronald Falcaro and Khaled Daoud.
“Harry” called the FBI in Newark twice more in the next few days with other seemingly authentic details. He agreed to a secret meeting but failed to show. Even so, it was a breakthrough: Someone deep inside the Gemini had decided to risk Roy’s wrath and look out for himself first. Keeping an interesting card in the hole, however, the caller had not given up the name of the true boss of the operation, Roy.
Because of the Empire Boulevard raid, Roy was in a more wrathful mood than ever. On June 5, 1980, three weeks after Patrick Penny was murdered, he committed his third double homicide in nine months’ time. The victims were young body- and fender-men who had taken over one of Chris Rosenberg’s old shops, which was next door to Richie DiNome’s and across the street from Freddy’s. As in the Falcaro-Daoud murders, one victim just happened along at the wrong time.
The plot against the other had unfolded over many months. Outside a Manhattan bar, Charles Mongitore had been in a nasty fight with a nemesis from childhood whose father was a Gambino gangster from Queens; Mongitore was stabbed in the neck and decided to press charges. The defendant’s father, Salvatore Mangialino, did not want his son in jail; he asked Roy to intervene.
Roy dispatched Freddy, Richie, and Vito to talk to Mongitore, who knew Roy, but only as a man who was a friend of Freddy’s and Richie’s. “Roy will give you ten, fifteen thousand,” Vito said. “You don’t even have to drop the charges. You can wait until you go to court and just make like you can’t identify the guy.”
Sealing his fate, Mongitore refused to go along despite several more meetings and pointed messages. He had almost died from the stab wound. He wanted some measure of revenge and could not fathom why Roy did not understand. He complained to a friend, “I can’t believe it, I get in a fight in Manhattan with a guy from Queens, and now I’m getting static from a guy in Brooklyn.”
Underestimating the guy from Brooklyn, Mongitore agreed when Richie asked him to come to his body shop and help him work on a Porsche the crew had recently stolen from designer Pierre Cardin. Inside, Roy had convened his underworld court-for-hire. Without offering a last-minute plea bargain, Judge Roy and his clerk Dirty Henry immediately shot Mongitore more than a dozen times.
With Mongitore, Roy at
least had a motive—the young man had refused to listen to reason. With Mongitore’s partner and friend, Daniel Scutaro, Roy had no motive at all; it was pure evil bloodlust. He could have spared Scutaro when in a little while Scutaro knocked on the door of Richie’s shop and asked if Mongitore was there. He could have told Richie to tell Scutaro he had no idea where Mongitore was.
But no. He told Richie to stall Scutaro while he and Henry reloaded and then wave him inside. Idiotic Richie did as ordered, and Scutaro walked right into a sick hail of thrill-killing fire. The bodies were piled in the trunk of another stolen car, which was then parked and abandoned by a nearby cemetery. Hours later, Richie telephoned Vito and asked him to help cleanse the shop of blood. Roy no longer helped out with such details, which were for peons like Richie.
After Vito arrived, Richie realized his wallet was missing and began worrying it had fallen out of his jacket pocket as he was leaning over and helping Roy and Henry put the bodies into the car trunk. Desperate, he pleaded with Vito to go with him to the cemetery and drive the car back inside the shop, which they did. Inside the trunk, they did indeed find hapless Richie’s wallet beside one of the victims; they then reabandoned the car in the same spot by the cemetery.
“Imagine if the police found the bodies with your wallet,” Vito said. “You know what happens to you.”
“Don’t tell Roy! He’ll kill me!”
When the bodies were discovered a day later, Frank Pergola, the same detective who drew the Chris Rosenberg murder, was assigned to investigate. Within days, from the distraught families and girlfriends of Mongitore and Scutaro, he learned the probable motive and was certain the same people who killed Chris were involved. But without any witnesses, and with suspects who would tell him to take a hike and talk to their lawyers, there was not much else he could do.
