Murder Machine

by Gene Mustain

  Predictably, a macabre mood filled the garage. “Think we should take the chandelier to Gladys, as is?” a cop said.

  Someone else said they better get the crime-scene pictures taken before the body thawed. “He looks like a drunk lost in a snowstorm. Hurry, before he melts!”

  “Yeah, a retirement party picture!” another cracked.

  “I’ll bet my badge Nino did it,” Kenny later advised Walter, after Patty Testa got confused in an encounter with Kenny and admitted Roy was to come to his shop that day. “I bet Paul ordered him to. I bet Joey and Anthony were there. They all thought Roy was going to cooperate.”

  To the task force’s surprise, the autopsy of Roy, who they had never seen with a drink in his hand, showed his liver to be in the same condition as those of alcoholic bums found on the street.

  The night of the recovery, Kenny and others went to Massapequa Park to inform the family. After he rang the bell, an irritated Gladys called out from an upstairs window. She had a drink in her hand. “What is it? Can’t you just tell me what it is?”

  “It’s about Roy, it’s freezing out here. Can’t you open the door?”

  Gladys finally came to the door, with Albert. “My father in the trunk?” Albert said.

  “Yes. Shot to death. In Brooklyn.”

  Young Albert started crying. Gladys did not. She just sat down and silently listened to the details with a blank face.

  The next day, Albert had to go to the stationhouse of the Six-One precinct, in which the murder had occurred, to give some biographical details for the local detectives’ reports. Hoping Albert might provide information about his father’s associates, Kenny was there waiting.

  “Your father was smart,” Kenny told Albert, “too smart to let a stranger get the drop on him. He was comfortable when he was killed. Inside somewhere. His coat off. His friends killed him. When you realize that, give me a call.”

  Albert began to respond, then just shrugged, as if his father had taught him that just as an ironworker might fall from a skyscraper, ending up in a trunk was an occupational hazard of that life. Albert never telephoned.

  Albert’s father was buried in St. John’s Cemetery in Middle Village, Long Island, after a one-day wake at a funeral home in Massapequa. No one from the crew attended either ceremony—more evidence that Roy, like Chris, was sacrificed for the presumably greater good of the family. His casket was carried by hired pallbearers. At the funeral home, the mortician asked Gladys to provide some information for a death certificate, so Roy went down in official history as a self-employed business consultant.

  Gladys was administrator of Roy’s estate; reading the public probate records, a stranger to his life might conclude he was a hermit. He died owning nothing and owing nothing. But Roy had set his unhappily accommodating wife and other family members up for life by placing all his life’s bloody spoils in their names—so everything passed on to them without court scrutiny. They received nearly one million dollars in life insurance, several expensive cars, a speedboat, the million-dollar-plus home in Massapequa Park—and any brown bags he might have left around.

  In time, the family would sell the house. Gladys would move to a nearby town. Albert would graduate from St. John’s; his older sister Dione would marry; and his younger sister, Dawn, would enroll at Yale College—to begin becoming the doctor her grandmother always said her father should have been.

  CHAPTER 22

  California Schemin’

  Although no one lost any sleep over it, the Gaggi task force would have rather beat Roy DeMeo in court than lose him as a target. Just as Vito Arena coming on board had, the murder actually energized them. They were not as far along as their foes feared, but clearly Nino and the remnants of the DeMeo crew—and even Paul—were running scared. Their foes had also miscalculated. Because Roy had murdered so often, the task force never intended to cut him a cooperation deal. Giving Vito Arena one was bad enough.

  “Now, we just figure out how to turn this to our advantage, that’s all,” Walter Mack said at a strategy session after Roy was murdered. In the updated game plan, hundreds more people would be interviewed—crime witnesses; friends and relatives of victims; cops, FBI agents, lawyers, anyone with a history with the crew.

  “We’re going to do all this in just sixty–ninety more days, right Walter?” someone in the room teased.

  “Right, sixty–ninety more days.”

  With the expanded effort, the case would become massive, but the aggressive patrolling and marshaling of firepower had to be done. Walter was not going to trial with a clever self-promoting murderer like Vito as his key witness without trying to corroborate everything Vito said, and without trying to learn what else was to know. If and when the main battle arose, Captain Mack was not going to walk into any legal ambush because he had failed to prepare well.

  So he implored his troops to keep their eyes and ears open for any illuminating details, including those about a character who, from his perspective, was obscure but intriguing, assuming he was still alive. It was someone he knew only by some remarks Matty Rega had made and by surveillance photographs—Dominick Montiglio.

  Unknown to anyone in New York but Buzzy Scioli, still in-the-wind Cheryl Anderson, and also Denise Montiglio’s suffering parents, Dominick was still alive. Nobody knew many details, out of concern for their personal safety. But the ex-LURP point man was not only alive, but reasonably prosperous, in a Brooklyn sort of way.

  His second try at making a go at life in California had begun a few days before Christmas 1979, when he bundled his family into the thirty-thousand-dollar Mercedes that he was revengefully stealing from his accuser and ex–drug partner, Matty Rega. After a paranoid, desperate coast-to-coast drive, the Montiglio crew—now personal family members only—wound up in Sacramento.

  Hightailing it across country, Dominick and Denise had reluctantly decided they could not start a new life in their old fantasy playground, the San Francisco–Berkeley area; that was where anyone who wanted to find him—Nino, Roy, or Matty Rega’s father’s friends—would look.

  An old friend of theirs had since moved a few hours east of San Francisco, to Sacramento, so it seemed the next best choice. As former residents of the northern part of the state, they inherited the northern Californian’s uppity attitude about the supposed tinselly qualities of the southern part. Sacramento, a farming, textile, and military manufacturing center on a plain between mountain ranges, was also the state capital and home to a quarter-million people. It was a place to prosper and stay anonymous. As a couple, they had time to grow strong new roots. He was thirty-two, she twenty-eight.

  They arrived with their clothes and about a thousand dollars in cash. They rented a rundown apartment in a tired neighborhood; Matty Rega’s Mercedes, which Dominick intended to sell when their money ran out, was easily the most conspicuous car on the block. Happily for him, unfortunately for taxpayers, he did not have to because to his surprise the family was able to apply for and receive public assistance—enough to cover the rent, feed Camarie and Dominick, Jr., and keep Dominick in Camels. Denise, now in her second trimester, also got free prenatal care.

  It was easy to get welfare in California in those days, so easy Dominick just produced some old letters from a Veterans Administration doctor who treated him for delayed stress syndrome in 1974 and said that for emotional reasons he was still unable to work or relate well with people. Indeed, he told welfare officials, he had not been employed since 1973, when his uncle folded a car service he managed—a job he was able to cope with because it was indoors and did not involve much human interaction.

  The irony of this devious fiction was that the war’s ill effects, the dismemberment flashbacks, and the nightmares in which artillery shells drilled holes in his chest, subsided two years after he quit the car service and was working full-time for Uncle Nino in a job requiring much interaction, human and inhuman. He still attributed this to the “action of ‘that life.’”

  Getting away
with a fast one a few days after arriving in California was the worst that could have happened. Rather than have to work and possibly find a job he could enjoy and build on, he was back being a wiseguy—though he looked upon the welfare as compensation for the Veterans Administration’s Catch-22 finding that his nightmares were not combat-related, because he did not complain about them when he was discharged.

  With not much to do, and no money for cocaine, girlfriends, or nightlife, he began hanging out at a Vietnam veterans center in Sacramento and learned that Vietnam veterans were committing suicide at a higher rate than veterans of other wars. He volunteered to become a counselor for men who, unlike him, were still troubled. His clients had similar complaints. They were called to war with grand deceptions, maimed in often meaningless battles, then branded losers; they felt like the butts of a sick national joke. He tried to make them see the war the way he did: no shame in having served or lost; shame was on generals and politicians who sent them to fight with one hand tied behind their backs.

  “Easy for you to say,” one veteran told him once. “You came home a hero, with all those fucking medals.”

  Dominick did feel like a hero, a war hero at least, but did not ever admit it. “I never tried for a medal,” he said. “Nobody who ever tried for a medal ever got one. It was all instinct and survival. That’s all life is. Watching your back.”

  Dominick became active in a campaign to force the government to recognize the cancer-causing effects of Agent Orange, a defoliant used in the war, and compensate veterans exposed to it, as he was on Hill 875. In time, his center collected ten thousand signatures on a petition that led to a class-action lawsuit against the government, which insisted—despite substantial evidence—that Agent Orange could not be linked to high cancer rates among Vietnam veterans.

  With other veterans on the Agent Orange committee, Dominick built a wooden shack high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. It was a treehouse for men—an actual, legitimate Veterans and Friends social club. The only deals involved marijuana joints. Up in the mountains, he felt removed from the tremors of Brooklyn but not really at peace. Sacramento felt transitional. His welfare scam was cute but damaging to him and his family’s self-esteem.

  In May of 1980, Denise gave birth to a daughter they named Marina—like Camarie, it was an indirect tribute to his mother Marie. Marina’s birth spurred him to action. He told Denise he had to get his own “things” going again. “But not around here, I’m going to start checking out LA.”

  “Do you have to get back into ‘that life’ again?”

  “What should I do, sell shoes? It’s not like I’m going back to Brooklyn. The people down there dress nice, but as someone always said, ‘If they’re not from Brooklyn, they’re farmers.’”

  Dominick laughed, and so did Denise. The Uncle Nino in her husband was an amusing trait to see, now that Nino was safely in the past. Even so, she did not like the idea of Dominick going to Los Angeles alone and, rightly provoked into self-analysis by all the current women’s liberation debates, was frustrated by him always setting their agenda without consulting her much. She was, however, also tired of poverty—and, after an almost decade-long marriage, convinced he was not going to change. Much as she was beginning to rankle privately at his domineering will and way, family security came first, and so she still passed her husband off as someone who was just a rogue, not a criminal.

  That summer, once a month, Dominick deducted fifty dollars from each welfare check and cruised to Los Angeles for the weekend. Unable to afford more expensive bars and discos in Beverly Hills, Hollywood, Westwood, and Santa Monica, he decided to hang out “over the mountain”—at still glitzy but accessible clubs on the north side of Sunset Boulevard and the Hollywood Hills, in the San Fernando Valley area. His Rega-model Mercedes, although not an uncommon sight, made more of an impression, and he introduced himself to people, once again, as Dominick Santamaria.

  After a few weekends, at the La Hot Club, someone he got to know at the bar introduced him to a cocaine dealer from Colombia. Dominick turned on the ex-commando charm and soon the Colombian, a much bigger dealer than Paz Rodriguez ever was, was offering him a Brooklyn-type job: collecting a debt—in this case, sixty thousand dollars from another cocaine dealer. It was the break Dominick was surveying for, and he collected that weekend by going to the other dealer’s home, pointing a borrowed pistol and saying he was not leaving until he was paid, which was quickly.

  The Colombian gave Dominick a fifty-percent collection fee, thirty thousand dollars, and offered a full-time job. Dominick declined; he did not want to work for people he assumed the Colombian worked for, some cartel in his native country. The next weekend he was in Los Angeles, he strode to the entrance of The Daisy—a private, Studio 54–type club on the south side of the mountain, in Beverly Hills—and greased the impressed doorman’s palm with a hundred-dollar bill and walked past the velvet rope like he put it there. He was astounded that his act played—and then, in The Daisy, that the cocaine dealer he threatened a month before was seated at the bar and, after their wandering eyes met, the man came over and offered to buy a no-harm-done drink. Talk about farmers, he smiled to himself.

  The dealer, Glen Gorio, was short, slim, only twenty-three years old, but already a cocaine millionaire. He operated out of a phony movie-production company. His customers included prominent names in the movie and record businesses; he threw big parties at his house in Chatsworth and gave away ounces of good will. He told Dominick his uncle was a one-time boss of the Los Angeles Mafia family, but Dominick was hardly impressed; the LA family had fewer made members than Roy DeMeo had killers.

  After the second no-harm-done drink, Gorio said, “I could use good security like you. How about it?”

  “I don’t know, my family’s up in Sacramento.”

  “Forget about it, I’ll rent you a place down here, a car, whatever you need.”

  Back in Sacramento, to disappointed but unsurprised Denise, Dominick described the job with Gorio as a cakewalk, not far off the truth by his standard. “He just wants me there when he’s got business. With his customers, all I have do is look scary.”

  Gorio tossed in moving expenses and before long the Montiglio family left Sacramento for the tinsel life. They moved into a condominium in Calabasas, in the valley; Gorio leased them another car, a Maserati. As Gorio’s bodyguard, Dominick jumped back into cocaine; he became a regular at The Daisy, other clubs, and Hollywood parties. The little black book he carried—a made-in-Italy diary purchased years ago during an Italian-week marketing ploy at Bloomingdale’s in New York—began filling up with names and numbers of Italian-American actors, Hell’s Angels, producers, drug dealers, rock stars, and, as 1981 began, a foreign-born businessman who became his Buzzy Scioli–type friend in California.

  The new friend was a legitimate entrepreneur who came from a well-to-do family. He was young, single, smooth, and living a fast life in Los Angeles. Dominick nicknamed him right away because he did not want to get in a habit of using his real name, for fear his identity might somehow get to Brooklyn and expose him to a strong-arm visit. He settled on “The Armenian,” not because he was, but because during a silly drunken moment they shared a laugh over an ethnic joke about an Armenian.

  The Armenian was the first person in California to hear the story of Dominick’s life and times in New York. The saga now included the news (which Dominick learned in a telephone chat with Buzzy) that Anthony Gaggi had manufactured a story to explain his nephew’s hasty exit from Brooklyn: Dominick had stolen a quarter-million of his dollars. After the shock, Dominick understood why. Taking off during an unresolved dispute with another family over Matty Rega’s restaurant, he had embarrassed his uncle. Nino could not just say he ran away; that implied his nephew did not respect him. It had to be something that made Dominick look bad, and what was worse than stealing from your family?

  “I know my uncle,” Dominick told The Armenian. “He was pissed off and embarrassed, so he told a stor
y. Someday, to make it look real, he’ll try and make me disappear. Probably after my grandmother dies. He wouldn’t want to upset her.”

  “Some family you come from.”

  “That’s always been my problem. I was able to choose my friends, but not my family.”

  The bodyguard job lasted nearly a year, until Dominick collected enough money and knew enough people to go off on his own, as a drug dealer. In mid-1981, he thought he had finally arrived. He moved his family into a house to rival Paul’s, Nino’s, and Roy’s, a big house in a private enclave known as Westlake, a section of Thousand Oaks, one of the San Fernando Valley’s most upscale communities. The house was on the market for one million, seven hundred thousand dollars, but a cocaine partner of Dominick’s concocted a lease-buy plan that gave him occupancy on only ten thousand down. The house came with a pool, a dock and gilt-edged furniture—“our own ‘White House,’” he told Denise.

  “Can we afford this?” she asked, marveling at the silk drapes, marble floors, and baby grand piano in the formal living room.

  “It’s only fifty-five hundred a month, no problem.”

  Of course, with the vagaries of the cocaine business, it was a problem, every month. Though the last year as Gorio’s bodyguard had hardly been a tame time, the Westlake house marked the start of a wilder, more corrupt journey—and an even more puerile and promiscuous life than his former Hole-in-the-Wall life.

  Determined to hold onto the house, he went into the cellar fast. A couple of times, short of money to buy cocaine, he sent acquaintances from The Daisy to steal it from dealers he knew had it; with his friend The Armenian, a handsome and debonair performer on the nightlife stage, he again rampaged for days at a time.

  In the middle of it all, through a brother of hers, he contacted his old girlfriend, now a fugitive, Cheryl Anderson, and flew her to Los Angeles. He picked her up in a limousine and took her to the house in Westlake, where she stayed a few weeks; under Denise’s nose, they relit their fire.