Murder Machine Read online

  “A MODERN-DAY ‘MURDER INCORPORATED’ . . . A VICIOUS GAMBINO CRIME FAMILY CREW . . . SO BRUTAL THAT EVEN JOHN GOTTI FEARED THEM . . . A VIVID, CHILLING TALE OF MOB TREACHERY AND DEPRAVITY THAT SHOULD DISPEL ANY REMAINING ROMANTIC MYTHS ABOUT MAFIA LIFE. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.”

  —Library Journal

  “Nobody knows the mob like Jerry Capeci and Gene Mustain, and in Murder Machine, they’ve got the most amazing wiseguy story yet . . . the saga of a crew of serial killers run amok, a cross between The Godfather and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

  —Gail Collins, columnist,

  New York Newsday

  “Murder Machine shows us that the latest and last model for the mob’s inspiration is Caligula’s Rome—where murder is just another form of recreation . . . chillingly told.”

  —Murray Kempton,

  Pulitzer prize–winning columnist

  “This is the scariest book I’ve ever read about the mob. We’ve heard tales about professional killers and tales of solitary serial killers. But this is the tale of a complete gang of serial killers. They maimed. They tortured. They slaughtered. And they enjoyed it. After this, nobody can ever write another Mafia romance.”

  —Pete Hamill

  “The authors re-create the DeMeo underworld in gripping detail . . . A MASTERPIECE OF TRUE-CRIME REPORTING.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  for Doreen, forever

  for my wife, Barbara, and our children, Matthew, Jenna, and Craig

  and for those New York Daily News strikers who stood tall and chased the bullies out of town

  ONYX

  Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Onyx, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Dutton edition.

  First Onyx Printing, July 1993

  Copyright © Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci, 1992, 1993

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-101-66588-6

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  I: LOVE AND WAR

  CHAPTER 1: Uncle Nino

  CHAPTER 2: Bully Boy

  CHAPTER 3: Hill 875

  CHAPTER 4: Swing of Things

  II: “That Life”

  CHAPTER 5: Night of Knives

  CHAPTER 6: Map of Murder

  CHAPTER 7: The Coronation

  CHAPTER 8: Button Man

  CHAPTER 9: Killing Spree

  CHAPTER 10: Thin Blue Line

  CHAPTER 11: Pet of the Year

  CHAPTER 12: The Car Deal

  CHAPTER 13: Sprouting Wings

  CHAPTER 14: Bay of Pigs

  CHAPTER 15: Body Shop

  CHAPTER 16: Into the Wind

  III: THE CHASE

  CHAPTER 17: Travesty of Justice

  CHAPTER 18: Empire Boulevard

  CHAPTER 19: Harry

  CHAPTER 20: Semper Fidelis

  CHAPTER 21: Retirement Party

  CHAPTER 22: California Schemin’

  CHAPTER 23: The Other Shoe

  CHAPTER 24: Class President

  CHAPTER 25: Wally’s Pet Shop

  CHAPTER 26: Lassie Comes Home

  CHAPTER 27: Nine South

  CHAPTER 28: Clean Slate

  EPILOGUE: Special Update for the Paperback Edition

  Acknowledgments

  INDEX

  Photo Inserts

  Prologue

  It was about six p.m., already pitch black out, and one of those wet stingy snows was coming down hard. Mr. Todaro parked his car in the street in front of the crew’s clubhouse. He was an older gentleman, sixty, I think. What was about to happen to him was, well, to me it was something out of Auschwitz. Roy had ordered Freddy, who was like Roy’s servant, to lure Mr. Todaro to the clubhouse by making him think Roy had a used car to sell. But actually Roy was going to kill him so that the man’s nephew, a friend of Roy’s, could take over Mr. Todaro’s film-production business. Roy was always available for this kind of work. After the first few, I think he started enjoying it.

  Anyway, it’s dark and it’s snowing and as expected Mr. Todaro sees Roy’s guy Freddy waiting outside and says hello. They start walking toward the clubhouse. Now, there is a picture window with venetian blinds next to the doorway, and as Freddy’s walking he sees someone inside the clubhouse pinch the blinds and look out. All he sees is the person’s eyeballs; it’s eerie and he begins to quiver. He knows Mr. Todaro is going to die, but he’s never seen Roy DeMeo murder before.

  Mr. Todaro goes in first. There is a living room off the hallway that leads to the kitchen. As soon as Mr. Todaro is past the opening to the living room, Freddy is startled to see someone he knows, Chris, leaping out into the hallway with a butcher knife in his hand; it was an almost balletic move. Chris, by the way, was the first kid to join Roy’s crew; at the moment, he doesn’t have any clothes on, except for his Jockey shorts. He always worked in his underwear because he didn’t want to bloody his clothes. Freddy starts to wet his pants—he believes Chris is going to stab him—but no, Chris just grabs him by the arm and wings him out of the way. “You, over here!” he says.

  Freddy then sees Roy DeMeo coming out of the dark from the other end of the hall, just gliding along, and he’s got a gun in one hand and a white towel in the other. He just glides up and shoots dumbfounded Mr. Todaro in the head, and before the man even hits the floor Roy is wrapping the towel around his head to prevent the blood from spurting all over. Then Chris comes over and stabs Mr. Todaro in the heart. Many times. “That stops it from pumping blood,” Roy tells Freddy, who’s still shaking. The murder only takes a few seconds, but of course they’re not done yet. They’re going to make Mr. Todaro disappear.

  Some other kids in Roy’s crew appear from somewhere, and they all drag Mr. Todaro’s body across the kitchen and into the bathroom, where they put it in a
bathtub. Now, before they begin cutting Mr. Todaro up, they have to wait forty-five minutes or so, until his blood congeals. Dismemberment isn’t so messy that way, Roy tells Freddy, like Freddy was a medical student. So they wait. Maybe they even ordered a pizza, I don’t know, but we do know they did that once while waiting. One of the men waiting actually lived in the clubhouse. The others called him Dracula, and not just because he had silver hair and a deep voice.

  As I indicated, Mr. Todaro was one of those free-lance jobs that Roy and the crew did. There were a lot of those. But normally they were out making money for a gangster named Nino. You knew Nino was a gangster soon as he walked into a room; he was a murderer too, but did not do as much killing, and so far as we know, was not present for any of the dismemberments at the clubhouse. Neither was Dominick, who was the guy Nino used to collect his cash and keep an eye on the DeMeo crew. When Dominick was a little boy, Nino practically stole him from his father. Dominick went on to be a Green Beret war hero in ’Nam, and was a tough guy, but he did not have a killer’s eyes. Roy and his crew, they all did.

  Eventually, Mr. Todaro’s body was taken out of the bathtub and placed on either a tarpaulin or one of those swimming-pool liners they sometimes used. Then Roy and his crew sawed the man apart, put him in garbage bags and took him to the biggest dump in Brooklyn. It was like a disassembly line. None of Mr. Todaro was ever seen again. This butchery went on all the time. It was systematic. The system was, you know, almost ceremonious. And they used to talk about the kick they got from it, the high, the power. They used to say killing made them feel like God.

  * * *

  Of all the horrifying stories about Roy DeMeo and his crew, the murder of Mr. Todaro is the one that stays in the mind of FBI Special Agent Arthur Ruffels. While telling it in the main conference room of FBI headquarters in New York City, Ruffels—a former high school teacher—rose to his feet to mimic the killers’ movements. His audience—other agents, their boss, and the authors of this book—was spellbound. The room felt colder than before. Ruffels had transported us to a charnel house.

  “They were the scariest people we’ve ever seen,” he continued, sitting down. “Just in Roy’s crew there were five people you’d have to call serial killers.”

  This was in the fall of 1989. It was our first major interview for a story we came upon while researching a previous book on John Gotti, the ex-hijacker who bludgeoned his way to the top of the underworld and became a household name because of his winning streak in courtrooms. Poking into Gotti’s past, we found a transcript of a conversation secretly recorded by FBI agents in which Gotti’s brother Gene said he and violent John were afraid to take on Roy DeMeo because Roy had “an army” of killers. At the time the comment was made, only a few cops and residents of certain neighborhoods even knew the crew existed. But who were these people so notorious in their malignant realm that even the Gotti brothers were afraid? And what had they done?

  Out of the search for those answers comes this story about the most foul and prolific gang of murderers in the modern history of the United States. The Roy DeMeo crew was the coming together of an uncommon union of killing spirits; Roy and his followers killed for profit, for revenge, and finally, for fun. Many of their victims were themselves criminals, but many others were innocents who simply strayed into their merciless path, or who committed particular acts—such as insulting someone in a bar—that agitated the hairiest triggers anyone would want to encounter.

  Jules Bonavolonta, supervisor of the FBI’s organized crime squads in New York, opened that first interview this way: “We speculate this group killed in excess of two hundred people. A great many were just innocent people who got in the way, who just wandered in, who just happened to witness something. In other words, wanton killing. With no remorse.”

  Officials of the FBI, the New York City Police Department, and other agencies that eventually joined forces and tried to put the DeMeo crew out of business faced monumental obstacles because witnesses to some of the murders never came forward and because so many victims, such as Mr. Todaro, were never found.

  The gang was unique not just for its violence, but also for its pedigree. Some of the most important members were still teenagers when they joined. One was a champion racecar driver. One had taken and passed the cops’ entrance exam; another’s brother was a cop. One more was the product of an upright Jewish family; his brother was a doctor. The gang’s leader was smart enough to be a doctor—and his favorite uncle was a prominent New York lawyer.

  This story will tell who the gang members were, how they got together, how they killed, and how they were brought to justice, one way or the other. It also is the story of many of their victims, including a teenage beauty queen, a college student, and a father and a son short of money and long on naiveté.

  The saga unfolds across a raw and treacherous landscape that stretches from Kuwait to Beverly Hills and from New York to Miami—and against the background of a ponderous criminal justice system that frequently misfired, and not just because of the usual bureaucratic nonsense. Some heroic cops and prosecutors battled the DeMeo crew, but some cops not so heroic aided and abetted it.

  Two men that Special Agent Arthur Ruffels mentioned while describing the demise of Mr. Todaro—Nino and Dominick—are central to the story. Nino’s full name was Anthony Frank Gaggi; he was what Roy DeMeo wanted to be—a top Mafia gangster. His roots extend to Lucky Luciano and the dawn of organized crime in America. Strictly speaking, Dominick was Nino’s nephew, but son was closer to the truth, for better and for worse.

  It is because of Dominick that we are able to tell many parts of the story. We met him in an elevator at a federal courthouse. In our earlier book on John Gotti, he was mentioned in one paragraph in which we described him as a thief, loanshark, and drug addict. The characterization came from a legal document.

  “So you’re the guys who called me a thief, a loanshark, and a junkie?” he said.

  We were happy there were cops in the elevator with us, and that he began to smile. “There’s more to the story,” he added.

  It was the first few seconds of eventually hundreds of hours of conversations with Dominick Montiglio. They were conducted in separate cities around the country and at pre-arranged times on the telephone. He never refused to answer a question. As with the other sources for this book, he was not paid any money.

  “All I want is for someone to lay it out the way it was,” he said at the outset. “Then maybe my kids can understand what happened to me.”

  All the characters in this book are, or were, living people. Almost all their conversations come from hundreds of interviews with one or more of the participants, or from some half million pages of official documents, public and secret. A few are based on what people recall being told. As memory is never really completely infallible, no nonfiction book can be, but we have endeavored to make this one as true as experience and judgment enable.

  The land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence.

  —The prophet Ezekiel

  Only the dead know Brooklyn.

  —Thomas Wolfe

  I

  LOVE AND WAR

  CHAPTER 1

  Uncle Nino

  Dominick grew up in a house dominated by his uncle Nino. It was a roomy house but not fancy, just a rectangle of bricks the color of dried blood sandwiched between others like it on an ordinary street in Brooklyn, New York, the Borough of Churches and Homes. The Gaggi clan, mostly one generation removed from Sicily, occupied three floors but shared a common kitchen and a common wariness for the world beyond what they called “the bunker.” From 1947 when he was born, and on through the Eisenhower years, Dominick lived there with his mother, another uncle, his grandparents, assorted aunts and cousins—but Uncle Nino, who had an opinion about everything, was always boss of the bunker. Early on, Dominick’s father had lived there too, but he was a drunk and a bum and had run away when his son was about age three, or so Uncle Nino always said. />
  To outsiders and little boys, Nino Gaggi was a successful car salesman. With no children of his own until his nephew was nine, he was affectionate and attentive, if always aggressively and profanely blunt-spoken. “Your dad was a drinker, he treated your mother, my sister, like shit,” he would tell the boy.

  Growing up, Dominick sought particulars, but Uncle Nino always blocked inquiry with further condemnation. His mother Marie was gentle, but not much more forthcoming; she would say her husband was a good man, but they had a hard time living together and the marriage just never worked out—next question please. Once in a great while, though, she gave up a biographical detail. So her son came to know his father, Anthony Santamaria, a popular boy from the neighborhood, who served in the Army Air Corps and then fell in love with his mother after coming home a hero from the war.

  When Dominick began showing some athletic ability, his mother also gave him a tiny silver boxing glove his father had given her. It was inscribed, “Army Air Corps Boxing Champ—1943.”

  The boxing glove became a cherished memento because, in time, Dominick recalled his father only as someone recalls a few scenes from an obscure play seen years before and therefore has trouble deciding what the story line was. His earliest memory was of the boxer coming home one night, tweaking him on a cheek, then stumbling into the bathroom and puking like a baby. Bombed out of his mind, Dominick concluded as he and the memory got older.

  The second memory was more a sequence of scenes, probably from his fourth year, 1951, sometime after his father left the bunker, when they were allowed to see one another on Sundays. His father was living a few blocks away, back home with his parents, but after Dominick was dropped off the reunions usually led to the Magic Lantern, a rowdy local tavern, where the Army Air Corps champ defeated all comers, bare-fisted, for money and drinks.

  Dominick never forgot his father telling him during one of these jousts that he would prefer living with him, but it was impossible so long as it meant living with Uncle Nino too. “He wants me to do things I’m against,” he said.