Murder Machine Read online

  “Like what?”

  “Some things you can’t understand yet.”

  Anthony’s brother-in-law and estranged wife threw fits when they heard about the Magic Lantern; consequently, Dominick never spoke to his real father again. The boxer stayed in the neighborhood a while and occasionally his son saw him walking along—but as his Uncle Nino and mother Marie had instructed, he crossed the street and avoided him like the man had chickenpox.

  The boy felt terrible, but his mother said life is terrible sometimes. “The man is a fucking bum,” Uncle Nino added, bouncing the little bambino on his knee. “I’ll take care of you now.”

  Obviously, Dominick was too powerless to protest and too ignorant of family history to wonder if this was the right course for his life.

  * * *

  Antonino Gaggi came to life on a hot-tempered summer’s evening in 1925. He was the third and last child of Angelo and Mary Gaggi, who lived in a cold-water walkup on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a brawling area of immigrant angst. In time, his first name became Anthony, but its original form yielded his nickname—Nino.

  Some avenues on the Lower East Side were known by letters, so it also had a nickname, “Alphabet City.” The Gaggis lived on Twelfth Street, near Avenue A and the neighborhood’s noisy hub, Tompkins Square Park. Angelo Gaggi, a placid man from Palermo, ran a barber shop. His iron-willed wife was a sweatshop seamstress who quit work to stay at home with Nino and her other children—two-year-old Marie and one-year-old Rosario, later known as Roy.

  It was a hard life in a hard neighborhood. The couple wanted out as soon as possible, but the Depression hit and things got worse. Men stopped getting haircuts as often and Angelo laid off barbers he employed. As soon as little Nino was able, he was put to work sweeping up and polishing the shoes of men lucky enough to have jobs.

  With the suspicious clans huddled together, with their common anxiety but different languages and strange rituals, the dense streets were always filled with disagreement. Children on virtually each block formed gangs known as “mobs.” Kids without the stomach for fighting were lucky to arrive at school with their milk money.

  In 1932, seven-year-old Nino posed for his first Holy Communion photograph at the Roman Catholic church across the street; the photograph showed no trace of cowardice in his face, nor evidence of a lost fight. The camera did capture a remarkably handsome, utterly rigid child appearing to possess great discipline. It was proof he had inherited his mother’s willful personality.

  On the other hand, Nino’s brother Roy resembled, both in appearance and demeanor, their father, a slender man with a prominent Adam’s apple and a weak chin. Nino’s sister Marie was somewhere between—solid and plain like her mother, but like her father, reserved and inclined to resign herself to situations.

  Mary Gaggi was so struck by Nino’s photo—he was such a manly boy—she spent a few scarce dollars and made it a postcard she mailed to relatives. Because his mother doted on him, and Nino took advantage, Nino’s sister thought he was a mama’s boy. The accusation always caused a prominent vein left of his jugular to swell—its thickness was how people measured little Nino’s anger.

  As his sister and brother had, Nino attended public school the first three grades, then transferred to the parish school behind the church across from his home. Besides after-school chores at his father’s shop, he delivered flowers. By age ten, he roamed the Lower East Side confidently and was hanging out at Tompkins Square, the neighborhood piazza at Avenue A and Tenth Street.

  This was the domain of Alphabet City’s toughest gang, the Tenth Street Mob; its boss was a wild thirteen-year-old, Rocco Barbella, a ferocious fighter who took on much older boys before large crowds in the park. Later on, as Rocky Graziano, he became middleweight boxing champion of the world.

  Many fighters came out of the neighborhood, but only Tenth Street spawned two middleweight champions. The second was Jake LaMotta, with whom Nino became friendly before Jake, like Rocco, was sent to reform school. The professional handle Jake adopted, “Raging Bull,” captured all the fury of Alphabet City.

  The mobs aligned along turf and ethnic lines, which was why a boy from Twelfth Street and Avenue A ran with the boys from Tenth Street. With fists and sticks, the Tenth Street Mob fought the Avenue B Mob, the Eleventh Street Mob, and anyone who had a smart remark. They swiped fruit from pushcarts and clipped candy from newsstands, and when the mostly Irish cops of the day grabbed them, penalties were administered on the street.

  Nino never complained that he was given an official beating, but he developed a seething grudge against cops. Given the anti-cop grousing that went on in his father’s shop, a beating was not required. All the official plundering of Sicily through the ages made contempt for authority a Sicilian tradition. Passing cops on the street, Nino sneered and swore under his breath.

  It was obvious that the cops operated according to a double standard. The men who ran the neighborhood’s gambling, loansharking, and fencing rackets operated in plain sight. It was obvious the “rackies” were prosperous. Lucky Luciano, the biggest gangster in New York City, was out of an Avenue A walkup. So it was natural that Nino emulated that life and stood on streetcorners flipping coins, mimicking George Raft as menacing Guido Rinaldo in a big film of the day, Scarface (the story of Al Capone, a New York-born rackie).

  Nino’s mother Mary knew the phenomenon. She grew up in the similarly disgruntled Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side. One of her playmates was George Raft, and she always joked to Nino that her old friend became a movie star just by being himself and every other Guido Rinaldo on the corner.

  Nino’s father Angelo was even more acquainted. A cousin of his, Frank Scalise, was a powerful gangster and an associate of the nation’s most infamous men—Luciano, Capone, Meyer Lansky, Dutch Schultz. Scalise sat at the table when those men met and divvied up the rackets among “families” of criminals that collectively became known as the Mafia. Milquetoast Angelo did not move in such circles, but he and Scalise played together in Palermo as kids, emigrated about the same time, and still socialized at each other’s homes out of a yearning for old-country camaraderie.

  When Scalise came to Twelfth Street, neighbors buzzed over his car, clothes, and jewelry. How he made his living was not a polite topic, but an Alphabet City child did not need to be told when someone was “connected.” The sight of Scalise entering the Gaggi walkup boosted Nino’s standing with the corner boys.

  With audacious solemnity, he told them: “I only want two things when I grow up. I want to be just like Frank Scalise and when I die, I want to die on the street with a gun in my hand.”

  The boys were well aware that death on the street was an occasional fact of that life. Now and then, people came running up to the church across the street from Nino’s house to inform the pastor that some rackie had been shot and was lying mortally wounded and in need of extreme unction, the church’s last rites.

  When Nino was almost fourteen, he graduated eighth grade. Though contemptuous of the work, he began barbering hair in his father’s shop; between that and his florist’s delivery job, he had spending money for the first time. Leaving childhood behind, he became acutely interested in the image he projected; he began dressing as sharp as funds allowed, and when his eyesight deteriorated, he chose spectacles so dark they appeared to be sunglasses.

  He also learned to play dice but decided gambling was not for him; he could not bear losing and hated handing over money to anyone. He was intrigued, however, by the loansharks who circled the dice games, charging the foolish gamblers up to five percent interest, or “vig” (for vigorish), a week. He saw that taking advantage of a sucker’s weakness was what the rackets were about.

  Unlike his siblings, he did not even try high school; low regard for education was another immigrant Sicilian tradition—especially if work was waiting at home, and Nino’s parents provided that when they announced to his dismay that the family was moving to rural New Jersey, w
here they had bought a small farm.

  Nino stewed on the farm. In 1942, after war broke out in Europe and Asia and after his seventeenth birthday, he tried to escape by enlisting in the Army. He was five-feet-eight, one hundred sixty pounds, and muscular from hard labor, but he was rejected during the physical exam because he was too nearsighted. This hardened the chip on his shoulder about men in uniform.

  In New Jersey, the adults did not adjust well to a farming life either. As Angelo Gaggi later said, they were city people who barely knew a hoe from a rake. After two years they gave it up but decided against returning to the Lower East Side. Some of their relatives had since moved across the East River to Brooklyn, the promised land of immigrant families.

  In 1943, Angelo and Mary found a house they liked in Bath Beach, an Italian neighborhood on the southwest coast of Brooklyn. It was a roomy but bunker-like brick house, and affordable—one hundred dollars down secured a mortgage for eight thousand five hundred and fifty. The deed was placed in the name of the eldest child, Marie, the one who understood English best.

  Compared to Alphabet City, Bath Beach was a paradise. One hundred years earlier, it was a fashionable resort area for the wealthy and even by 1943 there were still only a few windswept marshes between the Gaggi bunker on Cropsey Avenue and the Atlantic Ocean. Coney Island and all its amusement parks lay only a couple of miles away.

  Bath Beach adjoined Bensonhurst, a larger, similar community of immigrants beginning to make it. In both, merchants and residents replicated the culture of their old Sicilian and southern Italian villages. Tiny cafes and fruit-and-vegetable stands lined commercial streets; in residential areas, fig tress grew in backyards and grape vines formed canopies over makeshift carports.

  Eighteen now, Nino scouted opportunity. Not to his parents’ surprise or particular alarm, he turned to his father’s connected cousin, Frank Scalise, whose influence had continued to grow; he was a leader of the city’s largest Mafia gang and had made a fortune as a loanshark. His customers included many top politicians and union officials, so Nino got a job on a truck dock; in hardly any time he was a supervisor. He hated it as much as the farm but worked hard and added ten more pounds of muscle. He bossed older workers with confidence and never tolerated sloth or tardiness.

  Angelo Gaggi opened up another barber shop, and his wife and daughter got work in a dress factory. His other son, Roy, who had enlisted in the Army but was sent home after a training-camp injury, sold peanut dispensers to local bars; Roy had grown up in the shadow of his younger brother and would stay there.

  Over the next two years Nino cultivated his connection to Scalise. At age twenty, he quit his job on the truck dock—but not on paper. He was made a ghost employee as a favor to Scalise. The phony job covered him with the tax man and he began a full-time life on the sly. To his parents he was still just devoted son Anthony—a respectful young man, as handsome as George Raft, strong and self-assured, and destined to find what best suited him. Mary Gaggi especially felt that way.

  Like her brother, Marie Gaggi had matured into an attractive person, brunette and shapely. When the neighborhood men came home from war in 1945, she fell in love with Anthony Santamaria, a local legend whose boxing skills were regularly on display in barroom exhibitions.

  Nino was scornfully unimpressed. His childhood friends Jake LaMotta and Rocky Graziano were now marquee professional fighters, not barroom hacks. He derided Anthony Santamaria as having no future; the boxer was just a deliveryman for a butcher shop. The man also drank too much, in Nino’s exaggerated estimation. Nino did not drink liquor at all; he did not like losing control. He did not smoke, either. He prided himself on having no personal vices.

  Marie resented her brother’s heavyhanded opinions; Anthony Santamaria was always a gentleman around her. Late in 1945, they married and he moved into the Gaggi bunker. Nineteen months later, their only child was born. Marie incorporated her gentle father’s name into the infant’s, Dominick Angelo Santamaria.

  Anthony Gaggi was the only adult in the bunker who did not rise early in the morning to go to work, so he became Dominick’s primary babysitter. Nino made his money at night, loansharking in the bars and poolhalls of Brooklyn and doing whatever else came along. At home, his business was not discussed. He had a new car, cash, clothes, and no job; that said everything. His parents accepted life as it came. This way everything was normal. Everyone in the bunker was the same way—including Anthony Santamaria, who just tried to keep his distance.

  In 1950, however, the relationship between brothers-in-law, strained from the start, grew frayed. It happened after Nino developed what would be a lifelong interest in the money to be made in the automobile business—one way or another—and asked Anthony to help stage a phony car accident so that Nino could defraud an insurance company. Anthony refused, and Nino began complaining that Anthony was a freeloader who abused Marie.

  With most men, Anthony would have answered these accusations with fists, but he feared Nino might strike back with bullets. At the bunker, he kept going his own way, but since everyone ate in the common kitchen, it was hard. A cold war Anthony had no chance of winning set in; in time, with no money to take his wife and child away, he became sullen and defeated. He got deep into the bottle, began staying out late, arguing with his wife, and by 1951, his marriage was on the rocks and he was history.

  For all intents and purposes, twenty-six-year-old Nino became the father of the four-year-old Santamaria boy, Dominick.

  * * *

  No one ever sat Dominick down and explained why and how Nino was different from other men. He was left to learn by osmosis, to read between the lines and keep his mouth shut.

  What indirect lessons there were came in the form of pointed remarks—such as when Dominick, shortly after entering the first grade, said to Nino that he wanted to be a policeman someday. On his way to Public School 200 each morning, he had enjoyed friendly encounters with cops changing shifts at the precinct stationhouse across from the school.

  “I hate cops,” Nino huffed. “No one in our family has ever been a cop.”

  When Dominick, after hearing about the Korean War at school, next said he wanted to be a soldier, Nino said people were fools to die for anyone but their families. Because Uncle Nino was so sure about everything, his nephew was in awe of him.

  Dominick was age seven the first time the police came to his house. In his room one night, he woke to a frightful racket. He knew but a few words of Sicilian, but they included “Police!” which his grandfather was screaming repeatedly. He then heard a door slam, someone thrown against a wall, and Nino swearing loudly. His mother came and sat with him until he stopped bawling; some men had just come to see Uncle Nino, she said.

  In truth, Anthony Gaggi had been arrested and taken away in handcuffs, not by police, but by the FBI; he was accused of running an international stolen-car ring out of the used-car lot he had opened in a nearby neighborhood—no doubt with the backing of Frank Scalise, who had become the number-two man or underboss of the city’s largest Mafia family.

  Scalise lived in the Bronx, north of Manhattan, but supervised the family’s various branches, the largest of which was in Brooklyn. Nino was not a “made” member of the family yet, and by tradition would not be until he demonstrated he was a capable money-earner and a killer.

  The car operation showed the former. Over two years, Nino and two others created phony registrations for dozens of nonexistent Cadillacs, then dispatched thieves to steal ones that matched. The hot Caddys’ vehicle identification numbers were replaced, new license plates obtained with the bogus registrations were installed, and within hours they were on their way to some cash customer in Florida, Georgia, Texas, or Mexico.

  Nino was released on bail in a few hours. The next morning, no one in the bunker mentioned the FBI raid of the night before; everything was normal, though Dominick went off to school with a first inkling of what Anthony Santamaria might have meant when he said Nino wanted him to do things he
was against. Meeting expectations, he kept the revelation to himself.

  The stolen-car case dragged on nearly three years, with all the classic earmarks of Mafia tampering. Witnesses suffered sudden memory loss; codefendants who pleaded guilty either refused to testify against Nino or changed their stories from grand jury to trial. By early 1956, the federal prosecutor was left with a shell of a case and a jury found Nino not guilty. Nino did not take the stand, adhering to the first vow a potential made man must make, absolute noncooperation with official authority.

  While the case pended, Nino also took another vow—to love and honor Rose Mary Pezzella, a stunning blond telephone operator whom he married shortly before his twenty-ninth birthday. She was eight years younger, a ringer for Betty Grable, and had lived with her parents atop a furniture shop a few doors from his used-car lot. She and Nino had to petition the judge in Nino’s case to permit Nino to leave the state for a honeymoon, after which they took over the first floor of the bunker, forcing Dominick and his mother to smaller accommodations on the second floor. The couple’s first child, a boy, was born a year later.

  Though a neighbor lady had become Dominick’s chief babysitter, Nino still looked after him if the neighbor was unavailable and the other adults were still at their jobs. If he had business to conduct or people to see, he took his nephew along. At family events, the boy had bounced on Scalise’s knee many times, listening to folk tales of Sicily and the suffering of its people, but now he began to meet others with whom Nino would rise to power, men he was encouraged to regard as uncles.

  The first was Paul Castellano. Ironically, his father owned the butcher shop that once employed an upstairs tenant, Anthony Santamaria, as a deliveryman. After his wife divorced him, however, Anthony had quit and was gone from the neighborhood by the time Dominick returned to the shop to visit Uncle Paulie. By appearances, Paul was following his father into the meat business, but he also was top aide to Carlo Gambino, who ran Scalise family business in Brooklyn. Carlo, a sly Sicilian who arrived in America in 1922 as a cargo ship stowaway, and Paul were cousins, and Paul had married one of Carlo’s sisters. Carlo was fifteen years older than Paul, who was a decade older than Nino.