Murder Machine Page 26

  Muriel Padnick never telephoned Roy again, but he probably would not have taken her call because suddenly a bigger problem than an anxious wife and mother landed in his lap.

  In Florida negotiating the deal, Chris had made a terrible mistake. It arose from his wishful penchant for sometimes introducing himself as “Chris DeMeo” and boasting to strangers that his father, Roy, was a powerful man in Brooklyn. Portraying himself that way to Serrano was not the problem, because Serrano was going to be dead soon anyway; the mistake was in assuming Serrano was the source of the cocaine, not El Negro, to whom Serrano had passed along the information before leaving on the doomed trip to New York.

  In the worst of all coincidences for Roy and Chris, El Negro also knew someone who might know about the DeMeo family of Brooklyn: Paz Rodriguez, the cocaine dealer who kept Matty Rega and Dominick Montiglio happy.

  Because Dominick had not identified the “Brooklyn contacts” who put up the ninety-six thousand dollars Paz borrowed through him a few months before—money that, in another twist, probably funded a deal with El Negro—Paz did not know Nino, Roy, or anyone in the crew. But he told El Negro that two coke customers of his who regularly came to his apartment probably would know who in New York was capable of such treachery, especially the one with the Brooklyn contacts.

  “Could you find out who this Chris DeMeo is?” Paz said when Dominick, unaware of the slaughter, came with Rega to Paz’s apartment later that week. Handing over a slip of paper with the name, Paz added: “He set up a deal, five people weren’t heard from no more. Two Jews, three Cubans. One of the Cubans was the mother of the son of my friend, my top supplier. He wants this Chris bad.”

  From the look Rega gave, Dominick assumed Rega had already told Paz who Chris was; Rega still carried a grudge against Chris for the pushy way Chris collected Roy’s loans. Dominick also assumed that because five people were made to disappear in a drug ripoff, Chris had to be involved. Still, until he spoke to Nino, he chose to be coy.

  “I don’t know a Chris DeMeo, but let me check it out.”

  He left Paz’s apartment astonished that Chris’s Roy-worship would result in such reckless talk while setting up such a murderous ripoff. Then, he recalled how Chris smirked over Danny Grillo’s murder and his own prediction to Henry that Chris “would dig his own grave someday,” and he smiled inside. If the day had come, the world would be better off. Arriving home, he told Anthony Gaggi he was bearing bad news.

  “What the fuck have those cowboys done now?”

  “It looks like they set a bunch of people up and took them out, and now some Cuban people in Florida are very pissed off.”

  Nino instructed Dominick to visit Roy and get the details, but Roy was evasive and advised Dominick to “stall” the Cubans until he could learn what happened.

  Not for a second did Dominick or Nino doubt that Roy already knew what happened and was personally involved, but Nino told Dominick to attempt to stall the Cubans. The next day, however, Paz told Dominick: “They are very concerned in Florida and they are sending some people up here.”

  Informed of this implicit threat, Roy now said Chris used his name without his knowledge and that Joey and Anthony also were involved. “It’s a crisis situation with the Cubans now, our own little Bay of Pigs,” Dominick replied. “I’m gonna have to tell them something, or they’re gonna start shootin’.”

  Both men spoke to Nino in a diner across from Tommaso’s; after hearing Roy’s claim and Dominick’s warning, he said: “Go tell ’em it was Chris.”

  Dominick quietly relished the role he was playing, ferrying life and death messages among Nino, Roy, and Paz in an attempt to mollify the mysterious El Negro and preclude a showdown between Gambinos and Cubans. It was diplomacy of the most urgent kind, and a chance to restore relations with Nino and demonstrate his ability. It could even be the episode Nino was waiting for, the test on which he would pass judgment—and pass on the torch! His heroic notions turned inside out by the last six years, his calculating yet still-boyish heart thumped anew with the romantic attraction he felt for “that life” as a child—the daring uniqueness of it!

  “I found Chris, his name is Rosenberg,” he told Paz. “We know where he is, what do you want?”

  Given the precipitating carnage, El Negro’s proposal to end the crisis, passed along by Paz, was generous: “We just want him killed and that will end it. But you have to do it in a way that makes the newspapers. We won’t take your word for it. It has to be in the papers.”

  More than fair enough, Nino said. Bolstering his nephew’s belief that the situation was a test and he was turning the matter entirely over to him, he added: “Tell Roy to take care of it.”

  “It’s the only way we avoid a big battle,” Dominick told a heavily distressed Roy. More than he dared show, he was enjoying seeing Roy twist in the wind. “Nino says to do it.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Roy said solemnly.

  All this took place within ten days of the five murders, but the drama—predictably, Paul Castellano was never clued in—would drag on nearly six more weeks. Revealing a heart not yet totally gone to stone, Roy could not muster a murderous attitude toward Chris, his original recruit and would-be son.

  “Chris is a hard guy to set up,” Roy said after Dominick reported that Paz and El Negro were getting “antsy.”

  In reality, Chris was an easy target. He was never told anything. Unaware his sacrifice had been demanded and approved, he went about exercising regularly with Roy in a Long Island health club and renovating the new fancy house on the waterfront in Queens that he had recently purchased—in between all his recent murders. The house, he had told the others, was directly across the street from one owned by “that Jew comedian Sam Levenson.”

  While Roy agonized, Dominick began going to Paz’s apartment each day—to monitor the Cuban mood and counsel patience. Soon, he was introduced to two El Negro gunmen, up from Florida. He pulled Paz aside: “Let’s don’t get carried away here. We’ll have bodies all over the place.” He had begun going to the apartment “dressed up”—armed with his Smith & Wesson, which was tucked into a girdle-like contraption he wore beneath his trousers.

  With the arrival of El Negro’s men, Roy began hiding out in his expensive waterfront home. “The Rooster is a nervous wreck,” Henry told Dominick after speaking to Roy. “He’s seeing Cuban hit men all over the place.”

  This was about as prophetic a statement as Henry ever made.

  * * *

  Seeking only to make money for college, an eighteen-year-old part-time vacuum cleaner salesman named Dominick A. Ragucci wandered into Roy’s paranoid realm shortly after seven o’clock on Thursday evening, April 19, 1979, the fifth day of the fifth week of the Cuban crisis.

  Ragucci lived with his parents in Massapequa, which was adjacent to Massapequa Park, where at 159 Whitewood Drive nervous wreck Roy was holed up in his security-conscious home with his cousin Joseph Guglielmo and several weapons. Ragucci was a recent honors graduate of a military academy and now a criminal justice student at Nassau Community College: He wanted to be a cop. He had just begun selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door to help pay for his education, dates with the woman he intended to marry, and upkeep on his car, a 1971 Cadillac on its second paint job.

  He had already made contacts with two potential customers on Whitewood Drive and had an appointment with one that night at a home down the street from Roy. Afterward, as he drove off in a fateful direction, he pulled over to the curb in front of Roy’s house, probably to record notes in the business journal he kept. Several Electrolux vacuum cleaner boxes were visible in his car’s backseat, and rosary beads hung from the rearview mirror.

  Dominick Ragucci could have passed for a Cuban. His mother was Puerto Rican, his father Italian. He was dark, smallish, and fresh-faced, but had recently grown a thin mustache that made him seem older than eighteen. He was wearing a gray sportscoat and trousers and a flowery white shirt with a gray tie; in the gathering
dusk, through the lens of the security camera mounted on a pole outside Roy’s home, and especially to the anxious eyes looking at him on the monitor inside, Ragucci could have, and did, pass for a Cuban assassin.

  When he saw two men, Roy and Guglielmo, walking toward him with what appeared to be guns, Ragucci slammed his car into gear and sped away—confirmation, in Roy’s state of mind, that he was indeed an assassin. Roy and his cousin hustled into Roy’s Cadillac and gave chase. Ragucci might have thought they were just a couple of lunatics trying to frighten him until he turned off Whitewood Drive and sped into the nearby community of Amityville, the bucolic setting for a popular horror story.

  In Amityville, with Roy behind the wheel, the Cadillac came up behind Ragucci’s car. Holding onto the wheel with one hand and leaning out the window with a pistol in the other, Roy fired several shots into Ragucci’s car. The young salesman zoomed off again, but over seven more miles of crowded streets—despite running several red lights, weaving perilously through traffic, and barreling across median strips and curbs—he could not shake the wildmen who inexplicably kept firing bullets into his car, shattering three windows.

  Nino’s “cowboy” references to Roy were never more apt as Roy blazed away, endangering the lives of countless motorists and bystanders, hitting Ragucci’s car twenty times. His cousin Dracula kept reloading the pistol, so excited he twice shot holes in the floorboard as the cars raced into neighboring Suffolk County.

  Finally at a busy intersection, Ragucci’s car crashed into another; despite two flat tires, and with fear only he could describe, he pulled away and drove another five hundred feet before his disabled vehicle came to a halt and Roy’s car pulled alongside. Roy jumped out, assumed a combat firing position right out of police training films and kept shooting until his pistol was empty and the teenager was dead from a tight cluster of seven bullet wounds to the upper body. The hapless victim did not even have time to try and run; he was found still buckled in his seatbelt and with his eyes open, as though he had died of fright.

  A passerby walked up to Ragucci’s car, looked inside, turned off the ignition and then left without ever coming forward again. Hundreds of others saw parts of the fanatical tragedy, but Suffolk County police reported that no one saw enough to help them make much sense of what happened. Some witnesses said only that the shooter returned to his car with executioner-like poise.

  “If that guy wasn’t a cop, I ain’t talkin’ to nobody,” one added, more astutely than he imagined.

  The next day, Roy read a Long Island Newsday story and realized, as he later said, that he made a “mistake.” He drove into Brooklyn and told Freddy he felt “bad,” then asked him to repair his car’s bullet-ridden floorboard. He later gave the car to Patty Testa, who quickly sold it through his dealership.

  In a few days more, Ragucci’s parents emerged from their grief and offered a five thousand dollar reward for information. Ben Ragucci, owner of a local fireplace and garden-supply store Roy had patronized, bitterly complained that the paucity of witnesses to his son’s murder reminded him of an infamous murder in Queens, where he lived years before. The victim in that case was Kitty Genovese, whose death became a memorial to urban indifference when her screams for help went unanswered by neighbors.

  “I’m heartbroken and sick,” Ben Ragucci said. “How the hell could this be?”

  In reality, Suffolk County police did have a good lead provided by a witness. John Murphy, intelligence officer of the NYPD Auto Crime Unit, discovered this after reading a followup story in Newsday and saying to another cop, “I bet that Canarsie crew has something to do with this. They’re the only people who are this wild.”

  Murphy telephoned a Suffolk detective and asked, “Has the name Patty Testa come up in your investigation?”

  The detective’s reply showed that Murphy’s obsession with Patty was not unwarranted: Indeed, a witness had said the gunmen’s car was equipped with special transporter, or automobile dealer, license plates and provided a number that was traced to Patrick Testa Motorcars, which unfortunately had reported to the Secretary of State some time earlier that the plates had been stolen.

  “That’s what they do all the time, report the plates stolen and put ’em on another car!” Murphy said.

  “Well, as far as we’re concerned, it doesn’t rule him in, or out, of our investigation,” the detective said.

  Murphy hung up thinking that Suffolk County, which had as many murders the year before as New York City had in an average week, was never going to go anywhere with the case, and he was right.

  * * *

  Portraying himself a victim of circumstances, Roy went to Nino’s house to explain his mistake. “The guy looked like a killer and when I tried to talk to him, he took off.”

  “An eighteen-year-old vacuum cleaner salesman, eh, Roy?”

  “Nino, I’m tellin’ ya, I thought he was gonna to take out my whole house.”

  “I told you the Cubans weren’t gonna make a move yet, I have that situation under control,” Dominick interjected. “For now.”

  “Ah fuck you, you weren’t there.”

  “Okay, Rooster. Cock-a-doodle-do.”

  “What did you say? You better watch your smart ass.”

  “All right, morons,” Nino said, “that’s it. Roy, take care of this stupid bullshit because there are gonna be other people killed who don’t deserve it. Just end it.”

  In a few days, Nino left for Florida and instructed Dominick to provide regular updates. Dominick kept going to Paz’s apartment each day to say the matter would end soon. But Roy still could not bring himself to do what he promised. Instead, as Ben Ragucci kept speaking out about his son’s murder, Roy instructed Freddy DiNome to reconnoiter Ragucci’s place of business “in case we have to hit him” because he was “puttin’ too much heat” on the Suffolk County police.

  From the journal found in Ragucci’s car, Suffolk detectives did discover he kept an appointment a few doors from Roy’s home. They tried to interview Roy, but he ordered them off his property. They did speak to Patty, but he stuck by the story that the plates had been stolen. End of case.

  Symbolically, the murder also ended what little marriage Roy had. The bargain Gladys had made with Roy depended on him keeping his crimes out of the house and away from their children; she did not need to know for certain that he actually did it to be acutely embarrassed and angry that during a time of a great community uproar over the death of such an innocent kid, the cops were coming to her home to ask her husband questions about it. Everyone on Whitewood Drive knew Roy was a suspect, even if the case was going nowhere. Although Roy stayed close with his kids, he and Gladys retreated to different corners of the house.

  Two weeks after the murder, Paz confronted Dominick about the Chris Rosenberg situation. “Is this gonna happen or what? If it ain’t, we’re gonna take care of it, and who knows what’ll happen.”

  To buy a little more time, Dominick warned of a bloodbath. “You want to start in? Fine. You ain’t scared of them? Fine. But they ain’t scared of you either. So lots of people will die. Be patient. Let the Italians straighten out their own problems.”

  Sure the game was up, Dominick flew to Florida and checked into a hotel near Nino’s retreat. He took Cheryl Anderson along for company and Matty Rega for the bill. Alone, he went to see Nino and said war was imminent. Nino then telephoned Roy and told him to stop stalling.

  The situation was comparable to a hangman whose own son’s neck was in the noose. But Roy was a professional hangman and finally he resolved to open the trap door.

  That night, minus Chris, he convened an emergency meeting of his crew to draft a plan for a murder that would make the newspapers. Seeing Roy come to grips with the matter, the crew did too. It was easiest for Henry, who volunteered to do the work, but Roy said he had to; he brought Chris into “that life” and had to be the one to take him out, no matter how much it hurt. And it did hurt. “I loved that kid,” he said, in a deliberate past t
ense, and with glumness the others had never seen before.

  The regular Friday-night shapeup of the DeMeo crew occurred two days later, on May 11, 1979. Roy arrived at the clubhouse a little early and put a fresh handgun into a brown paper bag like the one in which he always carried his cash. He laid the bag on the kitchen table where the crew always ate their meals and divvied the week’s profits.

  Henry and Freddy had been told to make themselves late, but Chris and his would-be brothers Joey and Anthony all arrived at about the usual time, eight o’clock. Chris arrived in a jet-black BMW, his wife’s car, because she was using his Mercedes. Inside, as he normally did when greeting Roy, he kissed him on the cheek; he said hello to the others and sat down at the kitchen table, utterly at ease.

  Roy smiled, reached into the bag, pulled out the pistol and in one smooth movement shot Chris in the head. Chris fell to the floor—not yet dead, however. Feeling remorse for once, Roy was slow to react when Chris even staggered to one knee, but Anthony rose to the occasion and fired four more bullets into Chris’s head, putting an end to his misery and made-man dreams.

  After wiping the blood from their old friend’s head wounds, Joey and Anthony put an arm under each of Chris’s shoulders and walked him out of the clubhouse as if they were taking a drunk buddy home and put him in the passenger seat of his wife’s BMW.

  To meet the Cubans’ demand that the murder make the newspapers, Roy knew that something more unusual than merely leaving Chris and the car on a road somewhere was necessary. Only a handful of the city’s average thirty-five murders per week make the newspapers, and though the BMW might stir an editor to decide the murder was unusual enough to be newsworthy, it might well not, particularly on a weekend. So the plan developed two days earlier was put into action.