Murder Machine Read online

  Anthony drove the BMW with the body propped against the passenger window and abandoned it a couple of miles away on a four-lane stretch of highway dissecting the open grasslands of the Gateway National Recreation Area. The road linked Brooklyn to Belle Harbor and Neponsit, adjacent seaside communities in Queens where Chris and his wife lived and where he was renovating their new home across the street from Sam Levenson.

  Freddy DiNome and Henry Borelli followed in a separate car; after Anthony had exited the BMW and joined Roy in yet another car, Freddy drove by and Henry raked the BMW with machine gun fire—even in New York, such an apparent assassination should make news; although the plan was not executed very well, it would.

  Perhaps because Henry was too excited by the chance to put even false nails in Chris’s coffin, perhaps because Freddy drove by too fast, Henry shot wildly during the first pass-by, and so a second was necessary. This time, using a Thompson submachine gun out of Roy’s arsenal, Henry put several bullets into the car and the body.

  After patrol officers came upon the scene near midnight, Detective Frank Pergola of the NYPD’s 12th Homicide Zone squad was dispatched to investigate. Pergola had been a cop since 1965 and a homicide detective since 1977, when he was drafted from a citywide burglary squad and assigned to the “Son of Sam” serial murder case.

  Examining the interior of the BMW, he quickly began to suspect that the murder occurred elsewhere because of the position of the victim—in his haste, Anthony had left the legs of the body straddling the console between the front seats—and because there was hardly any blood in the car even though it appeared the victim had been struck at least a dozen times.

  The next clue for Pergola was sitting nearby in a Mercedes Sports Coupe that had pulled off the road—Joey Testa. Joey said he had noticed his friend Chris Rosenberg’s car while passing by and, after he stopped to ask the police what was wrong, he was shocked to hear that Chris was apparently dead.

  “Then you can identify the body for me?” asked Pergola, who, according to a driver’s license in the victim’s wallet, thought he was investigating the death of a Christopher Rosalia of Miami.

  “I don’t think I can do that,” said Joey, a good actor. “We were friends all our lives.”

  Young men, murder, and expensive cars triggered Pergola’s memory. In 1977, while investigating the Son of Sam killings, he reviewed many homicide files—among them, the case of Andrei Katz, which was so savage he made a point of studying it carefully. Now he recalled that Joey Testa was charged and acquitted in the Katz homicide and that Chris was an uncharged suspect.

  Returning to the BMW, Pergola noticed another Mercedes slow down as it passed the scene. He noted its license-plate number and asked an officer to run a check, which came back to Anthony Senter, whom he remembered as another uncharged suspect in the Katz case. “All we need now is what’s-his-name, Henry Borelli!” he said to himself as the name of the second person actually charged in the Katz murder jumped out of his memory.

  In another hour, Pergola ran into Henry—at Chris’s widow’s apartment in Belle Harbor. Joey and Anthony were there too. Joey, who had followed Chris out of Canarsie and with his wife and two daughters moved into an apartment on the same Belle Harbor block, had already broken the news to Stephanie. Anthony and Henry said they had come by to console her, although as Henry later said to Vito Arena, they were really there to make sure she did not say anything “out of the way.”

  When Pergola walked in, Stephanie was crying; so were Joey and Anthony, but not Henry. Stephanie told Pergola that her husband had been working that night on their Neponsit home, which they bought with wedding gift money. She did not know who might want to kill her husband, who made a good living as a car customizer while she went to school.

  Continuing with his disconsolate act, Joey consented to an interview by Pergola, and said he was visiting a brother’s hospitalized child earlier that evening. Anthony and Henry each said they knew no one who would want to hurt Chris and then, “Talk to my lawyer.” Pergola did not buy what anyone said, and left the apartment thinking he had been in the company of some unusually revolting people.

  After Pergola left, Joey and Anthony accompanied Stephanie to a city morgue; Joey and Stephanie could not look at the body, but Anthony, in a mournful performance of his own, identified it as Harvey Rosenberg, aka Chris Rosalia, but not aka Chris DeMeo.

  The following afternoon, Roy called Dominick to the Gemini. If Roy was feeling grief or guilt, it no longer showed. “We took care of the problem last night,” he said, handing over a newspaper clipping describing how a twenty-nine-year-old car thief with reputed organized crime ties had been found in a luxury car raked by machine gun fire. “Chris kept trying to get up,” Roy was compelled to add, “but Anthony shot him and he stayed down.”

  Getting around now in a black Mercedes 450 SL that Rega had given him to use, Dominick delivered the news clipping to Paz, then with an air of self-satisfaction soon deflated, reported in to Nino: “Paz says it’s all over now, but that fucking Roy didn’t even say thanks for all the time I spent trying to iron this thing out.”

  “Thanks? What the fuck did you do?”

  “I spent two months with a bunch of crazy fuckin’ Cubans!”

  “What the fuck you want, another medal? I’ll see you at the club when I get back.”

  “Sure, Nino,” came the sarcastic reply. “So long.”

  Henry was more grateful. He embraced Dominick and kissed him on the cheek. “The cocksucker finally got what he deserved!”

  In a few days, someone anonymously called the 12th Homicide Zone squad and informed Detective Frank Pergola that a “gangster named Roy DeMeo was involved with Chris Rosenberg’s murder.”

  Pergola went back to Stephanie several times, but she became evasive and hostile, a perfect standup widow. “We didn’t discuss business or school, that was one of our rules,” she would eventually say about Chris—after Roy, unknown to Pergola, gave her ten thousand dollars, a measly amount given the hundreds of thousands that began rolling in from the stolen coke.

  Following up the anonymous tip, Pergola, unacquainted with any FBI agents, telephoned the bureau blindly and asked if it had any intelligence information on Roy. He placed a similar call to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s detective squad, but did not ask for Kenny McCabe or Joseph Wendling, whom he had never met. Both calls produced nothing, and the case, as with the six murders related to it, went nowhere.

  * * *

  As the Cuban crisis played itself out, an old case against a crew member who had been out of circulation for a year did finally go somewhere—but only temporarily.

  In March, newly muscled, still bearded Peter LaFroscia was detained on an arrest warrant by police in Memphis, Tennessee, as he departed a federal prison after serving his year for violating probation. Joseph Wendling happily flew to Tennessee and brought LaFroscia back to New York to stand trial for the murder of John Quinn.

  Wendling had spent the year persuading LaFroscia’s former partner, master car thief Willie Kampf, to testify. First, he forced Kampf back to Brooklyn from his out-of-state hideout with a warrant identifying him as a suspect in an arson case, and then he got him to talk after truthfully informing him that LaFroscia was sleeping with Kampf’s girlfriend while the two had been partners.

  Try as he could, Wendling could not persuade anyone else to testify against LaFroscia. Quinn’s cousin Joseph Bennett, the man asked by Roy and LaFroscia to set up Quinn and Cherie Golden, was still too frightened to admit anything but his name. Another possible witness Wendling found in state prison serving life for a murder Wendling was told LaFroscia helped commit also rejected an offer to boost his chances for early parole by cooperating.

  Attempting to influence the inmate’s decision, Wendling arranged for the inmate’s wife and infant daughter to accompany him to the prison for the interview. “You’re not going to be there when your daughter has her first nightmare,” Wendling told him.

 
“You don’t understand,” the inmate replied. “You’re dealing with people who wouldn’t hesitate to kill her and my wife.”

  Midway through his efforts, Wendling grew suspicious of police officer Norman Blau, the Canarsie cop who introduced him to Kampf and volunteered to accompany him to Florida for his first face-to-face meeting with him. His worries began when a surveillance team saw Blau meeting with some of Kampf’s former associates. He confided in his boss, who ordered Blau to keep his nose out of the case.

  “I’m worried now about who else knows what we know,” Wendling said to Inspector John Nevins.

  Still, as the case went to trial in June of 1979, Wendling and Assistant District Attorney Steven Samuel were confident. They had a witness who could testify to a relationship between John Quinn and Peter LaFroscia, to a motive, and to LaFroscia’s admission that he helped kill Quinn. They also had the phone message that “Pete” left for Quinn hours before Quinn’s body was found.

  After Samuel rested the prosecution’s case, Fred Abrams, the politically connected Brooklyn defense attorney who was making a nice living representing DeMeo crew members, went to work. He called Kampf’s former girlfriend, who said Willie was just angry at LaFroscia because of her affair with him. But Samuel fought back with a tape recording Willie made of a call he received from her instructing him to keep his mouth shut about the case. The tape made her look like a liar.

  “Case closed,” Wendling said to himself.

  Late on a Friday afternoon, Abrams said he would call a surprise defense witness on Monday morning—police officer Norman Blau.

  Wendling and other officers spent the weekend trying to locate Blau—police officers are required to notify the NYPD anytime they intend to testify against the state—but Blau made himself scarce. On Monday, he took the stand in his uniform and said that while he was with Wendling and Kampf in Florida, Kampf pulled him aside and said he would do anything to get Peter LaFroscia. Kampf, he added, was not a believable person.

  The case was closed—not guilty, said the jury.

  Samuel and Wendling were devastated. After so much effort, they had been sandbagged by a cop. Strolling out of the courtroom, LaFroscia laughed in their faces.

  CHAPTER 15

  Body Shop

  The terrible thing about 1979, the worst year of the DeMeo crew, was that even with the bloody torrent preceding and including Dominick Ragucci and Chris Rosenberg, the year was less than half over. Bouncing back fast, Roy plunged down a bloody road. He picked Joey Testa to replace Chris as his new right hand, not that he did not like equally capable Henry Borelli, but Roy felt a closer bond to Joey, a former apprentice butcher too, and now, like him, a professional. He fit the last pieces of his car deal together, but did not neglect other deals, all of which led him—and Nino—to yet more heinous murders and one of them, finally, to jail.

  Henry was bitterly disappointed when Roy chose younger Joey over him, but Roy quickly sought to soothe his wounded feelings. While Joey and Anthony were given responsibility for moving all the stolen Cuban cocaine, Roy gave Henry a big job in the Kuwait stolen-car operation. Without having to do a lot of work, Henry was made one of the deal’s five active partners.

  The operation had been in abeyance several months while another partner, a Long Island used-car dealer, concocted a satisfactory scheme for shipping the cars under another man’s freight-forwarding company. The dealer was Ronald Ustica, a thirty-four-year-old lifelong resident of Baldwin, Long Island, who met Roy while selling cars for another used-car lot whose owner was perpetually in debt to Roy’s book. Ustica was mild-mannered, recently married, and had little in common with Roy and the crew except a larcenous heart.

  He and Roy came up with the scheme after he met two Arab importers who came to New York as partners to buy secondhand cars for resale in Kuwait. In discussions, Ustica discovered that one partner, Abdullah Hassan, had the same larcenous flaw as he. Encouraged by Roy, Ustica told the importers he could provide many quality used cars at five thousand dollars each, if they did not mind that they were stolen. Sure he could resell the cars for at least twice as much in Kuwait, Hassan did not mind. His partner, however, did, and they split up with the partner vowing to stay in New York and put his own legitimate deal together. Hassan returned to Kuwait to await the cars.

  As he had already indicated he would, Roy also brought Freddy into the deal and, because Freddy’s stumblebum brother, Richie, had shown such ambition in the Joey Scorney murder, him also. Roy informed Freddy that a full sixth share of the profit would have to go to Nino and the “hill,” meaning Paul Castellano, whose new white house occupied a Staten Island knoll known as Todt Hill (Todt meaning “death” in Dutch).

  Roy gave the active partners specific roles. Richie, aided by Vito Arena at one hundred dollars per vehicle, would steal the cars; Freddy, in his shop, would replace the locks; together, the brothers would make and install the phony VIN plates, using tool dies Roy had acquired and randomly chosen numbers that Roy would check with his cop pals to prevent the inadvertent invention of a hot VIN number. Henry would create the phony paperwork, a comparatively trifling worry now because a dealer’s mere invoice rather than a title would be enough to ship the cars overseas, which Ustica would oversee.

  “I want good cars,” Ustica said to Freddy the first time Roy introduced them. “Cars with not much mileage on them, possibly velour interiors, and with electric windows and seats.”

  Velour interiors were desirable, Roy explained, because the Arabs who would buy the cars from Hassan in Kuwait were opposed, for religious reasons, to sitting on leather. They were not opposed, however, to big cars with low gas mileage because gasoline was so cheap in Kuwait. Richie and Vito were told to steal high-end General Motors cars like Chevrolet Caprices, Oldsmobile Regencys and Buick Electras—preferably Caprices and preferably four-door, because some were destined to become taxis.

  Beginning in June, Richie and Vito began cruising for cars each night. Unlike Peter LaFroscia and Willie Kampf who in their heyday drove around in a Jaguar, the Gemini thieves used Richie’s homely station wagon, with its stroller, baby seat, and other infant paraphernalia. They began around midnight and usually swept through the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park in Brooklyn because, as Vito explained, they would find, for religious reasons, fewer cars with leather seats made from pigskin.

  With Joey Scorney out of the way, Richie was finally able to demonstrate he could steal cars too. Bulky Vito was still mainly a getaway driver, but stole on occasion, though he still had difficulty squeezing beneath the dashboards of some cars. The cars were driven to Flatlands and left, with the passenger-side sun visor pulled down, on the streets near Freddy’s shop.

  “There’s four in the bush,” Richie would say over the telephone to Freddy each morning, so Freddy and Henry would know, by the sun visors, which four cars to drive into Freddy’s shop and begin working on. The shop only had room for four at a time.

  After the cars were outfitted with new identities, locks, and transporter plates from Ustica’s dealership, they were driven to Nassau County and parked along the streets near his home in Baldwin—around the corner from a police station. Vito’s boyfriend Joey Lee, Roy’s cousin Joseph Guglielmo, and a few other fringe characters were paid a few dollars to drive the cars to Baldwin, where they sat until they were driven to Ustica’s lot and taken by rented car carrier to Pier 292 in Newark, New Jersey, from which they were shipped to al-Shuiaba, Kuwait.

  For the first few months, most everything went swimmingly. Freddy did gripe that Henry was hard to work with because he was always showing up late and complaining. In Kuwait, Abdullah Hassan griped that some cars were showing up without their radios, and Roy had to tell Freddy to stop stealing them. The partners, however, were each making seven to nine thousand dollars a week. Roy griped to Freddy they would be hauling in that much more if they did not have to pay Auto Crime Unit cops Peter Calabro and John Doherty fifteen hundred a week to check the VINs and
did not also have to cut in Nino and “Waterhead.”

  Real problems began early in September. Making his arrangements with Hassan, Ustica had failed to consider the persistence of Hassan’s former partner, a Jordanian citizen named Khaled Fahd Darwish Daoud. Daoud was a secretary in the chemistry department of the University of Kuwait when Hassan persuaded him they could make money importing cars. Daoud still believed and was trying to do it on his own, and had already written a letter home mentioning Ustica and complaining he was competing against thieves.

  That might have been the end of it if Daoud had not begun to notice that rarely were there any more Chevrolet Caprices available at the used-car auctions in New Jersey where new-car dealers dumped trade-ins. Caprices were the cars he wanted most too. Out of curiosity, he stopped by Pier 292 in Newark and found the answer to this riddle—dozens of Caprices lined up for shipment to Kuwait; the reason the dealers and auction lots had so few Caprices was that so many were here, undoubtedly hot. Daoud began writing down the dashboard VINs just as Ustica showed up.

  Daoud, a blunt-spoken, defiant man with no appreciation of the deadly nest he had disturbed, began arguing with Ustica and threatened to report him to the police.

  At an emergency session of the active Gemini-Kuwait partners, Ustica reported Daoud’s remarks to Roy. Of course, this was the same as signing the Jordanian’s death warrant. “Then, we’ll have to kill him,” Roy said to no one’s surprise, including ambitious Richie and suddenly prosperous and ruthless Ustica.

  “He has to go and I’ll pay for it,” Ustica volunteered.

  Arguing with Daoud, Ustica had learned that Hassan’s former partner was living at the Diplomat Hotel in Rockville Centre, in Nassau County, not far from the Gemini. Roy, Henry, Freddy, and Vito promptly staked it out, but discovered that Daoud’s room was near the manager’s office.

  That would not have thrown a wrinkle into the hit if, in an unusual oversight, Roy had not neglected to bring a gun equipped with a silencer and to remind the others. It was a sign that Roy, always the one to worry about armament before departing for work, was getting a bit forgetful as his bloodlust mounted—but then he was drinking a lot, late at night, in his house that was not a home.