Murder Machine Page 29

  With two potential twenty-five-year-to-life prison terms to worry about, however, Nino was not going to rely only on the bullet-switch. He instructed Roy to begin working on another plan—bribing Patrick Penny and/or Paul Roder to forget or alter what they saw and said in the immediate aftermath of the killings.

  Penny was targeted first. He was more crucial because he could testify he saw Nino leave the Thunderbird just after the Eppolitos were shot. Penny, however, was proving hard to track down; at the moment, even the police did not know where he was.

  After the shooting, detectives had stashed Penny in a motel, to make certain he testified before a grand jury and helped the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office obtain indictments of Nino and Piacente. Afterward, they sought to keep him in protective custody—to make sure he stayed alive to testify at trial—but Penny reverted to his antisocial habits and decided he did not want to hang out with police anymore. When detectives escorted him home for fresh clothes, the wiry little burglar went to the bathroom, climbed out a window, and ran away.

  Believing Penny would stay in contact with his family, Nino and Roy decided to send him a message through his brother Robert. They dispatched Dominick and Henry, and Joey and Anthony, to the gas station where Robert worked. Nino paternally told Dominick to go in disguise; the others did not bother. Joey, Roy’s new right hand, did the talking:

  “Your brother is fucking with the wrong people. He saw what happened to the two guys in the car; if he testifies, it’ll happen to him. Tell him to do the right thing. We’ll give fifty thousand up front and take care of him the rest of his life.”

  “I think he’ll go along,” Robert replied.

  “He better,” the other Gemini twin said.

  * * *

  Roy’s hyperactive imagination in the days following the Eppolito murders was also due to the unresolved threat he felt from the Jordanian car exporter, Khaled Fahd Darwish Daoud. Daoud was still perturbed that car thieves he believed were led by seemingly mild-mannered Ronald Ustica were giving his estranged partner in Kuwait, Abdullah Hassan, a distinct competitive advantage.

  Unaware the crew had already abandoned one plan to kill him because Richie DiNome accidentally shot himself in the hand, Daoud had continued grumbling about Ustica and the shortage of Chevrolet Caprices at the used-car auctions in New Jersey. As yet, however, he had not carried out his vow to contact police.

  In the month since the plan was aborted, the stakes had increased. In Kuwait, Abdullah Hassan was ecstatic with the way the car deal was unfolding and had ordered more “rentals,” as Ustica referred to the stolen cars. To handle the request, Roy moved the operation out of Freddy’s four-car garage and into a former milk company warehouse where twenty cars at a time were retagged. In Baldwin, Long Island, now, cars ready for shipment were stored in a warehouse Hassan had bought for Ustica rather than parked on the streets near Ustica’s home.

  The five active partners in the car deal, and the inactive tandem of Nino and Paul, were now making up to twenty thousand dollars a week each. The profits were so outrageous even Vito Arena—who got a hundred dollars for every car he helped steal, rather than a full partner’s share—was spending thirteen hundred a week just on food.

  In the giddy dinners at the Gemini clubhouse before the Eppolito murders, Roy had discussed expanding the operation further and then leveling off at one hundred cars per week—or, based on the five thousand dollars Hassan paid for each car, some eighty-three thousand dollars a week, per partnership.

  “No use getting greedy,” Roy said to a lot of happy hooting.

  In such an avaricious atmosphere, no matter if he never contacted police, Khaled Daoud likely was doomed. But on October 10, two days after Dominick’s smuggling trip to Rikers, Roy learned that Daoud had blindly called police and had been told to write a letter outlining his allegations. One more time, Detective Peter Calabro of the Auto Crime Unit provided the tip.

  Unusually, because it was Wednesday, Dominick happened to be at the clubhouse that night, updating the Eppolito situation with Roy, when Roy’s principal hook came by. As ever, Calabro and Roy talked out of earshot of anyone else, this time in a hallway.

  “A lot of guys have got clipped because of that guy,” Roy appreciatively said to Dominick after Calabro left.

  Because Roy had not discussed Daoud with him, Dominick did not understand the remark’s specific implication, only that someone was about to die. He went home depressed and not because of any cocaine letdown. Here Nino was in jail for a double homicide, and Roy was out planning another killing. The murders just never stopped. Roy had recently bragged of being up to a hundred “notches”—and “counting.” Was he going for a thousand?

  Dominick left and let the Gemini cabal hatch a plan for whoever it was they were set to kill. With all of Roy’s experience, a plan was quickly hatched. And because Daoud was in the market for cars, he decided to lure him to Freddy’s engine shop, not the clubhouse. This was not a big step for Freddy to take, because he had always said he would do anything for Roy.

  At an auction in New Jersey the next day, Ronald Ustica arranged for a friend to tell Daoud that a man named Freddy DiNome, who happened to be at the auction, had two hard-to-find Caprices for sale at his garage in Brooklyn. Daoud sought out Freddy, who invited him to inspect the cars the following day. That evening, the setup took on a surprise dimension when Daoud telephoned to say he would be coming with a friend.

  At a strategy council, Freddy wondered what to do.

  It was a silly question, Roy said. “We just shoot them both, and make ’em disappear,” he added.

  “Disappear?” asked Vito Arena, familiar with the crew’s methods, but not its nomenclature.

  “Cut them up.”

  The friend of Daoud’s who wandered into this void was Ronald Falcaro, another Long Island used-car dealer who had been assisting Daoud in his efforts to purchase cars legitimately. Leaving home on the morning of October 12, Falcaro, the father of three children, told his wife Donna he had business with his new associate, Khaled Daoud, but would be home in the afternoon to help her prepare for a birthday party for their youngest child.

  For his second double homicide in eleven days, Roy arrived at Freddy’s shop an hour before the scheduled meeting. The rest arrived within minutes. This time, Roy had distributed clean silencer-equipped weapons beforehand, which he and Dirty Henry began checking and rechecking. The Gemini twins removed a vinyl pool liner and their tool kits from their car trunks and carted everything inside. Although not partners in the car deal, they were helping out “as a favor to me,” Roy said to Vito.

  With Roy directing, they passed the time rehearsing. A car with its hood up was parked nearly against the door of Freddy’s shop. Vito Arena would pretend he was working on the engine and make sure no one not supposed to exited the shop, a windowless building that could be lighted only via a power cord strung from an adjacent building. Roy, Henry, and Joey and Anthony would hide in the darkness and do the work when Freddy led the victims inside. To limit the number of bullets flying around, Roy would take one victim; Henry, his prized stone-cold shooter, the other—with the twins on standby.

  Everyone was in position when Falcaro and Daoud arrived on schedule. Freddy led them straight past Vito to the door of the shop and waved them in ahead.

  “Christ, your electricity get cut off?” Falcaro said as he stepped into a trap darker than death.

  “Fuck, I forgot the lights,” Freddy said, so fast that he was able to turn and leave the shop before the victims had any hint of doom, which suddenly announced itself in a series of muffled popping sounds.

  Daoud went down quickly; although wounded, Falcaro ran for the door; he pushed against it as Henry kept firing at him, and actually got a single hand around the outside edge, but heavyweight Vito was on the other side; he grunted, pressed against the door, and fed Falcaro to the sharks.

  After Freddy turned the lights on and after Roy said it was okay to come in, Vito saw
Henry pump be-sure shots into Daoud’s head and Roy leaning over Falcaro and deciding nothing more was required there. “Got a little hairy there for a bit,” Roy said. “That one guy didn’t wanna go down.”

  “Piece a cake, Roy,” Henry said.

  Joey and Anthony laid out the pool liner and the knives from their tool kits. Freddy brought in garbage bags and several heavy cardboard boxes the crew used to transport its smut films.

  “We’ve got about forty-five minutes to kill,” Roy said to Vito. “Why don’t you and Henry go get some hot dogs and pizza?”

  By the time Vito and Henry returned with the food, the bodies were stripped of clothes. Roy knowingly re-dispatched Henry, and Vito, to dispose of Falcaro’s car at a local auto shredder.

  Then, after making preliminary slices and determining the victims’ blood had not yet coagulated, Roy began to have lunch, so cavalier now about this demented work that he never even removed his bloody surgical gloves. The scene was out of some prehistoric time, but Roy calmly snacked as if he was back at Banner Dairy in Flatlands, just eating a Snickers and stocking shelves with Ivory Snow large.

  As Chris, Joey, and Anthony once had with Andrei Katz, Freddy proved his toughness to Roy by serving as Roy’s apprentice once the ritual butchery got underway. He and Roy began taking apart Falcaro while Joey and Anthony concentrated on Daoud.

  “Here’s how you do the head,” Roy said to Freddy, whose only prior experience was with a neighbor’s dog.

  Roy then handed Freddy the knife and told him how to make a slice around the shoulders, to detach the arms.

  “No, no, no!” he yelled when Freddy mangled the job. “This way!” he said, taking the knife back.

  For sheer perversity, however, Freddy outperformed everyone. Vito and Henry returned from disposing of Falcaro’s car to witness Freddy cutting off the penis of the beheaded Falcaro, and with a “Fuck you!” sticking it in the victim’s mouth.

  “Freddy, cut that out!” Roy laughed.

  Henry was disturbed that all of this barbarity had not been completed by the time he returned, but he gutted it out, and for the first time, helped out with the packaging, to the extent of holding the garbage bags as the others filled them.

  The plastic bags were tied, placed in the smut-film boxes and stacked along a wall. The next day, the boxes would be taken to Richie DiNome’s nearby body shop—where Anthony Senter’s uncle’s sanitation company, a client of the Fountain Avenue dump, picked up the garbage.

  In a few hours, everyone reassembled at the Gemini for the regular Friday-evening shapeup. Making his pickup for Nino, Dominick arrived later on, and noticed that everyone seemed unusually euphoric. Vito said he and the boys were all on a “high.” Dominick thought they had just killed someone in the clubhouse.

  Weary of the crew’s relentless killing, Dominick finally verbalized his contempt. “Who checked into the Horror Hotel tonight?” he said sarcastically. “Who didn’t check out? A baby?”

  Everyone laughed and thought he was only making a joke. He left and felt like never coming back.

  Roy ordered Henry and Vito to go ransack “the Arab’s” hotel room and collect his personal belongings; Freddy had removed the room key from Daoud’s trousers. Roy said, “Bring back everything. We wanna make it look like he left town. This way the cops will blame him for the other guy’s disappearance.”

  Although familiar with the Gemini method because of the two naked corpses he saw in the clubhouse bathroom one day, Vito was still taken aback by the afternoon’s firsthand illustration. En route to the hotel with Henry, he asked: “Do you always cut ’em into pieces like that?”

  “No, but we’ve done it several times. Not me personally. It just depends. Sometimes you want ’em to be found. Sometimes it’s better if they’re missing.”

  Henry asked Vito if he had any qualms and Vito said no.

  “Well, don’t worry about anything. You’re with good people. Roy is good people. He looks out for his people.”

  Henry continued to ramble on about Roy, then mentioned some of the crew’s more notorious murders—Andrei Katz, Cherie Golden, Chris Rosenberg, especially Chris. As he summed up Joey Testa’s role in that murder, there was a bitter edge in his voice that Vito mistook for mere irony. “Joey’s very good. He even went to ID the body, and he cried. Joey’s the best.”

  Back at the Horror Hotel, Henry and Vito helped Roy inventory Daoud’s suitcases; they found Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building souvenirs, family photos, business papers—and a typed letter addressed to various authorities alleging that a gang of thieves was shipping stolen cars to Kuwait.

  “We got him just in time,” Roy smiled. “Ain’t no more problem with the Arab.”

  The next day, after reporting to police that her husband was missing, a panicky Donna Falcaro discovered that Daoud, whom she had met, had apparently checked out of his room. Because her husband was in the car business, Nassau auto squad officer Charles Meade was among those sent to interview her.

  “I don’t know much about what he does, but I’m really upset,” she said. “All I know is, he was meeting some people in Canarsie or someplace.”

  Not wanting to upset her further, Meade did not give any indication, when he heard the word “Canarsie,” that he was certain her husband was dead.

  On her own, Donna Falcaro contacted people she knew her husband had done business with, such as Ronald Ustica. Summoning his best Joey Testa imitation, Ustica appeared to be sympathetic and concerned, and offered this advice: “If I was you, I’d tell your husband not to hang around with that Arab because he’s bad news.”

  The case was assigned to Nassau missing-persons detective Bill O’Laughlin. He interviewed Ustica, but Ustica played dumb, naturally well; as so many times before, the case went nowhere.

  CHAPTER 16

  Into the Wind

  The contempt for Roy and the crew that Dominick began to express during the Eppolito drama—his calling Roy “Rooster” to his face, his sarcastic jab at the clerks of the “Horror Hotel”—did not spring up overnight of course. The root went back to the time the crew equated Henry’s aversion to butchery with cowardice; it grew when they made Danny Grillo disappear and when Roy, in a fanatic panic, killed a young vacuum cleaner salesman. Associating with such people, and with his own considerable degeneracy, Dominick was not very entitled to claim to be holier than thou, but he felt that way nonetheless. He was also depressed and anxious, and in the middle of a personal crisis from which he saw no way out; it began months earlier, soon after his do-or-die diplomacy in the Cuban crisis.

  One of his favorite haunts was still the Pear Tree, the Manhattan bistro where he and Henry began meeting years before. The Pear Tree usually contained some interesting people. Dominick had met Nino’s old childhood pal, former middleweight boxing champ Jake LaMotta, there and also the writer Truman Capote, to whom he had introduced himself as “Dominick Santamaria”—a name he sometimes traveled by now, an alias but not really, and therefore another neat Sicilian trick.

  At the Pear Tree one evening, Henry brought the news that set Dominick off on another binge. Even though Dominick did not feel close to Henry anymore, because Henry had shown in the wake of Danny Grillo’s murder that he believed Dominick had been dispatched to kill him, they still got together. Henry, as always, kept him posted on crew events and politics.

  Henry had just begun making easy money in the car deal but was still disappointed that Roy had picked Joey to be his second in command. “That slot ought to be mine,” he whined.

  “Well, why don’t you just whack them both!” Dominick joked.

  “Very funny. Even if I wanted to, Roy is a man who can’t be killed. I don’t know what it is, a sixth sense or something, radar, he just wouldn’t let you get ’im.”

  “I think Roy thinks the same thing about Nino. Nino’s the only guy he’s afraid of. Nino would smell ya coming and shoot ya first. That’s what keeps them from ever turnin’ on each other. It’s a wonde
rful life.”

  “I just felt I was entitled to the job. You know how much work I’ve done?”

  “I can imagine. The job should’ve been yours, but the Rooster thinks you’re too friendly with me. Joey’s his dog, he knows Joey hates me because Chris hated me. Joey won’t spill anything to me, which means he doesn’t have to worry about Nino as much.”

  “I was there before fuckin’ Joey.”

  “It’s just the way things are. It’s the Rooster’s crew. My uncle would never get involved in it, if that’s what you’re driving at.”

  “Speaking of Nino, you know that thing with the Cubans? Your uncle got a hundred and fifty grand off the top of that.”

  “What?”

  “Yep, Roy gave him a hundred and a half of what they made on that.”

  Dominick began to boil as he listened to Henry describe how Roy, Joey, and Anthony had sold most of the stolen twelve kilos in lucrative chunks and given Nino maybe the biggest one. In an enraged whisper, he fumed: “The fucking Rooster never said thanks for how I got him out of that situation! And my uncle hollered at me for expecting any! Those fucks! They can’t even throw me a lousy ten grand? Sick, greedy fucking miserable fucks!”

  “They got balls, that’s for sure, but there’s no way Roy would try and hide money like that from your uncle; like you said, Nino’s the only guy he’s afraid of.”

  “It’s a pacifier, that’s what it is! A hundred and fucking fifty grand of pacification! And they don’t throw me a dime! Assholes!”

  Nino’s windfall—he had recently informed Dominick that he and Rose were looking to buy a new, larger house in Bath Beach—was not the only ironic footnote to the miserable Cuban saga.