Murder Machine Page 31

  “Lighten up, will ya?”

  The next day, coked-up, he became convinced that if he went anywhere in a car with Nino and Roy, it would be to the Fountain Avenue dump. He telephoned Nino and said he had business to conduct first and would make his own way to the sitdown.

  That night, he sat in his bunker apartment and pondered what to do. As a baby he had lived with his mother and father on the first floor, as a boy, with his mother on the second floor, as a man, with his wife and his children on the top. The more steps he climbed, the more things had grown worse. The only logical thing to do was to leave—not just the bunker, but Brooklyn.

  As the hour of the sitdown came and went, he made his decision. In a general way, he had kept Denise apprised of the Rega situation, and he told her now: “Matty and his dad are telling so many lies; it’s like if they tell enough, some stick. If I’m not dead now, I will be. I’ve had it. Let’s go to California.”

  Denise, four months pregnant, did not object. She was tired of taking angry telephone calls from Nino about Dominick, tired of her husband being away so much chasing his “things.” They had started anew in California once before, and they might have made it if Dominick’s Brooklyn Back Street Blues Band had gotten a break, if his mother had not been sick, and if The Godfather had not been made. Before all that, California was everything they wanted, a fairytale life, and so she was happy to seek it again.

  Denise began packing suitcases. Dominick went to the trap in his daughter Camarie’s bedroom; he counted his cash—fifteen hundred dollars—and grabbed his weapons, including the machine gun Pedro Rodriguez had given him. He then woke six-year-old Camarie and said they were taking a trip to California.

  “What about school tomorrow?”

  “They got good schools in California, honey.”

  After she fully woke, Camarie got excited and could not wait to leave. “We’re taking a trip!” she said to two-year-old Dominick, Jr.

  Dominick and Denise bundled their children into Rega’s Mercedes; the car was worth thirty thousand dollars—the amount he was accused of stealing, now a fee he was charging for aggravation. Just as when they married in 1971, they hit the road for California and got into the wind, believing everything bad was being left behind in Brooklyn. This time for good.

  That is what they hoped anyway. But as time would show, the last few months of incremental depression, anxiety and paranoia had only taken the boy out of Brooklyn, not Brooklyn out of the boy. He would sneak back one day, and at first against his will, then wholeheartedly, he would associate himself with a new crew and begin pounding nails into the coffins of all the good fellows, including those of real and honorary uncles. What goes around comes around; what goes up must come down.

  III

  THE CHASE

  CHAPTER 17

  Travesty of Justice

  A lot would happen while Dominick was in the wind, much that was tragically familiar, much that was surprisingly different, and much that was wholly treacherous. The next couple of years would be the long beginning of an end, as the dice began coming up snake-eyes—not always but enough to signal a change in fortunes—for Paul, Nino, Roy, and the DeMeo crew.

  For one thing, the forces of law and order arrayed against “that life” began cooperating more and became more effective—not in every example, however, so more victims would die before the cracks in the thin blue line were filled.

  Eventually, a man—as unlike anyone in “that life” could be—would step forward and take charge of a historic and monumental effort to smash the evil empire. But all of that was in the future and incapable of occurring to the mind of the likes of Anthony Gaggi, who, as 1980 began, was trying to beat the Eppolito case and deal with the witnesses against him.

  In Brooklyn, the prosecutor and detective assigned to the Eppolito murders had labored hard to preserve the case against Nino and Peter Piacente. The prosecutor was Steven Samuel, the assistant district attorney who had been sandbagged by police officer Norman Blau, whose last-minute testimony had enabled Peter LaFroscia to exit the courtroom with a smile on his face and an undeserved acquittal in John Quinn’s murder.

  Samuel had announced plans to enter private practice when the Eppolitos were murdered, but delayed them to try and avenge his loss in the LaFroscia case by convicting a major Mafia hoodlum such as Nino. The detective was Roland Cadieux, of the 10th Homicide Zone squad; he had helped Samuel win his first murder case five years before.

  One of their two Eppolito witnesses, burglar Patrick Penny, had continued giving Samuel and Cadieux fits—and the other, police officer Paul Roder, was not keen on testifying against two made Mafia men, especially Nino, whose reputation now preceded him, because of the Westchester Premier Theater case and the surveillance intelligence gathered by Kenny McCabe and his unofficial FBI partner, Tony Nelson.

  After escaping from protective custody following his grand jury appearance, Penny had been caught—but then had run away again. When he was caught again he was put in jail. He had so embarrassed police that he was transported in chains and leg irons when being brought in for trial preparation. Samuel and Cadieux did not want their witness treated this way, but higher-ups said they could not afford to house Penny and pay officers to guard him.

  “What the fuck is going on!” Samuel complained to a superior. “We’ve got two mobsters redhanded for a double homicide and you’re pinching pennies!” Penny was then moved to a motel.

  Cadieux tried to make amends with Penny, and reassure fellow cop Paul Roder, who kept saying that testifying in a murder case against a Mafia capo was not the uncomplicated future he imagined when he left the Police Academy ten years before and was assigned to the unorganized crime of the Housing Authority. Still, no one had threatened Roder yet, and Cadieux pointed out several times that it was against Mafia rules to harm a cop acting in the line of duty.

  By Mafia tradition, that was true because of the grief it was believed to cause; threaten a cop and every bookmaker, loanshark and made man in the neighborhood starts getting harassed.

  However, there was no rule against trying to bribe a cop. So, on January 3, 1980, Joey Testa, who had handled the earlier approach to Penny’s brother, was assigned to telephone Roder at his home. Demonstrating that he remained confident of his decision to pick Joey over Henry to replace Chris, Roy told Freddy, “Joey is the only guy I can trust to handle something like this.”

  Joey told Roder that two friends of his were ready to pay him twenty-five thousand dollars if he lied about a crucial element of the case: “Instead of saying you were a police officer that night, just say you said, ‘Hey you, hold it.’ Don’t say you identified yourself as a police officer.”

  Regrettably for Roy and Nino, the attempted bribe offended Roder and hardened his attitude. “I am a cop. I’m going to testify the way it happened. I wouldn’t take a hundred thousand, and you can tell your friends I’ll take a bullet before I’ll take their money.”

  The next day, after he reported the call, the police department moved Roder into hiding—a wise move, because both Nino and Roy had shown they were capable of breaking with Mafia tradition.

  With Penny and Roder out of reach and set to testify, the case against Nino remained strong. Even so, as he went into the dock for the third time in his life, on January 30, 1980, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office was still apprehensive. Albert DeMeo, Roy’s uncle, had resigned the office many years before to teach law, but the wisdom of his day still applied: The unexpected happens in Mafia cases.

  Therefore, prosecutor Samuel and his bosses asked Judge Edward Lentol to sequester the jury for the entire trial—not just during deliberations, as was customary. The risk of jury-tampering was too great, they argued. Judge Lentol, an Italian-American, agreed. This had not happened in Brooklyn since the Murder, Incorporated cases of the 1940s (which were prosecuted by, among others, Kenny McCabe, Sr.).

  The judge’s order eliminated Nino’s last possible ex parte move—bribing a juror—b
ecause the jurors would be guarded around the clock. Unable to buy a way out, Nino was reduced to his riskiest option: Make the jury believe his story that he was shot by the same gunman who had shot the Eppolitos, and that he then escaped with one of the assailant’s guns and had fired on Roder in self-defense. The phony bullet smuggled in by the departed Dominick made the story plausible, but it was a highly improbable tale; worse yet, it required Nino to testify in his own defense and tell the tale without getting tripped up on cross-examination.

  In reality, his dilemma was even worse. Nino was not aware that prosecutor Samuel was ready to ambush the fake bullet evidence. X-rays of Nino’s neck shortly after the incident showed that the bullet lodged beneath the surface of his skin was different from the round he turned over later. While the rifling marks on the bullets that killed the Eppolitos and the one that had supposedly come out of Nino’s neck were the same, their shapes were different, because they had been fired into different surfaces—flesh and water. The bullet switch was not such a clever idea after all. The X-rays proved that Roder, not the gunman, shot Nino. The question for the jury was reduced to simple terms: Who to believe, the gangster or the cop?

  Only a lucky break could save Nino—and on the third day of juror selection, he caught one, as juror number nine was sworn. Her name was Judy May; she was a pretty, doe-eyed paralegal. She was about to be married, and unknown to her, her fiancé’s father was one of Anthony Gaggi’s oldest loan customers. When her future father-in-law, Sol Hellman, found out from his son that she was a juror in the case, he rushed to tell Roy the serendipitous news.

  The search for remaining jurors and two alternates dragged on more than a week. On Valentine’s Day, the judge permitted the sequestered jurors to have dinner with their sweethearts, under supervision of court officers. Understandably, no one was suspicious of the way Judy May’s fiancé, Wayne Hellman, whispered lovingly into her ear. But a new fix was on. To protect his lawyers, Nino—a savvy client—kept them in the dark.

  In the dark too, the prosecution put on its case. Penny and Roder stood by their stories and Samuel introduced his X-ray evidence. Nino took the stand—he had to give Judy May something to work with in the jury room—and told his story. Playing a little joke on his nemesis, Detective McCabe, he said that the gunman in the car with the Eppolitos was a loanshark known to him only as “Kenny.” Nino was only there to mediate a dispute between the victims and Kenny, when the loanshark suddenly shot them all. Of course, after he escaped with one of Kenny’s guns, he thought Roder was a friend of Kenny’s seeking to kill him. The only people in the courtroom who seemed to believe the yarn were Rose Gaggi, who cried, and her and Nino’s children.

  Roy eschewed the trial, to avoid witness Patrick Penny, who had seen “Kenny” leave the car with Nino and the forgotten man of the case, Peter Piacente.

  Besides, Roy had work to attend to—such as, on March 7, the murder of Joseph Coppolino: Another one of the DeMeo crew’s offshore marijuana shipments—twenty-three tons, this time—had been waylaid by the authorities, and Roy and the crew fingered Coppolino, a smalltime pot dealer, as the person who tipped police. Coppolino was dealt with in an atypical way—he was stabbed and decapitated, but also left on the street to be found. It was evidence that Roy had confused his two tried and true murder styles while in some ferocious fit of the moment.

  Steven Samuel thought his case was a winner as the judge instructed the Eppolito jury. During a break, Piacente’s defense attorney told him he feared a quick, devastating verdict. Lawyers on both sides were struck by Nino’s calm. Mostly, he stayed seated at the defense table browsing the financial section of a newspaper. Once again, he was a reader of the Wall Street Journal, not the Daily News.

  Once the jury began deliberations, jury foreman Philip Von Esch also expected a quick, devastating verdict of guilty on all counts because the evidence was “so strong.” Only Judy May, of course, felt otherwise. In the jury’s first vote, only she dissented: “I don’t believe anything Patrick Penny said.”

  Over two days, Von Esch and the other jurors pressed her to further articulate her opinion. “It’s just my feeling,” she would say.

  Rather than declare themselves a hung jury, which would have caused a retrial, Von Esch and others felt compelled to reach a verdict. When the lone dissenter finally conceded there was some evidence Nino had assaulted a policeman, they seized on the compromise and voted to acquit Nino and Piacente of murder, but convict Nino of assault and Piacente of a less serious charge, reckless endangerment. Judy May, a paralegal, knew that a watered-down verdict was better than a hung jury because the defendants would have still been vulnerable to murder charges in a retrial.

  The tortured compromise was “a travesty of justice,” Von Esch said, after some jurors agreed to discuss the case with lawyers from both sides. “But it was felt it was the only thing we could get because she was not going to budge on the homicide charges.”

  Because he had a ringer in the jury, and the others did not understand the hung-jury option, Nino was facing five to fifteen years in prison—rather than life. Judge Lentol denied bail pending appeal, but another judge overturned him and Nino went home in a relatively gay mood to await formal sentencing.

  A month later, at the sentencing, Nino’s lawyer James La Rossa asked for a lenient sentence because his fifty-five-year-old client had lived “an exemplary life,” and: “For all intents and purposes, this is his first real brush with the law where someone has found him guilty. He has worked all these years. He has constantly been employed; he has constantly earned money; he has constantly contributed to society.” Understandably, all of the cops in the courtroom felt like gagging.

  Judge Lentol showed what he felt in the sentence he handed down—the maximum, five to fifteen years. However, because he had already been overturned by an appeals court when he tried to jail Nino after the verdict, Lentol let Nino stay free pending Nino’s obligatory appeal of the assault conviction.

  Nino, of course, had already decided to punish Patrick Penny, the witness whose testimony made the case, according to what all jurors but Judy May had told lawyers for both sides. In fact, the only reason Penny was not already dead was that Nino dared not act while the sentence was pending, on the off chance La Rossa’s pleas for leniency might seduce the judge.

  Now, however, the deadly coast was clear. Penny’s death was not going to affect the appeal Nino’s lawyers were mounting. The appeal was of the conviction, not the sentence, which is almost always legally unassailable.

  Much as he wanted to, however, Nino could not do the work himself. Newly convicted, he could not risk another serious arrest; as a two-time loser, he would never leave prison. He would have to get his revenge vicariously, through Roy of course.

  Roy was eager to oblige, and not just because Nino assigned him complete responsibility. Roy felt a grudge of his own, however twisted and self-serving it was. It was Penny’s fault that for the first time in Roy’s indefatigably murderous career that someone on a job with him got caught and convicted—it was doubly embarrassing that this distinction, this chink in his invincible armor, had fallen to his boss, Nino. He also was still smarting over the accusation by Dominick Montiglio, wherever the upstart brat had gone, that he had left Nino in the lurch.

  Even before Nino’s sentencing, Roy told Vito, “Ya know somethin’? That little cocksucker Penny is gonna pay, soon as we find out where he’s hiding and who he hangs with.”

  From the trial, Roy knew that Penny was a burglar with a police record, because Nino’s lawyers had thrown it in Penny’s face while trying to discredit his testimony. That meant that the police had to have a mug shot of Penny; Roy wanted the mug shot so he could copy it and distribute it to crew members as they began searching for Penny.

  Ordinarily, Roy would have relied on Detective Peter Calabro of the Auto Crime Division for this crooked service, but shortly after Nino was convicted Calabro was murdered in a violent and sudden way—through no fault of the
crew, for once.

  Driving home to New Jersey after finishing a tour of duty in Queens, Calabro was shotgunned to death by assassins in a passing car. Kenny McCabe and other detectives who investigated the murder never found enough evidence to prosecute, but came to believe that thirty-six-year-old Calabro was murdered by relatives of his wife, who had drowned under suspicious circumstances in 1977.

  Calabro had been residing with his young daughter—and with his auto crime partner, John Doherty, the former Flatlands resident and childhood friend of Roy’s who introduced Calabro to Roy. Doherty’s wife had drowned at home in a bathtub in 1978, after a heart attack, according to the medical examiner’s report.

  At the time of his partner’s murder, Doherty told the media he was “grief-stricken” and said: “I’ve had a death in the family.”

  Leaving Doherty alone, Roy contacted another cop he had befriended during the last three years—another detective, in fact—Thomas Sobota, a ten-year veteran and Canarsie resident who had been drinking heavily at the Gemini since 1977. Sobota also liked to gamble and owed the bar’s bookmaker, Joseph Guglielmo, about one thousand dollars. Like all the other officers and firemen who drank and gambled at the Gemini Lounge throughout its history, he never knew what was happening in the clubhouse in the back.

  Making his pitch to Sobota, Roy said he needed a mug shot of Penny because a friend wanted to find him and give him an important message. Sobota was not a Mafia expert; he investigated run-of-the-mill crimes in Manhattan’s 6th Precinct. He believed Roy was just a loanshark, which was no big deal; he was not principled either. The worst he thought Roy was up to was that Penny had testified against a friend, and Roy or the friend wanted to slap him around—also no big deal.

  To cover himself in his Greenwich Village squad room, and make it seem he had reason to request a mug shot of Penny, Sobota began a phony case file claiming that an anonymous tipster had telephoned and claimed that a Pat or Bill Penny of Brooklyn was “ripping off the fags” at the Hudson River docks in the West Village, a traditional gay cruising ground.