Murder Machine Page 33

  The Scutaro murder showed that Roy was following old friend Danny Grillo off the deep end. Where Danny was in love with dice, Roy was now clearly in love with murder. “It is like having the power of God,” he told Vito. “Deciding who lives, who dies.”

  The fat boy from Flatlands might have achieved the power of God, but as he finally, totally succumbed to the beast inside, he was not happy. His bloodletting had not prevented his mentor Nino from getting jammed up, or his car deal from getting busted—or him from having to kill his equally tortured protégé, Harvey Rosenberg. Roy had made it to the top of the heap, only to feel it begin to collapse. He would never admit it, but the bully felt the ground beneath his feet trembling. He was getting scared.

  A month after the murders, Roy and Gladys pretended (not very well) that they were a happy couple and hosted a lavishly catered Fourth of July bash at their splendid waterfront home in Massapequa Park. Of Roy’s principal associates, only Nino—who was free on bail while appealing his assault conviction—did not attend; some of the event was videotaped by Freddy, who expended much footage following Roy around like the faithful puppy he was.

  “Freddy, if you don’t stop, I’m going to shoot you!” camera-shy Roy shouted at one point, to the delight of several children.

  Wearing jeans belted too high and a too-tight red pullover, thirty-nine-year-old Roy looked more fat and dumpy than ever; his most dangerous, loyal, and handsome followers—Henry and Joey and Anthony—looked as silky and sleek as ever.

  “Look at him,” some male guest said as Freddy focused in on Henry Borelli. “He’d like being on television. He’s so photogenic Barbara Walters is going to interview him.”

  Richie took Roy, Roy’s son Albert, Freddy, Vito, and Joey Lee for a ride on his newest toy, a cabin cruiser he sailed up to the party on; by the dock area of one particular home along the inlet leading to the ocean, Roy ordered him to cut the engine and spoke familiarly of the home’s former occupant, Carlo Gambino, a man he had never met. Back at his refuge, as the day wore on and many empty bottles of Dom Perignon piled up, Roy grew somber.

  After Roy’s son Albert and some young friends shot off hundreds of large fireworks, Vito saw Roy sitting alone in his living room and asked what was wrong. Roy said he was depressed because one of his usual guests was not there this year.

  “I miss the kid Chris,” he said, with emotion Vito took as absolutely genuine. “I really loved that kid. Some things you don’t like doing and I really didn’t like doing that.”

  Later, after more Dom Perignon, Roy told Freddy maybe they should do what Dominick Montiglio had done. “You know, just run away from all of this.”

  Freddy was shocked too. He had never seen all-powerful Roy have a weak moment. Although in emotional turmoil, Roy was hardly immobilized. Two months later, he played God again. At the clubhouse, he machine-gunned Paul Castellano’s former son-in-law Frank Amato to death. He told Freddy that Paul had contracted the work; others believed Roy had volunteered, knowing about Paul’s rage at the man who cheated on his daughter and wanting, unrealistically, to improve his standing with Paul in the wake of the Eppolito debacle. No matter what, Paul was never going to like Roy—just his money.

  The Gemini method was employed on Amato, who was lured to the clubhouse with talk of a business deal. Departing from their normal abnormalities, the crew did not take the packaged remains to the Fountain Avenue dump. Roy, Henry, the Gemini twins, and the DiNome brothers all took a moonlit ride on Richie’s cabin cruiser and tossed them overboard many miles out to sea. They joked about using the pieces for bait, and “chumming for man-eating sharks.”

  * * *

  Little by little, the authorities made headway against the crew—and further rattled Roy. A federal prosecutor in Brooklyn tied Patty Testa to stolen cars transported across state lines, and rather than face trial, Patty pleaded guilty to interstate transportation of the proceeds from one stolen car and to altering another car’s odometer. This would not have caused Roy much stress had not Detective Kenny McCabe shown up at Patty’s sentencing hearing.

  As an organized crime authority, Kenny was regularly asked by prosecutors in federal and state courts to testify at proceedings involving defendants with Mafia ties. As to Patty, he said that four informants had linked him to Roy, Freddy DiNome, and Peter LaFroscia and to illegal firearms and drug-dealing. Although Patty was just twenty-three years old, he “was an up-and-coming wiseguy in the Canarsie area,” Kenny testified.

  For his part, Patty—represented by crew stalwart Fred Abrams—filed an affidavit in which he personally asked the judge not to send him to prison. He now employed six people, including youngest Testa brother Michael, at Patty Testa Motorcars. “All the effort that was expended by me in building up my business will have been for naught. I will lose all my business contacts I have built up over these past four years.”

  Judge Jacob Mishler gave the defendant a break—one year as opposed to ten—because of Patty’s age. “Now, if that straightens you out,” he told him, “I will have done a good job. If it doesn’t, then I took a chance and lost, and society lost.”

  Naturally, society lost. That night, with Fred Abrams in attendance, the crew held an urgent meeting at Roy’s house to discuss Kenny’s worrisome testimony: Who were the informants? Kenny soon learned of the meeting and more—courtesy of, indirectly, Freddy DiNome.

  While still unknowingly under investigation by FBI agents in Newark and New York because of the telephone tips from “Harry,” Freddy had unwittingly stumbled into a Suffolk County sting operation. It began when two auto-crime officers visited his home in Shirley, Long Island, and asked about two motorcycles found in woods nearby. In another of his insurance scams, Freddy had recently reported that the motorcycles, which were his, had been stolen. When the cops more or less suggested this, Freddy got in a heated argument with one of them and ordered both to get off his property, just like Roy would have.

  The officers suggested to their bosses that Freddy might be an ideal foil for learning more about organized crime in Suffolk County. The following day, Robert Gately, the officer who had not argued with Freddy, came back alone and, pretending to be corrupt, began cultivating a relationship. That first day, Gately accepted a hundred-dollar goodwill gesture from Freddy, and over time took eleven hundred dollars more, a chainsaw, and a Rolex watch. In return, Gately drank with Freddy, gave him meaningless police gossip and helped him out with a driver’s license problem.

  Freddy was vulnerable to a police sting because his mentor Roy was so good at collecting cops. Nowadays, Freddy was feeling more on top of his game than his boss was. With money made from the car deal, he had mounted surveillance cameras like Roy’s at his house, which he also was renovating in a deluxe way. He had one hundred thousand dollars in loans on the street, and once while drinking with Gately, he pulled forty thousand in hundred-dollar bills from his pockets and ostentatiously tossed them on the bar.

  “Put that away, before we have a problem in here,” Gately told him.

  “Fuck it,” said Freddy, all powerfully.

  By the time Kenny testified at Patty Testa’s sentencing hearing, Freddy believed he and Gately were fast friends. After the emergency crew meeting in which Roy wondered who Kenny’s informants were, Freddy told Gately about the pesty Brooklyn detective and asked him to find out who was talking.

  Gately then told Kenny of his undercover relationship with Freddy. Happy to string Freddy along, and seeking to unnerve Roy, Kenny gave Gately official-looking documents describing in broad terms what he knew of Nino, Roy, the crew, and a few of their murders—but not mentioning any informants.

  The documents fell short of what Freddy wanted, but he was impressed when Gately produced them. Later, he handed them to Roy as they drove to the pornography parlor Roy still owned in Bricktown, New Jersey; although he had launched another car deal, it was not on the same scale as before, and so Roy, trying to compensate for the drop in income, was now planning to import pro
stitutes from Manhattan to provide onsite services to his peep-show and magazine and film customers.

  Freddy told Gately that Roy was shocked by the accuracy of the documents and so angry he ripped them apart and threw them out the windows of his car.

  Kenny knew all of this when he and Tony Nelson had a long encounter with Roy in March 1981, on the eve of the day that Nino (an appeals court having finally upheld his conviction) was to surrender to corrections officers and begin serving his five-to-fifteen-year hitch in the Eppolito case.

  Nino had already set in motion one more desperate attempt to challenge the conviction on new grounds, by encouraging his ringer on the jury, Judy May, to make some outlandish charges about sexual misconduct by court personnel during the sequestered jury deliberations. But the legal process would take many months, and for the last two weeks he had come to terms with what he always dreaded, prison, and had been putting his affairs in order.

  His and Roy’s manipulation of Peter Piacente in the Eppolito murders had strained his relationship with Paul. Even so, he designated Roy as his stand-in with Paul while he, as wiseguys liked to say, went “away to college.” A year earlier, the job would have been the elder Jimmy Eppolito’s.

  Nino had not seen or heard from his mercurial nephew Dominick since December 1979. Nobody from New York had except Buzzy Scioli, who had received a few telephone calls, but he was not about to admit it—except to Quāalude fugitive Cheryl Anderson, who had telephoned from her hideaway somewhere to ask how Dominick was. Denise Montiglio, now mother of her third child, a girl, had not told anyone where she and her family were hiding out and, after a rough start, living well if not normally.

  Kenny and Tony ran into Roy outside a pre-“college” sendoff that was held for Nino at Tommaso’s; many capos, made men and DeMeo crew members came by—but not Paul. Paul’s neighbor Thomas Bilotti, now the new de facto underboss of the Brooklyn faction, did attend.

  Anticipating such an event, Kenny and Tony had staked the restaurant out and were sitting in Tony’s FBI car. As the party ended, Roy came out and waved at them, then got into his Cadillac, made a U-turn, and pulled alongside. In an agitated way, he yelled through his open window, “I got a bone to pick with you, McCabe! You are gonna get me killed! You’ve put me in dope! If you can prove I’m in dope, you can shoot me here in the street because I’m a dead man if I deal drugs and you know it!”

  “What are you babbling about?” Kenny asked, but well knew.

  “You testified I was involved in narcotics. You’re gonna get me killed! You can accuse me of killing little babies, but don’t say I’m involved in drugs.”

  “I said four of your friends said you were involved.”

  “You want to be a rich man, just give me one name.”

  Kenny laughed, and as the banter continued Roy seemed to relax, as if the cops were just potential business partners. “You guys have been sitting out here three hours,” he said pleasantly. “You should’ve just come in and had a drink.”

  For several years now, Kenny, Tony, and others had had Roy, Nino, and others in the crew under surveillance, but Roy was the only one who ever, as he did now by getting out of his car and standing alongside theirs, talked to them at any length.

  The conversation lasted forty-five minutes. Roy talked about his uncle the famous lawyer and his cousin the famous medical examiner. He discussed his son and his two daughters and how proud they made him. He talked about how his mother always said he was smart enough to be a doctor.

  “But I’m just our family’s black sheep,” he said, almost remorsefully, Kenny and Tony thought.

  “You seem to have done all right for yourself,” Tony said. “In a way.”

  “I’m a legitimate guy! I just buy and sell, that’s all.”

  Roy also wanted Tony to know he was always on the ball. “I know you were in my bar once peeping around. I know it, but so what? Nothin’ goes on there.”

  The detective, the agent, and the gangster continued to play a coy game. They were trying to determine if Roy was a potential informant. He was trying to gauge whether they were straight and narrow as they seemed. Well, a legitimate salesman like you could help us a lot and maybe help yourself, they would say; it would be nice to have friends like you, and maybe you would find the friendship profitable, he would say.

  The three men were set in their ways, however, and the game ended with everyone firmly on their own side of the field. As Roy was about to depart, Kenny saw Nino leave Tommaso’s, hesitate, then begin walking away from where his car was parked, seemingly because he did not want to pass the FBI car stationed between Tommaso’s and his Cadillac.

  Kenny was pleased that Nino found him and Tony so irritating. “Where the fuck is he going?” he asked Roy with mock alarm. “You better go tell him he doesn’t have to walk home. It’s late, you never know who you’re going to run into, even in this neighborhood. The streets aren’t safe anymore.”

  “You know how Nino is,” Roy said. “Unlike me, he has a thing about cops.”

  Roy let Nino go; on March 26, 1981, his last night of freedom, Nino left his car on the street and walked home alone. After orientation and transfers, he was incarcerated at Attica State Prison, the toughest “university” in New York State.

  By now, Roy had accurately reasoned that the police suspected someone else, not him, was with Nino and Piacente when the Eppolitos were murdered. Leaving Kenny and Tony, he sarcastically said that he had no idea why anyone would want to harm such a pair of underachievers as the Eppolitos. “It totally beats me, I just can’t understand it.”

  Kenny accurately sized it up as fake bravado. “Roy’s not as strong as he wants you to believe,” he said to Tony after Roy left. “I’m not sure if Roy can stand up to pressure.”

  Nino had made the same observation to Dominick years earlier, when Roy began gulping Valium after the IRS began investigating his returns. He offered it again during the Cuban crisis, when Roy panicked and an eighteen-year-old college student and vacuum cleaner salesman died. Obviously, Kenny was unaware he and Nino shared this insight of Roy. There was still so much he and the other cops interested in the crew did not know, but this would begin to change soon. In fact, some pivotal groundwork had already been laid by other cops.

  * * *

  John Murphy, the low-key intelligence officer of the NYPD’s Auto Crime Unit, was deeply frustrated as the summer of 1980 began. For three years, he had been unable to persuade the NYPD to mount a serious investigation of Mafia influence in the stolen-car rackets. Then, out of the blue, as his undermanned unit underwent another upheaval and was reconstituted as a division of a new Organized Crime Control Bureau, people with power began to listen.

  Joseph Harding, the division’s first commander, called Murphy to a meeting and announced that the new United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York—seeking to shore up local-federal relations—wanted to jointly investigate and prosecute a case with the NYPD. The Southern District, the local wing of the United States Justice Department, prosecuted violations of federal law in Manhattan, the Bronx, and several upstate counties; its prosecutors had won convictions in the Westchester Premier Theater case against all defendants but Anthony Gaggi. They could tap into the resources of numerous federal agencies, such as the FBI, the IRS, and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

  The new boss of this well-funded seat of official power was John Martin, who had vowed an assault on organized criminal conspiracies, such as the city’s five Mafia families. A friend of his, Robert McGuire, a former assistant U.S. attorney, was currently the “PC,” police commissioner of the NYPD.

  “We’ve been asked to give a presentation to Martin’s people for a case that could be worked jointly,” new auto crimes commander Harding said to Murphy. “Have you got anything?”

  Murphy felt like a broken record by now, but Harding—new to auto crimes—was hearing his song the first time: “Sure, I got a great case,” Murphy said. “Patty Testa.”
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  The case, of course, was much greater than Murphy or anyone outside the crew realized. But after hearing Murphy and Murphy’s friend on the Nassau County Auto Squad, Charles Meade, describe what they knew of Patty’s operations, Harding ordered Murphy to prepare a formal presentation.

  Over the next month, Murphy updated his charts and files and then briefed the case for Dominick Amorosa, chief of the Southern District organized crime unit, and other prosecutors at a series of meetings held over the summer. The list of homicides that Murphy believed were related to the stolen-car business in Brooklyn now included seventeen names. The DeMeo crew’s toll was already much higher, but Murphy yet had no way of knowing that because he was focusing on cars—not drugs, contract hits, intra-crew discipline, and all the rest.

  Murphy believed other victims belonged on the list, such as Ronald Falcaro and Khaled Daoud, just because Charles Meade had told him the missing men were in the car business and disappeared en route to Canarsie. Decorous Murphy did not mention that when he began urging action three years before the list contained only seven names.

  Because stolen cars appeared to have been transported across state boundaries, the federal government had reason to prosecute; whether the Southern District had geographical jurisdiction was another matter. It appeared the cars had been stolen in Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island—the geographic province of another local arm of the Justice Department, the Eastern District of New York. Murphy was ready with an answer to this question that was more crucial than he imagined—Matty Rega.

  After Dominick fled Brooklyn late the year before, Rega was free to be himself again. The flight—Nino was telling Buzzy and others that Dominick had run off with a quarter million dollars of his money—was the proof Rega needed to make it appear he was telling the truth about the disputed thirty thousand dollars. He still owed Nino and Roy other money, however, and was hardly (as his father had claimed at the sitdown over his restaurant) straightening himself out.