by Philip Carlo
DeMeo loaned money to a kid named Chris Rosenberg, who sold nickel bags of pot. With the money Roy loaned him, Chris was able to buy weight and was soon selling ounces and even pounds. Roy made Chris his partner, co-opted him and his pot business. This would be a recurring theme in DeMeo’s bloody, infamous life of crime: he made people who owed him money and couldn’t pay him on time his partner. This was, in fact, a classic Mafia ploy, used from its very inception. The word mafia in lowercase means a man of respect, an individual who has pride and honor and walks with his head high. Mafia, capitalized, has come to mean the criminal enterprise that began in Sicily in the mid-1800s and spread its insidious tentacles all over the globe. For many years the Mafia was a highly secretive, highly successful criminal enterprise the likes of which the world had never known; all its members took a blood oath to the particular family they were inducted into. Until Joe Valachi, at the 1963 McClellan Senate hearings in Washington, told about the intricacies of the Mafia—where it began, how it worked, its structure—law enforcement had no comprehensive understanding of the Sicilian Mafia. In fact, there are three distinctly different criminal organizations in Italy: the Camorra from Naples, the ’Ndrangheta from Calabria, and the Mafia from Sicily. Of the three the Camorra was—and still is—the most violent and vicious.
The infamous John Gotti was one of the few Neapolitans who was allowed into the ranks of the Sicilian Mafia, into the Gambino family, which many say was a fatal error in judgment on Carlo Gambino’s part. An exceedingly cunning individual, Carlo Gambino was a small, frail, unassuming Sicilian who dressed and acted like a simple peasant from Sicily, when in truth he ran the largest and most successful of the five New York crime families. Carlo opened the books to John Gotti because Gotti killed a man who was stupid enough to kidnap Carlo’s nephew Sal and murder him after a ransom was paid; that, of course, was a one-way ticket to a graveyard, and John Gotti gladly killed the jerk who masterminded this ill-conceived kidnapping and killing.
Carlo would later make a second grave error in judgment, and that was appointing his brother-in-law, Paul Castellano, the head of the family when he died in October 1976.
Paul Castellano was a tall, gaunt, sallow, and dark-eyed man who had a butcher shop on Eighteenth Avenue, just off Eighty-sixth Street, in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, another very tough, Mafia-ridden neighborhood. If the Mafia had a graduate school, it was surely the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. Made men—soldiers, lieutenants, captains, underbosses, and bosses from all the five families—lived in Bensonhurst. Here they bought homes, baptized and married off their children, celebrated holidays, lived their lives. The Bensonhurst public schools were filled with children who were the offspring of made men.
Paul Castellano was a good businessman, though a very bad mob boss. He parlayed his butcher shop into a large chicken and meat wholesale business that made him a wealthy man. Paul married Carlo’s sister, Kathy, and it was mainly that marriage that caused Paul to rise quickly within the Gambino hierarchy.
Paul was a notoriously greedy individual, did not come from the street as such, and was resented by most of the twenty-one captains in the Gambino family. Resentment of Castellano’s greed eventually caused Castellano to be killed in front of Sparks Steak House in December 1985. He and his bodyguard-chauffeur, Tommy Bilotti, were killed at the behest of John Gotti and Sammy “the Bull” Gravano by a hit team; one of those men was, in fact, Richard Leonard Kuklinski.
In theory, Roy DeMeo should have been associated with and inducted into the Lucchese family; they were centered in Canarsie, had scores of junkyards and chop shops in the area. But Roy wanted more for himself; he wanted to become a member of the Gambino family; they were Mafia royalty, and that’s where Roy wanted to be made. DeMeo was an excellent moneymaker—had interests in unions, stolen cars and credit cards, drugs and shylocking, had partnerships in restaurants and bars, had a lot of money on the street. But DeMeo was loud and boisterous and readily drew attention to himself, all traits shunned by mob guys, and he had a very bad temper…would scream and yell and pull guns at the drop of a hat. He believed the best way to get people’s respect was to bully them, to beat them up, to make them bleed.
“I don’t give a flyin’ fuck if anyone likes me; what I care about is that they fear me,” was a favorite saying of his, and people did fear him, with good cause, for Roy DeMeo was a bona fide raging psychopath. Besides all his other enterprises, he killed people for both sport and money. He filled mob-sanctioned hits as well as hits civilians wanted done and were willing to pay for. Essentially, he retailed murder. Roy had worked as a butcher in Key Food, a Brooklyn food store, and he was particularly adept at cutting people up to get rid of bodies.
“Disassembling,” he called it, laughing. With expert knife work he dismembered those he killed, cut them up into six convenient pieces—the head, arms, legs, and torso—all of which he cleverly disposed of in different places, the head in a garbage bin, the arms in the nearby Atlantic Ocean, the legs in the mountain-high Canarsie garbage dump over near the Belt Parkway.
DeMeo put together his own little killing crew, a bunch of cold-blooded serial killers named Joey Testa, Anthony Senter, Chris Goldberg, Henry Borelli, Freddie DiNome, and DeMeo’s cousin, Joe Guglielmo, who was known as Dracula, and they shot and stabbed and bludgeoned their way to prominent positions in the Mafia homicide hall of fame. Before they were finally brought to justice, the DeMeo crew murdered over two hundred people. Many of the murders were carried out in the rear apartment of a bar DeMeo owned called the Gemini Lounge on Troy Avenue.
DeMeo made the acquaintance of Nino Gaggi, a made man in the Gambino family and a close personal friend of Paul Castellano. Both Gaggi and DeMeo dealt in stolen cars. DeMeo had a contact in the Department of Motor Vehicles and provided Gaggi with clean vehicle identification numbers (VIN) and paperwork for stolen cars. DeMeo was only too happy to help Gaggi in any way he could. He saw Gaggi as his entry into the Gambino family.
Nino Gaggi lived at 1929 Cropsy Avenue in Bensonhurst. It was a redbrick three-family house with small yards in front and out back. Gaggi was from the old school, quiet and reserved, a slight man with small, seemingly frail hands, but he was tough like coarse sandpaper, with a bad temper. Everything about him was understated. He didn’t particularly like DeMeo, because he was so loud, so bold, so in your face. But DeMeo was a hell of a moneymaker, so Gaggi tolerated him and, as time passed, did more and more with him. During the Christmas holidays, DeMeo brought carloads of gifts for Gaggi’s three children and diamond bracelets and watches for Nino’s wife, Rose, an attractive blonde who was fiercely loyal to her husband. Gaggi had a vicious German shepherd named Duke. He loved the dog because it was tough and wanted to bite everyone, man or beast. Duke was so vicious that he used to climb up the eight-foot chain-link fence around the backyard, using his teeth and paws, to get at the sanitation guys on Bay Twenty-second Street. Gaggi had to have a chain-link overhang installed so Duke couldn’t escape and wreak havoc on the neighborhood. Duke’s tenacity gave Nino a big kick and he loved that dog as much as one of his own sons.
It was an inconsequential incident on Bensonhurst’s Eighty-sixth Street that eventually caused Roy DeMeo to be inducted into the Gambino family: when a neighborhood tough, a Golden Gloves champion named Vincent Governara, known as Vinnie Mook, hit Gaggi and broke his nose, Gaggi turned to DeMeo and asked Roy to kill him. Whatever Nino asked of DeMeo, Nino got; and he later sponsored DeMeo to be made by the Gambino family, making DeMeo’s long-cherished dream come true.
Because DeMeo lived and worked out of the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, a few miles away from JFK International Airport, he had a lot of contacts at the airport and helped mastermind numerous cargo thefts, heisting all kinds of merchandise from all over the world: wines and champagnes from Italy and France, exotic foods, jewelry, cash money, and guns. Lots of guns. Crates of pistols, revolvers, and even machine guns, Berettas from Italy, Walther PPKs from Germany, Uzi machine g
uns from Israel.
Roy was a genuine gun fanatic and truly loved firearms. He had an extensive collection of them, enough guns to arm a small army, and he happily and easily sold all the stolen armaments from Kennedy Airport to members of organized crime. Because of Roy DeMeo, crates upon crates of clean, untraceable guns found their way to the New York and New Jersey underworld, and thus DeMeo was inadvertently responsible for scores of mob killings all across America.
When Tony Argrila, a friend of DeMeo’s, went to Roy and told him that Richard Kuklinski was behind on his payments and had an “attitude problem,” DeMeo said he’d talk to Kuklinski.
26
Partnership Born in Hell
It was a blistering hot August day, 1973, the humidity near 100 percent, the temperature in the low nineties. No one was in a hurry to go anywhere. People seemed to move in slow motion. DeMeo was in a foul mood, on his way to the office–film lab of Argrila and Rothenberg to collect his end of the business.
A year earlier, DeMeo had gone to see them and told them he was their new partner. Rothenberg laughed. DeMeo took out a pistol and slapped the shit out of him. Argrila and Rothenberg had a new partner. Theirs was a quasi-legal business, and neither Argrila nor Rothenberg had the balls to go to the police at that point.
That August day all DeMeo knew about Richard was that he was big, acted tough, and was behind on his payments. DeMeo was at the office when Richard showed up for some product. Acting tough, DeMeo was heavy-handed with Richard. Richard had no idea who DeMeo was and that he was truly connected, and Richard was curt and nasty with DeMeo. Richard didn’t like this loudmouthed Italian guy trying to strong-arm him.
“I’m a friend of Tony’s here,” DeMeo said.
“And so?” Richard said.
“And so I’m here because you’re behind and you got a bad attitude, I hear.”
“Like I told them, I’ll pay back everything I owe when I have it.”
“Yeah, and when’s that?” Roy demanded, getting mad, not liking this big Polish guy’s attitude one bit.
“Hard to say,” Richard said, a slight smirk on his chiseled face. “You know how it is. The product’s out there. I’m waiting to get paid; when I get paid, they’ll get paid—simple.”
“You think you’re cute?” DeMeo asked.
“I think I don’t like you coming around and trying to put the squeeze on me,” Richard told him, and these two very dangerous men—neither knowing anything about the other yet—stared at each other with angry, homicidal eyes, like two white sharks eyeing each other, sizing each other up.
DeMeo could see that Kuklinski was not scared of him and would readily fight. Like all bullies, DeMeo was not about to tangle with a guy as big and tough as Richard apparently was.
“We’ll see,” DeMeo said, and he turned and stormed off.
“Yeah, we’ll see,” Richard said to his back.
Argrila now, for the first time, told Richard who DeMeo was, that he was a connected guy. “I don’t wanna see you hurt, Rich. Leave, leave before he comes back.” With that Richard turned, went into the hall, and pushed the elevator button.
DeMeo was steaming. There was no way he was going to let this big Polack trifle with him, disrespect him. Downstairs, in his white Lincoln, were his cousin Joe Guglielmo, Anthony Senter, and Joey Testa. Guglielmo was gray haired and resembled Bela Lugosi, thus his nickname, Dracula. Anthony Senter and Joey looked so alike that they appeared to be brothers, but they weren’t. They were both dark eyed and handsome with a thick head of black hair, each six feet, muscular, and athletic.
Now, with his guys behind him, DeMeo went back upstairs to see Richard, and they found him in the hall waiting for the elevator. Richard was suddenly surrounded, guns pointing at him.
“So, tough guy,” DeMeo said. “You wanna die, you fuckin’ wanna die?” And with that he struck Richard hard in the head with the butt of his gun. Knowing his life was on the line here, Richard did nothing. He had a .38 derringer in his pocket, but he didn’t draw it. DeMeo hit him several more times. Richard went down. Guglielmo hit him in the back of the head and kicked him in his right knee. Now they all proceeded to pummel Richard. Though they didn’t knock him unconscious, they beat him good. Richard had never gotten a beating like this in his entire life. He was angry beyond words, but he knew that DeMeo would kill him on the spot if he fought back. He had only a two-shot derringer on him. DeMeo found Richard’s derringer and took it.
“You come up with the money or you’re fuckin’ dead—fuckin’ dead, motherfucker!” DeMeo said, and they left.
Richard was suddenly alone, bleeding all over the floor. He stood up, went into a bathroom off the hall, and looked at himself in the mirror. He was a mess.
Cursing out loud, using paper towels to wipe away the blood, Richard vowed to kill DeMeo. The wounds he’d gotten from the pistol-whipping were deep, and Richard had to go to St. Vincent’s Hospital on Seventh Avenue to have them stitched up. He received thirty-eight stitches on three different mean gashes on his head. His eyes blackened, his lip swollen, all stitched up, Richard slowly went back to New Jersey. He was so beat up that he didn’t want Barbara and his daughters to see him, so he went to his mother-in-law’s house. Shocked when she saw him, Genevieve let him in the house and got an ice bag for him. He told her, and later Barbara, that he’d been mugged, jumped by four guys and robbed. He slept that night at Genevieve’s house—mostly tossed and turned, planning how he’d torture Roy DeMeo.
It didn’t take long for Richard to find out who Roy DeMeo really was—an associate in good standing of the Gambino family, who ran a ruthless band of serial killers. Richard knew if he killed Roy now, he’d surely be killed in turn, and quickly. He was so mad over what DeMeo and the others had done that if he hadn’t been married with children, he might have gone and found DeMeo and killed him anyway. But because of Barbara and his family, he had to play it cool—for now. No easy thing for Richard Kuklinski. But Richard knew that there would be, in the future, an opportunity for him to get revenge; he’d bide his time. But, he vowed, he would one day pistol-whip and kill Roy DeMeo.
The first thing Richard did was make arrangements with Tony Argrila to pay him back the money. That done, Richard went to Brooklyn, to the Gemini Lounge, and asked for DeMeo. DeMeo was shocked to see Richard at the bar by himself.
“I hear,” DeMeo said, “you’re doing the right thing. You got balls coming here like this.”
“I wanted to talk with you.”
“Yeah, well, talk.”
“First off, I didn’t know who you were,” Richard diplomatically, and uncharacteristically, said. “Second, Rothenberg and Tony are stealing from each other—I’ve seen it myself. Sure I’m a little behind, but nothing like they’re saying. All the time Rothenberg is trying to give me material on the side. That’s the truth, Roy.”
Richard figured, correctly, that it was Rothenberg who had sicced Roy on him, and now he was returning the favor.
“I’ll tell you, big guy, you got balls; you got some pair a nuts coming here like this. I’m thinking maybe we got off on the wrong foot here—I got mad when I should’a been talking. I asked around ’bout you and I know you’re a stand-up guy. You had a gun on you, and didn’t use it…you got balls.”
“Roy, I want to make money with you, not fight with you. That’s all I want to do here is make money…do business.”
“I hear you got contacts all over the place; we can do something together. You just play straight with me and you’ll make money—a lotta money.”
“Sounds good.”
“Let’s shake on it,” Roy said, and these two killers shook hands, a slight smirk on each of their faces.
“I hear,” Roy said, “you got an Italian wife. Take a ride with me,” Roy offered. They got into his car and drove to an Italian food shop a few blocks away.
“Come on,” Roy said.
They went inside. The place had sawdust on the floor, salami and giant rolls of provolone hangi
ng from the ceiling. Roy picked out all kinds of meats, Italian sweet sausages and giant blocks of different cheeses and a head-sized piece of mozzarella in water.
“They make mozzeralla fresh a few times a day,” he told Richard. Roy paid for everything—$150—and gave Richard four big bags.
“You bring this stuff home to your wife. She’ll like it, I bet you. Call me in a couple of days and we’ll do business, okay? I got a few lines of my own and I’ll front you all you want.”
“Okay,” Richard said, genuinely taken aback by this little-seen generous side of Roy DeMeo.
“Thanks, Roy,” Richard said, and it was done.
27
Forgive Me, Father, for I Have Sinned
Anna McNally, Richard’s mother, was terminally ill, dying of liver cancer. When Roberta, Richard’s sister, called to tell him of their mother’s impending death, he didn’t even want to go see her. Finally, he thought, she’s getting her due. But Barbara convinced him that he should go see his mother one last time, so he and Barbara went. Barbara had no use for Anna; she knew what a rotten mother she’d been to Richard. But still she was his mother, and Barbara felt he should see her one last time before she died. It was the right thing to do.
As the years had gone by Richard grew to despise his mother more and more. He pretty much blamed her for everything: for marrying Stanley; for having children with Stanley; for how Stanley mercilessly beat Florian—killed Florian—for how Stanley beat him.
When they arrived at the hospital, however, Anna did not even acknowledge his presence. She was facing the wall, holding blue rosary beads, repeating over and over “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” nonstop, as if it were a Tibetan chant. Richard spoke to her. He tried to say good-bye. But she wouldn’t even look at him. It seemed as though she were already dead and gone but her body didn’t yet realize it. She had shrunken to a mere shell of the robust, attractive woman she had once been. For Anna McNally, life had been cruel—a constant bitter struggle filled with heartache, hard menial labor, pain, suffering, and want. For Anna death would be a blessing, certainly better than her life had been, and she welcomed it.