Murder Machine

by Gene Mustain

  Later, Roy praised Henry’s performance, telling Nino: “That Henry, he was ice-cold. He never flinched. He’s a natural, like Joe DiMaggio!”

  * * *

  As a reason for revenge, Roy’s black eye was equivalent to Nino’s broken nose at the hand of Vincent Governara.

  Fifteen months after surviving a grenade that destroyed his car, Governara had recovered from his broken leg; he did not know Nino was behind the attempt on his life. He had stayed in Florida until he received assurances that the man he did suspect was not angry at him. In Bensonhurst, on June 12, 1976, this proved to be a fatal misunderstanding.

  Governara was driving the same make and model car, only his new Plymouth was silver, according to a tip Nino got from one of Governara’s gambling acquaintances. In a virtual replay of his coincidental spotting of Governara the previous year, Dominick, striding home from a trip to a newsstand four blocks away, saw the silver Plymouth parked outside a candy store on Twentieth Avenue, between Eighty-fifth and Eighty-sixth Streets. The store was two blocks from the site of the previous year’s crap game. Once again, Governara had come to Nino.

  At Nino’s house, a birthday party for Denise Montiglio was underway in Nino’s mother’s apartment. Birthdays were big events in Nino’s house; each family member always got a party, and Roy was one of the guests at this one.

  Dominick pulled Nino aside. “Guess who’s back in town?”

  Nino, Dominick, and Roy all headed toward Nino’s basement enclave. “We’ve got to go out a while,” Dominick told Denise.

  Denise did not ask where or why. Since coming home from California and not objecting when Dominick went to work for his uncle, she had never asked where or why. Like Rose Gaggi, she read between the lines and that was enough. And like Rose, she was happy being a full-time wife and mother. Her love for her husband, and his for her, was what mattered.

  In the basement, Nino and Dominick donned disguises. Nino glued on a fake mustache, put on a fedora and replaced his dark eyeglasses with clear ones. Dominick drew a line of rubber cement across his right cheek—when it dried, it appeared to be a scar; he put on a Navy cap and three jackets to make himself look fat. The former LURP was an expert at subterfuge; in the jungle, for instance, he would cut the soles off his P.F. Flyers, then reattach them in a backward position, so that his footprints in a sandy trail made it appear he was walking in one direction, when in truth he was going the other.

  Roy did not bother with a disguise. With his knit shirt dangling outside his chinos, he appeared to be a harmless suburban hardware salesman.

  Nino retrieved three handguns—two .38 caliber Smith & Wessons and a .22 caliber, silencer-equipped Ruger—from a false-bottom kitchen cabinet; he also had another secret hiding place in the house, a floor trap in his mother Mary’s bedroom closet. Without anyone seeing them, they left the house and drove a few blocks past the candy store and parked. In the car, Nino gave Dominick the handgun with the silencer.

  “You get that one because you’re going to do the work.”

  “Fine,” Dominick said.

  “Hey, Dom,” Roy said, “as many people as you killed in Vietnam, fifty or whatever it was, this ain’t like that.”

  “You’ve said that before, Roy.”

  “You know, it’s just like what Michael’s brother Sonny said in The Godfather, when Michael’s going to kill that cop, and Sonny says, ‘Hey, Michael, this ain’t like war, where you’re shootin’ people a hundred yards away. Here you walk up and the brains are goin’ to fly all over ya.”’

  “You’re right, Roy,” Dominick snapped. “This ain’t war. We are going to shoot this motherfucker down and he doesn’t have a fuckin’ slingshot.”

  The men left the car and walked back to the candy store, where another craps game was underway, and waited in the shadows across the street for Governara to come out. An hour went by; Roy needled Dominick some more.

  “This is real war, Dom, real war. Are you ready?”

  “Fuck you, Roy. Fuck you and the pig you rode in on.”

  “Take it easy, soldier, take it easy. No need for insults.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Nino suddenly demanded. “Here he comes.”

  Governara walked toward his car. Nino surprised Dominick by countermanding his earlier statement that Dominick “do the work.” He told him to stay across the street and back up him and Roy in case Governara was armed; they never talked about it, of course, but Dominick was sure—and thankful—that Nino had deliberately consigned him to a role requiring him to pull a trigger only if Nino was in jeopardy. Pistols out, Nino and Roy walked into the street. Reaching his car door, Governara saw them and started running, but they opened up with their Smith & Wessons and he fell in sight of about twenty bystanders.

  The killers began walking toward Roy’s car; bystanders began to follow. Roy started to run, but Nino, with Dominick alongside, turned, raised an empty pistol and shouted, “Get down!”, and the crowd dived to the street. Nino and Dominick began running too, but Nino, now age fifty-one, slowed to a quick walk halfway to the car. Dominick stayed behind him—but Roy, who believed in self-preservation more than false heroism, kept on going.

  “Where is that fuck Roy?” Nino asked.

  “A block ahead.”

  “How can that cocksucker run so fast?”

  “He’s a dog, a fucking bunny rabbit.”

  Roy was behind the wheel of his Cadillac when Nino and Dominick arrived and got inside. As he drove away, he almost collided with another car, whose driver laid on his horn, rolled down his window, and cursed them. Roy yelled out his window—“Sorry!”—and he and Nino began to laugh hysterically. It was comical to them how the driver had no idea who he was yelling at.

  “If the cocksucker knew what we just did, I wonder if he’d be laying on the horn!” Nino laughed.

  “He don’t know how close he was to dyin’!” Roy added.

  Just as a man’s power sometimes depends on how he is perceived, Nino and Roy sometimes felt as much power in not killing as killing, and so they let the angry driver keep his life and drive away.

  They drove toward Manhattan and, while crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, tossed the weapons into the East River. On the Manhattan side, uncle and nephew removed their disguises and gave them to the down-and-outers and junkies who inhabit the Skid Row corner of Delancey Street and the Bowery. Then they drove back to Brooklyn and returned to Denise’s birthday party.

  Dominick’s former classmate would die a week later, unable to identify anyone. Ballistics tests showed that the fatal bullets were .38 caliber, not .22. Dominick had not pulled a trigger that night, but under accomplice theories of the law, he was a murderer. He always wondered what he would have done if the ambush went awry, and usually concluded that out of loyalty to Nino the street outside the candy store would have become Hill 875.

  It was a season for revenge. In a couple of weeks, a leader in another Mafia family told Nino that two armed robbers in Florida were overheard bragging that an electrical contractor had told them that a big shot from New York probably kept a lot of cash in his new winter home near Hallandale. The tip was good, but the target was home at the time and they had to smack him down with a pistol.

  Nino had vowed to kill the robbers who burst in on him and Rose the year before. Now, however, he judged the contractor’s conduct the graver crime. The contractor, George Byrum, had supervised the wiring of his house.

  A month after the Governara homicide, Nino and Roy traveled separately to Florida. Roy flew under the name “John Holland”—the surname being the James Madison High School graduate’s sly tribute to Dutch-founded Flatlands. In Florida, Roy called Byrum and portrayed himself a potential client; he was building a new home and wanted Byrum to examine the blueprints and make an estimate. After a meeting in Byrum’s office, Byrum agreed to a second meeting in the Ocean Shore Motel near Miami. He was immediately shot in the buttocks after walking into Roy’s room.

  Roy fired several more fata
l shots as Nino and a Gambino soldier who lived in Florida, both hiding in the bathroom, came out. They dragged the corpse to the bathtub and waited for its blood to congeal—another Pantry Pride night was in store. Part of Roy’s view that cutting up lifeless bodies was psychotically insignificant came from Nino, who had thrown the dead killer of Frank Scalise into a furnace.

  Even so, Nino was not keen on dismemberment; he would have preferred another furnace, but with one unavailable and Roy concerned that someone might have seen him with Byrum, they and the Gambino soldier with them agreed they had to make the body disappear Roy’s way. The plan was to take the body parts out in suitcases.

  As Roy was halfway through sawing off Byrum’s head, the Gambino soldier became spooked by the noise of construction workers outside the room and insisted they leave the motel, which they did. On July 14, 1976, a maid who later underwent treatment for psychological trauma came upon the partially decapitated body. The killers had not left any clues, however, and the resulting Dade County police case went nowhere.

  In less than two months, a black eye, a broken nose, and a tip to two robbers had caused killings in Queens, Brooklyn, and Florida. Officially, the Brocchini, Governara, and Byrum murders remained unconnected dots on a map of murder still very much in draft form, so far as Roy DeMeo was concerned.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Coronation

  From appearances in the bicentennial summer of 1976, Dominick Montiglio could have been a traveling salesman, but for the leisurely way he conducted Nino’s business. Most days, like Nino, he rose late, took long meals and fit personal errands somewhere into the day’s loan pickups. In his subculture, he was achieving status—and much more was just over the horizon. Life was more rewarding than he thought it could possibly be for the average twenty-nine-year-old man with no college degree or professional training apart from silent warfare and the use of light weapons.

  The Veterans Administration had ruled that he was not entitled to any disability benefits. Because he did not complain of any problems during his discharge physical examination, no evidence existed that his nightmares and flashbacks were related to his military service—a classic Catch-22 that was used against many Vietnam War veterans, including Agent Orange victims whose symptoms often did not materialize until many years later.

  “I knew the government would fuck ya,” Nino told his nephew.

  The dark visions, however, were appearing less often. Dominick’s doctor had prescribed a stronger medication, Thorazine. As Dominick would one day observe in an autobiographical sketch composed during a time of crisis, Thorazine was a form of “pest control” that “tempered the chill of bad thoughts.”

  At Nino’s urging, Dominick kept a hand in the car business—occasionally buying cars at auction for Team Auto Wholesalers, a Bronx firm whose principal owner, Matthew Rega, became involved with the DeMeo crew after meeting Chris Rosenberg and borrowing money from him. Chris turned the “account” over to Roy, and Rega was now heavily in debt to Roy’s book. Rega, the son of a bookmaker for another Mafia family, owned another dealership in New Jersey that had begun fencing dozens of cars stolen in New York by the crew. What he made on cars he spent on clothes, jewelry, extravagant trips, and a developing cocaine habit.

  Rega, thirty-three years old, told Dominick he did not like borrowing from Roy because Chris, who sometimes picked up Roy’s loans, was so pushy. “Chris has an attitude; he’s always in a hurry; you have to stop what you’re doing and handle him.”

  “Chris has a Napoleon complex; he’s always trying to prove how tough he is,” Dominick said. “But like I once told my friend Henry Borelli, Chris will dig his own grave some day.”

  In time, Rega began borrowing from Nino as well. When Dominick came to pick up, either in New Jersey or the Bronx, they always had a friendly drink. In New York particularly, in the bars near Rega’s dealership on Jerome Avenue in the impoverished South Bronx, Dominick became a familiar presence. The blacks and Hispanics who owned and patronized the shot-and-a-beer bars were not accustomed to socializing with Italians from Brooklyn, especially a seemingly friendly one who might break into a Little Anthony & The Imperials song, if he had enough to drink or—as began to happen the more he was with Matty Rega—had snorted a little cocaine.

  At the Gemini Lounge, Dominick also became friendly with a new member of Roy’s crew, Edward Daniel Grillo. “Danny” had just got out of prison for hijacking. Like so many others, he knew Roy from the Canarsie junkyard scene. Nearly fifty years old, he was twice the age of anyone in Roy’s crew, but up-and-coming Roy was his best prospect, and Roy thought a tough ex-con might come in handy.

  One day when Nino was in Florida, Roy telephoned the bunker and told Dominick that Danny needed a place to store some newly acquired merchandise overnight. This was how an arsenal of powerful fifteen-shot Smith & Wesson handguns spent the night on the living room floor of Dominick’s and Denise’s top-floor apartment. The weapons were bound for a police department in Finland until Danny and other crew members hijacked a truck before it got to John F. Kennedy Airport in Queens.

  The use of her home as a hijacking drop violated Denise’s unspoken accord with the life Dominick was leading—it was a detail she did not want to see. After Danny arrived in a van and she saw him and Dominick begin to deposit ten crates—each the size of a seaman’s trunk—onto her living room floor and saw that they contained handguns, she became furious.

  “You can’t leave them here! You’ve got to get them out!”

  Dominick tried to placate Denise by saying the situation was only temporary. In a moment, when he and Danny went to the van to retrieve another crate, he said to Danny, “Look, I can’t sit here with an armory in the house. Denise will be nutty until they’re out of here.”

  The next day, Roy and Danny came to get the shiny, steel-blue weapons, each in its own gift-like box. “Ain’t they beautiful?” Roy said. “You keep one for your trouble.”

  Dominick hid the gun in the same bedroom trap where he kept the cash he picked up for Nino. Roy and Danny departed with the remainder—one hundred nineteen. Many went into Roy’s basement arsenal at the Gemini; the rest were distributed to crew members, sold off in bars and eventually used in many murders.

  Although he was beginning to establish his own underworld identity by making friendships with crooks like Henry Borelli, Matty Rega, and Danny Grillo, Dominick’s main concern was still Nino’s loans and, when Nino was away, a new business Nino had started—R&A Sales, the letters denoting the company’s main beneficiaries, Rose and Anthony Gaggi. R&A Sales was a food brokerage. Plugging into the Gambino family’s influence in the food industry, Nino began supplying the one hundred sixty stores of the Key Food chain with frozen foods; an executive of the chain was a Gambino capo. With not much work involved, R&A Sales netted Rose and Anthony fifteen hundred dollars a month.

  Nino’s book was continuing to grow too. Dominick now made pickups from a jeweler in Manhattan’s Chinatown and at the Man o’ War Room, for highrollers at Aqueduct Raceway in Queens. When Nino was home, Dominick turned over the cash and Nino kept his own records, but when he was away, Dominick filled out the three-by-five-inch index cards on which payments were recorded. The cards were divided into weekly columns; if someone paid on time, an X was placed in the column; if not, a dash.

  Nino’s influence and prosperity yielded status dividends for Dominick. For example, at the Westchester Premier Theater, where he had been picking up two thousand dollars a week for two years, Dominick and Denise always got good seats when a headliner like Tom Jones or Dean Martin came to town. They drove there in the new tan Thunderbird he was able to buy on favorable financing terms from another one of Nino’s customers.

  Other than in the Governara murder, Nino did not ask him to dirty his hands. The one occasion Nino decided a customer needed a physical reminder of his obligation to avoid dashes on his index card, he accompanied Dominick on the pickup and administered the punishment—a slap in the face.
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  “You can’t get too rough with these guys because you want them to be able to pay,” Nino explained.

  Believing he was shouldering more responsibility for Nino’s business, Dominick asked for a raise. In the last two years, he had picked up several hundred thousand dollars for Nino, who was spending more and more time in Florida where he now also owned part of another restaurant, yet he was still making the same salary: two hundred fifty dollars a week.

  “Don’t you think I’ve earned a raise?”

  “What for?”

  “Everything I do. You spend five months in Florida and don’t have to worry.”

  “What I pay you is enough. You’re only paying one sixty-five in rent. I don’t know why you can’t live on two-fifty a week.”

  “You expect me to look nice—clothes cost money. You expect me to drive a nice car—cars are expensive. Denise and I want to have another baby. I need more money.”

  “Let’s wait and see.”

  Nino’s parsimony was infuriating, but Dominick knew he was not going to win the argument. He felt Nino believed the way to control him was money. Money was Nino’s leash and he wanted his nephew on a short one.

  “I think I’m worth more to you.”

  “Let’s wait and see.”

  When Dominick was complaining about his finances one day at the Gemini, Roy said, “Why don’t you do what I would do? Go borrow money off a loanshark and kill him the next day.”

  “Not my style, Roy.”

  “You won’t have to pay him back. It’s a way to get a nest egg.”

  “Okay, Roy, would you loan me a hundred grand?”

  It was a well-timed joke, and Dominick smiled and playfully slapped Roy on the back, but he immediately wished he had not tried to be funny at Roy’s expense. Especially that way.