Murder Machine

by Gene Mustain

  Dominick stayed in touch with his stepdad Anthony Montiglio, but never talked about his life with Nino. Now remarried, Anthony did not have to hear details to know that, just as he had predicted, Nino had won Dominick over; all the signs were there. Dominick had money, a car, clothes, and no apparent employment.

  As he grew older, Dominick had grown closer to his step-siblings Stephen and Michele, especially Michele. He squired her to fancy restaurants and bought expensive gifts for her birthdays. When Michele was fifteen and fell and injured her foot, he invited her to stay with him and Denise; each day, he changed her bandages and sanitized her stitches.

  Michele was fun to be around, a precocious teen who spoke her mind. Because she was four years old when Dominick left for Vietnam, she remembered little of him before that—the main memory was of him and the other Four Directions singing on the back porch. After Vietnam, when she was seven, she remembered the big homecoming party their mother threw and how everyone fussed over the photographs of him that she passed around. Later, she read a story in his old high school newspaper that described him as a “dark and intelligent” man who had won many medals, so she grew up thinking of him as a hero and running to him when frightened or hurt.

  After their mom’s funeral, Michele had been unable to fall asleep because she thought she heard noises emanating from the crawl space beneath the house in Levittown. When she was little, Dominick had told her that monsters lived in the crawl space and came out only when people slept. Michele was terrified that the monsters had made a mistake and come out while she was still awake. She ran to his room and asked him to investigate.

  Exhausted from four days without much sleep, Dominick got out of bed and went into the crawl space.

  “Nothing here,” he said.

  “Check all the way back,” Michele said.

  On his hands and knees, Dominick indulged her, checking out each corner with a flashlight. He emerged from the crawl space sweating and covered with dirt and prickly insulation fibers.

  “You go to sleep now,” he said. No one could ever say anything bad about Dominick in front of Michele.

  As with Dominick, no one ever explained to Michele what her Uncle Nino did for a living, but by age sixteen she too was using “that life” to describe his occupation. That summer, Dominick invited her to stay with him and Denise in Bath Beach for part of her vacation. She enjoyed going to Bath Beach. It was the only time she got to see her grandmother, but at the same time, she resented it. Since Marie Montiglio died, Nino had yet to visit the Montiglio family in Levittown; he had never even called.

  “It’s like he’s the king and we’re just servants,” she complained to Dominick.

  “That’s Nino.”

  Michele liked Denise, but was not fond of Rose. “She’s like Miss Queen Bee,” she said.

  “That’s Rose,” Dominick laughed.

  Some longtime loan customers of Nino were permitted to drop payments directly at the bunker. One day, when Denise was away, Dominick told Michele to answer the doorbell if it rang while he showered; someone might be dropping off a package.

  “Whoever it is, tell them I say it’s okay they give it to you.”

  The doorbell rang in a few minutes. Hesitatingly, a man eyed Michele up and down.

  “Dominick’s in the shower. He said to take whatever it is you have,” she said brightly. “I’m his sister, it’s okay.”

  The man handed over a thick envelope. By the size and feel, Michele knew it was money, and from then on she accepted the idea that her hero was some kind of gangster too.

  * * *

  In the fall of 1976, Carlo Gambino’s legal and medical team was still forestalling his deportation as an undesirable alien. Carlo had suffered another heart attack, or so said his doctors, who included his son-in-law, Thomas Sinatra, a heart specialist (no relation to the singer). The government was dubious. Carlo fed their doubt by his performance one day when Kenneth McCabe, a police detective assigned to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, went to Carlo’s city apartment to serve a subpoena requiring Carlo’s appearance before a grand jury.

  McCabe, age twenty-eight, was a tall, strapping detective with a solemn Irish face and controlled manner. He felt a large amount of contempt for the typical “wiseguy,” as people in “that life” were sometimes known. Kenny, as he was known, had observed many wiseguys in his seven years on the job. They were his specialty; he believed most were just too indolent to do much else. On the other hand, he grudgingly respected Carlo. He had served subpoenas on the old man before; unlike wiseguys moving up in ranks, Carlo was polite and respectful. He understood Kenny had a job to do; he always invited him into his home for coffee.

  When Kenny knocked on the door this time, Dr. Sinatra opened it, then slammed it shut again. Inside, Kenny heard Carlo begin berating the doctor, and then Carlo himself opened the door.

  “How are you feeling, Mr. Gambino?” Kenny asked.

  Carlo fished in his bathrobe for a vial of pills. “Look at all the pills I’m taking. How good can I feel?”

  “I have a subpoena for you.”

  “You want coffee?”

  “No thanks, I have another subpoena to serve. It’s for someone in Staten Island. Is it worth my while to go to Staten Island now?” Kenny knew Carlo would understand that he was referring to a Gambino captain who lived there.

  “Yes,” Carlo said. “He’ll be there.”

  Carlo put out his hand and accepted his subpoena. As Kenny turned to leave, Carlo smiled wryly. He lofted the vial of pills again and began to shake it between his thumb and forefinger like he was playing charades. It was as if he was telling Kenny he was faking it and no one could do anything about it.

  Carlo, however, was seventy-four years old, did have a bad heart, and on October 15, in his bed, the Sicilian stowaway who became “the boss of bosses” did die. He passed away “in a state of grace,” the Reverend Dominic Sclafani told relatives. Carlo had asked to talk to a priest when the end was near, and Sclafani had administered the Roman Catholic rites of extreme unction.

  The body was laid out two days at Cusimano & Russo Funeral Home, the same mortuary where Marie Montiglio was waked. According to custom, the daytime mourners included relatives and close family friends—the Castellanos, the Gaggis, the Montiglios, and some others. Nighttime was when members of Carlo’s elaborately extended family and members of other Mafia families paid their respects—and so Paul, Nino, and Dominick all came back without their wives and mingled with an assemblage of criminals exceeded in size only by the city jail population. Roy had urged the importance of the wake on his crew, and all were in attendance.

  Naturally, the question of who was to succeed Carlo was on everyone’s mind, and the factional consequences of the deal Carlo forged when he took power—naming an Albert Anastasia protégé as his underboss but limiting his authority to certain crews—now came into play. Before dying, Carlo said he wished that cousin Paul succeed him. Nino and the Brooklyn faction naturally agreed and favored a quick vote of family captains. Some captains, however, wanted to wait until Aniello Dellacroce, the leader of the Manhattan faction, got out of prison. Dellacroce was near the end of a year sentence on an income-tax case.

  On the other hand, Paul was due to go on trial soon on the loansharking charge for which his nephew, stock swindler Arthur Berardelli, had set him up. Most police and federal agents surveilling the wake were betting that the better-known Dellacroce would become the new boss; the captains decided to wait. At the wake, no matter what the future held, all the captains made sure to kiss Paul on the cheek, their traditional sign of respect.

  At the funeral service, Dominick and Denise were told to sit with Nino and Rose in the second row of mourners, near Paul and his wife, a symbolically important position that in the family hierarchy demonstrated how far they outranked Roy and his crew, who sat in the back.

  After the service, Nino and Dominick were also invited to ride with Paul in one of the limousines immed
iately behind the hearse transporting Carlo’s body to the cemetery. That Dominick had such status rankled Chris particularly, but not just because he envied Dominick’s proximity to the center of Mafia power. He had complained to Roy recently that Dominick had bad-mouthed him during a conversation with Matty Rega, the Bronx and New Jersey car dealer who was a loan customer of Nino’s and Roy’s.

  “He says I’m always trying to prove how tough I am,” Chris said. “Yeah, well, anytime he wants, I’m ready. All his Green Beret bullshit doesn’t scare me.”

  Dominick was unaware that Rega, his supposed new friend, had passed along his observation about Chris’s “Napoleon complex”—it was made only in response to Rega’s complaints about Chris. Chris never confronted Dominick about the remark, but it festered, and it would not be the last time Rega would play such games.

  Chris bit his tongue because Roy ordered him to. Roy had his own status concerns. Nino had always said that the Gambino family would “open the books” and initiate more members after the death of its patriarch, who was wary of expansion in later years. Roy had passed up a chance to become a made man in the Lucchese family on the belief his association with Nino would pay the same dividend in the city’s strongest family. That day was closer at hand, and, Roy thought, virtually guaranteed if Paul became boss. So he wanted no confrontation between his and Nino’s protégés.

  Roy also increased the money he gave Nino each week, so that Nino could increase his weekly tribute to Paul. If he had to, Roy would adjust to life under the Manhattan faction, but now was the time to show the Brooklyn faction what a stalwart he was.

  A month later, on November 16, the loansharking case against Paul fell apart in the middle of trial. His nephew, Arthur Berardelli, got on the stand and forgot everything. Artie Boy had no idea what the prosecutor was talking about—what loansharking?

  Paul walked out of the courtroom with a smile. The late Carlo could not have pulled off a better one. To a judge who was to sentence Berardelli for contempt for refusing to testify, federal prosecutor Peter Sudler complained: “What happened here is that somebody got to this defendant. There was a setup.”

  Berardelli, who did testify against another stock swindler, was given five years in prison. He also left the courtroom with a smile, and went off to do his time in peace, pleased to be alive.

  On Thanksgiving Day 1976, a few days after Paul’s acquittal, Aniello Dellacroce got out of prison. Dellacroce’s crews were not all based in Manhattan; his most notorious crew was headquartered in Queens, in fact. His faction was identified with Manhattan because of his social club on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. Dellacroce’s rugged Queens crew included the violent Gotti brothers. John Gotti, the former Brownsville-Canarsie resident who was the smartest and most ill-tempered brother, was completing a short prison sentence for a homicide that had been plea-bargained to attempted manslaughter by his connected attorney, Roy Cohn; even so, Dellacroce had a bevy of shooters at his disposal. With Paul backed by, among others, Nino, Roy, and Roy’s crew, a bloody showdown was possible if a successor to Carlo could not be agreeably chosen.

  A few weeks after Dellacroce was released, he agreed to a summit with Paul. Each contender for power would be allowed to bring two associates to a meeting at Nino’s house. On the appointed day, Nino ordered Dominick to see Roy at the Gemini and “pick up a package.” After Dominick returned, they would “pack up” Nino’s mother Mary, Rose, Denise, and all the children, and send them to Roy Gaggi’s house in Staten Island.

  “We’re gonna make Paul the boss tonight,” Nino said.

  Outside the Gemini, Roy the gun nut opened his Cadillac’s trunk and gave Dominick a package wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. Inside, broken down, was an M-2 automatic rifle and three “banana clips”—ammunition magazines containing ninety rounds of highly destructive .72 millimeter shells.

  Back in Bath Beach, after the women and children were sent away, Nino issued more orders. As Dominick listened in amazement, it became apparent Paul and Nino intended to eliminate the hierarchy of the Gambino family if the meeting did not go Paul’s way. Nino said the meeting would begin early in the evening and he wanted Dominick to assemble the M-2 and station himself by the front window in his upstairs apartment beforehand. The window looked out onto Nino’s driveway.

  Weapons, Nino said, had been banned from the meeting, “but I’m going to tape a pistol under the kitchen table just in case.” If Dominick heard shooting downstairs, he was to shoot anyone who came out the house—if the shooting went Paul’s and Nino’s way, no one would be leaving. If it did not, they would be dead, and so Dominick should “shoot anybody who tries to make it out the driveway. Don’t let any of the cocksuckers get away alive.”

  As darkness fell, Dominick walked up the steps to his apartment. The steps and the M-2 jarred loose memories. He turned off the lights, laid the banana clips on the windowsill, propped the M-2 across two pillows, and assumed a night ambush position. Like stars over a jungle trail, a small porch light illuminated the driveway, his kill zone. Through an opening in the canopy he saw a streetlamp on the corner—it looked like the moon. In its glow, apartment buildings loomed like hills. The only thing missing was the war paint, and Uncle Ben, Bones the radio man, and the rest of his LURP teammates.

  A passing car caused Dominick to snap to. This was no time to daydream. Too much reality on the line. If he had to litter the driveway with Gambinos, he would have to race to Staten Island, get Denise and their daughter and flee Brooklyn for a life on the run, wanted by cops and gangsters; what a legacy to leave behind—a massacre to rival the one staged by Frank Scalise and others on St. Valentine’s Day in Chicago in 1929.

  In a half hour, he saw Paul arrive with two men: Thomas Bilotti, a family captain, or capo, and Joe Gallo, an elderly man who was the family’s consigliere, or in-house lawyer. Dominick had known them since childhood. He had worked as a landscaper for Bilotti’s brother; Joe Gallo attended New Year’s parties at Paul’s with Carlo. Dominick grew anxious. What if he heard shots and these men came out? Surely, Nino had not meant he should kill them.

  In another few minutes, a car containing four men pulled up. Three men he did not recognize came up the driveway and went inside. He had not met Aniello Dellacroce before but knew this must be the Manhattan faction.

  Fifteen minutes passed, without any shooting. The Manhattan faction came out and walked down the driveway. Dominick looked down the barrel of the M-2 at their backs until they got in the car and drove away. In a few minutes more, Paul and his companions left. Dominick waited until Nino tapped on the door. After so much tension, Nino’s triumphant announcement was anticlimactic. “Come on out! They just made Paulie the boss!”

  The same deal struck twenty years earlier had been struck again. Rather than risk a fight, Dellacroce would remain underboss with authority over some crews. Dominick rejoiced in Nino’s jubilation. “Uncle” Paul was the new number one important man. The seat of power would stay in Brooklyn. Dominick felt on the inside of a historic event—a prince at his king’s coronation.

  He soon threw out the numbing Thorazine his VA doctor had prescribed for his dismemberment flashbacks and nightmares. Sitting by his upstairs window with the M-2, fully prepared to mow down Nino’s and Paul’s enemies, he had finally had a flashback worth savoring—him on point, watching out for his buddies.

  In his mind, just as he predicted to Denise when he went to work for Nino, the action of “that life” had chased his bad dreams away.

  CHAPTER 8

  Button Man

  Paul issued several decrees after he took over, but none involved Roy, to Roy’s utter distress. He promoted soldiers, moved others into different crews, settled old jurisdictional disputes, opened a new social club. He did not, however, make any new members; he told Nino he was against ever admitting Roy. In keeping with a self-image founded on the success of his meat and poultry distributorships, Paul preferred “white collar” rackets such as union manipulatio
n and construction bid-rigging. He looked down his bulky Sicilian nose at “blue collar” crimes like auto theft and hijacking, and thus also Roy. He accepted Roy’s money but not Roy, who bitterly protested to Nino and began plotting ways to change Paul’s mind.

  “I want to be made,” Roy complained with more firmness than he normally used with Nino, “and I fucking deserve it.”

  “I’ll speak to Paul; just relax.”

  Roy felt especially cheated because Nino was one of the men Paul promoted. Nino was now captain, or capo, of Paul’s old crew. Most of the soldiers formerly under Paul’s command were not very active, however. Most were getting on in years. With his blood relationship to Carlo, and the steady income from his meat business and loanshark book, Paul never needed a strong crew—so his men, apart from Nino, ran errands, smoked cigars, and contented themselves with a little bookmaking and loansharking.

  In practical terms, given such a moribund bunch, Nino’s promotion meant only a few extra ministerial duties. But in terms of status, it meant everything: Because of his long relationship with Paul, Nino was also the new de facto underboss of the Brooklyn faction. But Roy, who had lined Nino’s and Paul’s pockets for years, got nothing. He was merely Nino’s unmade associate, and he was infuriated that, technically speaking, the cigar-chompers in Nino’s crew had more clout than he.

  Nino spoke to Paul, but Paul was adamant.

  When associates became made men, they got “buttons” or were “straightened out.” It was all Roy wanted to talk about in the early days of Paul’s reign, Nino complained to Dominick one night.

  “Roy wants his button. I’m against it. I told him he doesn’t have to get promoted now, he’s doing fine. If he gets promoted, Paul ain’t gonna stand for half the stuff he’s gettin’ away with, and he’s gonna wind up hurt.”

  Dominick knew “the stuff” to which Nino referred was drugs and “sick shit” pornography, but these were subjects to be read only between the lines—they were not to be discussed, not with Nino, and it went without saying, never with Paul.