by Gene Mustain
He decided that even if alerted, Danny was unlikely to run away; it was better to try and talk Roy into some other remedy. Two days later, on November 15, 1978, he went to see Roy at the Gemini; he had waited a day too long. Chris and the Gemini twins had already wiped their knives clean and put the dismemberment “tool kits” Roy had given them back into the trunks of their Porsches and Mercedes.
Before talking to Roy, Dominick saw Chris and Joey and Anthony standing outside, examining one of their newest tag jobs. “Have you seen Danny?” he asked Chris, who shrugged, shook his head and smiled in a pointedly ironic way.
“Nobody will see Danny no more.”
Dominick heard Joey and Anthony begin to giggle repulsively. The crew was capable of anything, but it was still a shock to imagine them cutting up a supposed friend, rather than just shooting him in the head. He stared at Chris until Chris said: “If you could have seen the way we took Danny. He went like a sucker.”
For a moment, Dominick wished he had brought an M-2 like the one he had the night he stood guard over Paul’s coronation, but which had since been returned to Roy’s basement arsenal at the Gemini. He would have shot Chris first, in his bearded, smirking face, then obliterated Joey and Anthony, just like they were NVA soldiers popping out of a bush. He continued staring at Chris until Joey and Anthony stopped giggling and with Chris fixed him with equally hard glares. Dominick’s evolutionary estrangement from the DeMeo crew’s dismemberment faction was now complete.
Without a word, he broke away and went inside to ask Roy what happened. Roy was in a smirking mood too: “Danny’s car was found on the bridge last night, but if anybody wants to talk to him they’ll have to talk to him at the Fountain Avenue dump.”
As Danny had feared, his wife and his children were not going to be able to collect on his insurance policy because he was never found. After dismembering and dumping him, his killers had driven his car to the center of the Manhattan Bridge and left it there—with the motor running and the doors open—to make it appear that a despondent Danny had jumped into the East River.
“We committed him suicide,” Roy would later joke.
Danny had not gone like a sucker, but like a lamb. The day he disappeared, Roy telephoned his house and told him to come to the Gemini, meaning Joseph Guglielmo’s clubhouse-apartment. Suicidal Danny did as commanded. But he told his wife Angellina that he was just going to run an errand, and only later did she think it was significant that he had seemed to make a special effort to say goodbye to her and their two daughters. Only later did she also discover that he had left the house without his wallet or watch, and also his gold rope chain with a cross, which he always wore. Willingly ending his losing streak, Danny the hardboiled ex-convict went right into the lion’s den to be slaughtered.
“I wish you would’ve told me earlier,” Roy grunted when his Westie loyalists, Jimmy Coonan and Mickey Featherstone, told him that Danny had tried to secretly borrow from Roy through Coonan. “I would’ve cut him up in littler pieces.”
CHAPTER 13
Sprouting Wings
Even before his uncle was indicted and became preoccupied with his Westchester Premier Theater troubles, Dominick had told his wife he was going to start creating his own “things” because Nino was never going to pay him more money or set him up in some business. He meant to do more than sell drugs at his now familiar post by the ladies’ powder room at Studio 54, and he became more determined to sprout his own wings after learning that Nino had arbitrarily nixed a proposal from Paul that Dominick become his new chauffeur.
The driver’s job became open when Paul set him up in a concrete business. Unaware of what a party animal Dominick had become, because Nino was too embarrassed to tell him, Paul still thought of Dominick as his reliable and honorary little nephew.
“You did what?” Dominick snapped when Nino informed him. “Paul’s driver was making a grand a week!”
“Yeah but you’d practically have to live with the guy. You’d never be home. I didn’t think it was a good idea.”
“Don’t you think you should have asked me first?”
With money and a stronger will, Nino had been controlling Dominick for a long time, but he was also punishing him now for his recent behavior. “What for? You work for me, remember?”
“I’m just your fuckin’ mutt.”
“That’s true.”
Rarely was there any more talk in the bunker about a button for Dominick someday other than an occasional remark from Nino whenever Dominick irked him that made men had to demonstrate a responsible nature.
“You mean like Roy?” Dominick would fire back directly.
Technically, Dominick had met one condition of membership—in the Governara homicide, even without pulling a trigger, he had “made his bones”—helped kill someone. Usually only men who had taken part in a murder were made because this made it impossible for undercover cops or agents to infiltrate the family.
“I don’t need a button,” Dominick would also say to Nino now. “I don’t want one.” He did not sound as convincing as he wanted to sound.
Telling Denise what Nino had done, Dominick added: “It would be nice having our own house someday, but it ain’t gonna happen with me as his slave. I really am gonna have to get my own things together or we’re gonna be stuck in this damn bunker forever.”
“That would be nice, our own house,” agreed Denise, who had long since accepted her situation and was therefore uninterested in a detailed description of the “things” Dominick had in mind.
Having spent the last five years in the company of Nino and the DeMeo crew, it hardly even occurred to Dominick that money was made any way but illicitly. Schemes, scams, ripoffs—these were now the natural order of things. The only unnatural thing was the crew’s repellent barbarity, but that had nothing to do with him, he hoped.
Establishing his own order, he returned to the taverns that he formerly patronized in the South Bronx ghetto—when he worked at Matty Rega’s car dealership (since shut down) on Jerome Avenue, or went there to pick up payments—and reacquainted himself with the black and Hispanic proprietors, seemingly for a song and old times’ sake.
In a few days, however, the bars would get surprise visits from two intruders, who talked and acted like Mafia extortionists—Fordham University graduate Buzzy Scioli and Henry Borelli—and then the owners would complain to the only friendly, connected Italian-American they knew and ask him to intercede.
“I might be able to find out what group’s trying to shake ya down, but if it’s certain people, I won’t be able to do much except maybe get the price a little lower,” seemingly sympathetic Dominick would say.
In a few days, he would report that such and such capo usually wanted five hundred dollars a week to assure harmony at his locations, but was willing now to provide the same protection for two or three hundred dollars. Invariably, the grateful owner would say something like: “I’ll just give you the money and you give it to them, I don’t want those two guys in here.”
This classic wiseguy shakedown began netting the coconspirators a couple of thousand dollars a month—on occasion, more—from bars in the South Bronx and, later on, in New Jersey near Rega’s dealership there and the Bottom of the Barrel, his restaurant in Union City. They never had to hurt anyone: The sight of the bulge in Henry’s black leather purse and the cold look in his eyes was enough.
Though he never told Nino the details, only that he had a deal in the South Bronx, Dominick was sure Nino would have been proud of the operation; the Mafia captains he named existed only in his imagination, a little Sicilian chicanery Nino would have appreciated.
The money, however, began going out as fast as it came in. As he got even deeper into cocaine, a lot went up his nose, but he also bought expensive jewelry and gifts for his wife and their children Camarie and Dominick, Jr. He treated them and half-siblings Stephen and Michele Montiglio, who were now eighteen and sixteen years old, to elegant meals, concerts, and Broadway tickets. Dominic
k was many things, but there was one thing he liked everyone to know about him. Unlike Uncle Nino, he was not tight with a dollar.
The shakedown racket was humming nicely along at the time Danny Grillo was murdered by his supposed friends. For a while, Dominick felt partially to blame. By saying to Nino, as he left for the Grillo house after Angellina Grillo’s panicky call, that there was “some problem” there, he had inadvertently alerted Nino, and thus Roy, to the possibility of Danny being “weak.”
When Roy told him, however, that Danny had wiped out some markers by helping the Westies kill and dismember Ruby Stein, he stopped feeling guilty. Though he and Denise were social friends with Angellina, he never spoke to her again. Many times after the murder, she telephoned the Montiglio apartment to ask if Dominick knew where Danny was, but he told Denise to say he was not home and had no idea where Danny was.
“Let her call the ‘Rooster,”’ he added, using the nickname—inspired by Roy’s slicked-back hair and double chin—by which he and Henry now sometimes referred to Roy, behind his back of course.
The morning after learning of the murder, Dominick did take a telephone call: “Henry. Did you hear what happened? Am I next?”
“What are you talking about?”
“It looks like Nino and Roy are taking out everybody who uses drugs.”
“Get real, they wouldn’t have a crew left.”
Henry asked Dominick to meet in a small bar they had begun to frequent in SoHo, an artists’ colony south of Greenwich Village in Manhattan. Pulling up, Dominick found Henry outside on the street, standing with his hands behind his back in a rigid position.
“What the fuck are you doing? You look like one of those cigar store Indians.”
“If I’m next, I’d rather have you do it than anyone else. So go ahead.”
“You fuck,” Dominick said, with a sadness that Henry failed to detect. “Let’s go inside.” Dominick was distressed because a special bond he felt with Henry had just snapped. Because Henry believed that Dominick could kill him, it meant Henry did not trust him absolutely and that he could no longer absolutely trust Henry.
Inside the bar, Dominick hid his disappointment. He told Henry that Danny’s murder had nothing to do with them “unless Roy ever thinks we’re goin’ to fall apart.”
“No chance of that. I’d die before I’d be a rat. You have my permission to kill me if I ever rat out anybody on anything.”
“You have my permission too. But I think my uncle would beat you to it.”
In two months, Matty Rega would treat the entire Hole in the Wall Gang to Super Bowl Week in Miami—but Dominick’s and Henry’s friendship (though each remained a fixture of the other’s universe because of their shakedown racket in the South Bronx and New Jersey) would become more of an association.
Running amok, Dominick collected a wondrous assortment of friendships and associations. At the WPA, another bar-restaurant in SoHo, he ran into Richard Emmolo, an old friend from his teenage years in Levittown and at MacArthur High School. Richard was a waiter at the WPA and his girlfriend and eventual wife was a waitress. Her name was Geena Davis; she was outgoing, sharp, and unconventionally pretty, with large lips and eyes and, in those days, black hair. She was studying to be an actress and Richard always said she was going to be a star.
Dominick and Richard renewed their friendship and began seeing one another now and then. Geena was usually working or studying. A couple of times, she and Richard did come out to Bath Beach to babysit Camarie and Dominick, Jr., when Dominick wanted to take Denise to dinner and a jazz club and no one else was around. Understandably, he never told the future Academy Award winner or his old high school friend that when they walked into Camarie’s bedroom to check on her, that if they looked beneath her armoire they would find another secret trap he had built that contained an Army-issue machine gun that cocaine dealer Pedro “Paz” Rodriguez had given him, four other weapons, bullets for all, and anything else he was not supposed to have.
He also renewed his acquaintance with the Swedish ex–beauty queen who managed the Spartacus Spa, the swank Manhattan massage parlor where the late Danny Grillo treated him to a birthday session the previous July. This relationship was more of an association, although the woman did invite him to her private apartment several times, and he always accepted.
Though Nino was only suspicious, Roy—because of Henry, who was indiscreet about his and Dominick’s romps—was well aware of just how wanton Dominick’s philandering had become. But so far he had not told Nino and not only because he occasionally cheated on his wife too. Even with Nino, Roy rarely gave up information until there was a benefit to derive. Besides, not long after Danny was killed, Dominick’s association with the Spartacus madam became valuable to Roy.
On one of their visits to Spartacus, the Westies duo, Jimmy Coonan and Mickey Featherstone had paid with counterfeit one-hundred-dollar bills before they headed home to their wives; when a session attendant went to deposit the bills, a bank officer detected the forgeries and called the United States Treasury Department. The woman promptly gave agents physical descriptions and first names of her customers. The Westies contacted their Gambino family supervisor, Roy, who asked Dominick to ask the woman’s boss to ask her employee to rethink her cooperation.
Eventually, the woman’s cooperation became unnecessary either way because Secret Service agents and NYPD detectives mounted an undercover sting that linked Coonan and Featherstone to a counterfeiting ring operating in New Jersey and on the West Side; the Italophile and his Green Beret aide-de-camp would be sent to prison more than a year later, a loss for Paul, Nino, and Roy, but by then Roy’s Middle Eastern car deal would be churning out money like a printing press, and the Westies duo and their ten-percent honorariums were hardly missed.
That same fall, Dominick came into possession of a firsthand account of the breakup of his deceased parents, Marie and Anthony Santamaria, that helped fortify his increasingly independent attitude toward Nino.
Ironically, the account was provided by an uncle of Roy DeMeo, whom Roy had hired to run a restaurant he had taken over on West Fourth Street in the heart of Greenwich Village in Manhattan. When Dominick and Denise, who frequented jazz clubs in the Village (when his running-around with Cheryl Anderson and others permitted) came to have dinner, the uncle and his wife joined them at their table; it was the first time they had met. The uncle, a former resident of Bath Beach, knew only that Dominick was the nephew of “Nino,” an important friend of Roy’s.
The men began discussing boxers, which caused Dominick to sail down memory lane: “When I was little, my father, whose nickname was ‘The General,’ used to take me to a bar and I’d watch him beat people up for money.”
“I knew a boxer people called ‘The General,”’ Roy’s uncle said. “What neighborhood was this?”
“Bath Beach.”
“The guy’s name was Anthony Santamaria. Best fighter I ever saw. Best friend I ever had.”
“That was my father!”
“Jesus, you’re Anthony Gaggi’s nephew!”
For the next hour, Roy DeMeo’s uncle described how Anthony Santamaria and Anthony Gaggi had begun warring because the young boxer would not help the young gangster stage a phony car accident and commit insurance fraud. He described how Marie sided with her brother after her husband began drinking heavily. He described Dominick’s dad as the strongest but most gentle man he ever knew, a man who really died the day he left Marie and his boy behind in the bunker. At the end of the story, Roy’s uncle began crying.
Dominick had heard fragments of this story before but never the whole narrative and never with as much emotion and sympathy. He and Denise were briefly speechless. “I can see he meant a lot to ya,” he finally said.
“Your father hated it when you became like Tony’s kid—Tony was what we called your uncle—but Tony had him over a barrel. He ran the house because he made the money. Your dad never had but a few dollars, and he drank that up. It was the
saddest situation I ever saw.”
“My uncle is a piece of work,” was all Dominick could think to say, before turning the conversation toward neutral memories of Bath Beach.
One thing about life now was that it was rarely dull. On December 5, 1978, Dominick beat the reaper one more time; he walked away from a violent head-on collision on an exit ramp of the Belt Parkway, the oceanside expressway rimming the bottom of Brooklyn.
The accident occurred as the sun was rising and he was driving home alone from another night of scamming in the South Bronx. Matty Rega had issued some loans of his own there, and Dominick was his collector. When one customer got a dash beside his name, they became the de facto proprietors of an open-all-night social club catering to the black community; that was where Dominick was most of the evening. In fact, the new Lincoln he was driving at a high rate of speed had been leased for him by the same indebted customer.
The two drivers gave police different versions of the accident, but somehow they ended up in opposite directions of the same lane on the exit ramp leading to Bath Beach. Their cars collided with such force the other driver was propelled through the windshield of his Chevrolet Vega and against the windshield of the Lincoln, whose front end compacted like an accordion as he bounced up and away. The man suffered serious injuries, but eventually recovered; Dominick had a sore neck a few days, but that was it.
“I walked again,” he told Buzzy.
“No shit.”
“That was the fourth time, forgetting all the battles, just counting crashes and bombs, that I should’ve been wasted.”
“It would’ve been ridiculous to check out in an accident a few blocks from home.”
“That guy upstairs wouldn’t ever make it that easy for me. When I go, God has something special planned.” The reference to God was about all the religion Dominick or Nino or Roy or any of the other Italian-American crew members took away from their Roman Catholic upbringings. God was in charge of all death, that’s all. He either hammered you, or cut you some slack.