Murder Machine

by Gene Mustain

  “Four guys walkin’ in and shootin’ the guy, that’s gonna be noisy,” Vito brilliantly observed as they all regretted the mistake, sitting in Roy’s car in the hotel parking lot.

  Roy dispatched Henry to telephone Richie DiNome, who lived near the Diplomat Hotel, and tell him to bring the custom silencer Roy had awarded him upon his entry to the crew. Henry did, but an hour went by with no sign of Richie or the spanking new Joey Scorney-type Porsche Turbo Carrera he had purchased. Richie was also dressing like the late Scorney these days—very cool NYPD T-shirts and lots of gold chains under a dungaree jacket.

  Henry telephoned Richie’s house again and learned that while attaching the silencer to a loaded weapon, Richie—burnishing his reputation for ineptitude—had shot himself in the left hand and was in a hospital. Not knowing how he might have explained away the wound, the assassins abandoned their plan, for the time being.

  * * *

  Making money off cocaine, indirectly or directly, Nino and Roy had been violating Paul’s no-drugs policy and thus flirting with personal disaster for many years. So had several other soldiers and crews, including the one led by former Brownsville-Canarsie resident John Gotti, protégé of Manhattan faction leader Aniello Dellacroce. The profit in “going off the record,” as the practice was known, was too irresistible. Short of wiping out half of his family, Paul was unable to stop it. Now and then, however, to remind everyone of the rules, someone breaking them in an especially flamboyant way would be sent to the morgue.

  Late in September, Nino’s and Roy’s long flirtation with disaster came home to roost. It began with an intrafamily accusation, not the arrest Nino and Roy had always feared. A bookmaker in Nino’s crew, Jimmy Eppolito, told Paul that Nino and Roy had been going off the record a long time. Until lately, Eppolito had been the most influential of the elderly cigar chompers in the Bath Beach–Bensonhurst wing of Nino’s crew—a feeble bunch, compared to Roy.

  Because Paul was his former captain, and because he was Sicilian and had been made by Carlo Gambino, the sixty-five-year-old Eppolito was still technically Roy’s immediate superior when Nino was away. In fact, in Carlo’s day, his word alone would have sealed the accused’s fate—but these were Paul’s days now, and Jimmy’s word and life were not worth as much.

  In a sign of the times, Eppolito was motivated by his son’s off-the-record trouble. In a cocaine deal with Roy’s crew, the son, a thirty-four-year-old soldier also known as Jimmy, was swindled out of several thousand dollars. Jimmy, Jr., complained to his father, but Roy—and then Nino—accused Jimmy, Jr., of lying and being a police informer. Dishonored, Jimmy, Sr., went to Paul and made his accusations against Nino and Roy; he even asked for permission to kill them.

  His timing was not good. Paul was already angry at Jimmy, Jr., because of his participation in a crooked children’s charity that duped several celebrities, including the First Lady of the United States, Rosalynn Carter, and United States Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. What upset Paul most was that when the scam was uncovered on the CBS television program “60 Minutes” and newspapers published still photographs from the TV footage showing Jimmy, Jr., had conned the First Lady into posing with him at one of the supposed charity’s dinners. Paul feared that in retaliation, President Jimmy Carter might send another thousand FBI agents to New York with orders to smash the Gambino family.

  Jimmy, Sr., also failed to appreciate the depth of Nino’s relationship with Paul, who accepted Nino’s version of events and ordered him to resolve the matter however he chose—a de facto death sentence for Jimmy, Sr., and Jimmy, Jr., given how Nino had previously approved and Roy previously carried out executions of closer associates who caused trouble.

  One day soon afterward, outside the Veterans and Friends, Dominick saw Roy pointedly refuse to shake Jimmy, Sr.’s extended hand. He later mentioned it to Nino, who, without providing any background, told him to stop speaking to Jimmy, Sr. The next day, again outside the Veterans and Friends, he saw Jimmy, Sr., pacing and madly muttering to himself, “I fucked up. I fucked up.”

  Nino and Roy chose Monday, October 1, as the day to resolve the matter—employing the Gemini method. Nino had always told Dominick that while he was usually opposed to dismemberment, sometimes it was necessary. This, he now decided, was one of those times. With Jimmy, Sr., so keen about his future, however, Nino and Roy faced a tactical problem: how to get the old man and his son into voluntarily going to the Gemini charnel house. They found a solution in Peter Piacente, another aging soldier Paul had handed off to Nino; they duped Piacente into believing that a sitdown between the Eppolitos and Nino and Roy’s crew was to be held at the Gemini and to make everyone feel safe, he was to accompany all of them to the meeting.

  Piacente, whom Jimmy, Sr., trusted, would have claimed heart problems and stayed in bed if he had known what Nino and Roy had in mind when, around half-past-eight o’clock in the evening, the five men left for the Gemini in Jimmy, Jr.’s white Thunderbird.

  Nino sat in front with Jimmy, Jr.; Roy and Jimmy, Sr., with Piacente between, were in the back. Shortly, Jimmy, Sr.’s wary antennae detected fatal signals. He told his son to pull off the road so he could respond to an emergency bladder problem. Jimmy, Jr., laughed and urged his father to wait until they came upon a gas station. Nino and Roy exchanged wordless, ominous glances.

  “Listen to your father!” Jimmy, Sr., screamed. “Pull over!”

  As Jimmy, Jr., slowed to a stop on a service road beside the Belt Parkway, Nino and Roy simultaneously drew their weapons. As Nino fired three bullets into Jimmy, Jr.’s head, Roy leaned past Piacente and put four into Jimmy, Sr.’s. Blood splattered in all directions and the driver’s window exploded as one bullet exited Jimmy, Jr.’s brain.

  The spontaneity of the situation left no time to worry about possible witnesses, such as the three people in a car that happened to pass by at that moment. Behind the wheel of his beatup Buick, twenty-year-old Patrick Penny heard what sounded to him like firecrackers going off, then saw the Thunderbird’s window burst, and flashes of light. Two female companions implored him to drive on, but Penny stopped some twenty feet past and looked back. “I think I just saw someone get shot! A woman, I think!”

  Ordinarily, Penny might have made a perfect see-nothing witness. He was a runty, one-hundred-ten-pound dropout turned burglar in constant trouble with the law and, at the time, was carrying a loaded .25 caliber handgun. However, recently, he had recounted for friends a dream in which he outfoxed a cunning mass murderer and saved the entire city of New York. Against his usual instincts, baby-faced Patrick Penny became civic-minded.

  Looking back, he saw three men leave the Thunderbird. First a slender man, Nino, then two squat ones, Piacente and Roy. As a streetlamp lit the scene, it appeared the latter two were stained with blood. One of them wiped his face with a handkerchief and stuck what looked to be a handgun into the belt of his trousers.

  As Penny watched, the men talked excitedly, then split up. Roy went one way, Nino and Piacente another. Thinking it uncanny how much the scene resembled his heroic dream, and feeling confident because of the loaded pistol in his pocket, Penny decided to follow the two men who walked away together.

  “Let’s get out of here!” protested Penny’s nineteen-year-old girlfriend.

  Undeterred, Penny spotted the two men, Nino and Piacente, a block away. He watched until they turned down another street.

  “Let’s go!” yelled the other young woman in Penny’s car. “Get the cops!”

  Penny drove in the direction the men had gone but could not see them. He stopped by a pay phone and got out, only to then see them walking along a sidewalk toward him. He bounded back to his car and stood by it as they ambled by, unaware they were giving a witness another close look at themselves. In a few seconds, Penny saw a car-service driver stop at a nearby intersection and ran over. “Hey cabbie, can you get the cops on your two-way radio?”

  Just as Penny was no ordinary passerby, the driver was no
ordinary cabbie. He was Police Sergeant Paul Roder, a burly, mustachioed ten-year veteran of the NYPD’s Housing Authority division; he was off-duty and moon-lighting, without departmental permission, for the Pretty Darn Quick car service. He had just dropped a fare when Penny ran up. Per regulations, he was armed with his service revolver and carrying his badge, and he asked Penny what was wrong.

  “I just saw two guys kill a girl in a car over there!” said Penny, pointing toward the scene.

  “What guys killed what girl in a car over where?”

  “Those two guys just killed a girl in a car!” Now, Penny waved in another direction, to Roder’s left, and to Nino and Piacente proceeding farther down the block.

  “I’m a policeman, get in the car!”

  Penny remembered the gun in his pocket. “I ain’t gettin’ in your car. I got my own car, I’ll follow you.”

  Roder drifted slowly down the street; twenty-five feet away, he saw that one of the alleged shooters’ jackets appeared dark with blood. They were walking quickly and looking about.

  Roder rolled on past at about ten miles an hour, to look at their faces. They looked away and kept walking. On the other side of the next intersection, as Nino and Piacente walked past a gas station, Roder decided to act; he turned his car diagonally into the curb, jumped out and stood behind the driver’s door with his arms extended, gun in one hand, badge in the other. “Police officer!” he shouted. “Freeze!”

  Nino and Piacente were now about twenty feet away, directly in front of two gas pumps. They looked at Roder like they did not understand him.

  “Put your hands up!” Roder shouted.

  Nino calculated the odds against him—one excited cop—and began walking in a circle around Piacente.

  “Police officer!” Roder shouted again. “Put your hands up!”

  Suddenly, from behind Piacente, Nino whirled toward Roder and fired three shots, all errant. Roder fired three in return; one struck Nino in the neck and spun him around. Piacente tried to catch him from falling, but was struck in a leg and began hobbling away. Still much alive, Nino fell face first, his palms outstretched. His pistol landed inches away, and he reached out for it with the fingers of his right hand.

  Roder told him to stop, but Nino kept reaching—all he ever wanted, he had always said, was to be like Frank Scalise and die in the street with a pistol in his hand. He had gotten his first wish, and as his fingers now curled around the .38, was on the verge of realizing the second.

  “Don’t touch it or I’ll shoot again!” Roder shouted.

  Nino held onto the pistol, but was too weak to lift his arm. Feeling faint, he let the weapon go, rolled his head sideways and lay still. For the first time in his life, Anthony Gaggi gave up.

  At the bunker a half-hour later, Nino’s twelve-year-old son, Anthony, answered a telephone call from a nurse at Coney Island Hospital, the closest to the scene. Screaming, he ran toward the stairway connecting his and Dominick’s and Denise’s apartments: “Daddy got shot! Daddy got shot! He’s in the hospital!”

  Dominick raced downstairs as the Gaggi telephone began ringing again. This time, it was Roy. After separating from Nino and Piacente, he had seen and heard police cars and ambulances shriek past and assumed his accomplices had run into trouble and were in custody or dead. He had tossed his weapon down a sewer and called the clubhouse to have someone come fetch him.

  “Where the fuck were you!” Dominick shouted. “My uncle’s been shot! He’s at Coney Island now!”

  “Things got fucked. Meet me at the hospital in ten minutes.”

  Roy junked his bloody clothes, borrowed a fresh outfit from Freddy and zoomed to the hospital.

  Meanwhile, Patrick Penny, after hiding his gun in his car’s trunk, had accompanied another police officer who had responded to Sergeant Paul Roder’s call for assistance, and helped him locate Peter Piacente, whose leg wound had prevented him from hobbling much more than a block away. Like Nino, Piacente was arrested and taken to Coney Island for emergency treatment.

  Neither man was in danger; the outcome would have been different for Nino if the bullet had struck the stressful vein running down the left side of his neck, rather than a muscled area on its right. Stabilized, he was regaining strength rapidly. When an emergency room physician asked what happened, Nino said, “I was walking in the street, and I fucking got shot, that’s all.”

  Dr. Umasanker Paty felt the bullet still burrowed beneath Nino’s flesh, then said: “Don’t worry, it’s superficial.”

  Dominick did not know the wound was superficial. He arrived at the hospital thinking the worst, and that relative to death, even the most serious of his grievances against Nino seemed pathetically petty. He marched past police officers into the emergency room, saw Nino was conscious, but before reaching his bedside, was escorted into a waiting room by officers who said the patient would be all right but was under arrest.

  Roy then arrived; saying he was Nino’s brother, he also attempted to speak to him, but also was rebuffed. Outside the hospital with Dominick, he tried to explain what happened.

  The adrenaline in Dominick’s stomach turned to poison. His words were fast, deliberate, and contemptuous: “You left him in a bad spot again! Just like with fucking Governara! How come you weren’t there! You left him with a fucking old coot! You’re one fucking fearless guy. Rooster.”

  The words hit like a dagger, but Roy let them pass through. “We had to split! It was Nino’s idea! We have other things to worry about now. I’ve got to see Paul. I’ve got to tell him what happened first, ’cause he ain’t gonna like how we used Pete to set them up.”

  Dominick then went with Roy to Paul’s house on Staten Island. Beforehand, they picked up Thomas Bilotti, the Staten Island capo who had accompanied Paul to Nino’s house the night Paul was made boss. Since then, Bilotti—a power in the white-collar, labor-manipulating rackets Paul preferred—had almost supplanted Nino in importance because Nino had become so content to hang out in Florida and count his money that he was caring less if someone else got Paul’s ear.

  At Paul’s house, Bilotti told Dominick to wait in the car while he and Roy spoke to Paul. When they returned, Dominick asked Bilotti, “What does Paulie want me to do?”

  “For now, we just go home and wait.”

  Roy was not the waiting type and he immediately began thinking of ways to help out Nino, who in hours would be formally accused of murder, attempted murder, and other charges; so would the deceived Peter Piacente, but Roy and no one but personal family members would give Piacente a thought—so long as he stood up of course.

  The next day, Roy and Dominick met at the Gemini. Dominick, so familiar with the signs, thought Roy was so badly hungover that he must have been up all night drinking while thinking. Some of the ideas he began to spew were half-baked, but he also had solid information. From Nino’s lawyers, he had already learned that the witnesses in the case were Patrick Penny and Paul Roder; Penny, he said, was bribable—“We give him fifty grand, he’ll take it”—but Roder might have to die. He also had already discovered that Roder lived in Flatlands, not far from the Gemini. Unlike most officers, Roder kept his name listed in the telephone directory.

  “He practically lives around the corner,” Roy said. “We’ll just wait outside his house and pop him.”

  “You’re losing it, Roy. You don’t know what heat is until you kill a cop. You kill a cop, Nino will kill you.”

  “Your uncle just tried it! And don’t talk to me about heat.”

  “That was different. That wasn’t an assassination.”

  Roy barely skipped a beat to his next idea. Pending a hearing on a request for bail, Nino had already been transferred to the prison hospital of Rikers Island, a tiny isle in the East River where the city housed most pretrial detainees. “Here’s how we bust him out,” Roy said. “We’ll get some scuba gear and sneak up on Rikers and take the hospital with machine guns.”

  “That’s the stupidest James Bond bullshit I ever hear
d. If you ever tried a stunt like that, I guarantee it, my uncle would not leave with you. He’d shoot you if he could.”

  Finally, Roy came up with an idea Dominick found reasonable. Actually, the more he considered it, the idea seemed positively ingenious. On his lawyers’ advice, Nino had refused to let doctors extract the bullet that Paul Roder had fired into his neck. In time, the healing process would push it to the surface anyway. If in the meantime however, another bullet was smuggled in to Nino—one that ballistics tests would show was fired by a gun other than Roder’s—and Nino could substitute it for the one that would finally pop out of his neck, then, at trial, his lawyers could argue this fantastic, but reasonably plausible scenario: Nino was wounded by the same gunman who had escaped after shooting both Jimmy, Jr., and Jimmy, Sr.; exiting the car, the gunman dropped one of his two weapons; hard-luck Nino grabbed it when he fled on foot—and then pulled it in self-defense when someone who never identified himself as a cop began firing at him.

  “A long shot, but I like it,” Dominick said. “Only one juror has to buy it.”

  The plan required retrieval of the gun Roy had tossed in the sewer as he left the scene. So that night, while Dominick, Henry, and Joey stood guard, Roy removed a grating and climbed down into the muck near Bath Beach and recovered the Danny Grillo-type .38 caliber Smith & Wesson he had used. At the Gemini, Roy dipped the weapon into an oil drum filled with water and fired one round, which he then fished out.

  “Now, it’s your job to smuggle it in,” Roy said, handing over the ballistically correct bullet.

  On October 8, Rose Gaggi, who was never told about the plot, and Dominick visited Nino in his guarded room at the Rikers Island infirmary. Fearful of metal detectors, Dominick had wrapped the bullet in a condom and concealed it in his mouth. As the visit ended, he coughed into his right hand, then shook Nino’s, and kissed him on the cheek, Sicilian to Sicilian. That night, Nino lay awake, hastening nature by gouging at his neck with his fingernails. When the Roder-fired bullet popped out, he flushed it down a toilet; the next day, he gave the smuggled-in round to a corrections officer, who gave the manufactured evidence to police. The fix was on.