Murder Machine

by Gene Mustain

  Instead, Rega was using drugs again and dealing cocaine with Pedro Rodriguez while still awaiting trial on the Quāalude charge that caused him to shut down the Hole in the Wall and made Cheryl Anderson a fugitive. Rega and Rodriguez had set up shop in a Manhattan apartment, down the street from the New York office of the DEA. In April, agents raided the stash pad and arrested Rega, Rodriguez, and their girlfriends.

  About the same time, at his old car dealership in the Bronx, Rega had conferred with Rodriguez and Patty Testa on a scheme to ship twenty stolen cars to Puerto Rico, according to a car thief Charles Meade had arrested in Canarsie. The thief and his accomplices had stolen three Porsche Turbo Carreras right out of dealerships in Great Neck and Amityville. The thief was now Meade’s informant, and he said he and two others stole the cars for Patty; one of the Porsches was then confiscated from Rega in New Jersey after he was arrested.

  Rega’s Manhattan address and the Bronx allegation gave the Southern District jurisdiction. Even the Porsche was enough; it could not have been driven to New Jersey from New York without crossing some highway or bridge in the domain of the Southern District, including the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. While it connected Brooklyn to Staten Island, where another bridge led to New Jersey, it still was, jurisdictionally speaking, in the domain of the Southern District because the water beneath it was. As the last meeting ended, prosecutors told new auto crimes boss Joseph Harding and John Murphy that they would give them an answer soon.

  “I know how these guys work,” Harding said afterward. “They’ll wait until next year to make a decision.”

  Instead, in two weeks, in September 1980, the prosecutors committed the government to an investigation. The primary target was Patty; secondary targets included Roy, Joey, Anthony, Henry, Freddy, and Peter LaFroscia—and several junkyards and chop shops. Prosecutors hoped to “turn” Rega—in the meantime, he had pleaded guilty in his drug cases—and persuade him to testify against the others for time off his prison sentence.

  That summer, Murphy had also begun to hear that while Patty Testa was important, brother Joey might be more so. One night, he went to the Six-Nine precinct in Canarsie after two officers arrested two car thieves and recovered a Mercedes reported stolen from Reggie Jackson, the all-star rightfielder of the New York Yankees. Murphy asked the officers if the thieves were working for Patty. They were not sure.

  “But Patty isn’t the guy you should be worried about,” one said. “His brother Joey is the boss.”

  The Testa brothers were the most infamous men in Canarsie, the officer added. Only the oldest one, Salvatore, was living an apparently legitimate life. He was a city police officer.

  Murphy and other auto crime officers began working a few days a week at the Southern District offices on Foley Square in Manhattan, preparing reports for an assistant U.S. attorney assigned to the case. Much to Murphy’s dismay, however, the prosecutor was occupied with other cases and not much was done with their reports.

  To pass the frustrating time, Murphy began going on surveillance with Kenny and Tony and with Joseph Wendling, the DA’s investigator he met while waiting to take the NYPD test for promotion to sergeant. Murphy and Wendling had both passed, but they were not sergeants yet because the NYPD was under pressure to promote minorities first.

  By spring of 1981, like Kenny and Tony, Murphy and Wendling had become unofficial partners too. Just as Murphy was kidded by fellow officers for his obsession with Patty Testa, Wendling was ribbed for his desire to get even with Peter LaFroscia, who had taunted him as he walked out of the courtroom with an acquittal in the John Quinn murder case.

  With more officers, detectives, and agents outside the Gemini all the time, younger members of the crew began meeting elsewhere when they wanted to get together socially. The Friday night business meetings at the clubhouse continued, but the crew hung out more at a Canarsie body shop, R-Twice Collision, that was run by a friend of Joey Testa’s who was involved in a big way in the drug business. When R-Twice became hot, the crew moved on to another bar, the 19th Hole, and then a disco, Scandals.

  Wendling “sat” on R-Twice a lot, with Murphy, or Kenny, or by himself. He tailed Peter LaFroscia whenever he could, and began seeing him with known drug dealers. One day, LaFroscia pulled over and waited for Wendling to come up behind, then got out to complain that Wendling was harassing him for no reason.

  It was the moment Wendling was waiting for; the aggressive, former Seven-Three cop did not lose many when he served at Fort Zinderneuf. “Remember that day in court when you laughed at me? It was the biggest mistake of your life, pal.”

  Meanwhile, Murphy grew impatient with the Southern District. So did his police bosses. After all the enthusiasm of the previous fall, the case against Patty Testa and the rest was in repose; the prosecutor assigned to it was busy with other cases and trials, and his superiors had not provided any help. He had met with a few informants and potential cooperating witnesses such as imprisoned Matty Rega, but made no deals; no one had talked to a grand jury, with or without immunity.

  Despite the disappointing Southern District effort, a new spirit of federal-local cooperation was in the air—at least insofar as the FBI’s investigation of Freddy, Henry, and the Empire Boulevard operation. Unlike 1977, when the NYPD and the FBI were at cross-purposes while investigating Quinn and LaFroscia, they were now sharing information. While on surveillance with Wendling and Kenny, and while attempting to prod the Southern District, Murphy also was assisting the FBI probe on an official basis.

  Because of the surveillance photographs shot the day of the Empire Boulevard raid and the anonymous tips from “Harry” right afterward, agents had quickly identified Freddy and Henry. It took about a year more to reach dead ends on the other suspects and Harry’s additional tip that Freddy and Henry had murdered Ronald Falcaro and Khaled Daoud. As to interstate shipment of stolen cars, however, the FBI linked Freddy and Henry through their fingerprints to evidence found at the warehouse, and with Murphy’s help, tied them to the phony company Henry set up, Big A Exporters.

  By late May 1981, the FBI was set to arrest them: A grand jury in Newark had returned sealed indictments. Because so many of their acquaintances in the car world had been questioned by agents, Freddy and Henry suspected their arrests were imminent. On the evening of May 21, when he saw Kenny in a car outside his new house in Queens, Henry thoughtfully notified him: “I’m going to be home all night.” In the new spirit of cooperation, Kenny had been asked to assist with Henry’s arrest.

  At four-thirty a.m. the next day, as another team woke Freddy at home and took him into custody, Henry was shaken from sleep and arrested. They were taken to the FBI’s Brooklyn-Queens office for new fingerprints and photographs. John Murphy was telephoned at home on Long Island so he could come in and have the pleasure of helping with the processing.

  Once advised of his right to remain silent, Henry snarled and asked to call his lawyer, Fred Abrams. Freddy DiNome was more congenial. He also spelled his name one way, but wrote it another—D-I-N-A-M-E, although this may have been unintentional because he had never learned how to write anything but his name, and he did that in more of a scrawl.

  Kenny McCabe suggested to Bruce Mouw, boss of the FBI’s Gambino family squad, that he interview Freddy outside Henry’s presence. “Freddy is weak; he could be a witness for us.”

  Mouw met with Freddy for half an hour, dangling the idea he could help himself by cooperating. Freddy did not bite, although by the questions he asked about Mouw’s duties he appeared to enjoy being in the presence of an important person. “But I don’t think he’s a nut that can be cracked,” Mouw told Kenny.

  After processing, Freddy and Henry were taken to the federal courthouse in Brooklyn so that they could be legally transferred to the custody of Newark officials. Murphy rode in the car containing Henry, who had relaxed and even decided to be cordial.

  Joshing, Henry said he was just a self-employed salesman and a former carpenter with a wife and tw
o daughters, ages twelve and thirteen. He hoped to send the children to college some day, but with inflation he did not know if he could ever afford it.

  “Forget about it, Henry,” Murphy could not resist replying. “Where you’re going, you don’t have to worry about it. Tuition, interest rates, inflation, nothing. You’re out of the rat race, Henry.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Harry

  Even without knowing that he and his crew had attracted federal interest (lame though it still was), Roy felt pressure mounting from other directions in June 1981. Only briefly into his new role as acting captain of Nino’s crew, he was worried about the Empire Boulevard arrests and whether the case would reach to him. He also found out about Suffolk County’s undercover sting of Freddy, because Freddy made an ominous remark about Kenny McCabe’s wife to his supposed dirty cop friend, Robert Gately, who had to warn Kenny, who then told Freddy that if he ever came near his wife, Kenny would forget he was a cop. That warning told Freddy he had been suckered by Gately, and when Freddy admitted it to Roy, Roy could only suppose what secrets his pot-smoking gopher had given Gately.

  He also was wondering about another crew member he had admitted during his expansionist heyday—Vito Arena. Vito had stopped coming by the Gemini a few months after the downbeat Fourth of July party at Roy’s house and was rumored to have flown the coop to Florida with Joey Lee. It unnerved Roy that someone in his crew had disappeared without his knowledge.

  On top of it all, Nino had gone to prison furious at Roy. Leaving his going-away party at Tommaso’s, he had seen Roy talking to Kenny and Tony and had felt forced to leave his car on the street and walk home. He mentioned the incident in a farewell chat with Paul, who dispatched a family capo to berate Roy, telling him it was impossible to spend forty-five minutes talking to cops and not give up some information of value.

  “Stop being stupid,” the capo told Roy, who felt that was the last thing he was.

  Since Nino’s departure, Roy had handed cash to Paul a few times, but only at the Meat Palace, never Paul’s majestic white house. Paul did not know half of what he should have about Roy, but the Eppolito disaster reaffirmed his negative notions; only because he had such a history with his disappointing friend Nino had he let him put Roy in charge while Nino was at “college.”

  Roy, on the other hand, hated being treated like a second-class captain. He deserved better treatment because he earned Paul so much money. Roy began having murderous fantasies about Paul. He indulged them after Freddy arrived home from the Newark federal courthouse on bail. He told Freddy that it might become necessary to “whack Waterhead,” so they better devise a plan.

  It would be difficult to get close enough to kill Paul without getting killed themselves; he had too much security. The plan they settled on was to assassinate Paul, and maybe his driver and now customary companion Thomas Bilotti, along some highway. While doubled up on one of Freddy’s motorcycles, they would pull alongside and fill Paul’s Lincoln with machine gun fire. Because Freddy was an expert motorcyclist, they would get away quickly and safely, and because of their helmets with dark visors, no one could identify them. Several times in the wooded area around Freddy’s home in Shirley, Long Island, they practiced mock assaults.

  The drills helped vent the pressure Roy felt, but never for long because the pressure kept mounting—more than he knew sometimes.

  On June 10, a made man from another family accused a friend of Patty Testa’s of being an informer. Because Roy was responsible for Patty, the accusation was brought to him. A sitdown was held at the Arch Diner, an urban truck stop on the Flatlands-Canarsie border. Roy, his top crew members, and the alleged informer’s accusers were all inside arguing when a meter maid arrived outside and began ticketing illegally parked crew cars. Everyone spilled to the street.

  After moving their cars, everyone continued arguing outside for most of an hour. Roy was so agitated someone might have died if they were not all in the open. Finally, it ended without resolution, but not without benefit to John Murphy and Harry Brady, another auto crimes cop assigned to the Southern District case. They were shooting photographs through the one-way glass of an undercover NYPD van parked across the street, and had just obtained photos of Roy, his inner circle, and an outer circle not yet well known.

  However circumstantial, the photographs were damaging. Murphy gave copies to Gerald Fornino, an agent from the Brooklyn-Queens office working on the Newark FBI’s continuing Empire Boulevard investigation, because they showed Roy meeting with the two men under indictment in the case, Henry and Freddy.

  On June 13, more pressure. Anthony Senter was arrested and caught with a loaded handgun, cocaine, and loansharking records. Responding to a Canarsie friend’s early morning telephone call that some drunk neighborhood punks were urinating on his lawn, Anthony had raced over in another friend’s car that he was using at the time—without much ado about what he had inside, or his speed, a probable function of the cocaine. Lately, Anthony was looking more gaunt than sleek.

  Just as two highly active officers from the Six-Nine precinct were approaching an intersection in their squad car, Anthony roared through from another direction. Between them, Paul Wuerth and Michael Signorelli had logged more than two thousand arrests. They were Fort Zenderneuf types, and now they turned on their siren and raced after Anthony; they caught up as he pulled into his friend’s driveway. On demand, he produced a driver’s license giving his real name and age of twenty-six years, but purporting that he was a resident of Nevada.

  Having plied Canarsie a few years, Wuerth knew better. “I know the name Anthony Senter and I know he lives in Brooklyn.”

  “What’s your hurry?” added Signorelli.

  Just then, Anthony’s friend came up. He began to explain why he had called Anthony as Signorelli had the precinct check Anthony’s name for outstanding arrest warrants, a standard procedure.

  Back came a bulletin that Anthony was wanted in New Jersey for failing to pay a fine for trying in 1976 to register a car with a bogus title. “You’re under arrest, pal,” Wuerth said.

  Searching Anthony, Wuerth found a vial of cocaine in one of his socks. On the front seat of Anthony’s friend’s car, which had Patty Testa transporter plates, Wuerth found a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson, and in a maroon pouch, five more grams of cocaine—a lot, but in Anthony’s case, for personal use.

  At this point, Anthony’s Canarsie friend panicked; his telephone call had led a connected man right into trouble. He shouted to Wuerth, “It’s my gun, it’s my pouch! Arrest me! I’ll even pay you to arrest me!”

  “You better shut the fuck up or I will arrest you, for bribery.”

  Anthony’s friend kept insisting he wanted to be arrested—“I’m telling ya, it’s my coke, my gun!”—and finally he was.

  At the Canarsie stationhouse, Wuerth and Signorelli vouchered other property seized from Anthony: three thousand dollars in cash, an address book and a small spiral notebook containing the names of several individuals—each with a dollar amount beside, a tipoff the notebook was a loanshark diary.

  For what began as a traffic case, it was an unusually productive arrest—but it was not without another demonstration of why the crew had flourished so long in Canarsie. A sergeant approached the officers and said Anthony and his friend were his friends. He did not squash the arrest, but did order them to remove the pair’s handcuffs and to return their property: “I know them, I’ll be responsible.”

  Wuerth and Signorelli were furious, and before giving back the loanshark records, secretly copied them. The sergeant, meanwhile, continued having an upsetting shift. In a matter related to Anthony’s only by his show of sympathy for suspects, another pair of officers arrived with another handcuffed denizen of Canarsie. “What the fuck is going on here?” the sergeant shouted. “You’re lockin’ up all my friends in the fuckin’ precinct!”

  Anthony would make bail, and his case would drag on nearly two years. On the other hand, in a few months, Wuerth would b
e promoted to detective—and the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Division began investigating the sergeant, who was forced to retire.

  On June 28, two weeks after Anthony’s arrest, another arrest made Anthony’s seem almost insignificant. In Brooklyn, two undercover auto crime officers staking out a suspected chop shop saw a car with three furtive men circle the block many times. They decided to pull the car over, but it bolted recklessly away, and a chase down busy streets and across a crowded parking lot was on.

  The trio had been stalking a woman eating lunch with friends at a sidewalk café, after deeming her a potentially wealthy robbery victim when she pulled up to the café in a Mercedes. Their pursuers did not know that, but—on the Belt Parkway, after tossing a pistol away—the pursued decided they were the chase’s lucky losers. Their main worries were the car, stolen, and its license plates, also hot—small fries next to armed robbery, so they pulled over; Vito Arena, Joey Lee and another man gave up without further resistance.

  Unknown to Roy and the crew, Vito had been back in New York for some time. After telling Joey Lee that he believed Dominick Montiglio had “ratted out” and it was best to lie low a while, he and Joey had gone to Florida, but just to hang out at Disneyworld a few weeks. Since then, they had been living in a motel in Suffolk County and plying Vito’s pre-car-deal trade—armed robberies of dentists’ and doctors’ offices. The contemplated robbery of the woman in the Mercedes was a spur-of-the-moment crime concocted with a friend of Vito’s.

  Vito and Joey had been calling on dentists and doctors late in the afternoon as the victims were about to close their suites. Joey went in alone and complained of a toothache or other malady requiring emergency treatment. Slight, drug-ravaged Joey looked sick all the time, so it was a good setup for Vito, who would then go in, pose as Joey’s distraught dad, but pull a gun, tie up the doctors, nurses, and patients and take everyone’s money—and sometimes keys to their cars.