Murder Machine

by Gene Mustain

  Vito never came back to Roy and the crew because he thought they were a literal dead-end street. The signs were plentiful. Roy had told crew members to get phony jobs because they were all under investigation and needed a plausible way to account for their high standard of living. Freddy had said he wanted to kill Detective Kenny McCabe, or maybe his wife. Then Roy and Henry had murdered young body-and-fender man Daniel Scutaro in Richie’s shop merely because he came looking for his friend and partner Charles Mongitore.

  Although Vito himself was brutally calculating when he executed Joey Scorney and won a position in the crew, the Scutaro murder was beyond his large threshold. He came to believe that the crew might just kill him for fun someday. Near the end, his paranoia became so keen he shook inside when business took him to the Horror Hotel, or whenever he was in a room alone with Roy, or Henry, or Joey and Anthony.

  Then there was Vito’s homosexuality; though Roy and sexually adventurous Freddy did not care, it was a hurdle other crew members never jumped. They treated him as an outsider; somehow, he was less reliable. Though their reasoning was homophobic, their conclusions were on the money. A few days after the Empire Boulevard raid, Vito had telephoned the FBI in Newark and introduced himself to Special Agent Frank Barletto as “Harry.”

  By giving the FBI some details and the names of Freddy and Henry, Vito was making a down payment on an insurance policy; if the Empire Boulevard investigation led to him, he could surface as Harry and already be on his way to making a deal with the government that might keep him out of prison, or at least shorten his incarceration.

  Now, after his arrest in Brooklyn, opportunistic Vito telephoned Special Agent Barletto again and gave his real name. “I can tell you things you haven’t even dreamed about,” Vito said.

  Hoping the FBI would extricate him from his current jam, he agreed to a meeting, but in the meantime, in the stolen car Vito was using, his arresting officer, Jerry Friedman, found an album containing photographs of Vito, Joey Lee, and other men engaging in sexual acts. Vito then assumed that unless he cooperated with police, they would blackmail him with the photographs, maybe even share them with Roy—a definite turn down a dead-end road, because Roy would solve the potential blackmail problem by killing the potential victim.

  Vito decided to become an NYPD informant. He told Friedman he could reveal information about stolen cars—and so many murders they amounted to a “mob graveyard.” He wanted to make a deal right away. Friedman’s superiors, under pressure to keep overtime down, told Friedman to wait until the next day to begin talking to Vito. Incredibly, no one thought to tell prosecutors how important it was to keep Vito in jail by asking for a high bail at his arraignment because he was such a potentially important witness.

  So, some twenty-four hours later, Friedman was shocked to learn that his potentially important witness had been released from jail on a small bail. So had been Joey. Utterly surprised by the system’s ineptness, Vito changed his mind about becoming an informant, and he and Joey ran away again. “Harry” also did not keep his FBI date. No use cashing in the insurance policy if it was not needed.

  When all the cops and agents interested in the DeMeo crew heard that Vito had slipped through the cracks, they were naturally furious. Still, learning the identity of “Harry” was a major breakthrough. Vito had given the FBI enough details to establish his authenticity, and was obviously someone who could be pressured into becoming not just an informant but a cooperating witness at a trial. He was a gift, if he could be found. A search for Vito began.

  On and off duty, and without much help or guidance from the still too busy Southern District prosecutors, the cops staked out his mother’s home and gay bars and hustler hangouts in Greenwich Village—but neither she nor anyone else admitted to having seen Vito or Joey Lee in some time.

  The cops also applied new pressure on Roy and the crew. They asked inspector-friends in city and state agencies to visit crew hangouts to examine fire-safety compliance and building and liquor permits. They kept up their annoying surveillance—and soon began to see signs it was producing the desired paranoia. When they pulled up outside bars and discos, crew members began grabbing wives, girlfriends, and barmaids and roaring away. Some replaced the windows in their Mercedes and Porsches with tinted glass so prying eyes could not see inside.

  “No matter where I am, when I turn around, you’re there,” Roy snapped at Murphy one day.

  Another time he told Kenny, “Freddy said he saw you by the club last night.”

  “Freddy’s losing it, Roy, he’s fucked up. I was in the Bronx last night.”

  “Yeah, Freddy is losing it.” It was such a downcast admission that Kenny thought Roy might be losing it too.

  “We’ve got to keep the pressure on Roy,” he told the others.

  Though he had remained in the background and left no hard evidence against himself, Roy was a legitimate suspect in the FBI’s Empire Boulevard investigation, so a subpoena was obtained in Newark requiring him to give his fingerprints and sit for a photograph—a novel experience in his incorrigible career.

  The subpoena was served on Roy by Kenny and Tony, and they decided to let him know they knew about Vito. “We have a subpoena for Vito Arena too,” Kenny said. “Can you tell us where he is? We heard he wants to talk to us, but he’s just a little bashful.”

  This was grave news for Roy, and not just because Vito could put him at the top of the car deal: Vito also was an eyewitness to the Falcaro-Daoud murders; he had helped with the cleanup on the Mongitore-Scutaro murders; he had seen naked corpses in the Gemini. Vito knew more than enough to give Roy a lifetime ticket to prison.

  While inwardly realizing that he was going to have to find Vito before the cops did, Roy said to Kenny: “I don’t know any Vito. Sorry.”

  “That’s not what we hear.”

  “Quit bustin’ my balls, will ya?”

  Wendling got under Roy’s skin next by stopping at the Gemini to tell him, “An old friend of yours, Peter LaFroscia, led me right to this drug connection in New Jersey.”

  “What the fuck are you talkin’ about?”

  “I know how it’s flown in, who ships it.”

  “If you ever put me in drugs, I am a dead man.”

  “I know, Roy. I also hope.”

  Hoping it might reduce the pressure, Roy ordered Freddy and Henry to plead guilty in the Empire Boulevard case. Except for a minor case against Patty Testa, crew members had always gone to trial before—and always won—but Roy was betting the Newark FBI and maybe everyone else would take the two scalps and go away.

  “It’s best for everybody,” he told Freddy and Henry.

  Most of all (no surprise), it was best for Roy. Trusty lawyer Fred Abrams had reported that the FBI had interviewed more than one hundred witnesses. If they were called to testify, a lot of dirt would fly—a lot in Roy’s direction.

  Neither Freddy nor Henry wanted to relinquish his right to a trial, but only Henry complained. Ferocious as he was, however, Henry would not cross Roy. As he had often said to estranged pal Dominick, Roy could not be killed. So now, at thirty-three, Henry would give up a few years of freedom without a fight; based on the plea offer the Newark prosecutors had discussed with Fred Abrams, Henry might be sentenced to five years in prison, and would probably have to serve half.

  Freddy, whose prison exposure was the same, was sanguine. He was absolutely faithful to Roy, who had rescued him from the ashes of his drag-racing career and a low-prestige association with the Lucchese Mafia family. As Freddy had often said, Roy made him a gentleman, made him rich, and even paid to get his teeth fixed.

  On August 4, 1981, Henry and Freddy went to the federal courthouse in Newark and pleaded guilty. They told Federal District Court Judge Vincent P. Biunno that the Empire Boulevard operation was their idea, their fault, and had lasted only a month.

  Two months later, in light of the sharply reduced charges the defendants had pleaded to, Judge Biunno gave sentences that were reaso
nable and expected: five years each. He ordered them taken into custody immediately.

  In ordering the guilty pleas, anxious Roy overplayed his hand. His opponents were not holding as many high cards as he thought. The Empire Boulevard investigation had stalled at Henry and Freddy. Vito was still “in the wind,” and the Suffolk County sting had ended before Freddy divulged anything seriously damaging. Roy did not know about the nascent Southern District investigation, but it hardly mattered; a year after its inception, it was still in a holding pattern. At a time when it was really unnecessary, Roy deprived himself of his best assassin, Henry, and his utterly devoted valet, Freddy.

  That fall, Roy for a change got some good news. A judge ordered a hearing into whether imprisoned Anthony Gaggi should get a retrial in the Eppolito case. The judge acted after Judy May, Nino’s secret ringer on the jury, claimed in an affidavit that another juror and a court employee had engaged in sexual relations while the jury was sequestered and mulling a verdict—and that other court personnel had told the jurors the case involved “Mafia people.” In the Eppolito case, as in most cases anywhere with defendants like Nino, those words were banished from the trial because of their presumed prejudicial effect.

  Under constant harassment from cops, feeling abandoned and ostracized by Paul and the other capos, Roy wanted Nino home badly. Just by being his steely self, Nino would lighten the pressure Roy felt. So he was happy to pay the legal costs associated with Nino’s fraudulent new attempt to undermine justice in the Eppolito case, according to what he told Freddy one night, just before Freddy left for “college.”

  The cost, Roy told Freddy, was one hundred thousand dollars. Carrying the cash in a brown paper bag, Roy personally delivered it to a new lawyer in the case. After meeting the lawyer privately, Roy turned to his driver in mock pain and complained, “These fucking lawyers are breakin’ me!”

  It was a good investment. In a few months more, after the hearing on Judy May’s specious claims, Nino’s assault conviction was thrown out and he was released from prison, having only served a little more than a year for a case involving two murders and the attempted murder of a cop. Nino had not exactly lost his touch, and he came home from Attica State Prison to a big victory party at Tommaso’s.

  By that time, something major had happened at the Southern District. And Roy would begin having reason to wish Nino had stayed in school.

  CHAPTER 20

  Semper Fidelis

  What the moribund Southern District case needed was a prosecutor to take command and devise an orchestrated plan of attack. In December 1981, such a person appeared to step forward at a Christmas party at the Southern District offices in Manhattan; he was a tall thirty-eight-year-old assistant U.S. attorney with sandy hair and a confident bearing, and he strode up to John Murphy and introduced himself.

  “Hi, I’m Walter Mack.” The voice was crackling and authoritative, the manner crisp yet pleasant. “I’m going to take over that car case.”

  Murphy suppressed an impulse to respond skeptically. This was a Christmas party and strapping Walter Mack seemed sincere, but he knew that a month before, Walter had been promoted to a big job, chief of the Southern District’s organized crime unit. As supervisor of the fifteen assistant U.S. attorneys working on “OC” cases, how would he have any more time than his predecessor?

  While Murphy measured his words, Walter read his face. “No, really, I am going to personally handle the case.”

  Murphy, in his low rumble of a voice, surrendered to his initial impulse, but with a smile—“Yeah, sure you are.”

  “Apparently, you do not believe me.”

  “Well, we had this other guy and we’ve just been walkin’ around down here for more than a year.”

  “If I tell you I am going to take the case, I am going to take it and I will take it to the end.”

  The statement was disarming. It contained no false or belligerent edge, no hint the speaker was affected by holiday cocktails (a condition that Murphy, a teetotaler, instantly recognized). It was just straightforward matter-of-factness. Still, he would wait to see if words led to action. “Okay, great,” he said, raising his tonic water with lime. “Happy holidays.”

  Walter Mack continued working the room; the Southern District Christmas party was always a spectrum of the city’s law-enforcement community and therefore a chance to widen his contacts. Like his boss, United States Attorney John Martin, Walter wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the “task force” model of prosecution in which federal, state, and local agencies bring resources to bear in a coordinated attack supervised by the prosecutor who would try the case in court, once a grand jury voted to indict.

  Martin had been promoting the idea for a year. John Murphy’s car case was to be the prototype, but because it was permitted to languish for so long, Walter had fences to mend, particularly with the NYPD: Murphy’s boss, Joseph Harding, was even ready to take the case out of the Southern District and ask the Brooklyn District Attorney to prosecute.

  One reason Walter was promoted was his ability to get people to work together. He possessed qualities people want in a doctor—serious, intelligent and, above all, concerned. He had been an assistant U.S. attorney since 1974 and won many types of criminal cases. In the courtroom, he was proper and conservative, methodical and businesslike—all outcomes of his upbringing and personality but also the favored federal style.

  Few people knew much of Walter’s personal history; he rarely spoke about himself, and then only with trepidation, as if he was concerned about misinterpretation. Some of the details, by themselves, suggested a life of genteel privilege. He was raised well and comfortably in a close-knit family on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His father was an entrepreneur and philanthropist, and a former president of the Pepsi-Cola Company. He was educated in private boarding schools and was a graduate of Harvard College. While an adolescent, he once said, he had been “a pretty spoiled kid.”

  If so, he was also self-aware. After college, as the Vietnam War heated up, he told his father he wanted to learn more about the world and himself. He also wanted a challenge and so he intended to enlist in the United States Marine Corps. “The Marines will toughen me up,” he said.

  His father was a Navy veteran and believed in public service, but knew that during war most Marines saw combat. “Do you have to be in the Marines? Do you have to do it the hardest way?”

  Walter had thought it out carefully. He was in the Reserve Officer Training Corps at Harvard. He believed combat asked more of a human being—more intelligence, ability, and determination—than any other endeavor. He believed, as General George S. Patton once said, that next to war, all human endeavor shrinks in significance. Walter wanted to know: Was he up to it? Could he lead men into battle? Walter also believed in linear thinking: Every problem, even the chaos of combat, was susceptible to analysis; all risks could be minimized through rational planning. Was he a rational planner? After the war, he would begin doubting the United States role in Vietnam, but at the time it was where he wanted to be.

  “I know I’m being stubborn and selfish, but I want to do this,” he told his father shortly before he enlisted in 1965. “It’s important to me.”

  In Vietnam in late 1967, while Dominick Montiglio was conducting LURP patrols on Hill 875 near Dak To for the Army’s 173d Airborne Brigade, Marine Corps Captain Walter Mack took command of a rifle company. It was stationed near the allegedly demilitarized zone between the warring northern and southern halves of the country. Its job was to guard against infiltration from the north.

  As a company commander, Walter was a relentless cajoler and taskmaster. He wanted every advantage he could seize. He hounded superiors for more and better firepower and scavenged spare parts and supplies from other units. When not on patrol, his men were drilling and cleaning equipment; they had to obey rules—no smoking while on patrol, camouflage gear on at all times. The greatest enemy, Walter said, was habit—always patrolling at the same time, always movi
ng in the same formation, always returning to base along the same route. Anything predictable was bad.

  In time, Walter’s company became the main “reaction” company when an enemy force penetrated the zone. Applying his theory that warfare was susceptible to analysis, Walter never let his company move without first studying his maps and intelligence reports and determining where along a trail an ambush might occur. Many hours of preparation preceded a major movement; he worked while others slept. His endurance and devotion impressed his troops. Because they rarely suffered casualties and were never ambushed, morale soared. They and Walter achieved the group loyalty and commitment to duty implicit in the Marine motto—semper fidelis (“always faithful”). Even-keeled Walter was never corny or trite about it; neither trait was part of his style.

  After eleven months, it came Walter’s turn to take a rest and relaxation trip to Hong Kong, but he notified his superior officer that he was going to pass up the R and R. His superior ordered him to go; one vacation a year was Marine policy.

  “I’m not going while my company is in the field,” Walter said, “I don’t give a shit.”

  Wishing all his officers were as committed, the superior ordered Walter’s company in from the field to a secure camp, and then Captain Mack’s own troops urged him to go—so he did.

  While he was away, an American supply convoy was ambushed on a road near the camp. Because of its reputation, Walter’s company was ordered to rescue the convoy. The company’s intelligence officer, a Yale man, was next in command. He sent a platoon of forty men ahead to check on the convoy’s condition. They were pinned down by a seemingly small enemy force. He then ordered the rest of the company to rush in and help—exactly what the enemy wanted. In the ambush, Walter’s company walked into a kill zone. Fifty percent of some two hundred men were either killed or wounded.

  On his return from Hong Kong, all Walter could do was write letters to the families of the dead and comfort the wounded. He apologized to them for not being there. He wanted to confront the intelligence officer who ordered troops into ambush, but the man was emotionally devastated and already had been relieved of duties and sent to the rear.