by Gene Mustain
Hefty Vito and wispy Joey were a memorable odd couple, and nearly every policeman in the metropolitan region had seen their wanted posters—including Steve Marks, an off-duty NYPD sergeant who recognized them as they walked into the Good Earth and sat at a table some thirty feet from him and his family.
Marks, a robbery squad supervisor in Brooklyn, was en route to a baseball game at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx when the violent rain drove him, his wife, and three sons into the restaurant. He was unarmed and wearing sandals, a short-sleeve shirt, and bermuda shorts.
“Dad, look at that big guy!” whispered Marks’ son Philip, whose thirteenth birthday had occasioned the baseball outing.
Marks smiled and reminded his son it was impolite to stare at strangers. Without his weapon, it would have been foolish for Marks to attempt to arrest two probably armed men, and more ill advised to try it in a restaurant. Not wanting to alarm his family, Marks did not explain why he abruptly had to make a telephone call.
Because it was Friday night and the appropriate people were hard to track down, it took a dozen telephone calls—and a couple of return calls to him at the restaurant—for Marks to make all the necessary arrangements and notifications. Fortunately, Vito and Joey were making a meal of it.
“Dad, look at that big guy eat!”
“Philip!”
Finally, Marks saw the car of a Brooklyn detective-Bill Behrens, who was leading the robbery squad’s hunt for Vito and Joey—pull into the parking lot. He excused himself and went outside, leaving his still unaware but befuddled family inside.
Outside, Marks told Behrens, “They’re still eating; we’ll grab them when they come out. But let me go back in and get my family out first.”
Just then, however, the officers saw Vito and Joey rising to pay their dinner check. They waited in the rain for them to come out. “Police!” Behrens shouted. “Get your hands up! Faces against the wall!”
Joey was carrying a .45 caliber pistol, but he and the most wanted man in New York quietly complied. More police from Suffolk and Brooklyn arrived almost simultaneously. One ran up and teased Marks for his attire as he handed over a weapon Marks had asked him to bring. Hearing this, Vito turned and wanly shook his head at Marks, as if in despair that he had surrendered to an unarmed cop in bermuda shorts.
“Face against the wall!”
One of the other officers had already notified John Murphy, who sped from his Long Island home and caught up with the arrest at the 6th Precinct in Suffolk County. So far, Vito had refused to speak.
“Who are you?” Vito asked when Murphy approached him in the squad room.
“Murphy, auto crimes.”
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
“You’re in a lot of trouble; maybe you should talk to me.”
“You’re a cop from auto crimes. What can you do for me?”
Murphy told Vito that the Suffolk officers would keep Joey because of the illegal weapon he was carrying, but the New York cops would take him to the Six-Seven precinct in Brooklyn and arrange for his robbery victims to view him in a lineup. Maybe then Vito would rethink his position.
From the Six-Seven, Murphy telephoned Walter Mack at home. “Would you like to talk to Vito Arena?” he dryly said. “We’re having coffee with him now.”
“Fantastic, John!”
Hearing the details, Walter added, “We’ve got to move fast. If it looks like he wants to talk, we’ve got to get him transferred to our custody before he has any second thoughts.”
Murphy next telephoned his wife, a devout person like him, and active in their parish church and children’s charities. They grew up a block apart in the South Bronx, and had been together since their teens. “We got Vito,” he said. “I’m gonna be stuck all night and day.”
Mary Murphy was upset, but not only because their weekend was ruined. She was worried about the long hours he was logging lately. He looked tired, and two months before, his barber had said his hair was falling out in clumps. She urged him to see a dermatologist, who advised nothing was wrong that he could find. “But something is wrong in your life and you ought to figure out what it is,” the doctor said. Mary diagnosed the problem as job-related stress but understood this was no time to remind her husband. “Just tell Vito I’ll pray for him,” she said.
Murphy hung up and spoke to Vito again. “Can you imagine that? I’m married to my wife twenty-five years. I get spit, but she tells me she’s gonna pray for you.”
“What is she praying for me for?”
“She thinks you need a friend.”
“Maybe I do—what do you want to know?”
“First, you’ve got to give me something that says you’re a credible witness. Something I can bring to the U.S. Attorney’s office. I’m working for an important guy, Walter Mack, and he could do something for you if you come around.”
“I’ve got stolen cars all over the place.”
“Big deal. I’ve got all the stolen cars I want. I want something better than that.”
Vito squirmed, calculated, then tossed a high card on the table—the location of the victim whose murder won him a job in the crew. “I’ll give you Joey Scorney.”
Murphy recognized the name as that of a missing car thief; it was on one of his charts. “Where is he?”
“I can’t remember exactly, but he’s in a barrel out on the island.”
“How do you know it’s Joe Scorney?”
“Because I put him there.”
Murphy asked what other murders Vito knew about. Vito said plenty, but first he wanted one assurance. “This Walter Mack, if he is so powerful, can he get Joey Lee out of Suffolk County and in jail with me?”
Probably, Murphy said, producing a list of murder victims. Vito began pointing at some of the names. “I was there when they did that one. I know about that one. I heard about that one.”
It took all night to process Vito on the robberies and to conduct lineups in which each victim identified him as their oppressor. Early Saturday, Murphy informed Walter of Vito’s single demand; moving fast, Walter visited a judge at home and secured a writ requiring Suffolk to release Joey Lee to the Southern District.
With Harry Brady, Murphy returned to Suffolk and picked up Joey Lee. At thirty-three, Brady, a detective’s son, was on his way to his detective’s shield too. He was fifteen years younger than Murphy, but they had become friends since joining the task force. En route to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a federal jail adjacent to the Southern District offices, they turned off the highway onto a side road. They were headed to a restaurant.
Joey Lee thought otherwise and began to tremble. “Don’t kill me!” he pleaded.
“All we had in mind was coffee and donuts,” Brady said.
Vito, meanwhile, agreed to meet with Walter. The paperwork for his transfer to federal custody took until Sunday. Walter met him for the first time that evening. He was joined by Murphy and Brady and by Detective Joseph Coffey, chief of another special NYPD unit, the organized crime homicide task force. Coffey was the detective who had coined the term “Westies” for the press.
None had ever met anyone like Vito, a killer giant with a seeming soft spot for a comparative midget half his age.
“What do you want in return for your cooperation?” Walter asked.
“All I want is to be in jail with my friend, Joey Lee.”
Coffey asked, “Apart from the obvious reason, Vito, why?”
“I have to protect him. They’ll rape him and beat him up if I’m not there to take care of him.”
Vito would prove more selfless than he appeared and as conniving as he was while in the crew—but by then he would be indispensable to the case and Walter would have to endure him.
That first night, Vito rambled on until three a.m. Walter and the others mainly listened. They were trying to evaluate the man and his credibility and lead him past a point where he had given so much information implicating himself that it would be impossible to back out of a
cooperation deal.
A clear sign the task force had struck pay dirt came the very next day. A lawyer telephoned Walter and said a friend of Vito’s had hired him to check into Vito’s well-being and determine if he wanted legal representation. Unsurprisingly, Vito’s friend’s name was Roy DeMeo, who was tipped to the arrest by relatives of Vito and Joey Lee, after they made their allowed one telephone call.
After interviewing Vito, and after a separate conversation with Walter, the lawyer gave Roy the pressurizing news: Vito did not want representation and was a witness for the government.
The report was accurate, but premature. Before striking a deal with Vito and putting him in front of a grand jury, the task force had to begin verifying his truthfulness. The natural place to start was Vito’s account of Joseph Scorney’s unnatural death.
A couple of days later, Vito led Joseph Coffey and other task force members to a pier near Center Moriches on Long Island and pointed out the general area of Scorney’s underwater grave.
Scuba divers searched a couple of hours before locating a concrete-filled barrel. They attached chains and it was hoisted to the pier and firemen began tearing at the steel and concrete with large saws. Inevitably, the eerie work yielded dark humor. “First time I ever seen firemen do an autopsy,” Harry Brady said.
Joseph Coffey, a tall swashbuckling type whose glibness with reporters made him one of the city’s better-known detectives, had waited out the search in a nearby restaurant. Once the sawing began, he came out with a few cocktails under his belt. A Scuba diver then surfaced and gave a medical examiner a piece of concrete that had fallen off the decaying barrel as it was hoisted. It appeared to encase a human bone.
“This is the hip bone,” the medical examiner told Coffey.
A few cops nearly fell in the water as Coffey began singing, “The hip bone’s connected to the thigh bone . . .”
It was no problem identifying the body as Scorney’s. He had been entombed with his hands across his chest. Beneath one skeletal hand, in a dungaree jacket pocket, was a wallet; it contained several still intact identification cards. Some cops began thinking that opportunistic Vito had intentionally left it on the body so that some day, if needed, people would have proof they should listen to what he had to say. The wallet was another insurance policy, like the one “Harry” wrote for himself with the FBI.
Vito’s arrest was a sudden light in a dark moldy room that sends the vermin scurrying for their holes. Believing, incorrectly, that they would be arrested immediately, Roy and most of the crew suddenly vanished from the Gemini and other feeding grounds. Roy even stayed away from his home in Massapequa Park. His disappearing act, particularly, bolstered the task force’s confidence in Vito’s credibility.
Hoping to intensify the pressure on Roy at home, Kenny McCabe telephoned Gladys DeMeo and said he was worried about her husband because he had not been seen lately.
“I’ll be sure to tell him that,” she said, with indifference that struck Kenny as unwifely. Days later, with Roy still in the wind, he went to her house to deliver a grand jury subpoena for him. She would not come to the door. “Just put it in the mailbox,” she wearily said from a second-floor window.
These encounters made Kenny feel he had uncovered another of Roy’s secrets, an unhappy home life. In similar situations, Rose Gaggi had exhibited far more concern and defiance: A few times, leaving her house, Rose had seen surveillance cars sitting across the street; she would smile and wave sarcastically, then go back inside and tell Nino. Once, in her car, she saw Kenny and Artie Ruffels approaching from the opposite way; she U-turned and raced back home to warn Nino, honking and waving as she flew by their car.
Roy’s home life was worse than Kenny imagined, but Gladys’s failure to be like Rose, Kenny concluded, could only help the case. If Roy did not get much support at home, he might become even more out of sorts as the pressure mounted.
Trying to be a good soldier while laying low, Roy did tell Nino and Paul that Vito had “rolled over.” Nino and Paul did not show as much concern as they felt. Paul was especially disturbed; Vito knew that Roy had reported to Paul while Nino was away. As Roy had for him, Paul began harboring murderous thoughts about Roy.
The FBI’s Gambino squad was aware of Paul’s reaction because of the electronic surveillance agents were conducting against the John Gotti crew in Queens. A week after Vito’s arrest, they taped Gotti’s brother Gene telling another crew member that Paul called John to a meeting and “put out feelers” about killing Roy if he began to crack. Gene added that John was wary of accepting a contract on Roy because Roy had such a violent “army” around him.
Many times while away, Roy telephoned Frank Foronjy, his old childhood friend from Avenue P in Flatlands—the one who taught him so much about weapons—and complained that he was being persecuted by the government. Foronjy was now a successful electrical contractor on Long Island and lived near Roy. They were still close personal friends; between marriages in the late 1970s, Foronjy drank at the Gemini Lounge and bedded women at Dracula’s apartment, on those evenings it was not otherwise in use. In 1980, he borrowed twenty thousand dollars from Roy, who told him to repay when he could.
Now, Roy told Foronjy to start making payments on the loan through Roy’s sixteen-year-old son Albert because he had to “keep the cash flow going” at home while he was in the wind.
The debriefing of Vito continued many weeks. The big man was no dummy and wanted everyone to know it. He enjoyed hearing himself talk, and some of his talk was straight out of Roy’s mouth. “No one understands what it’s like to kill,” he told Artie. “The power you possess when you kill someone, it’s like being God. Do I want this guy to continue living, or should I kill him? No one can understand it unless you do it.”
Vito also was a blatant self-promoter; describing crimes he committed during his limited time with the crew, it was always he who was most calm, brave, and resourceful. “You know that time you guys came to my mom’s house?” he told Harry Brady. “I was hiding in the closet with a .45 ready to blow you away.”
Nonetheless, Vito was a valuable witness. He disclosed the stages of the car deal preceding Empire Boulevard and provided names new to the task force—Ronald Ustica and Joseph Guglielmo, manager of the Horror Hotel. Then, Vito talked about murders—some he took part in, others that Henry or Roy had described: Andrei Katz, Chris Rosenberg, Ronald Falcaro, Khaled Daoud, Charles Mongitore, Daniel Scutaro, and the father-son victims, Jimmy Eppolito, Sr. and Jr.
On those he knew the most about, Vito enjoyed reciting the lurid details—and morbidly making light of his own contributions. Describing how he had helped dispose of the packaged remains of Falcaro and Daoud, he joked to John Murphy: “I just delivered the heads to the garbageman. I was only responsible for the homicides from the neck up.”
His Eppolito revelations were particularly crucial. The gunman in the murder car who got away was Roy DeMeo, not mysterious “Kenny,” as Anthony Gaggi had testified. Furthermore, Vito said, through Roy Nino paid him and Joey Lee forty-five hundred dollars for helping Roy and Nino gain their revenge against the Eppolito witness, Patrick Penny. These disclosures hooked a big Mafia fish to Roy and the crew—and to an ongoing criminal enterprise. The DeMeo task force became the Gaggi task force.
Walter Mack asked the NYPD for more help, and so two men acquainted with parts of the story, homicide detectives Frank Pergola and Roland Cadieux, joined the team full-time. Pergola had investigated the Chris Rosenberg murder and the Mongitore-Scutaro double homicide in Richie DiNome’s shop; Cadieux had investigated the Eppolito double. The detectives, both Brooklyn-born and -bred, were excited about their new assignment. With Vito as a witness and federal resources such as Walter and the powers of RICO, maybe they would finally learn the truth of those murders.
From the outset, murder had been a major element of the case, but more as an undertone of the Canarsie stolen-car culture, a thread running through Murphy’s files. Now it emerged as the
case’s dominant and more complicated theme. Not yet knowing it was actually true, task force members began saying to one another that Roy had probably murdered more than any serial killer yet known. The task force currently had him linked to twenty murders. Roy had bragged of a hundred, and eventually the task force would credit him and the crew with seventy-five, many of which could never be proven in court. The worst serial killers in United States history had all been caught somewhere around their thirtieth victim.
Roy, in fact, continued to murder even as his problems grew worse. However briefly, it helped ease the pressure and reaffirm his power. That summer, on July 4—in the uncomplicated past, a day of fireworks and festive parties with Chris and the boys—he came out of hiding long enough to shoot down another father-son pair, Anthony and John Romano. Their mistake was in still being around when Roy, no doubt in an alcohol funk, decided to act on a four-year-old suspicion that they (with two others already dead) had set up someone he did not care much for, Peter LaFroscia, for a robbery.
Two months later, as the summer of 1982 ended, Roy and most of his crew came out of full-time hiding. Anthony Senter, who had the added problem of pending gun and coke charges from his arrest in Canarsie the year before, was an exception. Unless they wanted to leave New York and start over somewhere anonymously, there was not much point in hiding out anyway. If the cops wanted to find them, eventually they would. The better course, Roy decided in consultation with Nino, was to surface and fight in court whatever ill tide Vito was bringing ashore.
Consulting with lawyers about the Southern District investigation, Roy now began seeing his decision to order Freddy and Henry to plead guilty in the Empire Boulevard case as a colossal blunder; all the government had to do was prove that the operation was part of the crew’s criminal enterprise and Freddy and Henry would have to pay twice for the same crime. Roy would order no more guilty pleas if anyone was indicted.