Murder Machine

by Gene Mustain

  “I’m going to fight the government with lawyers,” he told his friend from childhood, Frank Foronjy.

  Meanwhile, agents from the IRS joined the Gaggi task force—to determine if crew members were vulnerable to income-tax charges. U.S. postal inspectors also came aboard—to investigate whether the crew had used the mail or interstate communications in their phony insurance-claim schemes. The grand jury Walter had impaneled also began issuing subpoenas requiring crew members—and their wives and other relatives—to testify or provide handwriting samples and fingerprints; he was trying to identify who else had a hand in the Empire Boulevard operation and its predecessors.

  “We have no beef with you,” Harry Brady politely said when Joey Testa’s wife Joanne complied with her subpoena for handwriting and fingerprints. Such evidence was evaluated, then stored in a rapidly filling office at the Southern District that was dubbed the “war room.”

  In telephone switching boxes near crew members’ homes, the task force also installed devices that listed the outgoing numbers crew members dialed from their private phones. The so-called “pen registers” were not as potent a weapon as telephone taps and hidden recording devices likely would have been—but actual eavesdropping requires more than mere suspicion; court authorization, which is granted only when there is evidence the target is actually committing a crime, or is about to, is presented. That burden usually requires an informant still on the inside, as was the case in the FBI’s ongoing electronic surveillance of the John Gotti crew.

  Still, the pen registers helped the task force identify the crew’s relatives and friends—all possible interview subjects, or witnesses—and provided insights into the daily rhythms of crew members’ lives, which were under surveillance whenever possible.

  That fall, Artie Ruffels, Bruce Mouw, and other cops and agents were uninvited guests at an elegant wedding reception for Nino’s daughter Regina—the young woman Buzzy Scioli swooned for years before—at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. With the hotel’s permission, they videotaped the guests from a small room built into the ceiling high above the ballroom. (Normally, Secret Service agents hid there while protecting the President or other dignitaries.)

  “There comes Roy with John Gotti,” Mouw pointed out. “John’s just getting friendly with him so he can kill him.”

  About ninety minutes into the reception, someone on the hotel’s kitchen staff—probably a member of a connected union—informed Nino that the ceiling had eyes. Nino and another family capo, Danny Marino, wound their way to the room and stormed inside. Nino looked on the verge of a heart attack.

  “You are ruining my daughter’s wedding!” he shouted at Kenny. “These fucking rats at this hotel! They let you in here! I’m not paying them a fucking dime!”

  Kenny tried to calm him, but Nino kept ranting. Turning to Marino, Kenny said, “I can’t talk to this guy, Danny. He’s irrational. Get him out of here, and we can discuss this.”

  “How would you like it if we came to your daughter’s wedding!” Nino screamed.

  Six-foot-five, tough-talking Kenny relished his own next words: “You come to my daughter’s wedding, and I will shoot you.”

  James La Rossa, Nino’s lawyer in the Eppolito case, then entered the room and politely asked the interlopers to leave, which they did, having ruined Nino’s evening and caused his blood pressure to soar—and having recorded it all on videotape.

  Evidence in the task force war room piled up. The list of targets now included twenty-four major and minor crew members. The task force was investigating hundreds of alleged new crimes and re-investigating dozens of old cases and arrests. Walter was turning over every stone in the crew history—and so he obtained the Anthony Senter loanshark records the two straight-arrow Canarsie cops had secretly copied, the Westchester Premier Theater files on Anthony Gaggi, the records of Roy’s presidency of the Boro of Brooklyn Credit Union, and thousands more documents tracking the crew’s bloody march across New York.

  Though Nino was the top target, the task force zeroed in on Roy, hoping he might fold. The grand jury subpoenaed Roy’s friend Frank Foronjy; he was not a crew member, but had helpful information. He testified that he once took Roy, Roy’s son Albert, Freddy, Henry, and others target-shooting on land he owned in upstate New York, and so Walter made plans to search the property for shells and bullets that might be matched to murder weapons.

  Hoping his friend would not remember many such stories, Roy told him to deduct from the twenty thousand dollars he owed Roy the seven-thousand-dollar legal tab he ran up trying to minimize his cooperation with the grand jury.

  Roy was served his second grand jury subpoena a few weeks before Christmas 1982. The lawyer Roy was fighting the government with now was Gerald Shargel, the one who had taken over the appeal of Nino’s assault conviction in the Eppolito case and won a reversal—after, as Roy complained to Freddy, Roy gave Shargel one hundred thousand dollars in a brown paper bag. After a life spent representing the oppressors, the crew’s favorite lawyer, Fred Abrams, had peacefully passed away.

  Shargel told Walter Mack that Roy would exercise his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination before the grand jury, but would come to the Southern District offices and comply with a legal obligation to provide his fingerprints and handwriting samples and to pose for a photograph. Consequently, Walter and Roy had a brief meeting. Roy put on his best salesman’s suit and face and acted like a gentleman; even so, he also subtly tried to intimidate Walter by showing he had conducted some research on Walter and learned about one of his hobbies.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you, Mr. Mack. I’ve heard you like horseback riding. I like to ride too. Maybe we’ll run into each other on some trail some day.”

  Walter interpreted Roy’s remark for what it was—an attempt to make him wonder if he was a candidate for the Fountain Avenue dump. But Walter only smiled and gave Roy more to wonder about. “I’ve heard quite a lot about you, Mr. DeMeo, and am constantly learning more and more. Every day, I find out some fascinating detail about you that I didn’t know before.”

  Walter’s policy was to invite grand jury targets, in the presence of their attorneys, to provide any information they wished the grand jury to know. Roy demurred. “But if there is anything else I could do for you, let me know.”

  Later, at the Gemini, Kenny McCabe taunted Roy about going away to college soon, like his buddies Henry and Freddy.

  “I can do the time,” Roy said. “I could do thirty years standing on my head.”

  Kenny laughed in Roy’s face. “No way, Roy, but don’t worry about it. On second thought, your friends aren’t going to give you the chance.”

  “No problem, I’m with good people.”

  “They’re gonna put you in the trunk of your Caddy, Roy.”

  Roy’s bravura performance in Walter Mack’s office and with Kenny was remarkable because, elsewhere, he was acting more like a man walking up the gallows steps.

  He probably now knew that Paul Castellano had spoken murderously about him to John Gotti, and that could only have caused him to worry about Nino, who had not been spending too much time with Roy since getting out of prison. Nino had told him it was wise to limit contact under the circumstances. Besieged by cops everywhere, Roy also was not spending much time with Joey or with Anthony, who had finally decided to come out of hiding and face the music in his pending gun and coke case.

  Whatever he was thinking about Paul and Nino as 1983 began, he gave outward signs that he was collapsing emotionally, as predicted. He was frantic and full of foreboding, and increasingly, he turned to relatives and friends for advice and solace.

  On January 5, he telephoned his family’s white sheep, the man he named his son after, his seventy-one-year-old uncle, Albert DeMeo, the former star prosecutor in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office who now taught at Brooklyn Law School. He told his uncle he was under investigation and requested a meeting because he valued his judgment. Professor DeMeo, a small man with an elf
in face and brilliant shock of white hair, lived privately with his wife in Brooklyn. He had not seen Roy in two years; before then, usually at extended family events, or when he served as Roy’s real estate lawyer when Roy bought his old and new Massapequa Park homes. He knew enough about his nephew to want to keep his distance.

  That afternoon, driving his latest new car, a maroon Cadillac, Roy picked up his uncle outside the law school and drove to a diner. The professor commented on a small microphone, equipped with an on-off switch, that he saw wedged between the backrest and seat on Roy’s side of the car. Roy said he was recording his conversations now because he feared “entrapment”—being lured by secret government operatives into committing a crime. A wire connected the microphone to a tape-recorder in the trunk.

  At the diner, Roy attributed the grand jury investigation to “a homo” telling “a pack of lies.” Even though he knew Vito had raised a curtain on some of his murders, Roy pretended to be most alarmed, as always, about his cooked tax returns and his vulnerability to charges of tax fraud. Just as sixteen years before, when he sought advice from a former classmate who had become an IRS agent, he wanted Uncle Albert to explain how the government assembled a “net-worth case”—how it proved a taxpayer spent more than he claimed to earn.

  The preoccupation with money rather than murder showed that Roy was trying to deny reality even as reality was rising up and slapping him in the face. “I think I can show every penny,” Roy said.

  Mainly, Professor DeMeo listened, but did tell Roy he should not underestimate his problems: “If the government has you right, you could go away many years.” As to the government’s “homo” witness, the former prosecutor added, “The credibility of a witness is in the eyes of the beholder.”

  The next day, January 6, Roy visited the office of his target-shooting friend, Frank Foronjy. He was clearly in distress and for reasons Foronjy soon grasped never removed his overcoat. Roy said a “police source” had told him that the government had issued a murder contract on him.

  “You’re crazy—those things don’t happen,” Foronjy said.

  “If anything happens, just take care of my son and my family.”

  Foronjy went all the way back to Avenue P in Flatlands with Roy. The Roy he knew had suffered terribly when Chubby DeMeo was killed in Korea; the Roy he knew doted on children, helped neighbors, and was generous with friends. His lifelong friend may have dabbled on the other side of the law, but just as a loanshark; he was worthy of respect and compassion. He stood, walked from behind his desk and embraced Roy.

  His arms around Roy, Foronjy, still an avid gun collector, felt what he believed was a sawed-off shotgun rising out of a deep inside pocket of Roy’s overcoat.

  “Why are you carryin’ that?”

  “I told you, the government has a contract on me.”

  “I told you, that’s nonsense.”

  Roy gave an odd smile. “My mother always said I should have been a doctor.”

  Roy said he had to go. He invited Foronjy to his house on Monday, January 10, for a nineteenth birthday party for his eldest daughter Dione, a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology. As in Nino Gaggi’s house, everyone in Roy’s house always got a party for their birthday.

  On January 8, Roy visited his lawyer Gerald Shargel’s country home in Quogue, Long Island, and gave him a Christmas gift—a .12 gauge, double-barreled shotgun that Roy bought under his own name. He had told the gun store clerk that Quogue in the dark of winter was scary as Times Square after midnight, so he was buying a friend protection against home invaders. “I’ll tell him to be careful with the shotgun, though, because if anything ever happened to him or his family, I couldn’t live with myself.”

  That same day, in the parking lot of a shopping center near their homes, Foronjy saw Roy walking to his car. He began walking toward him to say hello, but Roy pointed toward the inside of his overcoat and waved Foronjy away like he expected to be set upon by Cuban assassins at any moment.

  In the meantime, Roy became concerned about the state of his personal affairs. He telephoned Professor DeMeo to ask him to get some legal papers together involving his Massapequa Park property transactions. They made an appointment to meet outside the law school at three p.m. on January 10.

  On January 10, Roy left home at nine-thirty in the morning. He told Gladys he would be home early for Dione’s birthday party. By seven p.m., he had not arrived; he had not kept his appointment with Professor DeMeo either. His son Albert, soon to be a freshman at St. John’s University in Queens, began to worry; he telephoned Frank Foronjy, who was finishing paperwork at his office. Foronjy told Albert to relax, Roy would be home soon.

  Albert then telephoned his father’s attorney and asked Shargel, a former student of Professor DeMeo, if his father had been arrested. After telephoning Walter Mack, Shargel reported to Albert that it did not appear so.

  By ten p.m., when Foronjy arrived at Roy’s house for Dione’s party, Albert, who met him at the door, was panicky. “My father is missing again!” he said.

  “Calm down, he probably just got stuck someplace.”

  “This is not like him. He doesn’t miss cake, you know how he is with birthdays, he doesn’t miss the cake.”

  Foronjy conceded it was unlike Roy to be tardy, especially for a daughter’s birthday. He said Albert’s father might have decided to “disappear” a while, like before. He also noticed that if Gladys DeMeo was concerned she did not show it.

  Gladys probably sensed her husband’s miserable journey had finally come full circle, and she was right of course. Roy was not found for a week but was dead that day. The fat little bully who became a hardworking, brown-nosing teenager, the high school loanshark and former butcher’s apprentice who became one of the most infamous gangsters anywhere, the man who murdered more often than any serial killer yet known to United States history went the way of many of his victims—a volley of head shots at close range.

  No one was ever convicted of the crime, but based on some admissions, an autopsy, other evidence, and their insights into Roy and the situation he was in, the task force developed a theory that is highly plausible, if unprovable.

  Under this scenario, Roy was set up just as he once set up Chris Rosenberg. And just as he had to be the one to do the work on Chris, Nino was the one who had to kill Roy, on an order from his superior, Paul, who feared Roy might become a cooperating witness. Just as Chris’s recklessness had caused the family grave problems, so had Roy’s recklessness in allowing an unreliable person like Vito Arena to get so far inside his crew. Paul had reason to fear the task force investigation might reach to him; Vito would have known he was the ultimate boss of the enterprise.

  Because Paul hardly cared for Roy, and because Nino had amply demonstrated his way of solving intrafamily problems, and because he was obligated to obey Paul and had his own interests at stake besides, the scenario makes sense. But, in the details, there is even more treachery and irony—because, like Danny Grillo, forty-two-year-old Roy went right into the lion’s den to be killed—not butchered, however, because his killers wanted the government to know he was dead.

  On the day of the murder, Nino summoned Roy to a meeting at one of Patty Testa’s garages. Patty was not there, but the Gemini twins were, along with Nino. Roy’s long-time sponsor and his long-time followers—the only two of his original crew not dead or in jail—were the only people in Brooklyn who could have caused him, in his paranoid state, to let his guard down for a second or two, which was all it took.

  After Roy took off the black leather jacket he was wearing, Nino pulled out a handgun and began firing at his head. Roy threw up his hands in defensive surprise at the final moment of reckoning, but the bullets tore through his hands into his face. He was hit seven times in all, and was already dead when he was shot once behind each ear, which suggested to some that Joey and Anthony symbolically demonstrated to Nino that they accepted the necessity of the work by firing their own be-sures into the contorted
brain of their ex-leader. Having helped Roy murder their childhood buddy Chris, such betrayal was nothing new.

  As Kenny McCabe predicted, Roy wound up in the trunk of his Cadillac. The killers abandoned the car in the parking lot of the Varuna Boat Club in Sheepshead Bay, in Brooklyn, near where Roy murdered Patrick Penny as Vito Arena watched.

  The club’s manager noticed the unfamiliar car soon after it was deposited there and telephoned police to complain; precinct officers came, then left after determining the car was not stolen. No telltale rotten-egg odor emanated from the trunk because it was wintertime and Roy’s body was frozen.

  The car sat in the parking lot until January 20, when the club manager telephoned the local precinct again. By this time, Gladys DeMeo had filed a missing person report and the task force had issued an alert for the car. When he arrived, Kenny McCabe jumped up and down on the Cadillac’s rear bumper, trying to determine if anything inside bounced around.

  “He ain’t in there,” Kenny bet.

  The car was towed to a nearby police garage. Because the car had sat in the cold so long, NYPD crime-scene experts recommended waiting for two hours before dusting it for fingerprints and popping the trunk.

  With most of the victim’s police antagonists assembled, Detective Harry Brady of auto crimes, an expert in such matters, easily popped the trunk to Roy’s car. The sight inside was bizarre: His body, his leather jacket wrapped around his head like a Gemini-style turban and frozen to a spare tire, lying beneath an ornate chandelier. Roy had put the chandelier in the trunk a few days before, after taking it out of his home for repairs, and his killers had placed it like a shroud over his body.

  Poking around in the backseat, Brady and others found a New York magazine—the cover story was about drug dealing; they also found a wire leading into the trunk from the car’s interior—but no tape recorder, meaning that the killers confiscated the tape Roy had been making and that whatever he said on it was lost to posterity.