Murder Machine

by Gene Mustain

  Cheryl, still a would-be Ma Barker, proposed a score—a robbery of her own father, a well-to-do contractor who kept sixty thousand dollars in his home on Long Island. Dominick informed Denise he was going to New York with Cheryl, but not why. She complained, but only about the risk of him being seen.

  “Don’t worry, in and out,” Dominick said.

  In Garden City, Long Island, he broke into the Anderson home, tripped an alarm, fought off a watchdog, found the money, got stuck in a locked garage on the way out, but managed to escape seconds before the police arrived.

  The score was forty, not sixty thousand. He suspected Cheryl had taken twenty before she came to see him in California and set up the robbery to cover her tracks. She denied it, said she loved him and wanted him to leave Denise. He said forget about it, and flew back to Los Angeles alone, after stopping at his half-sister Michele’s house to say hello. Michele was now happily married and living on Long Island. She still loved her half-brother, but her picture of him had changed. Her childhood hero was a man to pity too. He had been contaminated as a boy and now as a man the virus was fully developed. Because of a lot of things—Nino’s pull, his mother’s death, his decision to leave the Army—Dominick had wandered down the wrong road in search of himself. The journey was still continuing; despite all, he was just a scared kid searching for an identity.

  The close call in Garden City hardly had any effect other than purging Cheryl from the scared kid’s system. But in the summer of 1982, she was replaced by another woman. It happened one Friday night when a cocaine partner who could not get into The Daisy without him telephoned him at Westlake and asked him to come play.

  “Nah, I’m bushed.”

  “I got two girls.”

  “No thanks.”

  “What if I told you one of them was Miss Penthouse 1980?”

  “What time do you want to meet?”

  The second Penthouse Pet of the Year to come into his life was named Danielle Deneux, at least for modeling purposes. Coincidentally, both women had appeared in the same issue, June 1980. Danielle was that month’s featured Pet and Anneka di Lorenzo, the Pet he met in New York at Chuck Anderson’s apartment in 1977, was pictured in a lesbian grope from the movie Caligula—as far as Anneka ever got in her pursuit of a star on Sunset Boulevard.

  Twenty-two-year-old Danielle had run away from her home in Texas at fourteen. She was a pretty, leggy brunette, like Denise. When Dominick met her outside The Daisy, she was dressed like Pocahontas on her wedding day; he became her brave that night, and for the next six months they danced with wolves. He went so out of control, was away from home so much, he did not notice the disenchantment finally taking root there.

  All he noticed was that without any help from Nino, he was making it on his own. Just as Paul, Nino, and Roy had for their families in New York, he had provided his family, outwardly at least, an upper-middle-class lifestyle, ill earned though it be.

  The Montiglio family, however, survived by its patriarch’s ability to make a big score each month somehow, and thirty-one-year-old Denise was growing tired of living on such a tightrope. She liked the posh house, but not much in it was theirs, and she liked the spending money, when Dominick had some. With a fifty-five-hundred-dollar monthly nut on the home alone, but a husband who did not have regular income, she always felt like an eviction notice was in the mail. To make ends meet at the end of one cash-short month, Dominick had already peddled Matty Rega’s Mercedes, and was now driving a Cadillac Seville borrowed from his friend The Armenian.

  Denise did not know her thirty-five-year-old husband felt he had to raise more than fifty-five hundred each month, because he was helping out his new moll, Danielle Deneux, who lived beyond her means in a four-thousand-dollar-a-month penthouse in Beverly Hills. Dominick usually made the nut, but in traditional working wiseguy fashion, usually at the last minute—and in modern wiseguy fashion, usually through some drug-related scheme.

  The robbery of Cheryl Anderson’s father’s home was an exception, and so was another scheme early in 1983 that caused Denise, who lied to bail Dominick out of a jam, to resent her situation even more. On January 6, four days before Roy’s murder (the news never reached Westlake) Dominick and two pals from his debauched crowd at The Daisy were arrested after they botched the robbery of a jewelry broker.

  The victim worked out of his home, also in Westlake. Dominick had met him at The Daisy and bought fifty-five hundred dollars worth of jewelry on goodwill, plus a gram or two. He still owed the jeweler three thousand. These days, as during his runaround years in New York, he was not encumbered by many moral notions apart from thou shalt not kill except in war and self-defense. His first waking thought each morning was usually how to “get over” that day. The day he was arrested, the thought was to raise the money for the jeweler by robbing him.

  The heist was not planned well. Dominick stayed outside the jeweler’s house, playing lookout; a second accomplice was at the wheel of the getaway car; the third robber, armed with a pistol, went inside alone, but quickly lost control of the situation because four people happened to be in the house; while trying to herd them into one room, he lost track of one, who fled out a bathroom window.

  A neighbor saw the man fleeing and telephoned the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office. Dominick and his accomplices fled too, but were caught fifteen minutes later because the neighbor also saw the getaway car and it was spotted and pulled over. A young, excited sheriff’s deputy put a shotgun against Dominick’s head, then reflexively pumped it; an unexploded round jumped out the chamber. Dominick imagined his head as an exploding ball of red mist. “Easy man, no trouble here,” he said.

  At the sheriff’s office, he identified himself as a Mercedes-Benz salesman, then got cocky, waived his right to remain silent and tried to improve on a would-be alibi that accounted for his presence in the getaway car but put him at home during the time of the robbery. Instead, he became confused and placed himself in the car at the time of the robbery.

  The detective who interviewed him then went to Westlake to see Denise. At first, she was a calm stand-up wife. She said she did not know what time her husband’s friends came to the house that day, or what time he left with them.

  The detective smelled baloney. “Your husband will talk his way into prison without your help,” he said, then began to leave.

  “Okay, I was lying,” Denise called to him. “I was scared and didn’t know what to say.”

  “The truth,” the detective said, but Denise lied again and said Dominick’s friends had come to the house, then left for a while, then come back and picked him up. “The second time they came, they seemed upset and frustrated about something.”

  For a story made up on the spot, it was a good one. Because of it, and because none of the victims or other witnesses could put him at the scene, Ventura County officials decided the case against Dominick was unwinnable and ordered his release. With a large assist from Denise, he skated out of trouble again.

  Denise lied because Dominick was her breadwinner, father of her three children, and husband—but for the first time she spoke up and complained about his antic and criminal behavior. All her resentment about the way they lived came tumbling out. She felt alone and trapped—the twin themes of the fights they would have over the next seven weeks.

  “You’re never home!”

  “I’m out making money!”

  “Holding up your coke customers? What a great life.” As she continued to complain, Dominick for the first time began to wonder if he had used up all her patience and loyalty; some of her remarks could be interpreted two ways: “If it weren’t for the kids . . . I’m not sure what I’d do.”

  Dominick was trapped too, in a dissolute web of his own weaving, but was having too much fun to change; he was a boy locked inside a candy store with all the chocolate he wanted. Even the constant pressure of making the monthly nut was a fun game to play.

  Early in March, he, Danielle Deneux and another man hatched a
money-making plot that involved a trip to New York. They knew the man only as “Val” and had met in a bar in Westwood; he was a prison escapee from Canada. He said he knew someone in Montreal with a large supply of Quāalude tablets. Dominick said he knew people in New York who would buy thousands. Danielle said she would smuggle them over the border—by sewing them inside the liner of the mink coat she received as Pet of the Year.

  “Nice touch,” Dominick said.

  “It’s not gettin’ much use out here.”

  Danielle was unpredictable and frequently strung out on cocaine, but he was attracted to her in the same way he had been to Cheryl Anderson. She was funny and had balls—she had talked her way out of a serious Quāalude arrest in Ohio some months before and paid only a fine—and she was so sultry when she got made up in one of her Pocahontas-type outfits.

  To finance the trip and drug purchase, Danielle also sold a luxury sports car she won in the Penthouse competition. She and Val flew to Montreal, got the drugs and went on to New York. The night before Dominick was to leave Westlake to hook up with them, Denise, as she had when he went there with Cheryl, told him that going to a city where people wanted to kill him was an unnecessary and stupid risk.

  “It is necessary, and it is a big town.”

  “Not your part of it.”

  “I’ll be back in no time.”

  CHAPTER 23

  The Other Shoe

  With more breakthroughs on the near horizon, the Gaggi task force kept at the tedious task of verifying Vito Arena’s information and determining which of the crimes he described they could prove. Members of the task force came to the assignment as individuals, but were now a close-knit crew. All had won many citations for bravery and performance; they were the moral opposites of the cops who had helped make the crew strong. From Vito, the good cops began learning about the bad cops—mainly, the slain detective, Peter Calabro, and Norman Blau, the Canarsie patrol officer who helped Peter LaFroscia beat a murder.

  Because Calabro was a former auto crime cop, John Murphy and Harry Brady felt particularly betrayed. So it was with a sense of poetic justice that Walter dispatched them to the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Division in Brooklyn to get records on Calabro and Blau; the IAD knew little of Calabro, but had investigated Blau—and found him guilty only of failing to report that his informant, Willie Kampf, smoked marijuana.

  A high-ranking officer at the IAD refused to turn the records over because Murphy and Brady were just “uniformed cops.” They tried explaining that in this instance they were just messengers too—for Walter Mack, an assistant U.S. attorney.

  “How dare he send two police officers to see me.”

  “We’ll call him and tell him how you feel,” Brady said.

  “I’ll be right over,” Walter said.

  Walter took the subway to Brooklyn and marched into the IAD boss’s office with Murphy and Brady, prepared to shed his normal rectitude because this was one of those big moments he had been holding in reserve—a time to step on toes. “The reason I sent these two officers here is I don’t want the IAD to fuck up this case like it did the Blau case!”

  Murphy and Brady left the room, heard much yelling inside, then saw Walter come out with a smile and several folders under his arm. “Let’s go, fellows!”

  In a few months, Walter would haul Blau into the grand jury; Blau invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. A judge then granted him immunity from Southern District prosecution—but not NYPD departmental charges—and ordered him to testify. Blau made several damaging admissions. The IAD, however, never followed up and he stayed on the force. Police brass could never adequately explain why. Task force cops assumed that Blau possessed damaging information against higher-ups.

  Though tired and practically bald now, John Murphy no longer complained that the case was taking so long. He and the rest were now on a mission; although the case was even bigger than they imagined, they saw it as one of those times in a career when something is worth doing not for the reward but the meaning.

  Other than for his daughter’s wedding, Murphy had not taken a day off in six months. And now Vito had heaped so much more on his plate—Richie DiNome, for example. Vito had identified Richie as a partner in the car deal, and Murphy decided to apply some indirect pressure.

  One day, he and Frank Kollman, another auto crime cop on the task force, visited Richie’s father in Brooklyn. “Your son’s pals are going to kill him unless he comes in and talks to us,” Murphy told Ralph DiNome.

  “If that happens, I’ll know it came from the Gemini, and I’ll take care of it.”

  “Then we’ll arrest you for murder. Why don’t you save yourself the trouble and have your son call us?”

  Heading back to Manhattan, Murphy began feeling faint; his stomach growled. “I feel woozy, I must be hungry,” he told Kollman. They stopped at a McDonald’s and he ordered what he always called the “cop’s cure”—French fries, a Quarterpounder, and coffee. Later walking up steps leading to the Southern District offices, he felt a radiating pain shoot through his left arm to his chest. An hour later, in the task force war room, his face turned ashen.

  “We’re taking you to a hospital,” Frank Kollman said.

  At the hospital, doctors hooked forty-nine-year-old Murphy to an electrocardiogram. “Why did you wait so long?” one doctor asked. “You’re having a heart attack.”

  A nurse came into the room: “Sorry, doctor, that machine has not been working properly.”

  Murphy was placed on another machine. “Doesn’t seem to be a problem now, you’re fine,” the doctor said. Then, the nurse said she was not sure which machine was working and which was not.

  “Give me my coat, I’m out of here,” Murphy said.

  Kollman drove Murphy to Murphy’s own doctor, who put him in another hospital and diagnosed the heart attack. A week later, in the hospital, Murphy’s heart failed again and took him right to death’s door, but not past.

  Months later, after he was well enough to leave bed, NYPD doctors refused to certify his return to active duty, and he retired on a disability pension. Walter invited him to stay on the task force in some administrative capacity. “I’ll find some way to get you some money for it. You were instrumental in starting this case, you might as well finish it.”

  Murphy felt another radiating pain admitting he could not finish it. “Walter, I’d do it for free if I could, but I am just not physically able.”

  While Brady and the remaining auto-crime experts on the task force focused on the stolen-car aspects of the case, the homicide experts the NYPD had assigned to Walter, Detectives Frank Pergola and Roland Cadieux, worked the murders.

  Frank was Italian-American but looked more Irish and, with his short graying hair, wiry build, and Camel cigarettes, like an active-duty drill instructor. He was forty-four years old, a cop for seventeen, a detective for thirteen. He dressed fastidiously—black leather topcoat over crisp shirts, immaculate suits, and polished shoes with stretch hose—“gangster socks,” they say in Brooklyn. The gangster link ended there; Frank took the Mafia as a personal insult and hated its influence in Bath Beach, where he was born and raised and still lived—not far from the old Gaggi bunker.

  The taller, heavier, dark-haired Cadieux would likely have been a drill instructor if he had remained in the Marine Corps, but at age forty-one, he already had eighteen years “on the job,” thirteen as a detective. He was a raconteur and a sharp dresser too, but more in the style of a politician; he was an elected official of the Detectives Endowment Association, the bargaining unit for men and women of the NYPD who carry the gold shield of a detective. Although his first name was “Roland,” friends called him “Ronnie” because he did not like the sound of “Rollie.”

  Frank and Ronnie had never worked together, but they became an effective team. Their styles were different, but complementary. Where Frank was reserved, Ronnie was gregarious; where Frank threw a question and listened, Ronnie threw one and expo
unded on it with a story, if the situation seemed right. Ronnie loved his stories—such as the time a big drug raid did not go as planned and he was caught alone with twelve heroin dealers in the dimly lit coal bin of a Harlem drug den and he talked them into giving up. “Believe me, make a move, and I will shoot at least half of you before you get me!” Or the time: “I was a young cop on a drug bust, I always liked to go up the stairs first. Then an old cop said, ‘First guy in gets shot; second guy gets the medal’!”

  Comparing Vito Arena’s stories to old files, Frank and Ronnie became convinced he was for real; some details he could not have possibly known unless told by crew members. Because the RICO statute enabled him to make use of a case ending in acquittal, Walter already had begun looking at Andrei Katz’s unholy demise again, and now he assigned it to Frank and Ronnie.

  They tracked down a woman who had left New York in despair years before—Judy Questal, the former go-go-boots girlfriend of Henry Borelli destroyed on the stand by defense lawyers as she testified in state court that she was duped into luring the Rumanian immigrant to his death.

  Judy, now a settled, happily married wife and mother in another state, agreed to tell them the story, but never to testify. “I will never go through that again,” she said. “I’m not going to give those people another chance to kill me.” However, she took a liking to Frank—beneath the drill-instructor look, he had a gentle and charming way—and he stayed in contact with her. He told Walter she might change her mind someday: “But the more I talk to her about it, the more guilty I feel. She doesn’t want to be humiliated again and who can blame her?”

  “Keep holding her hand, we need her,” Walter said.

  Working from John Murphy’s list of unsolved homicides, Frank and Ronnie also looked into cases Vito had not mentioned—such as the murder of another young man from Canarsie, Jerome Hofaker, in 1977. He was executed in front of his girlfriend’s house after a fight with one of the notorious Testa brothers, Dennis. Joseph Wendling told Frank and Ronnie that the girlfriend’s brother saw the murder, and knew the killers—Joey Testa and Anthony Senter, according to neighbors. However, he had refused to talk.