Murder Machine

by Gene Mustain

Around everyone else, Denise was warm and appeared to be enjoying herself. “This is great,” she told Ronnie early on. “This is the first time in nine years this family has sat down and had three meals in the same day with sane people.” After only a few days, the detectives put their rifles back in their cars. No one was going to try anything, or go anywhere.

  After others went to bed, Frank and Dominick began staying up to talk and to have more than a couple of drinks. The witness had promised to stop using drugs, but had not mentioned alcohol—and Frank became astounded by his ability to drink heavily and rise with a seemingly clear head the next morning. “If I keep this up, that kid is going to put a fucking hole in my stomach,” he told Ronnie.

  At times, Dominick became introspective. He was tormented by the notion that Nino’s pull on him had proved stronger than his ability to resist it. This implied a fundamental character flaw that was painful to try to understand. “What are you supposed to think when the man who’s your role model always cheers the TV bad guys, like my uncle always did? By the time I realized what a disastrous fucking life ‘that life’ was, it was too late—I was in too deep. And then I got off in the drugs and the broads. I knew it was gonna end some day, but what was I going to do, sell shoes?”

  Frank was a homicide detective, not a psychologist. He did, however, give colleagues this early assessment of Dominick: “He was pushed into that life. He didn’t jump, but once he was in it, he went whole hog. That’s the kind of guy he is, whole hog. His uncle manipulated him, but he became a total wiseguy. I’ve never met anyone like him, he’s a piece of work.”

  One of the key questions in debriefing Dominick and preparing him to be a witness was determining that, apart from Vietnam, he had never killed anyone—as he maintained in his sworn statement. At the outset, he told the detectives about his role in the grenade attack on Vincent Governara and admitted he was with Nino and Roy when they later shot and killed the neighborhood kid who broke Nino’s nose. When a check of records of interviews of witnesses indicated that the youngest of the three men at the scene did not fire his weapon, Frank and the others in the task force began to believe in Dominick.

  “I don’t think he’s capable of killing anyone,” Frank said to Ronnie. “He doesn’t have that look in his eye, you know, like Joey and Anthony do.”

  Frank and Ronnie stayed with the family the entire time, ten days. Others came and went, and became part of the bonding taking place. One Sunday, Artie Ruffels brought along his wife Inger, a teacher, so she could assess the intellectual ability of the two oldest Montiglio children; Dominick had told Artie he knew Camarie was bright, but he was not sure about Dominick, Jr., whom he was just getting to know because he was such an absentee father while in Southern California. Inger Ruffels gave the children intelligence-quotient tests used in her school. Camarie and Dominick, Jr., zipped through. “Don’t worry about your son,” Artie told Dominick afterward. “He is off the Richter scale.”

  With his instinct for quick familiarity with people he enjoyed, Dominick began calling the FBI agent and former amateur boxer, “Uncle Artie.” He told his kids, “You listen to what my Uncle Artie has to say. He knows what he is talking about.”

  Despite the serious business, at times a kind of campground-holiday-horseplay mood prevailed. One night, Kenny and Artie came up after several days back in Manhattan, and Frank and Ronnie enlisted Dominick to help them get even with Uncle Artie because he had gone to the comfort of the nearby motel. So had Kenny, but as Frank said, he was NYPD and “too big to get even with.”

  While Artie was finishing his evening meal and a few cocktails, they broke into his room, short-sheeted his bed and filled it with cereal flakes.

  “First crime I ever did with a cop,” Dominick said.

  “First one I ever did with a gangster,” Ronnie teased back.

  Near the end of the campground stay, Walter Mack arrived to catch up with the debriefings and become acquainted with his new star witness. They had little in common but the trauma of combat, but Walter did not try to foster a relationship by appealing to shared experience. In the clutter of Walter’s office, however, Dominick had noticed the Iwo Jima sculpture and Marine Corps watercolor, and he began to ask questions. When a veteran asked about Vietnam, Walter answered, and Dominick was the most unusual, if also most wayward, veteran he had ever met. The former Green Beret and the former company commander established a respectful, friendly rapport.

  “Let me tell you one thing, Dominick,” Walter said. “If you screw up while on the program, I will personally come after you and make sure you go to jail. Even if you die doing whatever it is and come back as a ghost, you will do time.”

  “I ain’t gonna fuck up.”

  The detectives’ update on the debriefs pleased Walter. The information surpassed expectation. Dominick had given more information on the Gambino family than any witness in history—including how Nino did report to Paul, a crucial step up from Dominick’s sworn statement two weeks before. Legally, with what Vito had already said about the car deal, Paul was now the indictable leader of a criminal enterprise. A minor stolen-car case against Patty Testa was headed to the top of the Mafia. The Gaggi task force became the Castellano task force.

  Getting clearer all the time, Dominick got into his role. For the second time since Vietnam, the first while with Nino, he began feeling like a point man again, only this time he was the eyes and ears of an aboveground army. Despite the scoundrel he had become, he was still an inherently patriotic person—and this rose to the surface as he shed a skin and grew another. He volunteered to visit Henry Borelli in prison and talk him into cooperating. “He and I were close once. Maybe he’d see it the way I do now.”

  Walter nixed the proposal; if it failed, the targets would know for certain Dominick was cooperating. It was better to keep them guessing. “Don’t worry—Henry will get a chance to decide whether to cooperate or go down with the rest.”

  At the end of his visit, Walter said that the family would be turned over to the federal marshals in a couple of days. He did not know to what safe harbor the marshals would take them; no one on the task force was supposed to know. Dominick and Denise began to realize how isolated they would be when Walter said further contacts between them and their new government friends, even telephone calls, would be arranged through the marshals.

  Walter then invited everyone to dinner at a restaurant in a nearby town. They piled into two cars and left the campground as a snowstorm began to swirl. Dominick was with the detectives and Uncle Artie, Denise and the children with Walter. On an interstate highway, Dominick was looking in the rearview mirror of the lead car when the headlights of Walter’s disappeared from view.

  “Stop, turn around, they’ve crashed!”

  Walter had hit a patch of ice and skidded completely around. Dominick and the others came back and saw everyone was okay. The children were laughing because Walter had said he was just practicing “evasive driving.” Dominick smiled at Walter. “I told you I was on your team, you don’t have to threaten my kids.”

  In the restaurant parking lot, after the meal, the detectives built the children a snowman, and everyone threw snowballs at one another. “It’s going to be shitty giving these people to the marshals,” Ronnie told Frank. “We’ve got a Stockholm syndrome here, the hostages and their takers have become one happy family.”

  The family was turned over in the parking lot of a Howard Johnson’s restaurant and service area along the interstate. The children began to cry; the adults felt like it. Marina Montiglio, not yet three years old, was too young to write, but Camarie and Dominick, Jr., gave the detectives poems and elaborately decorated cards. “Roses are red, violets are blue, you are nice friends and I’m sorry to lose you,” Camarie wrote. Dominick, Jr.’s message was as unabashed as his father’s: “I love you.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Wally’s Pet Shop

  Federal marshals, who tended to play it more by the book than the FBI, accompanied the
reunited but hardly healed Montiglio family to an anonymous city in a wholly unfamiliar region of the country. Fourth-grader Camarie, a sharp Southern California kid, began feeling depressed as their airplane descended in a clear sky; for miles around, all she saw were wheatfields. Dominick and Denise tried to keep their children upbeat, but they felt marooned on another planet too.

  The marshals helped them find an apartment, then provided a couple of hundred dollars, some fake identity papers, and a number to dial if they needed any more help. Dominick was expected to work, an alien idea for many years, but he took a job loading and unloading a Pepsi-Cola truck. Denise looked after Marina and tried starting a household from zero. Camarie and Dominick, Jr., enrolled in public schools; she got in a fight with some local nitwits who poked sticks in the spokes of his new bicycle. In no time at all, everyone was completely miserable.

  But they hung in. Dominick kept his word and tried to be a good husband and father. At night, he also began doing something he had meant to do since Vietnam—write about it. Because he became casually acquainted with many people in the movie business while cavorting in Beverly Hills, he chose the screenplay as his form. The first words he wrote, inspired by the effect of moonlight on damp Vietnam vegetation, were: “The Glass Jungle.”

  Once started, he could not stop. He finished in two months and mailed it to The Armenian, who knew a film producer. Having heard a few Hollywood horror stories at The Daisy, he worried his work might be stolen, so he registered it first with the United States copyright office. Prudence aside, it was unlikely anyone would try and steal it; although poignant and clever in several scenes, it was a raw amateur’s work. It also was unlikely it would ever be made into a movie, not with the way it ended.

  It was a dark story about a highly decorated Vietnam veteran who returns home to New York and becomes a bum. He begins to have dismemberment nightmares, checks into a VA hospital and falls in love with a nurse. Bobby Russo (the last name was an old alias of Nino’s) then cleans himself up, but a dope pusher claims he owes him money. They have a fight; the pusher pulls a knife, but Bobby kills him with a lead pipe. In a Hickory Pit restaurant, he tells the nurse it was self-defense, but the police will never believe it. As Detectives Furgola and Cordol close in, he jumps off a roof. Head first. End of movie.

  Someone who read the screenplay urged Dominick to junk the ending. Bobby was too strong to commit suicide, and why send the audience home feeling bad? Through several rewrites, he did drop the ending, but could never come up with another. Suicide seemed the only way to resolve Bobby’s torment and the plot. Nothing else felt right. He told Denise, “It’s what I would do, if I were Bobby.” Without an ending, “The Glass Jungle” was filed away.

  Although they still had a long way to go, Denise began feeling closer to her husband and they became lovers again. Conveniently deciding it made no sense to disturb the progress they were making, he did not reveal any sexy skeletons in his closet, but also behaved himself when a woman along his Pepsi-Cola route seemed charmed by his way-out-of-state accent.

  Gradually, the couple tried becoming part of their new surroundings. He joined a health club and they began sampling what nightlife there was—mostly restaurants and movie theaters. Denise adapted better than he did. He found it frustrating to remain silent about his past with strangers—as the marshals had warned. Despite having changed his ways, he was hubristic about his past; it was a better story than anything he could invent.

  He began ignoring the marshals’ warning, as it applied to his army life. It was simply too much self-identity to give up; the paratrooper tattoo on his right forearm made it impossible anyway. Much as he hated it, he remained careful when someone, because of his accent, guessed he was from Brooklyn. Inevitably, the stranger would make a joke about gangsters, or ask: “Did you ever meet anyone in the Mafia?”

  “Nah, people make more of it than it is. I knew a guy once; people said he was, you know, connected, but all he ever did I think was swipe a few cars. Big deal.”

  Many times, he held his tongue as people he just met felt compelled to tell the new guy in town from Brooklyn that he had a cousin whose uncle once robbed a gas station. “Can you believe these people?” he would later laugh to Denise. “His cousin’s uncle robs a gas station and he thinks he’s Dillinger!”

  “Most people haven’t lived the way we have,” Denise would say. “Thank God.”

  Unsurprisingly, he soon tired of the Pepsi-Cola route. “I need something more challenging,” he complained in a telephone call to Uncle Artie.

  “Please, just make it legitimate.”

  “I will, I will. That part of me is over, I told you.”

  Just when he needed an outlet for his energy, he found one. He met a prominent local citizen with a few investment dollars who said he always wanted to own a restaurant. Dominick said he always wanted to run one, and furthermore his wife was a gourmet cook. “Something tells me this town never had a real Italian restaurant,” he added.

  In not much time, he and Denise became managers of a small restaurant specializing in Southern Italian cuisine, according to the debut advertising. In not much more time, it became a popular spot. This made them a highly visible couple—and much easier to find, if some Brooklyn nasty learned what city they were in—especially because they were still using their first names.

  Dominick and Denise, however, thought they were so far away it did not matter, even when the food critic of the local newspaper came by and wrote: “The souls of the day to day operation are Dominick, whose Sicilian heritage shines throughout the menu, and his wife Denise, daughter of a New York restaurateur.” The souls of the operation were “refreshingly unabashed,” and their specialties included a Sicilian egg roll, lasagna, baked ziti, and “New York-style cheesecake.”

  Now and then, the male half of the operation disappeared for a few days—not to visit ailing relatives, as was claimed, but to make grand jury appearances in New York or to travel incognito to other cities for more debriefings with the Castellano task force. He did not know where he was going until a marshal walked him on an airplane, and usually his first stop was only to catch a connecting flight. At the actual destination airport he would be met by another marshal who would usually deliver him to Artie Ruffels or Kenny McCabe and Frank Pergola or sometimes Walter Mack.

  More than Vito Arena—and Vito gave a lot—Dominick provided information that meant more work for the task force. He gave work to federal agents in Los Angeles too—the names of several major cocaine dealers in Southern California. Happily for him, he never had to confront his reluctance to speak about Buzzy Scioli; with so much else to do, the task force forgot about Buzzy because he was not a crew member.

  Being who he was, Dominick knew more than Vito about Paul and Nino, the main targets now that Roy, whom Vito had known best, was dead. He also knew more about Gambino family rules and customs, its history, structure, and relations with other groups—information of use against other family capos and other criminal enterprises, such as the Irish-American Westies. Westies leader Jimmy Coonan and sidekick Mickey Featherstone had gone to prison but not on RICO charges, and they were due out soon.

  “Ever since Carlo died, even though Paulie is the boss, our family has really been like two families,” Dominick said one day. He then went on to explain how and why Paul Castellano gave the Manhattan faction under Aniello Dellacroce a wide berth. The detectives could hardly believe their ears when Dominick added, “Did I tell you they made Paulie the boss at my house? I was there. My uncle told me to go upstairs and shoot everybody who came out of the house if the meeting didn’t go our way.”

  As Nino’s eyes and ears, Dominick also had more history with the DeMeo crew than Vito Arena did, and the more history he gave, the more task force members came to believe they were investigating not just one serial killer—Roy—but four more: Chris Rosenberg, Henry Borelli, and Joey and Anthony. Dominick added so many murders to the crew’s toll—among others, the five Cuban Crisi
s victims, Danny Grillo, the young unknown man who insulted Roy at the Gemini one night—that the task force made plans to excavate sections of the Fountain Avenue dump relevant to the time period; ultimately, the plans were dropped as impractical given the cost and the improbability of meaningful identifications of bones.

  Walter, however, did spend two hundred thousand dollars digging up the underground tanks of a gasoline station that Roy once pointed to, saying to Dominick, “They ought to erect a tombstone there because we buried two bodies there.” No bodies were found, although a section of a blue tarpaulin of the type used to cover swimming pools was found. The task force concluded that for some reason the crew removed the bodies; building records showed the station was under construction at the time, so a midnight exhumation would have been a simple if ghoulish matter.

  Dominick understood why the detectives kept going over what he knew about the murders of such sympathetic victims as Vincent Governara, Cherie Golden, father-son amateur drug dealers Charles and Jamie Padnick, and vacuum cleaner salesman Dominick Ragucci. These were murders with “jury appeal.” He was surprised, however, his interrogators wanted to know every detail about every victim, no matter how unworthy the person was while alive.

  “I don’t understand why you’re so hot on some of these,” he told Frank Pergola one day. “Sometimes, it was just one criminal killing another criminal over some beef. By the rules, they had the right to do it.”

  Frank and Dominick now talked to one another like brothers. “Don’t be a shithead,” Frank said. “Nobody has the right to kill. Nobody has that right, not for anything.”

  “Not in Nino’s book.”

  “You ain’t with Nino no more.”

  Meanwhile, task force members kept collecting evidence elsewhere too. The crew had long since cleaned out Roy’s arsenal in the basement of the Gemini Lounge, but a search of Dracula’s clubhouse-apartment turned up some forensic clues. “I betcha you ain’t gonna find a fuckin’ thing,” the failed bank robber said as a task force raiding party, armed with a search warrant, began ripping up walls and floors with saws and hammers. “I’ll give you hundred-to-one odds.”