Murder Machine

by Gene Mustain

  “Hundred to one?” Ronnie Cadieux said. “You’re not much of a street guy are you? How easy do you think it would be for me to lay a gun on the floor and say it’s yours. But this is your lucky day: We’re all straight guys—you got that going for you.” By the time the raiders were done, they had recovered several dozen bullets embedded in the walls and floors—some right where Freddy DiNome, though not officially on board, had said to look.

  Artie Ruffels and the detectives also searched Freddy’s home in Shirley, Long Island. They found a videotape from a Fourth of July party at Roy’s house—and hanging on the inside of a door to a hallway closet, a poster-size photograph of a nude and unusually well-endowed Freddy posing at his Broadway Freddy’s Diagnostic Center. “He is a very strange person,” Artie said to the others, “to have that hanging in a closet his kids use.”

  Working with Kuwaiti government officials, Harry Brady and John O’Brien, an auto crimes lieutenant, spent three weeks in the desert emirate identifying cars stolen from New York. Kuwait did not have a sophisticated national automobile registration system—or an auto-theft problem; the year before, only one car in the entire country was stolen. Still, Brady and O’Brien returned to New York with enough VIN plates to show major shipments—but not the cars; logistically and under international law, it would have been virtually impossible to accomplish.

  The case itself, however, was looking more possible all the time, and it was still growing. Because he was part of it, Dominick provided an inside story on the fix at the Eppolito trial—a particularly satisfying revelation for Ronnie Cadieux, still much disturbed by Nino’s acquittal and the murder of Patrick Penny, whom he had unsuccessfully urged to leave New York. Dominick told how he was part of a team sent to Penny’s brother Robert to offer Patrick a payoff. This meant Nino was vulnerable to a new charge, obstruction of justice, a predicate RICO act. It also suggested Nino might have “reached” a juror—what Ronnie and prosecutor Steven Samuel thought from day one.

  “I think you guys should go question everyone on the jury,” Walter told Frank and Ronnie. “See what went on in that jury room.”

  “Is that legal?” Ronnie asked.

  “Ask the questions, we’ll worry about that later.” With an attitude such as that, plus his commitment, Walter had gained the admiration of everyone on the task force. Many times in their careers, Artie Ruffels and the cops were teamed with prosecutors whose initial instinct was negative. They fixed on why things could not be done; Walter fixed on how to get them done. His first instinct was positive—and on the question of whether it was legally proper to interview the Eppolito jurors, entirely correct.

  “Walter’s got the biggest balls I ever saw in a prosecutor,” Ronnie, the ex-Marine, told Frank. “I’d follow him into combat any day.”

  Kenny McCabe felt the same way. Many times he told his colleagues the biggest mistake the crew made was killing Roy and not Walter. “That’s the only way they could have stopped this case,” he would say. One day he told Walter his bosses in the Brooklyn DA’s office were giving him grief for spending so much time on the task force, and he was tired of NYPD politics. He would even quit if he could find another job.

  Walter reached into a desk drawer and, retrieving an application form, said, “How’d you like to be an investigator for the United States Justice Department, Southern District?” Kenny, now thirty-five years old, was a little over the age limit for applicants, but Walter pushed and though it took two years, Kenny got the job—basically, more of what he was already doing on the task force.

  Frank and Ronnie interviewed the Eppolito jurors; after also checking records related to a home that Judy May and the man who led her into Nino’s clutches, Wayne Hellman, had purchased after the verdict and after their marriage, the task force became highly suspicious of them and Wayne’s father, Sol. Dominick identified Sol as a loanshark customer of Nino’s. All three Hellmans were added to the already crowded target list.

  As always, as much as possible, Dominick was checked against facts. As to his Eppolito bullet-switch story, Walter examined records of the Rikers Island infirmary and learned that the day before Nino handed over a bullet he claimed fell out of his neck, Dominick Montiglio was listed as a visitor.

  Artie and the detectives stayed in regular contact with Dominick. They furnished news that the media in his city would never report, such as the shooting, in September 1983, of former 21 Club maître d’ Chuck Anderson by armed robbers who held up the Manhattan restaurant he recently opened. The robbers believed Nino’s long-time loanshark customer was lying when he said he did not have the combination to a safe, and they shot him in the head. “Mr. New York” died a few months later.

  By the federal marshals’ rules, task force members were not supposed to know what city Dominick was in, but they did; neither were they supposed to telephone him without setting it up with the marshals, but most also did. Breaking the rules was part convenience, part personal concern. They were rooting for him and Denise to survive as a couple, and were worried what their mercurial witness might do if a domestic crisis occurred. He frequently telephoned them, at the office or at home, with facts that came to him in the middle of the night—or to say hello. Over the telephone, he became friendly with their wives, including Sarah Lawrence graduate Consuela Mack, a rising talent in television news. “Hi Muffy,” he would say. “Is Buffy there?”

  * * *

  By the fall of 1983, Walter Mack was getting ready to write a memo outlining the case and recommending who to ask the grand jury to indict and on what charges. The task force war room was now brimming with evidence, but to minimize every risk of legal combat, Walter still wanted Freddy DiNome on board; Freddy could corroborate Vito Arena on the stolen-car angle of the case that Dominick knew little about. He also could fill in gaps in crew history created by Dominick’s flight to California in 1979 and Vito’s defection in 1980.

  The problem with getting Freddy to cooperate was still his wife, not him. Kenny and Artie had arranged to take Freddy out of his cell again for another visit with her. In the meantime, Artie had also talked his Gambino squad supervisor Bruce Mouw into assigning another agent to help out with the paper trails and witnesses, and so the task force got its second Harvard graduate—Special Agent Marilyn Lucht, thirty-two-year-old native of Ohio, expert on RICO law, and member of the Gambino squad. Artie asked for her because she was a careful investigator and might be able to develop a better relationship with Carol DiNome.

  Freddy’s wife, however, was still pleased with life without Freddy and again refused to agree to join him in the witness protection program. Marilyn actually made a bigger impact on Freddy—who made some lewd remarks about her to Artie—than Carol. “It’s not easy convincing someone who’s spent their whole life in New York that they’re going to be happy in Kansas,” Marilyn told disappointed Artie. “Especially if it means getting back with someone she’s been terrified of her whole marriage.”

  In their private meetings, Carol apparently gave Freddy another line of reasoning. “She says I can’t be a rat,” Freddy told Artie.

  It was a setback, but these days the task force won, sometimes only in small ways, more than it lost. For example, while visiting Freddy in the federal prison in upstate Otisville, Kenny and Artie became acquainted with a prison official whose office computer showed where every inmate in the federal system was housed. “I’m curious, where’s Henry Borelli?” Kenny asked.

  The computer revealed that Henry, convicted with Freddy in the Empire Boulevard case, was in a minimum-security, camplike facility near the maximum-security federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, a few hours by car from Brooklyn. “I know it was just a car case they got him on,” Kenny said, “but the guy has killed fifty or so people. Why such a soft joint?” Within days, Henry was transferred from the camp to a hellhole in Arkansas, making it much more difficult for family and friends to visit.

  In his wallet, Walter began carrying a color snapshot of a happy-looking
young man, his adoring wife, and infant child. The young man was Peter Waring, a smalltime Canarsie cocaine dealer who, exceeding his reach, did a deal with the crew and became one of the first to die during the crew’s foulest year, 1979. Waring was among those victims sent to the Fountain Avenue dump after the crew decided they were threats—in Waring’s case, because they learned he was going to meet with narcotics detectives.

  The task force learned about him after Waring’s widow refused to let authorities forget her husband’s disappearance, and detectives found a journal he kept in which he had written about his minor drug relationship with the crew.

  Walter acquired the photograph after interviewing the widow. He carried it because it symbolized what the case was about—the crew’s brutality and trail of tears, its defiance of authority—and his belief that any murder in the case should be probed to the maximum, regardless of who the victim was, because it might be the one that nails a conviction.

  Some in the Southern District thought Walter had become obsessed with the case and that it was interfering with his supervisory duties as chief of the organized crime unit; Walter saw it differently. Many cases against the city’s other criminal enterprises had begun since he took over. He believed he managed them all, and worked harder than everyone else—often eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. He was not going to turn the case over to someone. “If ever a case deserved to be finished, this is it,” he told wife Consuela, whose television reporter’s job kept her away from home a lot too. “The people in this are the worst we’ve ever seen, or even heard about.”

  Finally, in December 1983, after two years of putting off his superiors, police brass, and the FBI for “sixty–ninety days” more, Walter began the countdown to indictment. The statute of limitations governing the time frame in which the government is allowed to bring charges after learning of a crime was expiring on some of the stolen-car matters.

  Thinking they might crack, Walter sought to isolate Richie DiNome and car-deal maven Ronald Ustica by moving against them first. He secured arrest warrants alleging the same crimes that Richie’s brother and Henry Borelli were imprisoned for three years earlier.

  Kenny McCabe, John O’Brien, and Harry Brady knocked on Richie’s door early on December 4, a Sunday morning, a favorite time to arrest a suspect seen as a potential cooperating witness because, in theory, the suspect has more time to mull a deal without worrying if his criminal associates know he has been arrested. In theory, word travels slower on Sunday. Kenny and Ronnie had visited Richie’s house in Brooklyn only a week before to warn him that the crew intended to kill him and Freddy as soon as Freddy was released. Richie laughed them off; he had survived a shooting six months earlier and believed his only problem now, like then, was cocaine dealers. Richie too had fallen in love with cocaine in the last two years and had separated from his wife.

  “You’re under arrest, come with us,” Kenny said when Richie opened his door. “Maybe we can save your life. You’re gonna wind up getting killed if you don’t come on board.”

  “Like I told you before, that shooting had nothing to do with Joey and Anthony. They’re my friends. I got no problems.”

  The arresting officers took Richie to Walter, who gave his standard opening remarks: “I’m the prosecutor in your case. Now we’re charging you with serious crimes, but I’d be happy to hear your side of the story, if you’d like to talk to me about it. I’d like to ask you a few questions; you don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to, but if you do, anything you say could be used against you in a court of law. . . .”

  Richie was the last person in the world to match wits with Walter, but he tried anyway. While attempting to deny crimes he actually admitted some and while saying he would not cooperate actually provided some details about the crew.

  O’Brien and Brady, with fellow auto crime cop Frank Kollman, picked up Ronald Ustica the next evening. Ustica’s used-car business on Long Island was now bankrupt, and the lot formerly filled with stolen cars was now a parking lot for suburban railroad commuters. Brady tried softening him up for Walter. “Schmuck, they took you for everything, your business is down the tubes, and we got you involved in murders. Roy’s dead. Don’t spend the rest of your life in jail.”

  In Walter’s office, Ustica, also way over his head, denied wrongdoing but admitted being friendly with crew members and having done business with them. He, like Richie, also said he would never cooperate.

  Paul Castellano and Anthony Gaggi were now virtually certain their former fair-haired boy Dominick was a cooperating witness. They had become suspicious when he abruptly made bail and was released from the MCC, seemingly into thin air, and grew more alarmed as detectives began turning over dirt piles such as the Eppolito case. They also feared that another former Green Beret, Mickey Featherstone of the Westies, had grown weak. A few months into his parole from prison, he was saying he was done with crime.

  The family captain who had replaced Roy as Gambino liaison to the Westies was ordered to evaluate Featherstone’s state of mind. The pair met in a Manhattan bar. “I know why I’m here, and I’m not the stoolpigeon,” Featherstone said straight off. “I believe it’s Dominick, Nino’s nephew.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You guys are saying it’s an ex–Green Beret, and the only one I know besides me is Dominick.”

  Featherstone also had run into Nino at the Rikers Island jail a couple of years before, when Nino was brought from prison for a court appearance. “When I bumped into Nino in Rikers, he said Dominick was missing a few years already. So the stoolpigeon has got to be Dominick. It’s not me.”

  As Featherstone spoke, Dominick was huddling with Walter and Artie on another debriefing, and on December 19, 1983, he met them in Atlanta for one more. This time, the task force invited Denise and the children to come along as a kind of pre-Christmas vacation; with all the trips her husband was taking, Denise was feeling left out.

  In January 1984, for different reasons, some corners of the federal law enforcement establishment also began saying Paul should not be included in Walter’s case. Rival prosecutors in the Eastern District and FBI agents based in Queens were the most outspoken—and if Paul had been privy to why, he would have been worried less about Dominick and more about what he had been saying around his white house lately.

  The same team of prosecutors and agents working on the drug-dealing case against the John Gotti crew had succeeded in placing a hidden listening device inside Paul’s Staten Island home. Gambino squad boss Bruce Mouw, his superiors, and many others did not want Walter to include Paul in the indictment, mostly because they wanted to be the ones to nail Paul.

  The Brooklyn-based federal team thought the Manhattan-based team was about to bring a case against Paul that paled in comparison to the one they could bring. Walter told his counterparts in the Eastern District to relax, the Justice Department in Washington, which approved all major RICO indictments, was not going to approve his plan to put Paul into his case, and that he had made such a request only on a pro forma basis.

  In fact, Walter believed in the strength of his case against Paul and was confident Justice Department higher-ups would agree. The reason was that a Justice Department higher-up Rudolph Giuliani, had recently been appointed United States Attorney for the Southern District. Less than a year before, Giuliani, a Brooklyn native who aspired to elective office, held the number-three job in the Justice Department, chief of the criminal division. More than his counterpart in Brooklyn, he had Washington’s ear, and Walter was telling him the indictment could be drawn in such a way that Paul would be charged with being only the boss of the DeMeo crew criminal enterprise, not the Gambino family. That way, the Brooklyn prosecutors could bring their own case against Paul.

  The irony of the situation was ample: the Manhattan faction of the Justice Department—the Brooklyn wing of the Gambino family in its sights—squaring off against the Brooklyn faction of Justice, which was trying to make the most of a case that
began as an attack on the family’s Manhattan branch.

  Waiting for the turf issue to play out, the task force kept making moves. Following their arrests, Walter got his grand jury to indict Richie DiNome and Ronald Ustica, legally isolating them from the crew for the moment. Both again refused to cooperate, then made bail. Kenny told Richie it was a bad move: “You’re on the street now. Don’t be stupid all your life; make a deal.”

  “Stop believing all that crap about my friends,” he said.

  The next day, February 4, 1984, in the Brooklyn neighborhood known as Gravesend, Richie was assassinated in the living room of an apartment he leased after leaving his wife for cocaine. Two men who lived nearby who happened to be visiting at the time were also executed. Richie had let people he knew well into his home; they did not forget their silencers or shoot themselves in the hand, and whoever they were, they thoughtfully locked the doors on the way out.

  If the crew was behind the murders, and no one doubted it, it was another desperate and dumb move. The task force brought Freddy back to the MCC to work on him, and on February 16, Joey and Anthony visited him and tried to do the same; Anthony had recently finished serving several months in jail for his Canarsie gun and coke case. They told Freddy how sorry they were and how blameless too. Freddy listened but in disbelief. He thought he was listening to the men who murdered his brother.

  Now came time to begin arresting the other targets. Several cops had been constantly keeping the Canarsie contingent under surveillance the past several days, hoping to catch them in the middle of a drug deal—a big pile of cocaine always makes a telling trial exhibit. The cops had seen new crew member Carlo Profeta, an acne-scarred heavy who had begun helping Joey Testa collect Roy’s old loans, accepting a package from Joey and Anthony, but held off that time because the circumstances were not to their liking.