by Gene Mustain
The marshal sought the guidance of supervisors in Washington, who decided that a woman afraid of her husband had a right to live apart from him—so suddenly Freddy was looking at going into the program by himself, a scary journey for even the most well-adjusted person. Beforehand, however, he began speaking on the telephone from prison to his first wife, Peggy; they became close again. She was not keen on joining him in the program, but at least he was saved from feeling unloved.
The task force kept in tune with Freddy’s emotional lows and highs during breaks in many pretrial appearances he made to bolster an effort by Walter to throw one of the defendants’ lawyers out of the case. The effort had begun after Freddy testified in the grand jury that he was along when his boss Roy DeMeo gave defense attorney Gerald Shargel one hundred thousand dollars in a brown paper bag, to press an appeal of Nino’s conviction in the Eppolito case and other legal business.
Since that time, Shargel had represented seven other DeMeo crew members and was now attorney of record for a minor defendant in the task force case. Walter subpoenaed him to appear before the grand jury and provide records showing fees paid to him by the crew. Shargel fought the subpoena, but eventually it was ruled enforceable. He then told the grand jury he had destroyed his fee records to avoid a situation such as this: being forced into providing sensitive information about clients. He also said that Roy’s brown bag contained only two thousand dollars.
“Roy carried that much around in his shirt pocket,” Freddy scoffed to Walter.
The sideshow dragged on a long time, and Freddy gave more secret testimony about the hundred-thousand-dollar payment and those times in the MCC when Freddy was thinking of cooperating and Shargel came on like he was his attorney, though Freddy had not asked him to be. Although it was not the same as testifying in a public courtroom, Freddy did fine in his grand jury appearances. Although smarter than he sounded, he seemed incapable of invention. Eventually, Walter prevailed. Judge Abraham Sofaer ruled that Shargel’s actions suggested he was “acting in effect as a ‘house counsel’ for the enterprise.” Shargel was off the case.
Midway through the Shargel matter, Freddy pleaded guilty to his RICO crimes. Like the other cooperating witnesses, he would not learn his penalty until after the case was over; as Vito also was, he was more vulnerable than Dominick to a sentence including some time in prison because, if not ever the actual shooter, he was on the edges of many murders—Scorney, Todaro, Rosenberg, Mongitore, Scutaro—and right in the perverse middle of Falcaro and Daoud.
In his plea, Freddy referred briefly to each murder; officially, he finally broke with Roy DeMeo. Describing Roy’s actions in one killing, he said: “Mr. DeMeo was the shooter all the time. He wanted to do all the shooting. He was the killer.”
Near the end of 1984, Freddy completed his Empire Boulevard time and was whisked into the witness program by marshals. He was renamed “Freddy Marino” and deposited in San Antonio, Texas—as foreign to Freddy as the moon, but he hunkered down and went to work fixing junk cars.
In a few months, he talked first wife Peggy into joining him in the program; she was unhappy at the time because of a tragedy in her family. They rented a cookie-cutter home in a subdivision on the western edge of San Antonio known as Emerald Valley; all the street names suggested a paradise of rolling hills and lush forests, but it was flat and barren as an overworked pasture.
Freddy and Peggy tried to mesh with the customs and rhythms of life deep in the heart of Texas, but their hearts were not in it. They wanted to relocate as soon as Freddy finished testifying at the trial. In time, however, they did become regular patrons of a drab pancake house twenty minutes away, a twenty-four-hour place called the Kettle; waitresses got to know the couple and were impressed that though Freddy and Peggy said they had been married a long time they pampered each other like newlyweds.
Often, Freddy came back at night by himself; a lot of young pot-smoking auto mechanics and gas-station jockeys also showed up then. The Kettle became a kind of Gemini Lounge, minus the murder suite next door. Freddy became “buds” with many of the young men, who called him Pops. He eventually told his new friends he was a hitman on the run from New York. Nobody believed Pops, not then.
* * *
Early in June of 1985, just when they began believing Freddy had found peace of mind in the program because of Peggy, the task force learned of trouble in the Montiglio household. At a neutral-site debriefing in Oklahoma City, Dominick told Frank Pergola and Uncle Artie that Denise was acting distant lately.
“It was great until a few weeks ago—she even told me she had fallen back in love—but then all of a sudden, she changed and said she didn’t love me. It’s weird.”
Frank and Artie got an uneasy feeling. The trial was only a couple of months off. Testifying against his uncle, and Paul, and Henry, in a courtroom sure to be packed with Rose Gaggi, and every other family member the defense lawyers could muster, each with the word “rat” in their eyes and on their lips, Dominick was due for the emotional test of his life. Nothing added more pressure than a wife whose love had waned, even if she had a lot more justification than she knew.
“What’s her beef?” Frank said, raising an eyebrow.
“No, no, I haven’t done that. I’ve been like Beaver Cleaver for over a year. Not once.”
“Did you hit her?”
“C’mon, I’ve never done that. I don’t understand it. For all those years, she complained because I wasn’t around enough. Now she says I’m suffocating her, I’m around too much.”
Frank and Artie, without telling Dominick their intention, decided to bail out of the debriefing a day early—a prosecutor interested in another New York case stayed on—and they flew to where Denise was.
Denise seemed a different person from the one they saw at the Christmas vacation they arranged for her in Atlanta. Speaking directly and frankly, she said Dominick’s assessment of the relationship was correct, it had deteriorated. “I’m just tired of everything, tired of living with this trial over our heads, tired of him. I was against this from the start. It was you guys who made it seem like I had no choice; I still resent that.”
“If you’re tired of the pressure,” Frank said, “imagine Dominick. He’s going to court against his uncle.”
“He made his own life.”
Her last remark left little else to say. “Just try to hold on a little longer,” Artie said. “If anything happens, if you guys fight and he takes off, let us know, will you please?”
Denise said she would and Frank and Artie took the disturbing news back to New York.
Dominick came home the next day. Denise thought he had sent his task force friends to talk to her and was angry. They began arguing. In front of Camarie, she told him he was smothering her and she hated it because she did not love him, so why didn’t he just leave? He did. He hugged his three children, took a few hundred dollars saved from the restaurant and got on a flight to Los Angeles—a major infraction of the marshals’ rules, but he was flying away from everything, including being a witness.
After two weeks went by with no telephone call from Dominick, who always called at least once a week, Frank and Artie got on a telephone line to Denise.
“He left,” she said. “I don’t know where he is.”
“You said you’d let us know!” Artie protested.
“I thought he’d call you. He calls you all the time.”
“Denise, so much is at stake here. We’re going to trial in three months and we don’t even know where our main witness is. You said you’d call.”
Denise was not bearing anyone’s burdens anymore. “Look, I don’t have any obligation to you. I don’t have to explain anything. Goodbye.”
In Los Angeles, Dominick jumped off the cocaine wagon and burned himself out until he was broke and had only two options: be a bodyguard for cocaine dealers he had already told FBI agents in Los Angeles about or keep the bargain he had made. He telephoned New York a day after Frank and Artie sp
oke to Denise.
“Uncle Artie,” he said, “Denise kicked me out. I’m standing at a pay phone on a street corner in LA. I’m fucked up. I could take off with these drug guys I met if I want, but I don’t. It’s the same dead end I walked away from before. I need help.”
“Give me the address, I’ll have someone there in half an hour.”
Artie called bureau friends in Los Angeles and two agents picked Dominick up and took him to a motel. Frank and Artie flew to Los Angeles to calm him down, then explain the facts of life. He had made a deal, and if he did not live up to it, the government would hound him forever.
A few days later, on June 20, 1985, he was brought back to New York, where Walter reminded him of a two-year-old threat to put him in jail if he ever violated his deal, even if he had died and come back as a ghost. Feeling guilty and cementing his relationship with the government, Dominick then pleaded guilty to his RICO crimes—extortion; loansharking; robbery; drug dealing; because of his role in Nino’s one-way grudge match against Vincent Governara, attempted murder and murder. It was the last two crimes that most interested the judge accepting his plea, William C. Connor.
Recounting, in response to a question from Connor, the second attempt on the victim’s life, Dominick said, “I had a pistol on me. I was supposed to shoot like everybody else, but I didn’t.”
“Was there any particular reason why you didn’t?”
“Yes, your honor. I never shot anybody in the street.”
Afterward, the task force turned Dominick over to the marshal’s service, which was not happy to take him back. Denise did not want him back either, so the marshals took him to Jacksonville, Florida, but the local marshal there determined that Florida was a “hot” state for someone from New York City and shipped him to another marshal in Springfield, Illinois, but that marshal checked his computer and learned that another witness in the program who might know Dominick was there, so he shipped him to a marshal in Birmingham, Alabama.
All the frequent-flyer miles did nothing for Dominick’s morale. He was more afraid and more lonely than he had ever been before. He telephoned Camarie and his other children every night to say hello, and to try and win Denise back. “We’re blowing our family apart over this, let’s just try and make it work.”
Denise would not budge. “I just want to be left alone.”
“It’s those trips with the government, you think I was fooling around? Do you think Walter Mack would let me fuck around on those trips?”
“I don’t care about those trips anymore. Some private detectives from New York came by here after you left. They had a lot of things to say about you.”
By the sudden sarcasm in Denise’s voice, Dominick knew the marriage really was over—and that somehow Nino and the others he was soon to face had found out where he had been living and sent private investigators to collect some dirt for cross-examination.
Each word that now came out of Denise’s mouth was a blunt instrument: “Dominick, they said something about a girl named Danielle. Seems you were arrested with her.”
There was a long silence, in which she let him hang. “So that’s it, I guess,” he finally said.
“That’s it, you’ll get the divorce papers in the mail.”
He hung up the telephone and began drinking. As he always told friends, Denise was the best woman a man ever had, but he chased her away. She gave him her complete trust, and he turned it into complete hate. As he kept hitting the bottle, it was impossible not to dwell on the not-so-fictional character of Bobby Russo taking a nose dive off a tall building in the original final scene of “The Glass Jungle.” With the trial less than two months away, Dominick was a basket case.
Denise was not the only woman in Dominick’s life contacted by the defense as the trial date neared. One night on Long Island, his half-sister Michele was stunned to pick up the telephone and hear Nino’s voice on the other end—the first time he had called her since her mother died fifteen years before.
Nino made it seem like he was passing through the neighborhood and had telephoned on the spur of the moment to invite her to dinner. Michele, now twenty-three and tough-minded about her Bath Beach relatives, almost burst out laughing, but decided to go hear what Nino had to say. She knew it had to be about Dominick.
“This should be fun,” she told her husband Chris on the way to the restaurant where Nino was waiting, ten minutes away. “Unless Nino wants something, you are a pile of shit. He thinks he’s the king, and we’re just little people from Levittown.”
Nino, sipping a glass of wine, ordered a couple of drinks for Michele and Chris before asking if Michele would consider testifying for the defense about Dominick’s relationship with Nino.
“You know the only thing Dominick ever did for me was drive my car.”
Michele smiled. She wanted to hear more. Her husband said, “If that’s all he did, you got nothing to worry about, not from him anyway.”
Nino focused on Michele. “You know, we could subpoena you as a defense witness, ask you about that time Dom stopped over your apartment after he knocked off his girlfriend’s father’s house. We know all about that. We already talked to her.”
Michele put her anger and resentment on the table. “You want to subpoena me? Great! Go ahead. What do you think I’ll say about you—that you’re a wonderful, warm human being? Go ahead, take a chance!”
“Okay, okay, calm down.”
“I don’t owe you shit!”
“Will you at least meet with my lawyers? They just have a few questions.”
Michele said she would, but did not tell Nino it was because she wanted to tell them off too, which she eventually would. Nobody ordered dessert and Nino’s first and last trip to Levittown came to an awkward end.
* * *
Early in September 1985, the judge who was to preside over United States v. Castellano ambushed Walter. Acting on defense motions, Judge Kevin Duffy ruled essentially that Walter had put too much firepower into the indictment: too many defendants were accused of too many crimes to sort it all in one trial. The judge, whose reputation was that he was hard on prosecutors, then hard on defendants convicted in his courtroom, further said that a series of trials would be necessary, perhaps as many as five, depending on what crimes how many defendants ultimately decided to plead guilty to. Walter was looking at a minimum of five years’ more work.
Almost worse, Judge Duffy peeled off the twenty-three counts of the indictment relating to stolen cars and ruled that they be tried first—as a relatively straightforward conspiracy case, not as a RICO case, meaning that the illegal-enterprise theory of the task force investigation was down the tubes, at least insofar as the stolen-car matters went. Only five murders were part of the car conspiracy; all the others would have to be tried later. The judge set a September 30 opening for the conspiracy case, which involved only nine of the original twenty-four defendants.
The judge’s rulings exposed a potentially fatal flaw in the task force investigation as it concerned lead defendant Paul Castellano. Since the aim all along was to portray Paul as the ultimate boss of the DeMeo enterprise and recipient of cash from all its crimes, those who debriefed Dominick—the only witness capable of putting cash from Nino and the crew in Paul’s hands—had not asked him if he ever took money to Paul that was for stolen cars alone.
A week before trial, Walter, Frank, and Artie flew to Minneapolis to see a spurned and lonely man from Birmingham. “Yeah, I took money to Paul for the cars,” Dominick said after everyone got together. “Actually, that money was handled special. When I got money from Roy for porno and stuff, I’d keep it if Nino wasn’t around and he’d square with Paul when he got back. But the car money, I took that straight to Paul.”
“Dominick, you could have told us this before,” Artie said.
“I answer every question you ask me! We’ve had so many of these get-togethers, I can’t keep tabs on every little detail. You told me I wasn’t a big witness for the car stuff.”
Dominick flew back to Birmingham. Emotionally, he was still in bad shape; he missed his children and was dreading his date in court, tentatively set for midway through the trial. He followed the beginning of the trial on a national television report, then learned a private detective working for Paul and Nino had found and tried to question The Armenian; he began to believe it was only a matter of time before he was found—but not just to be asked a few questions.
He began drinking. He imagined hitmen invading his dreary apartment while he slept. He went to an electronics store and bought fifteen radio transmitters that properly converted made excellent trip-wire alarms for doors and windows. Then, from the only friend he had in Birmingham, a man he met at a gym, he borrowed an M-16 machine gun and seven hundred rounds of ammunition.
He went home and while drinking another bottle of whisky, rigged a nighttime perimeter of trip-wire alarms. He started on another bottle, wrapped a jungle bandana around his forehead, put the M-16 on full automatic, barricaded his bedroom door, and telephoned Denise. He started crying, but she still felt the same way about the divorce. He hung up, hit the bottle again, then decided to make another call—to Uncle Nino’s house.
His godson Michael Gaggi, now twenty-three, answered the call. Nino and Rose were not home. “Mike, I’m going to make it easy for your dad,” Dominick said, then gave Michael his address and telephone in Birmingham, the make and model car he was driving and its license plate. “Tell him to come any old time. I’ll be waitin’.” Michael just listened; Dominick hung up, then passed out before he died of alcohol poisoning.