by Gene Mustain
Freddy grew agitated; he wanted Peggy back now. A desk clerk came up and asked him to move his car; it was blocking access to the hotel entrance. Kenny and Artie walked out with him and told Freddy, who was wearing a jogging suit, to go home, get dressed for dinner and come back, but he barely heard them.
“I’m calling Johnny Gotti right now and I’m going to get that bitch killed. I’m going to get this all straightened out.”
“Freddy, take it easy!” Artie said.
Freddy got into his car and as Kenny and Artie stood on either side, opened the doors and urged him to relax, he jumped on the accelerator and roared away—in reverse, with the doors still open, and Kenny and Artie barely got out of the way. Several yards later, he braked the car, then zoomed forward as they jumped out of the way again.
“Freddy, Freddy, Freddy,” Artie lamented.
“Let’s go to our rooms,” Kenny said. “He’ll be back by six.”
Freddy went to the Kettle and met Jack Knight. He told him he might be going to New York soon. The pair then drove to the house in Emerald Valley, but Knight left to visit friends and Freddy was home alone.
He took off his jogging suit, and lay down on a canopied king-size waterbed that he had built on an especially high platform. Two wandering jews hung on either side of the headboard, attached to the ceiling by macrame rope. After a time spent in some interior hell, Freddy rose and took one of the plants down and unfurled its macrame hanger; it was six feet, three inches long. He got back on the bed and, standing on the rolling mattress of water, removed a mirror from the canopy and put it on the floor. He tied one end of the rope around one of the canopy’s two- by six-inch support beams; he tied the other around his neck, its brass ring snug against his windpipe. He bent his legs behind him at the knees and let his body sag, tensing the rope.
Then, as a purplish Texas twilight closed in on the house in Emerald Valley, Freddy DiNome jumped knees-first off the waterbed and into his own black night.
* * *
After Freddy had sped away from the Davy Crockett, Artie had telephoned Marilyn Lucht in New York and asked her to move Peggy to another hotel because Freddy had made a threat and who knew what he would do. Marilyn did as requested, but felt guilty she and the others were going to such lengths, for the good of the case, to get a woman back with an abusive man.
Kenny and Artie did not know Freddy’s address in San Antonio. At eight-thirty p.m., with no one answering the telephone at Freddy’s house, they went to dinner. Beforehand, they made sure the guns they carried were loaded, then stayed alert through the meal. They now thought it was possible Freddy was so completely flipped he might try to kill them.
Three hours later, Kenny and Artie were back in their rooms. As he was falling asleep, the telephone in Kenny’s began to ring. Jack Knight had come home, found the man he knew as Freddy Marino and telephoned the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, whose detectives found Kenny’s name and local number in Freddy’s bedroom.
“Kenny McCabe?” a Texas drawl said. “This is Detective Hernandez of Bexar County. Do you know a Freddy Marino?”
“You got him under arrest?”
“I got him dead.”
Kenny and Artie flew home the next morning. Marilyn picked them up and they went to Peggy’s hotel to tell her the news. On the way, Artie stopped and bought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
At first, Peggy thought Artie was joking. In another hotel just a few days before, she had told him how she had just seen a movie about a witness whose death was faked by the FBI so he could disappear.
“I’m sorry I’m not kidding. He’s dead,” Artie said.
Peggy began screaming and crying. Over several hours and a few drinks, she passed through all the inevitable emotions: “I’m so mad at him, that he would do this to me—make me feel it’s my fault, that son of a bitch.”
Freddy’s suicide made the New York newspapers a day later; the jurors in the car case were already deliberating the verdict. Walter felt battered; the case had been a disaster since it was broken up and watered down. His lead defendant had been murdered, one of his main witnesses had killed himself and then, near the end of the trial, his own elderly mother had become gravely ill. His coprosecutor Mary Lee Warren gave the final argument. She did a superb job, but so did the defense attorneys, who were betting each other they would beat parts of the case, and on March 5, a few days after Walter’s mother died, they did.
The biggest winners were Joey and Anthony—acquitted of the stolen-car charges and recipients of a hung jury on the Falcaro-Daoud murder counts. The biggest losers were Henry Borelli and Ronald Ustica, convicted of everything. In between, with Peter LaFroscia, was Anthony Gaggi—convicted only of conspiracy to steal cars. From the task force view, the verdict was a disappointing wash, and, as to Joey and Anthony, an egregious defeat.
Frank Pergola put the best face on it. “Don’t worry,” he told Dominick, “Nino and Joey and Anthony are going to have to come back and stand trial again for about fifty more murders.” Frank was exaggerating, but not by much.
One juror later wrote in a guest newspaper column that had it not been for Dominick’s testimony, Nino Gaggi would have left the courthouse as completely acquitted and delighted as Joey and Anthony. As it was, however, Nino was already in the MCC pending his sentencing; Judge Duffy had jailed the convicted defendants immediately. Reading the clipping days later and visualizing Uncle Nino in an orange jumpsuit and sneakers, brooding in the same prison he once was, Dominick was certain there was no doubt now; Nino would put Lassie to sleep, if he ever got the chance.
A month later, Nino, still the defiant raging bull, was led into court to be sentenced. Before being jailed, he had been the only Sicilian capo in the Gambino family who had not hastened to kiss the Neapolitan feet of John Gotti—according to Gotti, who was talking on a secret government listening device in his Queens social club. In one conversation, Gotti complained to an underling about the way Nino had told one of his underlings to bring Gotti to him for a meeting—about an unspecified problem at a restaurant that was eventually torched. “He told you to bring me? He’s under me! Yeah, tell him to get his ass up here to see me.”
At the sentencing, Nino’s attorney Michael Rosen strenuously objected to a pre-sentencing report prepared for the judge by the probation department. In it, Nino was described as someone unable to live by “socially acceptable standards.” Judge Duffy, however, true to his reputation for being tough on prosecutors and defendants, turned a stony ear on Rosen and gave Nino and all but one of the other convicted defendants maximum sentences and ordered that they begin serving them immediately. In Nino’s case, maximum meant five years.
“I am quite sure that your family will be hurt no matter what I do,” Judge Duffy told Nino. “I just hope that you recognize that whatever hurt is brought on them is brought to them not by me but by your own actions.”
Nino’s prominent vein seemed permanently engorged nowadays, and he had nothing to say. Unlike the Eppolito case, his lawyers also could not get an appeals judge to let him stay free on bail while they appealed his conviction. After being allowed a brief moment with Rose, his mother Mary, and four grown children, sixty-year-old Nino was taken right to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania—to the maximum-security prison there, not the adjoining camp. He did not look like a man who was going to do his time easily.
Henry Borelli had a lot to say when he stood before Judge Duffy, but disingenuous Henry, convicted of several murders related to the car conspiracy, was facing life in prison. First, he quoted from a book, The Goals of Democracy—A Problems Approach, that he probably discovered in a prison library while serving his Empire Boulevard sentence: “The safeguards of our liberty are not so much in danger from those who openly oppose them as from those who, professing to believe in them, are willing to ignore them when found convenient for their own purposes.”
Then, he said that the Roman Catholic Church’s decision to deny Paul Castellano a funeral mass hurt him, a
Catholic, in the eyes of jurors and that he was only “guilty of being an Italian.” Finally, he said he was a fool for believing he would get a fair trial.
“You did get a fair trial and you will get, to my mind, what is a fair sentence,” Judge Duffy said. “You have been convicted of being what is generally called a contract killer.”
Fair ended up being life, plus ten years for each of sixteen car-conspiracy counts. The judge urged that Henry never receive parole. “Henry Borelli, you profess Roman Catholicism. I would suggest that what you should do is beg God for forgiveness.”
Henry smiled and turned his back on the judge.
Ronald Ustica, the used-car dealer who became suddenly lethal once he suddenly began prospering with Roy DeMeo, got a life sentence too. Peter LaFroscia, who escaped culpability for John Quinn’s murder a second time, but was convicted on a car count, got five years.
The only defendant in the conspiracy who got a break from Judge Duffy was Ronald Turekian, the crew member who coined the term “Wally’s Pet Shop.” His knack for words was what saved him with the judge. He told of an impoverished Canarsie childhood in which his mother died and his father rejected him and how now he had met a woman who loved him and had “a chance not to be alone.” He added, “There may be grease on my hands, but there’s no blood on my hands.”
Judge Duffy gave Turekian five five-year sentences, but ordered them to run concurrently, meaning Turekian would be eligible for parole in thirty months. “When I came out here they were going to be consecutive sentences,” the judge said.
On that lenient note, U.S. v. Gaggi came to an end—but all the other elements of the original indictment, the other murders, the drug dealing, prostitution, pornography, loansharking, and bribery, the fraud and obstruction of justice in the Eppolito case, remained to be tried.
Happily for Walter on August 7, 1986, after Patty Testa and several other of the original twenty-four defendants decided to plead guilty, Judge Duffy consolidated the charges into a single trial, not four as was once feared. It would be the RICO trial Walter wanted from the start.
The lead defendant would be Anthony Gaggi, boss of the Roy DeMeo criminal enterprise; and nine other defendants would include Joey and Anthony and the Hellman family. A redrawn indictment upped the murder counts to thirty. “There are at least twenty-five more homicides I could list,” Walter would say in a sidebar remark to Vincent Broderick, the judge who got the second installment of U.S. v. Gaggi. “They were not put in this indictment for a variety of reasons. We figured thirty was enough.”
Pretrial maneuvering would take a year and a half. The trial would begin on February 22, 1988, and last an agonizing sixteen months—longer than any other federal racketeering case. It would amount to the bloodiest story ever told in a federal courtroom.
Walter and the task force tried to leave no stone unturned. A vast cast of witnesses took the stand to tell what they knew about the DeMeo crew and its victims. Overcoming her reluctance to get involved again because of her humiliating experience on the stand in state court, Judy Questal—with Detective Frank Pergola of Bath Beach holding her hand between breaks—testified in disguise and relived her Andrei Katz nightmare. Victor Katz, Andrei’s previously afraid brother, also found the courage to come forward and take part in the mournful parade.
Dr. Todd Rosenberg also recalled his brother Harvey, as Robert Penny did his brother Patrick, and Youseef Najjar his brother Khaled Daoud. Harry Beinert remembered his adoptive son Joseph Scorney, as Giuseppe Mongitore did his son Charles, and Matthew Scutaro his son Daniel. Brian Todaro spoke about his father Frederick. Donna Falcaro recalled her husband Ronald, as Barbara Waring did husband Peter. Muriel Padnick remembered both her husband Charles and son Jamie.
Most of the victims’ relatives talked willingly; a few, such as Angellina Grillo, did not, even though Walter had made it possible for her to finally collect on husband Danny’s half-million-dollar life insurance policy, by telling the insuror her husband was dead, not missing. Roy DeMeo’s son Albert was in the same reluctant group, as was Roy’s friend Frank Foronjy.
Gladys DeMeo got a pass so far as being called to testify, because Walter was unsure what she knew or tolerated and what the stone-cold widow might say on the stand; in a written statement, she was allowed to “stipulate” to some fuzzy details about who her husband was.
One of the defense lawyers, in a sidebar comment, described Roy’s childhood friend Frank Foronjy as a “loose cannon,” which caused Judge Broderick to comment on what was an atmospheric characteristic of the courtroom on many days: palpable fear. “If I were sitting there looking at this lineup of defendants, I might be a loose cannon, pretty much a frightened loose cannon. It’s been in the trial from the beginning, and it’s one of the things that makes this a very tough trial.”
Later, with Foronjy still on the stand and acting like a loose cannon, Broderick said at sidebar: “This witness has been either frightened or strongly persuaded by somebody to change his testimony. It is crystal clear to me that this witness is coloring his testimony in a conscious effort to aid the defendants on trial in this case. Why he is doing it, I don’t know. But he is lying to this jury.”
* * *
Anthony Gaggi sat impassively during the RICO trial’s early months. He was awaiting another stare-down, the moment his nephew would come back to testify about much more than hot cars. In the meantime, for the trial’s duration, he was housed in the MCC, on a high-security floor known as Nine South. After nearly two years at Lewisburg Penitentiary, he did not look well, and he did not even pretend to be a Wall Street Journal reader anymore. His lawyer Michael Rosen had tried and failed to win time off his five-year, car-conspiracy penalty. “His wife Rose, four children—and now his grandchildren—visit him regularly and keep his spirits up,” Rosen had written Judge Duffy. “But Anthony Frank Gaggi is not doing his time easily. The time he serves is ‘hard time,’ mentally and physically.”
On Nino’s behalf, Rosen blamed it all on Dominick and gave Nino’s version of an old event at the Gaggi bunker. “The hard time I refer to exists as a result of an uncle who knows he was framed by his no-good nephew, whose life he actually once saved when he was choking on a quantity of narcotic pills. Even the most hardened, insensitive judge must realize how extraordinarily difficult it must be to languish in prison, separated from loved ones, because of the word of a desperado such as Montiglio.”
Sixty-two-year-old Nino was also mourning the death of the woman with whom he lived all his life, his mother Mary, who had died at ninety, with him at Lewisburg. By the time he reached the MCC, even though he had been so fastidious about his health all his adult life, he had also developed—just like his father Angelo, the Lower East Side barber—a heart ailment for which he took medication four times a day.
The trial dragged on. More witnesses kept going on the stand and hurting Nino, the remaining mainstays of the DeMeo crew, Joey and Anthony, and the Hellman family. Ex-detective Thomas Sobota, describing himself as a recovering alcoholic, and Housing Police officer Paul Roder told parts of the Eppolito–Patrick Penny saga. Even ex-Westie Mickey Featherstone, whose West Side friends had framed him for a murder, turned up. Becoming the second ex–Green Beret to make a Southern District deal, he described the Westie-Gambino connection and told the jury how Nino and Roy had painted themselves as his superior officer and supervisor.
In April 1988, just prior to Dominick’s appearance, another person from Nino’s past took the stand: Dr. Jesse Hyman, a Brooklyn dentist and insurance-plan schemer who had tried to bail Nino, Paul, and Carlo out of their shaky loans to the Westchester Premier Theater by arranging a bank bailout. Hyman had also agreed to cooperate, after receiving a thirty-year hammer in an unrelated case.
Nino’s impassive air wilted as Hyman described visits to Nino’s house and said he saw Dominick giving Nino loan collections. Nino squirmed in his chair as Hyman put Rose Gaggi in the trial transcript and identified her in a photograph and, doing
so, gave a nod toward her in the spectator section.
One of the Hellman-family defense attorneys, Lorin Duckman, was struck by how red Nino’s face became, how his chair seemed to vibrate, and later he told colleagues he thought Nino was on the verge of a heart attack. “That was against all the rules, pointing out the wife,” he said.
The incident occurred late on a Thursday afternoon, and the trial was adjourned to Monday. In between, on Saturday morning, April 16, 1988, Nino rose from a lower bunk in his cell on Nine South and went to the rooftop recreation area to take a walk. He was joined by a legendary MCC inmate, Joseph Doherty, a soldier in the revolutionary Irish Republican Army; Doherty had been in the MCC longer than anyone in history—the result of a topsy-turvy court fight in which the United States was trying to force his deportation to Great Britain, where he was badly wanted for alleged crimes in Northern Ireland.
Doherty was on Nine South too, in a cell directly opposite Nino’s, and they had become friendly. Nino would tease him about how tough the Irish cops on the Lower East Side were when he was a kid; Doherty would say how tough British-backed cops in Northern Ireland were when he was a Catholic kid in Belfast. Although they had little else in common and Doherty was only thirty-three, they regularly exercised together. Mostly, Nino talked about his family and his R&A Sales food brokerage—only rarely about his case, which was so ignoble, compared to Doherty’s.
On this Saturday morning, Nino began to complain of physical discomfort. “My stomach really hurts, I got indigestion.”
“If it’s a stomachache, it’ll go away,” Doherty said. “Come on, keep walking, maybe it’ll go away.”