by Gene Mustain
Nino’s discomfort did not go away. He spent most of the rest of the day in his cell; his cellmate was Ronald Ustica, who also was standing trial again in the second task force case.
After lockdown at eleven p.m., Doherty heard Ustica banging on the tiny plexiglass window of the cell opposite his. “Nino’s sick!” Ustica screamed. “Call the guards!”
Doherty and other inmates began banging on their cell doors to attract the attention of prison guards studying a television set several yards away. After a few moments, the guards arrived.
“The man has a heart complaint!” Ustica said, as Nino lay on his bunk clutching his chest. “You’ve got to get this man to the hospital!”
“What do you mean, heart?” one of the guards said.
“Get the doctor, will ya!” Doherty yelled.
Across several crucial moments, the guards debated whether to ask a prison doctor on duty several floors below to come up, or to take Nino down to him; the guards chose the latter option and escorted a stricken Nino down a flight of stairs leading to an elevator.
“Wait a minute,” one of the supervisory guards said. “We can’t take him down if he ain’t wearin’ his jumpsuit.”
Absurdly abiding by prison rules at a time of clear emergency, the guards ordered Nino, dressed in a warm-up outfit, to walk back up the steps to his cell and put on his prison-issue orange jumpsuit. From the tiny windows in their cells, Doherty and the other inmates looked on furiously and helplessly.
Nino walked back down, got in the elevator and was escorted into the prison infirmary about two a.m. He lay down on an examining table and as he was being attached to an electrocardiogram, Anthony Frank Gaggi balled his fists, moaned softly, then closed his eyes for the last time. He died at sixty-two, the same age his father had.
Death’s shadow, which had hung over the witness stand from the start, now fell on the defendants’ table in U.S. v. Gaggi, which was adjourned ten days, then renamed U.S. v. Testa. Several defense lawyers attended the wake for Nino at Cusimano & Russo’s funeral home—the parlor where Carlo Gambino and Marie Montiglio were waked—and gave their condolences to Rose, who, when she saw Kenny McCabe and Artie Ruffels on surveillance across the street, gave them a mocking salute.
Eventually, Rose filed a negligence suit against the prison, the guards, and the government. Prison officials had waited until late the next day to inform her of Nino’s death. Four years later, judging by documents submitted in the suit, it appeared the only issue remaining was how much the government would have to pay Rose Gaggi for contributing to Anthony Gaggi’s death.
Dominick was preparing for his appearance in the case when Frank Pergola telephoned with Nino’s obituary. He took it as one takes the unexpected death of a distant relative—regretful news, but not devastating. In the last two years, still in love with the same woman he met in Albuquerque and beginning to recast himself as a legitimate businessman in the field of merchandising, he had ceased feeling much emotion, love or hate, for Nino, now just a memory of a former life. “In Nino’s mind, dying like that would mean he beat you guys,” he told Frank.
CHAPTER 28
Clean Slate
Anthony Gaggi’s former eyes and ears went on the stand two weeks after Nino died, and stayed there two weeks. Because Walter had gotten his chance to throw the kitchen sink at the crew in a RICO case, Dominick got to tell more of the story this time, but the rules of admissibility removed most of the interior emotions and shadings—the area between the lines. Nino’s lawyer stayed on the case to help all the other lawyers subject the witness to the usual brutality of cross-examination, but Dominick was stronger than before—and did not make any smart-aleck remarks to the remaining defendants.
On weekends and between breaks, he relaxed with his friends on the task force. One day, he visited Uncle Artie’s home in Connecticut, and Artie gave him a tour of his competition sailboat, The Bootlegger. It was a lazy day, a time to reminisce about the unlikely road they had traveled the last six years.
“You know what is strange?” Artie said. “If someone ever tells this story, no one is going to believe it happened.”
“When you live it, it doesn’t seem so unbelievable.”
U.S. v. Testa played out to an almost empty courtroom. The parade of witnesses—including Vito Arena again—continued. Vito pulled another stunt, this time right on the stand, where he announced a sudden case of amnesia and refused to continue testifying until a recess was called and he extracted some pampering by the task force.
Walter and his coprosecutor Arthur Mercado put on a relentlessly detailed case, dotting every point in the dense indictment. The defense lawyers challenged every move. The trial transcript swelled to more than thirty thousand pages and the evidence included many hundreds of exhibits. Jurors got sick, lost loved ones, and quit jobs. The trial was a legal triathlon, the longest federal criminal case anyone could remember. Seeking relief, Joey Testa and Anthony Senter brought cocaine to court one day and were arrested and hit with more charges as they departed a snorting break in a hallway bathroom.
Near the coda, Judge Broderick ruled that Walter lacked the evidence to prove that Joey helped killed Roy DeMeo as the indictment charged—but since Joey was accused of so many other murders it mattered only technically. The judge also dismissed the bribery counts against the Hellman family but kept them in the case on fraud charges related to the Eppolito fix.
Closing arguments began the first week of June 1989—more than a year after Nino died. One by one, the nine defense lawyers got up and put their best spin on the million or so facts strewn across the trialscape. “This is the ninth defense summation,” Anthony’s lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, told the jury. “I feel a little bit like Elizabeth Taylor’s seventh husband on his wedding night. I know what to do; I know how to do it. The trick is to make it interesting for you.”
Brafman went on to spin a brilliant web, so preposterous yet so cleverly woven as to be plausible, that laid blame for all the murders in the case on the witnesses, mainly Vito Arena—frequently as if they related somehow to Vito’s homosexual lifestyle.
In his rebuttal summation, normally just properly aggressive, Walter delivered the most emotional argument colleagues had ever heard. Some neck veins rising out of his Christian Dior collar appeared inflamed. He ridiculed Brafman’s web and marched the jurors quickly through the horror of the case one more time. “We ask that you resolve the facts in this case,” he concluded, “that you find the truth in the spirit of complete fairness and impartiality. Now is the time for justice. Godspeed.”
The jury deliberated two weeks. Some defense attorneys took that as a good sign, but on June 22, the jurors hammered the rest of the DeMeo crew into oblivion. They found them and the Hellman family guilty on every single count left in the indictment. It was a complete and shattering victory for the task force.
Judge Broderick, a former commissioner of the NYPD, thanked the jury for enduring the ordeal, then said, “The story of systematic murder that has come before the jury in this case is something that I am sure was beyond the ken of anybody in the jury. It certainly was beyond my previous ken.”
The judge denied bail to Joey and Anthony and their crew mates pending appeals. He said, “I am so sure that the jury’s verdict was correct with respect to those defendants alleged to have been involved in the murder activities of the DeMeo crew that I can see no possible argument that could be put forward before me that would justify continuing any one of them for a single day at liberty.”
He allowed the Hellmans to remain free pending sentencing, and when that came he said that by the standard of a sentencing hearing—preponderance of the evidence, rather than reasonable doubt—he believed that Judy, Wayne, and Sol Hellman did tamper with the jury process in the Eppolito case, and gave them two, three, and five years respectively.
Joey and Anthony were sentenced on September 14, 1989. With one side of the courtroom packed with their relatives and friends and the other side wi
th task force members and their supporters, Broderick gave Joey and Anthony what Henry Borelli had gotten, enough time for several lifetimes in prison. Joey’s attorney, Herald Fahringer, found himself in the legally logical but incredibly insensitive position of arguing that it was wrong for the probation department to have included in the presentencing report letters from relatives of victims in the case describing the impact of the crimes on their lives.
“They are not the victims, they have not had the crime committed against them,” he said.
Try telling that to Dominick Ragucci’s parents, or Ronald Falcaro’s daughter, or Peter Waring’s wife, or Cherie Golden’s grandmother, or any of dozens more relatives, everyone on the task force side of the courtroom said to themselves. Fahringer’s words hung in the air like noxious fumes.
Joey smiled that wide mocking smile of his through most of the sentencing. He knew the time had come to pay the hangman; so did Anthony. Neither ever gave anyone on the task force side a glance. In one of those moments too good to be true, the bells of a church adjacent to the courthouse began pealing through the open windows just as Broderick lowered the boom on the Gemini twins. When he added fines to Anthony’s life sentence, Anthony sneered out loud. “I’ll send you a check.”
Joey and Anthony were permitted to say goodbye to their wives along the well of the court. Old neighborhood friends came up and slapped them on the back. “Can you imagine what heroes they would be if they had won?” Frank Pergola whispered to Artie, as they watched Joey’s and Anthony’s fans gather around.
The marshals then took the pair away—and off to different prisons to live out their lost lives; for the first time since childhood, Joey and Anthony were not inseparable.
On December 18, 1989, it was Dominick’s turn to discover what punishment he would get for his guilty plea to one RICO count in June 1985. His sentencing had been delayed until the case ran its course, and it was still up to Judge William C. Connor to determine whether he should serve some time in prison.
Under law, he was a murderer for being along when Nino and Roy shot Vincent Governara to death. He had pleaded guilty to that, and to attempted murder for rigging a grenade to Governara’s car, and to a raft of other crimes: robbery, extortion, loansharking, and drug dealing. His court-appointed attorney intended to ask Judge Connor for probation, but it was expecting a lot to walk away from such a record without any time behind bars, even considering—as Walter had always reminded him—his contribution to the destruction of the crew.
Prior to meeting his federal marshal and leaving for New York from yet another new hideaway, Dominick sat down at a personal computer and composed a statement he intended to read to the judge. His friend The Armenian offered to fly in from Los Angeles and address the court on his behalf.
They were reunited in an office at the Southern District, where Walter Mack, Kenny McCabe and Artie Ruffels had gathered. They saw a new Dominick—tan, fit, and bursting out of a camel-colored sportscoat because he had bulked up his arms and upper body pumping iron in a gym. The old fireplug physique that once provoked his Army friends to nickname him Stubby was back. He looked a lot more like Anthony Santamaria than Anthony Gaggi now—except for the tinted eyeglasses.
“Take those fucking things off,” Detective Frank Pergola of Bath Beach growled when he came into the room.
“They’re prescription!”
“They make you look like a fucking hood.”
“You must be Pergola,” cracked The Armenian, who had never met Frank before. Everyone laughed; Dominick had obviously provided an accurate account of his relationship with Frank.
The tension he was feeling gave way a bit as everyone chatted, but began building again as the entourage made its way to Judge Connor’s courtroom. Whatever came, he was anxious to get it over with; since Albuquerque in 1985, the marshals—keeping him on the go for fear someone might find him—had sent him and the special woman he met in Albuquerque to Cheyenne, Wyoming; Denver, Colorado; and Seattle, Washington. He had been in the program longer than most anyone in history. He wanted to put it all behind and live where he wanted without federal intervention, and hoped to get to know his children again. He had not seen them in four years.
Judge Connor invited The Armenian to take a seat at the defense table with Dominick—a good sign—and got the hearing underway. In the case of a cooperating witness, judges normally determine sentence by applying a three-tier test. Has the witness acknowledged his crimes and shown contrition? To what degree has he rehabilitated himself? Has he fully cooperated with the government?
Dominick’s court-appointed attorney, Lee Richards, a former prosecutor, got straight to these points:
“On each of these important tests, your honor, I have to say that Dominick Montiglio presents the most remarkable picture of a defendant that I have ever encountered. No defendant I have ever met or heard of has ever faced mistakes and changed his life so completely or contributed so much to law enforcement. Your honor this morning has the power to put the final piece of the puzzle for Mr. Montiglio in place and to allow him to complete what I really believe is a remarkable transformation.”
As to the violence Dominick committed, Richards attributed it to the “extraordinary influence” of Nino Gaggi and the men around Nino. “Those people made what I call the old Dominick Montiglio. Since then, Dom has remade himself.”
Judge Connor asked to hear from the defendant. Dominick rose and spoke in a voice that cracked, then grew steady. “I make no excuses, your honor, for crimes I committed in the past, here in New York or afterward, in California. Everything I did was of my own accord, and I fully understand that I am to be held accountable for my actions.” Four words in the statement came straight from the Latin motto of Airborne Rangers—sua sponte, of my own accord.
Dominick shifted his feet, fiddled with his prepared statement, then ad libbed. He said he wanted to particularly mention how Frank Pergola, Kenny McCabe, Arthur Ruffels, Walter Mack, and other “good guys” had helped him salvage something of his life.
He recalled how Frank had told him “nobody has the right to kill” and how Kenny once was the “enemy outside our club taking pictures” but was now “one of the few men I trust in my life.” He “couldn’t say enough” about Uncle Artie and said Walter had “made only one deal with me and that was to tell the truth.” He added: “What I learned from these men was that family isn’t necessarily one of blood, but trust and respect. They are the family I have now.”
He concluded with a simple plea for mercy: “I have a good job, a nice apartment, a future that I can look forward to. I have been with the same woman four years. I do realize I committed serious crimes. Whatever your judgment may be, your honor, all I want is for this all to end and to have a clean slate.”
Walter stood next and told the judge that Dominick had been of “extreme value to the United States” and met all his obligations as a witness. Uncle Artie added, “I have found Dominick to be forthright and honest in all the dealings I have had with him.” Frank Pergola spoke last: “The New York City Police Department and the people of the City of New York owe Dominick a great deal. He has cleared up a lot of mysteries for families of victims.”
As Judge Connor began speaking directly to him, Dominick grew more relaxed with each word:
I think you are what we sometimes refer to as a situational offender. You got into criminal activity because of the situation in which you were raised. . . . When you were arrested you immediately agreed to cooperate to an extent which has rarely been exceeded. . . . You have been separated from your children for a number of years and from friends. . . . You have been in a form of prison for a number of years and will continue to be so in the sense you will always be looking over your shoulder wondering whether your identity and your location have become known to those who I am sure would like to get retribution against you. . . . You have turned your life around. I think your rehabilitation is complete.
The proper punishment, the judge
concluded, was five years—on probation.
The judge left the bench wishing Dominick health and safety, and Walter, Kenny, Uncle Artie, and The Armenian took turns slapping his back and shaking his right hand. But the last scene was of Frank Pergola and Dominick, with the Great Seal of the United States on the maple wall beyond them, embracing like brothers who had grown up together in a normal house in Bath Beach, Brooklyn.
EPILOGUE
Special Update for the Paperback Edition
Gladys DeMeo had no comment when approached for an interview about her late husband. “No,” was all she would say, closing the door to her new home, and to that part of her life, the way she always had.
Rose Gaggi did not have anything to say either. Approached in a courthouse hallway after a hearing on her negligence suit against the government for the way her husband died in prison, she was more ironic than she may have intended to be when she smiled and said through clenched teeth, “The record speaks for itself.” Months later, the negligence suit was quietly settled. The details were kept a secret, but sources said Rose got what she wanted most, a pledge by the federal Bureau of Prisons to implement new medical-emergency rules, including one requiring a doctor to be on duty at the MCC at all times. “Rose insisted throughout that she was not interested in a financial settlement,” a person involved in the proceedings said, “only that procedures be put in place that would make it less likely no one suffer the way Nino did. So Nino, through Rose, ends up contributing something to society.”
Denise Montiglio did not want to be bothered either. “I will no longer be a part of what is an embarrassment to me and my family,” she said.
It is hardly surprising the women wanted to keep all skeletons in the closet. Besides, they all grew up in Brooklyn where, in the neighborhoods that incubated the DeMeo crew, legend has it that people mind their own business, or else.