by Gene Mustain
Early in 1991, co-author Jerry Capeci visited the former Gemini Lounge and clubhouse in Flatlands; he was accompanied by Richard Scheslinger and Alan Goldberg of the CBS Television program “48 Hours,” which was preparing a segment featuring a look at this story. The three journalists found one person willing to talk—Debbie Doyle, who had moved into Dracula’s old clubhouse-apartment next to the bar. Some walls in her apartment still bore the damage from the task force raid of several years before.
After moving in, she had learned a little history about the apartment from a newspaper story. Still, she said, living there was disturbing in only one way, and that was “all the blood that went down the drain from the bodies. You know, I kind of felt eerie when I took a shower. But other than that, it really didn’t bother me because I feel when people are dead, they’re dead. I mean, it happens. You know, it’s life.”
As the interview was taking place on the street outside the apartment, another woman came out of the old Gemini Lounge, now Justin’s Pub, and listened to Debbie Doyle’s remarks. She then introduced herself as a former Gemini patron and barmaid. She knew Roy, Joey, and Anthony and all the rest and knew they were accused of terrible crimes, but they were always pleasant to her, so she always minded her business. “You know how it is,” she said, “this is Brooklyn.” (And in Brooklyn, about two years after older brother Joseph was sentenced to prison for life, Patrick Testa, the former teenage genius-with-cars who had served only a few months for his DeMeo-crew activities and then joined the Luchese crime family, would be shot dead in his body shop by an unknown gunman.)
As the hardcover edition of this book was being published, co-author Capeci, accompanied this time by reporter Steve Dunleavy and producer Cynthia Fagen of Fox Television’s “A Current Affair,” returned to the bar. The owner of what was now Justin’s Pub wasn’t too pleased to see them. He tried to block the show’s cameramen from filming the exterior and screamed at Fagen, “I had nothing to do with those guys!”
Police from the Six-Three Precinct were called in to soothe over everyone’s feelings, but not before Debbie Doyle came out of her haunted house to say, “Just because one hundred people got killed in my apartment—what’s the big deal?”
Eventually, Doyle invited Dunleavy and Fagen in for a look-around, and thus a national television audience got a guided tour of Dracula’s cutting-room floors. The old DeMeo crew clubhouse-apartment looked too oddly banal for the horror that went on there.
Meanwhile, the cops, agents, and lawyers who worked on the Testa-DeMeo-Gaggi-Castellano task force got together at Tavern on the Green in Central Park for a victory party. Walter gave out red T-shirts with white letters—“I Worked in Wally’s Pet Shop” on the front, “U.S. vs. Castellano” on the back.
To the twenty-eight members of the task force who attended, Walter also presented silver bowls—a replica of one struck by Paul Revere to commemorate a band of Revolutionary War patriots who, according to an accompanying note, stood up to corruption and “the violent menace of villains in power.”
The FBI gave out commemorative cocktail glasses, inscribed somewhat haughtily with the date the Bureau had entered the investigation. Joseph Coffey, now an investigator for a state organized-crime investigative agency, got up and said: “If anyone wants to say thanks for this dinner, you should say it to John Murphy, because if it wasn’t for him, none of us would be sitting here.”
Multiple heart-attack victim Murphy, who was there, was stunned and embarrassed. He was a bit stronger these days and doing some private investigative work with the Fort Zinderneuf graduate, Joseph Wendling, who had since retired from the NYPD with a serious back injury after a car slammed into the rear of his as he transported a prisoner.
Ronnie Cadieux had retired from the NYPD too, and opened his own private detective agency; he would soon help solve a brutal double homicide of two ordinary Bath Beach women—a case the NYPD had bureaucratically fumbled until Ronnie showed that the victims, a mother and a daughter, had wandered, completely innocently, into the web of a connected man.
Uncle Artie Ruffels, still a champion sailboat racer at age fifty-five, was about to launch an enterprise akin to Ronnie’s because, incredibly, the FBI was kicking him out the door. Though the stupid policy was soon to change, the bureau was at that time enforcing a mandatory-age requirement for brick agents. Meanwhile, Marilyn Lucht was off working on another big FBI case. Kenny McCabe was still an investigator for the Southern District, and Danielle Deneux’s platonic buddy, Harry Brady, was applying for a similar job he would eventually get. Frank Pergola was now attached to the NYPD major-case squad based at NYPD headquarters at One Police Plaza, a few steps from Walter Mack’s office.
In his wallet, Walter was still carrying the photo of DeMeo-crew victim Peter Waring; now and then, he still got telephone calls from around the country from people who had heard about the case and were looking for relatives missing in New York. The head of the organized crime squads at the FBI in New York, Jules Bonavolonta, had publicly said the crew might have killed in excess of two hundred people. The NYPD did “clear” seventy-five homicides by attributing them to the crew.
The NYPD clears a homicide when it believes it knows who is responsible but cannot go further with the case because the suspect is dead or because of other insurmountable problems. Considering the nature of the crew, and the years of crew history for which no cooperating witness was available, its victim toll is probably higher than seventy-five. But even Joey, Anthony, and Henry could not be precise, because they were not always around when Roy got the urge. Roy would not know either, because the crew kept killing after his murder. Not long after the hardcover edition of this book came out, one of Roy’s relatives called to tell us: “Roy certainly was the black sheep of the family. He brought a lot of shame to the family, but we never knew how bad he was until we read about it. I’m glad he got it. Many of us would like to exhume his body and dump it on the street.”
Walter was investigating a new case—the murders of Paul Castellano and Thomas Bilotti. He saw the murder of Paul, a task force defendant at the time, as a last bit of task force business. Eventually, he gathered enough evidence to recommend indicting Gambino family boss John Gotti under a RICO theory that the murder was a racketeering act to achieve power in a criminal enterprise. Meanwhile, however, prosecutors in the Eastern District had assembled a broader case against Gotti, based partly on yet another listening device agents had secreted in a place he felt safe to talk—a widow’s apartment above Aniello Dellacroce’s old Little Italy hangout.
This led to another turf war over which district would indict Gotti. This time, because Rudolph Giuliani had resigned to run unsuccessfully for mayor of New York, Walter did not have a powerful lever to pull in Washington. The Eastern District won. Not long afterward, Walter resigned from the Southern District and took a big job on Wall Street. Eventually, the Eastern District would win its case against Gotti—thanks partly to the Dominick-like testimony of an insider, Salvatore Gravano, the man Gotti had appointed underboss after taking over the family from Paul Castellano, whose murder he was convicted of orchestrating. Bruce Mouw, Artie’s and Marilyn’s boss on the FBI’s Gambino squad, would get the Justice Department’s highest award for achievement for his role in assembling the case that ended Gotti’s winning streak in courtrooms.
Gravano also provided information that bore directly on a major scene in this story—the murder of Roy. Gravano told Mouw and other agents that he was visiting Paul’s White House the day after Roy’s body was found when Paul showed him a newspaper account of the recovery and asked for his reaction; Gravano knew some members of Roy’s crew. “If you’re not mad, I’m not mad,” Gravano said he told Paul. As 1993 dawned, we were trying to persuade Gravano—who pleaded guilty to nineteen murders as part of his plea bargaining with the government—to help us tell the story of Gotti’s reign and fall, the subject of our next book.
On February 15, 1991, a major, if grating, figure in Walter’s case made the
news again. Vito Arena, released early from prison because of his testimony, had gone back to the robbery game, only this time he played with the wrong people in Houston, Texas. Armed with a gun, he held up a convenience store. He would have gotten away with some cash if he had not stopped on his way out and come back to demand some music tapes too. A clerk reached below a counter and came up firing into Vito’s face with a .357 Magnum, definitely ending his cosmetic-surgery dreams.
Today, of the case’s major witnesses, Dominick is the only survivor. He was pleased to hear in early 1992 that an appeals court upheld the convictions of all of the defendants except for the jury-rigging Hellman family. The court said the Hellmans should have been tried separately. (And when that took place in December 1992 only Wayne and Judy Hellman were in the dock because Judy’s father-in-law, Sol, had died in the interim. Even though Judge Broderick had said after Judy’s original conviction that he believed she had thrown a case for Nino, she was acquitted this time around. Her husband, Wayne, was not, and he faced three years in prison as the softcover edition of this book went to press. He was convicted of fraud related to financial transactions he made after Nino Gaggi’s acquittal, in which he lied about the sources of his income.) In disguise, and while wearing an “America’s Most Wanted” baseball cap, Dominick would make his national television debut on “A Current Affair” with Debbie Doyle and talk about what it was like testifying against his uncle—“I’d rather do three more tours in ’Nam,” he said, among much else.
His romance with the woman he met in Albuquerque had ended, but he had met another woman and had fallen in love once again. Today, they and his daughter Camarie live somewhere in the great expanse of the country he grew to know during his turbulent time in the witness protection program. Camarie, a pretty seventeen-year-old with a heavenly voice, came to live with him six months after he received probation.
In the immediate wake of the publishing of the hardcover edition, the authors received a letter from someone who got to know Dominick’s father, Anthony Santamaria, after Nino chased Anthony out of the Gaggi bunker when Dominick was three years old. The letter, which was passed along to Dominick through government channels, painted a poignant portrait of Anthony. It was a bittersweet reminder of what might have been, if Dominick had grown up with “The General” as the man of the house. But it also gave Dominick something to cherish—his father’s affirmation. Here is an excerpt:
For many years I helped “The General” deal with the hurt and pain of losing his son Dominick and the guilt held inside wondering what Dominick thought of him, and further wondering what had become of him. Many times I watched The General cry over the mistake of losing Dominick and hearing him repeatedly say that Nino was “no good” and would eventually ruin Dominick’s life. Knowing The General’s constant battle with alcoholism and the pain harbored within him made me especially sad. To see a man so powerful in so many ways and powerless in other ways was truly a tragedy. The General always preached high moral values, demanding that people be honest, law abiding, and good natured, which were truly his values. When he heard Dominick was a decorated war hero, he was so proud that Dominick had not become part of “that life.” I know if The General were alive he would also be so proud and would admire the courage that Dominick displayed in separating himself from a life that is worse than cancer.
By the time Dominick received the letter about his father, he had repaired his relationship with his other two children, Dominick Jr. and Marina; Denise allowed them to live with him in the summer of 1990. Fourteen-year-old Dominick Jr., like his father was, is rather stubby and large for his age, and a promising football player and math wizard. Marina, age eleven, sounds like she is going to be a talented singer like Camarie is. All the children live under new names. Dominick even gets along better with Denise these days; he says she still doesn’t want to talk publicly about her harrowing life with him, but has read this book and was surprised to find that their relationship had been accurately portrayed.
Despite the torment he still feels for testifying, Dominick seems happy. He has found his identity; it was there all along, waiting for the virus to be purged. The proof was when he told his sentencing judge, “Your honor, I never shot anybody in the street.” He makes a comfortable living in the merchandising of entirely legitimate products. Once in a while at parties, friends will badger him to get up and sing, and after a few drinks he might. He has been crime-free for ten years now. In a couple more, he will be off probation; his slate with society will be clean.
He will live the rest of his life, however, looking over his shoulder. He fully expects that someday friends and relatives of the people he helped send away will come calling. Without saying too much about his defensive preparations, he is ready for them.
Acknowledgments
Many people helped us tell this story. The effort that many characters in it showed during their troubling times inspired us during ours. We begin with Walter Mack and the detectives, cops, agents, and government lawyers involved in the law enforcement thread of the story—particularly Kenneth McCabe, Arthur Ruffels, Frank Pergola, Roland Cadieux, John Murphy, Harry Brady, Joseph Wendling, Anthony Nelson, and Marilyn Lucht—and also Bruce Mouw, Gil Childers, Charles Meade, Mary Ellen Luthy, Barbara Jones, Mark Feldman, Joseph Coffey, Bill O’Loughlin, Steven Samuel, Jules Bonavolonta, and Nick Akerman.
In addition, we received assistance from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the New York City Police Department, the United States Attorney’s office in Manhattan, the United States Attorney’s office in Brooklyn, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, and the Bexar County Sheriff’s office in San Antonio, Texas.
We also salute New York City Councilman Herbert Berman, who gave us an insider’s tour of eastern Brooklyn, the officials and employees of James Madison High School and Saint Thomas Aquinas School, both in Brooklyn, and Mary Help of Christians School in Manhattan. A large number of those who helped have to remain anonymous. Many of them live in Bath Beach, Canarsie, and Flatlands, Brooklyn, particularly on or around Avenue P in Flatlands and Cropsey Avenue in Bath Beach. Some folks in the vicinity of Whitewood Drive and Park Place in Massapequa Park, Long Island, were also helpful.
Some people were not wild about helping us, but treated us courteously and offered some information, people such as Judith Questal and Professor Albert DeMeo of Brooklyn Law School.
For being friends, or for lifting a hand and answering a question when we asked, we thank Eliot Wald, Jane Wald, Dominick Marrano, Gail Collins, Patrice O’Shaughnessy, Michael Lipack, Helen Peterson, Vera Haller, Edward McDonald, Laura Ward, Douglas Grover, Charles Healey, Michael Pizzi, Ralph Parente, and members of the Montiglio family, Anthony, Michele, and Camarie.
All through the usual trauma of bringing a book home, our cheerleading literary agent Faith Hampton Childs was always there to hold our hand and, near the end, Senior Editor Laurie Bernstein of E.P. Dutton saved the day.
As we noted in the prologue, we owe a special debt to Dominick Montiglio. May he live happily, return to college, and become class president.
INDEX
The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. To find the corresponding locations in the text of this digital version, please use the “search” function on your e-reader. Note that not all terms may be searchable.
Abrams, Frederick, 107, 113, 241, 297, 307, 343
Akerman, Nick, 173, 198
Amato, Frank, 110, 267–68
murder of, 297
Anastasia, Albert, 16, 35, 52, 129
Anderson, Cheryl (Ma Barker), 195–96, 220, 235, 265, 268, 363
“in the wind,” 266, 267, 300, 304, 353
robbing her father, 359–61
Anderson, Chuck (Mr. New York), 53, 59, 72–73, 186, 267, 398
Arena, Vito, 200–206, 222, 225, 238, 348
arrest of, 313–15, 333–34
car deal with Arabs and, 244–47, 257, 287–88
credibility
of, 336–37, 345, 364, 367
Daoud-Falcaro murders and, 257–61, 339–40
as “Harry,” 293, 298, 307, 315, 337
as homosexual, 201, 314, 425, 444
hunt for, 325, 331–33
as informant, 315, 316, 333–40, 352, 365, 369, 394, 398
“in the wind,” 309, 313, 315–16, 317
Mongitore-Scutaro murders and, 294–95, 313–14
Penny murder and, 288–89, 339
pre-testimony problems, 412, 423–24
Scorney murder and, 203–205, 314, 335–37
testimony of, 423–25, 443–44
Armenian, The, 357, 358–59, 360, 391, 422
arrest of Dominick and, 377–78, 380
Bath Beach, Brooklyn, 8–9, 14, 23, 66, 116, 127, 268–69, 366, 378
Beame, Abe, 107
Beltry, Joseph, 373
Bennett, Joseph, 151–52, 154, 240, 424
as FBI informant, 328
Berardelli, Arthur, 108, 131
Big A Exporters, 291, 307
Bilotti, Thomas, 132–33, 253, 310
as Mafia underboss, 300, 428
murder of, 429–30, 454
Biunno, Judge Vincent P., 317
Blau, Norman, 178
grand jury testimony of, 365
as rogue cop, 178–79, 181, 241, 279, 364
Borelli, Henry, 95, 113, 124, 153, 155, 158, 190, 212, 258–61, 295–96, 332, 375
arrest of, 307–308, 311
car deal with Arabs and, 243–47, 291, 293, 317
Chris and, 114, 158, 235–39
conviction of, 434
dismemberment and, 102, 169, 197, 223, 263
Dominick and, 113, 158, 167, 184–99, 263–64, 382–83
guilty plea of, 317, 327, 341
Katz murder and, 95–107, 113, 115
in prison, 389, 399, 412
sentencing of, 436
Boro of Brooklyn Credit Union, 39–40, 42, 69, 112, 177, 343