Murder Machine: A True Story of Murder, Madness, and the Mafia

431 Pages·1993·3.04 MB·English

by  Gene Mustain

“A MODERN-DAY ‘MURDER INCORPORATED’ . . . A VICIOUS
GAMBINO CRIME FAMILY CREW . . . SO BRUTAL THAT EVEN JOHN
GOTTI FEARED THEM . . . A VIVID, CHILLING TALE OF MOB
TREACHERY AND DEPRAVITY THAT SHOULD DISPEL ANY
REMAINING ROMANTIC MYTHS ABOUT MAFIA LIFE. HIGHLY
RECOMMENDED.”
—Library Journal
“Nobody knows the mob like Jerry Capeci and Gene Mustain, and in Murder
Machine, they’ve got the most amazing wiseguy story yet . . . the saga of a crew
of serial killers run amok, a cross between The Godfather and The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre.”
—Gail Collins, columnist,
New York Newsday
“Murder Machine shows us that the latest and last model for the mob’s
inspiration is Caligula’s Rome—where murder is just another form of
recreation . . . chillingly told.”
—Murray Kempton,
Pulitzer prize–winning columnist “This is the scariest book I’ve ever read about
the mob. We’ve heard tales about professional killers and tales of solitary serial
killers. But this is the tale of a complete gang of serial killers. They maimed.
They tortured. They slaughtered. And they enjoyed it. After this, nobody can
ever write another Mafia romance.”
—Pete Hamill
“The authors re-create the DeMeo underworld in gripping detail . . . A
MASTERPIECE OF TRUE-CRIME REPORTING.”
—Publishers Weekly

for Doreen, forever
for my wife, Barbara, and our children, Matthew, Jenna, and Craig
and for those New York Daily News strikers who stood tall and chased the bullies out of town
ONYX
Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New
York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,
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division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL, England Published by Onyx, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin
Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Dutton edition.
First Onyx Printing, July 1993
Copyright © Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci, 1992, 1993
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-101-66588-6
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Version_1
Table of Contents
Prologue
I: LOVE AND WAR
CHAPTER 1: Uncle Nino
CHAPTER 2: Bully Boy
CHAPTER 3: Hill 875
CHAPTER 4: Swing of Things
II: “That Life”
CHAPTER 5: Night of Knives
CHAPTER 6: Map of Murder
CHAPTER 7: The Coronation
CHAPTER 8: Button Man
CHAPTER 9: Killing Spree
CHAPTER 10: Thin Blue Line
CHAPTER 11: Pet of the Year
CHAPTER 12: The Car Deal
CHAPTER 13: Sprouting Wings
CHAPTER 14: Bay of Pigs
CHAPTER 15: Body Shop
CHAPTER 16: Into the Wind
III: THE CHASE
CHAPTER 17: Travesty of Justice
CHAPTER 18: Empire Boulevard
CHAPTER 19: Harry
CHAPTER 20: Semper Fidelis
CHAPTER 21: Retirement Party
CHAPTER 22: California Schemin’
CHAPTER 23: The Other Shoe
CHAPTER 24: Class President
CHAPTER 25: Wally’s Pet Shop
CHAPTER 26: Lassie Comes Home
CHAPTER 27: Nine South
CHAPTER 28: Clean Slate
EPILOGUE: Special Update for the Paperback Edition
Acknowledgments
INDEX
Photo Inserts
Prologue
It was about six p.m., already pitch black out, and one of those wet stingy snows
was coming down hard. Mr. Todaro parked his car in the street in front of the
crew’s clubhouse. He was an older gentleman, sixty, I think. What was about to
happen to him was, well, to me it was something out of Auschwitz. Roy had
ordered Freddy, who was like Roy’s servant, to lure Mr. Todaro to the clubhouse
by making him think Roy had a used car to sell. But actually Roy was going to
kill him so that the man’s nephew, a friend of Roy’s, could take over Mr.
Todaro’s film-production business. Roy was always available for this kind of
work. After the first few, I think he started enjoying it.
Anyway, it’s dark and it’s snowing and as expected Mr. Todaro sees Roy’s
guy Freddy waiting outside and says hello. They start walking toward the
clubhouse. Now, there is a picture window with venetian blinds next to the
doorway, and as Freddy’s walking he sees someone inside the clubhouse pinch
the blinds and look out. All he sees is the person’s eyeballs; it’s eerie and he
begins to quiver. He knows Mr. Todaro is going to die, but he’s never seen Roy
DeMeo murder before.
Mr. Todaro goes in first. There is a living room off the hallway that leads to
the kitchen. As soon as Mr. Todaro is past the opening to the living room,
Freddy is startled to see someone he knows, Chris, leaping out into the hallway
with a butcher knife in his hand; it was an almost balletic move. Chris, by the
way, was the first kid to join Roy’s crew; at the moment, he doesn’t have any
clothes on, except for his Jockey shorts. He always worked in his underwear
because he didn’t want to bloody his clothes. Freddy starts to wet his pants—he
believes Chris is going to stab him—but no, Chris just grabs him by the arm and
wings him out of the way. “You, over here!” he says.
Freddy then sees Roy DeMeo coming out of the dark from the other end of
the hall, just gliding along, and he’s got a gun in one hand and a white towel in
the other. He just glides up and shoots dumbfounded Mr. Todaro in the head,
and before the man even hits the floor Roy is wrapping the towel around his
head to prevent the blood from spurting all over. Then Chris comes over and
stabs Mr. Todaro in the heart. Many times. “That stops it from pumping blood,”
stabs Mr. Todaro in the heart. Many times. “That stops it from pumping blood,”
Roy tells Freddy, who’s still shaking. The murder only takes a few seconds, but
of course they’re not done yet. They’re going to make Mr. Todaro disappear.
Some other kids in Roy’s crew appear from somewhere, and they all drag
Mr. Todaro’s body across the kitchen and into the bathroom, where they put it in
a bathtub. Now, before they begin cutting Mr. Todaro up, they have to wait
forty-five minutes or so, until his blood congeals. Dismemberment isn’t so
messy that way, Roy tells Freddy, like Freddy was a medical student. So they
wait. Maybe they even ordered a pizza, I don’t know, but we do know they did
that once while waiting. One of the men waiting actually lived in the clubhouse.
The others called him Dracula, and not just because he had silver hair and a deep
voice.
As I indicated, Mr. Todaro was one of those free-lance jobs that Roy and the
crew did. There were a lot of those. But normally they were out making money
for a gangster named Nino. You knew Nino was a gangster soon as he walked
into a room; he was a murderer too, but did not do as much killing, and so far as
we know, was not present for any of the dismemberments at the clubhouse.
Neither was Dominick, who was the guy Nino used to collect his cash and keep
an eye on the DeMeo crew. When Dominick was a little boy, Nino practically
stole him from his father. Dominick went on to be a Green Beret war hero in
’Nam, and was a tough guy, but he did not have a killer’s eyes. Roy and his
crew, they all did.
Eventually, Mr. Todaro’s body was taken out of the bathtub and placed on
either a tarpaulin or one of those swimming-pool liners they sometimes used.
Then Roy and his crew sawed the man apart, put him in garbage bags and took
him to the biggest dump in Brooklyn. It was like a disassembly line. None of Mr.
Todaro was ever seen again. This butchery went on all the time. It was
systematic. The system was, you know, almost ceremonious. And they used to
talk about the kick they got from it, the high, the power. They used to say killing
made them feel like God.
*
Of all the horrifying stories about Roy DeMeo and his crew, the murder of
Mr. Todaro is the one that stays in the mind of FBI Special Agent Arthur
Ruffels. While telling it in the main conference room of FBI headquarters in
New York City, Ruffels—a former high school teacher—rose to his feet to
mimic the killers’ movements. His audience—other agents, their boss, and the
authors of this book—was spellbound. The room felt colder than before. Ruffels
had transported us to a charnel house.
had transported us to a charnel house.
“They were the scariest people we’ve ever seen,” he continued, sitting down.
“Just in Roy’s crew there were five people you’d have to call serial killers.”
This was in the fall of 1989. It was our first major interview for a story we
came upon while researching a previous book on John Gotti, the ex-hijacker who
bludgeoned his way to the top of the underworld and became a household name
because of his winning streak in courtrooms. Poking into Gotti’s past, we found
a transcript of a conversation secretly recorded by FBI agents in which Gotti’s
brother Gene said he and violent John were afraid to take on Roy DeMeo
because Roy had “an army” of killers. At the time the comment was made, only
a few cops and residents of certain neighborhoods even knew the crew existed.
But who were these people so notorious in their malignant realm that even the
Gotti brothers were afraid? And what had they done?
Out of the search for those answers comes this story about the most foul and
prolific gang of murderers in the modern history of the United States. The Roy
DeMeo crew was the coming together of an uncommon union of killing spirits;
Roy and his followers killed for profit, for revenge, and finally, for fun. Many of
their victims were themselves criminals, but many others were innocents who
simply strayed into their merciless path, or who committed particular acts—such
as insulting someone in a bar—that agitated the hairiest triggers anyone would
want to encounter.
Jules Bonavolonta, supervisor of the FBI’s organized crime squads in New
York, opened that first interview this way: “We speculate this group killed in
excess of two hundred people. A great many were just innocent people who got
in the way, who just wandered in, who just happened to witness something. In
other words, wanton killing. With no remorse.”
Officials of the FBI, the New York City Police Department, and other
agencies that eventually joined forces and tried to put the DeMeo crew out of
business faced monumental obstacles because witnesses to some of the murders
never came forward and because so many victims, such as Mr. Todaro, were
never found.
The gang was unique not just for its violence, but also for its pedigree. Some
of the most important members were still teenagers when they joined. One was a
champion racecar driver. One had taken and passed the cops’ entrance exam;
another’s brother was a cop. One more was the product of an upright Jewish
family; his brother was a doctor. The gang’s leader was smart enough to be a
doctor—and his favorite uncle was a prominent New York lawyer.
This story will tell who the gang members were, how they got together, how
they killed, and how they were brought to justice, one way or the other. It also is
the story of many of their victims, including a teenage beauty queen, a college