The Ice Man Page 18

  When Richard was sober and not in a bad mood, he was relatively easy to get along with. People he did business with tended to like him. He had a keen sense of humor and would readily pay for drinks and meals. For the most part, he tried to keep his word. Because of that he expected people to keep their word, which all too often didn’t happen. One individual who let him down was named Bruno Latini. He was a short, balding, mobbed-up guy who owned a bar on Eighth Avenue. Richard had given him fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of films on consignment. Because the fifty-two-year-old Latini had mob connections (his brother was Gambino captain Eddie Lino, who would, it would later be alleged, be murdered by crooked cops Louis Eppolito and Steven Caracappa at the behest of Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso), he thought he could get away without paying. He kept stalling Richard, then stopped returning Richard’s calls. This incensed Richard, ate at him.

  Christmas was still very much a big deal to Barbara and she went out of her way for the holidays to be special; she bought dozens of wonderful gifts, had a huge tree, decorated the house beautifully. That Christmas Eve Richard was quiet and morose. He was thinking of Latini, not his family. When everyone went to bed, Richard quietly got into his car and drove to the city looking for Latini, looking to kill him. It was snowing hard but that didn’t stop Richard. When he reached the bar, he learned that Latini just left. Richard went to the lot on the corner of Forty-ninth Street and Tenth Avenue and found Latini sitting in his car. Latini invited Richard into the car and gave him a song and dance about the fifteen hundred dollars. Richard pulled out a .38 and shot him twice in the head. For a minute or two he was blinded and couldn’t hear because of the report of the gun in the enclosed space. Richard found Latini’s wallet. There was several thousand dollars in it. Richard took his fifteen hundred and put the wallet back with the rest of the money still in it. Odd. He finally stepped from the car, went back to his Caddy, and returned to New Jersey.

  In the morning on Christmas Day a parking attendant found Latini with his destroyed head, quite dead. Police discovered his wallet on him and there was sixteen hundred dollars in it. This murder was never linked to Richard by the police or by the mob.

  I killed him, Richard explained, out of principle. He thought he could treat me like a piece of wood.

  Though Barbara made a big deal of the holidays, they tended to depress Richard. They reminded him of his childhood, and that always made him…angry. He still thought about his father, about killing him.

  Tony Argrila kept hounding Richard for the money he owed. Richard kept stalling, giving excuses, not money, to Argrila. Just when Argrila began getting hot under the collar, Richard would give him some money—but not what he said he would—to shut him up. Richard was planning to pay him and was doing his best, but his best wasn’t good enough. Finally, Argrila lost his patience and called his silent partner, Roy DeMeo, and suddenly everything took a serious turn for the worse.

  Roy DeMeo was an out-of-control psychopath, an associate of the Gambino crime family, who would eventually become the subject of a popular true-crime book appropriately entitled Murder Machine, by journalists Jerry Capeci and Gene Mustain.

  The Gambinos

  Roy DeMeo was born and raised in Canarsie, a tough neighborhood in one of the toughest towns anywhere in the world—Brooklyn, USA. As a boy Roy had been overweight, Humpty Dumpty–like, and was regularly put upon and abused by neighborhood bullies. He had thick black hair, dark eyes, olive-colored skin, and a huge belly, and waddled like a penguin. His older brother Anthony, known as Toby, was a tough, muscle-bound kid—always there to protect Roy—but he joined the marines, went to fight in Vietnam, and never came back. Thus fat little Roy was left to fend for himself on Canarsie’s mean streets.

  The young Roy DeMeo always admired neighborhood mob guys, of whom there were many. They were all over Canarsie, mostly members of the Lucchese crime family, with their fancy cars, fancy women, fancy clothes, and huge rolls of hundred-dollar bills. That’s what Roy wanted for himself; that was Roy’s dream; that’s what Roy saw in his future. Roy’s heroes were Lucky Luciano, Al Capone, and Albert Anastasia, infamous killers all. Those were the people Roy looked up to, wanted to emulate. He longed to be respected and feared like them.

  Though a bright child and good with numbers, Roy did not do well in school. School didn’t interest him in the least. He knew that what he wanted he could never get in any classroom. What he wanted you could learn only on the street, so that’s where Roy spent his time; that’s where he went to school; that’s where Roy DeMeo applied himself.

  The first order of business was to lose weight and to get muscular, and the young DeMeo began to diet and lift weights with a vengeance, and soon enough he lost the baby fat and protruding stomach, and his muscles became large and rock hard. Now when anyone bothered him, Roy gladly beat him to a pulp. He was an extremely dirty fighter, biting and gouging people’s eyes, and soon—as he planned—he secured a reputation as a tough guy, as someone who was stand-up, dangerous; no one to trifle with—not an easy task in Canarsie.

  As a young teen, DeMeo began loaning out (shylocking) the money he earned working at a supermarket. If someone didn’t pay back on time, Roy took apparent delight in beating him up. He quickly became a loudmouthed bully, mean and sadistic, swaggering around with his mouth twisted up as if he’d been sucking on lemons. He had a chip on his wide shoulder and dared people to try and knock it off. He was trouble looking to happen.

  DeMeo loaned money to a kid named Chris Rosenberg, who sold nickel bags of pot. With the money Roy loaned him, Chris was able to buy weight and was soon selling ounces and even pounds. Roy made Chris his partner, co-opted him and his pot business. This would be a recurring theme in DeMeo’s bloody, infamous life of crime: he made people who owed him money and couldn’t pay him on time his partner. This was, in fact, a classic Mafia ploy, used from its very inception. The word mafia in lowercase means a man of respect, an individual who has pride and honor and walks with his head high. Mafia, capitalized, has come to mean the criminal enterprise that began in Sicily in the mid-1800s and spread its insidious tentacles all over the globe. For many years the Mafia was a highly secretive, highly successful criminal enterprise the likes of which the world had never known; all its members took a blood oath to the particular family they were inducted into. Until Joe Valachi, at the 1963 McClellan Senate hearings in Washington, told about the intricacies of the Mafia—where it began, how it worked, its structure—law enforcement had no comprehensive understanding of the Sicilian Mafia. In fact, there are three distinctly different criminal organizations in Italy: the Camorra from Naples, the ’Ndrangheta from Calabria, and the Mafia from Sicily. Of the three the Camorra was—and still is—the most violent and vicious.

  The infamous John Gotti was one of the few Neapolitans who was allowed into the ranks of the Sicilian Mafia, into the Gambino family, which many say was a fatal error in judgment on Carlo Gambino’s part. An exceedingly cunning individual, Carlo Gambino was a small, frail, unassuming Sicilian who dressed and acted like a simple peasant from Sicily, when in truth he ran the largest and most successful of the five New York crime families. Carlo opened the books to John Gotti because Gotti killed a man who was stupid enough to kidnap Carlo’s nephew Sal and murder him after a ransom was paid; that, of course, was a one-way ticket to a graveyard, and John Gotti gladly killed the jerk who masterminded this ill-conceived kidnapping and killing.

  Carlo would later make a second grave error in judgment, and that was appointing his brother-in-law, Paul Castellano, the head of the family when he died in October 1976.

  Paul Castellano was a tall, gaunt, sallow, and dark-eyed man who had a butcher shop on Eighteenth Avenue, just off Eighty-sixth Street, in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, another very tough, Mafia-ridden neighborhood. If the Mafia had a graduate school, it was surely the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. Made men—soldiers, lieutenants, captains, underbosses, and bosses from all the five families—lived in Bens
onhurst. Here they bought homes, baptized and married off their children, celebrated holidays, lived their lives. The Bensonhurst public schools were filled with children who were the offspring of made men.

  Paul Castellano was a good businessman, though a very bad mob boss. He parlayed his butcher shop into a large chicken and meat wholesale business that made him a wealthy man. Paul married Carlo’s sister, Kathy, and it was mainly that marriage that caused Paul to rise quickly within the Gambino hierarchy.

  Paul was a notoriously greedy individual, did not come from the street as such, and was resented by most of the twenty-one captains in the Gambino family. Resentment of Castellano’s greed eventually caused Castellano to be killed in front of Sparks Steak House in December 1985. He and his bodyguard-chauffeur, Tommy Bilotti, were killed at the behest of John Gotti and Sammy “the Bull” Gravano by a hit team; one of those men was, in fact, Richard Leonard Kuklinski.

  In theory, Roy DeMeo should have been associated with and inducted into the Lucchese family; they were centered in Canarsie, had scores of junkyards and chop shops in the area. But Roy wanted more for himself; he wanted to become a member of the Gambino family; they were Mafia royalty, and that’s where Roy wanted to be made. DeMeo was an excellent moneymaker—had interests in unions, stolen cars and credit cards, drugs and shylocking, had partnerships in restaurants and bars, had a lot of money on the street. But DeMeo was loud and boisterous and readily drew attention to himself, all traits shunned by mob guys, and he had a very bad temper…would scream and yell and pull guns at the drop of a hat. He believed the best way to get people’s respect was to bully them, to beat them up, to make them bleed.

  “I don’t give a flyin’ fuck if anyone likes me; what I care about is that they fear me,” was a favorite saying of his, and people did fear him, with good cause, for Roy DeMeo was a bona fide raging psychopath. Besides all his other enterprises, he killed people for both sport and money. He filled mob-sanctioned hits as well as hits civilians wanted done and were willing to pay for. Essentially, he retailed murder. Roy had worked as a butcher in Key Food, a Brooklyn food store, and he was particularly adept at cutting people up to get rid of bodies.

  “Disassembling,” he called it, laughing. With expert knife work he dismembered those he killed, cut them up into six convenient pieces—the head, arms, legs, and torso—all of which he cleverly disposed of in different places, the head in a garbage bin, the arms in the nearby Atlantic Ocean, the legs in the mountain-high Canarsie garbage dump over near the Belt Parkway.

  DeMeo put together his own little killing crew, a bunch of cold-blooded serial killers named Joey Testa, Anthony Senter, Chris Goldberg, Henry Borelli, Freddie DiNome, and DeMeo’s cousin, Joe Guglielmo, who was known as Dracula, and they shot and stabbed and bludgeoned their way to prominent positions in the Mafia homicide hall of fame. Before they were finally brought to justice, the DeMeo crew murdered over two hundred people. Many of the murders were carried out in the rear apartment of a bar DeMeo owned called the Gemini Lounge on Troy Avenue.

  DeMeo made the acquaintance of Nino Gaggi, a made man in the Gambino family and a close personal friend of Paul Castellano. Both Gaggi and DeMeo dealt in stolen cars. DeMeo had a contact in the Department of Motor Vehicles and provided Gaggi with clean vehicle identification numbers (VIN) and paperwork for stolen cars. DeMeo was only too happy to help Gaggi in any way he could. He saw Gaggi as his entry into the Gambino family.

  Nino Gaggi lived at 1929 Cropsy Avenue in Bensonhurst. It was a redbrick three-family house with small yards in front and out back. Gaggi was from the old school, quiet and reserved, a slight man with small, seemingly frail hands, but he was tough like coarse sandpaper, with a bad temper. Everything about him was understated. He didn’t particularly like DeMeo, because he was so loud, so bold, so in your face. But DeMeo was a hell of a moneymaker, so Gaggi tolerated him and, as time passed, did more and more with him. During the Christmas holidays, DeMeo brought carloads of gifts for Gaggi’s three children and diamond bracelets and watches for Nino’s wife, Rose, an attractive blonde who was fiercely loyal to her husband. Gaggi had a vicious German shepherd named Duke. He loved the dog because it was tough and wanted to bite everyone, man or beast. Duke was so vicious that he used to climb up the eight-foot chain-link fence around the backyard, using his teeth and paws, to get at the sanitation guys on Bay Twenty-second Street. Gaggi had to have a chain-link overhang installed so Duke couldn’t escape and wreak havoc on the neighborhood. Duke’s tenacity gave Nino a big kick and he loved that dog as much as one of his own sons.

  It was an inconsequential incident on Bensonhurst’s Eighty-sixth Street that eventually caused Roy DeMeo to be inducted into the Gambino family: when a neighborhood tough, a Golden Gloves champion named Vincent Governara, known as Vinnie Mook, hit Gaggi and broke his nose, Gaggi turned to DeMeo and asked Roy to kill him. Whatever Nino asked of DeMeo, Nino got; and he later sponsored DeMeo to be made by the Gambino family, making DeMeo’s long-cherished dream come true.

  Because DeMeo lived and worked out of the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, a few miles away from JFK International Airport, he had a lot of contacts at the airport and helped mastermind numerous cargo thefts, heisting all kinds of merchandise from all over the world: wines and champagnes from Italy and France, exotic foods, jewelry, cash money, and guns. Lots of guns. Crates of pistols, revolvers, and even machine guns, Berettas from Italy, Walther PPKs from Germany, Uzi machine guns from Israel.

  Roy was a genuine gun fanatic and truly loved firearms. He had an extensive collection of them, enough guns to arm a small army, and he happily and easily sold all the stolen armaments from Kennedy Airport to members of organized crime. Because of Roy DeMeo, crates upon crates of clean, untraceable guns found their way to the New York and New Jersey underworld, and thus DeMeo was inadvertently responsible for scores of mob killings all across America.

  When Tony Argrila, a friend of DeMeo’s, went to Roy and told him that Richard Kuklinski was behind on his payments and had an “attitude problem,” DeMeo said he’d talk to Kuklinski.

  Partnership Born in Hell

  It was a blistering hot August day, 1973, the humidity near 100 percent, the temperature in the low nineties. No one was in a hurry to go anywhere. People seemed to move in slow motion. DeMeo was in a foul mood, on his way to the office–film lab of Argrila and Rothenberg to collect his end of the business.

  A year earlier, DeMeo had gone to see them and told them he was their new partner. Rothenberg laughed. DeMeo took out a pistol and slapped the shit out of him. Argrila and Rothenberg had a new partner. Theirs was a quasi-legal business, and neither Argrila nor Rothenberg had the balls to go to the police at that point.

  That August day all DeMeo knew about Richard was that he was big, acted tough, and was behind on his payments. DeMeo was at the office when Richard showed up for some product. Acting tough, DeMeo was heavy-handed with Richard. Richard had no idea who DeMeo was and that he was truly connected, and Richard was curt and nasty with DeMeo. Richard didn’t like this loudmouthed Italian guy trying to strong-arm him.

  “I’m a friend of Tony’s here,” DeMeo said.

  “And so?” Richard said.

  “And so I’m here because you’re behind and you got a bad attitude, I hear.”

  “Like I told them, I’ll pay back everything I owe when I have it.”

  “Yeah, and when’s that?” Roy demanded, getting mad, not liking this big Polish guy’s attitude one bit.

  “Hard to say,” Richard said, a slight smirk on his chiseled face. “You know how it is. The product’s out there. I’m waiting to get paid; when I get paid, they’ll get paid—simple.”

  “You think you’re cute?” DeMeo asked.

  “I think I don’t like you coming around and trying to put the squeeze on me,” Richard told him, and these two very dangerous men—neither knowing anything about the other yet—stared at each other with angry, homicidal eyes, like two white sharks eyeing each other,
sizing each other up.

  DeMeo could see that Kuklinski was not scared of him and would readily fight. Like all bullies, DeMeo was not about to tangle with a guy as big and tough as Richard apparently was.

  “We’ll see,” DeMeo said, and he turned and stormed off.

  “Yeah, we’ll see,” Richard said to his back.

  Argrila now, for the first time, told Richard who DeMeo was, that he was a connected guy. “I don’t wanna see you hurt, Rich. Leave, leave before he comes back.” With that Richard turned, went into the hall, and pushed the elevator button.

  DeMeo was steaming. There was no way he was going to let this big Polack trifle with him, disrespect him. Downstairs, in his white Lincoln, were his cousin Joe Guglielmo, Anthony Senter, and Joey Testa. Guglielmo was gray haired and resembled Bela Lugosi, thus his nickname, Dracula. Anthony Senter and Joey looked so alike that they appeared to be brothers, but they weren’t. They were both dark eyed and handsome with a thick head of black hair, each six feet, muscular, and athletic.

  Now, with his guys behind him, DeMeo went back upstairs to see Richard, and they found him in the hall waiting for the elevator. Richard was suddenly surrounded, guns pointing at him.

  “So, tough guy,” DeMeo said. “You wanna die, you fuckin’ wanna die?” And with that he struck Richard hard in the head with the butt of his gun. Knowing his life was on the line here, Richard did nothing. He had a .38 derringer in his pocket, but he didn’t draw it. DeMeo hit him several more times. Richard went down. Guglielmo hit him in the back of the head and kicked him in his right knee. Now they all proceeded to pummel Richard. Though they didn’t knock him unconscious, they beat him good. Richard had never gotten a beating like this in his entire life. He was angry beyond words, but he knew that DeMeo would kill him on the spot if he fought back. He had only a two-shot derringer on him. DeMeo found Richard’s derringer and took it.