True Crime Documentary -Mafia Documentary - Roy DeMeo (The Gemini Lounge Butcher)

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1:00Meet the Red Bull Dragonberry Emergizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so? Fire. Try them all. Only Admetos. On a cold blustery morning, January 18, 1983, a businessman called the police once again to report a maroon Cadillac that had been left in the parking lot of the Varnace boat club in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York. It had been there for over a week. Clearly, it was abandoned. The police had already been there once, and upon determining that the car had not been reported stolen, had left it where it was. They assumed that the owner would eventually come to collect it.

2:01Yet no one came, so the club manager asked police to have another look. They decided to investigate more fully. By now, they were aware of a missing person report on a man from the area, filed by his wife, and this car fit the description of the one they were seeking. The car appeared to be empty, although there were dark stains on the seats. One officer jumped up and down on the rear bumper, and from the way the car rocked, he decided that the trunk was empty, so they towed it to a police garage. Burensik analysts allowed the car to warm up inside for two hours before starting their examination. Then, they popped the trunk and found something they didn't expect, a chandelier. But there was something else. Beneath the chandelier was the dead body of a heavy-set, dark-haired man, Fortyish, who appeared to have been shot several times. His body had frozen into rigor mortis, and the cold, January temperatures had kept it rigidly in place, with one hand defensively over the face. His black leather jacket was wrapped around his head like a turbine, and his torso was

3:05frozen to the spare tire. A bullet hole went right through his now-solid hand, and an examination later indicated an execution-style killing, with a bullet hole behind each ear. In all, the man had been shot seven times, and he lay in a pool of frozen blood. According to his son, who later claimed the car, papers from the gloves used by crime-seem technicians were dumped into the blood, as if the criminalists had used the once-fying car as a trash can. In the backseat was a wire that apparently had been attached to a recorder, but the recorder was gone. There was also a New York magazine, according to reporters Jean Mustaine and Jerry Capichi and Murder Machine, which featured a cover story on dealing drugs. There was little doubt in anyone's mind that this killing had been a professional hit, and that the body was meant to be discovered. It was unlikely the killer or killers would ever be found. Yet, in many ways, the victim had done himself in a common fate for those who run with the wrong crowd.

4:07This man had left home on January 10th, around 930 in the morning, saying he had an appointment that afternoon to go over some legal papers. His daughter's birthday party was scheduled for that evening, and he assured his wife he would be there. He was always around for birthdays. But he never returned this time. The family filed the missing person report that led to the opening of the car, but it was eight days before they learned that he had been executed and left locked in the trunk of his car. The 17-year-old son cried in disbelief, but the man's wife did not. She had him buried in St. John's cemetery on Long Island. It was years before the real story came out. Offered from two perspectives, the son who knew that his father was in trouble, and someone who knew the gang that it killed him. Currently there are two primary sources for information about Roy Domeo, Murder Machine, and Albert Domeo's for the sins of my father. Roy Domeo's father was a significant, different perspective on the man reputed to be the Mafia's

5:07most cold blooded killer, responsible for orchestrating possibly as many as 200 executions. How does someone go from such a powerful and feared position in one of New York's prominent crime families to sharing the bloody trunk of his car with a broken chandelier? Roy Albert Domeo was born in 1942, into a working-class Italian family in Brooklyn, New York. With most teenagers in the 1950s, especially those in economically deprived circumstances, he looked for ways to make money. From hanging out with the sons of a neighbor, Mafia boss Joseph Profacci, Roy learned about the illegal practice of loan-sharking. Someone with means loaned money to people who could not get loans from regular venues, such as banks, and for this favor, they would then charge exorbitant interest rates. At first, Roy's assignments were just to pick up the interest owed each week from various businesses, but eventually, he learned how to make the loans on his own. Through that enterprise, he was drawn more deeply into organized crime and was exposed

6:10to the ways of the Southern Italians who had transplanted to New York. Southern Italian men, as detailed in Howard Abbotensky's organized crime, had long developed certain ideals that fueled ambition in an arena where they were otherwise powerless. According to their code, a real man did not cooperate with authorities, maintained self-control in the face of adversity, carried out vendetta's to avenge any slight suffer by his family, and did not forget. According to this ideal, the family connection was the only basis for trust, and that included even the most remote blood relatives. Outsiders could become family through rituals that involved the tradition of God-parenting. The patriarch decided all of the important matters in the family, including who would live and who would die, as well as the enterprises in which the clan made money. Carlo Gambino and Paul Castelano, for example, or Bade drug dealing among family members, especially heroin, because the stiff penalties could easily turn dealers into government

7:12informants. Those who participated in this illegal and forbidden venue risk being made a memory. Everyone, right-author Richard Gambino in Blood of My Blood, was responsible to the Capote Familia. The duty of family members was to make the family, especially the patriarch, wealthy, respectable, and powerful. That meant good marriages and honorable alliances with other families of statuses, mostly Sicilians with Sicilians. Those who were strong and aggressive on the family's behalf were rewarded with more responsible roles. To prevent anarchy and the avenging of imagined slights, rules were devised to keep order. Hence, even as criminals exploding society at large, if they respected the rules, they could consider themselves men of honor, a concept associated with domination, manhood, and strength. When several families were allied, or at least in agreement, one man stood out as the boss of all bosses, the Capote Tuti Capi.

8:13The others owed him their support and respect. He offered protection in the form of employment, lawyers when arrested, expenses for the family when serving time, and threats against business rivals. For these services, he took a cut from everyone's pie. All business was transacted through him, and he settled grievances among family members. Nicholas Pilegge says that the attitude developed among wise guys, or members of traditional families dealing an organized crime, that crime was preferred over legitimate business because much more money could be made. In Wise Guy, life in a mafia family, he states, they lived in an environment awashed in crime, and those who did not partake were simply viewed as prey. To live otherwise was foolish. Easy money, especially made by getting one over on someone else, was the best money. Meet the Red Bull Dragondary Emergizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so?

9:14Fire. Try them all only at McDonald's. Meet the Red Bull Dragondary Emergizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so? Fire. Try them all only at McDonald's. Meet the Red Bull Dragondary Emergizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so? Fire. Try them all only at McDonald's. Apprentice ships often occurred within the neighborhood gang. You came into contact with it. You got assignments, and you proved yourself. As an adolescent, Roy DeMail might just as easily have learned some other trade. His mother hoped he would become a doctor, but loan-sharking proved to be easy money, made quickly, and he was good at it, partly because he had no qualms about using violence against someone who failed to pay on time.

10:15He saw nothing wrong with the practice. Strongly impressed with the shiny Cadillacs that the neighborhood gangsters drove while he was growing up, he made his choice. It wasn't long before he met members of the Gambino crime family. Carlo Gambino commanded some 250 made men and hundreds of other associates who collectively controlled a virtual crime empire in the New York area. Roy wanted in, so he proved himself as a soldier under the command of Anthony Gaggi, known as Nino. The more money he turned over to Nino from his own take, the more Nino could pass on to his overbosses. Nino had influence, and Roy had the ability to earn, so they used each other. Nino Gaggi had grown up in the doggy dog world of Manhattan's lower east side, learning fast about the survival of the fittest among the racketeers who made up the crime families. Those who were powerful got the spoils, and they displayed their power in material wealth, fine clothing, and a polished appearance. Beneath tailored suits, silk ties, and manicured nails, they were willing to do whatever took

11:19to develop, hold, and improve their position in the family. About 5'8 and 160 pounds, Nino had been a fighter, and he quickly sniffed out the opportunity for himself in the form of his father's cousin, Frank Scalise. Alone shark with connections in high places, Scalise was an underboss for Albert Anastasia, and Nino ran a stolen car ring for him. In 1957, Frank Scalise was hit while outbuying fruit, allegedly because he was selling memberships into the family to enrich himself. Then two more soldiers from the same family were assassinated, including his brother, which provoked a war in the underworld. By the end of that year, Anastasia was murdered, which meant someone could take over the reins. Carlo Gambino and his cousin and trusted underboss, Paul Castelano, rose to the top of the heap, and Nino, having proven himself in the lesser rungs of the latter, now became a made man. To become a made man in a crime family, one had to demonstrate two abilities on a continuous

12:19basis. One was to make money. As one character on the Mafia television series The Sopranos told another, you're only as good as your last envelope. To prove one's manhood meant lining the pockets of the bosses, as well as one's own. The other qualification was to kill when necessary. Family members had to be trustworthy, which meant they kept quiet about the family's clan death-stein operations. If they didn't, they were dead. However, people could be whacked or eliminated based on mere suspicion and innuendo. So if someone wanted to usurp another's business operations, he had only to spread the rumor that the target man was either an informant or talking subversive, as in threatening to undermine the boss. People got whacked for lesser crimes. But Roy's were not insignificant. Roy was 32, living in a nice home in an exclusive community with his wife and children when he committed his first murder for the family. He was running an extortion scheme with Nino against a lucrative, ex-rated film business,

13:24and when the owner and his partner were raided and arrested, it appeared that one of them, Paul Rothenberg, might offer up his association with Roy and Nino in a deal. Roy scheduled a meeting with him in a diner, ostensibly to assist with legal expenses. When they got out of their cars, Roy pulled a silencer-equipped gun, took the businessman into an alley and executed him with several bullets to the head. Used to being a bullies the teenager, he had no problem threatening people. Now that he had killed, it was just business as usual to him. In fact, it empowered him. Once you've killed someone, he was later to impress upon his apprentices. You can do anything. Thereafter he began to train a crew of young men to become killers undemand and to get rid of a body quickly and efficiently. Roy had once been a butcher's apprentice, so he understood how to cut limbs from bodies. Among Dimeo's initial recruits was a 16-year-old Jewish kid, named Chris Rosenberg, who despised his ethnicity and desperately hoped he could one day prove himself to the extent that the

14:28Italians would welcome him as one of their own. Roy met Chris in the Brooklyn-based neighborhood of Kanarzi, where Chris was dealing pot, and helped him move into a larger money-making arena. He got Christmas friends into the business of stealing cars that could be turned into saleable items for wealthy clients overseas. A car mechanic named Freddie Denome joined them. Then two more came aboard, high school dropouts, Joey Testa, and Anthony Center. Roy bought an owner's interest in Phil's lounge, a bar in the front of a two-story building from which he had run his illegal operations, and one of his cohorts renamed it the Gemini lounge. Joey and Anthony were soon dubbed the Gemini Twins. A fifth young man, with a killer's cold heart, Henry Burrelli, came onto the team, and they would all meet at the spot to socialize, organize their illegal business operations, and perform more clandestine tasks. Roy began collecting weapons as he kept his impressive arsenal of machine guns, automatic rifles, and silencers in a room at the lounge.

15:31He also installed his cousin, whose nickname was Dracula, into the adjoining apartment. Because he could stomach it, Roy devised a specific form of getting rid of someone, which eventually came to be known as the Gemini method. He trained his crew how to participate in a disassembly line. If someone needed to be made a memory, disposal was always a problem, so his method appeared to be an answer. Mustain and Kapichi, recording what they had learned from the confessions of Nino Gaggy's nephew, Dominic Montiglio, present the method in detail in murder machine. The target person, whom someone higher up had ordered eliminated, would be invited into Dimeo's Gemini lounge, or in one case, the meat department at a supermarket. He'd be shot at once by one crew member, often Roy himself, wrapped in a towel by another to prevent blood from messing the place up, beheaded, and hacked into pieces. The various parts were then packaged in plastic garbage bags like meat and tossed into a dump.

16:31Just like taking a part of deer, Dimeo told his gang, there was no real difference. While they did execute a few females, there's no record of female dismemberment. However, this manner of disposal had to be refined. The first time they tried it, on a criminal car dealer who turned informant in 1975, they were careless. First, Chris Joanne Anthony used a pretty girl to lure Andre Katz, so she was a witness. Next, they hauled him off the streets publicly, leaving his car open and empty, clearly a missing person. Then they took him to a supermarket where they met Roy. Then he told them the plan, and they had to go along with it, or walk. It was the moment of truth for all of them, could they deal with hacking a human being apart? On this night of the knives, as Mustaine and Kapichi call it, Chris used a butcher knife to steal the man's heart by piercing it clean through several times. The crew dawned butcher's aprons to proceed, and the others wrapped the body parts in green

17:32bags. Then they dumped these packages into a garbage bin to be hauled away. However, the team had miscalculated when the garbage collection would occur, giving a foraging homeless man ample time to pull open the packages and expose the human body parts. He ran, but another man coming along saw what it was and called the police. In all, they found eight neatly wrapped packages, but never did find the genitals. The corner who examined the mess and eventually identified the remains was Roy's second cousin. The girl who had innocently lured the doomed victim read about his death in the papers and turned on the crew. The police arrested two of them, but no evidence connected them to Roy. He got them a lawyer, but they had to serve some time. When their trial came, their lawyer undermined the girl's credibility and the two crew members were acquitted. To Roy's relief, nothing came of the incident that compromised him, and thereafter, with the exception of a victim they hastily left have to capitated in a motel room. The crew took on the added chore of taking the parts themselves to the dump.

18:36A few were buried beneath ongoing construction, and one was sealed into a barrel into which concrete was poured, but it appeared that the standard disposal was the local garbage dump. Such disappearances happened frequently and systematically. By some estimates, in less than a decade there were between 75 and 200. The five men involved in the disassembly line said to associates that they got a kick out of it. According to Mustaine and Capichi, they used to say killing made them feel like God. In 1976, when Domeo was 34 and had been training as killing crew for over a year, Carlo Gambino died. Inevitably, power shifted, and the new Godfather was now big Paul Castelano. This was one more good thing for Roy, because the person closest to Castelano was Nino Gaggy. Although Castelano despised Roy, since he was a Neapolitan and therefore considered by the Sicilian gangsters as unreliable, Nino kept putting in a good word for him.

19:36Being a man with a strong sense of duty, Roy had no trouble showing that he had what it took. Making a made man was his goal, and that meant getting attention for his feats. Making money was one of them, but the other, killing people, he developed into such a grizzly art form that stronger men with greater status actually feared him. Castelano listened to the rumors about him with concern. He wanted no cowboys in the family, going off and killing for the hell of it. He told Nino he did not want Roy to become a made member of the family. We thought it was just a matter of turning more money over to him, so we redoubled his efforts in his illegal businesses. He made deals with the Irish gangs on the west side, bringing in 10% of their business. Nino told this to big Paul, who could not help but be impressed. Once Paul decided to make some changes in the family roster, Nino once again advanced Roy's name for the status of made man, and Paul once again refused. Yet he eventually acquiesced on the strength of Roy's ability to negotiate with the troublesome

20:39west side gang. And finally, Roy Domeo got his button. He was a member of the Gambino family. He pledged his allegiance to a Malta, the Sicilian code, and knew there was no getting out of this alive. However, he continued to deal in drugs, despite the rule against it, and he was drawing the FBI's attention. His reputation as a killer was of interest to them. That's what concerned Paul Castelano. In the crew killed a man who had offered information to a grand jury, along with shooting his young mistress and leaving their bodies to be found, it was clear to Castelano that Roy was acting on his own initiative. He had performed two murders that had not been discussed or approved by his superiors, and there would be more. But Castelano had his own problems. With breaches in security, made men wearing wires, and murmuring among family members that his leadership style was weak, big Paul had to watch his back. The FBI was always there, just waiting for a chance at him.

21:40We had what I believe was one of the first court authorized video installations on an organized crime case, said an FBI agent who had done surveillance on Castelano's enterprise. This was around 1975 or 76, as best I recall. We targeted Castelano's loan shark operation, and managed to install a hidden video camera, along with microphones in what was their loan-shurking headquarters. No microwave transmission then, we had to hardwire everything and monitor it from a nearby Catholic school. Every day the money would come pouring in from various collection points to their location. We had them on camera counting the money, stacking it in piles, and checking their lists as to who paid and who didn't, etc. They had compromised a loan officer from a branch bank, and would send their clients to the bank, where the loan officer would make sure the paperwork was right for their loan. In effect, they were using the bank's money for their loan-shurking operation, skimming the vig off the top, and, most of the time, the bank got repaid as well.

22:41It was a sweet deal, until, as one of the thugs explained to me in flawless Brooklynese as we raided the place, use guys or f**king this all up. Castelano withdrew out of the social clubs, meeting with members less often, and since Roy was not called on the carpet for his crimes, he expanded and empowered his killing crew. The years from 1977 to 1979 were their most prolific, and anyone who got in the way or tried to cheat the crew on deals seemed to disappear. Even members of the crew were vulnerable, and it wasn't long before one of them, acting on his own initiative, got himself into big trouble. Sometimes Chris Rosenberg, who felt like a son to Roy, would introduce himself as Chris Domeo. Also like Roy, he would go out on his own in business deals. When a drug deal went bad in 1979 with some Cubans in Florida, Roy learned that Chris had scammed them using his last name, Domeo. Chris had also told them that he had a powerful father living in Brooklyn, and he was involved with three Cubans and two Jewish men who had gone to New York, and had disappeared.

23:45That means that when the Cubans came looking for the men who had stiffed them, and possibly snuffed their associates, Roy's family would be right in the line of fire. That was unforgivable. Yet Chris was like a son to Roy, and when the Cubans told him what would satisfy them, he blanched. They wanted Chris dead, with a notice in the newspaper that it had been accomplished. Otherwise, they would come looking for him themselves. Nino had his nephew instruct Roy to take care of it, but Roy stalled for several weeks, and the order was given again. Still, Roy stalled, and with drew into his home, paranoid that the Cubans would come looking for him. At one point, he spotted a dark-haired young man sitting in a Cadillac outside his home, apparently looking through some papers. Roy's wife, Gladys, said that the man had come to the door that day trying to sell a vacuum cleaner. It seemed an unlikely story to Roy. He felt sure it was just a way to see if Roy lived there. In light of the fact that the man was still hanging around in the neighborhood, and that

24:48he certainly looked Hispanic, Roy decided to take action and save his family. He and a cousin who was there with him, got guns and went outside to confront the man. Roy went marching out to the car. The man looked up, started his car, and drove off, with Roy in his own car, telling him and shooting at him. After seven miles, Roy caught up and shot the man seven times, killing him. Then he went back home, hurt his wife and three children into the car, and took them to hide out. When they eventually came home, Roy learned what he had done. The Cuban outside his house had been an 18-year-old college student, Dominic Ragucci, who was legitimately selling vacuum cleaners door to door as a way to put himself through college. Roy had made a mistake. He sold his Cadillac, and according to his son, Albert, in for the sins of my father, Roy wept over the murder of an innocent civilian. It was one thing to kill other soldiers, or to kill informants or people who double-cross them on a deal, but this boy should not have died.

25:52Albert viewed his father as a genuinely caring man who was devastated by this error. And yet, the Chris Rosenberg situation was still up in the air. Roy knew he had to act. Calling the crew together one night without Chris, Roy told the others that he would do the shooting. He had brought Chris into the life, he would take him out. As hard as it was for him, he had a duty, this was part of being a made man. The incident took place on May 19, 1979. Roy asked Chris to come, and after Chris greeted Roy with a kiss on the cheek, Roy shot him in the head. The others finished the job and put the body into Chris's car so it would be found and reported. That settled the Cuban crisis, but another one was on its heels. This time, a family member was telling Castelano that Nino and Roy were dealing drugs, so Nino decided that the man and his son had to disappear. Yet, the job was badly botched, and got Nino arrested, while Roy ran off.

26:53The murders continued unabated, even as Nino got out on bail. Detectives began to link some of them, and the crew began to fall apart. Nino's attempts to foil his convictions failed, and he went to Attica. He picked Roy as a stand-in man, which did not please Big Paul, who was growing tired of all the killings. Nino had no idea yet how this arrangement would contribute to his downfall. For the crew, Henry and Freddie were arrested for two murders. They were also tied to the stolen car ring. Soon the other crew members were under investigation, but Nino's conviction was overturned and he was out. Yet, the FBI agents watching them were putting more pressure on everyone, from Paul Castelano, down the line. The government had a powerful weapon in the Rico Law, or racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, enacted to go after Mafia crime families. It allowed witness protection, wiretaps, and the power to impendal grandjuries. The penalties for such criminal enterprises were stiff, even just for membership.

27:57Assistant US Attorney Walter Mack took over the case, looking for anyone who would implicate Roy Domeo in murder, and he was a bulldog. The task force kept pressuring Roy, who grew more agitated, just as they hoped. Finally they got a break with the arrest of a crew member, Vito Arena, who began to roll at once. He described the murders in which he had been involved, and even showed investigators some of the body dump sites. Roy soon found out that Vito was a government witness, so he made himself scarce. The police delivered a grandjury subpoena to his home. Roy told Nino and Paul about Vito's defection, and Paul realized that Vito knew about him as well. Roy would have to go before a grand jury, and he could not be trusted. The FBI surveillance equipment picked up a conversation in which John Gaudi was asked, on behalf of Big Paul, to accept a contract on Roy. Gaudi declined, because Roy's gang was known to be dangerous. Big Paul finally ordered an end to those things that were getting them all into trouble, notably

29:00the drugs and the members who were acting out too much. He gave Nino the task of taking care of Roy Domeo, as depicted in boss of bosses, saying that Domeo loved killing too much. Nino had brought him into this life, in a way, so he would take him out. Roy's son, Albert, writes about how frightened his father was during those days, and how he would take his son aside to ask him to do things in preparation for Roy's sudden departure. Roy was thinking about going into the wind, as mobsters referred to being on the run, but he also realized that he might be killed. He'd brought trouble down on the family, and someone was going to end his connection with them, one way or another. He was right. Before the government could have their way, the family got him first. Albert Domeo grew up with a fairly good idea of what his father was doing, although he was later shocked by photos he saw during a grand jury hearing, and by what he read in Mondstains and Capiches' book, Murder Machine.

30:01He once told a girlfriend that if she wanted to understand him, she should read about Michael Corleone in The Godfather. While his mother gave him a Bible to read, his father gave him Nicolo Macavelli's political treatise, The Prince, seemingly The Blueprint for the Italian Underworld. Albert found the book fascinating. After serving 14 years as a secretary to the second chancery of the Signoria in the Florentine Republic, Macavelli had fallen out of power in 1512. He wrote that religion and morals have no place in the rise to power. A prince cannot indulge in the virtues of goodness, because, to hold power, he must be a lion and a fox. In other words, he must rely on such traits as cruelty, craftiness, mercilessness, and dishonesty. If necessary, he should not hesitate to break promises. He must ally himself with his own kind, choose wise counselors, and do whatever must be done in the name of power. The survival of the fittest was the ultimate game, and even the closest of alliances could

31:05be betrayed. Pulled into this world before he could understand it, Albert found himself torn between utter devotion to his father, and discussed over what he was sometimes asked to do. At the age of 13, he was putting a gun in his backpack to go to school. He saw things, but never imagined the extent to which his father was fully involved in crime, including multiple murders. In a literate memoir, Albert describes what it was like to grow up in a family, where his father made a fortune through criminal ventures, and his mother, like many other wives in these families, allowed herself to be protected from knowing how she and her children were being supported in such a grand lifestyle. This was the way of the Mafia. The men engaged in their war, but the women were to be protected from knowing anything about it. In the end, this system inevitably broke down, since mobsters often shot those who made them paranoid, or whom they felt had betrayed them, and it was difficult for the women to ignore the violence by which their husbands and sons had lived and died.

32:07The men seemed to want their families to exist in this pure arena, wherein they could view themselves as somewhat gentile. At home among family, they could forget their own self-loathing over what they felt they had to do. Their home was the pristine castle, the place where they could exercise the part of themselves they most wanted others to believe they were. For example, they swore freely in the bars and awgled half-naked women, but did not swear at home. They had sex all over the place away from home, but the members of their home life were to be faithful. They killed, lied, and stole without compunction, but this is not an acceptable part of their family-man identity. While these men had a supreme ability to compartmentalize, to be psychopathic in one venue but caring and good in another, their families were also viewed as idealized extensions of a part of themselves. It was another area of control. Family members, especially wives, were not allowed to be people in their own right.

33:10They were to play a role that suited the mobster's purpose. Albert felt some of this and was largely protected, but his father ended up bringing him partly into the Koza Nozzara, our thing, by introducing him to members of the notorious crime crew, and by asking him to learn to use a gun, potentially for criminal purposes. He did not witness a dismemberment, and he often underestimated the potential for brutality in someone he met at the Gemini Lounge. So it came as a shock to him to learn more about his father's activities via other reports. According to his reaction, he did not quite believe the full story. After Roy was found dead in the trunk of his Cadillac, the very thing that he most wanted to prevent happened. His family suffered for his crimes. His wife, finally brought into public awareness through media stories, ultimately sold the dream house into which Roy had moved his family, while Albert spiraled into a deep suicidal depression, which he documents in detail in his revealing memoir.

34:10Mafia life had been far from glamorous, he writes, and despite the fine clothing, nice cars, and high standard of living, Roy had inflicted a lot of psychological damage on the people around him. Albert had realized by the age of ten that his father's occupation was different, and unlike other kids, he had nothing much to share at school. He knew that his father carried a gun and kept odd hours. As the years passed, tension mounted and his father became increasingly more paranoid. He was away from the family more, and he gave the adolescent Albert charge of protecting his mother and sisters, and even took him on a few jobs. It was a poor legacy to hand down. When Albert was only fifteen, Roy enlisted him in a plan to fake his death, should the need arise. When Roy was killed two years later, Albert had to identify his body and avoid the FBI's intense scrutiny. Speaking revenge, he was nearly killed. Eventually his life fell apart, his wife left, and he was faced with a realization that

35:12his father's life of crime had taken a terrible toll. He would not forget the bloody fate to which his father's crimes had consigned him, the body and the morgue, the crime scene photos, the photographs of victims. It was only after he read murder machine that he understood how truly brutal the man he adored could be. He also learned from an insider about the intimate betrayal within the family that had brought his father down, just as Roy Domeo had done to Chris Rosenberg. Fearing that Roy might become a cooperating witness for the government, Castilello had ordered Nino to take care of him. Nino was a man whom Roy trusted, so when Nino invited him one day for a meeting, he went. Nino met him, along with the Gemini twins. Roy took off his leather jacket, and Nino fired at his head. He was hit seven times, including the symbolic bullets that the twins put into his skull, behind the ears. Then they put him into the trunk of his car, placed the chandelier over him that he was taking to get repaired, and parked him at the club in Sheep's Head Bay, Brooklyn.

36:16The government had lost Roy Domeo as a witness, but they had not lost Nino or Paul. They continued to look for evidence against these men. Nino was arrested in 1984 and released on bail. He was eventually convicted of a conspiracy to steal cars and sentenced to five years. On these same charges, Joey Testa and Anthony Center, the Gemini twins, were acquitted. Then they were all brought up, along with the other crew members, on multiple counts of murder. Before the trial was over, Nino, 62, died in prison. The others were convicted. Eventually, thanks to a bug in Castilello's home and surveillance photos of a meeting of the heads of the crime families, the grand jury returned an indictment against everyone at the meeting, including Castilello. Before he went to trial, however, John Gaudi made a power play to become head of the Gambino family by having Castilello assassinated in front of Spark Steakhouse on December 16, 1985.

37:17When John Gaudi's underboss, Sammy, the bull, Gravano, testified against Gaudi in the trial in which Gaudi was convicted of his part in the murder of Castilello. Gravano also recalled Castilello's lack of reaction to Dimeo's demise. Apparently, when one accepts the life, one accepts whatever form of death comes with it.