They carried his body and laid it in the trunk of the Cadillac, draping the chandelier over the corpse. Other shooters - his colleagues in murder - probably helped inflict his total seven head wounds. DeMeo tried to deflect the shots with his hands, but two slugs burst into his face. No sooner had DeMeo removed his jacket than Nino opened fire.
But Nino had to obey Castellano’s hit command. Lured to a garage in Brooklyn used by the car ring, the 42-year-old DeMeo met with his trusted comrade and mentor, Anthony “Nino” Gaggi, a Gambino capo 15 years his senior. He discovered too late that the loyalty of his oldest and closest friends lay with the boss. Growing increasingly fearful, DeMeo likely heard rumors that Gambino boss Paul Castellano wanted to silence him. In June 1982, Arena showed police where to find the body of one of the crew’s victims, a low-level hoodlum encased in a cement-filled oil barrel submerged in Moriches Bay off of Long Island. A member of DeMeo’s car theft and hit crew, Vito Arena, had flipped and told federal prosecutors about several murders he participated in for DeMeo.ĭeMeo himself or with his crew participated in more than 200 homicides almost without detection starting in the 1970s. A police investigation into the Gambinos’ profitable international car theft ring led to joint local and federal probes into a string of Mob homicides. He told his son Albert, whose 17th birthday was January 10, that his father was marked for death. But it was now far from his mind.Ī few weeks before, a federal grand jury had subpoenaed DeMeo, for a second time, to testify in a racketeering case.
In the trunk was a chandelier from his Long Island home he once intended to have repaired. He drove the streets of Brooklyn in a new 1983 Cadillac registered in his wife’s name. His body was placed in the trunk of a car and, with low winter temperatures, it soon froze.ĭeMeo dressed in a long overcoat with a pocket concealing a sawed-off shotgun. On January 10, 1983, DeMeo was killed by a member of his own hit squad on orders from Gambino family boss Paul Castellano. In the days leading up to January 10, 1983, Roy DeMeo, the former butcher’s apprentice and creator of “the Gemini method” to dispose of murder victims for the Gambino crime family, felt trapped between a law enforcement task force pursuing him and members of his own crew who feared he’d turn on them to avoid a long prison sentence.
The Top 5 are: “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn, Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, Roy DeMeo, Joe “The Animal” Barboza and Giovanni Brusca. The richness of the stories, the amount of dependable research material and how the individuals fit into the greater context of their times mattered more to us than the number of victims they chalked up. Our selections are limited and the methodology subjective.
JOHN DEMEO SERIES
In this third installment in our series on the Top 5 most notorious Mob hitmen, we focus on a particularly gruesome era in the 1970s and early ’80s in the Brooklyn and Long Island areas of New York. Roy DeMeo led a crew that committed as many as 200 murders for the Gambino crime family in New York in the 1970s and early 1980s.
0 kommentar(er)
