Roy DeMeo
 | The neutrality of this article is disputed. |
Roy DeMeo(1942, – January 10, 1983) was a ranking member of the Gambino crime family, the largest and one of the most feared crime families in New York.
Career
Roy Albert DeMeo was born in 1942 in Brooklyn, New York into a working class Italian immigrant family. As a kid DeMeo grew up on the same block as crime boss Joseph Profaci and often played with Profaci's sons. In his teenaged years he began a small loan sharking operation which turned into a full time job by the age of 17. DeMeo dropped out of High School and began working seriously in criminal enterprise while maintaining legitimate business practices. In the 1960's he began a working relationship with John Gotti, while still under Gambino. He married and fathered three children, and worked his way up the criminal career ladder, first with car-theft, loansharking, then through pornography. Much of DeMeo's enterprise is still clouded in suspicion today because many of the witnesses who could have testified to his crimes were already dead. The few that did report on his crimes are those suspected of acting in his killing.
According to the book Murder Machine by Jerry Capeci, DeMeo committed his first murder in 1974, when he was 32, shooting to death an associate in his car theft ring who he suspected of being a 'rat', or an informant. After that, DeMeo began committing more murders, slaying anyone who he suspected of being an informant, anyone who got in his way, anyone who upset him and, of course, anyone he was paid to kill. It should be noted that in his book For the Sins of My Father DeMeo's son Albert strongly contests much of the writing in the book.DeMeo had a great deal of help from a small but vicious gang he built around him. They hung out at the Gemini Club in Brooklyn, which was their base and also the scene of their murders, which earned them the name the Gemini Crew. Victims were lured to the Gemini Club at night. They would be swiftly shot, a towel wrapped around their blood-spurting head, and they were then stabbed in the heart to stop the blood pumping too much. The crew of killers would often eat pizza and drink beer whilst the corpse was left to bleed out in a bathtub, before it was hacked up and disposed of. Some bodies were incinerated, others buried in landfills, and some taken out to sea on a private yacht owned by one of the crew and the remains dumped overboard to feed the sharks.
Members of The Gemi Crew included were Richard Kuklinski, Henry Borelli, Chris Rosenberg, Joseph "Dracula" Guglielmo (Roy's cousin), Joey Testa and Anthony Senter.
Occasionally, when necessary, victim's bodies were dumped where they could be found to send out a warning. One victim's decapitated corpse was dumped in the road. The head was never found. DeMeo once killed five Cuban drug-dealers simply to avoid paying for a large shipment of cocaine. Unlike most gangland killers, the Gemini Crew had no inhibitions about killing women. One victim, who was suspected of being an informant, turned up at the Gemini Club with his 19-year-old girlfriend. DeMeo and his men did not hesitate to execute both their intended target and his young girlfriend. DeMeo and his crew lent their 'talents' to other mobsters, carrying out murders for cash (in some cases charging as little as $5,000) or even for free as professional favors.
DeMeo eventually achieved his ambition to become a 'made' man, a formal member of the Gambino Family. However, the Gambino Godfather, Paul Castellano, never liked DeMeo, especially when he heard DeMeo was dealing in drugs (Castellano did not like his men being involved in narcotics, because the penalties for drug-trafficking were so harsh that they often tempted suspects to become informants. John Gotti earned Castellano's disfavor for the same reason.)
By 1982, the FBI was investigating the enormous number of missing and murdered persons who were linked to DeMeo or who had last been seen entering the notorious Gemini Club. DeMeo grew paranoid and increasingly on edge. In January 1983, DeMeo went off for a meeting with fellow Mafiosi. A few days later, January 18, he was found murdered; in traditional Mafia fashion, DeMeo's bullet riddled corpse was found stuffed in the boot of his own car.
DeMeo's crew was soon rounded up and most were imprisoned for life after a series of trials that saw them convicted of a collective total of 25 murders, in addition to extortion, car-theft and drug trafficking.
Paul Castellano was indicted for ordering the murder of DeMeo, as well as a host of other crimes, but he was killed in December 1985 whilst out on bail and awaiting trial. The murder was ordered by John Gotti, who thus became the new Gambino Godfather.
Roy DeMeo's immediate superior in the Gambino family, Anthony Gaggi, was suspected of being the one who personally killed DeMeo. Gaggi was not charged with this crime, although he was charged with a number of other murders. He died of a heart attack during his trial in 1984, aged 62.
The FBI and NYPD say that DeMeo and his Gemini Crew murdered at least 70 people between 1973 and 1983, but the true total could be as high as 200. The vast majority were disposed of so thoroughly that they were never found.
Sources
- Murder Machine by Gene Mustain & Jerry Capeci, 1993, ISBN 0-451-40387-8.