

In an act of overkill, Chris ran Katz's head through a compacting machine, and the others wrapped the body parts in green bags. The crew donned butcher aprons to proceed. Then he repeatedly stabbed him in the back. On this "Night of the Knives," as Mustain and Capeci call it, Chris used a butcher knife to still the man's heart by piercing it clean through several times. It was the moment of truth for all of themcould they deal with hacking a human being apart? There he told them the plan, and they had to go with it or walk. Then they took him into a supermarket, where they met Roy. Next, they hauled him off the streets publicly, leaving his car open and emptyclearly a missing person.

First Chris, Joey and Anthony used a pretty girl to lure Andrei Katz, so she was a witness. The first time they tried it, on a criminal car dealer who'd turned informant in 1975, they were careless. However, this manner of disposal had to be refined. (While they did execute a few females, there is no record of female dismemberment.) Just like taking apart a deer, DeMeo told his gang there was no real difference. The various parts were then packaged in plastic garbage bags like meat and tossed into a dump.

Then he'd be cleaned up, allowed to "settle" for 45 minutes (perhaps hung upside down over a bathtub in Dracula's apartment), drained of blood, laid out on a swimming pool liner, beheaded, and hacked into pieces. 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, and repeatedly stabbed in the heart by yet a third person to quickly decrease blood flow. The target person, whom someone higher up had ordered eliminated, would be invited into DeMeo's Gemini Lounge (or in one case, the meat department at a supermarket). Mustain and Capeci, recording what they had learned from the confessions of Nino Gaggi's nephew, Dominick Montiglio, present the method in detail in Murder Machine. If someone needed to be "made a memory," disposal was always a problem, so his method appeared to be an answer.
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He also installed his cousin, whose nickname was "Dracula," into the adjoining apartment.īecause 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 "dis-assembly" line. Roy began collecting weapons and he kept his impressive arsenal of machineguns, automatic rifles, and silencers in a room at the lounge. A fifth young man with a killer's cold heart, Henry Borelli, came onto the team and they would all meet at this bar to socialize, organize their illegal business operations, and perform more clandestine tasks. Joey and Anthony were soon dubbed the Gemini Twins. 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. Then two more came aboard, high school dropouts Joey Testa and Anthony Senter.

A car mechanic named Freddy DiNome joined them. He got Chris and his friends into the business of stealing cars that could be turned into saleable items for wealthy clients overseas. Roy met Chris in the Brooklyn-based neighborhood of Canarsie, where Chris was dealing pot, and helped him to move into a larger money-making arena. Roy had once been a butcher's apprentice, so he understood how to cut limbs from bodies.Īmong DeMeo'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 Italians would welcome him as one of their own. Thereafter, he began to train a crew of young men to become killers on demand and to get rid of a body quickly and efficiently. Once you've killed someone, he was to later impress upon his apprentices, you can do anything. Now that he had killed, it was just business as usual to him. Used to being a bully as a teenager, he had no problem threatening people. 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. Roy scheduled a meeting with him at a diner, ostensibly to assist with legal expenses. He was running an extortion scheme with Nino against a lucrative X-rated film business, and when the owner and his partner were raided and arrested, it appeared that one of them, Paul Rothenburg, might offer up his association with Roy and Nino in a deal. 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.
