Roy DeMeo: The Mafia Hitman So Dangerous Even Castellano Was Afraid to Kill Him – HT
Friday, June 13th, 1975. The meat department of a grocery store, Brooklyn, New York. Night. Roy DeMeo was waiting. He had been a butcher’s apprentice as a teenager. He knew how to break down an animal carcass, how to find the joints, how to separate the parts, how to reduce something large and whole into pieces that could be wrapped and packaged and moved.
He had learned it as a trade skill. He was about to apply it differently. Andre Katz had been lured to a woman’s apartment complex with the promise of a date. He arrived expecting an evening out. He found Henry Borelli and Chris Rosenberg and Joseph Testa and Anthony Senter waiting for him instead. He was forcefully abducted.
He was driven to the meat department of a supermarket in Brooklyn. DeMeo was inside. What happened in that meat department is documented through forensic evidence and through the testimony of crew members who cooperated with the federal government years later. Andre Katz was stabbed multiple times in the heart.
Then, after he was already dead, he was stabbed over a dozen more times in the back. His body was stripped of its clothing. He was dismembered. Arms, legs, head removed. The butcher’s apprentice directing the procedure with Joseph Testa, another former butcher, assisting.
After decapitation, his head was put through a machine normally used to compact cardboard boxes. The remains were wrapped in plastic bags and deposited in the supermarket’s dumpster. A pedestrian walking his dog found one of Katz’s legs on the curb near the store. Police responded. They recovered eight neatly wrapped packages from the dumpster.
The remains were so extensively damaged that dental records were required to identify them as Andre Katz. He was 22 years old. His parents were Holocaust survivors who had come to Brooklyn from Romania in 1956 with their 4-year-old son. His brother Victor was still alive. Victor had visited Andre in the hospital months earlier when Andre had been beaten by two members of the same crew and had heard his brother swear that he would get revenge on Chris Rosenberg and the others.
Andre Katz did not get his revenge. He got eight packages in a dumpster and a dog finding his leg on a curb. If you are watching this for the first time, subscribe right now and drop a comment telling us which state you are watching from New York, Texas, California, Florida, anywhere in the country. Hit subscribe, drop your state, then let us get into this because this is not simply a story about a murder.
It is the story of the murder that created a method. Everything the DeMeo crew did between 1975 and 1982, the between 100 and 200 killings, the Gemini method, the disassembly line in the back apartment of the Gemini Lounge, the packages in the East New York garbage dump, traces back to Friday, June 13th, 1975 in a grocery store meat department in Brooklyn, the DeMeo crew’s first known murder by dismemberment.
The night a group of criminals who had been loan sharks and car thieves and drug dealers became something else entirely. The night Roy DeMeo discovered what he was capable of and decided to make it a business. This is the story of how that night happened and what it made possible. Brooklyn, Flatlands, 1940. Roy Albert DeMeo was born September 7th of that year, the fourth of five children of Antonio Joseph DeMeo, a deliveryman, and Eleanor Colaruulo.
The family’s roots were in Formia, a coastal city in the Lazio region of Italy, working-class immigrant stock that had settled in the working-class Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatlands. His older brother was killed in the Korean War in 1951. His father died of a heart attack in 1960. After his father’s death, his mother returned to Italy with his youngest sibling.
He graduated from James Madison High School in 1959. Bernie Sanders was in his graduating class. They were, by every available account, not close friends. As a teenager, DeMeo worked in a local grocery store and trained as a butcher. He learned to break down animal carcasses. He learned the mechanics of the work, which cuts to make, how to use the tools efficiently, how to reduce a carcass to manageable, packageable pieces in the minimum amount of time.
It was ordinary trade knowledge in a butcher shop context. It was something else in the context of what he became. He was also, from an early age, running money, loan-sharking from small amounts to other teenagers, then to adults in the neighborhood. He was noticed by a Gambino family soldier named Nino Gaggi, who invested his own money in DeMeo’s loan-sharking operation, and connected him to the broader Gambino family infrastructure.
Gaggi became DeMeo’s patron, his entry point into the organized crime world that would eventually consume him entirely. By the early 1970s, DeMeo had assembled a crew. Not a formal La Cosa Nostra crew, he was not yet made, but a collection of young men from the Brooklyn neighborhoods he had grown up in who shared his combination of ambition and willingness.
Chris Rosenberg, the Gemini twins, Joseph Testa and Anthony Senter, childhood friends who had known Rosenberg since their early teens, and who had been stealing cars since before any of them could legally drive. Henry Borelli. They stole cars. They sold stolen cars. They dealt drugs, cocaine and Quaaludes, Rosenberg acquiring product through a pharmacist connection.
They ran DeMeo’s expanding loan sharking operation. They were, by the early and mid-1970s, a profitable and increasingly capable criminal operation that had not yet crossed the line between criminals who intimidate and criminals who kill. Friday, June 13th, 1975, was when they crossed it.
To understand why Andre Katz died in a grocery store meat department in Brooklyn on that Friday, you have to understand the sequence of events that began in August of 1974. Andre Katz was born in 1952 in Romania. His parents had survived the Nazi concentration camps, the specific and documented horror that consumed the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe during the Second World War.
They had emigrated to New York City in 1956, bringing four-year-old Andre and settling in Brooklyn. He had a younger brother, Victor. He grew up in the same borough that produced Roy DeMeo and Chris Rosenberg and the Gemini twins. In the immigrant working-class neighborhoods of Brooklyn, where people from different backgrounds lived in close proximity, and where the boundaries between the legitimate economy and the criminal one were permeable. He was not a mob figure.
He was not connected to organized crime in any institutional sense. He was a young man in Brooklyn in the early 1970s who bought cocaine from Chris Rosenberg, who purchased stolen cars and auto parts from DeMeo’s operation. The kind of peripheral involvement that thousands of people in Brooklyn had with the mob world at that time, buying something you knew was stolen, selling something you knew was not entirely legitimate, navigating the edges of a criminal economy that was deeply embedded in the
neighborhood fabric. In August of 1974, Andre purchased a stolen van through the crew. The van had a false VIN, a falsified vehicle identification number that was supposed to make it appear legitimate. The false VIN was poorly manufactured. When a friend of Andre’s purchased the van from him and was subsequently stopped by police, the officers identified the vehicle as stolen without difficulty.
The friend told police he had bought it from Andre. Andre was arrested. The auto crimes unit pressured him to identify his source, to give up the people he had bought the van from, to cooperate. He refused. He made bail. And he was furious at Chris Rosenberg for selling him a van with a VIN that had gotten him arrested.
The fury expressed itself in violence. Andre was pulled from his car and severely beaten by two men. His brother Victor would later testify that while Andre was still in the hospital recovering, he told Victor that the men who had beaten him were Joseph Testa and Anthony Senter, two members of the DeMeo crew.
Victor also testified that his brother, from his hospital bed, swore that he would get revenge on Rosenberg and the others. He meant it. And that intention, that specific and stated intention to get revenge on Chris Rosenberg, set in motion the chain of events that ended in the meat department, January 1975.
The Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, Andre Katz walked in voluntarily and provided information that Chris Rosenberg was heavily involved in auto theft. He was not cooperating under duress or in exchange for leniency on pending charges. He walked in and told them what he knew. Roy DeMeo learned about this visit the same day it happened.
He had a corrupt detective on the auto crimes unit on his payroll. The detective’s job was to keep DeMeo informed of everything the unit was doing and everything it was learning about his operations. The moment Andre Katz sat down with the DA’s office and started talking, DeMeo knew.
This is the detail that makes the story of Andre Katz more than a story about a young man making a bad decision about who to associate with. The system he was trying to use to protect himself was the same system that was already working against him. The law enforcement apparatus he went to for help was penetrated by the man he was trying to bring down.
Every word he said to the Brooklyn DA’s office went directly back to Roy DeMeo. In May of 1975, Andre appeared before a Brooklyn grand jury and testified about what he knew of the DeMeo crew’s illegal activities. By this point, every word was already known to DeMeo before the day was out. The corrupt detective was running both sides of the table simultaneously, taking DeMeo’s money to report on the investigation, while also appearing as a legitimate member of the law enforcement apparatus that Andre was trusting to
protect him. DeMeo convened his crew to discuss what to do about the problem. Direct action was risky. The back-and-forth violence between the crew and Andre had already attracted law enforcement attention. Another attack on Katz, or a straightforward killing, would be immediately investigated in the context of the existing conflict.
They needed a different approach. Henry Borelli had a female acquaintance. He could use her as bait, have her contact Andre, and arrange a meeting, a date, something that would get him to a location alone and away from his brother Victor, who had been accompanying him everywhere since the hospital beating. The woman initially agreed.
Then she backed out. The crew postponed. Then Borelli convinced her again. June 13th, 1975, a Friday, Brooklyn. The woman contacted Andre Katz and arranged to meet him at her apartment complex. A date, an ordinary social arrangement of the kind that a 22-year-old man in Brooklyn would have found nothing unusual about.
He arrived expecting to take her out for the evening. Chris Rosenberg, Henry Borelli, Joseph Testa, and Anthony Senter were waiting. They grabbed him immediately. There was no conversation, no warning, no moment in which Andre would have understood what was happening before it was too late to matter.
They drove him to the meat department of a grocery store in Brooklyn. Roy DeMeo was inside, the butcher’s apprentice, the man who had learned how to to down a carcass in the back room of a Brooklyn grocery store as a teenager and who was now about to apply that knowledge in a different context.
The specific forensic and testimonial record of what happened in that meat department that night is precise enough that what follows is not speculation but reconstruction based on documented evidence. Andre Katz was stabbed multiple times in the heart with a butcher knife. The stabbing was intended to cause rapid death through cardiac damage.
After he was dead, the stabbing continued over a dozen more wounds in the back attributed by investigators to Chris Rosenberg. The postmortem stabbing was not functional. It was something else. The expression of something beyond the operational necessity of killing someone. Then the dismemberment began.
DeMeo and Testa, both with butcher experience, removed the arms, the legs, and the head. The procedure was done on the surfaces available in a functioning grocery store meat department with the tools that were present in that space. After decapitation, Katz’s head was put through the cardboard compacting machine.
The machine reduced it to something the forensic investigators would later struggle to fully recover for identification purposes. The remains were wrapped in plastic bags. The packages were taken to the supermarket’s dumpster. The crew made one critical error. They dumped too early. The garbage truck had not yet come.
A pedestrian walking his dog found Katz’s leg on the curb near the store. Police came. They found eight packages in the dumpster. The damage to the remains was so extensive, particularly to the head, that dental records were required to establish a positive identification. The The was Andre Katz, 22 years old, the Romanian Jewish immigrant child of Holocaust survivors who had grown up in Brooklyn and who had tried to use the law to protect himself from the people who had beaten him in the street.
The law had not protected him. The corrupt detective on DeMeo’s payroll had made certain of that. The investigation that followed was immediate and focused. Henry Borelli and Joseph Testa were arrested and spent months in custody awaiting trial. The woman who had served as bait confessed her role to investigators soon after learning about Katz’s murder, but she was unable to specifically identify Rosenberg as one of the abductors.
At trial in January of 1976, a defense attorney completely discredited the prosecution’s witness. Borelli and Testa were acquitted. Rosenberg was not charged. DeMeo was not charged. Testa and Senter walked out of court free men having spent months in jail for a murder that the legal system could not make stick.
The case was not closed. It would resurface in the late 1980s when a federal-state task force targeted the remnants of the DeMeo crew. But in 1976, the immediate consequence of the Katz murder for the people who had committed it was an acquittal and a lesson. The lesson was about disposal. Dominick Montiglio, the nephew of DeMeo’s superior Anthony Gaggi, later testified that Chris Rosenberg told him shortly after the murder that the killing of Andre Katz had driven DeMeo and his crew to a decision.
Any future conflicts would be settled in a similar manner of dismemberment to make the victim disappear. They would not leave people to be found. They would eliminate the evidence of the killing entirely. But the cats’ disposal had been careless. One location, one dumpster, a leg on the curb because they had not waited for the garbage truck.
Eight packages that allowed investigators to reconstruct the crime scene even if they could not prosecute it. The refined method required improvement on every element of the cats’ disposal. And DeMeo, who was a careful and methodical man when he chose to be, developed those improvements systematically. The Gemini method.
The headquarters of the DeMeo crew through the late 1970s and into the early 1980s was the Gemini Lounge, a bar in Canarsie, Brooklyn, that DeMeo ran as his operational base. Behind the bar was a back apartment dubbed the clubhouse by crew members that was used for the most sensitive business of the operation, including murder.
The method developed from the lessons of the cats’ killing was described in exhaustive detail by crew members who cooperated with the government after the crew’s dissolution. It was also documented in the book Murder Machine, written by Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci, the definitive account of the DeMeo crew’s operations.
The victim would be lured to the back apartment of the Gemini Lounge. Often they were wined and dined first, comfortable, relaxed, unaware. Then, when the lounge was clear of other witnesses and the coast was secure, the process began. DeMeo himself was almost always the first to act.
According to crew member turned government witness Frederick DeNome, he would approach the victim with a silenced pistol in one hand and a towel in the other. One shot to the head. Immediately the towel was wrapped around the wound like a turban to to prevent blood from flowing and contaminating the space.
A second crew member would simultaneously stab the victim in the heart, stopping the blood from pumping out of the head wound by eliminating the cardiac pressure behind it. The victim would be dead or dying. The body would be stripped of clothing. It would be dragged to the bathtub in the apartment where it would hang for a period allowing the remaining blood to drain and congeal within the body.
This made the next step, as Demeo told his crew in language that has been quoted in every account of this operation ever written, “Just like taking apart a deer. No real difference.” Plastic sheets were laid out in the main room. The body was placed on them. The dismemberment followed the same procedure, now refined and systematic, that had been applied to Andre Katz in the grocery store meat department.
Arms, legs, head, the body in six pieces. Each piece was wrapped in plastic, then in brown butcher’s paper. Each package went to a different location. The primary disposal site was a massive garbage dump opposite the Starrett City apartment complex on Pennsylvania Avenue in East New York, an enormous facility that received tens of thousands of tons of material and that was essentially impenetrable as an evidence source.
The dump was closed in 1985. It was capped over. It was converted into parkland. What is buried in it will stay buried. During a federal investigation in the early 1980s, a plan was developed to excavate sections of the dump in an effort to locate human remains. The plan was abandoned as too costly and too unlikely to produce meaningful evidence.
The murders in that dump are beyond the reach of any subsequent investigation. DeMeo told his crew that if they didn’t kill at least three people a week, they would be depressed. This statement, documented in testimony from Montiglio, is either the most disturbing sentence in the history of American organized crime or a close contender for it.
Between 1973 and 1982, the DeMeo crew is believed to have killed between 100 and 200 people. The precise number cannot be established because many of the victims were never found and never reported missing. The Gemini method had been specifically designed to produce exactly that outcome.
100 to 200 people, most of them in the back apartment of a bar in Canarsie, Brooklyn. Most of them processed through the disassembly line that DeMeo had developed from the lessons of a Friday night in June of 1975 in a supermarket meat department. Roy DeMeo’s career ended in the same way his victims’ careers ended.
In early January of 1983, DeMeo was summoned to a meeting with members of his own crew. He went. He did not come back. His body was found 10 days later in the trunk of his Cadillac outside the Verrazano Boat Club in Sheepshead Bay. He had been shot multiple times. He was 42 years old. The widely accepted account, based on testimony and law enforcement intelligence, is that Joseph Testa and Anthony Senter, with Paul Castellano’s blessing, had arranged the hit.
DeMeo’s operations, the drug dealing that Castellano had explicitly banned, the out-of-control killing that was generating FBI heat on the entire Gambino family had made him a liability. The same calculus that had led him to eliminate problems was applied to him. He was placed in the trunk of his own car and found 10 days later.
His son, Albert DeMeo, wrote a memoir about growing up as Roy DeMeo’s son, For the Sins of My Father. His wife sold the house Roy had bought for the family. Albert spiraled into a deep depression. The Gemini Lounge is gone. The garbage dump in East New York has been a park since 1985. Andre Katz’s parents, who had survived Nazi concentration camps and come to Brooklyn to build a life, buried their son, what remained of him identifiable only through dental records, in 1975.
His brother, Victor, testified at two different trials connected to what had happened to him. The case against Borelli and Testa for the Katz’s murder came back in the late 1980s as part of the federal state task force prosecution. By that point, it was one count among many. The surviving core of the DeMeo crew, Anthony Senter and Joey Testa, were convicted of all counts and sentenced to life in prison.