A second crew member would simultaneously stab the victim in the heart, sVito Genovese Killed Her Husband — Then Made Her His Wife HT
March 16th, 1932. The roof of 124 Thompson Street, Greenwich Village, Manhattan, 2:15 in the afternoon. A building janitor found two bodies. The first was Gerard Vernotico, 29 years old, a baker from Little Italy. He had a wife. He had a daughter. He had a second child on the way, due in 3 months.
He had lived at 191 Prince Street, a few blocks from where he was found. He was hog-tied. He had been strangled with a length of sash cord. The second body was Antonio Lonzo. He had been with Vernotico. He had seen what was happening. He had been eliminated for that reason. He was also strangled with sash cord.
He was also hog-tied. He had done nothing wrong, except be in the wrong place at the wrong time, in the specific and terminal way that witnesses to mob murders find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. The police came. They documented the scene. They asked questions. They found no one willing to say anything useful.
12 days later, in a church ceremony in Greenwich Village, Vito Genovese married Anna Vernotico, the grieving widow of the man found hog-tied and strangled on a Manhattan rooftop. The woman who was 6 months pregnant with that man’s child. The woman who later said she hated Vito, but had no choice but to say yes. Her great-niece put it plainly, years afterward, when she told the Mob Queens podcast researchers what the family had passed down about that moment.
Anna hated Vito. She felt she had no choice. She had suddenly found herself raising two children alone, 6 months pregnant, with no money and no protection. In a world where the man asking for her hand had just removed the only obstacle standing between him and getting it. Refusing Vito Genovese was not an option Anna Petillo Vernotico had available to her in March of 1932.
She said yes. And for the next 21 years, until she walked into the Freehold County Courthouse in New Jersey on March 2nd, 1953, Anna did something no mob wife had ever done in the history of American organized crime. She lived inside the consequences of that yes. 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 story belongs to Anna, not to Vito. Not to the career of the man who would eventually lead one of the most powerful crime families in America, whose name would be attached permanently to that family by the FBI after 1957.
Not to the murders and the power struggles and the Appalachian disaster and the narcotics conviction. This is Anna’s story. What was done to her, what she built despite it, and what she chose to do in the end. October 28th, 1905, New York City. Giovannina Petillo was born the eldest child of Italian Catholic immigrants, Aniello Vincenzo Petillo from Risigliano, Naples, and Concetta Cassini Genovese, whose surname connected her family by blood to the man who would eventually
make her daughter’s life what it became. She was known as Anna from childhood. She grew up in the Italian immigrant neighborhoods of Manhattan, where the bonds of community and family were the architecture of daily life. At 19, in the spring of 1924, she fell in love with Gerard Vernotico. He was a baker.
He was, as Anna’s family noted with disapproval, a young man of no means. The family thought she could do better. Anna was in love and chose not to care what the family thought. They married. They had a daughter, Marie, born in 1927. They lived on Prince Street in the heart of Little Italy. Anna worked nights at a club in Greenwich Village to help support the family.
They were poor. They were together. It was a life that was building towards something ordinary and decent and their own. Then Vito Genovese’s first wife died. Donata Ragone had been Vito’s wife since 1921. She died of tuberculosis on September 17th, 1931. Genovese observed a period of mourning, 6 months approximately.
And then he announced his intention to marry Anna Petillo, who was his fourth cousin through her mother, and who was already married to Gerard Vernotico. He announced it, not as a question, as a statement. He intended to marry Anna. The obstacle would be managed. Joe Valachi, the Gambino crime family soldier who would later become one of the most famous mob informants in American history, testified about what happened next.
He told investigators, and eventually the Senate Rackets Committee, that in 1932, Gerard Vernotico had been strangled on a rooftop in Greenwich Village by two men who were part of the Luciano family. He said Genovese had ordered it. He said the second body, Antonio Lonzo, had been someone who had seen too much and paid the standard price for that.
The police had a crime scene and no case. Nobody talked. Nobody saw anything. The men who had been on that roof with sash cord and the intention to remove an obstacle were not identified or charged. 12 days later the church ceremony took place. Tony Bender Strollo was the best man. Anna Vernotico became Anna Genovese.
She was 6 months pregnant. Vito Genovese was born November 21st, 1897 in Risigliano, a small village in the province of Naples, Italy. He came to America in 1913 at the age of 15, settling initially in the same Little Italy neighborhoods that had received hundreds of thousands of Southern Italian immigrants in the preceding decades.
He came up through the streets at the same time and in the same world as Lucky Luciano. They were childhood friends, criminal partners. The two men who would eventually reshape the structure of American organized crime more profoundly than almost anyone else in the first half of the 20th century.
He was violent in ways that were casual and matter-of-fact. He participated in the Castellammarese War of 1930 through 1931, the power struggle between the Masseria and Maranzano factions that ended with both bosses dead and Luciano’s installation of the parties Commission as the governing body of American organized crime.
He was present at the Nuova Villa Tammaro restaurant in Coney Island when Joe the Boss Masseria was shot to death while playing cards, having been invited to that game by Luciano, who had arranged his own exit from the room before the gunmen arrived. Genovese was one of those gunmen. He was also, throughout these years, building a specific and devoted obsession with Anna Petillo.
She was his cousin. She was married to someone else. Neither of these facts modified the obsession in the slightest. When his wife died in September of 1931, the primary consequence in Genovese’s mental universe appears to have been the removal of one obstacle between himself and Anna.
The other obstacle was on that rooftop in March. The wedding was 12 days after the murder. The timing communicates everything about how Genovese processed the relationship between what he wanted and what stood in the way of getting it. Their first apartment was at 43 5th Avenue, a Beaux-Arts building with limestone pillars, a marble lobby, and wrought-iron balconies.
Not Prince Street in Little Italy. Not the working-class immigrant neighborhoods where Anna had built her first life with Venotico. 5th Avenue. Then 29 Washington Square West with views of the park and the Empire State Building. In 1935, Vito bought Deep Cut, a 1928 mansion on a 40-acre property in Middletown Township, New Jersey.
The money was extraordinary. The life it built was, by any material measure, far beyond what Anna had known before. Anna hated him. This is not inference. This is what her family passed down and what the court documents she later filed reflect directly. Being married to Vito Genovese had endangered her health and made her life extremely wretched.
Those are her own words, filed in court proceedings in the early 1950s. The money was real. The luxury was real. The hatred was also real, and it was present from the beginning, from the moment she had looked at the situation she was in after Gerard was found on that rooftop and concluded that she had no choice but to say yes.
In 1934, Genovese killed Ferdinand the Shadow Butcher. Butcher had helped him swindle a wealthy gambler out of $150,000 in a rigged card game and had demanded $35,000 for his role in setting up the mark. Genovese did not pay him. He killed him instead, shot to death in a coffee shop in Brooklyn on September 19th, 1934.
Then, special prosecutor Thomas Dewey started building cases. One of the hitmen Genovese had hired for the Butcher murder confessed. The body came up from the Hudson River. The charges were coming. In 1937, Vito Genovese fled to Italy. He left Anna with three children, Marie, her daughter from her first marriage, Nancy, Vito’s daughter from his first marriage, and Philip, their son together.
He left her the responsibility of managing the family’s finances during his exile. He left her with connections and obligations to the criminal organization, but without his presence. And in doing so, he gave her the only thing that could have produced what she eventually built.
He left her alone. Anna Genovese opened Club Caravan in 1939 at 578 West Broadway. She booked performers, singers, entertainers, drag artists at a time when drag performance was simultaneously flourishing underground and being actively persecuted by law enforcement. The State Liquor Authority in New York could and did revoke liquor licenses from establishments that served gay patrons, that permitted same-sex dancing, that allowed the kind of gender non-conforming performance that the drag community was developing in the margins
of Manhattan nightlife. Anna used mob connections to keep the police at bay. She knew which palms to grease and she greased them. The clubs she ran were not just businesses. They were, in a specific and historically significant sense, sanctuaries. Places where people who were excluded from the ordinary social fabric of 1940s New York could exist in some version of safety.
She co-owned the 181 Club on the East Side, which was advertised as the East Side’s gayest spot, and which contemporaries called the homosexual Copacabana. She ran Club 82, which became one of the most famous and long-lasting drag venues in New York City history. It would survive into the 1970s, well past Anna’s involvement, because the community it served was real and loyal.
During these years, with Vito in Italy donating to Mussolini’s fascist party and supplying cocaine to Mussolini’s son and being knighted as Commendatore by Il Duce, Anna was in Manhattan building something that had nothing to do with the world that had forced her into her current situation. She was running businesses that generated money, some of which flowed to Vito in exile, the organizational obligation she could not escape.
But she was also building community, a world of people who needed safe spaces as badly as Anna needed something of her own. She was also, during these years, exploring her own sexuality. Multiple accounts confirm that Anna had affairs with women during the period of Vito’s exile. The clubs were not just professional environments, they were personal ones.
For a decade, with Vito in Italy, Anna had a life. Not the life she had wanted with Gerard Vernotico in a Little Italy apartment on Prince Street, but something she had built herself with her own intelligence and her own connections and her own understanding of what the city’s underserved communities needed and how to provide it. Then, Vito came home.
1945, Vito Genovese was extradited from Italy and returned to the United States to face the Botcher murder charges that had sent him fleeing eight years before. Two key witnesses against him were found dead before the trial could proceed. The case collapsed. He was freed. He came back to Anna.
He assessed what she had built and he made an immediate and non-negotiable demand. The family was relocating to New Jersey, Atlantic Highlands, then other New Jersey addresses, away from Manhattan, away from the clubs, away from the community Anna had spent a decade building. The move ended her club career. She could not run Greenwich Village drag bars and gay clubs from a house in New Jersey while being the wife of the emerging boss of one of the most powerful crime families in America.
The logistics were impossible. The political reality was impossible. Vito wanted her visible and controlled. And in New Jersey, she had been free for a decade. Vito’s return ended that. Their relationship in the years after his return became increasingly acrimonious.
The domestic violence she would later describe in court filings began or escalated. The distance between the life she had built and the life she was now required to live produced a bitterness that made the trapped feeling of the original marriage feel even more suffocating in retrospect because she had now experienced what freedom looked like and it had been taken from her.
In 1950, Anna Genovese walked out on Vito Genovese. She filed for maintenance. She asked for $200 a week in alimony without divorce. She was not seeking to end the marriage formally, just to live separately and be financially supported for doing so. She dropped that suit in 1951. She resumed proceedings.
The back and forth continued. She was trying to find a mechanism that would give her freedom without requiring her to do the thing that was most dangerous to do. Then she did the most dangerous thing available. March 2nd, 1953. The Freehold County Courthouse, Freehold, New Jersey, morning. Anna Genovese took the witness stand in open court.
What she did in that moment had never been done before in the history of American organized crime. A mob wife of her standing, the wife of a senior figure in the National Crime Syndicate, the wife of a man who was moving toward the position of boss of what the FBI would later name the Genovese Crime Family, walking into a public courtroom and testifying against him.
Not in a private proceeding. Not in a closed session. In open court with reporters present, with the public record being made in real time, the code she was breaking was omertà, the vow of silence that governed everyone connected to organized crime, made member and associate and wife and family member alike.
The specific version of omertà that applied to mob wives was particularly absolute. They were expected to know nothing officially and to say nothing under any circumstances. Wives who were charged with crimes sometimes refused to testify even under immunity. The idea of a mob wife voluntarily taking the stand against her husband was, by the standards of the world she had inhabited for 21 years, incomprehensible.
She did it anyway. She testified about Vito’s finances. She described the organizational structures around their marriage. She stated that Club 82 was gang-owned, implicating the Mafia’s financial interests in the drag and gay bar scene she had built, which simultaneously exposed those interests and shifted legal responsibility from solely herself.
She described what she knew of his criminal activities and associations. The proceeding was a divorce and alimony case, not a criminal prosecution. Vito was not arrested or charged as a direct result of what Anna said, but the financial and organizational intelligence she placed in the public record that day contributed to the broader understanding that law enforcement was building of his operations.
The information she provided became part of the picture. The shockwaves through the American Mafia were immediate. A mob wife had broken the silence in public, on the record. And nothing had been able to stop her. Not the implicit threat of what happened to people who talked about Vito Genovese’s business, not the code she had been expected to observe, not the 21 years of the marriage that had made her silence an assumed fact.
She was done being silent. Vito Genovese did not go to prison immediately as a result of Anna’s testimony. He continued to operate. He became the boss of his family after engineering the shooting of Frank Costello. In 1957, Costello survived but retired from the position. Genovese organized the Appalachian Summit in November of 1957, which ended catastrophically when state troopers stumbled upon the gathering and the most powerful organized crime figures in America scattered into the surrounding woods in their expensive
suits. In 1958, federal prosecutors brought narcotics conspiracy charges against Genovese. He was convicted. He was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison. The case was built on the work of multiple investigators and informants and the broader law enforcement intelligence that had been developing around his operations for years.
He died in federal prison on February 14th, 1969. Valentine’s Day. The man who had murdered a baker on a Greenwich Village rooftop to possess the woman he loved died in a federal prison on the feast day of Saint Valentine, the patron saint of love. Anna Genovese outlived Vito by 13 years. She died in January of 1982.
She is buried in New Jersey. The clubs she had built during Vito’s exile became part of a history that has only recently been fully told. The Mob Queen’s podcast, produced by Jessica Bendinger and Michael Seligman, spent years documenting Anna’s story and in doing so, recovered a chapter of both mob history and queer history that had been largely overlooked by both traditions.
Anna Genovese, the mob wife who ran the homosexual Copacabana and the drag bars of Greenwich Village. Anna Genovese, who had affairs with women during her husband’s decade in exile. Anna Genovese, who built safe spaces for a community that had no other safe spaces in 1940s Manhattan. None of that was in the history books that recorded Vito Genovese’s career.
She was a footnote in those books, his wife, the one who testified against him, the end of a paragraph. She was more than that. She was a woman who had been given no choice at the beginning. The husband strangled, the pregnancy, the six months, the wedding 12 days later, and who had spent 21 years finding the choices that were available to her within the constraints she had been given.
The clubs, the community, the affairs, the walkout in 1950, the court filings, the testimony in open court. Every one of those was a choice made by a woman who had been told she had none.
topping 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.