Roy DeMeo

Roy Albert DeMeo (September 7, 1940 – January 10, 1983) was an Italian-American mobster in the Gambino crime family of New York City.

He headed a group referred to as the "DeMeo crew", which became notorious for the large number of murders they committed and for the grisly way they disposed of the bodies, which became known as "the Gemini Method".

The crew is believed to be responsible for up to 200 murders, many of which were committed by DeMeo himself.

Roy Albert DeMeo was born on September 7, 1940, in Flatlands, Brooklyn, to a working-class Italian immigrant family of Neapolitan origin.

Roy's older Brother Anthony Frank "Chubby" DeMeo, a U.S. Marine Corps corporal, was killed in action during the Korean War on April 23, 1951, aged twenty.

The fourth of five children of Eleanor (née Colarullo), a housewife, and Antonio Joseph "Anthony" DeMeo, a laundry company deliveryman, DeMeo graduated from James Madison High School in 1959, during which time he began earning money as a loanshark.

The economist Walter Block and future presidential candidate Bernie Sanders were among his graduating year classmates.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two, DeMeo also worked at a local grocery store, where he trained as an apprentice butcher.

His father died of a heart attack on December 12, 1960, when Roy was nineteen, and his mother subsequently returned to Italy with Roy's youngest brother to live with relatives near Naples.

Roy DeMeo was initially an associate of the Flatlands–Canarsie faction of the Lucchese crime family, which controlled tow truck companies, junkyards, and car theft operations in that section of Brooklyn.

Through the late 1960s, DeMeo's organized crime prospects increased on two fronts.

He continued in the loansharking business with Gaggi, and began developing a crew of young men involved in car theft.

It was this collective of criminals that became known both in the underworld and in law enforcement circles as the DeMeo crew.

Anthony Gaggi, a soldier in the Gambino crime family, noticed DeMeo in 1966 and told him that he could make even more money with his successful business if he came to work directly for the Gambinos.

The first member of the DeMeo crew was 16-year-old Chris Rosenberg, who met DeMeo in 1966 when he was dealing marijuana at a Canarsie gas station.

DeMeo helped Rosenberg increase his business and profits by loaning him money so that he could deal in larger amounts.

As the 1970s continued, DeMeo cultivated his followers into a crew experienced with the process of murdering and dismembering victims.

With the exception of killings intended to send a message to any who would hinder their criminal activities, or murders that presented no other alternative, a set method of execution was established by DeMeo and crew to ensure that victims would be dispatched quickly and then made to disappear.

The style of execution was dubbed the "Gemini Method", after the Gemini Lounge, the primary hangout of the DeMeo crew, as well as the site where most of the crew's victims were killed.

By 1972, Rosenberg had introduced his friends to DeMeo and they began working for him as well.

The additional members of the crew came to include Joseph and Patrick Testa, Anthony Senter, Richard and Frederick DiNome, Henry Borelli, Joseph "Dracula" Guglielmo (DeMeo's cousin), and later, Vito Arena and Carlo Profeta.

DeMeo joined a Brooklyn credit union that same year, gaining a position on the board of directors shortly afterward.

He utilized his position to launder money earned through his illegal ventures.

He also introduced colleagues at the credit union to a lucrative side-business, laundering the money of drug dealers he had become acquainted with.

DeMeo also built up his loansharking business with funds stolen from credit union reserves.

DeMeo's collection of loanshark customers, while still primarily those in the car industry, soon included other businesses such as a dentist's office, an abortion clinic, restaurants and flea markets.

He was also listed as an employee for a Brooklyn company named S & C Sportswear Corporation, and frequently told his neighbors he worked in construction, food retailing and the used car business.

Bonanno underboss Salvatore Vitale claimed to the FBI that in 1974 he was ordered to deliver the corpse of a man who had just been murdered to a garage in Queens so that it could be disposed of by DeMeo.

In late 1974, a conflict that had erupted between the DeMeo crew and Andrei Katz, a young auto repair shop owner who was partners with DeMeo in a stolen car ring, had continued to escalate.

In January 1975, Katz visited the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office and voluntarily provided them information that Chris Rosenberg was heavily involved in auto theft.

DeMeo learned about the meeting immediately after it happened from an Auto Crimes detective on his payroll.

Roy ordered DeMeo crew associate Henry Borelli to contact a female acquaintance, Babette Judith Questel, about being used as bait.

In May, Katz appeared before a Brooklyn grand jury and divulged what he knew about the DeMeo crew's illegal activities.

On June 13, 1975, Questel was used to successfully lure Katz to her apartment complex for what he thought was a date, where upon arrival he was immediately abducted by members of the DeMeo crew.

He was then taken to the meat department of a supermarket in Rockaway Beach, Queens, where he was stabbed multiple times in the heart and then the back by a butcher knife.

After being decapitated, Katz's head was then crushed when it was put through a machine normally used for compacting cardboard boxes.

The body parts were wrapped in plastic bags and then deposited into the supermarket's dumpster, where they were discovered days later when a pedestrian walking his dog spotted one of Katz's legs lying on a curb near the store.

The police reported to the press that a grisly, brutal killing had occurred, but that was the extent of the information given.

The body was identified as that of Andrei Katz two days later through the use of dental records.

The process of the Gemini Method, as revealed by multiple crew members and associates who became government witnesses in the early 1980s, was to lure the victim through the side door of the lounge and into the apartment in the back portion of the building.