Murder Machine (Onyx True Crime) - Softcover

Mustain, Gene; Capeci, Jerry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451403878 ISBN 13: 9780451403872

Publisher: Berkley, 1993

Synopsis

"The inside story of a single Brooklyn gang that killed more Americans than the Iraqi army."—Mike McAlary, columnist, New York Post

They were the DeMeo gang—the most deadly hit men in organized crime. Their Mafia higher-ups came to know, use, and ultimately fear them as the Murder Machine. They killed for profit and for pleasure, following cold-blooded plans and wild whims, from the mean streets of New York to the Florida Gold Coast, and from coast to coast. 

Now complete with personal revelations of one of the key players, this is the savage story that leaves no corpse unturned in its terrifying telling. 

INCLUDES PHOTOGRAPHS 

About this title

About the Author

Jerry Capeci is considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Mafia and organized crime. He covered the crime beat for both the New York Daily News and the New York Post (and was the only newspaperman to sneak his way into Carlo Gambino’s funeral in 1976) for more than 20 years. He is the co-author of Murder Machine, the terrifying saga of Roy DeMeo’s bloodthirsty Mafia crew, and Gotti: Rise & Fall. A native of the mean streets of Bath Beach, Brooklyn, he now lives in Manhattan.

Gene Mustain is the co-author of Murder Machine and the author of Mob Star.

From Kirkus Reviews

First-rate story of a Mafia murder crew so deadly that even John Gotti turned aside a contract on its leader. New York Daily News reporters Mustain and Capeci (coauthors, Mob Star, 1989--not reviewed) tell the fascinating and repellently detailed story of Roy DeMeo and the gang he raised from teenagers in Canarsie--a Brooklyn neighborhood where death by natural causes is ``six bullets in the head,'' according to one cop. The middle-class DeMeo, a natural criminal, was carrying cash in brown paper bags and driving a Cadillac by his high- school senior year. After establishing loan-sharking headquarters at his Gemini Lounge in Brooklyn, he shipped scores of stolen luxury cars to Kuwait, distributed drugs (one of his crew was the chief supplier of cocaine at Studio 54), and wholesaled child pornography. When the inevitable business disputes arose, his crew simply made the other parties disappear. The victims were lured into a clubhouse behind the Gemini Lounge, where they were shot and dismembered (``it's just like takin' apart a deer''), then secured in Hefty Bags and tossed on the Canarsie dump. One murder led so easily to another that soon the ``Gemini method'' was used on anybody who got in the gang's way or annoyed them. DeMeo presented three of his coke-crazed crew with sets of custom carving knives, which they kept in their car trunks in case a quick assignment arose. When a special NYPD/FBI task force cracked the DeMeo gang, it tagged the criminals for 75 murders. DeMeo (who was rubbed out by fellow mobsters as the cops closed in) bragged of one hundred personally, making him far more destructive than any known US serial killer. Vivid, hair-raising, day-to-day-in-the-life-of narrative: the best mob book in recent memory. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Berkley
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0451403878
• ISBN 13: 9780451403872
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 496