Monday, January 10, 2011

Jan. 10, 1983: A Mob Executioner's Last Ride


There's being good at your job, and then there's being too good at your job. The latter was the case with Mob executioner Roy DeMeo and his crew, who perfected the process of murder and body disposal to the degree that it was named the "Gemini Method" (after The Gemini Lounge, where most of DeMeo's victims were killed).

DeMeo started out as a loanshark in the early 60s and worked his way up in the Gambino crime family (which would eventually be run by John Gotti). By the 70s, DeMeo ran most of his operations out of his club, The Gemini Lounge. This included DeMeo's primary job as mob executioner. Victims were lured to a back apartment at the club. A gunman, usually DeMeo, would quickly shoot in the victim in the head with a silenced pistol and immediately wrap a towel to contain the blood flow. Additional methods were employed to contain the blood before the corpse was later dismembered, wrapped in plastic bags, and packed in cardboard boxes. The boxes were then taken to the Fountain Avenue Dump in Brooklyn. DeMeo's crew had a near-100% record of a body never being found.

Eventually, the vast number of people who "disappeared" after visiting the Gemini Lounge piqued the attention of the FBI. That and some of DeMeo's other enterprises, such as extreme pornography and narcotics (both forbidden under threat of death by the family), made him too much of a liability. Gambino crime boss Paul Castellano was apprehensive about going up against DeMeo and his army of killers, but eventually gave the order.

On January 10, 1983, DeMeo went to a meeting at an auto bodyshop owned by one of his crew members. Two weeks later, after responding to the second report of an abandoned car left in a Brooklyn parking lot, police finally opened up the car to discern the owner. Inside the trunk, beneath a chandelier, was DeMeo's body, dead from multiple gunshot wounds to the head (a wounded hand was thrown up defensively), and frozen to the spare tire.

READ MORE: The Crime Library

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