Cosa Nostra News

Joseph Testa—one of the "Gemini Twins," who was released from prison on April 30, 2024, and retired to Nevada—died on January 26. He was 71. The Gemini Twins Anthony Senter, left, and Joey Testa. Testa had been dealing with medical problems for years. His longtime partner (the other Gemini Twin), Anthony Senter, 70, was released on June 21, 2024. (See video below for a peek at the Gemini Twins and other DeMeo crew members enjoying a barbecue at their boss's Long Island home.) Both Testa and Senter had served about 35 years in prison, a fraction of the well-earned, life-plus-20-year sentences they were slammed with in 1989 after they were convicted of participating in nearly a dozen murders. The once-fearsome Gemini Twins—they got the nickname from the Gemini Lounge, a bar once located on Flatlands Avenue in Canarsie, Brooklyn—were first associated with the Gambino family, where they were part of the Roy DeMeo crew , made famous by the book Murder Machine: A True Story ...

True-crime network Investigation Discovery (ID) has launched a new podcast called "Mafia Tapes," which focuses on the life and crimes of Murder Machine’s Dominick Montiglio, the former Gambino associate who joined Team America and who died on June 27, 2021. Dom Montiglio, left, who died last year, and Celia Aniskovich. (Source: Deadline ) The Mafia Tapes , produced for ID by Gigantic Pictures, features never-before-released recordings of Montiglio and highlights his personal struggles. (The "twist" ending is that Montiglio died during the making of the podcast, days after suffering a stroke, as per Deadline .) The series launched on January 17 with episodes released weekly. Montiglio's story was told, famously,  in the true-crime book Murder Machine by Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci —though the book missed "a helluva lot," Dom once told us as part of a brief Q&A that was to prelude a larger story. (See story here .) Truthfully, we never took that li...

The “Gemini Twins” was a nickname for Joseph Testa and Anthony Senter, who were once part of the most prolific crew of mob killers ever assembled. The Gemini Twins, Joey Testa, left, Anthony Senter....  In the 1970s and early 1980s, the “Murder Machine” crew positively bloomed under Gambino wiseguy Roy DeMeo. (Jerry Capeci christened the crew the Murder Machine , which also was the name of the book he co-authored with Gene Mustain ---- Murder Machine is the single most-absorbing Mafia read on the market today). Other members of the DeMeo crew included Joseph (Dracula) Guglielmo (a DeMeo cousin), Joey Testa's younger brother Patrick, Freddie DiNome (who previously was Roy DeMeo's driver), Henry Borrelli, and Chris Rosenberg. The crew's MO was to first lure the intended victim inside the little apartment behind the Gemini Lounge on Flatlands Avenue in Canarsie, which was the crew’s main hangout. The victim would be shot in the head — and in quick succession, ...

EXCLUSIVE: Dominick Montiglio, for those not familiar, is the nephew of Anthony "Nino" Gaggi, a Paul Castellano loyalist and rising star within what Jerry Capeci has called the "white-collar wing" of the Gambino family during the reign of Big Paul.. Dominick Montiglio, former emissary to the murder machine... Gaggi died in 1988, never attaining the position of underboss he'd long sought when he was close to the Gambino boss before the spectacular 1985 coup by John Gotti. It's through Montiglio's eyes that much of Murder Machine  is told. Murder Machine relates the story of how, after Carlo Gambino died of natural causes in 1976, the ruling members of the Gambino Family met at Nino and Dominick's Brooklyn home ("the bunker") to name a new boss.  Roy DeMeo also hunted people. Gaggi expected the best but prepared for the worst. He taped a gun under the kitchen table and sent Dom upstairs to watch the front of the house from an...

Here we have what some might call an exceedingly rare "treat": video of Gambino soldier  Roy DeMeo and his crew of killers  frolicking at a lively barbecue possibly on Long Island at DeMeo's Massapequa home. (The video is featured below.) The DeMeo crew killed a hell of a lot of people . (The death toll could be as high as 100 victims.) Members of the DeMeo crew included Joseph (Dracula) Guglielmo (a DeMeo cousin); Gemini Twins Joseph Testa and Anthony Senter; Patrick; Freddie DiNome (DeMeo's driver); Henry Borelli; and Chris Rosenberg. In the video, Roy is seen first, telling "Freddy" to shut the camera off, twice he says it, then quietly adds "I'm gonna shoot ya!" Henry Borelli, in the black T-shirt, offers us a rendition of the "Ben Dover" speech. (THAT's a real Brooklyn accent).  Next, someone off-screen says: "I think I had the machine on the whole while"...  Someone else replies, with apparent disappoin...

Roy DeMeo was a ruthless killer—allegedly—and not a man worthy of admiration—but in the context of Cosa Nostra, he offers an example of a fascinating mobster with great business acumen.   DeMeo mugshot  Gambino boss Paul Castellano at least at first rejected the idea of straightening Roy out, but in the end was too greedy not to. Roy was bringing in too much cash to simply dismiss. Roy combined his skills with a blood lust that drove him to commit torture murders not common even among mobsters. (Or so we have been lead to believe.) Roy had a crew of young wannabes, some of whom would eventually be given buttons, such as Gemini Twins Anthony Senter and Joey Testa, who hooked up with the Lucheses after leaving Roy. Others wound up dead. (Like Roy when the Gemini Twins left him.) An FBI bug installed in the home of Gambino soldier Angelo Ruggiero picked up an intriguing conversation between Angelo and Gene Gotti, a brother of John Gotti. When Castellano finally decided ...

The swath of marshland beside the Belt Parkway along Jamaica Bay's northern edge is a wasteland, a place I have driven through my whole life. I remember staring at those drab-colored reeds as a child, sitting in the backseat on the way to or from my grandparents' house for Sunday dinner. I refer here to the moldering woods stretching for miles along Jamaica Bay’s northern edges, near where Brooklyn dissolves into Queens. It is a place well out of sight for most New Yorkers, and therefore out of mind. A law enforcement officer walks throug h  an old mob dumping ground. Having the imagination that I have, that desolate expanse sparked all kinds of dark fantasies in my brain, most of which centered on monsters rising up out of the tall reeds while dead bodies decomposed beneath them. I was right about the bodies being there (not to mention a mere letter "b" away from actually hitting the nail on the head). Mobsters, for decades, left the victims of count...

Roy DeMeo, hunting -- game this time, it would appear. Ray Merrole and his crew considered themselves as untouchable car thieves -- and even claimed a big budget Hollywood movie was based on their exploits (we strong disagree with this, as we noted ) Roy DeMeo, who also ran a stolen-car ring, had a much bigger operation than Ray did. Roy's went all the way up to mob boss Paul Castellano, who was actually on trial for this auto-theft operation when he was whacked by John Gotti and company. Big Paul, not trusting Roy to "stand up," had had him whacked months earlier.

Below are candid photographs of Gambino mobster Roy DeMeo , who operated a massive stolen-car ring and ran a crew that specialized in murder and body disposal. Former Gambino capo Roy DeMeo has a word with someone  standing off-camera... A mob historian seeking to uncover Roy DeMeo 's FBI files sent them along to this blog. It was the crew's body disposal method—dubbed the Gemini Method, after a bar Roy owned and used as his HQ—that earned them the nickname "Murder Machine" from Jerry Capeci. The FBI suspect the crew murdered between 150 and 200 people in the 1970s and early '80s—at least. These photos prove quite chilling to those knowledgeable about Roy, a man whom John Gotti himself may have feared (or at least, Gotti once seemed to say as much).  Johnny Boy, the tough guy destined for mob infamy, turned down Gambino boss Paul Castellano's request that he and his Bergin crew whack DeMeo. "That guy has an army of killers," Gotti's ...

Thomas (Tommy Karate) Pitera, made member of the Bonanno crime family, in his most recent effort to get out of prison, sought to use DNA evidence to shift blame for several murders on a former partner in crime. Moment of Truth: Tommy Karate, nose busted, comprehending  his career's end. Pitera's appeal was crushed (just like his nose when the DEA arrested him) by a dead judge, who while alive penned the legal documents that validated the denial. As Forbes reported: "A federal court of appeals yesterday denied a criminal defendant’s Motion To Compel Post-Conviction Relief in the form of DNA testing of six items related to the crimes at issue. "The defendant/appellant, Thomas Pitera, alleges that genetic testing of those items would exonerate him by showing that the guilty party was in fact Frank Gangi, whom the court determined to be his accomplice. In United States v. Pitera (2d Cir. Apr. 3, 2012), the Second Circuit determined after very careful a...