Roy shielded his two daughters from his mob life.
When Al was 6, his father gave him and his sisters envelopes with $5,000 in cash in them as Christmas gifts. His father used only pay phones and always carried large amounts of cash in envelopes. His father had friends with names like Frankie Elbows and Mikey Hammer, and sometimes those friends would come to the house bloody from gunshots. Al would see guns and disguises in the trunk of his father's Cadillac. The living was good at the new house on Whitewood Drive, with lavish cookouts and opulent Christmas and birthday gifts.Īs a child, Al was at a loss to explain his dad's job to classmates, but he began to understand slowly. Roy DeMeo had moved his family out to Massapequa from Brooklyn early on, to give them a better life, Al DeMeo said. He was killed that year, and law enforcement officials and Al DeMeo agree that the killers were members of Roy's own crew, who feared that Roy would cooperate with the feds. In 1983, Roy DeMeo began being investigated by federal prosecutors. It became known as the "Gemini method" and appalled even seasoned mobsters, including Paul Castellano, who succeeded Gambino as boss of New York's largest crime family in 1976. The crew's headquarters was the Gemini Club in Brooklyn, where they disposed of the bodies by draining them of blood in the shower and then slicing them into pieces, to put in garbage bags. The book describes Roy DeMeo's rise from teen-age loan shark in Brooklyn to capo in the Gambino crime family, leading a crew known as the DeMeo gang that did contract murders and ran one of the biggest auto theft rings in New York history. The pay phone out front, now ripped out, was one of those where Al would wait for his dad's calls when Roy was in hiding. "I try not to go out too much around here," he said recently in an interview at the Massapequa Diner, where he and his father used to discuss strategy. And now that the book has been featured on national news programs, Massapequa is buzzing again about Al DeMeo, who still lives here. "His father's in the Mafia." He would hear it in the school hallways or in line at the bagel store. Still, people around town tended to whisper when they talked about the family. Intimidation? My younger brother would stand in front of the DeMeo house, serenading Al's sister and dancing for the surveillance cameras that Roy DeMeo had installed to watch for potential assassins. Some said the Mafiosi in the neighborhood made it feel safer, both because of the mob security and the increased surveillance by law enforcement officers. The mob presence didn't seem to make the neighbors nervous. The waterfront home of Carlo Gambino, the "boss of bosses," could also be seen from my family's house. I used to watch the DeMeos' parties from my back yard across the canal. I grew up in Massapequa with Al DeMeo and saw him beat up that eighth-grader.
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