The Gemini Method

So the story goes, in 1983 in Brooklyn, New York, young John Gotti, not quite the infamous leader of America’s biggest crime syndicate just yet, was approached by the leaders of his crime syndicate and ordered to commit a hit on one of their own. John Gotti allegedly refused, not out of any sense of loyalty towards the man he’d just been instructed to kill, but because the man in question was simply just that dangerous.

But notoriously brutal Roy Albert DeMeo hadn’t been born the man that he’d become.

He came into the world the fourth out of what would be five children to housewife Eleanor DeMeo and Antonio Joseph DeMeo, the delivery man for a laundry company. That hardly seems the likely familial background for someone about to make history in a harsh and cruel way, but the Brooklyn streets were about to become the learning grounds for a burgeoning crime lord. 

On the surface, young Roy DeMeo was doing everything he could to get a safe and law-abiding start in life. He graduated from high school, alongside other names that would be famous in the future like Walter Block and Bernie Sanders, and then he got a profession. Roy found both work and an education in the butcher section of a local supermarket, where he learned how to dismember and render animal carcasses and turn them into packaged meat to sell at the counter.

But hiding just below that facade was the up-and-coming young criminal, firmly set on his way to a life imbued with crime.

Roy had started on this path back when he was still a high schooler. He and a few others under his wings set up a loan shark operation and by the time Roy was about to turn twenty, he was already making a name for himself. 

Nino Gaggi, associate and later bigwig in the notorious Gambino Family, noticed how well Roy was running his operation and approached him with an offer. There would be more money to have, he told the young Roy DeMeo, if Roy aligned himself with the Gambino’s.

This offer came to Roy at a delicate time of his life. His father had just died of a sudden heart attack, and the loss had split his surviving family into pieces. The older children stayed in America, but Eleanor took her fifth and youngest child with her and moved back to Italy. This left the still only nineteen-year-old Roy practically on his own and with no one to warn him of the potential dangers that would follow, affiliating himself with the mafia.

Roy agreed to become a Gambino associate, and he brought with him the same drive and intelligence that had gotten him noticed in the first place. As Roy climbed the ranks, he proved his worth. He still made money as a loan shark, but also put his own crew together and began stealing cars and trafficking narcotics.

Now all he needed was a way to launder his ill-gotten money.

Roy wormed his way into the Brooklyn credit union and then made it onto the board. He used the union’s transactions to clean his own money, and then started approaching his colleagues with tempting offers. Money came out of the union to help build Roy’s loan shark operation, but it also came in from multiple sources as well. Roy and the colleagues he managed to sway began laundering money for drug dealers and other criminals, and this made Roy a very popular man in the seedy Brooklyn underworld.

But he wasn’t exactly popular with everyone.

During the 1970s, one of his men turned on him. Andrei Katz, Roy’s partner in the DeMeo Crew’s ongoing car theft operation, volunteered himself to the authorities. He confessed to the long list of crimes he and the crew were up to and became an informant.

Roy had been betrayed, and he saw only one way to deal with it.

He and the other members of the DeMeo Crew lured Andrei into an apartment. Andrei thought he was about to go on a date with a woman, but what he didn’t know was that there was a group of men lying in wait just behind the apartment door. Andrei stepped into the apartment that evening, and then he was escorted back out by the very criminals he had just given up to the authorities. 

Roy and his crew then led Andrei to the butchers at a local supermarket, where they made sure that he wouldn’t be talking to the police again. First they stabbed Andrei in the heart and back with a butcher’s knife, and then they decapitated him. They then put his head into the trash compactor usually used for flattening cardboard boxes and turned it on. While his head was being crushed, his former friends and colleagues set about carving his body into pieces.

A pedestrian found his remains a few days later hidden between the dumpsters behind the supermarket. 

A cruel end, but Andrei turning on the crew had taught Roy a couple of things. First was that even the people that he trusted the most could turn on him, and second was that he and his crew would need a more efficient way of getting rid of those snitches when they did arise.

Roy, just like he had by taking Andrei to the butchers in the first place, thought back to his early days and came up with a solution. 

He liked the bit about luring his victims in, so he kept that part of the plan but switched the location to the apartment buildings right beside the Gemini Lounge; the crew’s usual hang out. 

But then came the question of what to do with his victims when he had them. The whole business with the compactor had been messy and time-consuming and even after all that, the investigators had still been able to identify Andrei through his dental records.

Roy and his gang hit the drawing boards. Together, they figured out that the quickest way to kill someone was to shoot them in the head. A silencer and wrapping the gun with a towel would make sure that no one heard the shot, and then a quick stab to the heart would stop blood flow and make the cleanup easier.

Then they could put the body in a bathtub to drain, and all that was left to do then was to slice up and package the deceased. Just like he’d done during his time at the butchers, Roy wrapped up body parts in plastic wrap and then put them in plastic bags. He and the other members of the crew would then put those bags into boxes and take them to the dump, where those boxes would very quickly disappear amongst the rest of the rubbish.

The plan was practically foolproof, and what became known as the Gemini Method became the go-to solution whenever someone in the Gambino Family needed to make someone else disappear. 

As if washing their money and now handling their dirty business wasn’t enough, Roy actually managed to do one more thing to strengthen his position with the Gambinos. He suggested that they join forces with an Irish American gang called the Westies and the partnership ended up being incredibly lucrative for both gangs.

It looked like everything Roy touched turned to gold and to celebrate him and his success, the Gambinos officially welcomed him into the family.

There were, however, some conditions to him becoming an official family member. Roy and his crew wouldn’t be allowed to deal drugs anymore, and they were supposed to ask permission before committing any murders.

The conditions sounded simple enough, but Roy didn’t like them. Dealing drugs was still a huge part of his income, and so he ordered his crew to continue trafficking. 

Then there was the part about killing, and Roy found he couldn’t keep up with that bit either. Many believe that during his lifetime Roy killed at least forty people himself, most of which ended up disappearing under the Gemini method, but there were some that got away.

One of them, a young door-to-door salesman who’d parked outside Roy’s house one day, suddenly found himself in a frantic and dangerous car chase. Roy was still supposed to be operating under the condition that he ask permission before killing anyone, but Dominick Ragucci looked like a Cuban Cartel member to Roy, and Roy wasn’t taking any chances. Dominick was actually just a student who was trying to make some extra money by working as a salesman, but he ended up being killed by Roy anyway.

Allegedly, when Roy found out that he had murdered an innocent young man with no gang affiliations whatsoever, he broke down into tears. The shock of what he’d done strengthened his growing sense of paranoia and weakened his relationships with almost everyone around him.

By then, the feds were looking for anything and everything they could get their hands on to try and take the Gambino Family down, and Roy had just given them something huge to use. He’d gone from being a major asset to a massive weakness, and the Gambino Family wanted him gone.

That was when John Gotti was approached and allegedly refused the hit. The Gambinos asked a few other hitmen to handle business, but all either refused or simply couldn’t do it. Allegedly, it was Nino Gaggi, Roy’s mentor and the man who’d introduced Roy to the Gambinos in the first place, who was the one who completed the hit.

On January 10th, 1983, Roy and his crew went to a meeting, thinking that it would be one just like any other. 

Only Roy never left.

Ten days later, he was found in the trunk of his car, which had been abandoned at a Brooklyn boat club. He’d been shot several times, and the winter weather had partially frozen his remains.