Roy DeMeo: The Mafia Hitman So Dangerous Even Castellano Was Afraid to Kill Him

Andrei Katz was a twenty two year old Romanian-Jewish immigrant in Brooklyn. His parents were Holocaust survivors. He bought cocaine and stolen cars from Chris Rosenberg and the DeMeo crew. When a bad VIN on a stolen van got him arrested, he was furious at Rosenberg and ended up in the hospital after being beaten by crew members. He decided to fight back the only way he knew — he went to the Brooklyn DA's office and testified before a grand jury about what he knew of their illegal activities. Roy DeMeo learned about every meeting the same day it happened. He had a corrupt Auto Crimes detective on his payroll who reported everything Katz was saying to prosecutors in real time. On Friday June thirteenth, nineteen seventy five, a woman lured Katz to her apartment complex under the pretense of a date. He arrived expecting an evening out. He was abducted and taken to the meat department of a grocery store in Brooklyn. Roy DeMeo was waiting. DeMeo had been a butcher's apprentice. He knew how to break down a carcass. This was the DeMeo crew's first known murder involving dismemberment — the night that a crew of loan sharks and car thieves became something else entirely, and the template for between one hundred and two hundred murders that followed was established. In this video we cover all of it: Who Andrei Katz actually was — the child of Holocaust survivors, the Romanian immigrant, the young man in Brooklyn who stumbled into the orbit of the most lethal crew in the history of the American Mafia Who Roy DeMeo actually was — the butcher's apprentice from Flatlands Brooklyn, the loansharker noticed by Nino Gaggi, the progression from loan shark to car thief to drug dealer to the man who built the most prolific murder operation in Gambino family history The stolen van, the bad VIN, the arrest, and the hospital beating — the specific sequence that made Andrei Katz a problem the DeMeo crew needed to solve The corrupt Auto Crimes detective on DeMeo's payroll — and how every step Andrei took toward law enforcement was immediately reported back to the man he was trying to bring down The woman used as bait, the abduction, the meat department, and what happened in that room documented through forensic evidence and government witness testimony The disposal mistake — dumping too early, the leg on the curb, the eight packages, the dental records required for identification The acquittal of Borelli and Testa in January nineteen seventy six — and what the crew learned from the Katz case about how to do it better The Gemini Method — the silenced pistol, the towel turban, the stab to the heart, the bathtub, the plastic sheets, the disassembly line, the packages distributed across Brooklyn, the East New York garbage dump that is now a park Between one hundred and two hundred murders built on the template established in a grocery store on a Friday night in June Roy DeMeo found in the trunk of his Cadillac in January nineteen eighty three — killed by his own crew What this story reveals about what happens when the systems designed to protect ordinary people are compromised by the people those systems are supposed to stop Key figures: Roy DeMeo, Andrei Katz, Chris Rosenberg, Joseph Testa, Anthony Senter, Henry Borelli, Nino Gaggi, Dominick Montiglio, Frederick DiNome Timeline: September seventh, nineteen forty through January tenth, nineteen eighty three — and the body count that exists between those dates Why this story matters today: The murder of Andrei Katz was not the end of a story. It was the beginning of one. Between one hundred and two hundred people followed. The Gemini Method that killed them was built from the lessons of what went wrong in a Brooklyn supermarket dumpster in June of nineteen seventy five. Every one of those people traces back to a twenty two year old immigrant child who tried to use the law and found that the law was already working for the other side. Subscribe for a new mob documentary every week. Drop your state in the comments. Verified sources: Wikipedia — Roy DeMeo, Chris Rosenberg, Andrei Katz | Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci, Murder Machine: A True Story of Murder, Madness, and the Mafia, Dutton, nineteen ninety two | Alchetron — Andrei Katz biography | Gangland Wire — Roy DeMeo profile, Gary Jenkins | They Will Kill You — The Story of Serial Killer Roy Albert DeMeo | Crime Library — Roy DeMeo: The Butcher of Gemini Lounge | Albert DeMeo, For the Sins of My Father, Broadway Books, two thousand two #RoyDeMeo #AndreiKatz #GambinoCrimeFamily #MafiaHistory