![]() But he made them money all along, and he made himself very useful when he used his skills as a supermarket butcher to dispose of the bodies. The conservative men who ran the family (through “legitimate” businesses in Canarsie like the local junkyards and chop shops) thought he was too loud and took the longest time to finally induct him. ![]() Roy was out of Central Casting for a mobster: loud and swaggering and lethal. He also started lending out the money he made at the supermarket, no doubt at usurious rates, and when his customers didn’t pay him back fast enough, he was only too glad to beat them up. So Roy had to man-up for himself, and he started working as a butcher at the local supermarket to build beef, while he lifted weights with a vengeance to build muscle, which he started throwing around plenty. And that’s how the partying stopped, and her neighbors moved out in a hurry, and the neighborhood got as quiet as before and became, she says, a “family” kind of place again.Īccording to the Philip Carlo book about prolific gangland hitman Richard Kuklinski, The Ice Man, Roy aspired to run with the fast crowd in Canarsie, but he was a portly kid who always got picked on, particularly after his older brother and protector went off to Vietnam and got killed. And one day an armada of mobster battle wagons, Denalis and Escalades with butterscotch leather seats blaring their battle cry of Sinatra and Bon Jovi, climbed the sidewalk and crashed right through the neighbor’s fence and pinned the revelers who couldn’t run fast enough against the walls of the house. So she told them nice, she said, but they wouldn’t stop so she told them nice again, and now they cursed her out. (One was that she was offered a mink coat by one of the henchmen in the Lufthansa airport heist portrayed in the movie, which she refused: good thing, because he was later bumped off for being too ostentatious with his end of the loot and so were the wives and girlfriends.) She told a more recent story that her West Indian neighbors were partying a little too hard once and tossing their beer bottles and cans over the fence into her yard and terrorizing her elderly mother. The woman with the flaming red hair who was once a bartender at the Bamboo Lounge lived in Canarsie up until a few years ago and she had stories to tell. Canarsie doesn’t look much different now than it did when Roy hung out there: Holy Family is still the anchor of the Catholics in the community and it still rings its bell on Sundays, though the parishioners who now flock there are mostly West Indian.īut there’ s still a pocket of Canarsie’s old Italian stock living around the main drag on Rockaway Parkway near the fire station, and according to at least one account, they still have clout. Roy was a homegrown boy who was born in Flatlands but sowed his wild oats not far from the bar just fifteen minutes down the road in Canarsie, a reputed stronghold of the Lucchese crime family and home of the Bamboo Lounge that was featured in the movie Goodfellas. On most nights when the traffic subsides on Flatlands Avenue and the buses float down the street mostly empty, you might look up in the sky over the little storefront church with the white walls and maroon awning with the cross on it, and if you let your imagination run riot, you might see the ghosts of all those wise guys who were murdered there and chopped up in what used to be a bar called the Gemini Lounge that also doubled as a killing factory for a local mobster named Roy DeMeo and his crew.
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