Surviving the Mob - Dennis Griffin [62]
“I walked out of there knowing that my crew had killed Robert. I’d had a hard time controlling my emotions while Mike was feeding me his line of shit. I wanted to shoot him where he stood. But I couldn’t. If I tipped my mitt, I was a dead man. So I had to keep myself in check.
“I knew that with nobody else from the crew going to the funeral, word must already be out on the street that we were being blamed for Robert and Thomas.
“They didn’t have an actual funeral for Robert. They had a memorial service at Saint Bernard’s Church in Bergen Beach. Regina [Dina’s cousin], the girl I was dating at the time, had attended school with Robert and they’d been good friends. So the two of us went to the memorial service. We sat down in a pew and I saw the guys from Robert’s crew looking at us. We exchanged nods, but their expressions and body language told me what they were thinking. They thought I had a lot of balls showing up at a memorial for a guy that me or my crew had killed.
“After the service, Robert’s mother was swarmed by the mourners and I wasn’t able to speak with her. I said hello to a couple of the Lucchese guys. They spoke, but barely. Mike had told me to take the temperature. I did and it was ice cold.”
Over the next several weeks, more information came to light about Robert’s murder. Regina learned from the families of Robert and Thomas that Mike Yannotti’s beeper had been found at the scene of the killings. And Andrew learned that Yannotti had been brought in by the police for a voice analysis and to give hair samples for DNA testing. He spoke to Yannotti a couple of times during that period and Yannotti failed to mention that he was a suspect in the case or that his beeper had been recovered at the crime scene.
The more Andrew thought about it, the more he believed Yannotti not calling him to go along on the hit was a clear sign that Nicky Corozzo and Yannotti didn’t trust him. But he could only guess at what they were thinking then or now. Then he got more disturbing news.
“The word coming out of the Luccheses and on the street in general was that Mike and I had killed Robert. We were the two shooters. I had an alibi for that night, though. I’d been with Tommy Dono and Benny Geritano on the botched robbery. Then Regina joined us at the Japanese restaurant. After that she went home with me and spent the night. So if I had to, I could have Regina vouch for me that I had nothing to do with Robert’s death.”
But then things calmed down temporarily when Yannotti left for Florida to let the heat die down.
Andrew returned to his apartment one evening in late February to find a business card under his door. It was from a Secret Service agent. A handwritten note advised Andrew that he was to report to their office at the World Trade Center for a handwriting analysis in the Marriott scam. He wasn’t overly concerned about that, because he’d only endorsed the checks, not forged any of the signatures. He contacted Nicky’s nephew, attorney Joseph Corozzo Jr., to accompany him.
“The analysis was a piece of cake. Afterward, I took Jo Jo to lunch. I gave him five hundred dollars for his hour of work. He said, ‘You can drop the other twenty-five hundred off at my office next week when you get a chance.’
“I almost fell out of my chair. This guy and I had been friends since childhood. And now the bastard wanted to charge me three grand for sitting there while I gave a handwriting sample. I told him, ‘Sure. But I might have to be away for a while. If I don’t make it into your office before I leave, go see Nicky. Tell him to give you the money for me.’
“I’d told my parole officer about the handwriting thing. He didn’t say two words about it at the time. I had to see him again a couple of weeks later. It was on a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of March and everything seemed fine.
“It happened that the same week, I was planning a bank