Henry Borelli

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Henry Borelli in an FBI mugshot, May 22, 1981

Henry Borelli (b. 1948) is an Italian-American mafioso, a former core member of the DeMeo crew, an infamous group of murderers, car thieves and drug dealers associated with the Gambino crime family. The crew was led by Gambino soldier Roy DeMeo, and also included Joseph Testa, Anthony Senter, Joseph Guglielmo and Chris Rosenberg, among others.

The DeMeo crew garnered a notorious reputation even among the often violent criminal underworld Cosa Nostra is a part of, and is suspected of being responsible for 75-200 murders from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, when many of the surviving crew members were brought to justice.

Due to his reputed efficiency as a shooter in homicides the crew committed, Henry Borelli was given the nickname "Dirty Henry" by DeMeo and his associates, a play off the popular Dirty Harry series of movies that premiered in the early 1970s. Despite his usefulness as an enforcer as well as his willingness to murder for the good of the crew and its business enterprises, Borelli would never become a made man in the Gambino crime family as he had at one time taken the NYPD entrance exam in the early 1970s.

[edit] Notable murders

Among the dozens of murders the DeMeo crew committed (and the dozens more they were suspected of committing by the FBI) that Henry Borelli was involved in are the following:

He was a key contributor to the murder of Andrei Katz. Borelli used a female friend to lure Katz to a location where he could be confronted and abducted by members of the DeMeo crew. Borelli is not assumed to have actually killed Katz however, nor participated in the dismemberment of his corpse afterwards. Regardless, Borelli was arrested for the slaying along with Joseph Testa when the female friend he had used as the bait went to the police to confess her role. Both Borelli and Testa were acquitted of the crime after the woman's testimony was torn down by defense lawyers during the trial.

Borelli was a shooter in the next known murder committed by Roy DeMeo and his crew however. On May 20, 1976 Borelli, along with DeMeo himself, shot to death Joseph Brocchini, a made member of another Mafia family who was killed for punching DeMeo during an argument the two were having concerning a pornography business both were involved in. Brocchini was shot five times in the back of the head in the office of a used-car dealership he owned, the other employees having been blindfolded and handcuffed. The crime was made to look like a robbery due to the fact that DeMeo did not have permission for the murder and would have been killed himself were it traced back to him.

On October 12, 1979, two men were shot to death in a garage owned by one of the DeMeo crew members. One of the men, Khaled Daoud, had been threatening to inform the police on Roy and crew's extremely lucrative Middle East operation, where stolen vehicles were being shipped to Kuwait in large numbers, earning the main members of the operation thousands of dollars a week. The other man, Ronald Falcaro, was merely accompanying Daoud to what they thought was a meeting to discuss purchasing vehicles for their own legit auto-sale business. Testimony by crew members Frederick DiNome and Vito Arena confirmed that Roy DeMeo and Henry Borelli were the two shooters in the murder, with the Gemini Twins Joseph Testa and Anthony Senter assigned as backup.

On June 5, 1980 Borelli and DeMeo again committed a double homicide, shooting to death Charles Montigore (who refused to recant testimony that would imprison the son of a friend of Roy's) as well as Daniel Scutaro, a friend of Montigore's who had nothing to do with the situation but made the mistake of showing up at the body shop where Montigore had just been murdered and asking crew member Richard DiNome if Montigore had been by there. Roy DeMeo told Richard to send Scutaro in, where he too was shot to death by DeMeo and Borelli.

In 1986, Henry Borelli was sentenced to life in prison, as well as a concurrent sentence of 150 years for the 15 counts of auto theft. He successfully appealed the life sentence, although ultimately that meant little, as the 150 year sentence for the auto theft was upheld[1]. He is currently serving out his sentence at Hazelton Federal Penitentary located in Preston County, West Virginia.