Andrei Katz
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Andrei Katz (1952, – June 13, 1975) was a Romanian-Jewish immigrant living in New York City in the 1970s, where through auto theft and drug dealing he became involved with a group of criminals associated with the Gambino Mafia Family known as the DeMeo Crew. After he agreed to cooperate with law enforcement against the crew, Andrei became their first known murder victim.
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[edit] Background
In 1956, Andrei's family immigrated to New York. His parents, both survivors of a concentration camp during World War II, chose to live in Brooklyn. Andrei was four years old at the time. He also had a younger brother by the name of Victor.
[edit] Criminal Career
In 1974, at the age of twenty-two, Andrei was running a bodyshop in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn known as Veribest Foreign Car Services. That same year he was introduced to Chris Rosenberg through one of his customers, a pharmacist who at the time was serving as Rosenberg's drug connection for cocaine and quaaludes. Rosenberg was affiliated with an up-and-coming Gambino associate named Roy DeMeo, who led a crew of young car thieves and drug dealers that included Chris among its members. Chris, who owned a body shop near Andrei's, offered to sell him stolen car parts for his shop. The two soon developed a professional relationship and also began to meet socially along with Rosenberg's friends Joseph Testa and Anthony Senter, also members of the DeMeo crew. Andrei began buying cocaine from Rosenberg and selling it on his own, and also continued to purchase auto parts from the trio. In August of 1974, Andrei purchased a .38 revolver from Chris. This same month he also became involved in a deal with the crew relating to a number of stolen vans.
One month later a friend of Andrei's purchased one of the vans. Shortly after the purchase the acquaintance was stopped by police, who determined that the van had been stolen. He informed police that he bought the car from Andrei, who was arrested in October. Once in custody, Andrei was pressured by New York's Auto Crimes Unit to cooperate and reveal to them the source of the stolen vehicle. He refused the offer and made bail soon after. Reportedly, once freed Andrei was angry at Rosenberg, who he felt was to blame for his arrest due to the poor quality of the false VIN that had been put on the van. Almost immediately after making bail, he was confronted at Veribest by Chris, Joseph Testa and Joseph's younger brother Patrick, who threatened him to keep quiet to authorities about their involvement in stolen vehicles. An argument broke out between Andrei and Chris, and the next day the two confronted each other again, the argument ending with Chris punching Andrei in the mouth. Two days later, Andrei was taken out of his car and assaulted by two masked men. Andrei's injuries were severe enough to warrant a hospital stay. His face badly swollen from the beating, he was unable to speak coherently for three days after the attack. Afterwards he informed his brother Victor that the masked men who beat him were Joseph Testa and Anthony Senter.
Upon his release from the hospital, Andrei avoided going anywhere alone for fear of further attacks. Soon however he attempted to kill Chris, firing on him with an automatic rifle one morning as Chris was opening his garage. Rosenberg was hospitalized but survived the attack with minor disfigurement to his lower face where one of the rifle bullets had struck his jaw. Shortly after the shooting, on November 19, 1974, Joseph Testa and Anthony Senter were arrested in front of the crew's headquarters, the Gemini Lounge, for carrying loaded handguns. It was also around this time that Henry Borelli became closely involved with the crew's activities after bailing the two men out of jail immediately after their arrest. Testa and Senter would be sentenced to the relatively light punishment of probation, thanks to Roy DeMeo providing his crew members with legal support.
Soon after, the crew, now including Borelli, met with Roy to discuss what should be done about Andrei Katz. Katz had continued to avoid going anywhere alone, his brother Victor always accompanying him to and from work. Borelli suggested the plan of using a female acquaintance of his as bait to lure Andre out in the open where he could be confronted. He discussed this plan with her, but after agreeing to go along she then decided against it. The crew decided to postpone any further attempts at retaliation due to the attention from law enforcement they had already brought upon themselves in the course of the conflict.
[edit] Cooperation and Murder
In January of 1975, Andrei visited the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office and voluntarily provided them information that Chris Rosenberg was heavily involved in auto theft. Roy DeMeo learned about the meeting immediately after it happened from an Auto Crimes detective on his payroll. Roy ordered Henry to contact his female acquaintance again about being used as bait. In May, Andrei appeared before a Brooklyn grand jury and divulged what he knew about the DeMeo crew's illegal activities.
In June of 1975, the female friend of Borelli's was used to successfully lure Katz to her apartment complex for what he thought was a date, where upon arrival he was immediately abducted by members of the DeMeo crew. He was then taken to the meat department of a supermarket, where he was stabbed multiple times in the heart and then the back by a butcher knife. His corpse was then dismembered, presumably by Roy and Joseph Testa, both of whom had work experience as butcher's apprentices. After being decapitated, Katz's head was then crushed when it was put through a machine normally used for compacting cardboard boxes. The body parts were wrapped in plastic bags and then deposited into the supermarket's dumpster, where they were discovered days later when a pedestrian walking his dog spotted one of Katz's legs lying on a curb near the store. The police reported to the press that a grisly, brutal killing had occurred, but that was the extent of the information given. The body was identified as that of Andrei Katz two days later through the use of dental records.
[edit] Aftermath
Almost immediately after learning of the murder, the woman friend of Henry Borelli who acted as bait left New York for a vacation, disposing of the clothes she wore on the day she was seen with Katz. While out of town, she was informed by a friend that she was linked to Andrei Katz and his final day seen alive and that law enforcement officials were seeking her for questioning. This led to her returning to New York in early July 1975 and immediately confessing her role in the murder, leading police to Henry Borelli and Joseph Testa, who were both arrested. The day after Testa and Borelli's arrest, police told the press that "two or three" other men were being sought for the crime. However, the woman was unable to identify Chris Rosenberg or Anthony Senter so no charges were brought against them. Victor Katz never approached police with information on his brother's murder, presumably out of fear for his life.
On January 5, 1976, Joseph Testa and Henry Borelli's trial for the murder of Andrei Katz began. In three weeks, on January 23, the two were acquitted after their defense lawyers destroyed the credibility of Borelli's woman friend, who testified against them in the trial. They attacked her story and cited her past drug use and medical treatment for anxiety to make her appear unreliable. This, as well as the absence of any physical evidence linking the men to the crime scene, secured a victory in the case.
This first murder committed by the DeMeo crew would be largely forgotten until the 1980s, when a joint FBI/NYPD task force that had been targeting the DeMeo crew for years had finished putting together a case against all of the surviving members. Indictments against the crew were handed down in early 1984 and the first of two trials took place in late 1985 and early 1986. Borelli would be convicted of auto theft and of murdering other men involved in a large-scale auto theft operation the crew had put together in the late 1970s. He was given a life sentence plus an additional 150 years, 10 years for each count of auto theft.
Although he was not a defendant in the second trial of the DeMeo crew, which started in early 1988, Henry's past acquaintance who had been used as the bait against Andrei Katz agreed to testify for a second time about the murder. Andrei's brother Victor testified about the circumstances leading up to the murder as well. At the end of the trial, which charged the men with the killing of 11 victims and included evidence of an additional dozen murders, all of the defendants were convicted of every count against them and the remaining core of the DeMeo crew, namely Joseph Testa and Anthony Senter, were sentenced to life imprisonment.
[edit] Sources
- Murder Machine by Gene Mustain & Jerry Capeci, 1993, ISBN 0-451-40387-8.
- "2 Held in Murder of Auto Mechanic". (July 6, 1975). The New York Times, p. 34
