Arrest and Cooperation
By 1983, Dominick's continuous scheming to pay his rent led to him agreeing to fly back to New York City for a drug deal with an old associate. After arriving and being informed by the associate that the drug deal had fallen through, he attempted to collect on an old loan he was owed. He had his associate meet with the man who owed the money and told the associate to use Roy DeMeo's name to scare the man into paying, not knowing that Roy had been murdered in January of that year. The extortion victim immediately went to the police and offered to wear a wire, then met with Dominick to pay some of his loan back.
Dominick was arrested on the scene by officers working with a combined Federal and State Task Force that had been investigating his uncle Anthony 'Nino' Gaggi and Roy DeMeo's crew since 1981. Facing a minimum of 20 years imprisonment for his extortion arrest and additional crimes he had been accused of by associates of the DeMeo crew that had already become cooperating witnesses for the government, including the man whose accusations of drug dealing had originally led to Dominick fleeing New York, he became a cooperator as well in hopes of drastically reducing his sentence.
Dominick provided a great deal of information to the Task Force, including details of his uncle paying tribute to Gambino Boss Paul Castellano with portions of the earnings given to him by Roy DeMeo. He also provided the Task Force with information on a number of murders committed by Roy DeMeo and his followers. This gave the authorities evidence linking Castellano to the DeMeo Crew enterprise. The Gaggi Task Force was subsequently upgraded to the Castellano Task Force. By early 1984 the indictment was ready and the 24 members or associates of the Gambino family and DeMeo Crew, including the reigning boss Paul Castellano and his uncle Nino, were arrested.
Dominick testified in both of the trials against the DeMeo Crew, and it was reportedly his sole testimony that compelled jurors to find his uncle Nino Gaggi guilty in the first of the two. Gaggi was sentenced to five years after the first trial but died early on in the second, in April 1988. His testimony helped lead to the guilty verdicts of every single defendant in the second trial.
After the trials were over he was sentenced for his crime and given five years probation instead of time in prison due to his cooperation with the government. Shortly after the 1989 conclusion of the DeMeo Crew trials, he worked with crime reporters and authors Jerry Capeci and Gene Mustain on their book Murder Machine, which focused primarily on the reign of the DeMeo Crew.
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Famous quotes containing the words arrest and/or cooperation:
“An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.”
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948)
“There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his activities in the learning process, just as there is no defect in traditional education greater than its failure to secure the active cooperation of the pupil in construction of the purposes involved in his studying.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)