Chris Rosenberg - Andrei Katz Murder

Andrei Katz Murder

For more details on this topic, see Andrei Katz.

By 1974, a 23 year-old Rosenberg began selling cocaine and quaaludes, again backed by DeMeo. He acquired the Quaaludes through a pharmacist connection, as well as the cocaine, which at the time could be prescribed for medical purposes. Through this pharmacist, Chris Rosenberg and the rest of the early DeMeo crew met 22-year-old Andrei Katz, a man who became what was most likely the crew's first murder victim. When Katz was arrested due to a stolen vehicle he purchased from the crew, he blamed Rosenberg for his predicament.

The situation soon escalated to violence when Katz was pulled from his vehicle and severely beaten by two men and put in the hospital. Andrei's brother Victor later testified in court that Andrei claimed the two men were Testa and Senter. Victor also testified that while still in the hospital recovering from his injuries, Andrei swore to his brother that he would get revenge on Chris and the others.

The revenge came on November 13, 1974, when Rosenberg opened his garage door and was struck with 3 bullets fired from an automatic rifle. Rosenberg survived through sheer luck, one bullet hitting him in the lower jaw, another his right arm and a third that was aimed for his chest merely glancing off. Surviving what should have been a fatal shooting, Rosenberg was reportedly furious. His jaw was left disfigured from the bullet wound. Despite undergoing reconstructive surgery, from that point on Rosenberg wore a beard to mask the scars that resulted from this attack.

The man who had shot Rosenberg that morning was never seen but it was assumed by Rosenberg and the rest of the DeMeo Crew to be Andrei Katz. After this incident, and while Rosenberg was still in the hospital recovering from his gunshot wounds, DeMeo met with his followers and it was decided that Katz had to be murdered.

Directly taking care of Katz was considered by the men to be too much of a risk due to the back and forth violence that had already occurred. Henry Borelli, who had become involved with the crew shortly after Chris was shot, suggested that he use a woman friend of his to bait Andrei to a location where he could be abducted and then dealt with discreetly. Arriving at the woman's apartment complex expecting to take her out on a date, Andrei was forcefully abducted by Rosenberg, Borelli, Testa and Senter and taken to the meat department of a grocery store, where DeMeo was waiting.

It was this night, Friday June 13, 1975, that the DeMeo crew is first known to have been involved with murder and dismemberment. While first-hand accounts of the incident are unavailable, information provided by crew members who cooperated with the government years later as well as the actual remains of Andrei Katz provided clues that were used by law enforcement as well as author Jerry Capeci to reconstruct the events. Andrei was stabbed multiple times in the heart with a butcher knife, presumably by Rosenberg in revenge for the shooting that had ruined his face.

After he was already dead, he was then stabbed over a dozen times in the back, again presumably by Rosenberg. Katz's body was then stripped of its clothes and dismembered, likely by DeMeo and Testa, both former butcher apprentices. After the corpse was decapitated, one of the men, presumed to be Rosenberg, crushed the head with a machine normally used to compact cardboard boxes. Because of the damage done to the remains, dental records had to be used in order to positively identify the victim as Katz.

Although the woman friend of Henry Borelli's would confess her role soon after learning about Katz's murder, she was unable to identify Rosenberg. Borelli and Testa were arrested however, and spent months in jail while waiting for trial. They would secure an acquittal in January 1976, but the case would come back to haunt the surviving members of the crew in the late 1980s, when a Federal/State task force targeted the DeMeo Crew.

The nephew of Demeo's superior Anthony Gaggi within the Gambino Family, Dominick Montiglio, later testified that he learned of the murder from Rosenberg shortly after it happened. He also testified that Rosenberg claimed Katz's murder had driven DeMeo and his crew to decide that any future conflicts would be settled in a similar manner of dismemberment to make the victim disappear.