A “cold” mob hitman linked to at least 11 bodies, some of them dismembered, will be released from federal prison next year after serving just 35 years of a life sentence, outraging the families of his victims.
Former Gambino crime family point man Anthony Senter, 68, behind bars in Canaan, Pennsylvania, was recently given the green light for release by the United States Parole Commission.
“The Commission determined that he had substantially observed the institution’s rules and that his release in June 2024 would not jeopardize the public welfare,” a Justice Department spokeswoman told The Post.
But that’s a far cry from how federal authorities once viewed Senter, who was sentenced to life in prison plus 20 years in 1989 after being convicted of participating in at least 11 murders.
Senter, along with six other mobsters, was also charged with racketeering, including narcotics trafficking, car theft, loan sharking, and extortion.
Senter was a member of a mafia group that worked under the command of Roy DeMeo, a Gambino-made man.
The team operated out of the Gemini Lounge at 4021 Flatlands Ave. in Flatlands, Brooklyn, where many of their murders were committed during the 1970s and 1980s.
Convicted mob hitmen Anthony Senter (right) and Joseph Testa, known as the “Gemini Geminis,” blazed a bloody trail through Brooklyn in the 1970s and 1980s. instargram @wiseguy_channel Anthony Senter, former family associate criminal Gambino, received a life prison sentence plus 20 years for his vicious career as a mafia hitman. Instagram @wiseguy_channel
Federal and city authorities traced at least 75 deaths and disappearances to DeMeo’s crew, and independent investigators put the brutal toll at more than 200.
Rudy Giuliani, the then-U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York who initially brought the case against Senter and 20 other members and associates of the Gambino family, including then-godfather “Big Paul” Castellano, was stunned by the parole decision. .
Senter “should die in prison,” Giuliani declared. “He showed, without exaggeration, a wanton disregard for human life.
Gambino crime family boss “Big Paul” Castellano (left) was indicted along with Senter and others in 1984. Associated Press Photo Rudy Giuliani (right) was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York when he and then- FBI Director William Webster described an extensive case against the five New York mafia families in 1985. Newsday RM via Getty Images
“He was a cold-blooded killer who liked to kill,” the former prosecutor said. “And I think he liked to participate in some way in the dismemberment of the bodies that took place afterwards.”
The “Gemini Method”
Born in Canarsie, Senter was the son of Italian immigrants who had anglicized his original surname of Sente.
He and another crew member, his old friend Joseph Testa, spent so much time at their boss DeMeo’s hangout that they became known as the Gemini Twins.
“Everyone knew the Gemini Lounge was a house of horrors, don’t go in there because you might not get out,” recalled Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, who grew up playing stickball with Senter in Canarsie.
The Gemini Lounge in the Flatlands neighborhood of Brooklyn was the scene of dozens of bloody murders. Photo from the New York Municipal Archives
The future murderer was widely known in the neighborhood as a hothead.
“He could really flip the script: He could be having a conversation with you and all of a sudden one little thing would set him off,” Sliwa said. “Joey Testa often had to calm him down.”
DeMeo, who worked as a butcher’s apprentice before launching his criminal career, used his early training to devise a grisly murder procedure, later dubbed “the Gemini Method,” which Senter and the others gleefully followed.
FBI surveillance photographs captured Testa (left) with Roy DeMeo, head of the hit group. Wikipedia
Former gang member Dominick Mantigilio testified at Senter’s trial that those wanted to kill would first be lured to a converted slaughterhouse apartment next to the Gemini Lounge that had been rented by mobster Joseph “Dracula” Guglielmo.
“When the [victim] If he entered, someone would shoot him in the head with a silencer,” Mantigilio told the court. “Someone would wrap him in a towel to stop the blood and someone would stab him in the heart to stop the blood from pumping.”
The crew members, often dressed only in underwear to avoid staining their clothes, would drag the corpse to the shower and let it bleed out, like a pig in a slaughterhouse.
DeMeo’s team hid the body parts of their victims in Brooklyn’s Fountain Avenue landfill, now transformed into Shirley Chisholm State Park. Gregorio P. Mango
Then “they took it out, put it on a pool liner in the living room, took it apart and packed it up,” Mantigilio said matter-of-factly.
The bloodless body parts were placed in cardboard boxes and taken to the Fountain Avenue landfill in Brooklyn, now Shirley Chisholm State Park in Canarsie, where they were buried under mounds of trash and lost forever.
Senter and his gang “engaged in mass murder,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Walter Mack said during his 17-month trial in 1988 and 1989, committing the “most violent” crimes ever tried in federal court. New York, the prosecutor stated.
golden years
The DeMeo gang’s heyday, from 1975 to 1983, spanned the last decade of the New York mob’s “golden years,” said historian Selwyn Raab.
“The New York families ran the country, they ran the mafia in America,” said Raab, author of the definitive mafia chronicle “Five Families.”
“The Gambinos and the Genovese were the two largest and most powerful families,” Raab explained. The Gambino family, headed by Castellano, had about 100 official members, or “made men,” like DeMeo.
Castellano was publicly shot to death outside Midtown’s Sparks Steak House on December 16, 1985, along with his driver and bodyguard Thomas Bilotti. Courtesy of the FBI
But “every made man had probably 10 people working for him,” Raab said: “associates” like Senter and Testa.
The extensive structure made it possible for Castellano to maintain plausible deniability of the bloody activities of family associates, even while earning $20,000 a week in cash from the lucrative luxury car theft ring run by DeMeo and his team.
In January 1983, shortly after DeMeo received a grand jury subpoena to testify in a federal racketeering case, his bullet-riddled body was found frozen in the trunk of his own Cadillac; erased, investigators later learned, by members of his family. own crew.
DeMeo’s death did not stop the case.
In March 1984, Giuliani charged Castellano, along with Senter and others, with a series of racketeering charges, including drug trafficking, extortion, and murder.
The Post reported Castellano’s death on its front page on December 17, 1985.
Eighteen months later, as the trial dragged on, Castellano himself was murdered in a notorious public hit on the sidewalk outside the Sparks Steak House in Midtown Manhattan, ordered by the man who would succeed him as head of the Gambino family: John Gotti Jr.
Senter, then 30, emulated the style of the emerging “Dapper Don” during his trial.
The “devilishly handsome” defendant, a Post fashion reporter wrote at the time, was careful to display his “fresh elegance” in Giorgio Armani suits and ties and “crisp white shirts” whenever he appeared in court.
“You want to look good,” Senter smiled.
John Gotti (right) ordered the hit on Castellano and took the reins as head of the Gambino family. AP
Dozens of victims
Most of the DeMeo team’s confirmed and suspected victims were rival gangsters, but not all.
Two of the murders that sent Senter to prison were those of Charles Mongitore and Daniel Scutaro, workers at a Brooklyn body shop.
Mongitore, 30, filed charges after being stabbed by the son of a Gambino family soldier in a personal dispute. On June 5, 1980, DeMeo’s team attacked Mongitore at his workplace, shooting him 14 times at point-blank range and slitting his throat.
Shortly after, Scutaro, 25, arrived at the body shop to begin his work day, only to find the gangsters cleaning up the crime scene.
He was also shot dead.
Both victims were later discovered in the trunk of a car, Newsday reported.
Senter (left), then serving his sentence of life plus 20 years in a federal prison in Lompoc, California, posed with visitor Kevin Kelly in 1990.
In 1977, Senter and Testa shot and killed Cherie Golden after her boyfriend became a federal informant.
As Golden and Testa talked outside the salon, Senter shot the woman twice in the back of the head and once more in the face as her body throbbed on the way to the ground, according to “Murder Machine,” a book from 1993 about the DeMeo team of Gene Mustaine and Jerry Capeci.
Jerome Hofaker was just 23 when Testa and Senter killed him outside his girlfriend’s house in 1977 after getting into a fight with one of Testa’s brothers, Mustaine and Capeci wrote.
Senter was never charged with the murders of Golden or Hofaker.
“We knew he was mob-related,” cousin Denise Hofaker, 69, told The Post. “What I remember is being at the funeral and my aunt turned to me with fear in her eyes and said, ‘Oh my God, what are we doing here?’ She was nervous that someone would come after us.”
Hofaker was shocked by the news of Senter’s imminent release.
“That would be horrible,” he said. “From what he understood, he had been sentenced to life in prison. He is 68 years old. That’s not a life. He has a lot of life to live and that is not right.”
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Source: vtt.edu.vn