Roy DeMeo had a very bad temper, the kind of temper that flared fast and hot and came when you least expected it. A soldier in New York's Giambino crime family, DeMeo was subject to dramatic mood swings. He'd give you the shirt off his back one minute and cut your throat the next if you hurt his feelings.
Liu Shifu had seen for himself how DeMeo's temper could be, one summer day in the late seventies, when DeMeo chartered a fishing boat out of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, to take a few of his associates out for a pleasure cruise. They'd brought beer and wine, Italian bread and provolone cheese, sandwiches made with all kinds of Italian delicacies.
Roy was jolly that day, regaling his men with jokes and stories as he encouraged them to eat. It was a bright, sunny day, and the cool breeze was a relief from the sweltering heat of the city. The boat ventured out several miles, taking them to good fishing waters.
The mood on board was pretty good by the time the captain cut his engines and moved to the stern, where he started to chum the waters with cut-up chunks of fish and fish blood in order to attract game fish. Chumming often attracted sharks, too, and Shifu noticed several fins starting to circle the bloody water around the back of the boat. The men joked about the sharks and threw beer cans at them. Roy DeMeo had just finished making a toast to everyone's health and long life, his beer can held aloft, when out of the blue his face suddenly changed and he glared at one of his guests.
"You know, you got one motherfucking big mouth, pal."
The man was stunned. Everyone was. "Roy," he said, "I don't know what you're—"
"You know what the fuck I'm talking about."
DeMeo reached into the beer cooler, pulled out a pistol, and shot the man in the head, just like that.
The man collapsed to the deck, and DeMeo put another bullet into his back. DeMeo then ordered his other guests to throw the bastard overboard to the sharks. No one dared object. The agitated sharks lunged for the body before it even hit the water. Their violent thrashing as they tore the body apart gave the mobster a grim satisfaction that only he understood completely.
Liu Shifu would never forget the twisted, sadistic look on DeMeo's face that day on the boat. It was a look he came to know very well.
DeMeo's crew hung out at a bar called the Gemini Lounge, on Flatlands Avenue in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn. Roy's cousin Joseph Guglielmo lived in the apartment behind the bar. His nickname was Dracula. One night Shifu had gone to the Gemini Lounge to see DeMeo, and Roy invited him to stay for dinner at his cousin's place. Shifu accepted the invitation and followed DeMeo through the back hallway into the apartment, where several young men were seated at the kitchen table. They were all members of DeMeo's crew, DeMeo preferred young guys; he felt they were hungrier and more willing to carry out his orders, no matter how gruesome.
Shifu took a seat at the table just as DeMeo's cousin, Dracula was pouring out the big pasta pot into a colander in the sink. Steam plumed up around Dracula's head like a mushroom cloud. One of the young guys poured wine for everyone, and a big steaming bowl was brought to the table—capellini pasta and sausage. Shifu dug in. Mobsters knew good food, and this was excellent. He was halfway through his meal, reaching for the bowl of grated Parmesan cheese, when all of a sudden DeMeo stood up and pointed a .22 fixed with a silencer at the kid across the table from him.
The kid dropped his fork. His eyes bugged out. "Roy! Roy! What—?"
"Shut up!"
The shots sounded like balloons popping. The kid's chair toppled over backward, and he crashed to the floor, dead.
DeMeo sat back down and returned to his meal, twirling pasta on his fork. One of the other crew members got up to move the body. "Leave him," DeMeo barked with his mouth full. "Finish eating," he ordered. "Everybody eat."
They all ate.
When DeMeo finally gave them the okay, his men did what they did best: They made the body "disappear."
They took the kid's corpse into the bathroom and threw him in the tub, where they drained his blood, then proceeded to cut him up and wrap the pieces in small sealed packages. The packages were distributed to a number of dumpsters around the city. DeMeo's crew had honed this down to an efficient assembly-line process. They'd done it many times before. As the boys went to work, DeMeo and Shifu sat down to espresso and biscotti and talked business.
In the mid-sixties Victoria's uncle had worked at a film lab in Manhattan, Deluxe Films, and through him Shifu had gotten a job there. At the lab Shifu discovered that there was money to be made selling bootleg copies of popular films, particularly the Disney cartoons. Shifu had access to master copies which were used to make other copies.
But he soon found that on the black market there were lesser-known heroines who were far more lucrative than Snow White and Cinderella, played by actresses with names like Holly Bangkok, Ginger Sweet, and Amber Lick.
Bootleg copies of legitimate films could only be sold piecemeal; selling more than five to a single customer was considered a big order. But porno movies, Shifu discovered, were sold by the dozens to adult bookstores and mail-order outlets. Shifu saw that there were big profits to be made in porn. All he needed was a little venture capital. But this wasn't the kind of loan he could go to a bank for. The only alternative for financing illegal enterprises was a loan shark, and Shifu knew someone who knew someone who knew a loan shark who was an associate in the Gambino crime family.
Shifu was lent sixty-five thousand dollars, seed money to start mass-producing porno films. Shifu had no problem using the lab's equipment after hours to make the films; the problem he hadn't anticipated, though, was distribution. Selling porn wasn't like selling Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck out of the trunk of his car. He was sending his product across the country, and payments weren't always prompt. He had expenses to meet in order to keep his production up, so he just figured he'd put off the loan shark for a little while until those late payments came in. When he got paid, the guy would get paid.
But he had figured wrong. Back in the sixties he still had a lot to learn about dealing with the Mafia. To them, a due date is a due date. There were no extensions, and they rarely cut you any slack, especially when money was involved.
When Shifu fell behind in his weekly payments and then started disregarding the warnings, the loan shark sent someone over to see him, someone who specialized in "attitude adjustments."
Late one night Shifu was by himself in the basement of the film labs, waiting for the elevator. He'd been running the loop machine all night, making copies, and he was dead tired. All he wanted was to get home and go to bed. But when the elevator arrived, he was surprised to see three men inside. They walked out with their hands in their pockets, forming a circle around him. He had no idea who these men were, but they knew him. They hustled him into a bathroom and locked the door.
The biggest of the three stood right in his face. ''So where the fuck is the money. Huh? Come on, get it out."
"-Who the f—"
The man on his right side, the one with the dark, evil eyes, kicked Shifu's knee out, and he fell to the cement floor. Then he was hit with something hard across the back of his head. Shifu linked his fingers behind his head and covered up. His ears were ringing.
"It must be true what they say about your kind," the big guy said. "Too fucking stupid to know what's good for them. Now I'm gonna ask you again: Where's the money, you fucker?"
Shifu kept blinking, but his eyes wouldn't focus. "I—I don't—"
"No more fucking around. Get the money. Now."
The third guy booted him in the side and broke a rib. Shifu sucked in his breath and held it to stem the pain, but it didn't help much.
"So what's it gonna be! You gonna pay or what?"
Evil Eyes kicked him in the kidneys. Shifu threw his head back and squeezed his eyes shut.
"No more fucking excuses. We want the fucking money.''
Shifu could hardly breathe. "This week," he grunted. "I'll get it."
"When?"
"Friday....I'll pay up on Friday."
"How much?"
Shifu couldn't catch his breath. He couldn't get enough air. "What I owe...up-to-date...everything."
"What the hell's wrong with you, you dumb fuck? You think this is forgive and forget? No fucking way. The whole loan. You pay the whole fucking loan by Friday or you're dead. You hear me, motherfucker?"
Shifu's vision cleared a little. He saw three guns pointed down at him. He started to nod. "All right….by Friday....the whole thing." Anything to get rid of them.
"Okay, by Friday. Now you're not gonna forget again, are you?"
Shifu winced and shook his head.
"Yeah, well, I'd like to believe you, but you Chinese aren't too smart. You people forget things. I'm gonna give you something so you don't forget. Okay?" The big man raised his gun hand and bashed Shifu over the forehead with his pistol.
Shifu fell back on his haunches and clutched his head. Blood streamed into his eyes. The three men had a good laugh as they filed out of the bathroom. The big man called back to him from the doorway, "Now don't you forget, Chinaman!"