A “stone-cold” Mafia hitman tied 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 – angering his victims’ families.
Former member of the Gambino crime family, Anthony Senter, 68, in prison in Canaan, PA, was recently given the green light for release by the US Parole Commission.
“The commission determined that he had substantially complied with the rules of the institution and that his release in June 2024 would not harm the public welfare,” a Justice Department spokeswoman told The Post.
But that’s far different from the way federal authorities once viewed Senter, who was sentenced to life plus 20 years in prison 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 distribution, car theft, loan sharking and extortion.
Senter is a member of a mob crew working under Roy DeMeo, a Gambino made man.
Crews operate out of Gemini Lounge at 4021 Flatlands Ave. in Flatlands, Brooklyn, where many of their murders were committed in the 1970s and 1980s.
Convicted mob murders Anthony Senter (right) and Joseph Testa — known as the “Gemini Twins” — carved a bloody trail through Brooklyn in the 1970s and 1980s. instargram @wiseguy_channel Anthony Senter, a former associate of the Gambino crime family, received a life sentence plus 20 years for his brutal career as an assassin. Instagram @wiseguy_channel
Federal and city authorities traced at least 75 deaths and disappearances to DeMeo’s crew — and independent researchers put their brutal figure at more than 200.
Rudy Giuliani, then US Attorney for the Southern District of New York who initially brought the case against Senter and 20 other Gambino family members and associates – including then-godfather “Big Paul” Castellano – was surprised by the parole decision.
Senter “should die in prison,” Giuliani declared. “He displayed, without exaggeration, a disregard for human life.
Gambino crime family boss “Big Paul” Castellano, left, is indicted 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 outlined the sweeping case against five New York mafia families in 1985. Newsday RM via Getty Images
“He was a serial killer who loved to kill,” the former prosecutor said. “And I believe he liked to participate in some way in the dismemberment that followed.”
“The Gemini Method”
Canarsie-born Senter is the son of Italian immigrants who anglicized their original surname Sente.
He and another crew member, longtime friend Joseph Testa, spent so much time at their boss DeMeo’s hangout that they became known as the Gemini Twins.
“The Gemini Lounge that everyone knows is a house of horrors, don’t go in there, you might not get out,” said Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels, who grew up playing stickball with the Flashlight in Canarsie.
The Gemini Lounge in Brooklyn’s Flatlands neighborhood was the scene of a bloody murder. NYC Municipal Archives photo
The future killer was widely known around the neighborhood as a hot-tempered person.
“He can really flip the script — he can be talking to you, and then all of a sudden one little thing will bother him,” Sliwa said. “A lot of times Joey Testa has to calm him down.”
DeMeo, who worked as a butcher’s apprentice before launching his criminal career, used his early training to devise a gruesome murder procedure — later dubbed the “Gemini Method” — that Senter and the others happily followed.
An FBI surveillance photo shows Testa (left) with Roy DeMeo, the boss of the hitman crew. Wikipedia
Former gang member Dominick Mantigilio testified in Senter’s trial that those targeted for death would first be lured to an apartment-turned-convent adjacent to the Gemini Lounge that had been rented by robber Joseph “Dracula” Guglielmo.
“When [victim] would come in, someone would shoot him in the head with a silencer,” Mantigilio told the court. “One would wrap a towel around him to stop the blood and someone would stab him in the heart to stop the blood from pumping.”
Crew members – often wearing only underwear, to avoid soiling their clothes – would drag the corpse into the bathroom and let it bleed, like a pig in a slaughterhouse.
DeMeo’s crew hid their victim’s body parts in Brooklyn’s Fountain Avenue landfill — now transformed into Shirley Chisholm State Park. Gregory P. Mango
Then they would “pull it out, put it on the pool liner in the living room, take it apart, and pack it up,” Mantigilio says candidly.
The bloodless body parts were placed in cardboard boxes and taken to Brooklyn’s Fountain Avenue landfill — now Shirley Chisholm State Park in Canarsie — where they were buried under a pile of trash and lost forever.
Senter and his gang “engaged in wholesale murder,” Assistant US Attorney Walter Mack said during their 17-month trial in 1988 and 1989 – committing the “most violent” crimes ever tried in New York federal court, prosecutors alleged.
Golden Years
The heyday of the DeMeo crew, from 1975 to 1983, spanned the last decade of the New York Mafia’s “golden years,” says historian Selwyn Rabb.
“New York families run the country, run the Mafia in the US,” said Rabb, author of the definitive group chronicle “Five Families.”
“The Gambinos and Genovese are two of the biggest and most powerful families,” Rabb explained. The Gambino family, headed by Castellano, has about 100 official members, or “made men,” like DeMeo.
Castellano was gunned down in public outside Sparks Steak House in Midtown on December 16, 1985, along with his driver and bodyguard Thomas Bilotti. Courtesy of the FBI
But “every created human probably has 10 people working for him,” says Rabb — “allies” like Senter and Testa.
The elaborate structure allows Castellano to maintain a reasonable degree of credibility in the family’s blood-soaked activities, even while raking in $20,000 a week in cash from a lucrative luxury car theft ring run by DeMeo and crew.
In January 1983, shortly after DeMeo was served with 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 — scrubbed, investigators later learned, by his members. own crew.
DeMeo’s death did not end the case.
In March 1984, Giuliani indicted Castellano, along with Senter and others, on a raft of racketeering charges, including drug trafficking, extortion and murder.
The Post reported Castellano’s death as front-page news on December 17, 1985.
Eighteen months later, as the trial dragged on, Castellano himself was killed in a famous public bust on the sidewalk outside Sparks Steak House in Midtown Manhattan, directed by the man who would succeed him as Gambino family boss: John Gotti Jr.
Senter, then 30, imitated the rising style of the “Dapper Don” during his trial.
The “devilishly handsome” defendant, a Post fashion reporter wrote at the time, was careful to display his “cool elegance” in a Giorgio Armani suit and tie and a “perfect white shirt” whenever he appeared in court.
“You want to look good,” Senter smiled.
John Gotti (right) ordered a hit on Castellano and took over the leadership of the Gambino family. AP
Many victims
Most of DeMeo’s crew of confirmed and suspected victims were rival gangsters, but not all.
Two of the murders that sent Senter to prison were the murders of Charles Mongitore and Daniel Scutaro, workers at a Brooklyn auto body shop.
Mongitore, 30, claimed after being stabbed by the son of a Gambino family soldier in a personal dispute. On June 5, 1980, DeMeo’s crew attacked Mongitore at his workplace, shooting him 14 times at close range and slitting his throat.
Soon after, Scutaro, 25, arrived at the morgue to start his day — only to find thugs cleaning up the scene.
He was also shot dead.
The two victims were later found in the trunk of a car, Newsday reported.
Senter (left), then serving a life sentence plus 20 years at a federal prison in Lompoc, Calif., poses 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 chatted outside the lounge, Senter shot the woman twice in the back of the head, and again in the face as her body was whipped on its way to the ground, according to “The Killing Machine,” a 1993 book about the DeMeo crew by Gene Mustaine and Jerry Capeci.
Jerome Hofaker was just 23 years old when he was killed outside his girlfriend’s home in 1977 by Testa and Senter after a fight with one of Testa’s brothers, Mustaine and Capeci wrote.
Senter was never charged in the murders of Golden or Hofaker.
“We knew it was mob related,” cousin Denise Hofaker, 69, told The Post. “All I remember is being at the funeral and my aunt turning to me with fear in her eyes and saying, ‘Oh my God, what are we doing here?’ He was nervous that someone would come after us.”
Hofaker was shocked by the news of Senter’s impending release.
“That would be terrible,” he said. “What I understand is that he has been sentenced to life in prison. He is 68 years old. That’s not life. He has a lot of life to live, and that’s not right.”
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
