Joey Testa, one of the most prolific killers in Mafia history, died of cancer last month at the age 71, two years after his release from Terminal Island, a federal prison in Los Angeles.
Testa’s murderous career seems almost too lurid for real life. As a principal in a notorious murder-for-hire ring run by Gambino mobster Roy DeMeo, he helped coax dozens of victims to an apartment off a dilapidated corner bar, the Gemini Lounge, on Flatlands Avenue in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. With drink in hand, the prey unwittingly found himself lured into a back apartment rented to Joey Guglielmo, a tall, gray-complexioned Gambino hitman nicknamed Dracula. The apartment was stocked with knives, icepicks and saws.
Their killing technique came to be called the Gemini Method: The unsuspecting target walked the length of a hall where he was ambushed and shot in the head. The crew immediately wrapped the victim’s head in a turban of towels to stanch the blood and stabbed him in the heart to stop blood from pulsing from the wound. To avoid staining their clothes, the crew stripped to their underwear.
The half-naked men then undressed the body and dragged it to a shower where they disemboweled it and hung it upside down to bleed dry, as a hunter would bleed a deer carcass. They often ate dinner with blood-stained hands while the naked body drained in the next room. The Daily News later called their procedure “a collective derangement.”
Later, the crew laid their victims out on a thick plastic swimming pool liner unfurled across Dracula’s living room floor. They severed the body into parts — arms, legs, head, torso — shearing through sinew and joint with butchering techniques. They wrapped the parts in cardboard boxes lined with plastic bags which they discarded among the refuse heaps in the Fountain Avenue dump, a wasteland between the Belt Parkway and Jamaica Bay.
“Testa and the whole crew, they were all murderers, they were psychopaths,” said Frank Pergola, former NYPD homicide detective who arrested Testa, and others, after flipping a handful of former associates.
In June 1989, Testa was found guilty of racketeering and 10 counts of murder. Though Detective Pergola had definitively connected Testa and his group to seventy-nine murders. “There were undoubtedly many more that we never knew about,” Pergola said.
Testa was sentenced to life plus twenty years. At Testa’s sentencing, U.S. District Judge Vincent Broderick said that his crimes “were so horrendous and so inhumane and so unbelievable that the only sane course that I could see for sentencing was to make sure that as long as it could be possible, you will not be available to commit any more such crimes.”
Testa was paroled in 2024, at age 69, after 35 years in prison. “Joey’s had serious medical problems for years, and he has done well in prison,” his attorney, Linda Sheffield, told the New York Post.
“Those are things that play into setting a release date.”
Today the former Gemini Lounge is a place of worship. The Purpose Life Church holds services where the bar and dance floor once stood. The back apartment, scene of the killings, is now used as church offices.
