On March 19, 1978, Nino Martini, a 38-year-old man, was found dead in Brooklyn, New York, alongside Michael Mandelino, after their bodies were discovered stuffed into the trunk of a car left in the East New York area. The scene carried the unmistakable chill of an execution: both men had been shot multiple times in the head, killed with the kind of finality meant to end questions as much as lives.
Investigators and later accounts tied the double killing to the DeMeo crew, a violent faction associated with the Gambino crime family that law enforcement and historians have described as specializing in murder and making bodies vanish. In the story that emerged around the killings, Mandelino was accused of having set up Peter LaFroscia for a robbery, a suspicion that could turn deadly in the world they moved through. Martini, by contrast, was described as having no involvement in that alleged betrayal, a man close enough to the wrong person on the wrong day that he became collateral in a message written in gunfire.
The disposal itself echoed patterns attributed to the crew: bodies packaged for transport and abandonment, designed to be found only after the killers were long gone and any immediate trail had gone cold. Accounts describe the victims as wrapped in plastic and bound, emphasizing that this was not a spontaneous outburst but a controlled, practiced routine—an operation that treated death as procedure.
For years, the homicide sat in the shadow of a broader storm. A police investigation into an international car-theft enterprise linked to the Gambinos widened into joint local and federal probes, and the pressure around the DeMeo crew intensified as investigators chased not just stolen vehicles but the bodies that seemed to follow the ring’s business. The Mob Museum’s historical account describes how a crew member, Vito Arena, flipped and provided federal prosecutors information about murders he participated in for Roy DeMeo, helping investigators pry open a world that had relied on fear and silence. That same account describes federal allegations in the mid-1980s aimed at the car-theft operation and a long list of associated crimes, including murder.
Even with that larger crackdown, publicly available accounts do not clearly point to a specific arrest or conviction that was solely and explicitly for the murder of Nino Martini. What does appear in the record is that the crew itself was eventually hit by sweeping prosecutions: by June 1989, multiple members of DeMeo’s crew were convicted of racketeering, and two of its most infamous figures—Anthony Senter and Joseph Testa, known as the “Gemini Twins”—were found guilty of racketeering and multiple murder counts, receiving life sentences in federal prison. Their convictions and the later parole decisions underline how the violence surrounding crews like DeMeo’s ultimately did draw courtroom consequences, even if individual victims like Martini can still feel lost inside the larger tally of a criminal machine built to erase names.
