Joseph E. “Joe Bikini” Brocchini, 43, a White male from Queens, New York, had a reputation in organized-crime circles as an enforcer and loanshark who later moved into gambling and the pornography trade, building out a lucrative smut-distribution business tied to Times Square peep shows and related operations. In the early 1970s, he surfaced publicly in law-enforcement dragnet headlines aimed at major pornography distributors, one of the names swept into obscenity indictments during that
period.
By 1976, Brocchini was described as operating day-to-day out of a used-car dealership in Woodside, a place that looked like work to passersby but functioned, in the shadows, as a piece of his wider rackets. Around that time, he collided with Roy DeMeo—an associate of the Gambino family who commanded a feared crew—and the quarrel turned physical, leaving DeMeo humiliated and angry. Accounts that later emerged said the dispute set a revenge killing in motion, planned with the understanding that permission would never come from Brocchini’s own side of the underworld.
On May 20, 1976, the violence arrived at Brocchini’s office: later narratives attributed the shooting to DeMeo and Henry Borelli, describing how the scene was staged to resemble an armed robbery gone wrong. The version repeated across multiple sources says two employees at the lot were handcuffed and blindfolded while the office was ransacked for effect, and then Brocchini was shot five times in the head inside the dealership.
In the aftermath, the killing did not snap into focus as a mob hit—at least not publicly. Retellings describe a mystery that lingered for years, with detectives and even Brocchini’s own criminal associates left to speculate about motive, including suspicions that he had been targeted over skimming or internal disputes rather than as part of a cross-family vendetta. He was ultimately buried at Mount Saint Mary Cemetery in Flushing, Queens, a quiet ending that contrasted brutally with the way he was taken.
What later hardened into a narrative of suspects came from the broader unraveling of the DeMeo crew: sources state that Gambino associate Dominick Montiglio, after becoming a government witness in 1983, revealed the story of how Brocchini was killed and by whom, placing names and roles onto what had looked like an unsolved “robbery” on paper. Those accounts did not translate into a clear public record of convictions specifically for Brocchini’s murder; instead, the story of his death became one of the killings “allegedly committed” by the DeMeo crew, while different members of that circle were later prosecuted and convicted in other racketeering-and-murder cases.
