From Gangland News

Anthony Senter, Murder Machine Gangster Convicted Of Ten Killings, Granted Parole

Luchese mobster Anthony Senter, who has been serving a prison term of life plus 20 years since 1988 for racketeering and 10 gruesome murders committed as a member of a Mafia crew, has been granted parole and will be released from federal prison in the coming months, Gang Land has learned.

Many of the victims killed by Senter's crew were dismembered and disposed of along with household garbage in nearby landfills, a ghastly series of crimes detailed in our 1992 book, Murder Machine.

Senter, 68, whose release date was listed by the federal Bureau of Prisons for many years as October 13, 2032, was granted parole by the moribund U.S. Parole Commission (USPC) which still has jurisdiction for inmates who've been sentenced for crimes committed before 1987, according to a spokesman for the BOP.

The USPC granted Senter parole after he had completed 35 years behind bars, according to his lawyer, Linda Sheffield, an Atlanta-based attorney who specializes in post-conviction appeals for federal inmates and who represented the inmate last year at a "special consideration hearing" he had before the USPC.

"Anthony is not the person he was back then and the Commission recognized that and decided that 420 months in prison was sufficient punishment for him," Sheffield told Gang Land. "He was a model prisoner in every facility he's been at, and he received excellent recommendations from all the BOP supervisors we could find."

The USPC, under Acting Chairman Patricia Cushwa and Commissioner Charles Massarone, has jurisdiction over only 39 of the 158,462 federal prison inmates these days. No one responded to numerous Gang Land telephone and email requests for details about its decision to parole Senter, or the status of Joseph Testa, who was convicted at trial and received the same prison term as Senter, but is still serving a life sentence, according to The BOP database.

Senter is slated to be released from custody on June 22, but all BOP inmates are eligible for placement in a hallway house a year before their release.

Testa, also 68, will likely seek parole soon. He is currently scheduled for mandatory release on parole in 2032 under the protocol for convictions for pre-1987 crimes, unless prosecutors in the case object.

Sheffield doesn't represent Testa. But during her work for Senter has become familiar with the case against Testa, a longtime friend of her client, and whose involvement in the savage crimes of the car thieves and drug dealers in the crew headed by Gambino mobster Roy DeMeo began in the early 1970s, when they were teenagers.

"Anthony and Joey have both done well in prison," said Sheffield. "They were young when this case was made and even younger at the time of the offense behavior. They were not leaders and if they were ever a danger to the community that is absolutely no longer the case. Both of these men have been very fortunate that their wives have stood by them through the trials and incarceration. Their children are all law abiding citizens."

Senter, Testa and Henry Borelli were key members of the DeMeo Crew which was suspected by the FBI of 200 killings of rival car thieves, drug dealers, and others who crossed them in the 1970s and 1980s. Many were killed in an apartment near the Gemini Lounge in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn, according to testimony at two Manhattan Federal Court racketeering trials in 1985-86 and 1988-99.

Murders by the DeMeo Crew were a carefully staged operation. Chris Rosenberg, a gangster who would himself later be killed by his own crew, would begin by attacking the victim as he entered the living room. He would be wearing only his underwear so he wouldn't get any blood on his clothes, as detailed in Murder Machine, the book about the DeMeo Crew by Gene Mustain and yours truly.

The undies-clad Rosenberg would jump out and stab the victim in the heart, according to FBI agent Arthur Ruffels. Then DeMeo would glide over and put two bullets in his head using a silencer-equipped pistol. A towel was carefully wrapped around the victim's head to keep the blood from squirting. The bodies would then be placed in a bathtub to let the blood congeal for about 45 minutes.

"Eventually," Ruffels stated in describing what he called "a disassembly line," the body "was placed on a tarpaulin or one of those swimming pool liners they sometimes used" and "Roy and his crew sawed the man apart, put him in garbage bags and took him to the biggest dump in Brooklyn," an infamous landfill in southeastern Brooklyn known as the Fountain Avenue Dump.

Ironically, Borelli, whose two murder convictions were thrown out for technical reasons, and who stands convicted only of 15 car theft counts and has served 38 years behind bars, has little chance of ever winning his release from federal prison. Borelli, 75, was sentenced to 150 years for car thefts and his mandatory release date is still 59 years away, in 2083.

In rejecting Borelli's appeal for an early release, Judge Loretta Preska agreed with his trial judge, Kevin Duffy, who stated that Borelli had been convicted of "being what is generally called a contract killer" and he could not envision "any justification by anyone, including the parole board, to return you to any kind of access to the public."

Judge Vincent Broderick seemed to feel the same way about Senter and Testa. He gave them life plus 20 years, stating that their 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."

But under the old rules, inmates sentenced to life, which, as the greater prison term, controls, "max out" in 45 years. But inmates with numerical prison terms max out after two thirds of the time behind bars, which in Borelli's case, is 100 years.

The U.S. Attorney's office, which opposed two motions for release by Borelli but did not oppose Senter's request for parole, declined to comment about the case. *