Andrei Katz - Biography

Andrei Katz (1952 – June 13, 1975) was a Romanian-Jewish immigrant living in New York City in the 1970s, where through auto theft and drug dealing he became involved with a group of criminals associated with the Gambino crime family known as the DeMeo crew. After he agreed to cooperate with law enforcement against the crew, Andrei became their first known murder victim. In 1956, Andrei's family immigrated to New York. His parents, both survivors of a concentration camp during World War II, chose to live in Brooklyn. Andrei was four years old at the time. He also had a younger brother by the name of Victor.

Cooperation and murder

In January 1975, Andrei visited the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office and voluntarily provided them information that Chris Rosenberg was heavily involved in auto theft. Roy DeMeo learned about the meeting immediately after it happened from an Auto Crimes detective on his payroll. Roy ordered Demeo crew associate Henry Borelli to contact his female acquaintance again about being used as bait. In May, Andrei appeared before a Brooklyn grand jury and divulged what he knew about the DeMeo crew's illegal activities.

In June 1975, the female friend of Borelli's was used to successfully lure Katz to her apartment complex for what he thought was a date, where upon arrival he was immediately abducted by members of the DeMeo crew. He was then taken to the meat department of a supermarket, where he was stabbed multiple times in the heart and then the back by a butcher knife.

After being decapitated, Katz's head was then crushed when it was put through a machine normally used for compacting cardboard boxes. The body parts were wrapped in plastic bags and then deposited into the supermarket's dumpster, where they were discovered days later when a pedestrian walking his dog spotted one of Katz's legs lying on a curb near the store. The police reported to the press that a grisly, brutal killing had occurred, but that was the extent of the information given. The body was identified as that of Andrei Katz two days later through the use of dental records.

Sources

• Murder Machine by Gene Mustain & Jerry Capeci, 1993, ISBN 0-451-40387-8.