Joseph ’Joey’ Scorney was 25 and part of the DeMeo crew’s grand-theft-auto operation when he was killed on September 28, 1978. Vito Arena and Richard DiNome were named as the men who executed the order. Arena shot Scorney inside an auto shop in East Flatbush; although wounded, Scorney was still alive until DiNome struck him fatally with a sledgehammer.

Scorney’s body was placed in a fifty-gallon oil drum, filled with cement, and the barrel was rolled off a pier in Center Moriches, New York, apparently to hide the crime. The remains were not recovered until 1982. One of the killers was later convicted; in 1985 Vito Arena received an eighteen-year sentence for Scorney’s murder.