The Underboss

by Dick Lehr

  As he dined at Francesca’s Restaurant, these were the kinds of concerns that nagged at Angiulo, that had intensified during the past twelve months, ever since his suspicions about the feds and RICO had been confirmed. On August 3, 1982, Jerry, his brothers, a leading capo de regime and brutal enforcer named Ilario M. A. “Larry” Zannino, and sixty other mobsters had been notified that for nearly four months in 1981 their conversations had been tape recorded. Now a new federal grand jury was hearing evidence against the family. But none of the Angiulos knew when the blow from the FBI would come. And for reasons no one fully understands, none of them fled the country.

  So they kept up their routines, which included dinner at Francesca’s. On this particular night, Jerry ordered pork chops. Frank and Mike Angiulo both had linguini with clam sauce. Unknown to them, two pairs of FBI agents, posing as married couples, sat at separate tables among the other diners. After “Mrs. Jones” called Quinn at 9:00 P.M. at the squad room, the rug was permanently pulled out from under the Angiulos. For the Mafia in Boston, nothing would be the same again.

  In Quinn’s possession was Jerry’s arrest warrant, the result of the mob boss’s secret indictment, along with warrants for Angiulo’s four brothers, Capo Zannino, who had been hospitalized earlier that day, and another aging capo named Sammy Granito from Revere.

  Since 1978, the veteran FBI agent, whose hair was now graying slightly, had been in charge of “Operation Bostar,” which was designed to topple the Angiulos. In Quinn, the bureau had chosen an Irishman who was Angiulo’s polar opposite—the God-fearing son of a Boston police lieutenant, graduate of Boston College High School and Boston College, and ex-Marine. Busting bank robbers and mobsters was the kind of work Agent Quinn preferred. It’s what the bureau did best and it was work without any gray areas, only a bold, bright line between the good guys and bad guys. There weren’t the perplexing ambiguities that surface in some of the bureau’s other domestic activities, such as the ones Quinn faced firsthand during a stint in New York in the 1970s. The devout Catholic had been part of a team of agents staking out a church to arrest radical priest Daniel Berrigan, who never did show up. Give him a bank robber or mobster any time.

  Hanging up the phone, Quinn surveyed the squad room of the almost thirty agents he had mobilized for this moment: The seven-year battle of wits and stamina was about to end. Somewhere along the line, the mission against the Boston Mafia had been reduced to its simplest terms—Ed Quinn versus Jerry Angiulo. Or at least Angiulo saw it that way starting back in 1981, when he began asking his brothers who this Quinn guy was, and what his family situation was. He learned that Quinn, after more than a decade in the bureau, had been transferred back to his native Boston in 1978.

  It was the kind of Angiulo talk that put Quinn on notice, causing the agent to worry that Angiulo was unpredictable enough to violate one of the unwritten rules among agents and the mob that innocent family members were off limits. So one day in April 1981, knowing he would meet Angiulo in federal court, Quinn wired himself on the hunch that he’d capture a threat made to a federal agent.

  “You know,” Jerry said, approaching Quinn near the courthouse elevator accompanied by his attorney and his son. “I know that you know me, and most certainly I know that I recognize you, but I can’t remember your first name.”

  “Yeah, well my name is Agent Quinn.”

  Jerry smiled. He loved to spar. For the next several seconds, the two went back and forth, playing a word game, until Angiulo boarded the elevator. “Be careful,” he told the agent.

  Then, returning to his office in the North End, Angiulo relished the retelling of this face-off with Quinn. “‘I know who you are but I can’t remember your first name,’” he told his capo Larry Zannino, quoting from the conversation. “What was his fuckin’answer? Tell him.” He gestured to his son and his attorney, but then answered his own question. “‘may name is Mr. Quinn.’ ‘Oh, I know that.’ Now he knows I’m hitting on him. ‘What I want to know is your first name.’ Like, nice and easy I’m sayin’ to him, you know I wanna know, you cocksucker, where you live, Quinn, that’s what. He knows it.”

  In the years to come, the two would go nose to nose countless times. By 1987, the case did indeed boil down again to Quinn versus Angiulo. In Massachusetts Superior Court, where Jerry was on trial for ordering a gangland execution, Quinn would stand in the witness box, arms folded, while Angiulo sat alone at the defense table. Quinn would testify that as a result of the FBI probe and subsequent legal proceeding he had met Angiulo “at least 100 times.” When Quinn sidestepped a question from the mobster’s lawyer, Angiulo, from his seat, would mutter “son of a bitch.”

  So a face-to-face exchange that hot summer night in 1983 was something both men had been working toward for years. For Boston, the city’s biggest bust would have an apt finish: Quinn and Angiulo, each man playing a prototypical part in an age-old conflict that began when the North End first filled up with immigrants from southern Italy as the second-generation Irish moved out, sniping as they left. In some ways, the arrests were acts of historical destiny: Boston was the perfect setting for the final interplay between Irish cop and Italian mobster.

  Having received the call from the restaurant, Quinn then gave last-minute instructions to some twenty agents before they all headed down to the garage of the John F. Kennedy Federal Building and launched the caravan that would mark the beginning of the end for Gennaro Angiulo and his crime family. Quinn sent one team to Revere to arrest Capo de Regime Sammy Granito at his home, and another to the Lynn Hospital to find Larry Zannino. The final plans for Jerry Angiulo’s arrest had involved a certain amount of protocol to acknowledge those who’d played key roles in the long and exhausting probe. Two agents had been assigned to arrest each mobster: he and Pete Kennedy would take Jerry; John Connolly and Bill Regii would take Frank; Nick Gianturco and Bobby Jordan had Mike. The six had been among the central cast in the FBI’s Operation Bostar.

  To take care of coordinating with the Boston police, Quinn also had Eddie Walsh, the veteran Boston Police deputy superintendent who had been hounding mafiosi since the 1950s and attributed Angiulo’s supremacy to “the three B’s—balls, brains and bucks.” Quinn made sure to invite John Morris, the former boss of the squad who had conceived the bugging plan and oversaw its implementation but, between the bugging and now, had been transferred to run another squad. Morris, thankful for being “invited,” nonetheless felt somewhat left out, an observer rather than a guiding force on this night.

  Within ten minutes of leaving their office, their eight cars having snaked past Boston Garden and into a dark, narrow alley behind the restaurant, FBI agents flooded Francesca’s dining room.

  Quinn was the first agent through the door. As the other agents fanned out to make sure no young up-and-comer tried something foolish to save the Angiulos, Quinn kept his eyes focused straight ahead on the mobsters’ table in back. In the end, it would take a matter of seconds. But just as waterlogged timber is double in weight, these seconds, soaked in years of FBI sweat, passed in a kind of slow time.

  Looking up, Angiulo spotted Quinn. “Mr. Quinn,” he called out, referring to the agent as he had in their first encounter.

  Quinn’s response had four parts:

  “Mr. Angiulo.”

  “FBI.”

  “You’re under arrest.”

  “Stand up.”

  Quinn already had the handcuffs out. He pulled Angiulo’s arms behind him. The other agents moved in on Frank and Mike.

  “There is no reason for that,” Angiulo snarled. He tried to move his hands in front. Of course he had known for months that this was coming—the FBI had the tapes, which contained even his own prescient insights about his outfit’s mounting slip-ups and vulnerabilities. “You know what happened?” he once asked Larry Zannino. “Gennaro Angiulo fell asleep.” But even if he knew Quinn’s appearance was inevitable, it didn’t mean he had to suffer the indignity of having his hands cuffed behind his back.
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br />   Quinn would not budge. He always applied handcuffs in back. This way the person could not raise his hands or try any other move. It was the way Quinn had been taught. “That’s the rules, and this is how you go,” Quinn told him. No exceptions. He pulled back Angiulo’s arms and snapped on the cuffs.

  Now Angiulo led a different kind of entourage past the other tables of the restaurant—the major figure in a Mafia roundup that included five associates. With military dispatch, the multiple arrests had taken two minutes. A waitress in the kitchen missed the whole thing. Hangers-on just sat there stunned, their mouths open for a full moment after the lightning operation was over and the Angiulos had been herded out to unmarked Fords. The restaurant then exploded into a hubbub. Minutes later, six agents handcuffed Danny Angiulo two blocks away as he walked to his car. Within hours, reporters from all the newspapers and radio and television stations in Boston would be scrambling for details of what became the most sensational organized crime story in the city’s history.

  But Jerry Angiulo was not one to go quietly. He may have had to tolerate Quinn’s handcuff rules on that particular summer night, but it didn’t mean he had to stop playing the wiseguy. As he left, the always defiant Angiulo sought the last word. Over his shoulder he vowed angrily to anyone within earshot, “I’ll be back for my pork chops before they’re cold.”

  2

  The Mob in Boston

  After an arduous birth and stunted childhood, the backwater Boston Mafia came of age the day in 1931 when Irish gang leader Frankie Wallace staggered into a dingy third-floor office in the North End. He died there of a single bullet wound to the heart while a secretary literally shrieked bloody murder.

  It had been a quickly planned killing, an impromptu addendum to what was supposed to be a peace parley on how best to split up liquor hijacking and the hundreds of cases of booze coming over land and by sea for the speakeasies of New England.

  Though Wallace didn’t know it, negotiations had ended that morning when, in a telephone conversation with his North End counterpart, Wallace ruled out any compromise on who would get what. As leader of the best-known crime gang in the city, he was coming over from the Irish stronghold of South Boston to dictate terms, not divvy up the pie. His Gustin Gang was to be cut in on all liquor unloaded on the shoreline in and around South Boston, and the gang’s convoys were not to be raided. Or else.

  But when Wallace and two henchmen strode briskly into the Testa Building three days before Christmas, seven mafiosi were behind closed doors on the third floor. When Wallace banged on the door of Joseph Lombardo’s C and F Importing, the guns roared for several seconds. Barney Walsh, one of the Gustins, tried to escape down the stairwell but was cut down and died on his face on the second-floor landing. The terrified third gang member, Timothy Coffey, survived by hiding in an office up the hall, not coming out until the police arrived to mop up after the blood-splattered, epochal event on Hanover Street. Wallace staggered down the hall to the law office of Julian H. Wolfson and careened through the door, landing like a ragdoll on a foyer chair, then toppling half over, his head on the floor.

  Prior to the Gustin Gang ambush, the Boston Mafia had been viewed as the puny pushcart peddlers of organized crime, a bush-league embarrassment compared to Al Capone’s Chicago and Lucky Luciano’s New York. But when Frankie Wallace began to reach too far and demand too much, the Italians knew they were facing a subsistence future in a flagrantly Irish city. They would either have to settle for smuggling by fishing boat and minor gambling in the North End—or take some action. The barrage in the Testa Building was their resounding answer.

  The audacious execution of the preeminent Irish mobster on alien turf at high noon, while war veterans packed Christmas baskets for the poor children of the North End on the floor above, meant Boston’s underworld would stay balkanized. The Mafia won because it didn’t lose. There would be no Boston overlord, and the warring factions would retreat to their ethnic enclaves where they would stay put for decades, leaving the Mafia firmly in charge of the North End and with its fair share of Boston bootlegging.

  During the Depression era and World War II, the Mafia was able to expand slightly its loansharking and gambling network into other small pockets throughout the city, most prominently in East Boston, another former Irish stronghold that became an Italian neighborhood after World War I. In this post-Gustin era, the uneducated but stately Joseph Lombardo became a major figure in the mob, a consigliere and then an eminent elder statesman, sharing power with an older, better connected man from Sicily who had arrived in 1920 with a special imprimatur from the Old World. Together, they ran a laissez-faire gambling operation in Boston until it fell into the eager hands and facile mind of Gennaro Angiulo, a North End native who was twelve years old when the Irish gang leaders were murdered around the corner from where he lived.

  Lombardo’s bold action gave the Mafia the time it needed to take hold and even prosper in Boston’s wildly competitive crime market, one that was structured by the order in which immigrant ships arrived. The Irish came first in the mid-nineteenth century and controlled politics and the waterfront within a generation. Jewish mobsters, whose forebears arrived near the end of the century, were dominating the speakeasies of the Roaring Twenties. For the Italians, still bunched into one of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods, the demise of the Gustin Gang was a propitious event. It gave the Mafia prestige and room to grow in the wild gestation period for crime in America known as Prohibition. Never again would the Mafia be denied its fair share.

  In what became a familiar pattern in Mafia cases, Timothy Coffey, the surviving member of the ambushed Gustin trio, refused to testify before a grand jury, taking the Fifth Amendment in both of his appearances. Only three Italians—Lombardo, Frank Cucchiara of the North End, and Salvatore Congemi of the North End—were held on probable cause. They were not indicted by the grand jury after Coffey refused to testify, and no other witnesses could be found. Along with Lombardo, Cucchiara rose in the ranks, going on to be Boston’s only representative at the infamous mass meeting of the national Mafia at Apalachin, New York, in 1957.

  But Lombardo became an almost mystical figure, a man of respect who could arbitrate the endless childish squabbles among his underlings over money and territory. Known as J.L., he had the bearing and manner of leadership, a combination of street toughness and old-world gentility that makes those who remember him nostalgic for his era.

  His importing business was on the North End’s main thorough-fare, historic Hanover Street, once home to Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, and Revolutionary War cabals—and then to successive generations of immigrants who jammed into squalid tenements that replaced manors. By the time of the Gustin Gang shooting, Hanover Street was a vivid symbol of a motley era, a bustling, congested, and dangerous section of town dominated by the wares and violence of the Prohibition era. Gunfights were so common on this street of saloons and small businesses that it had become known as the “shooting gallery.” After Wallace bled to death in the third-floor law office, Lombardo disappeared for nine days. He then surrendered on his own terms rather than suffer the indignities of being arrested. He knew the only evidence to put him at the scene was an Irish policeman who tried to sell Lombardo tickets to the policeman’s ball in the Testa Building two hours before all hell broke loose at C and F Importing. If no one talked, there would be no case against him.

  Lombardo and his bodyguard walked into Boston police headquarters on New Year’s Eve. “I’d like to see Superintendent Crowley,” he said to the desk sergeant. “Who’s calling?” he was asked. “Tell him Joe Lombardo would like to see him,” he said quietly.

  Questioned on his whereabouts the day of the murders, the 36-year-old Lombardo apologized repeatedly for his lack of cooperation—but firmly declined to answer. “I don’t want you to think I’m sassy, Superintendent,” he said, “but I’m not going to answer any questions.” He never did, not one, and was released for good in March. He would run gambling and the
satellite industry of loansharking for decades as second in command to Filippo Buccola, an older and more patriarchal Sicilian. They never took a backward step.

  While the Mafia remained hemmed into the monolithically Italian North End, it had salvaged its self-respect and solidified its hold. You could do little better in the ethnic free-for-all that shaped the Boston underworld. It had also benefited from the dissension in South Boston, as the Gustin Gang never fully regained its footing following Frankie Wallace’s sudden death. Named after a rough-and-tumble Southie street, the Gustins survived in name only, its members gradually drifting apart during the 1930s, freelancing here and there, sticking close to home, working the docks for pilferage or even wages.

  Boston’s underworld remained splintered into the 1960s, much as it had been since the end of the nineteenth century, a nexus of ethnic villages with political power vested in the Irish because they were the first off the ships and had a natural instinct for politics, a passion alien to the xenophobic Italians who came later. The Irish have dominated Boston politics since they took City Hall at the turn of the century.

  When hard times in Southern Italy precipitated an exodus in the 1880s, the first arrivals in Boston were outnumbered by the Irish by a 60—1 margin. By the time of the Gustin Gang, the Irish population advantage was down to 2-1 but it still meant there were only 90,000 Italians in a city of 780,000.

  Another immigration that shaped Prohibition-era crime in Boston was the influx of Eastern European Jews in the 1890s. They were relegated to the North End, East Boston, and the West End but would have a disproportionate influence in the speakeasy and rum-running end of the city’s underworld.

  By the 1930s, despite the steady increase in the Italians and Jews, Boston remained an Irish town, with politics and patronage firmly in hand from the bastion of City Hall. The Yankees of the Mayflower and after had retreated to Beacon Hill, where they had to make do with controlling state government and making life as difficult as possible for Irish mayors. They studiously ignored the rabble in the North End, deigning only to sell off a Bullfinch-designed brick church just off Hanover Street to the Catholic diocese, which formed an instant parish of five thousand persons in the mid-nineteenth century and called the building St. Stephen’s.