The Underboss

by Dick Lehr

  Buccola’s ostensible business was promoting boxing matches and his dream was to manage an Italian to a world championship. The closest he came was having one of his fighters, Odonne Piazzo, fight unsuccessfully for the middleweight title in 1932. Indeed, the mobsters of that era were all tied up in the Boston boxing scene, with Buccola and Charles “King” Solomon, the head of the Jewish bootlegging and nightclub scene, both having stables of fighters. They were hands-on managers who frequently were in the corners when their fighters were in the ring. They not only shared an avid interest, they had the same partner in some fight deals—an Irishman to even out the ethnic triumverate of the day. Daniel Carroll of South Boston shared an office on School Street with Buccola. Carroll was also so close to Solomon that he would race to Boston City Hospital after Solomon had been fatally shot in a speakeasy in 1933.

  No one knows for sure, but old hands in the North End and some in law enforcement today say Solomon was murdered because he openly denigrated Italians and was moving to cut them out of the bootlegging—or cheat them of the hard-won prerogatives gained by the Gustin Gang ambush. Solomon was also about to go to trial on bootlegging charges, something that made his various partners nervous about their own vulnerability. But, at the time, Boston police dismissed the murder as a random killing done by down-and-out Irish free-lancers who were simply after the big wad of cash Solomon always carried. Whatever the reason, it left Buccola undisputed champion.

  When Solomon was murdered, the only measure of his wealth on paper was an indictment for operating a $14 million rum-running network. He was a period piece, a character from a gangster movie to the very end, railing at the “dirty rats” who shot him, as he fell on a nightclub table. He was everything Buccola was not. He was flashy, an expensive dresser with an expansive smile. He had swarthy good looks and was frequently seen with showgirls at night clubs, including the Cocoanut Grove, which he owned and which would be gutted in 1942 by Boston’s worst fire disaster.

  If the Solomon hit came out of the North End—and most police who have worked the Boston Mafia shift think it did—then it showed Lombardo had learned a lesson in the year that elapsed after the Gustin Gang ambush: no direct participation. When Maranzano, the boss of bosses, was killed in September of 1931, Luciano had used four Jewish gangsters to do the job. “King” Solomon was killed by a twenty-eight-year-old petty thief named James P. “Skeets” Coyne, who fired three shots after five accomplices crashed into each other to get out of the Cotton Club speakeasy at four in the morning. There were no Italians and none of the group was directly affiliated with Irish gangs.

  The shooting took place after Solomon and two dancers from his club joined the Cocoanut Grove bandleader for an early-morning jazz jam with black musicians in Roxbury. Solomon arrived at about three in the morning of January 24, 1933, and danced twice with one of the women before he had the waitress break a $50 bill. Across the dance floor were six Irish toughs in a booth, nursing drinks. After Solomon had been there an hour, one of the men went to his table and told him a friend wanted to see him in the men’s room.

  The next scene is from a James Cagney movie. According to the trial testimony, when Solomon got up and headed for the men’s room, four of the men followed him, one of them saying, “Keep going, we’ve got you covered,” as they got to the lavatory door. A waitress testified that when she was in the adjoining kitchen to pick up an order, she heard Solomon protest through the wall: “You’ve got the money. What more do you want?” Coyne replied “You’ve been asking for this,” followed by three shots. The four men inside raced to a waiting car. Coyne, apprehended in Indiana a year later, was sentenced to ten to twenty years after he pleaded guilty to manslaughter. The rest were acquitted of robbery and murder charges.

  The Solomon and Gustin Gang murders were the types of solutions that would later become a matter of routine for Patriarca. Avaricious rivals and insubordinate minions were ordered killed with brisk “do it” commands. It happened a dozen times a year. But in Boston of the 1930s, such drastic action by the Mafia was rare. It came only after a dire threat to take something away from the Italians; it was never used to grab something new. Boston became a city where the Mafia gradually gained the upper hand but not total control.

  By several accounts, Buccola was a savvy man who never overplayed his hand or stayed too long in the game. He was flexible as long as you didn’t push him in a corner. He wasn’t in the fight game for nothing, but he also had a temperament that meshed with his time and place. Buccola even looked the part. He wore suits and bow ties and rimless glasses, giving him a country doctor appearance. He was not hard to distinguish from his dark, glowering peers and is remembered, perhaps through the shimmer of time, as the last of the dignified dons. He gets the ultimate accolade: “A man you could talk to.”

  One North End operative used Buccola as a metaphor for the days of his youth when there was some gentility in the process, the right mix of magnanimity and firmness. Buccola was the Don of the Second Chance who said go and sin no more. You take that corner to take bets and you get this corner to sell your after-hours pints. The operative viewed Buccola as a patient, slightly weary man of goodwill whose demeanor still let you know he was not to be crossed. An old friend recalls him simply as The Great White Father.

  Surprisingly, Buccola never lived in the North End, although he preferred to hold court there, usually at the Florentine Café at the corner of Hanover and Prince streets, where he was often seen with Lombardo. Buccola lived in apartments around Boston until he married an Irish nurse named Rose Hogan who came from Charlestown and worked at a local hospital. They moved to Newton Center in 1934 and had a live-in maid. The couple’s last ten years in Boston were spent in an apartment on Beacon Street, just outside of Kenmore Square. Records indicate they left Boston in 1954. This is also the year the FBI says Patriarca formally took over the New England family.

  He would return at least one more time on Mafia business, coming back in 1957, shortly before the national commission meeting in upper New York State turned into a fiasco when a police raid forced scores of mafiosi to flee on foot through the woods near the small town of Apalachin. The Boston representative, Frank Cucchiara, was there with a message given him by Buccola from founding father Lucky Luciano, who had been living in Italy since being deported at the end of World War II. Before Buccola flew to Boston, federal agents claim that he and Luciano had conferred in Rome about the commission meeting, which had been called in part to sanction Genovese’s control of Luciano’s old family.

  Buccola had intermittent influence in Boston over the following decades. Most recently, he had sponsored some Sicilian Mafia members who came to Boston in the mid—1980s to help shore up the depleted middle level of the mob arriving with the same kind of entree that had helped Buccola get his start sixty-five years before.

  A North End friend, who has visited Buccola in Sicily several times, last saw him in the mid—1980s. Buccola had had breathing difficulties but had been in otherwise good health, even in his late nineties. The friend said Buccola always spoke fondly of Boston, especially its hospital care, noting that his wife returned for an eye operation in the 1960s. She died in Palermo in the early 1970s.

  It was Rose, the friend said, who urged Buccola to return home to a summer house that had been built after World War II. When he left, he was sixty-eight years old, had no children, and saw the Mafia attracting more and more national attention from congressional investigators. Buccola may have seen the handwriting on the wall before any of them, perhaps sensing danger in the rapid rise of ruthless men such as Patriarca and Angiulo. In any event, he decided it was time to go.

  The house he had built was a six-room villa in a small section of Palermo known as Villagio Ruffini at Piazza Marie Consultirce. It was on a five-acre lemon tree grove and a bigger home than he had asked for because the money he had sent to build it went so far in Sicily.

  He replaced the lemon trees with ten chicken coops, gradually building
a small business into a major one, starting at a time when the only chickens you could find in Sicily were scrawny ones pecking away in backyards. He added an incubator building and then a slaughterhouse in the 1960s, using seven small vans to deliver eggs and chicken parts to restaurants and retail stores. A store he started in the seventies with the son of a niece expanded into a small supermarket. He never had to borrow money from a bank.

  The old friend, who has profited from Boston real estate, kidded Buccola about not taking his advice to invest in property, not even buying his own home in the United States. Buccola was a renter. “I’d tell him,” the friend said, “well, they just sold your old apartment building on Beacon Street for a million dollars.” He said Buccola had just laughed and gestured toward his chicken farm as evidence of his wise use of money.

  On the last visit before his death, Buccola had asked his old friend about the trouble the Mafia was having in Boston with federal prosecutors. Someone got careless, he was told. Buccola simply nodded, saying nothing more about it, much like an accomplished old ball player who is still interested in the game but only as an elusive memory.

  3

  The Rise of Gennaro Angiulo

  Like most Mafia leaders, Raymond L. S. Patriarca faltered when he was asked what he did for a living. He blustered about being a small businessman who was maligned by press and police, a scapegoat kicked around Rhode Island for twenty years. But he could never tell you what it was he did to make money.

  When he was pressed about his resume at a congressional hearing into organized crime, Patriarca sputtered and digressed. The subcommittee counsel zeroed in again. Could you tell us, Mr. Patriarca, what jobs you held as a young man? At the 1959 hearing, Patriarca finally said he had no job from 1932 until 1944, which was true enough if you agree that armed robber, hijacker, and prisoner are not bona fide occupations. He added that in 1944—the year he got out of jail for robberies in Massachusetts—he went to work as a counterman in a small Providence restaurant. After a year at that job, Patriarca said, “I think I played the horses until 1950.” After he stopped playing the horses, he also happened to become the Godfather of New England and to select a fast-talking numbers man from Boston as his sottocapo, or underboss.

  Patriarca smiled on Gennaro Angiulo of the North End after Angiulo trekked to Providence with an envelope full of “tribute” money, seeking the privilege of running the Mafia gambling franchise in Boston, an untapped reservoir that had never come close to its potential. Patriarca quickly saw that Angiulo was the pepper pot needed to shake Boston out of its backwater doldrums. They would go on to be the odd couple of the New England underworld for nearly three decades, with Patriarca the low-key company man and mediator and Angiulo the flamboyant provocateur out for himself.

  The partnership brought Boston’s Mafia to a new vista. It became organized and opportunistic, evolving into the most successful money-making operation of its size in the country. Although Boston’s diverse underworld factions were too entrenched for Angiulo to subdue, he was able—with Patriarca’s help—to gain financial primacy over the rabid rivals that made up the city’s tumultuous crime network. Boston became the Wall Street of New England.

  One thing was clear from the start: no Ray, no Jerry. Angiulo’s power would always rest on his access to Patriarca. And his access came down to cash. The Patriarca-Angiulo alliance was strictly financial, a matter of money talking. Angiulo’s power base was rooted in Patriarca’s monopoly over the race-results wire and the numbers layoff that afforded bookies an insurance policy against big losses. An abrasive man, Angiulo was not particularly liked or respected. But he had Raymond—as long as Boston gambling money kept flowing down to Federal Hill in Providence.

  Even before he formally petitioned Patriarca for the job, Angiulo had already been proving himself, instilling a system into what had been a bad blend of amorphous gambling territories and little accountability. Once he began making biweekly deliveries to Providence, Angiulo would quickly jump ahead of enforcers with more seniority and more scalps on their belts. In fact, Angiulo had no scalps, never having “earned his bones,” or killed a man to become a “made” Mafia member. It was something that would always hurt him with his peers. Money—not muscle—got him baptized into La Cosa Nostra.

  Patriarca was the personification of both sides of the Mafia equation for success: He had the brawn and brain to run the equivalent of a multinational corporation with finesse and ruthlessness. He had come up the hard way, a Horatio Alger story without a shred of glamour or nobility to it, but a remarkable rise nonetheless.

  Born in Worcester in 1908 to immigrant parents, he escaped from a local jail in Massachusetts when he was twenty, bought his way out of prison when he was thirty, and was heir apparent to the don of New England when he was forty. The soldiers and associates soon learned that Patriarca was more than just resourceful, he was also utterly ruthless when he had to be. Cross him and he would have you killed—not ostracized or roughed up, but dead in a gravel pit or car trunk.

  His rise was similar to many of the New York City dons of the same era; they were born in the United States to parents from hardscrabble villages in Sicily or southern Italy who left around the turn of the century because there was little food and no work. As Patriarca told the Senate subcommittee, when he was seventeen and his father Eleuterio had just died, he “drifted a little.” Over the next half century, he was arrested or indicted twenty-eight times, convicted seven times, and incarcerated four times, serving a total of eleven years, more than half of it on a murder conspiracy charge late in his life. He was plagued by indictments on old capital crimes right up until his death, at seventy-six, in 1984. He was fatally stricken at the apartment of a woman friend who sold real estate in Providence.

  After getting off the front line of crime after World War II, he became a Godfather to the core, with nothing too minor for his consideration if it involved a supplicant who would remember the favor when the time came. For all his sinister looks and sullen ways, Patriarca had a deft sense of public relations. Despite his hostile appearance, he was urbane compared to other top mobsters. Unlike Angiulo, he had a polished way with the police and public. While he ducked the press, he always had a smile and wave for neighbors on his nightly walk and police who cruised by his office. Angiulo used to glare and spit on the sidewalk when he saw most policemen.

  Patriarca had the paradoxical personality of the most feared leaders: friendly but deadly. He was so smooth and correct in his personal dealings that people forgot how vicious he really was. His snap decisions on death contracts were one of the reasons he could drive home all alone at the same time every day without fear for his safety.

  On matters Angiulo would have sneered at, people felt free to petition Patriarca. He regularly sorted out domestic and family disputes in his Providence office, patching up such things as a feud between two brothers that was ruining their local auto body business. In another example, he showed sensitive judgment by declining to order a friend’s daughter home to her father after he determined she was a divorced woman who was old enough to be on her own. The rest of the time he ran a billion-dollar business.

  Except for the occasional supplicant, the daily agenda was made up of a parade of the faithful bearing tithes—cold cash for the middle drawer in the dirty back room of a cigarette vending-machine business in a rundown section of Providence. It could be the receipts from a wholly owned subsidiary or the rent from a franchise. In a complex maze of interests, he completely controlled some markets, especially those involving gambling, loansharking, and pornography, and dabbled in others such as truck hijacking and drug traffic in which free-lancers negotiated fees to do business. As a member of the ruling Mafia commission in New York, he also had some national investments, holding hidden interests in two Las Vegas casinos and pieces of deals in Florida and Philadelphia.

  By the 1960s, Patriarca had come light years from his first encounter with notoriety—an egregious prison pardon in 1938 tha
t became a resounding political blunder, culminating in the impeachment of a Massachusetts Governor’s Councilor. Patriarca was pardoned for armed robbery after serving less than three months of a three-year sentence, setting off a maelstrom that doomed a crusty caricature of corruption, Councilor Daniel Coakley. When Patriarca received the pardon, he appeared to be just another armed robber and three-time loser. In fact, he was a streamlined comer in the Mafia whose street smarts and toughness had made him a favorite in New York, mostly with major figures in the Genovese and Profaci families. He was their “can do” man in New England.

  Over the years, Patriarca appeared most involved in the affairs of the Profaci family in South Brooklyn, which was badly shaken in the 1960s by an insurrection that climaxed with the assassination of family leader Joseph Colombo in 1971. One of Patriarca’s top assistants in Rhode Island had been sent to New York to help shore up the Colombo regime—to no avail. The New York connection in Providence was further cemented by Patriarca’s number two man, Henry Tameleo, who was a veteran of the Bonnano family from Brooklyn.

  Patriarca’s frequent contact with Genovese family leaders seems to have been over jurisdictional matters, with New England divided along the Connecticut River. The Genovese family controlled such major cities as Hartford, Springfield, and Albany, while Patriarca had most of Worcester and exclusive control in Boston, Revere, and Maine.

  Patriarca’s ascendency in New England was formalized in 1944 when, recently released from jail in Massachusetts, he was transferred to Buccola’s regime as heir apparent. By 1950, he had eclipsed Buccola, who was in semi-retirement before leaving the United States for good in 1954.

  Patriarca’s trademark would be murder and political influence. As later FBI digests would show from a secret bug in his office from 1962 to 1965, his political contributions and payoffs gave him a sub rosa entrée with governors, legislators, and judges in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.