by Dick Lehr
Patriarca was as different from the benign Buccola as Lenny Bruce from Jack Benny. The changes in pace and tone he brought were profound. The axis would tilt toward Providence forever more. Of course, he had advantages that Buccola never did—strong New York connections and a small, largely Italian city as his base. By the mid—1950s, nothing east of the Connecticut River moved without his curt okay.
The final obstacle to absolute power for Patriarca was eliminated with the shooting death in 1952 of the only real rival left—the tough and defiant Carlton O‘Brien of Providence, who was a major bootlegging figure along with Charles “King” Solomon of Boston. Like most of the rum-running hierarchy, O’Brien moved into gambling during the Depression and World War II, eventually controlling the invaluable race-results wire and several betting parlors. When he died of two shotgun blasts in the early morning hours, Patriarca had a clear neld—and exclusive control of the wire. Mafia control of the wire meant more money for the coffers, as winners bet again when they get fast results.
Unlike Buccola, who seems to have started at the top, arriving from Sicily in 1920 and taking the reins quickly, Patriarca had paid his dues. His inestimable respect came from the way he had proved his mettle.
NOT so with Jerry Angiulo. While both he and Patriarca shared the same background of poor immigrant parents from southern Italy who had raised their children in hand-to-mouth households, Angiulo was a diminutive youth who would make it on stealth rather than strength.
When Angiulo returned from Navy duty in 1947 at the age of twenty-eight, he was just another guy driving a delivery truck on the streets of the North End, one of six sons of Caesar and Giovannina Angiulo. They had come over from small towns in southern Italy just after the turn of the century, meeting and marrying in the North End, then moving into an apartment on Prince Street in 1915.
The Angiulos lived in a sparse household on a tightly packed, narrow street of five-story brick tenements, but the family was no worse off than its blue-collar neighbors. They all nudged the poverty line. The subsistence life, however, left Angiulo with a permanent obsession with money. Decades later, when he was reminiscing with his top capo de regime, Larry Zannino, shortly after they worked out the details on murdering a malcontent, Angiulo said, “When you were born broke like all of us were, you know, money becomes very important.”
It was a rare understatement. Throughout his career, the pint-size Angiulo was a cunning man obsessed with the power and pleasure of money. It was his elixir, the core of his life. His power to command payments was primordial. No excuse was good enough, no punishment too severe, for it would be money that would transform his crowded, Spartan home on Prince Street into headquarters for the Mafia, not far from the corner café where Buccola often had held court and from the office building where seven mafiosi had gunned down the leader of the Gustin Gang from South Boston.
Angiulo was his mother’s son; he inherited her nimble mind and sharp tongue as well as the name of her father. Giovannina Angiulo was an inveterate card player who would take on all comers in the neighborhood while she ran the family grocery store with one hand. In later years, when the neighbors kowtowed to all her sons, she zoomed up Prince Street in a Cadillac and just dumped it in the middle of the road, bustling into the family home known as the Dog House. Flunkies ran out to park the car by a curb.
Having grown up around the corner from the Gustin Gang ambush site, Angiulo saw how the insularity of his neighborhood made it a place where the mob always felt safe, where tobacco stores, groceries, and funeral parlors were usually fronts for gambling operations where loans could be had and bets put down. He saw retail shops run from the backs of trucks and half-pints for sale in doorways after the bars closed. Strangers were always noticed immediately on these streets, the object of an informal house-to-house surveillance. It was a perverted crime watch, a reverse alarm system.
Policemen were negotiable hazards in such a place, potential allies for a price. Some of the men who broke the rules were killed and, after the grisly deaths, denounced on the street as dirty bastards who deserved it. It was a paranoid and violent world that was also a perfect breeding ground for a prospective Mafia leader.
Angiulo is remembered by high school classmates as a mischievous, outspoken teenager who loved an audience and who had a cutting edge to his humor. He made fun of certain kids to make the other kids laugh. One classmate, who was in his homeroom at Boston English High, recalled Angiulo as an extrovert who “wouldn’t hesitate to get out of the chair and say something to the teacher.” The yearbook lists his ambition as “criminal lawyer.” The classmate said, “Well, he got halfway there ...”
After the Navy, where Angiulo won some battle awards in World War II duty in the Pacific, he found his way quickly into the North End’s gambling network. He drove a truck days and worked in Consigliere Joe Lombardo’s “horse room” at night, taking bets and saving his money, biding his time.
According to some gamblers on the fringe, Angiulo’s ambition got the best of him in the late 1940s when he was taking in bets for the Lombardo operation. Some of the money failed to turn up and Angiulo had to go on the lam for a while until his parents made good for it. When all was forgiven and Angiulo could walk along Prince Street again with impunity, he immediately began figuring the angles, using the equivalent of insider trading to parlay his knowledge of fixed horse races into a quick bankroll. He graduated from the horse room to the job of runner for bookies in Roxbury and the North End. He would need some luck, but he was on his way.
AT THE SAME TIME, about four miles away, a shy, soft-spoken boy named Edward Quinn, who would spend much of his adult life as an FBI agent in pursuit of Angiulo, was a first-grader at St. Margaret’s elementary school in Dorchester, near Edward Everett Square. It was an Irish neighborhood of triple-decker apartment houses with driveways and backyards, giving it an almost rural flavor compared with the jam-packed five-story tenements and sunless streets of the North End.
Quinn’s father, Arthur, a gentle, dignified man who was a Boston policeman for thirty-eight years, was always home for supper at 5:30, eschewing the barroom stop on the way home for a few drinks with the boys. He liked his beer but he liked it at home. It was a strongly Irish Catholic family that did things together. Arthur never missed a basketball game, even though it was only church league stuff. Sometimes he was the only parent in the gym. There was not enough money for two weeks at Cape Cod in the summer, so they would go to Nantasket beach outside of Boston for the day or make the hour-long walk to Malibu Beach in Savin Hill, carrying their beach chairs. It was not a big thing, but when Ed Quinn was in grammar school, he was always vaguely aware that his father was a policeman. It pleased him.
BUT TO Angiulo, the only good Irish cop was the antithesis of Arthur Quinn, the one he could put in his back pocket, the one who would take the money and look the other way when there was a crap shoot, bar-booth game, numbers office, or after-hours drinking spot in his precinct. Angiulo and his brothers would know such men and prey on their weaknesses for money, alcohol, and, occasionally, women.
The ever-watchful Angiulo got his chance for the big time because of the fitful presidential ambitions of a somewhat obscure U.S. senator from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver, who began seeking a national audience by taking on organized crime in televised hearings in 1950. It was the first real, hard look at the Mafia on a national level and it terrified old-timers such as Buccola and Lombardo, who saw the klieg lights as the end of their subterranean world. They overreacted to the periodic announcement of Kefauver hearings in Boston—hearings that were scheduled but never took place. Lombardo ordered the gambling in town shut down and Buccola, at his wife’s behest, retired to Sicily by 1954.
Ironically, the ultimate impact of the Kefauver scare was to make the New England Mafia stronger. To some extent, it pushed aside the old leadership, leaving Patriarca firmly at the helm and giving Angiulo the opportunity to take gambling in Boston out of the petty cash category and into t
he big time.
Previously, Angiulo and his brothers had been runners for bookies who took bets almost as an avocation. They usually combined it with some other business: a restaurant, pawn shop, or candy store. Angiulo became the centripetal force that brought the disparate elements together. He made gambling a full-time, streamlined business.
In 1950, when Lombardo ordered all Mafia and independent books to shut down, or operate without a central layoff bank and no police protection, Angiulo went to him with a simple proposition: Let me run your books and take the fall if there’s trouble. J.L. gave him the go-ahead. The Kefauver plague passed when the congressional hearings focused on bigger fish in more established cities such as New York and Chicago, giving Boston an inadvertent boost.
But the Lombardo shut-down edict was a double-edged sword to the “independents,” or those bookies who were loosely affiliated with the Mafia. They paid tribute to do business in exchange for not having to worry much about mob shakedowns or police raids. During the Kefauver threat, they lost some of Lombardo’s protection but gained even more freedom to operate. All that ended with Angiulo. He became the bane of the independents, a scheming dictator always looking for ways to squeeze them for more money. His approach to bookies was that they operated at his sufferance. They had to pay him “rent” for their telephones and a percentage of the take or he’d have the phones yanked off the wall. The old regime’s philosophy was much more live and let live—as long as you didn’t cheat.
Angiulo was cunning and insatiable, a master at setting himself up as the arbiter of disputes he caused. He sent thugs around demanding more of a cut from independents and then commiserated with the frantic bookies when they came looking for justice from the underboss. With studied munificence, he would tell the petitioners he would call off the dogs, that it must be a mistake. But, do me a favor, he would say, just pay a little more so no one will lose face.
Lombardo had been tough but straightforward, treating underlings with a modicum of respect. Decades later, a bookie would remember Lombardo slapping one of his men for abusing the waiters at his restaurant in the North End. The soldiers were amusing themselves just for the macho hell of it and Lombardo put an end to it. “I can get along without you coming in here,” he told the soldier, “but I can’t without my waiters.” Angiulo never learned the value of loyalty and never had the restraint of true leadership. It would hurt him in the end.
But in the post-Kefauver era, Angiulo moved quickly to merge his gains into a network, picking up the business of some dropouts and slowly encroaching on Irish, Italian, and Jewish independents. It appeared he pacified Lombardo by making him more money at less risk by steadily increasing business. Through some basic management and hard work, the amorphous numbers and horse-betting operations in Boston coalesced into a whole. One of Angiulo’s innovations was ingenious in its simplicity: He turned casual bettors into small-time bookies by offering them a quarter back on each dollar bet they placed, providing an incentive to collect and deliver bets to a central spot for reimbursement. Angiulo was a creative hands-on manager and gambling was his only active business until he opened a lounge in Boston’s adult entertainment district, the Combat Zone, in 1961. He ran gambling offices in person and there was always an Angiulo brother there when money was to be counted.
The older Mafia leaders never really understood the intricacies of the numbers business, but Jerry and his younger brother Frank did. They figured out ways to monitor heavy betting on certain numbers and how best to lay off bets to avoid rare big payouts in the longshot number lottery that was based on parimutuel handles from certain racetracks.
Angiulo also could adjust to adversity. In the late 1950s, when a series of police raids occurred around afternoon collection time, rather than shut down for a while as Lombardo would have done, he moved back the “turn-in” time to midnight. He frequently ran the operation until four in the morning.
While he could be engaging when it suited him, Angiulo was usually intemperate and cutting, a leader remembered by the rank and file as a bully who ranted and raved, who shouted “you understand American?” when he was through talking and just wanted the job done. One associate was overheard on an FBI wiretap saying that he never really talked to Angiulo because he was always yelling and never listening.
The closest thing the family had to a velvet glove was Nicolo Angiulo, the first-born son who was three years older than Jerry. He was the family fixer, even from the early days, the one who showed up at the courthouse when a soldier or associate was being arraigned or sentenced. A former federal official who pursued the Angiulos for years viewed Nick as the keeper of the police payment “pad” because “he got results.” Nick became the consigliere and Jerry gave him a wide berth.
But business expansion was Jerry Angiulo’s exclusive purview. In addition to being the master of the “numbers,” he ran two other betting operations. At night, he and his brothers had a boiler room-type system in the North End that handled dog-race betting, with about fifteen men taking bets on eight races at fifty cents a race. His younger brother Danny would bring the workers sandwiches and pay them from a roll of half-dollars. The Angiulos had a similar operation during the day for horse races. All told, the brothers had about fifty office workers taking different kinds of bets. Lombardo, now richer with less work, was in semi-retirement, more concerned with his horse farm in Framingham than the numbers business in Boston.
By the late 1950s, one last hurdle remained for Angiulo. Though he was a born bookmaker who had hustled Boston into a sensible system, he was still stuck with free-lancer status. He was not a so-called Friend of Ours, a Mafia member. As such, he was fair game for made members short on cash. Leg-breakers such as Larry Zannino, a Patriarca favorite, began to prey upon the vulnerable Angiulo, shaking him down regularly, even roughing him up when he refused to pay.
The Angiulo solution, according to police and underworld accounts, was to stuff $50,000 in cash in an envelope and bring it down to Patriarca in Providence, promising him at least $100,000 a year for the right to run Boston. With a successful track record and cash on the table, Angiulo prevailed. They struck a deal. Patriarca made a call to Boston, perhaps calling off a dog he had put on the hunt in the first place. Zannino, who had had up to two hundred loan sharks working for him, became an obsequious enforcer for Angiulo after they had been competitors, crisscrossing each other in Boston’s low-rent district, the South End, both chasing the same people for money. Angiulo controlled the Lebanese bookies in the area and they and their customers were loan-shark customers of Zannino. For starters, Raymond’s imprimatur meant Angiulo would get the South End payments first instead of last. And paying up was the name of the game. By the early 1960s, Boston’s underworld had become so rabid that it seldom “stopped the clock” on debtors who were bled dry, by letting them pay just principal and not interest. Other cities stopped short of killing those hopelessly behind on the theory that a dead man can’t pay. Not in Boston. At least in this one area, the Mafia and Irish gangs worked in symbiotic harmony. Mafiosi lent surplus gambling money to Irish hoodlums for 1 to 2 percent a week and they, in turn, put it “on the street” at 3 to 4 percent a week. Law enforcement estimated that the victims of two out of every three murders or maimings in Greater Boston were people unable to keep up with debt services of up to 400 percent a year.
Although it is unclear exactly when Angiulo got “baptized” as a member of La Cosa Nostra, it appears to have been sometime before he turned forty. Angiulo joined Patriarca at a meeting in New York with Vito Genovese, the Ivan the Terrible of the national Mafia, not long before Genovese went off to jail for good in 1959. The New York luncheon meeting would have definitely been a members-only affair. It was a daunting moment for Angiulo, who was making his first trip to the big leagues. Genovese was the titular overseer of New England and Angiulo had to fork over some of the riches recently extracted from the Irish gangs in Boston, simply as tribute to the dominant don of the day. Although it was
the kind of thing he demanded for himself routinely, he didn’t like it a bit.
Angiulo recalled the meeting with angst in a conversation secretly recorded by the FBI in his Prince Street office in 1981. He was still tremulous over an incident more than two decades old. “Vito looked at me,” he told a visitor about the request for tribute, which had left the normally loquacious Angiulo tongue-tied. “It’ll be done, Vito,” was all he could say. The memory of having to be docile and to give up money still grated. “Right now I got a fucking knot in my stomach,” he said to the visitor.
It’s likely his searing experience with Genovese prompted him to tell Patriarca, when they were ruminating about Mafia family history one day in 1963, that it was better to have a small, manageable family like theirs than the tangled branches down in New York City. He sounded the rube. But, even if he didn’t know it, he was lucky to be invited to New York. He was in his thirties, the head of Boston gambling, rubbing elbows with Patriarca and Genovese and thirty other high-level mobsters in a New York restaurant. Ten years earlier, he had been on the lam, with Joe Lombardo’s men looking for him.
By 1961, Angiulo had extensive investments in real estate, owned a small hospital in Boston, and had interests in two car dealerships in Lynn and a country club in Worcester County. He had two business addresses, adding his new Combat Zone lounge to the longstanding Prince Street office. He named the lounge Jay’s after himself and used a basement room there as an office and apartment for most of the 1960s. His typical day was a whirlwind that began after noontime, when he left his Medford home, where he lived with his wife, Anna, and two children. He commuted the fifteen miles south to Boston, starting the day on Prince Street, moving on to Jay’s Lounge around supper time, and heading home at two or three in the morning.