by Dick Lehr
Once sanctioned by Patriarca, he had moved strongly against the independent bookies, setting up a system in which Mafia enforcers were assigned to bookies, collecting half their receipts as the price of letting them operate and, in turn, giving half to Angiulo, who gave half to Patriarca.
About a year after Angiulo opened Jay’s Lounge, the downstairs office was illegally bugged by the FBI, which was racing to get intelligence on the the Mafia in Boston and other major cities. Notoriety was not far behind. In 1963, the cocky street kid was publicly identified in congressional hearings as Patriarca’s underboss. Neighbors were asked by reporters about the Angiulos, but were told that they kept to themselves, with Jerry a virtual phantom, a ghostly face in a Cadillac that flashed by children walking home from school. No one ever saw him come home at night.
JUST AS Angiulo began dividing his time between the Combat Zone and Prince Street, Ed Quinn began Boston College as a self-effacing economics major who was vaguely interested in a business career. He went there on a scholarship he won from the Wianno Country Club on Cape Cod, where he had caddied for three summers. The scholarship paid half of the $800 annual tuition and he needed every cent of it. Quinn had a strong if inchoate sense of duty and was drawn to the military; his interest was heightened by letters from his older sister Elizabeth, an Air Force lieutenant stationed in Paris. He signed up with the Marines his junior year and went to Quantico training camp that summer, graduating from college in 1963 as a second lieutenant. There were stories in the local papers about the three lieutenants in one family, with his father being one of the commanders at Division Three in Mattapan.
Ed Quinn’s second stop in the Marines was at Da Nang in Vietnam, and though it was early in the fighting—1963—64—he saw a lot of action as part of a helicopter squad ferrying South Vietnamese troops to battle. On his first day there, twelve men in his company were killed. He thought more about getting out alive than what he would do in civilian life.
WHILE Quinn was stationed in Da Nang, the FBI in Boston was frantically trying to catch up with Angiulo, marching to new directions from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy that forced J. Edgar Hoover to drop his obsession with Communist infiltrators in favor of rooting out Kennedy’s Enemy Within. They put illegal bugs in Patriarca’s office in Providence and Jay’s Lounge in Boston just to find out where things stood and who was who. They found Angiulo was far more than just one of Boston’s bigger bookies: He was the major moneymaker who fed the coffers in Providence and grabbed a piece of everything that moved in Greater Boston.
The Patriarca bug told them as much about Angiulo as any of the New England Mafia figures, especially about his constant squabbles with rivals and his connections with corrupt policemen in the Boston department and the Massachusetts state police. But, because the tap was illegal and for intelligence gathering only, it gave them leads and not evidence. The best the FBI could do with it was devise a careful game plan with the certain knowledge it was up against a wily foe.
The tap revealed that the one town Angiulo couldn’t crack was Revere, the Dodge City of the East, a place of endless feuds long dominated by a bootlegger and gambler named Louis Fox, who had dealt directly with Patriarca from the beginning. Angiulo had put Boston gambling under tighter centralized control, but was never able to absorb the fiercely anarchical frontier city of Revere, a mad violent vortex that had been half Jewish bookies and half Italian since the end of Prohibition.
When Fox died in 1963, Angiulo tried to muscle in—but ran headlong into hard-nosed Phil Gallo, the deputy police chief who, to underline the inimitable nature of Revere, was both a police officer and heir to Fox’s empire. Gallo was a man of legendary chutzpah who chased bikers out of town like the marshals of the Wild West banished gunslingers. He would ask the motley crew whether it would like to clear out before or after the fire he was expecting in their modest quarters. During their feud over Angiulo’s encroachment, Jerry’s Cadillac was shot up one morning on Huntington Avenue, where Angiulo owned some property and was staying with his girlfriend, Barbara Lombard (she became his common-law wife after his 1963 divorce).
Angiulo could never crack Revere because mobsters there had direct access to Patriarca, who was apparently satisfied with his cut from Revere and felt some obligation to old allies in the city. Angiulo would have to make do with Boston and the slow, steady expansion against its indigenous Irish gangs and other, more vulnerable “independents.”
According to FBI digests of the Patriarca bug, Angiulo had much more success in cultivating high-level police contacts than in taming Revere mafiosi. The bug laid bare the vital role of political corruption in protecting the varied interests of the New England Mafia. It was a fragile two-tiered system built on personal rather than institutional relationships.
Patriarca’s contacts were primarily at a level high enough for him to influence legislation and get favorable treatment from courts for his troops. He was on a first-name basis with high Rhode Island officials, had fast access to a handful of judges in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York, and dealt regularly with politicians in Massachusetts and Rhode Island on legislation or in using them to make overtures to parole boards.
Yet over the life of the bug, which was in his office from 1962 to 1965, the political contacts didn’t yield Patriarca many tangible results. He worked mightily to get extra racing dates for a Massachusetts track he and others had a hidden interest in, even putting $225,000 in an escrow account for payment to legislators when the deal was signed by the governor—but the legislation was just too flagrant to fly. He also persistently sought the early release of his favorite tough guy, Zannino, but Massachusetts prosecutors put too much heat on the parole board to get that done, even with the winsome, redoubtable governor’s councilor, Patrick “Sonny” McDonough, on the case. Patriarca and McDonough had a secret meeting in Boston on the parole issue to no avail.
In Boston, the lower tier of authority belonged to Angiulo, where he followed the maxim that all politics is local. He cultivated Boston police wherever he could with the limited objective of protecting his gambling networks from raids that cost him money and manpower.
Building on traditional access to Boston police, Angiulo had strengthened the network greatly in a short time. A little over a decade after Lombardo gave him a half-hearted go-ahead to run some Boston gambling while the heat was on, Angiulo’s police pad included Carl Larson, a major in the state police, and Herbert Mulloney, a high-ranking officer in the Boston police department. One of the FBI summaries had Angiulo moaning about Mulloney returning a $500 Christmas envelope to an East Boston mobster as insufficient funds. Angiulo reported the hold-out got Mulloney $1,000, along with $2,500 he had already received from the North End. Mulloney worked in the department for ten more years, retiring in 1973 to become a security consultant. He died in 1985. Unlike Larson, there were not widespread suspicions about Mulloney while he was on the force. He was viewed by state police as an effective cop who happened to be soft on gambling.
Major Larson was a different proposition. He sought Angiulo out as his Revere contretemps became known in police circles through informants. Larson apparently saw it as a chance to increase his retainer, agreeing to tip Angiulo about pending state police raids there. Angiulo said Larson called his brother Nicolo with the proposition and that Jerry jumped at it, telling Patriarca that he would pay Larson $200 a month to get protection for a crap game he owned in Revere. Angiulo called Larson a “cute s.o.b.” who would only agree to final details in a face-to-face meeting with him at a house of a friend of his in Newton. Larson set up the meeting for 5:30 P.M. by calling Nick and saying only “Hiya. Will that guy be around tonight?” “Yes” meant the meeting was on.
When the meeting took place, Angiulo also asked for protection for a three-nights-a-week crap game in Chelsea for $500 a month and the transfer of a state policeman, who was the brother of a Boston bookie, to the intelligence division that developed information on organized crime.
One rare public manifestation of the Angiulo family’s cozy relationship with the Boston police occurred when Jerry’s mother Giovannina died in 1975 at the age of eighty-two. With the district deputy superintendent directing traffic in uniform, a forty-seven-car procession wound its way through the North End. Four patrolmen on motorcycles escorted the hearse and mourners, which included twenty-nine underworld figures from four states, to the cemetery. The deputy superintendent was reassigned out of the North End following the funeral and ensuing publicity.
In addition to police connections, the other major element in Angiulo’s burgeoning wealth was his unprecedented exploitation of so-called suckers, the non-Mafia employees who took most of the risks and did much of the dirty work. Summaries of conversations secretly recorded in Patriarca’s office in the 1960s and the FBI transcripts from Prince Street in the 1980s paint a portrait of a merciless mercenary who used people and threw them away.
And it was not just suckers who had to worry about being ripped off. In July 1963, when the mafioso owner of a Revere nightclub was shot, Angiulo told Patriarca in a recorded conversation that he went to the hospital and talked to one of the man’s sons. Although the mobster recovered, the son had told Angiulo that it looked like his father was going to die. Angiulo said he considered going to the man’s home with an associate and robbing it while his family was at the hospital, the implication being that the nightclub owner owed Angiulo money anyway.
His pursuit of money was nothing short of predatory. FBI agents overhead the following exchange at Jay’s Lounge in the 1960s when the death of an old-time Boston mobster was reported to Angiulo by an underling. At first, it appeared Angiulo was shocked and grief-stricken. He can’t be dead, Angiulo exclaimed. But he is, the foot soldier said. Jerry then ordered his man to call the hospital to make sure. The soldier balked, saying only family members can get patient information. “Then tell em you’re a member of the family.... He can’t be fuckin’ dead. He owes me $14,000.”
Even his own family was not completely safe from his cut-throat greed. Angiulo and his younger brother Danny once battled so vehemently over property that listening FBI agents just waited for guns to go off.
“You gonna kill me?” Angiulo angrily challenged Danny on one of the brother’s rare visits to 98 Prince Street.
“Kill you for what?” responded Danny, who was a brutal loanshark enforcer and the toughest brother in the family.
“Kill me, you cocksucker.... You’re the guy who does all that,” said Jerry
“You’re fucking right I do,” responded Danny, referring to Jerry’s failure to “earn his bones,” or kill someone to become a “made” Mafia member.
“Go ahead, what are you waiting for?” Jerry needled.
“You ain’t worth it,” said Danny wearily, ending the rancor for the moment.
Just one small window on the family wealth emerged in the 1980s when federal agents found that the Angiulos were using a local bank contact to illegally launder cash in amounts over $10,000. Between 1979 and 1983, the two Angiulo holding companies, Huntington Realty and Federal Investments, obtained more than $7 million in cashier’s checks from the Bank of Boston, with more than $2 million of the checks purchased with cash in amounts above $10,000 apiece. These should have been reported to the IRS and were not because the family had managed to get itself put on an exempt list for large transactions.
But on the street, away from the high finance, only Nick Angiulo seemed to have any real rapport with the rank and file. He would be there with solace or money when they were arrested or sent off to jail. He saw to it that families got some cash each week while the breadwinners were behind bars, paying the price for gambling raids. While Nick worked at building morale, Jerry would have none of it. There was no sympathy or concern from Jerry for “suckers” doing time. And if there was a hint that these underpaid men might talk, his solution was simple: kill them.
From the beginning, he was hard-hearted and utilitarian. His view was crystalized in a conversation with his brothers that was bugged by the FBI in 1981 in the aftermath of a massive gambling raid. Fussing about having to pay troops when they went off to jail for refusing to implicate the Angiulos, he told his cohorts that spending eighteen months in jail was the least the lower-level workers could do. “You know something,” he said. “We sent suckers to do eighteen. We gave ’em $300 a week and all they used to get was $90 to go pick up one envelope and you know most of them come out and they were all fucking rich.... If they can’t do eighteen fucking months, they don’t belong around here anyway That’s my opinion.”
This rapacious sentiment was the main reason that Boston, under Angiulo, became both bonanza and rat’s nest. It may have made the most money per capita of Mafia cities, but it also had the highest number of informers. Single-handedly Angiulo had turned Boston into one of the most lucrative—and dangerous—places for the Mafia to operate in the country.
Jerry’s self-interest was evident from the start. As often as not, when he made his biweekly trips to Providence to deliver his tribute, the agenda included some trouble in the ranks caused by the prickly, expansion-minded underboss from Boston. As events unfolded, it became clear that Angiulo was quick to move on another man’s turf, pick a fight, and then scurry down to Providence as the injured party. The issue was usually who pulled the fast one here: Jerry or the other guy. In the few years between Angiulo getting sanctioned as Boston leader and his opening the Combat Zone lounge in 1961, he got giddy with power. He began strutting around with a bodyguard like Frank Sinatra prowling through a Vegas casino at three in the morning, just looking for someone to displease him.
When the feds began to play catch-up in the early 1960s, the first trouble for the Angiulos came from the IRS, which attached some of their property held by a real-estate trust—a claim the family has apparently never had to satisfy. Despite the family’s millions, there is no discharge of a federal tax lien for $262,000 filed in 1967. Criminal charges of tax fraud were skirted largely through the destruction of records and the Angiulos seemed home free—until Jerry lost his temper. He slapped an IRS agent with two bodyguards present and had to serve a month in jail for it—the first time he was incarcerated in fifteen years of hustling bets and numbers.
He now had a potentate’s persona and was getting difficult to live with, both in Providence and at home. He was divorced in 1963, with allegations in court that he beat his wife. For much of the 1960s, he was in and out of hot water with Patriarca for making waves in the Boston gambling scene. By that time, he had moved from Medford to a two-story Tudor home in the exclusive East Point section of Nahant, a jewel of a house overlooking the water. It had a kidney-shaped swimming pool and a back lawn that swept to the sea and it was right around the corner from the church where one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s sons got married in 1938.
He had become Little Caesar, a short, scrappy satrap who used his mercurial mind as a weapon in a world of slow-witted brutes. His rapid rise, based on business acumen and moxie, left him preening his feathers and hopelessly insecure, especially about his physical prowess in the ultimate land of machismo. He came to demand absolute fealty to head off even a glimmer of disrespect, which was much worse than bad form—
it undermined his self-image as infallible tycoon. Jerry Angiulo was perhaps more conscious of his image than most politicians and movie stars. The only restraint in his life was Raymond Patriarca.
Always on stage, always conscious of being watched, Angiulo, particularly in his court appearances, was a poser who would glare at jurors, berate his lawyers, study notes with affected interest. One state investigator who worked the Mafia beat for decades has concluded all mafiosi are actors, even the dees and doses guys, playing out a bad movie in which real people get hurt. “I haven’t met a wiseguy yet,” said the detective, “who wasn’t an actor. When they go to prison and they’re doing time they have one goal—to get out. They meet with the sociologist and they pick up the buzz words and then when they go before the parole board, they use all those phrases. The person listening thinks they’ve learned something about themselves. They’ve learned how to act. That’s how they intimidate and control. Jerry with his ranting and raving—that’s part of an act. He wasn’t that tough a guy. He’s an actor.”
Angiulo performed regularly for Patriarca—and occasionally wore out his welcome. Several times in the three years of the Patriarca office bug, Raymond had to pacify high-level mobsters livid at the heavy-handed abuse they got from Angiulo after he decided he had been cheated or had not been shown proper respect. At one point, Patriarca was ready to throw Angiulo to the wolves over a vicious argument Angiulo initiated with the sons of an old rival of Patriarca’s from Worcester. They were all in a country club in central Massachusetts and Jerry had decided he was getting cheated. He resorted to profane name-calling so infuriating and humiliating that the brothers went to Patriarca seeking permission to kill Angiulo. Next time it happens, Patriarca told them, you can kill him with my blessing. Angiulo was summoned to Providence the next week and given the hard facts—he apologized profusely to the still smarting brothers.