by Dick Lehr
The other blunder around this time was vintage Angiulo. He had a headstrong encounter with a major Jewish gambler from Brookline who, apparently unknown to Angiulo, had strong ties to the Genovese family and was involved in large-scale odds-making and layoff networks across the country. He was a major leaguer not to be trifled with. But Angiulo trampled over some of the Brookline bettor’s prerogatives in Revere, clashing over loan-shark debts. It sullied an older, stronger allegiance of Patriarca’s and he moved against Angiulo immediately, summoning both men down to Providence for a formal hearing after the conflict was brought to his attention by elder statesman Joe Lombardo.
It all started when the Jewish gambler walked into Jay’s Lounge demanding rather than requesting to see Jerry over the Revere matter. Angiulo was not there, but several of his associates were present when the Brookline man banged the door on the way out. Angiulo was wild and, in a puerile tit-for-tat, sent one of his brothers and his bodyguard, Peter Limone, to the gambler’s hangout, where they mouthed off in profane and prejudiced epithets. The ground rules set by Patriarca telegraphed the outcome: Angiulo was not to holler, swear, or abuse the Jewish gambler. Each would make his case and Patriarca would then retire to make a decision. The final decree was “let the Jew be” and the word was soon out in Revere that Angiulo had been rebuked.
The telling difference between the two top leaders was crystalized in their contrasting grand jury appearances in the mid-1960s, when authorities were probing whether there really was a Mafia at work in New England.
On a fall day in 1963, Patriarca outfoxed the waiting press corps at the Providence courthouse by pulling into a parking lot alone in a Volkswagen, not the Cadillac the reporters were all expecting. He slipped in a back door and then chastised the prosecutor for besmirching his good name. He told his underlings back at the office that he took “the ball” away from the assistant district attorney immediately. He said he denied he was part of La Cosa Nostra and complained that his family was suffering needlessly from all the foolish talk, that his son had been forced to drop out of the University of Rhode Island and that his wife had enough trouble with cancer. On the way out, he was spotted and simply stared his famous stare of deep disdain at the photographers before driving away alone. The grand jury report said there was no evidence of organized crime in Rhode Island, though some gambling did occur here and there from time to time.
A year later in Boston, Angiulo and his brother were summoned to a grand jury with a similar purpose. Jerry arrived with a retinue and high-priced lawyer and played to the media crowd awaiting the underboss’s appearance. He jousted with photographers, who kept their distance. “What do you think we are, monsters or something?” He jawed with the newsmen the way he did with FBI agents he spotted in North End restaurants or on the street. He lingered in the spotlight that Patriarca ducked.
Angiulo agreed to pose for a television cameraman. He took off his glasses, removed the cigarette from his mouth, adjusted his tie, and dusted off his blue suit. “My tie straight?” he asked jocularly. “Wait’ll I say something to make me smile ... cheese, cheese.” He stopped suddenly with a look of concern. Does that thing have sound? he asked the cameraman. Assured it did not, he resumed his chant of “Cheese, cheese, cheese” as his brothers huddled with the lawyer in a corner. “Wait a minute,” was his final instruction. “If you are going to take my picture, take my good side.”
Angiulo was in the catbird seat in the early sixties, his gambling empire now firmly entrenched in the North End, West End, East Boston, and parts of Revere, Roxbury, and the South End. Independents in and around Boston paid escalating tithes to get strongarm men off their backs and to get access to Patriarca’s monopoly over racing results and layoff banks. The Angiulo gambling network had followed the exodus of Italians to such bedroom communities as Medford, Watertown, Waltham, and Newton.
A COUPLE of months after Jerry Angiulo hammed it up for the Boston press at the courthouse, Marine Lieutenant Ed Quinn came home to Dorchester from Cherry Point, North Carolina, for Christmas leave. He had six months left to serve and not a clue about what he was going to do with the rest of his life. The first night home, a new neighbor came over for a drink. He turned out to be an FBI agent and, with Arthur Quinn smiling over his shoulder, talked to Ed about the bureau. He was back the next day and they talked some more. The agent left an application behind. “Why not?” Quinn thought as he headed back to North Carolina. It had stirred his sense of duty.
4
Catch Up
It is better to die on your feet, than to live on your knees,
and know your concepts are sound,
Than to try to run, hide and scurry, out of fear, of the dirt,
the earth and the ground.
The crude couplet from “Boston’s Gang War” was penned by Joseph Barboza, a beefy, sleepy-eyed executioner for the Boston Mafia who almost brought Jerry Angiulo down. The poem was his macho motto—and self-imposed death sentence.
Born to a Portuguese family in the Massachusetts fishing port of New Bedford, Barboza was part of the Boston underworld’s caste system, one of the highly expendable “suckers”—non-Mafia employees who were routinely exploited by the Angiulos. They were quasi-wiseguys who got the dirty work and were packed off to jail with false camaraderie and $300 a month—if they were lucky. Sometimes, to eliminate any chance of prosecution, the sucker was killed after carrying out a difficult murder contract. No witness, no problem. For close to a decade, the high-flying Angiulo had used such men and thrown them away.
But Joe Barboza was different, and he tried to explain why. The poem, one of many, was his groping way of saying his pride was more important than his life and that, if double-crossed, he would take on the mob, regardless of the odds. Barboza was transformed by Mafia treachery into an informant who began talking with the same zeal that motivated him when he murdered people—to be the best. He’d killed more than twenty foes for the Mafia, and when he finally switched sides to become the government’s hit man, he wanted to go all the way: knock off the entire Mafia leadership, from Angiulo in Boston to Patriarca in Providence.
In law enforcement’s first major go-round with the leaders of New England’s underworld, Barboza ended the Mafia’s free ride. Before Barboza “flipped” in 1967, no one had laid a glove on the wily Angiulo. The 1963 congressional hearings in Washington, D.C., featuring Joe Valachi’s testimony—along with the intelligence gathered from secret buggings of various mafiosi around the country, including Angiulo in Boston and Patriarca in Providence—only served to document how far law enforcement had to go. Until then, they’d simply established that the Mafia was a tight, ruthless organization that had been prospering just below the surface of society for thirty years.
In the early 1960s, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, drawing on his years as a labor racketeering investigator for a Senate subcommittee, forced the FBI to shift its emphasis from Communist infiltration to the Mafia. The change could be measured in numbers. The New York office of the bureau went from four agents working on La Cosa Nostra in 1959 to one hundred and fifty by 1962. The FBI office in Boston was not any different, establishing its first Organized Crime Squad in the early 1960s, with Dennis Condon, a hometown product from Charlestown who’d mostly worked on bank robberies, being the first Boston agent handed the ticket on Gennaro Angiulo. He teamed up with another veteran agent, the dapper and coldly pragmatic H. Paul Rico.
The reaction by law enforcement coincided with Angiulo’s emergence from a decade in the city’s shadows. He found himself suddenly thrust onto the main stage, publicly identified as underboss. From then on, any mention of his name carried the tag, “reputed Mafia boss.” But he hardly suffered from all the exposure; he sailed through the early part of the decade, expanding his empire by fueling the self-destructive penchant of the Irish gangs and ducking the escalating interest lawmen had in him. By 1965, the best thing federal authorities had gotten on the crafty mafioso had been the assault of an I
RS agent who dared to question him on Thatcher Street in the North End. Angiulo first told Patriarca he would fight the charge by paying fake eyewitnesses for false testimony. But he eventually cooled off and copped a plea that netted him a mere thirty days.
Condon, other FBI agents, and state and city police were scrambling in those days to devise strategies to penetrate the Angiulo sanctuary as well as to control the region’s sudden surge in Irish gangland violence that had started in August 1960 when one gang member insulted the wife of a rival gang member after drinking beer all day at Salisbury Beach. The back alleys of Somerville and Charlestown became battlegrounds, with the death toll hitting double figures in the early 1960s and rising exponentially. At first the underworld chaos was encouraged by Angiulo as something he could exploit to his benefit. But things were getting out of control and Raymond Patriarca was threatening to “declare martial law” in Boston. Angiulo had fueled a fire he couldn’t put out.
He thought his main problem was Patriarca’s disenchantment with high visibility mayhem. But, without Angiulo knowing it, his true nemesis became the old school tandem of agents Rico and Condon. They were the original “fight fire with fire” brigade who knew how to play down and dirty. They joined forces with Joseph “The Animal” Barboza, a contract killer for the Mafia, who was willing to stretch the truth to settle scores against Mafiosi who had turned on him.
One typical victim was a middle-aged burglar named Teddy Deegan, who in March 1965 was ambushed and gunned down in an alley in Chelsea in the middle of the night. But not all the victims were Irish—in June the next year, the corpse of ex-boxer and wiseguy Rocco DiSeglio was found slumped in the front seat of a car abandoned in the suburban town of Topsfield, north of the city. DiSeglio had been shot three times in the head. He was quickly dubbed the thirty-second gang victim. There were few leads.
Not much the feds tried seemed to be working. The FBI had been gathering plenty of inside information that provided the bureau with its first sketches of the Mafia structure in Boston, but most of what they got was simply information, not evidence that could be used in court. They tried raiding the gambling operations on a regular basis, but the tactic was only a small bother to the mobsters, simply driving the Angiulos farther into the recesses of their North End neighborhood and causing the family to become even more subterranean.
It seemed that the harder the FBI tried to penetrate Angiulo’s world, the more elusive the mobster became. Early in 1965, Boston police hauled him in along with several other suspected mob leaders to question them about the gangland war, but the cops had nothing on Angiulo. He refused to answer any questions and, by dawn, was back on the street.
The strategy that finally produced some results was getting mobsters to turn on the organization. The FBI had detected a dent in the Mafia’s armor: the growing number of unhappy “suckers.” Angiulo and Patriarca had sent legions of these characters onto the front line, encouraging them to think they were big shots—until it no longer served their interests.
Starting in late 1966, Condon and Rico sealed a deal with Barboza, the most ferocious of the Mafia’s standing army of freelance killers.
In the end, Barboza became the best of the bunch. He was Boston’s Joe Valachi—an inside guy who told all, with the added punch of firsthand accounts of specific crimes, such as the murders of Teddy Deegan and Rocco DiSeglio. The FBI made a decision to not play fair with its new weapon, the brutal Barboza. The agents redirected the jilted Frankenstein against Mafia leaders, creating a courtroom contract killer—a lethal witness who implicated higher ups with little regard for the truth. Ironically, Barboza only heightened Angiulo’s aura of invincibility. When all was said and done, the bob-and-weave Angiulo was the only targeted top Mafia leader the informant could not convict—with truth or lies.
Even so, the backstage FBI alliance with Barboza foreshadowed grave problems in the Boston office, where a dangerous tradition was building to protect informants at all costs. In the 1960s, Rico and Condon played such favorites with Barboza and another informant—Vincent “Jimmy the Bear” Flemmi—that they let Barboza implicate innocent men for the Deegan murder carried out by Barboza and Flemmi. The agents stood by as Barboza testified falsely that the murder was arranged by Peter Limone, an Angiulo bodyguard, and sanctioned by Henry Tameleo, Patriarca’s right hand man. Despite FBI files that exonerated both men, Limone went to prison for more than thirty years, and Tameleo died behind bars.
THE MAFIA liked what it saw when it first recruited Barboza during the mid—1950s, when the young tough guy was serving yet another state prison term. A second-generation Portuguese-American, Barboza had gotten a head start in crime as the son of a two-bit boxer and convict who drank, chased women, and abandoned his wife and four kids when Joe was twelve.
From the beginning, Barboza was like a rewed-up Chevy: always running others off the road, burning rubber, causing havoc, and leaving tracks wherever he went. He slugged anyone or anything that got in his way At age thirteen, he and his older brother were arrested after a spree of vandalism—knocking out signals on the streetcar system in New Bedford. By 1949, the seventeen-year-old led a gang that broke into homes and small businesses, stealing money watches, liquor, and guns. At some of the restaurants the gang burglarized, police found pastry cream dripping from the ceiling. The food fights provided the Barboza gang with a nickname, Cream Puff Bandits, and revealed a leader still straddling the fence between being a kid and a killer.
The hardening came with hard time. Sentenced to the Concord Reformatory for five years in 1950, Barboza led a wild break-out in the summer of 1953 that was the largest in the prison’s seventy-five-year history. Barboza and six others, having guzzled whiskey and popped uppers, overpowered four guards and raced away in two cars. They beat up people, cruised the bars in Boston’s Scollay Square, wandered to Lynn and Revere, and were finally nabbed at a subway station in East Boston. The party lasted barely twenty-four hours.
“I don’t remember much about the escape,” was the party line a hung-over Barboza gave to police. It was the first time the public got a hard look at the muscular convict, whose dark, wavy hair, deep-set eyes, and thick lips were the prominent features of his oversize head. “I was drunk—drunk from capsules and liquor. I’m not going to tell you where I got the stuff, but I had goofballs and liquor the day of the escape.” That November, awaiting trial for the prison break, Barboza slugged a guard in the prison cafeteria. Three months later, he was at it again. He greeted a guard entering his cell with a table to the guard’s chest.
The prison escape earned Barboza a stay at Walpole, the maximum security prison. It was there that the Mafia took an interest in the surly convict, and it was for the Mafia that he mostly worked after his parole in 1958. Barboza did some boxing too, worked as a dockhand, even as a clerk in a fruit store, but he excelled at killing. He was a fixture in East Boston, particularly in a bar at the corner of Bennington and Brooks streets, which became known among wiseguys as Barboza’s Corner. He never became a Mafia soldier—his ethnicity barred that—but within eight years, during the escalation of the gangland war, he earned a reputation as one of the state’s real killers.
He also earned his nickname—Animal. The episode behind that name occurred at a Revere club popular with mafiosi, particularly Henry Tameleo, a powerful underworld figure who served as adviser to Raymond Patriarca. Barboza was at the club drinking and carrying on when an older Italian patron who did not enjoy Barboza’s crude behavior told him so. Barboza approached the man and slapped him hard across the face. Tameleo, seated not far away, shouted angrily, “I don’t want you ever to slap that man. I don’t want you to touch anybody with your hands again.” Barboza, brooding at the bar, suddenly leaned over and bit the man’s ear. “I didn’t touch him with my hands,” he snarled at Tameleo. Later, Barboza took revenge for the rebuke by falsely implicating Tameleo in the Deegan murder.
By January 1966, Barboza was big-time—often representing him now was the fam
ous criminal lawyer F. Lee Bailey But he was also facing big troubles. The law was constantly on his heels. For disturbing the peace one night at the same Revere nightclub, where he slugged a detective, Barboza received a six-month sentence.
More ominous, however, was his increasingly shaky position in the underworld. Before the nightclub debacle, he’d been shot at while standing outside his home in Chelsea. Police believed there’d been other attempts. Someone wanted him dead, and the headstrong Barboza wasn’t helping matters. Brimming with reckless power, he was having trouble playing by the Mafia’s rules. One time he’d gone into a nightclub on Stuart Street in Boston, where the owner paid Angiulo for protection, and told the owner to make payments to him too. The word on the street was that Mr. Angiulo wasn’t pleased.
By mid-1966, the unrelenting attention Barboza got from the law only made his standing in the outfit more tenuous. He’d become the rope in a tug-of-war between law enforcement officials who were trying to nail the killer and an underworld trying to shield itself. But if Barboza had any lingering doubts about his fall from Mafia grace, they had disappeared by October. He’d worn out his stay with Angiulo and Patriarca, and the moment he was back in police custody the two let go of their end of the rope.
Barboza himself realized this in early October 1966, after he and three local hoods were picked up on weapons charges while cruising the Combat Zone in Boston. In their car, police found an army M-I rifle, a loaded 45-caliber automatic pistol, and a knife. Once again, the law had enough to tie up Barboza’s time. The others were released on a low bail, but Barboza’s was set at $100,000, and the Animal couldn’t post it.