The Underboss

by Dick Lehr

  Barboza enlisted the other four defendants in the murder plot. The group succeeded as far as Deegan was concerned, but bungled an attempt to whack out a Deegan compatriot who was with Deegan the night of the murder. The man escaped and became a witness to corroborate Barboza.

  In the end, Barboza’s impressive performance was deeply flawed. While two of the three trials resulted in guilty verdicts that altered the underworld’s topography, one of them lay heavily on the fault line of false testimony The resounding public victory in convicting New England Mafia leader Patriarca more than obscured evidence in hidden FBI files about who really committed the Deegan murder. In 1968, the box score showed just the “Wins” and not the sorry story of suborned perjury and FBI collusion with the chief witness. Thirty years after the fact, the real scorecard in the Deegan trial showed four men falsely imprisoned. Two of them, including Tameleo, died in jail. And two, including Limone, were released after spending time on death row and three decades behind bars. It all came to light when the FBI’s misuse of informants in Boston was investigated by a special federal task force. Investigators found sealed records that revealed the bureau knew who murdered Jimmy Deegan at the time it happened—Barboza and another informant, Vincent Flemmi. The FBI was protecting Flemmi and accomodating another snitch, Flemmi’s younger brother, Stevie, who was on his own way to gangland infamy as the leader of Boston’s Irish gang with Whitey Bulger.

  But, for Angiulo, the Barboza broadside required some line-up changes. The loss of Limone led him to forge a stronger alliance with Larry Zannino, the brutal Capo de Regime who had already done a four-year state prison term for operating a “pay or die” loansharking ring. Zannino, born a year after Angiulo, was a favorite of Patriarca’s. He rose to the top through sheer ferocity, not guile. Although he was born in the North End, like Angiulo, he moved at an early age to the heavily Italian town of Franklin, on the Rhode Island border. There his career took shape. Patriarca came to like Zannino’s “can do” efficiency. The dirty jobs got done on time and there were never any excuses. The money was delivered or the legs were broken.

  Zannino moved to the South End of Boston in the late 1930s, where his specialty was collecting loanshark debts. Both he and Angiulo cut their teeth in the underworld at the same time, progressing in different career paths in the forties and fifties. While Jerry worked the numbers racket in the North End and South End, first as a clerk in Joe Lombardo’s office and then as majordomo for Patriarca, Zannino ascended from street tough to dominant enforcer, extorting small businesses and banging heads all over town.

  Had Angiulo not been such an impressive profit-maker, Zannino might have become the boss in Boston. But by the late 1960s the two were an item, and it was a pairing that worked. For fifteen years both men ruled the region, a formidable blend of brains and brawn.

  In those years, one of the major pieces of business the Boston brass took up was the Barboza matter. Even though Angiulo had walked away a free man, and Zannino had never even been dragged into the mess, the two were the point men in the Mafia’s patient pursuit of the turncoat.

  Having testified in 1968 in three Mafia trials—all within six months—Barboza’s legal problems eased. He pleaded guilty to conspiring to murder Teddy Deegan and, in return for cooperating with authorities, was given a one-year prison term to run concurrently with the year still remaining for possessing weapons. In March 1969, he was paroled on the provision he leave Massachusetts forever, an informant who had helped to initiate what is today a vast government witness protection program.

  Barboza, however, could not lie low. The hitman was given a new identity and relocated in California, but within a year he’d killed an unemployed mechanic in a dispute over stolen securities. By late 1971, he was on trial in California for murder, amid reports that the Mafia had a $300,000 contract out for his life. Barboza pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to five years. It was at Folsom Prison that Barboza wrote the poems portraying the evils of the Mob and his own fearlessness. There was “Boston Gang War,” “The Mafia Double Crosses,” “A Cat’s Lives,” and “The Gang War Ends.”

  But Jerry Angiulo and the men of the Mafia never forget. Barboza, paroled in October 1975, moved into a $250-a-month apartment in San Francisco under the name Joe Donati. The mob was waiting. It knew Barboza’s whereabouts, because a wiseguy from the Boston area named James Chalmas, alias Teddy Sharliss, had been living in California, visiting Barboza in prison and befriending the legendary hit man. Chalmas was even offered $25,000 to do the job himself, but declined.

  Then, less than three months after he was paroled, on February II, 1976, Barboza left Chalmas’ apartment at midday and walked toward his car. Four shotgun blasts were fired from a white van that pulled up next to Barboza. Barboza was carrying a loaded .38-caliber revolver, but never had a chance. He was killed instantly.

  “We clipped Barboza,” Zannino would say five years later, unaware he was being taped secretly—tapes that the government would use to accuse Zannino and Angiulo of ordering the Barboza hit. Retelling the tale of the Barboza murder to his soldiers one night, Zannino described how much he admired the man—J. R. Russo of East Boston—who shot Barboza: “A very brilliant guy ... who stepped right out with the fuckin‘ carbine.... I was with him every fuckin’ day. Him and me discussed everything. Then he had to leave. He made snap decisions. There, he couldn’t get in touch with nobody And he accomplished the whole fuckin’ pot, didn’t he? Am I right?”

  At the time, no one knew exactly who killed Joe Barboza, only that the Mafia had settled its score. The high-noon murder made for front-page headlines, but Barboza’s demise was not widely mourned. Said the Animal’s sometime attorney F. Lee Bailey “With all due respect to my former client, I don’t think society has suffered a great loss.”

  FOR THE FBI in 1969, Barboza’s batting average of 2 for 3 was proof that informant cases could succeed. But for Dennis Condon and the other agents assigned to stalk Boston’s mob leader, Angiulo’s acquittal was a frustrating setback. The North End world was tough to crack and Angiulo was now cockier than ever.

  Angiulo had dodged their best informant, Barboza, so the feds immediately followed with another. In October 1969, Angiulo was indicted in federal court as an accessory after the fact of an armored car stick-up that netted $68,000. The government’s witness—one of the robbers—claimed Angiulo laundered his share of the stolen cash. For $15,000 of the hot cash, Angiulo gave the robber back $11,250.

  The profit margin sounded like an Angiulo transaction, but once again the government had banked on a single informant. The case never even got to the jury, because the judge dismissed the charge after the informant testified. Angiulo, right from the start, seemed to sense an advantage. For the arraignment, he’d worn a custom-tailored charcoal suit, with fabric-covered buttons and black loafers. He acted bored, flipping through a copy of Time magazine while awaiting the bail hearing.

  Angiulo’s slippery reputation was enhanced by yet another courtroom victory He had emerged unscathed from the sixties, and the FBI had exhausted the arsenal of mob informants paraded at a series of criminal trials. Through his money, he had managed to tighten his grip on the region’s independent bookies and loansharks, including dominant Irish gangsters who rose to prominence during the post-gangland war era out of a heap of dead bodies. To maintain a gambling and loan-sharking franchise based in Somerville but extending south to Cape Cod and north into New Hampshire, Howie Winter had to pay the North End and Providence $20,000 weekly. And, because of large gambling debts of his own, Winter wound up $250,000 in debt to Angiulo personally.

  So the bureau shifted its focus to busting up these gambling and loan-shark operations that fed the Mafia leaders. The strategy was one the FBI adopted throughout the country during much of the 1970s—the idea being that by cutting off the Mafia’s tentacles, the underworld organization would lose its life-support system. It was as if the FBI were following the unsolicited advice of Vinnie Teres
a, the loudmouth mobster from Revere, Massachusetts, who in 1971 had testified before a congressional subcommittee. Teresa had counseled that “You’ve got to knock out the agents who are out on the streets.... Just remember the guy in the office can’t operate without the phone ringing from the agent in the street. If you stop the agents and knock them out of business, the phones won’t ring and ... Jerry Angiulo can’t operate.”

  In Boston, countless city state, and federal gambling probes were launched. Bookies and loan sharks were busted, but Angiulo remained out of reach. The Mafia boss often got mentioned in FBI affidavits submitted in the gambling cases, but Angiulo himself was not accused. He drew constant attention from the press—articles that, in flat journalese, underscored the man’s slipperiness. To explain the significance of the Prince Street office, one reporter noted, “The address generally is considered by Federal agents and Boston and state police as the headquarters of Jerry Angiulo and has been the object of numerous investigations for about 15 years.”

  During the summer of 1972, Angiulo was summoned to Washington, D.C., to testify at the latest round of congressional hearings probing organized crime. He refused to answer any questions, which included queries about his ties to Patriarca, about a horse track in western Massachusetts, and about a suspected acquaintance with Frank Sinatra.

  Back home, Angiulo’s name continued to surface during bugging or undercover operations. “Have you ever spoken with Jerry for any length of time?” bookmaker Mike Pellicci once asked a visitor at his Watertown car dealership, which was secretly bugged. “No, because he yells too much,” replied the visitor. The tapes were littered with references to Angiulo, but contained nothing the feds could hang a case on. They got Pellicci, who ran the gambling and loan shark operations for Angiulo in the Watertown-Waltham-Newton area, but Angiulo slipped away again.

  Right after the Pellicci case, the feds busted the man Angiulo assigned to take over Pellicci’s region, William “Skinny” Kazonis. Kazonis was a favorite of Angiulo’s and often drove the boss around. He was sent away after a loan-shark victim, wired with an FBI mike, snared Kazonis and a partner, Joseph “Joe Porter” Patrizzi, as they shook the victim down for his weekly interest payments of $75. Kazonis and Patrizzi got sentences of eight and five years, respectively.

  Then the feds got two other Angiulo loan sharks, including Richard “The Pig” DeVincent, who had been acquitted with Angiulo in the Rocco DiSeglio murder. The Pig was caught threatening to break the legs and use an ice pick on a borrower who’d lapsed in his $28-a-week payments.

  But no one got Jerry Angiulo. He nimbly sidestepped the FBI’s enhanced efforts to nail him, except for another one of those thirty-day jail stays. It took a couple of Coast Guard boatswains to accomplish what the federal agents couldn’t—arrest Gennaro Angiulo and make it stick. Just as in the IRS assault case a decade earlier, this case played off Angiulo’s temper. But while aggravating the mob boss, it hardly crippled him.

  The incident occurred in the spring of 1972, when boaters in Dorchester Bay had complained to the Coast Guard about Angiulo’s handling of his forty-five-foot yacht, Tajaba. Angiulo had a habit of ignoring the smaller boats and cruising the bay and Boston Harbor at speeds that caused huge wakes. On July 4, two guardsmen, Steven Brown and Steven Sacharczyk, spotted the Angiulo cabin cruiser in the inner harbor about 3:00 P.M., creating “excessive wake.” They hailed the Angiulo boat, intending to stop her for a routine check, but Angiulo dismissed the young officers with a wave and sped off. The guardsmen gave chase, flipping on the emergency flashing lights on their seventeen-foot boat, and followed Angiulo for almost three miles to a marina in Dorchester.

  Both boats tied up. Sacharczyk spoke first for the Coast Guard, informing Angiulo he’d caused too big a wake. “What are you, nuts?” Angiulo shouted in front of a small audience of friends who had been partying with him on his yacht. “That’s the ocean out there.”

  The guardsman, ignoring the remark, told Angiulo the large wake had caused havoc among the smaller boats.

  “The other boats shouldn’t be there then.”

  Sacharczyk and Brown, oblivious of Angiulo’s status as Mafia underboss, began inspecting the yacht, which fanned the mobster’s temper. “Who are you, the s.o.b. chief himself?” Angiulo shouted at Brown. Brown offered Angiulo his identification card, but Angiulo scoffed at it. “Who the hell are you to be promoting boat safety? If I had you in my Navy I’d teach you a few things.”

  Brown continued his inspection. “I’ve eaten up guys like you before,” Angiulo screamed. Angiulo was at the officer’s ear. “You do anything about this, I’ll have your job. Your life will be miserable.”

  Three violations were written up: failure to stop, failure to carry the boat’s registration, and continued harassment of the boarding officer. Brown handed Angiulo the citation and headed for his Coast Guard craft. Angiulo treated the citation as trash; he crumpled it and threw it aside.

  Brown, having bent over to untie the stern line of his boat, stood up and found Angiulo facing him, no more than four inches away his mouth yapping: “Walk around me, you son of a bitch. Don’t you ever speak to me again, you son of a bitch. Take the violation and stick it.” Angiulo then shoved the twenty-nine-year-old guardsman.

  “You’re under arrest for assaulting a federal officer,” said Brown.

  Angiulo howled in protest. From a second boat at the marina, jammed with about twenty of the mobster’s friends, came a flurry of derisive comments. Brown, worried about the numerical disadvantage, called for help from the Registry of Motor Vehicle’s harbor boat and the police. Brown and his mate then retreated from the marina, rendezvoused with the Registry boat, and returned to face Angiulo. Brown yanked out a Miranda card and began reading Angiulo his rights. The reading only triggered a fresh round of profanities. “Shut up and listen,” Brown said.

  After spending the night of July 4 in a police lockup, Angiulo was arraigned in federal court on the assault charge. The hearing drew a surprising number of federal agents—from the FBI, IRS, and the Justice and Treasury departments. They filled up several rows in the courtroom. “Brown had done what lawmen would give their handcuff tieclasps to accomplish,” noted one reporter sardonically “He’d arrested Gennaro Angiulo.”

  Angiulo missed the irony “I listened to the sailor testify and 90 percent of the allegations are untrue, especially the suppositions of an assault,” he complained after the arraignment, adding bitterly that the charge “was concocted on the 9th,” a reference to the FBI office on the ninth floor of the John F. Kennedy Federal Building.

  His organization took the matter seriously too. During jury selection, Salvatore Limone, brother of Peter Limone, summoned one juror to the back room of the bar the Limones owned in the fishing town of Gloucester, north of Boston. “We want you to vote not guilty,” Limone advised the juror. “We thinks the guy is framed.” Limone went on to explain that his brother Peter, who was serving a life sentence for the Deegan murder, was very close to Angiulo. “My brother would consider it a favor. I would consider it a favor.”

  But Limone got caught and convicted, as did Angiulo, following a one-day trial on the assault charge on May 9, 1973. Just before Thanksgiving in 1974-after a retrial and a failed appeal—Angiulo surrendered to serve his thirty days. In many respects, the Coast Guard tangle had provided a kind of comic relief in the crusade against Angiulo, but it also highlighted how little ground the FBI had gained in its more than ten-year chase of the North End Mafia leader.

  None of this was lost on FBI agent John Morris, the former Army MP who’d once chatted with a government witness named Barboza and was now part of the Boston bureau’s organized crime squad. Morris and another agent, Jim Vaules, were among the younger guys on the squad. Morris had even inherited the ticket on the Angiulo case from the veteran Dennis Condon, who was preparing to retire from the FBI. Morris was troubled by the bureau’s record, which had nibbled away at Angiulo, netting Pellicci, Kazonis, Peter Limone, an
d the Pig, but never landing the man himself, failing even with a snarling Joe Barboza. He saw a frustrating mindset among some of the other agents—agents who had tried a bunch of different ways to close in on Angiulo only to find themselves going around in circles. It was as if each failure provided yet another shred of proof to support the popular wisdom that Angiulo was simply too crafty and too well insulated in the North End to ever be apprehended. The FBI had had countless wiretaps and bugs on Angiulo operatives that were rich in hearsay and inside information but never yielded the direct, criminal link to the boss.

  Morris and Vaules brainstormed constantly, meeting with informants and examining any possible openings they might exploit in the Angiulo fortress. One of those sessions occurred in 1975, the year Patriarca went home after spending six years behind bars. The conviction had been a big one, but everyone in law enforcement knew that the mafioso’s outfit barely skipped a beat in his absence. Patriarca ran the family from prison, having provided for continuity in his underworld operations and for relaying messages when his word was required to resolve a particular problem.

  To Morris, six years wasn’t enough—they had to really put these guys away But more to the point—meaning his target, Angiulo—Morris believed that if the FBI could get to Angiulo it could thoroughly disrupt his rackets. Angiulo was not a good administrator, not the way Patriarca was. Angiulo hadn’t provided for any kind of continuity; he didn’t trust anyone and demanded total control. It’s what helped preserve him, but, if the FBI could ever catch him, it would also create permanent havoc in Boston. With this going on in their minds, Morris, Vaules, and one of the squad’s best informants considered once again the major hurdle they faced—Angiulo’s insulation. Few in the underworld had access to the Mafia boss, and those who did, saw him at the impenetrable Prince Street office.