by Dick Lehr
In the end, Morris decided the best way to eliminate the possibility entirely was to keep Debbie away from the other agents. Until just a few months before they actually began trying to crack the Mafia headquarters, Morris had had her working out of the FBI office in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, rather than Boston.
The obsession with identification didn’t end with her. The locksmith and technical personnel who were needed to install the bugs had been flown in from Washington for each entry attempt. Even Quinn, the leader of the break-in crews, had tried to stay out of the North End.
For Richard, the only drawback in all the beguiling talk about this mission of a lifetime was the Boston weather. She hated the cold and cursed repeatedly as she stood in the cold side street with Quinn and the locksmith, trying to outlast the guys lingering on the corner of Prince on the night of the first try. “I shoulda worn my woolie undies,” she cracked.
Quinn smiled, appreciating Richard’s spunk. Then he led the others out of the alley, but the three guys were stuck on the corner. “Hey, guys,” Richard called down the street. “Where’s the party? I think we got the wrong address.” All that came back was some hoarse chuckling. The agents retreated up Snow Hill, acting as if they were calling it a night. Once out of sight, Quinn contacted Morris by radio.
The crew chief had been waiting anxiously in his car with Kennedy; and more than fifteen other agents, scattered around in cars, lookout vans, and on foot, had all been on hold. Quinn told his boss the bad news—too much foot traffic at the bottom of Snow Hill. There were three guys who gave Quinn a bad feeling. Morris checked his watch, talked with Quinn, and after a few more minutes, the trio tried again. Again, they were stymied. The face-off went on for an hour before the tired agents, wary of an approaching dawn, called it a night.
So the first break-in attempt had ended in a stalemate. It was a setback that took a little bit of punch out of the usually steady squad leader. But their second try a few days later had been even worse than the first—because the screw-up was the FBI’s own fault. It was beginning to seem that, for each step forward, Morris and his squad took two steps backward.
In the second attempt, Quinn’s team did not even make it out of the drop-off car. Morris had made his final round of radio checks before sending Quinn off, to ensure that everyone was in position. But he had heard nothing back from one pair of agents. He tried again. Still nothing.
The marching orders he’d given for the mission had been to stay off the radios as much as possible. Again, the concern was security. The FBI knew the Angiulos kept a police scanner on constantly in their Prince Street office. There was always the chance some mobster would pick up the FBI talk.
Morris worried about this possibility even though his agents talked in code. Jerry Angiulo, for example, who was originally dubbed “Captain,” was now known as the “Maitre d’.” Morris ordered the change because he worried the first nickname was actually a tip off, since Jerry was so fond of boating. The other code names were nautical—Nick was “XO,” short for executive officer; Danny was “First Mate”; Frank was “Spotter”; Mikey was “Seaman”; and Jerry’s son Jason was “Disco.” They renamed all of the key streets in the North End, calling Prince Street “Broadway”
The problem was being overheard at all—the Mafia eavesdropper may not understand what was being discussed, but he would know something was up. Morris had always stressed: Stay off the air. But unable to raise the two agents in a routine check, Morris called the agents traveling the other streets surrounding the North End, such as Commercial Street, known as “Sponsor,” or North Washington Street, known as “President’s Way” Has anybody seen them? he asked. Anybody heard from them?
No, was the answer.
He and Kennedy exchanged looks, but neither mentioned any of the thoughts that began racing through both their minds.
Listening to a distant police siren wailing in the night, Kennedy feared the agents had been mugged or stabbed, knowing from his years of stalking the North End that the agents’ lookout spot, Snow Hill, was not in the safest section of the neighborhood. There had been a rash of muggings on that isolated and dark part of the hill, where drug deals were also known to go down.
Morris’s first fear was carbon monoxide. All of his men had been out in their cars for hours in the frigid night. To stay warm, the agents had probably kept their engine running, and they could have been breathing poisonous fumes all this time. Even worse, Morris worried in a brief capitulation to paranoia, was the possibility that Jerry Angiulo, having somehow acquired an inside track on the FBI’s movements, had ordered his soldiers to kidnap the agents.
Morris put everything on hold. No movement toward the Angiulo office until all the agents could be accounted for. He radioed Jack Cloherty and John Connolly, who patrolled the North End periphery in another “roving” car. Their assignment was to be ready to distract any unexpected visitors to the 98 Prince Street area such as a milkman, maybe a city cop, even one of the Angiulos. The way Cloherty saw it, he and Connolly were to put on dancing shoes and use whatever ruse necessary to grab the person and get him or her out of the way But it was a role that, in theory, was only to be played to protect Quinn and the other agents once they were actually inside the Mafia headquarters installing the bugs. No one had ever really contemplated the possibility that two of their agents would suddenly disappear.
“Drive by” Morris ordered.
They did. The car wasn’t there.
Cloherty and Connolly scanned up and down Snow Hill.
No agents.
They saw cars jammed into spaces all along the snowy street. Not one belonged to the FBI.
No agents, no car.
Christ, Morris thought. He cursed himself for ever having put the two agents together. The idea was to have them appear as lovers parked in a car, but both were young and inexperienced. He should never have matched the two neophytes. The mistake was his. “Find them,” he said, deciding right then to call off the entry attempt altogether. Other agents left the positions they’d taken for a break-in and joined the search.
Ninety minutes later, Cloherty and Connolly met Morris at the corner of Hanover and Commercial, not far from a Dunkin’ Donuts. “I’m going to give them another twenty minutes,” Morris said. After that, he explained, he’d have to call and tell the special agent in charge of Boston about the problem, a step that could have led to a decision to end the mission as too dangerous.
Cloherty and Connolly headed back down Commercial to the beginning of Prince Street. Cloherty was not optimistic. He could not come up with any plausible explanation. Even though the agents were young, they were conscientious. They were FBI. They would never just take off without telling someone.
“Where the hell is this car?” Cloherty asked his partner as they approached Prince Street. It was not on Snow Hill, they reasoned. It was not on Prince. Nor was it on any of the other streets they and other agents had inspected.
Then Connolly stopped in front of the large and empty parking garage at the corner of Prince and Commercial streets. The two agents got out and walked into the mostly abandoned building.
They drew their guns and began using their hands to signal one another. They walked and walked, up the first-floor ramp, onto the second, and finally all the way to the rooftop level of the garage.
That’s where Cloherty spotted the vehicle. Down the other end of the rooftop overlooking Snow Hill. The motor was running.
Cloherty and Connolly walked toward the vehicle, and each spotted the backs of two heads, slumped in the front seat. Both had the same thought: carbon monoxide.
Cloherty reached the car first and ripped open the door on the driver’s side.
“What’s the problem?” one groggy agent asked.
“What’s the problem!” Cloherty shouted back.
In a matter of seconds, the story tumbled out.
The two lookouts had been sitting in their car on Snow Hill doing their job, which was to make sure the s
treet was empty so that Quinn and his team could use the route. But then they had seen someone watching them suspiciously from an apartment window across the street. They became nervous, worrying they’d been made. Not wanting to jeopardize everything, they had decided they’d better move. So they had driven away from their location on Snow Hill Street and circled around until they found the abandoned garage. They drove to the roof and discovered a spot that gave them a commanding view of the street below.
Perfect, they had thought, and called Morris on the radio.
This was the moment in the tale when Cloherty grasped the only explanation for the massive screw-up. He took the agents’ radio from the car seat and tried it.
It didn’t work.
The young agents sank farther in their car seats.
All along, they had thought Morris knew their whereabouts. They had figured Morris never radioed back because of the squad leader’s strict orders about keeping radio silence. They had figured they never heard any of the other agents conversing on the radio with Morris because, like them, everyone else was also obeying the rule against radio communications.
Morris was immensely relieved to hear the agents were safe, that the snag had been a radio malfunction. But he still didn’t let himself off the hook. Only two inexperienced agents would ever display such radio discipline. Only virtual rookies would ever take so literally his instructions.
The Snow Hill lookouts went home after that second fiasco feeling like damn fools, only slightly buoyed by Morris’s “forget about it” sign off. In the office, the episode became known as “Car 54, Where Are You?.” Morris, however, couldn’t appreciate the joke. Instead, he fought back a feeling that perhaps this mission was doomed. First, bum luck—bumping into those guys the way they did. Then, radio foul-ups—lousy FBI equipment. He played what had happened over in his mind, shifting through the two abortive attempts in search of a pattern, something to adjust. But all he found was bad luck.
ON THE third attempt, after Morris okayed the Quinn teams’ descent down Snow Hill Street, he refused to put too much stock in how smoothly things were going. He sat in the car with Kennedy, tracking Quinn’s progress, waiting for another shoe to drop. Throughout the day there’d been no surprises. The opening move went off without a hitch. It involved agents Cloherty and Buckley. Starting in the late afternoon, they’d taken up their position in the back of a lookout van parked on Prince Street a half block from Angiulo’s office. From there, they watched the office for the departure of each of the Angiulos. The monitoring took hours, with brothers sometimes departing only to return shortly afterward, but nothing else could begin until the lookouts sent word that Angiulo and his minions had left for the night.
Morris heard from the lookouts around midnight, which wasn’t too bad. By the agents’ head count, the office was empty. He then dispatched other teams of agents to scour the streets, including a pair to relieve Cloherty and Buckley from the van, which got colder and colder as the night wore on. The new pair would monitor the street while Quinn was inside. Cloherty and Buckley split up and joined new partners in two of the roving FBI vehicles.
In little more than an hour, everyone was in place. Quinn, Richard, and the locksmith had left Morris’s car and easily made their way to the foot of Snow Hill and Prince. The Quinn team was about ready to make its final crossing, past the lookout van and to the front door of 98 Prince Street. Encouraged, Morris, for the first time during any of the attempts, ordered his three electronics specialists to stand by The techies were going to follow Quinn in, once Quinn’s team was safely inside the office. The chief’s radio crackled with reports from lookouts that the street remained quiet.
Morris listened as Quinn, in a hushed voice, described his team’s slow progress. Even though the FBI had carefully counted heads, every member of the break-in operation knew that this wasn’t an absolute guarantee the office would be empty
There was no guarantee, because even their best informants could not provide such critical information as whether someone was assigned to sleep in the office. In all the surveillance and intelligence work they’d done to prepare for the bugging, the FBI still did not know exactly what went on in the office from midnight until dawn.
Morris and Quinn had struggled with this gap, and, hard as they tried, could come up with only one idea. They could have an informant secretly drop a tiny microphone behind a couch during a daytime visit to the Angiulo headquarters. That way the FBI could determine whether anyone was inside the office late at night. But what if the mike made a noise when it hit the floor? What if it rolled out from under the couch? If the Angiulos caught their man, he would surely be killed and the bugging plan would have to be abandoned. They concluded the plan was too risky.
The FBI also didn’t even know whether the office was equipped with an alarm, because no agent had ever gotten close enough to check for one. If Quinn, Richard, and the locksmith ran into an alarm triggered by a key at the door, well, no problem. They could disarm it. But there wasn’t much they could do if the office had a silent “motion” alarm that rang elsewhere.
So the best the Quinn team had going for it was the scorecard that Cloherty and Buckley kept. As they looked across Prince the office certainly seemed abandoned; lights were on in other buildings, but 98 Prince Street was black.
Receiving word from the two agents in the van that the street was empty, Quinn hurried across Prince Street to the alcove of 98. Richard was at his side, and the locksmith a foot or two behind them. They found the lock on the outer door was frozen solid, leaving the agents momentarily stuck in limbo, exposed in the open street while the locksmith rubbed his thumb and breathed on the lock to defrost it. But in less than a minute, the outer door was open and they were on their way.
Having finally gotten inside the building, they confronted the one thing no one had expected but everyone had feared. They heard voices inside the office in what sounded like low, steady conversation. Instead of trying the second door, Quinn backpedaled quickly and led a hasty retreat, his mind spinning with confusion.
Hearing over his radio what was unfolding, Morris slapped the dashboard. In their own cars, Cloherty and Buckley were in shock. Both knew immediately that fingers would be shaken at them. They were the ones on early surveillance who had cleared the office. Had they miscounted? Had they blown it for Quinn? Even though they’d never been absolutely certain, all the surveillance work the FBI had done supported a premise that no one lived in the apartment. Were they all wrong? Or, Morris wondered, was this another round of bum luck—the night they pick to break in is the night some wiseguys happen to stay over?
In his car with Kennedy, Morris searched his mind for an explanation. The two previous failures had been frustrating, but this was becoming a bad joke. He could see Kennedy was about to say something, probably going to put into words the frustration that agents had so far refrained from expressing: Maybe they were not going to be able to pull this off. Morris knew he had to take control, had to quell the dismay. Quinn and his cohorts were fleeing the office, while agents in cars and on foot were shaking their heads in bewilderment. “Hey, look, we’re never going to know,” he told Kennedy with unwavering calm, insisting they had to keep trying and promising a fourth attempt. “Let’s do it.”
And three nights later, they did.
7
Break-In
The same month—January 1981—that FBI agents in Boston were struggling to install a secret bug inside the headquarters of the city’s Mafia boss, authorities in New York City bugged a reputed rising star in the Gambino crime family, John Gotti.
Gotti, an imposing figure with piercing, dark eyes, coiffured hair, and custom-made suits, was a capo de regime who was intimately familiar with the machinations of the Gambino family. In the 1981 bugging of his club in Queens, however, authorities quickly found that Gotti was tight-lipped when it came to his alleged Mafia business. Instead, when serious matters arose, he conversed while walking up and down 101st Avenue i
n Queens. So the secret tapes were weak, and in 1986 Gotti beat a federal rap charging him with illegal gambling, loansharking, armed hijackings, and at least two murders over an eighteen-year period. At the time of the Angiulo bugging and trial, Gotti was the prosecution’s nightmare—a top Mafioso disciplined enough to avoid incriminating conversations with underlings in a bugged office. In fact, Gotti seemed invincible until prosecutors finally got him the old fashioned way in 1992—with eyewitness testimony from an unlikely source, Gotti’s Underboss, Salvatore Gravano. Gotti got a life sentence without parole because he was betrayed, not because he tripped himself up on tape.
But in Boston, John Morris and Ed Quinn did not worry about being foiled by the tight-lipped tactics of New York’s top capo. The knew the jackpot awaited them in Jerry’s office. Based on intelligence secretly provided by a network of informants, the federal agents knew that Angiulo conducted nearly all of his business affairs in his North End headquarters. It was where he felt insulated, where he had worked uninterrupted for nearly three decades. The problem was getting inside to install their own secret bugging devices.
They’d had three failures in seven days.
Battle weary, the squad at least had the solace of making the fourth attempt on the optimal day—Sunday. It was the only night the neighborhood turned in early. Quinn, Richard, and the locksmith once again sat in the back of Morris’s car. Pete Kennedy, the driver, had the engine running and the heater blasting at its maximum. Boston had suffered through a string of days with subfreezing temperatures—so cold that schools had closed early on Friday to conserve natural gas supplies. Maybe it was the anticipation of being out in the frigid night, strolling the North End streets, but Debbie Richard shivered, even as she sat in the car with its windows fogged from the heater. She’d worn a thick wool sweater and heavy slacks and wrapped her hair in a scarf. She hated New England winters.