The Underboss

by Dick Lehr

  Suddenly, Angiulo abandoned the entreaty and, with mounting frustration, told Gambale to just do it. “While you strangle him. While you strangle him ... you get him where you want him, don’t ever tell me that something happened and we had to pass. Because you will be in more fuckin’ trouble than you were to start with. You understand? Even if you gotta snatch him off the fuckin’ street. You understand that? ... Because I’m gonna tell ya how I feel about it.... Tell him to take a ride, okay? ... Get out of the car and you stomp him. Bing! You hit him in the fuckin’ head and leave him right in the fuckin’ spot. Do you understand?”

  Shortly after Angiulo told Gambale to track down LaFreniere at the Mouse Trap, two agents brought the tape to the FBI’s Boston headquarters for a final review. They had to be sure it was a hit because taking action would surely jeopardize the bugging mission. The crafty Angiulo would suspect a bugged office when a contract could not be executed because the feds broke it up the night it was supposed to take place. But the FBI had unintentionally set LaFreniere up and they would have to save him—even if the price were electronic surveillance equipment strewn all over Prince Street the next day.

  Angiulo shut down the office for the night with a final exhortation: “Meet him tonight. I hope it’s tonight....Just hit him in the fuckin’ head and stab him, okay? The jeopardy is just a little too much for me. You understand American? Okay let’s go.”

  The mild threat had become a fatal obsession. It was 9:54 P.M.

  An hour later, after a review of the tape at FBI headquarters, Gianturco talked again to Quinn at home to confirm a planned hit and to tell him it could happen that night. Quinn told Gianturco and Jack Cloherty, the night shift supervisor, to meet him at the Mouse Trap in Park Square. The mission: Save LaFreniere first, and flip him as a witness against Angiulo second.

  They got to the lounge around midnight. Cloherty talked to the doorman, Gianturco to a waitress. Quinn, who was the only one who knew what LaFreniere looked like, having handed him a summons ten days earlier, cruised the periphery. They were absurdly transparent among the late-night crowd nursing drinks and ogling strippers and half-naked waitresses, three feds in suit coats asking for Walter. They could almost feel the room contract in suspicion. Someone asked them to not stand around, to order a drink or sit down. Finally, a waitress told Cloherty that LaFreniere had been in earlier but had gone.

  The agents conferred briefly and left, satisfied LaFreniere was not there. They went across the street to the Park Plaza Hotel to call him at home in Woburn. By the time they got to the hotel, the Mouse Trap bartender had called LaFreniere to warn him cops were skulking the place looking for him.

  Quinn went to a lobby pay phone and reached LaFreniere’s wife.

  “Is Walter there, please?”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Ed Quinn.”

  “Wait a minute [long pause] ... no, he’s not here.”

  Knowing it didn’t take LaFreniere’s wife thirty seconds to realize her husband was not home at midnight, Quinn breathed a sigh of relief that Walter was home and alive. He sent Cloherty home and headed to Woburn with Gianturco, arriving at a supermarket parking lot near LaFreniere’s house about 1:30 in the morning. Quinn called from another pay phone and LaFreniere answered the phone himself.

  “I have nothing to say to you,” he told Quinn.

  “Fine,” said Quinn. “I don’t want you to say anything to me. I just want you to listen. It’s a matter of life and death, specifically yours. You don’t have to believe me. But just hear me out. We’re just around the corner at the Purity Supreme.”

  Walter agreed to come talk.

  After twenty minutes went by with no sign of LaFreniere, the agents headed off to the house but made a U-turn when they saw him pull out of his street. They all drove into the supermarket lot together. LaFreniere got out and clambered into the back seat of Quinn’s 1979 blue Ford Fairlane. It was now 2:00 A.M. Quinn introduced Gianturco and got down to business: An informant had told the FBI that there was a North End contract out on him. No supposition, all fact. It could happen as soon as today and definitely before the next grand jury appearance. Quinn looked him in the eye the whole time and knew LaFreniere believed him, his face frozen by the dilemma: the FBI or the mob? Who do you trust?

  Quinn outlined options: Go into the federal witness protection program that night, taking his family with him into hiding; disappear for a month until the danger blew over; or, in the vernacular of the trade, “reach out” to the North End and see what happened. But Quinn, a decent as well as determined agent, gave LaFreniere the cold comfort of sincere advice: No matter what you decide, Walter, if you don’t want to come with us, don’t meet with them alone in a car. If you have to talk with them, do it on the phone or in a crowded place.

  Nonplussed, LaFreniere struggled silently with the fact Gambale had called him that night at 11:30 and asked to have a few drinks with him the next day. He then mentioned part of this to Quinn—that he’d already gotten a call.

  Quinn immediately asked who made the call.

  No answer.

  Where were you supposed to meet?

  “I’m confused about this,” replied LaFreniere. “I need to think.”

  LaFreniere then promised to call Quinn the next morning but never did. Instead, he called his father-in-law Venios, who put him in touch with Danny Angiulo, who quickly passed him on to the family lawyer Cintolo. Cintolo eventually advised LaFreniere not to talk to the grand jury and dutifully relayed all prosecutor questions to Angiulo—a liaison that would later net him a prison term for conspiring to obstruct justice.

  By the late afternoon of March 20, Angiulo had been briefed on Gambale’s abortive attempt to rendezvous with LaFreniere and carry out the murder pact. Angiulo was now in full retreat. Like LaFreniere, he too needed time to think. One decision had been made for him: You can’t execute a witness who knew what was up and, worse, was being watched by the FBI. Maybe in Sicily, but not in Boston.

  As astute as Angiulo was in assessing all the chess moves swirling around him, he remained obtusely and fatally oblivious of the two microphones in his midst. The closest he got to the mark was concluding that Gambale’s car had a hidden microphone. “His car is bugged, you know it,” he said. “There’s a fucking bug or beep on it.... Next thing you know, they’ll be coming from the parachutes.... The Mouse Trap is gotta be bugged ...” He began seeing bugs every place except over his head.

  Try as he might, Angiulo simply could not get to the obvious. His hubris precluded any breach in the neighborhood network that had protected his turf for decades. His office didn’t even have a burglar alarm, for who in their right mind would rob the Angiulos in the North End? No, there was some undercover work going on here but it was someone at the Mouse Trap.

  Angiulo’s worst fear was that the feds would flip LaFreniere and that he would land on his son Jason, who was then twenty-three years old but treated as a bumbling child by his father in alternatingly comical and poignant encounters. With the LaFreniere execution blown, Angiulo’s focus shifted to the grand jury on the nineteenth floor of the federal courthouse in Post Office Square.

  Angiulo’s plan was to have Jason tough it out at the grand jury, to lie about running the floating barbooth game, knowing that LaFreniere and Venios would not contradict him. The dice game cut close, though, because Angiulo was behind it, sharing in the meager proceeds—probably a thousand dollars on a good night—from a passé gambling racket that was no longer the big money-maker that it had been in the 1950s and 1960s. Nevertheless, it was easy money that had become a criminal exposure for Angiulo. And that was something never far from his mind.

  While Angiulo continued to detest the very idea of having to trust LaFreniere, his preoccupation with him receded as he got constant reassurances out of the Combat Zone. As the LaFreniere crisis faded, Angiulo turned his obsessive energy to the next step: prepping his protected son for grand jury pressure, something Angiulo himself had been thr
ough. While he knew his stuff, his impatience with the unfocused Jason made the tutoring sessions excruciating for both.

  With great pedantry, Angiulo instructed his son to always say, “to the best of my recollection,” instead of, “I don’t remember,” because the latter implied he once knew the answer. It becomes a semantical jumble, with Jerry’s rapid-fire instructions leaving Jason confused rather than confident. Frustration turned to abuse.

  On March 25, the day before Jason Angiulo was first scheduled to testify, Angiulo lashed out, ostensibly to toughen him up, but the sarcasm was loaded with disappointment. When Jason arrived carrying a basket of flowers a friend had given him, Angiulo greeted his son: “There’s a kid that’s worried to death he might go to jail tomorrow morning.”

  “Fuck you, Dad.”

  “Look at him, goes around with fucking roses.... Why is that basket shaking like that? You got the willies or something?”

  But the moment of truth before a grand jury was deferred when Jason’s appearance was postponed for a week because prosecutors planned to oppose Cintolo’s representation of both Jason Angiulo and LaFreniere.

  Assured of LaFreniere’s fidelity, Angiulo grew positively jaunty the closer his son got to his next scheduled grand jury appearance, on April 2. In fact, it energized Angiulo and he began to spoil for a fight with his nemesis Quinn and the “bitch” prosecutor Collins. “Tomorrow,” he announced, “I will get up at my convenience. And then I will escort my wary underling up to the federal building. And we will look for Miss Collins.”

  Angiulo ended the pregame planning with a rare paternal moment, giving a maudlin speech to his son from a bad movie: “Before you got this summons, I could call you boy, now I call you a man ... ain’t going to take much for you to be a man ... you take it easy now. All I just ask is you just stand up. Don’t worry about a fucking thing.”

  But, just before they headed off to the Federal Building, Angiulo had to get one thing straight with Jason. It was as brass-tacks a talk as a father can have with his son. Will you stand up for Dad if it comes to it?

  The real danger, as Angiulo saw it, was LaFreniere coming back to convict Jason Angiulo of perjury after Jason had denied all. It came down to the answer to two questions: “Does Jason admit he does this barbooth game? ... Does he admit that it’s not him, it’s his father?”

  Weeks after the issue first came up, Angiulo finally got to the heart of the matter: Would his son betray him in a world of traitors and motherfuckers? With all his wealth and power, Angiulo found himself pacing back and forth in a ramshackle office and worrying about whether he could trust his own child. “It’s a hell of fucking theory, isn’t it,” he said to Jason. “You wouldn’t be the first son that turned in his father. Take my word for it ... And on the other hand, you must remember there’re a lot of guys in Leavenworth and a lot of guys in Lewisburg that protected their sons. They went, ‘he had nothing to do with it. It was me.’ There’ll be no such thing here. We will be men or mice.”

  At the courthouse, Angiulo tried to set the tone for Jason Angiulo’s appearance by having calculated run-ins with Wendy Collins and Ed Quinn in blatant attempts to intimidate them both. He had been warming up for the pair of feds for several days.

  After listening to some of Angiulo’s threatening talk about where Quinn lives and whether he had a family, the case agent was alarmed enough to wear a hidden body wire to work that day. But Collins was not expecting a personal visit. Angiulo took her by surprise at the morning hearing held to consider the government’s challenge to Cintolo’s dual representation of Jason Angiulo and Walter LaFreniere. She argued that it was a conflict of interest for Cintolo to represent the latter party, who had been nearly killed to protect the former. The court ruled that Cintolo could not represent Jason.

  At the beginning of the hearing, Collins was sitting at the counsel’s table when she heard a gruff, imperious voice calling, “Miss Collins, Miss Collins.” She thought to herself, Gee, that sounds familiar. She turned and looked out over the courtroom, not seeing anyone until she looked down to find the diminutive Angiulo standing there with his arms crossed, wearing a floral shirt.

  “I’m Mr. Angiulo. Gennaro Angiulo,” he said, staring at her intently, something he always did when he first met somebody he wanted to intimidate. He basked briefly in his persona and made sure she knew that he knew who she was. “I’m the one you’re looking for, aren’t I?” he said.

  In a resolutely calm and patient voice, she told him, “If you are not a lawyer and you are not a witness, then you can’t be here in front of the bar. You will have to go back and sit down over there, behind the bar.” She turned to the bench and sat down hard, her heart pounding, unnerved by his boldness and by the disconcerting sensation of having a direct conversation with a man she had been eavesdropping on for weeks. Rebuffed, Angiulo blustered for a while and finally sat down. He had some choice words about Collins when he got back to the office, but nothing she hadn’t heard before.

  Angiulo’s encounter with Quinn was just as short but more menacing, an exchange marked by subdued mutual hostility. From the secret tapes, Quinn knew Angiulo had come to consider him as a personification of the mafioso’s troubles. Two days earlier, Angiulo had ruminated in his office about finding out more about Quinn’s family. The low-key Quinn had taken to wearing his .38 pistol instead of carrying it in his briefcase, a change that was not lost on his colleagues.

  Quinn deliberately appeared in the corridor near the elevator at the time Angiulo was leaving the courthouse, and Angiulo spotted him as he headed out with his son and Cintolo. “You know,” he said to Quinn. “I know that you know me, and most certainly I know that I recognize you, but I can’t remember your first name.”

  “Yeah, well, my name in Agent Quinn.”

  “You see, I said the first name; Quinn, I know it is, the first one?”

  “Well, I think that’s how you’ll know me though, right?”

  “Hey that sounds good. Okay. I call you Mr. Quinn.”

  “Okay and I’ll call you Mr. Angiulo.”

  “Until the time comes.”

  “Until the time comes,” Quinn repeated.

  Angiulo, as he stepped onto the elevator, looked up and said, “Be careful.”

  Quinn, as the doors closed, said, “Bye now.”

  Luckily for Angiulo, he made no explicit threat.

  And luckily for Jason Angiulo, he was able to duck testifying by citing the dispute over Cintolo’s challenged representation. The court decision to bar Cintolo from representing him appeared to have spared Jason a certain perjury indictment had he been required to testify about the barbooth game. When he was recalled later in the month, Jason Angiulo claimed illness and the feds let it slide, overwhelmed with work and confident they had enough on the family anyway. The bumbling Jason simply wasn’t worth it.

  Angiulo would also have good fortune when LaFreniere appeared before the grand jury at the end of April. LaFreniere read a statement prepared by Cintolo that contended the grant of immunity was flawed and he was really being forced to relinquish his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.

  It was a feisty, revitalized LaFreniere who went into the grand jury room on the nineteenth floor, jamming with Collins over her purported threat to put him in jail for not talking. She bristled and told him the issue was contempt, not necessarily jail. His refusal to testify despite immunity was quickly brought to a federal judge standing by on “emergency.” Five weeks later, LaFreniere was indeed in jail and would not get out for eighteen months. He would spurn another offer of witness protection from Quinn with two months left to serve. LaFreniere turned out to be the ultimate stand-up guy.

  But it wasn’t as if he lacked motivation. There was always Richie Gambale calling to see if he wanted to have a a few drinks. And there were sit-downs with his father-in-law and Skinny Kazonis, another stand-up guy who went away for the cause in the 1970s.

  Kazonis met with LaFreniere on the eve of a
scheduled grand jury appearance at the Penalty Box, a shot-and-beer bar across from the Boston Garden. It was part pep talk and part reminder of the consequences of talking.

  Kazonis, a stoic factotum and Angiulo favorite who would be convicted of obstruction in the LaFreniere case, was the outside reinforcement for Venios’s incessant admonitions to stand up or risk Gambale. Kazonis later reported to Angiulo, “Well, I convinced him already, for tomorrow forget about—”

  Angiulo interrupted to brag to others in the office: “In fact, what the kid wanted to do was when he got through with Skinny, he wanted to just go home and get his fuckin’ underwear and go, go, go away. See? Yeah, good health, gentlemen.”

  Earlier that week, Angiulo had personally worked over Louie Venios, who had been summoned to 98 Prince Street for a guarded discussion about his son-in-law’s reliability. Angiulo was so oblique, Louie had trouble following him. It was no time for crossed signals.

  Venios asked, “Now what’s your advice? To me?”

  That set off alarms for the wary Angiulo, who never had explicit conversations on matters that could come back at him as testimony, even with someone as tried and true as Venios. “I ain’t got nothin’ to do with it,” Angiulo told him. Moving on to safer ground, he told Venios, “You made the best decision you ever made in your fucking life. Let me tell you something. You better know him though.”

  “I know the cocksucker,” Venios assured him.

  The meeting ended with Jerry the Magnanimous: “Once he goes to the can, don’t you let a fucking day slip, wherever he is, that somebody goes up there to visit.” Later, Jerry offered Kazonis a different view of LaFreniere’s sacrifice. “Him ... he’ll go away like a jerk.”

  If Angiulo had failed to intimidate Collins and Quinn, he had been a smashing success with Walter LaFreniere. LaFreniere would spend Christmas in jail that year, residing for most of the sentence in a Manhattan prison, a tough place loaded with killers. He served from June 4,1981, to December 4, 1982, and never said a word. Not only did he stand up then, he testified for the Angiulos at trials in 1985 and 1986, denying that he was present at a barbooth game or that he ever took a loan from Jason Angiulo or anybody else. He even disputed his own words on tape, including the segment in which he identified himself, correcting Frank Angiulo, who thought Walter was another flunkie from the Mouse Trap. “I’m Walter,” LaFreniere had said to Frank.