by Dick Lehr
LaFreniere’s court testimony also included a bitter recollection of his visit from Ed Quinn two months before he was to get out of jail. “You come down here and tell me you tried to help me? You tell me a story about a contract on my life, you put me in a house with fifteen hundred killers. He tries to help me!” Later, Quinn, looking back, would remark: “I’d say Walter is home free. He stood up. He went the whole distance, even testifying—if you can call it that—denying his own voice.... He did his very best to help the guys who wanted to kill him.”
But the last word on the LaFreniere matter belonged, appropriately enough, to Gennaro Angiulo. Near the end of the bugging operation that lasted four months in 1981, when the roof was caving in, when the FBI formally tipped its hand and was running up and down Prince Street kicking down doors and grabbing betting slips to go with the recordings of Frank Angiulo counting the money, Gennaro could only blame fate and Walter LaFreniere. He was right for the wrong reasons. “Soon as that kid got a fuckin’ summons, that was the beginning. That was the beginning. We all fell asleep.... It was like, it was like God sending us a fuckin’ message, and we couldn’t read it.”
His empire shaken by pinpoint raids, Angiulo brought all the travail back to the laxity that produced Walter LaFreniere as a problem, overwhelmed and disgusted that such big trouble could come from simple complacency cancer from a small mole. “Why should I go to jail in this fuckin’ thing? You know how many fuckin’ things I did worse than this shit?” he asked in his office, filled with suddenly taciturn henchmen. No one disagreed with him.
10
The Noose Tightens
Not long after Walter LaFreniere’s life was saved, talk of another murder came across the FBI wire. “This Harvey Cohen. I’m going to kill him,” Larry Zannino told his soldiers in a late-night aside.
The line was tucked into a rambling Zannino discourse that suddenly veered to the grisly assertion and then just as quickly veered back to the main topic—some malcontent who concerned the Angiulos. “Now about Jerry,” continued Zannino. “Danny’s been talking to this guy ...”
The Cohen reference might easily have been missed, but it wasn’t. Eavesdropping agents rewound the tape in Charlestown to confirm what they thought they’d heard.
“This Harvey Cohen. I’m going to kill him.”
Later, Zannino explained the hit “is for the family in New York.”
The Zannino aside once again set off a series of FBI countermoves to stymie the Mafia—moves that increasingly frustrated Jerry Angiulo and his men. Angiulo had passed along to Zannino the request that had traveled from New York to Providence to Boston, and the failure to fulfill the contract was a cause for embarrassment and suspicion. Why so long? What the hell is going on here?
The very next day the FBI met with the man the Mafia had marked for death. Harvey Cohen was not an unfamiliar name to the bureau. John Morris’s men on the organized crime squad hadn’t had much to do with him, but agents on other squads had. Cohen, who’d grown up in Revere, was involved in his family’s trucking firm, Camel Trucking.
Cohen’s troubles stemmed from the trucking business. Camel Trucking had originally been based in East Boston, but Cohen moved the operation to an old terminal he purchased in an industrial wasteland in Chelsea, a city just north of Boston not far from Logan Airport. No problem there, except that Cohen immediately ousted the prior tenant of the terminal, a firm with mob connections.
The prior tenant was a subsidiary of Pinto Trucking of New York. The owners of Pinto included Philip Giacone and Chubby Bono, two reputed members of one of the crime families in New York City that had long-standing ties with Raymond Patriarca in Providence. Pinto was also one of Cohen’s chief competitors in hauling freight from airports in Boston and New York. Cohen, divorced and in his forties, kept an apartment in New York to stay at while there on business.
Even before Zannino’s pledge to kill Cohen, word had already filtered up to Boston from the FBI in New York that Cohen might have Mafia troubles. It was the white-collar crime unit in Boston that got the news, and one of the unit’s agents had gone to see him to discuss this possible problem.
At first, Cohen didn’t act too worried, but given fresh details of a specific threat, he flushed. “They want you dead,” agent Jim Cullen disclosed at the meeting in the rear parking lot of a Woburn restaurant within twenty-four hours of Zannino’s remarks. “They want you dead by the end of the weekend.”
Morris had instructed Cullen to play it close to the vest so as not to tip his hand about the source of the threat. Morris wasn’t so sure he would have jeopardized the secret bugs by warning Cohen if all they’d overheard Zannino discuss was a plan to hijack trucks. But a murder plot—well, you just had to tell the guy before he became a victim.
Cohen made Cullen’s job easy. He slipped into a kind of semi-shock and didn’t question the reliability of the threat, so Cullen tried to pry information from him.
“What’s this all about?” Cullen asked.
“I’m 1,000 percent sure it involves New York,” Cohen replied, going a little bit into the business conflicts that the FBI already knew about. He was visibly upset. Then he began to clam up.
“So what’s next?” Cullen asked, to keep things going.
“I think I’ll leave.”
“Where?”
“I’ll let you know.”
Three weeks later, Zannino, unaware that Cohen had been warned, began harping about him. He was livid with soldier Dominic Isabella for taking the order to kill so nonchalantly.
“I want to kill Harvey Cohen very shortly,” he demanded of Isabella. “You ain’t done a fuckin’ thing by tellin’ me you’re going by his fuckin’ house and see his car. I want the both of youse start talking to this fucking guy. As a matter of fact, run into each other accidentally. ‘Hey, what’d ya say? How are ya?’ Get his confidence.
“Shouldn’t he be dead by now?” he suddenly posed to his men. “This is for the family in New York. Now I’m responsible.”
Dominic Isabella promised to do better. “I think I’m gonna, gonna nail him comin’ out of the bar. Cause with that Jew, he’s always got four or five guys around him.”
“If you get his confidence,” encouraged Zannino. “I know where it is. I’ve been there. Get his confidence and you finally keep talkin’ to him and you make him feel he’s behind you. And we’ll hit him in the fucking head. We’ll bring a package behind and fuckin’ we’ll crack him.”
Isabella then confessed he couldn’t even find Cohen’s home in the swanky North Shore town of Marblehead. “There’s no number, Larry.”
Instead of chastising Isabella further for his ineptitude, Zannino launched into an emotional pep talk, sensing the soldier needed encouragement in a difficult assignment.
“You are basically a beautiful fuckin’ guy. And I’ll tell ya. I got the best regime in the fuckin’ country.... And not only that, we volunteered. And not only that, the boss and the underboss give us the work. Why did they give us the work? Why do they give it to us? Because they’ve got confidence in us.”
Zannino’s men never found Cohen. He went underground shortly after meeting with Cullen, resurfacing eventually in Israel. He never notified the FBI. Nor did he tell Larry Zannino. It was the kind of setback for the Mafia that Jerry Angiulo began to string together during the course of the FBI’s secret bugging operation. There was the Walter LaFreniere debacle, then the Cohen screw-up.
But if Angiulo was still reluctant to put too much stock in his apprehensions about “too many coincidences,” he no longer was after the FBI’s gambling raids of April 20. Since the FBI had all the evidence it needed and the electronic surveillance was nearing its end, Ed Quinn and his men hit Angiulo hard—twenty bookmaking offices in the Boston area, including the main office at 126 Prince Street managed by nephew “Jimmy Jones” Angiulo.
“Nicol,” Mikey Angiulo called out to his brother as he rushed into 98 Prince Street in the early afternoon. “They just
nailed Jimmy Jones.”
“Jimmy Jones? Where?”
“He was—”
“Up the street?”
“Yeah.”
Mike Angiulo cursed the bookmakers for not moving their operation often enough among different apartments to avoid snooping investigators. “Motherfuckers, I told them last Friday, ‘What are youse doing there? Is that the only place you know where to work?’ Fuckin’ nitwits.”
The FBI had tapped the telephone at 126 Prince Street with a pen register—a device that recorded not conversation but telephone numbers dialed for outgoing calls. Agents then traced the outgoing numbers and came up with the locations for all of the other offices—Medford, Chelsea, Boston, Watertown, and Revere. Quinn chose a Monday to get the records of the extensive weekend gambling activity. Mounds of evidence were seized—mostly betting slips and records—in the raids that had been planned to define the scope of the Angiulo illegal numbers operation, as well as to stoke the gambling talk inside 98 Prince Street.
The only wrinkle in the otherwise smoothly executed busts came when Quinn, leading four agents in the main raid at 126 Prince Street, broke into the wrong apartment—one on the second floor instead of the third floor. Knocking down the door, he startled two women and a young girl.
“Where’s James Angiulo?” Quinn barked at two frightened women who stared at him and the other agents as if they were from Mars. Seconds later, an agent tapped his shoulder. “Ed, not this floor, next floor.” Quinn stayed long enough to explain the situation to the women after sending three agents upstairs. James Angiulo and John Orlandella were found seated at the kitchen table, unaware of the commotion downstairs, amid piles of gambling receipts and records. Quinn told the women to send the FBI the bill for the shattered door.
News of the gambling raids traveled quickly in the city’s underworld. Throughout the afternoon, Mike and Frank Angiulo kept track of their losses. “They grabbed ‘G,’” Frank announced two hours after the initial word of the busts. “They grabbed Chelsea.” By 4:35 P·M·, the results were in. “They grabbed everybody today,” Frankie concluded. He also guessed correctly how the FBI did it. “Tapped Jimmy Jones’s phone,” he told his brothers. “He called all them fuckin’ guys.”
The main man did not show up at the Mafia headquarters until 7:30 P.M., but when he did, Jerry Angiulo began a tirade that lasted well into the next morning, and was resumed often during the days that followed. He vented anger, but also despair. “Who the fuck gives a fuck?” he claimed at one point, sounding uncharacteristically weary and resigned. For the most part, however, he schemed up ways to get back in business as quickly as possible.
But first, Angiulo had to lash out at everyone around him, remind them he’d suspected all winter long that with so many coincidences of late he knew the feds were circling in. “I remind you I only came in early one fuckin’ day, and I said, ‘They’re here.’ Now, they’re here.” He cursed about how soft they’d all become. “Remember how we beat ’em four years, five years ago? Do you remember how? No phones, no cars, no drivers. We got careless; that’s what happened, and we got exactly what we deserved. We have become fuckin’ idiots. And in our zeal we fell asleep. Remember the old days when we were in the cellars. Hear a knock here, crash, out the fire escape, over the top. We got ... What happened? Come in, take what you want, have a party.”
He didn’t even spare himself. “Fuckin’ stupid we became. I’ll tell you the truth, I know who fell asleep. Me. You know why? I started listening to some stories from lawyers. ‘Feds are giving up on gambling.’”
From his nephew and John Orlandella, Angiulo extracted the details about Quinn’s raid of 126 Prince Street. The two told Jerry Angiulo how they had refused to answer any of Quinn’s questions and wouldn’t sign an FBI inventory list of the evidence the agents had seized under a search warrant. “I’m beginning to hate this fuckin’ motherfucker more every minute,” Angiulo said. And Quinn wore white gloves to pick up stuff in the apartment, the nephew reported. “He’s a cute son of a bitch.”
By the next morning, the bookmaking was back on line, although Jerry Angiulo had issued new marching orders. Security was to be beefed up. No more outgoing calls from the main office, only incoming. Arrangements were to be made so that each branch office called in the business. “That stuff has absolutely gotta be done at nighttime. I don’t want to hear a fucking thing. You can forget daytime for the next five years. Don’t even think about it.”
“Better not stop looking in the mirror any more boys,” he warned his nephew and John Orlandella. In an effort to throw off the FBI, he ordered James Angiulo to hit the street and keep a high profile, particularly during the hours he used to book the numbers. This way the feds would think he was out of business. Others were assigned to book. “You know what it’s all about? Darkness. Well, that’s it, Frank. See what you can arrange and if you cannot arrange it, Friday fucking night you’re gonna tell everybody that doesn’t send stuff in that they’re out. Okay?”
In one sense, the raids were history. “Go from here,” Angiulo declared. “We’ll start brand fucking new.” But, in another sense, Angiulo could no longer shake his concerns about security. The network ruptures haunted him. How the FBI knew about every bookmaking branch office became a riddle even he could not solve. “How the fuck can we allow twenty-two fuckin’ guys to get caught with one fuckin’ telephone?” he asked. “Every motherfuckin’ stop. They didn’t miss a fuckin’ stop. They didn’t miss a fuckin’ one, did they? That’s a very interesting question.”
He badgered his brothers and Zannino with the different possibilities. “We got a louse in the middle of us. You understand American ?” If it wasn’t an informant, Angiulo concluded, it was a bug, coming as close as he would come to the FBI’s dark secret. “Frank,” Angiulo ordered the day after the FBI raids. “Tomorrow, tonight, call the electrician and give him ladders. Tell him to go outside and take that fan apart. Go all the way into that fan and take the air conditioner out of there and look in the air conditioner too. Okay? Before we wind up in the fuckin’ nuthouse.” Later, he told his brother, “I ain’t had a fuckin’ night’s sleep, trying to figure out how fucking stupid we got. And I’m not gonna blame me alone.”
Angiulo’s worry became the FBI’s worry, for eavesdropping agents in Charlestown went into a red alert every time Angiulo began talking about looking for bugs in 98 Prince Street. And Angiulo kept coming back to the subject, nagging his brother Frankie to get the electrician in, or to call Mickey Caruana of Peabody, a Patriarca favorite and major drug runner whose hobby was electronic gadgets and bug detection. He could sweep the office.
Finally, Frankie Angiulo climbed up onto a chair himself, lifted ceiling tiles, and poked around. “Look at Frankie,” Jerry pointed. “He’s looking for the feds on the fucking roof.”
Angiulo might make a nervous joke out of it, but Frankie snooping in the dropped ceiling set off a scramble in Charlestown. Within minutes, squad leader Morris and case agent Quinn were notified. Morris raced to the monitoring site and climbed into the jump seat. Quinn assembled a team of agents to descend upon the office if he got word from Morris that Frankie Angiulo had blundered into the battery packs in the ceiling. They would at least recover government property
Morris had had nightmares about this moment, and in them a bug was always discovered. If it happened, he would have to decide whether to have Quinn leave the second microphone alone. It had been done before in other buggings; some of the most candid lines had been taped after the mobsters thought they’d foiled the feds.
But the scare was a false alarm. Frankie gave up. A few days later, he took apart the fan and found nothing. Caruana came by after a Celtics game at the nearby Boston Garden, but never got around to sweeping the office. It was as if all the Angiulos knew there was a bug but simply did not have the energy or imagination to deal with the possibility of one being in their office, on their street, in their North End. So the hidden microphones remained intact an
d the FBI got what it wanted: a continuous stream of incriminating talk about gambling and obstructing justice—and an unending series of doomsday monologues from Angiulo. The Mafia boss grew more anxious each day following the raids, and the source of his anxiety was RICO.
Angiulo was obsessed with the law. “See this motherfucker,” he snapped at Frankie, waving a copy of the statute at his brother. “This is what they’re doing to us. This is RICO. This thing here. They appealed it to the highest fucking court. Now read it.” To Jason he complained, “Shoulda stayed single. I was single. I’d be fucking long gone.”
“Let me tell you something,” Angiulo told Larry Zannino at the end of April. “It’s gone. We blew the biggest fucking thing in the country. For fifty fucking G’s we could’ve got the best argument team in Washington. For fifty cold.” But Zannino tried to resist Angiulo’s dreary forecast. What if we win? he asked. What if the court upholds Turkette? There was always that chance. What if, as Turkette argued, RICO didn’t apply to a criminal outfit until the outfit tried to muscle in on some legitimate business?
Angiulo nibbled at the possibility. If somehow the court did decide in their favor, they’d all come out fine. The FBI would be left holding a gun with no bullets. “What the fuck are the feds gonna do with shylocking?” Angiulo ruminated. “What are they gonna do with numbers? What are they gonna do with horses? What are they gonna do with marijuana? What are they gonna do with junk? They can stick it up their fuckin’ ass.”