The Underboss

by Dick Lehr

  The Patrizzi death announcement was made by Zannino as part of a drunken reverie with his minions on the first night the North Margin Street bug was back in place. The news hit Collins hard. She felt herself becoming numb to the endemic violence of the mob, of closing herself to normal feelings just to get through the day. She was exhausted and confused by the tidal wave of paperwork needed to put a T-3 on some desk in Washington where it could be ignored while some guy in Boston died an unspeakable death. “I think that is when it really snapped for me,” she recalled later. “I don’t know how many bodies we had by then.”

  For months Collins had simply lived for the case—it was all she wanted to do, all she cared about. But the Patrizzi murder had forced her to confront how far she had drifted from her initial enthusiasm. She was becoming hardened—even as she fought it. When she learned of Angelo Patrizzi’s fate, she found herself thinking One more murder with weary detachment. The emotional toll and the mind-numbing hours were turning her into an automaton who popped diet pills to keep going. She laid off the pills only after someone had to stop her from absently picking at french fries from a trash barrel in the FBI’s headquarters. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she realized, holding the french fries container in her hands. “Something is very wrong here.”

  On April 3 at about 4:00 A.M., Larry Zannino soared past even Morris’s high hopes for the dual-bug system. After several rounds of drinks, Zannino solved four open murders by bragging about his role in them. It was as nuts-and-bolts as you can get. The blood-drenched list included the late Angelo Patrizzi, which still stands as the most brutal of any recent mob killings. The others were William and Walter Bennett, who were both killed in turf wars in 1967, and the 1976 retribution killing of Joseph Barboza after he had turned on the mob.

  INARTICULATE, brutish, barely literate, Ilario Zannino still had a curious charisma, stemming mostly from his physical presence. He had the bearing and features of a movie mafioso, a central casting capo regime with a high, shiny forehead and resonant voice, and the deadly, deep-set eyes of a man who gets genuine respect from wiseguys and abiding disdain from police.

  If underboss Gennaro Angiulo was in it for the money, the number two man Zannino was there for the stature the mob offered a South End street kid. Like some of the investigators pursuing him, Zannino was drawn to a fraternal organization with rituals and trappings in which the underlings carry out orders without question or comment and get unflinching loyalty in return. Zannino would kill as a favor to another family or over an insult to a soldier’s girlfriend. While there has been no more bloody enforcer in the Boston mob, Zannino was also a hopeless romantic about La Cosa Nostra.

  It was his life, producing boundless devotion to the “cause.” He even left one of his daughter’s funeral services in the 1960s to help Jerry Angiulo settle an escalating turf dispute between Boston and Somerville mobsters over gambling and loansharking rights. Recalling the scene years later, Zannino remembered telling Angiulo, “My poor daughter. I come back from the grave [to meet with you]. My fucking heart is broken. But This Thing comes first.” He would extract vows of loyalty from all parties and, at least this once, Zannino appeared to have avoided bloodshed rather than caused it.

  But, throughout his career, Zannino was a true believer who jumped at any chance to bloody an opponent. “Just listen to Larry,” strike-force chief O’Sullivan said about the hours of conversations secretly recorded by the FBI. “Every time, he’s ready to grab a machine gun.”

  So it was with Angelo Patrizzi. Zannino reported the “clip” as information passed to him by Angiulo. As an afterthought, he related a scene of barbaric brutality to two of his top lieutenants. Speaking matter-of-factly, Zannino covered the murder quickly in a by-the-way aside to John Cincotti and Ralph Lamattina.

  Three weeks after he and Angiulo had agreed that Patrizzi had to go like his brother before him, Zannino said to Cincotti, “Johnny, I told you didn’t I? About Joe Porter’s brother?” “No,” Cincotti said.

  “Well they clipped him and don’t say a fuckin’ ...”

  “Did they find him?” Cincotti asked.

  “No, they didn’t find him. They put him in his trunk. Don’t even say ...”

  Lamattina interrupted. “Is that the thing you tried to tell me?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.” Zannino said. “Nine of them. Nine of them. They lugged him from the fuckin’ Topcoat [a club]. Nine fuckin’ guys.”

  “We got—we got lucky Friday,” Lamattina observed.

  “But that’s all right,” Larry insisted. “They did, John ... nine of them did it.... And he’s in the trunk.... But they got him. They got him. Freddy was scared to death. The kid would have clipped him in two fuckin’ minutes.... Freddie fucked him in the ass.”

  Signaling the end of his interest in Angelo Patrizzi, Zannino changed the subject. “Johnny, you having no more brandy?”

  12

  The Fall Of Gennaro Angiulo

  Nearly two and a half years after the Angelo Patrizzi slaying, Gennaro Angiulo and two of his brothers were dining at Francesca’s when Ed Quinn made the arrest that rocked Boston’s underworld. “I’ll be back for my pork chops before they’re cold,” the surly Angiulo had promised that summer night, September 19, 1983. But it was a promise he never kept. In fact, he hasn’t been out of jail since making it.

  The Mafia boss and three of his brothers were taken to FBI headquarters a few blocks away. In handcuffs, they rode the elevator to the large FBI squad room on the ninth floor. Even a veteran agent like Nick Gianturco, one of the key lookouts in the van during the break-ins, was taken aback at how small the Angiulos were. From the mobsters’ reputation, agents expected them to stand more than six feet and weigh in at over 220. But Jerry, Danny, Frankie, and Mikey were all basically the same height—5 feet 4 inches to 5 feet 6 inches. Jerry even wore lifts on his shoes.

  Angiulo was on his feet most of the night, screaming and hurling curses in English and Italian. The agents who hung around to witness the ruckus could not recall ever having watched someone in federal custody carry on the way Jerry Angiulo did.

  He yelled at his brothers, telling them what they could and could not say. He tongue-lashed any agent within earshot, seeming almost crazed. Mostly, he sought out Quinn, going nose to nose several times, demanding to see his lawyer and insisting he deserved a bail hearing that night. It was as if the cornered Angiulo was tormented by Quinn’s refusal to fight with him. You can’t be the underboss and feel ignored.

  Quinn and the others resisted the bait. Some were tempted to swing past the irate mafioso and say, “Shut up, asshole—it’s over.” But no one broke character. “You’ll get your hearing—tomorrow,” Quinn told him.

  That news triggered another round of denunciations—nonstop abuse that included raw and vintage Angiulo remarks, such as every agent’s mother was a whore. “That’s the way it’s gonna be,” Quinn deadpanned, as his colleagues talked to Boston police about keeping the Mafia family at the District One station for the night.

  Angiulo was infuriated. For his arrest, he expected to be summoned to court during working hours, not have his dinner interrupted. He expected to be fingerprinted, photographed, and released all on the same day. But, instead of being treated in the respectful manner he thought befit a Mafia leader, he’d been rounded up like a two-bit bookmaker and was being held overnight.

  That he was arrested did not surprise Angiulo. He’d suspected it would happen sooner or later, ever since the end of the FBI’s secret bugging of his 98 Prince Street headquarters in May 1981. On May 3 of that year, it took FBI agents less than thirty minutes to make their last surreptitious entry into Angiulo’s office to remove the two bugs. The very next day agents swarmed the premises with search warrants to gather evidence to present to a grand jury.

  Even after eavesdropping on the Angiulos for nearly four months, Ed Quinn, John Morris, and the others who conducted those raids encountered a couple of surprises.

 
; From their secret surveillance, agents knew that Frankie Angiulo often left the office with cash, went upstairs, and came back without the money. So they had expected to find a huge bankroll. But no funds were in sight when they first inspected the upstairs apartment. A couple of agents began tapping the bricks. Some of them were loose, and there was a hollow sound. They had found a safe. Quinn told Frankie Angiulo to open it. But the Mafia’s bookkeeper, who’d been found with $4,000 in cash stuffed in his belt beneath a sweater, adamantly refused. Quinn summoned the Boston police, and for the next three hours police officers using jackhammers pounded away at the concrete encasement. Having pried the safe loose, it took four men to carry it outside and onto a truck. Back at the FBI office, a locksmith that Quinn found by flipping through the yellow pages drilled the safe open. Inside was $327,000 in cash, $300,000 in bonds, and a pile of jewelry.

  During the same raid, agents searched 95 Prince Street, which was directly across from the main office. In addition to finding another safe and more cash in Frankie’s apartment, they discovered a secret suite on the second floor. The three rooms were completely sealed off from the five-story building’s main hallways. Where there should have been an entrance from the landing, there was a wall. Where there should have been a window, there was red brick. You could reach the apartment only from inside two other apartments, on the first and third floors. The rooms were stuffy and without windows. One had a large meeting table. The hallway outside was wired for sound, so anyone inside the secret room would know if someone were approaching. The doors were reinforced with steel. The centerpiece of the apartment was a large gas boiler, its fire perfect for destroying cartons of gambling slips.

  To Morris and the others, the apartment was like something out of the movie The Godfather—a place to conduct secret meetings to baptize a new Mafia member, or for soldiers to sleep on mattresses placed on the floor in the event of a gang war.

  Two weeks later, Nick Gianturco and fourteen others hit Larry Zannino’s high-stakes poker game as it was in progress. The microphones hidden at 51 North Margin Street had been removed on May 14, and the FBI wanted to seize gambling evidence from there as well. Gianturco, dressed in street clothes, entered the building and got past the doorman posing as just another card player. Within minutes, the others stormed in. No guns were drawn. No one was arrested, just as no one was arrested the day of the 98 Prince Street raids. But mounds of gambling materials were seized.

  For Jerry Angiulo, the two quick hits at the core of his empire served as a harsh confirmation: He was nearing the end of the line. Perhaps the worst blow came on June 17, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the use of RICO against the strictly illegal drug enterprise of wiseguy Novia Turkette, Jr.

  Contrary to Turkette’s view, the court ruled that the government’s use of RICO was not limited to instances when a criminal outfit sought to infiltrate a legitimate business. In writing the majority opinion, Justice Byron White assumed an almost mocking tone toward the defense argument—a rationale that Angiulo and Zannino had so heartily embraced. “Insulating the wholly criminal enterprise from prosecution under RICO is the more incongruous position,” wrote White. The underboss’s back was against the wall.

  In the months to follow, Angiulo knew the case against him was building, particularly after official notification that he’d been taped secretly came in August 1982. He just didn’t know when the agents would come for him. One persistent question of those at the edge of the mob and among law enforcement itself was: Knowing what he knew, why didn’t Angiulo run? He even talked about it but, in the end, it seems he simply had no place to go and could not face an uncertain future in a strange place where no one knew who he was. Besides, he’d fought his way out of trouble many times already.

  And so time dragged on. The major reason for a delay in the arrests was that the FBI had to transcribe the Angiulo tapes and study the fine print of what they had for evidence. It took fifteen mind-numbing months.

  Within weeks of the May 1981 raids, Ed Quinn, Tom Donlan, Bill Regii, Pete Kennedy, Jack Cloherty, Nick Gianturco, and Joe Kelly were holed up in an office in Waltham, west of Boston, trying to put the words onto paper. First they reviewed 540 tapes, to isolate the criminal conversations and divide them into subjects-like gambling, murder, or loansharking. Once they found they had, say, twenty-five gambling exchanges, they chose the best eight and tossed out the others.

  They narrowed the tapes down to 696 separate conversations. These were sent to Washington, D.C., where specialists worked on enhancing the Mafia talk and reducing the background noise from the radio and television. Once the tapes were enhanced, the agents sat down and listened again.

  They played and replayed the tapes, writing out their first draft of a transcript in longhand. The draft was then typed, and the agent listened to the tape again. The second draft was typed and then went to Quinn. Quinn matched the transcript against the tape and made further corrections. Sometimes a transcript went through twenty drafts.

  The work drove the agents nuts. They’d start off clearheaded on Monday morning—grabbed some coffee and a donut and got comfortable in front of the tape recorders—but by Friday, they were batty. They fought over single words: Was that a “hum” or a “hah”? To break the monotony, most jogged. Donlan and Gianturco played handball. In the end, they listened to 850 hours of Mafia talk.

  By the time Angiulo was arrested in 1983, the tapes had been culled, transcribed, and placed into the hands of the prosecutors. For many agents, the arrest marked a turning point in the grueling investigation. It was not only the last piece of unfinished business, but it also meant the case, in a way, was no longer theirs. From then on, it would belong to Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan and his team of attorneys on the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Task Force.

  With all of this in mind, Quinn and the others didn’t find it difficult to tolerate Angiulo’s tantrums the night he was booked. He could rant all he wanted; they knew what they had on him. The ranting lasted for a couple of hours, then wound down. Quinn and Angiulo parted company, and Quinn drove home. It was after midnight. He rejected his usual Budweiser and poured himself a Cutty Sark on the rocks. He abandoned the practice of not talking business. He and his wife talked late into the night about the past few years, agreeing that, somehow, all the work had been worth it. The next night, after the media focused on little else but the Angiulo arrest, his neighbors surprised them by bringing over a bottle of champagne in honor of the historic FBI takedown.

  Quinn, looking back a few years later, would tell others that what got him through the months of around-the-clock work were the stakes involved. “It didn’t take a genius to figure out what we had,” he said. “From the very first conversations, we knew we were onto something very big and very important, and after you heard the talk, time became unimportant. You just did what you had to do.”

  Angiulo, meanwhile, spent a less comfortable evening in a downtown lockup. The air was stale and hot. The temperature, which during the day had climbed into the nineties, at night fell only into the high sixties. The brooding Mafia boss found that his cell block was already occupied by a shirtless drunk with a belly as round as a beer keg who didn’t show him proper respect. The drunk had been trying to get the guards to give him a match to light a cigarette when Angiulo arrived. Watching the commotion that Angiulo’s appearance created, the drunk stage-whispered, “Now that the Godfather is here, can I get a goddamn match?”

  The cell-block chatter continued to pick up as the night wore on. Several transvestites were brought in and placed in a cell down from Angiulo, his brothers, and Sammy Granito, the capo from Revere who’d also been nabbed. It wasn’t long before the transvestites realized that their neighbors included a very distinguished crime figure.

  “Oh Godfaaaather, Godfaaaather,” they sang.

  For once, Jerry Angiulo had little to say.

  THERE WERE no more New Year’s Eve parties thrown by Angiulo at which he serenaded his five hundred guests
. From the moment he was arrested at Francesca’s, he remained behind bars, even though he continually fought his incarceration starting the night Quinn brought him to FBI headquarters in handcuffs for processing. (The court refused to release him on bail.)

  If he’d been caught speechless in the jail cell, he soon regained his fighting spirit during the pretrial wrangling that dragged on for months, through 1984 and into 1985. For the most part, he was merely keeping up appearances. Many of the FBI agents and prosecutors felt they had won the battle as soon as Angiulo lost his bid to suppress the tapes that were the heart of the government’s case. “You can murder witnesses, but you can’t do anything about the tapes,” noted one of the prosecutors. Still, to fully exploit the tapes, the FBI and the strike force had long felt that a jury had to be able to use transcripts to follow the mangled syntax and poor audio of the secretly recorded conversations.

  But the government won this battle too, although not before prosecutors spent months worrying which judge would get the case and rule on the critical transcript issue. The government hoped to avoid U.S. District judges Joseph L. Tauro and Walter Jay Skinner. Both were considered especially tough on the use of transcripts. Tauro was viewed as antiprosecution, especially for having permitted Larry Zannino to escape trial on sports-betting charges in 1977 by accepting Zannino’s contention that he was seriously ill. Preferred were either judges Andrew A. Caffrey or David S. Nelson. The Angiulo racketeering case became Nelson’s.