This Land

by Dan Barry

  To his right, past the exercise ball he balanced on to do 1,000 situps every morning—he often invited people to test his taut stomach—was a closet crammed with still more memories: copies of indictments, appeals of convictions, transcripts of wiretapped conversations. (“I’ve got a crew of guys, I’ll tell you, and we rob armoreds, we rob armored trucks….”) A half-century archive of persistent criminality.

  Whenever the corpse of another wiseguy floated up to public consciousness, Mr. DeMasi was always in the mix of likely suspects. “Armed and dangerous” was stipulated.

  “He didn’t take any lip from anybody,” recalled Tony Fiore, a mob associate and friend. “I mean, he was a tough guy.”

  “One of the most dangerous criminals in New England,” said Brian Andrews, a former detective commander of the Rhode Island State Police. “A bad bastard.”

  No doubt, Mr. DeMasi would love to be back at it. Scoping out some strip mall for a week, a month, whatever it took. Getting the timing down for when the guard came out with that canvas bag of cash. Donning a nylon mask. Concealing a semiautomatic. Go!

  “It’s still in me,” he said, with a desiccated laugh.

  This was unlikely, though, given his age and his consideration for his ex-wife and three grown children, who had suffered enough. Besides, too many cameras out there now.

  His quiet life in Salisbury seemed to suit him. He had family living nearby. He had those three refrigerator shelves. And to help him remember all that he had done and seen, he had a framed newspaper article on his nightstand: “Tips For Improving Your Memory.”

  “Make lists…. Put frequently used items in the same place each time…. Repeat information…. Make associations…. Exercise your mind….”

  But some things cannot be forgotten.

  A few months after my visit, on a December afternoon as clear and cold as a stare, other visitors came unannounced to Ralph DeMasi’s door. And they were armed.

  As a Providence Journal reporter covering organized crime a quarter-century ago, I was their deadline Boswell.

  I eventually moved on, taking with me the noirish stories and vague threats. That time, for example, when the owner of a mob-connected strip club I was investigating mentioned during a tense interview the name of my wife and the address of the house we were about to buy.

  Those days came flooding back two years ago when the documentary filmmakers Marc Smerling and Zac Stuart-Pontier contacted me about “Crimetown,” a podcast focusing on the darker side of Providence. We began sharing our knowledge and research, which benefited me as I prepared a story about Maury Lerner, a minor-league baseball player who became a hit man for the Patriarca crime family.

  The documentarians, it turned out, had gotten to know Mr. DeMasi, who had spent time in prison with Mr. Lerner. Mr. Smerling kindly arranged for the two of us to meet with the gangster and his ex-wife and close friend, Sue, at his home last summer, where our conversation wound up centering on Mr. DeMasi and his turbulent past.

  “A journey and a half,” Sue DeMasi called it.

  In some ways, the man’s journey seemed preordained. Born in 1936 to a teenager in a Connecticut home for unwed mothers, he was soon abandoned. So began his peripatetic life as a troubled foster child.

  If his foster parents weren’t happy with him, he once said, “they’ll just call up the people that bounce you around and they just come and get you and take you somewhere else—take you to another foster home. But I don’t hold that against anybody.”

  Many years later, Mr. DeMasi tracked down his birth mother, who by then had been long married to a man who knew nothing of her first child. She told her son never to call again. “I remember the tears coming out of his eyes,” his ex-wife said. “He had spent all those years trying to find her.”

  In the distant blur of the 1940s and 1950s, who knows what truly happened to one forsaken boy? One version is that, at age 11, he finally found a foster mother whom he loved, a Mrs. Bowman, in Bridgeport. When her husband began hitting her, again, the boy grabbed the man’s shotgun, threatened to shoot and ran away. He slept nuzzled beside the gun in a graveyard, then robbed a bookie’s card game the next day by ordering everyone at gunpoint to strip naked.

  That, at least, is the family story. But there is no question that the young Mr. DeMasi spent time in a reformatory, time in the Army and time doing time, his progress chronicled in newspaper police items:

  Ralph DeMasi was arrested after breaking into the Kingsway bowling alley in Fairfield and rifling a pinball machine… was remanded to the custody of the New York State Police after being charged with burglarizing a sporting-goods store in Brewster, N.Y…. was arrested at gunpoint behind a Boston furrier’s, his car filled with $80,000 worth of furs, his pocket allegedly concealing a loaded gun.

  In 1970, soon after being released from prison for the fur-theft conviction, Mr. DeMasi met his wife. He had stopped at her mother’s house in South Boston with one of her brothers, who was working a con called the “short change”—in which the swindler uses confusing prattle to distract a clerk handling money. “You’d give them a 20 and say: ‘Oh, wait a minute, I didn’t mean to give that to you, take this dollar, oh, I need my change for the 20,’” Ms. DeMasi explained. “It’s just fast-talking.”

  The ex-con and the flimflammer’s redheaded younger sister were married within four months. Around the same time, Mr. DeMasi was suspected in the burglary of a suburban Boston home emptied of assorted valuables, including a mink coat, some jewelry and a saxophone. Searching the DeMasi apartment, the police found many of the goods, as well as a sweet but telltale note:

  “Hi Honey! Went out with the cat & got nothing! Am going over to give Millie the money & then shall be taking a fast ride to Providence & try to get some money for the diamonds & the fur. Take care. Should be back by 3 p.m. Get ready & I will take you downtown. Took $19 out of your pocketbook? Love, Ralph.”

  When their first child was born on Christmas Day, Mr. DeMasi was in prison. During her pregnancy with their second child, he pulled up to their Rhode Island home in a rental truck one night and informed his wife that they were moving—right now—to California, where he was soon arrested. With the help of some Rhode Island connections, she was able to post his bail just before giving birth.

  Ms. DeMasi spent most of her young married life waiting. Waiting and waiting for her husband to come home after a score, her heart pounding like cops at the door. “Like an eternity,” she said.

  Then there were waits that lasted for years, and his presence at home came in the form of his disembodied voice on cassette tapes mailed from prison. Amid the inmates’ clatter, he would express his love and promise to change.

  “I want to get out of here, and I want to be with you and the children,” he said on one tape, from 1977. “Never again going through all them crazy runarounds. No way, boy. We just got to put it all behind us, baby, and get away from it.”

  He never did.

  Back then, Mr. DeMasi was a valued associate of Mr. Patriarca, the Mafia boss who ran New England organized crime from his vending-machine business on Federal Hill in Providence. In the front of Mr. Patriarca’s drab store sat broken cigarette machines and old arcade games, and in the back, the cluttered desk where he collected tributes, co-opted elected officials and ordered people dead.

  Mr. DeMasi and Mr. Patriarca bonded while serving time in the Adult Correctional Institutions in Rhode Island, the two of them taking walks in the prison yard. The older Mr. Patriarca had also grown up without a father, and perhaps he saw himself in how his tough new friend avoided flash and kept his mouth shut. Even when Mr. DeMasi was wounded in that drive-by shooting, he refused to give names, including Whitey Bulger’s.

  The Patriarca connection paid off. During his frequent prison spells, Mr. DeMasi knew that his family would have food deliveries, the use of a car, a tree at Christmas. And every week, Ms. DeMasi said, she would go to Mr. Patriarca’s storefront—“and there’d be an envelope with $200.”
All 20s.

  In the brazen ranks of the Providence underworld, Mr. DeMasi distinguished himself as a dedicated family man who approached crime as a 9-to-5 job with the occasional late night. The police routinely watched him drive off in the morning to lay the groundwork for a planned robbery, then return home in the evening, leaving the carousing to others.

  “And that was not like the other wiseguys I knew,” said Mr. Andrews, the former Rhode Island law enforcement official. “Ralph was all about work.”

  Mr. DeMasi was so committed to his criminal profession that he might be in prison for one felony, on trial for another and under indictment for a third. He was almost as ubiquitous in the courts as the clerks and deputy sheriffs.

  There was the time he wrote a Rhode Island judge an impassioned letter on nearly eight feet of prison-issue toilet paper. It laid out the injustice of being denied bail, but not before inviting the judge to use the paper for its intended purpose. His scatological cri de coeur lives on in court archives.

  Then there was the time he represented himself against charges that he had conspired to murder a different judge by hiring assassins to blow up the man’s home. For the two-week trial, Mr. DeMasi wore button-down shirts, slacks and brown Hush Puppies with white socks—never a jacket or a tie. According to The Providence Journal, he presented his case without opening a law book, relying instead on a mail-order paperback that explained how to win a criminal trial.

  Mr. DeMasi, who has an eighth-grade education, wound up winning his own acquittal. He promptly accused the prosecutor of reneging on a $10 bet over the trial’s outcome and invited all the jurors to join him for a drink. That evening, though, he drank his bourbon and Cokes alone.

  New England back then had no shortage of mobsters like Mr. DeMasi, stealing, victimizing, doing harm. Colorful, but only from a safe distance. Then there was nearly everyone else, just trying to get by, like Ed Morlock.

  Mr. Morlock was that guy behind you in line at Dunkin’ Donuts, looking like he could use some caffeine. He was 6-foot-3 and a little heavy around the waist, with half-moon shadows under his eyes suggesting hardships endured.

  He grew up in Winchendon, an old manufacturing town amid the hardwoods and pines of north-central Massachusetts. It once produced textiles, wood products and so many novelties that it was called Toy Town. But those factories had closed long ago, leaving the Winchendon of his childhood a self-contained place, detached from the Boston bustle.

  By the age of 7, he was working on his family’s dairy farm, tending the cows. By his teenage years, he was driving a milk route in a cream-colored truck. Stopping to make deliveries along Maple Street, he would often see a smallish teenage girl balancing herself like a tightrope walker on the guardrail cables along the road.

  They never spoke. Sometimes, though, he waved.

  Eager to see beyond the Winchendon horizon, the young man defied his father by joining the Marines, returned from service, found factory work, got married, had four children, all girls. One evening, at a wake, he was introduced to a cousin’s wife, Jeannette, a petite woman with dirty blond hair. She had also grown up in Winchendon, one of 16 children of a French Canadian foundry worker and a homemaker.

  You weren’t that kid always walking on the wires?

  Yes, and I used to see you go by. You never said hello.

  Years later, Mr. Morlock was separated from his wife and living alone when he was invited to play cards at the house of that same cousin, whose relationship with Jeannette had soured. He had become abusive, she recalled.

  One cold November night, she said, he locked her out of the house after she announced that she wanted a divorce. She had 95 cents and no coat.

  “And who took me in? Ed did.”

  They married in 1968 and had one child, Ed Jr. Mr. Morlock returned to work at the dairy. Things, it seemed, would be all right.

  Then one day, while he was clearing land for firewood, a malfunctioning chain saw bounced and cut his right leg to the bone. The injury left him with a permanent limp and profound circulatory problems that required him to wear pump-powered stockings to keep blood from pooling in his legs and feet. Discomfort defined his days.

  The Morlocks moved around Winchendon, then down to Florida, then back to Massachusetts, where they eventually bought a small yellow Cape Cod house on a main road in the bypassed industrial town of Athol. One bathroom, and an endless whoosh of traffic just beyond the front door.

  All the while, Mr. Morlock struggled to remain in the work force with his disability, laboring at the dairy, pumping gas, doing security, installing patios. He was also tending to his wife, who was having what she called emotional breakdowns that had them considering a move back to Florida.

  In 1987, he found work as an armored-car security guard with Mass Transport Inc. Some days he was the driver and other days the courier, the one who got out to deliver or collect the cash.

  He wore a two-tone brown uniform that his wife kept washed and ironed, along with a bulletproof vest that she and their son bought for him. The company feared that vests gave employees delusions of invincibility, but Mr. Morlock figured that, given all the blood-thinning medication he was taking, he would bleed out if he were ever shot. Best to wear the vest.

  He also carried his own .357 Magnum, which he had yet to draw from its black holster in the line of duty.

  His adult son eventually joined him at Mass Transport. The older Mr. Morlock had not been easy to get to know; for one thing, his disability had deprived the family of so much time and joy. But now, on those pre-dawn drives to the office in his blue Ford Taurus, the father opened up about his childhood, his years in the service, his injury.

  “I didn’t know my father very well until we started working together,” Ed Morlock Jr. said.

  It was a Saturday morning in May 1991. The Boston Celtics and the aging Larry Bird had just been eliminated from the playoffs. The Red Sox were in the midst of being swept down in Texas. And the older Mr. Morlock had agreed to fill in as a courier for a co-worker who wanted the day off to celebrate his birthday.

  Before leaving, he told his wife that after work they would visit his mother at the nursing home and then have dinner at McDonald’s. “And that was a treat for us,” Ms. Morlock said. “Because we didn’t go out much.”

  I’ve got a lot of things to tell you, he said.

  Fine, she answered. We’ll talk when you get home.

  Armored trucks were money bags on wheels, often driven up to a bank or store at roughly the same time, day in, day out, depending on traffic. “There were always customers who wanted us to be there between this time and this time,” the younger Mr. Morlock said. “Security-wise, it made no sense.”

  By the late 1980s, a finite number of New England gangsters, about two dozen, specialized in robbing these armored trucks. Prominent among them: Ralph DeMasi.

  There were “two objectives,” Mr. DeMasi told the “Crimetown” podcast. “Get the money and don’t get caught getting the money.”

  A lot of preliminary work came first. You had to assemble your crew: gunman, wheelman, lookout. You had to spend weeks on surveillance: watching the police routines, the traffic flow, the arrivals and departures of the armored trucks, the habits of the armed guards. And of course, you had to plot your getaway.

  “Everything had to be planned out,” Mr. DeMasi said. “It couldn’t be just spur of the moment.”

  Tony Fiore, a former comrade in crime, agreed. Mr. Fiore’s reputation as a specialist in robbing armored trucks is memorialized by a tattoo adorning his chest. It depicts a thief wielding a gun, with a bag of cash at his feet and an armored truck in his sights.

  “We used to go sit in parking lots from 7 in the morning until 5 at night before we would do a score,” said Mr. Fiore, now 74. “We used to actually put more time into a score than people do if they were working a legitimate job.”

  The haul could be $100,000, $300,000, a half-million, with everything hinging on the element of surprise. By th
is point, law enforcement officials could narrow down the possible suspects to the same handful. “There weren’t that many guys doing these jobs,” Mr. Andrews said. “You always knew. That’s Fiore. That’s DeMasi.”

  In March 1991, the authorities arrested Mr. Fiore and his crew as they prepared to hold up an armored truck carrying $1 million at a mall in North Attleborough, Mass. The plan included having a grandfatherly thief in a wheelchair holding a semiautomatic under a blanket.

  With Mr. Fiore and his accomplices in custody and about to spend the better part of two decades behind bars, the small number of criminals working armored trucks in New England shrank. Still, two months later, there came another holdup, this one in the second-largest city in Massachusetts: Worcester.

  On that mild Saturday morning in May, an armored truck pulled up on schedule to a Shaw’s supermarket at one end of an elbow-shaped strip mall on Lincoln Street in Worcester. Ed Morlock clambered out, his .357 Magnum snug in its black holster, and went inside to make his collection.

  As he left with a bag of money and receipts, two men confronted him in the supermarket’s foyer, and one tried to disarm him. A bagger inside the store saw Mr. Morlock standing against the wall, his hands raised. Then came loud popping sounds, with blood spattering the soda machines. He slumped to the floor, his gun beside him, out of its holster.

  His assailants grabbed the bag, ran to an idling white Cadillac with stolen license plates and peeled out of the parking lot. The vehicle was found in an apartment complex a half-mile away, having been swapped for another getaway car. A chain blocking access to a back road out of town had been removed in advance.

  The work of professionals, well planned, well executed. That is, if you looked past the blood.

  On duty that morning was a young, clean-cut detective with street smarts and a military bearing named Steven Sargent, the son of a Worcester police lieutenant. Having grown up in a working-class neighborhood just down Lincoln Street, he knew this shopping center well. As a boy, he’d ride his bicycle to visit his grandmother, who lived in subsidized housing behind the plaza. As a uniformed patrolman, he’d take breaks at the Dunkin’ Donuts.