Legends of Winter Hill: Cops, Con Men, and Joe McCain, the Last Real Detective

by Jay Atkinson

  She was married to an Armenian named Nazelian, a bailiff in the Essex County Courthouse, and the couple had two teenage sons. Apparently Nazelian had accepted $18,000 from a man seeking a court officer's job. The sum, which represented a year's pay for an officer of the court, was a “fixer's fee.” In exchange, Nazelian promised to grease the man's application, a common practice in those days.

  Nazelian kept the money but failed to deliver on his promise. The aspiring court officer took his complaint to mob kingpin Jerry Angiulo, the man he probably should've turned to in the first place. Angiulo said he would get the money back for a 50 percent fee and assigned the collection to his principal leg breaker and enforcer, a thug named Richard “the Pig” DeVincent. Six foot four and heavyset, DeVincent was a known shooter and intimidator, complete with the typical black, velvet-collared overcoat, homburg hat, and a big, smoldering cigar.

  When the Pig appeared on the Nazelians' stoop demanding the $18,000, Peggy O'Malley's husband went rigid with fear. In a shaky voice Nazelian replied that he didn't have the money right then but would get it by the next day. DeVincent flung his cigar away and said he'd be back.

  The phone calls started that night, hang-ups mostly, and a few that threatened to burn the house down and made pointed reference to O'Malley's children. Before the appointed hour, Nazelian ran off without saying where he was headed or when he would return. Peggy O'Malley was left to face DeVincent alone and when the Pig discovered that the money wasn't there, he flew into a rage.

  “I'm coming back tonight and if it ain't here, I'm gonna stick dynamite up your ass,” said the enforcer, gesturing to indicate the two teenagers, “and the kids' asses, and blow this fucking place up.”

  When Joe and Leo heard all this, they told O'Malley to tell DeVincent that her husband would meet him that night at the Red Coach Grille on the Lynn Fells Parkway at nine o'clock and that he'd have the money. With other cops watching the restaurant, DeVincent appeared but left immediately after figuring out that Nazelian wasn't there. He drove to a phone booth and called O'Malley, while Joe McCain listened on the extension. It was a brief conversation.

  “Who the fuck do you think you are?” asked the Pig. “When I get my hands on you, I'll fucking kill you.”

  McCain had coached his old neighbor to insist it was a mix-up, and to tell DeVincent to come to the house: the money was all there, in an envelope, waiting for him. An hour later, when the Pig arrived, the Nazelians' lights were off and the shades were drawn. The street was empty and quiet, and emerging from his car, DeVincent strode up the front walk and pulled at the bell.

  O'Malley answered the door. “Come in,” she said. “I have the money.”

  “You better fucking have it,” he said, brushing past her.

  “It's right in there,” O'Malley said.

  Off the main foyer a single lamp illuminated the dining room, and there on the polished oak table was an envelope filled with hundred-dollar bills. Spotting the cash, DeVincent crossed the hall and as prearranged, O'Malley went straight through the house and out the back door.

  There were two entrances to the dining room; Joe was hidden behind one door and Leo the other. The Pig walked into the room without so much as a glance to either side and as he reached for the envelope, Joe stepped out from behind him, cocked his pistol and rested the muzzle against the back of DeVincent's head.

  “So long, Richie,” he said.

  Suddenly, there was a hissing sound, and the powerful stench of urine filled the room: DeVincent had pissed himself. Leo came out from behind the other door, his gun raised, laughing. “You're not such a big shot now, are you?” asked Papile, bending the mobster's arms behind his back to apply the handcuffs. “The big o.c. guy. A fucking pussy.”

  The Pig wasn't carrying a gun, but he had a small, incriminating slip of paper that represented the marker for the debt. While patting him down, Leo also discovered a leather cigar pouch in DeVincent's coat pocket. Inside the pouch were two giant Cubans, and Leo held them up where Joe could see them.

  “Joe, what does Red Auerbach do when the Celtics win a big game?” asked Papile.

  McCain shrugged his shoulders. “Has a cigar?”

  “Here, Joe,” said Leo, handing him one of the Cubans. “Light up a victory cigar. The best fuckin' pinch we ever made.”

  Richard DeVincent was convicted of extortion and received eight to twelve years in prison. Up on Winter Hill several years later, in front of a used car lot owned by two disgraced MDC cops, Joe McCain was driving the cement mixer for Boston Sand & Gravel when he spotted Richie the Pig on the sidewalk. Barreling toward him, McCain inched the great heavy bulk of the mixer over to that side of the road. Closer and closer to DeVincent, looming high above the street, Joe downshifted and laughed to himself. At the last instant he nudged the massive tonnage of the cement mixer, its tires as high as a man's head, to where a slice of cheese wouldn't have fit between his bumper and the back of DeVincent's shoes.

  Watching in his mirrors and snickering, Joe saw DeVincent throw his arms up like a bullfighter and then sprawl forward, onto the hood of his car. Joe kept going up and over Winter Hill, feeling justified that, for all the harm DeVincent had caused Peggy O'Malley's two sons by barging into their home, he could've dragged the Pig's body halfway to Lechmere Station.

  That wasn't the last time Joe saw Richie the Pig. While in private practice, McCain investigated a homosexual murder in Everett, and the information he gathered was useful in clearing DeVincent's son in the crime. (The younger DeVincent later died of AIDS.) In 1990 Joe attended the wake of a heroin-addled young woman, the daughter of a former Met cop. Passing through the funeral home, McCain encountered several ex-cops, and out of respect for the deceased, he made small talk with his former colleagues, then turned to leave.

  “Hey, Joe,” called a man's voice. McCain looked back as he went out the door: it was Richard DeVincent.

  Joe stuck his hands in his pockets; he didn't have a gun. His and Leo's testimony against DeVincent more than fifteen years earlier had been brutal, and from what he'd heard, the Pig had returned to his old ways since getting out of Walpole. Lines of sweat began running down Joe's back as he stood on the green-carpeted stairs, and the Pig descended toward him. It was dark on the street and the two men were alone.

  By now DeVincent was right on top of him, and Joe squared his shoulders. “What do you want?” he asked.

  DeVincent extended his hand. “I want to thank you for helping out my son,” he said, shaking Joe's hand.

  “Your son?”

  DeVincent nodded, looking at the ground. “Over in Everett . . .”

  “Oh yeah, right,” said Joe.

  Extricating himself from the handshake, Joe made another vacant remark and walked away under the giant elm trees that overhung the sidewalk, relieved that DeVincent had nothing more in mind.

  A short while later Richie the Pig was murdered, and they draped his body over a little granite monument in Medford Square; he died the way he had lived. But that night, as he'd groped in his pockets watching Richie come toward him in the dark, Joe McCain realized it wasn't his gun he was missing the most. It was Leo.

  For despite his reputation as a guy who got things done, in his own way, on his own terms, Joe McCain knew he was only as good as the people he surrounded himself with.

  And some of these people were a little shady.

  NINE

  Slow Walking

  A MAN'S REPUTATION IS A FUNNY THING, built out of the little things like a house is made brick by brick as much as by the cornerstone. Over time, a name and a face get associated with words and actions until, in the end, the very idea of that man's life is surrounded by an imposing edifice, good, bad, or indifferent, that can never be altered. Right now the uproar surrounding Joe McCain, Jr., and his suspension from the Somerville P.D. and the trash-pulling incident and all of Joey's idiosyncrasies and peccadilloes are coming together to determine his image and how he'll be remembered.

  N
ot so his father. Because of his handy fists and kind heart, not to mention the sheer number of big cases he tackled and solved, Joe Sr.'s reputation is already tinted with the sorts of hues attached to icons like Santa Claus and John Wayne, figures he was often compared to. And this spring, when Joe McCain's name goes on the memorial to slain police officers in Washington, D.C., the true depth, breadth, and color of his life will be established once and for all.

  But the most definitive way to gauge big Joe's reputation is not through the testimonials of other cops or district attorneys or through the recollections of family and friends. To really understand the measure of his influence, you have to hear from the guys on the other side of the street. The hustlers, gangsters, check kiters, con men, and thieves who dealt with Joe McCain every day knew just what kind of man he was.

  Now in his early sixties, Black Jimmy is the sort of anonymous fellow you might see hanging around the pari-mutuel window at the dog track. Average height, slender of build, dressed in jeans, sneakers, and sweatshirts, Black Jimmy, a Lebanese Catholic who grew up poor in Boston's South End, is so called because of his olive complexion and his dark hair, which is salted with gray. Known for his fast, nervous patter, Black Jimmy always has an angle, is always edging closer to the score that's going to get him off the treadmill of busted trifectas and petty cons. And you probably will see him at the track, since in his declining years the harmless-looking handicapper makes his living there, following the 'hounds from Massachusetts to Florida to Colorado and back again.

  Black Jimmy goes all the way back to the start of Joe McCain's career as a Met detective. He covered the spectrum of being an informant, doing all he could to keep himself out of jail by dropping a dime on somebody else. And he had balls, since more than one of the guys Black Jimmy put the finger on were mobsters who knew the dope on them was coming from somewhere and would just start killing off the likely suspects until they got the right one. So on a rainy night just after Christmas 1969, it was with considerable trepidation that Black Jimmy donned his favorite sport coat and headed out to meet James Vincent “the Bear” Flemmi at a Jamaica Plain nightspot called the Pond Café.

  At that time, the shifting roster of the Winter Hill gang was comprised of the Bear, his brother Stephen “the Rifleman” Flemmi, Howie Winter, James “Whitey” Bulger, and Joseph “the Animal” Barboza, along with the usual motley assortment of strong arms and collectors. Loosely organized and reckless even for mobsters, they were all “graduates” of Walpole State Prison, where most of them had served time in the early sixties. By the decade's midpoint, the Winter Hill gang had a piece of the loan sharking, gambling, prostitution, drug trade, and truck hijacking from Somerville to Mattapan, but the North End Mafiosi Jerry and Donato Angiulo had a lot more, and the Flemmis coveted it.

  Jimmy “the Bear” Flemmi was flamboyant, outgoing, and crazy; even the Angiulos, who employed a string of contract killers themselves, were scared to death of him. Law enforcement officials, including Joe McCain, estimated that the Bear had committed as many as thirty murders, often brutalizing the corpses beyond recognition. In one case that bore Flemmi's imprint, McCain and Leo Papile helped to fish a body out of the Muddy River near the Boston Globe offices on Morrissey Boulevard. The corpse, which had been deposited in the ocean, eventually floated down through Quincy and lodged itself in a narrow canal. The killer, or killers, had shot the man in the chest, obscuring his identity by cutting off the victim's head and arms, and burying a hatchet in his torso to hide the bullet wound.

  It was well known that the Bear liked to chop 'em up, that he loved guns and knives and hatchets. At one time he had owned a butcher shop on Dudley Street.

  Black Jimmy had done four and a half years in Walpole State Prison while James Flemmi was serving a much longer sentence for aggravated assault. They were both local guys, and to a degree, the young con artist had a rapport with Flemmi. But the Bear, a stocky, balding man who weighed over two hundred pounds, was the type that could smile at you one minute and stab you the next. One day in prison Black Jimmy was talking to another inmate named Jimmy O'Toole, a tough son of a bitch who had shot and wounded Flemmi on the outside, and the Bear followed Black Jimmy to his cell. “If you ever talk to that motherfucker again I'll kill you,” Flemmi said. Then he asked Black Jimmy if he knew a fellow named John Murray. Jimmy did; he and Murray were friends. “I killed John Murray,” said the Bear, with a smirk. “And then I cut his fuckin' head off.”

  When Black Jimmy got out of Walpole and was assembling his crew and working out a new con, the Bear allowed him to do business, for old times' sake. The con was running like a dream, and Black Jimmy was cruising around town in a brand-new Buick convertible, brown with a cream leather interior, the same car driven by one of the leading wiseguys in the Winter Hill mob. But Jimmy's new Electra raised suspicions; what exactly was he doing to be doing well enough to afford such a sweet ride? The Winter Hill gang was roaming all over in those days, extracting penalties from crooks of every description as a form of tribute. Whatever Black Jimmy's game was, the Bear wanted a percentage.

  Jimmy's game, which he had just about perfected, was called slow walking. It was the culmination of several lesser schemes: a sleight-of-hand activity known as shortchanging, a vacuum cleaner scam, and a two-man operation called the wedding ring con. To make the game work, Black Jimmy had pieced together a reliable crew of actors that included his childhood pal from the South End, Billy Dennett; Al Forzese, who sang in a rock band that played the Combat Zone; a degenerate gambler known as the Cowboy, who Black Jimmy met in a Denver card game; and a light-complected Irishman from West Roxbury, James O'Grady, who was referred to as White Jimmy.

  White Jimmy taught his counterparts how to 'loid a door, using the thin edge of a plastic card to pry open a lock— his favorite tool was a prayer card from the Mission Church imprinted with the slogan “Never Give Up.” He also said that, if the boys were casing for jewels and there were four mailboxes, Shaughnessy, Shapiro, Goldman, and Sullivan, “go for the Jews, 'cause the Irishman, he's got nothin'.”

  As their cons grew more elaborate, demanding a larger ensemble, Black Jimmy occasionally invited a jewel thief named Richie Carney to participate. A charming, handsome fellow, Carney talked like a Harvard grad and was the son of the Massachusetts Port Authority director. But one day on Storrow Drive he surprised Black Jimmy when he was unable to read a street sign. Although possessing a genius IQ and as well-dressed as a Back Bay stockbroker, Richie Carney was illiterate.

  In the classic version of the slow walk game, the actors would rent a room and install a pair of telephones— one for incoming calls and one for outgoing. Using the yellow pages, Black Jimmy would call up a string of bars, identifying himself as “Al, the UPS guy,” and when he got the owner or manager on the line, he'd say, “You still interested in that TV?”

  “Huh? What TV is that?”

  Parlaying the bar owner's initial confusion (“Is this Joe? Oh, I'm sorry, I thought it was Joe. We talked about this last week”) into an offer to buy televisions far below cost, Black Jimmy would suggest that he drop by with more information. A short while later he'd show up, dressed in the brown shirt and trousers of a UPS driver, equipped with a full-color brochure from Sears.

  “Check these model numbers out,” Black Jimmy would say, explaining that Sears had received an overshipment and he knew someone inside who would sell the TVs straight from the loading dock, complete with store receipt and warranties. “The guy wants five hundred apiece for these eighteen-hundred-dollar models.”

  As the sucker perused the brochure, Jimmy would add, “Grab seven or eight and we'll give you one for nothing. You can sell 'em to your friends for eight hundred, make yourself a little profit.”

  The game preyed on the sucker's greed. As soon as a guy said “No shit?” and began scheming out loud to sell himself ten or twelve or sixteen televisions, Black Jimmy knew he had one on the line. All the bar owner had to do was consolidate a few orders, Jimm
y said, and he stood to make well over a thousand dollars.

  Once the sucker was hooked, Black Jimmy would make arrangements to meet him in a Sears parking lot. Deals were cash only, he'd say, and the selected mall would usually require a drive of twenty or thirty miles, to ensure the sucker's commitment. The sucker was instructed to tell no one: Al the UPS guy and his buddy at Sears would lose their jobs if anyone found out.

  In the Sears parking lot, the sucker would meet Billy Dennett, a chubby, jocular man who told dirty jokes and was an expert at closing the deal. It was a psychological game, what Black Jimmy referred to as “dress up,” wigs and horn-rimmed spectacles with ordinary glass in them and a prop as basic as a shipper's vest. All Billy Dennett had to do was slip on that flimsy gray vest with “Sears” embroidered on it, stick a pencil behind his ear and a clipboard under his arm, and he became the Shipper, master of the loading dock.

  White Jimmy, a trim, narrow-shouldered fellow who dressed like Johnny Carson, usually played the part of the store manager. One time he went into a bar at the North Shore Mall to get the cash from a couple of suckers, and an hour and a half later he hadn't returned, which worried the other guys. So Black Jimmy crept into the mall and up to the bar entrance just in time to see a table loaded with five suckers, all of them drunk, regaling White Jimmy with “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow.” When O'Grady came out, the two Jimmies rode off with an extra eighteen hundred dollars.

  When Black Jimmy brought Dennett and White Jimmy in, he revealed the secret to making the game work: go for the kill right away, before the sucker could change his mind. In the mall parking lot, Billy Dennett would hand over an invoice for the TVs, take the envelope filled with cash, and tell the sucker to meet him around back. Dennett promised to stamp the invoice paid when the man picked up his TVs on the loading dock, just like a regular transaction.

  The sucker got in his car or pickup truck, eager to see his new televisions. And Black Jimmy and Billy Dennett walked off in different directions; moments later, they reunited in a far corner of the lot, jumped in a beautiful brand-new convertible with cream leather interior, and zoomed away, counting the sucker's money.