by Jay Atkinson
Other than funerals, McCain's grand jury appearance was the first time in twenty years he'd worn his Met uniform, and he was embarrassed, hurt, angry, and proud all at once. Most of the questions were horseshit, given the circumstances, and after an hour of testimony several participants were glancing at their watches. But near the end of the session, one of the grand jurors asked, “You think quite a bit of yourself, don't you, Detective McCain?”
“Yes, sir, I do,” Joe said. “The only thing a policeman has is his honor and his integrity, and I value mine very highly.”
Later, Joe McCain would say, “He asked me a question, and he got a fucking answer.” Emerging from the courtroom, McCain saw his adversaries grouped together in the hallway, laughing and talking. He started in their direction and his attorney, Jim O'Donovan, grabbed him by the sleeve.
“Joe, please don't say anything,” said O'Donovan.
McCain frowned. “Jim,” he said. “Fuck him.”
Big Joe twisted out of his lawyer's grip and crossed the hallway to where the district attorney was standing with his cronies. “You knew I had nothing to do with the Depositor's Trust and yet you let these fuckin' people torture me,” said McCain. “Shame on you.”
At the Exam Scam trial, Clemente admitted that he'd been cheating on police examinations since 1964, and that when he and Tommy Doherty broke into civil service headquarters for the first time, it was “like playing God.” Another immunized witness, the former Met sergeant Frank Thorpe, was asked on the witness stand if he was known by any nicknames.
“Everything but Late for Lunch,” said Thorpe, adding that he was also called Indian, Bear, Crazy, and Wahoo.
Thorpe's testimony provided some of the trial's lighter moments, including the admission that while a police officer he had crashed so many cruisers other Mets refused to ride with him. And he was asked about an incident in Roxbury where he shot a young man outside the district courthouse. “You and General Custer have something in common,” Thorpe had told his victim.
“What's that?” the man asked.
“You've both been shot by the Indians,” said Thorpe.
But it was the testimony of Joe Bangs that amazed some of the most hardened courtroom observers. A veteran cop and criminal, Bangs avoided prosecution on all charges and even wangled a tax-free disability pension of $1,950 per month from the Mets for a supposed heart condition. On the stand he admitted to knowledge of at least four gangland murders before they occurred, as well as having participated in a major drug trafficking business with a hoodlum named Bucky Barrett. The former Met boasted that he once sold fifteen tons of marijuana in two hours, over the telephone in a bar called the Little Rascals that he and Barrett had purchased with drug money.
Joe Bangs's most shocking revelation was that Gerry Clemente had asked him to murder his girlfriend Barbara Hickey and burn her house down because Clemente was afraid Hickey would testify against him in the Depositor's Trust case. Bangs refused, but only because Hickey wasn't aware of Bangs's own role in the burglary.
“If she had known about me, I don't know what I would have done,” said Bangs.
While Joe Bangs was testifying in the Depositor's Trust trial, Tommy Doherty's attorney, Tom Troy, asked Bangs if he had received the cash that the State Police had found in his trunk from Metropolitan Police Captain Bill McKay. In his testimony Bangs used McKay's name a dozen times, and even took the trouble to spell it for the court reporter.
That same afternoon a Boston Globe reporter named Paul Langner, who didn't really know Joe McCain, saw a big, white-haired man in the hallway outside the courtroom and asked another cop who he was. McCain was visiting the Middlesex Courthouse to testify in a rape case, but since he was talking to Attorney Troy, Langner believed him to be a witness in the attempted murder case.
In an article that appeared in The Boston Globe the next day, Langner made a significant error.
Q. (by Troy) Did Mr. McCain give you the $10,000 in Canadian currency? (Capt. Joseph McCain of the Metropolitan Police and Bangs had met in a bar earlier on the day of the alleged crime, according to testimony.)
A. No he did not, sir.
Another cop directed Joe McCain to the article, and after he read it, he wanted to tear the paper— not to mention Paul Langner— into little pieces. McCain called the new superintendent of the Mets to complain and was told not to worry about it. But Joe filed a million-dollar libel suit against Paul Langner and The Boston Globe, stating that they had “negligently, intentionally or recklessly inflicted emotional distress upon the plaintiff.”
In dismissing the charges, Superior Court Justice Thomas S. Connolly decided that Langner was just a harried beat reporter with no special animus toward McCain. Still, big Joe had made his point. And Langner's deposition in the suit contained an accurate description of the legendary Met detective:
He's a man slightly, I believe slightly taller than I am, sort of a little bit heftier without being fat. He's a— seems like a muscularly built man, but my recollection is grayish or almost white hair. I don't believe he wears glasses. He has sort of a square, Viking-like face, neatly dressed, you know, a friendly kind of man.
Langner also revealed that he heard about his mistake the day after the story appeared, during a conversation with two lawyers in the courtroom hallway. In his deposition, Langner stated that, upon learning of the error, “I burdened myself of an indelicate expression, but it was too late.”
Despite the fact that the Boston Globe article wrongly linked his name to an infamous chapter in the doomed history of the Metropolitan District Commission police force, Joe McCain's essential puckishness allowed him to savor Langner's pained exclamation of “Fuck!” and his later description of that as “an indelicate expression.” For all Joe's street smarts and Winter Hill toughness, he admired refinement of speech and men in possession of great book learning. In fact, he laughed at the very idea; he was, after all, an Irishman.
Joe McCain avoided any official taint related to the Exam Scam by virtue of the fact that the only test he took in his professional life was to gain entrance to the Mets in 1958. He was more than content as a detective, supplementing his pay by working at a second job.
Bangs's and Clemente's testimony was like Nero's fiddling— it signaled the beginning of the end for the Mets. The department was rotten with graduates of their accelerated promotion program and over the next few years, good honest cops like Joe McCain's old friend, deputy superintendent Al Seghezzi, were demoted and transferred to the hinterlands while the bad guys flourished.
A few years later, as several dirty cops were being paroled from jail, the state legislature debated the future of the organization these men had ruined. In 1992, four years after Joe McCain had been shot on the job and forced to retire, the Metropolitan Police department was dismantled and active officers in good standing were absorbed into the Mass State Police. Although there were more than six hundred Metropolitan Police officers and the vast majority of them were honest, hardworking cops, Gerry Clemente's criminal activity was the linchpin that decided the fate of the MDC.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Flowers of Evil
Look, the dead years dressed in old clothes crowd the balconies of the sky.
— CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
RETIREMENT WAS NOT A QUIET PERIOD in Joe McCain's life. He loved to play golf, especially at that little piece of heaven known as the Charles River Country Club, but Joe never entirely traded his sidearm for a pitching wedge. He was always busy with the P.I. firm, and his passion for investigative work, his mortgage, and his conscience wouldn't allow him to take it easy with so much going on in Boston. Every time Joe picked up a newspaper, he was reminded of some case he'd worked on, as the pigeons from the old Somerville-Charlestown wars came home to roost, and none so dramatically as the ghost of Teddy Deegan.
When Joseph L. Salvati was released from Walpole State Prison in 1998 after serving thirty years of a life sentence for Deegan's murder— a crime that he didn'
t commit— he thanked his wife, Marie, and their four children; his lawyer, Victor Garo; the Boston TV reporter Dan Rea; and retired Met detectives Joe McCain and Leo Papile for his freedom. And although he couldn't bring himself to utter the name, the man Salvati had to blame for his conviction and grueling incarceration was none other than Joe “the Animal” Barboza.
In the winter of 1965, Edward “Teddy” Deegan ran afoul of local mobsters after he and two other small-time hoods broke into the home of a connected wiseguy. Not long afterward, the bodies of Deegan's associates turned up in Boston Harbor. Meanwhile, a gang of thugs led by Joe Barboza was hired to take care of Deegan, a onetime club fighter and B and E partner of Roy French. French, who worked as a bouncer at the Ebb Tide on Revere Beach, was a large, well-muscled fellow with a volatile temper and a penchant for burglary. When the subject of Deegan's murder was broached, Roy French's only concern was that “the office” had authorized the hit. Barboza assured French that he had the blessing of the Angiulo brothers in the North End but expressed his concern that French and Teddy Deegan were pals. To that French replied, “I steal with Deegan; I'm not his friend.”
Just after midnight on March 12, 1965, the killers met in the Ebb Tide and proceeded to a rendezvous point in Chelsea, where French had lured Deegan with the promise of a burglary score. Assigned to organized crime, McCain and Papile were sitting on the Ebb Tide that night, maintaining surveillance on Barboza and his crew as well as the Rhode Island mobster Henry Tameleo. When a group of ne'er-do-wells left the bar, McCain and Papile noted the presence of Barboza, French, Richard “Romeo” Martin, a fat, sausage-lipped gangster named Ronald Cassesso, and James Vincent “the Bear” Flemmi. McCain and Papile visited a few other joints down on the beach, and when they walked through the Ebb Tide later that night, they saw the same five men.
Just before Joe and Leo's arrival at the Ebb Tide, bouncers had rousted the drugged-up kid brother of a North End bookie. Noticing blood on Roy French's sleeve and believing it to have resulted from that fight, McCain wagged his finger in the bouncer's face and said, “Keep your fucking hands off people. You have a problem with a patron here, you call us, the police, and we'll come down and evict them.”
Behind McCain, Papile was speaking in a loud voice, and when McCain turned around, he saw his partner telling a husky, balding man in a leather jacket to take a few deep breaths and relax. It was James “the Bear” Flemmi. Papile knew Flemmi from the Continental Café, where the hardworking detective moonlighted as a bartender.
“You guys all right?” asked the Bear, making a friendly gesture toward McCain. Later, Joe and Leo would laugh at such a vicious thug offering to back them up.
What McCain and Papile didn't know was that, in the interim, French and another man had driven Teddy Deegan to an alley behind the Beneficial Finance Company on Fourth Street in Chelsea. Unarmed, and believing that a door had been left open at the finance company to allow their entry, Deegan walked into the alley with French close behind him. As Deegan reached for the door, French took out a pistol and shot him in the head.
At the same instant a heavyset man stepped through the door, another figure rushed out from behind a stack of wooden pallets, and there were more gunshots. Deegan collapsed to the ground, bleeding from multiple bullet wounds.
His arm splattered with Deegan's blood, Roy French emerged from the alley with his gun still drawn. As he approached his getaway car, one of voices behind him said, “Get him, too.” The car sped off and French, with a look of awe and excitement on his face, hurried away in the other direction. After walking a few blocks he boarded a bus to Revere, disembarking at Wonderland station. He walked to the Ebb Tide from there, stashed his bloody coat and took up his customary position at the end of the bar.
Ballistics examination later proved that at least three weapons had been used to kill Teddy Deegan. Although the police had several leads and a grand jury was convened to examine the evidence, his murder went unsolved.
Two years later, not long after his dustup with Joe McCain in front of the Ebb Tide and the discovery of his unregistered firearm, Joe Barboza was arrested on gun charges for the second time, which meant he was looking at a five-year felony. Suffolk County District Attorney Garrett Byrne, calling Barboza “the worst killer in the Commonwealth,” set his bail at $1 million. With so many of his enemies in jail, a stretch in Walpole would've been a death sentence for Barboza. So he sent two of his cronies around to various bookmakers, enforcers, loan sharks, and thugs in an attempt to round up his bail money. At a bar called the Nite Lite, which was the headquarters of the connected mobster Ralph “Ralphie Chong” Lamattina, Barboza's henchmen got in a beef and slapped Lamattina around. A short time later, the bodies of the two men were found, shot up and bloody, in the trunk of a Cadillac.
With his two collectors in the morgue, Barboza fell short of the bail money and chose the only available route out of prison: he turned state's evidence and gave up the participants in the Deegan murder. In his new role as government songbird, Barboza also discovered a wonderful opportunity to get at people he didn't like, settling his old scores by way of the electric chair.
During his grand jury appearance, and later at trial, Barboza testified that the North End underboss Peter Limone had paid him $7,500 to kill Deegan with Henry Tameleo's approval, and that Joseph Salvati had driven the getaway car. In reality Barboza had substituted the names of two men he had grudges against, Salvati and Limone, for one of the real killers, his murderous drinking buddy James Flemmi.
Several witnesses had seen Flemmi leave the Ebb Tide with Barboza that night. To account for the fact that the thirty-two-year-old Salvati had a full head of hair, and that a police captain also stationed near the Ebb Tide reported that one of the men in the car with Roy French had a prominent bald spot— Flemmi was balding— Barboza claimed that Salvati had donned a phony mustache and a “wig” that made him look bald. Barboza went so far as to testify that he watched Salvati put on the wig through the rearview mirror and heard “the snapping of the elastic.”
Joe Salvati was arrested on October 25, 1967. In tune with the zeitgeist of the late 1960s, Barboza appeared in court for Salvati's trial wearing dark sunglasses and an open shirt, his lank, black hair down over the collar and his sideburns nearly meeting at the point of his chin. Cloaked in immunity and sneering at the defense lawyers, the hired killer and loan shark mounted the stand, took an oath, and lied, trading Salvati and Limone for Jimmy Flemmi and treating the whole experience like a great cosmic joke. His broad, Portuguese face was the color of a bruised ham, and he laughed and chain-smoked cigarettes and gestured like some sort of cranked up Revere Beach celebrity.
McCain and Papile were not called as witnesses. The Chelsea Police, Revere Police, and FBI, not the Mets, had conducted the “investigation” into Teddy Deegan's murder. And Joe and Leo admitted that they'd maintained only an intermittent surveillance on the Ebb Tide on March 12, 1965, and could've missed the arrival and departure of Joe Salvati. His trial came nearly three years after the Deegan killing, and the fact that, if anyone had cared to look, no mention of Salvati appeared in McCain's and Papile's reports was not considered an alibi. More than five hundred people were crammed into the little seaside bar that night, and it was also possible, as McCain pointed out, that Barboza or French had driven to the North End and picked Salvati up. Additionally, it was a fact that between Deegan's murder and Salvati's trial, McCain and Papile had investigated hundreds of crimes and made dozens of arrests; Joe Amico, Connie Hughes, Romeo Martin, and Buddy McLean were all dead; the wiseguys were killing each other wholesale. McCain and Papile were busy.
The Deegan murder trial lasted forty-nine days. Peter Limone, Henry Tameleo, Ronald Cassesso, and a man named Louis Greco were sentenced to death, which was later reduced to life in prison. Joe Salvati was convicted on two counts of conspiracy to commit murder and one count of being an accessory before the fact. He and Roy French each received life terms. (James Flemmi avoided char
ges in the Deegan murder but would soon end up in Walpole for the attempted murder of Joe McCain's informant Black Jimmy.)
Granting immunity to a known killer like Joe Barboza never made any sense to McCain. If someone asked him about the case or Barboza's credibility, his favorite response was “Hey, would a murderer lie?” But the mood in law enforcement was to get Barboza off the street at any cost. (As a protected witness, he'd be moved to another part of the country, at the very least.) Joe Barboza was a drug-addicted megalomaniac long before drug addiction and megalomania were in fashion, and grown men, tough guys who had fought in World War II, headed for the exits wherever Barboza appeared. His eyes glittered and his breath stank of methamphetamines, and when he strolled along Revere Beach, his porkpie hat and shiny half boots were like harbingers of the Apocalypse.
Barboza was suspected in more than twenty murders, including those of ordinary citizens in the wrong place at the wrong time when gangland hits were carried out, like the five people he was rumored to have killed inside the Mickey Mouse Club on Revere Beach. Three of the victims were mobsters; the fourth was just a poor sap having a drink at the bar; and the last one, an amiable bartender who was a favorite among Revere Beach wiseguys. Reportedly, Barboza apologized to the bartender before shooting him dead.
Over time Joe McCain learned that Barboza may have inserted the names of Joe Salvati and Peter Limone into his account of the Deegan killing because the Animal believed they had participated in the murder of his two bail collectors. Another scenario depicted Barboza as a dissatisfied creditor: Salvati had borrowed four hundred dollars from him, and although he repaid over a thousand dollars in “vigorish,” he still owed the principal. By all accounts Joe Salvati was a street guy, rugged enough to tell Barboza to go fuck himself. Some also speculated that Barboza implicated Limone, who was Jerry Angiulo's right-hand man, to get back at the North End for not contributing to his bail. Barboza also may have reasoned that if Salvati and Limone had whacked his two friends, he was probably next.