Big Stick-Up at Brink's!

by Behn, Noel;

  Tony couldn’t win many running races or pass a football very far, but his short, thick fingers were facile and strong. He was adept at building things and fixing things, which didn’t account for very much in the world of the young.

  There were other areas where he more than held his own, often winning the esteem of his particular crowd of urchins. He could climb a tree or shinny up a drainpipe with the best of them. Tony was also one of the most accomplished liars Andrew Square ever produced. There was often no particular reason for lying. It was merely something he did naturally, which seemed to be as much a characteristic or congenital talent as his humor. Often he employed the fibbing to con his teachers or the priest or the nuns. Some thought he was the most well-behaved, clean-cut, delightful little boy in the neighborhood—and he usually was, at school or at church or at home.

  In an age when finding or stealing coal to feed the ever-hungry potbellied kitchen stove was considered a routine duty for the children of the financially strapped, chubby six-year-old Tony Pino excelled at the latter. He appropriated his baby sister’s perambulator almost every night of the week, boldly rolled up the block, across the street and into a railroad coalyard and returned with a full load of the precious black fuel. His parents believed the perpetual explanation that he had picked the lumps up one at a time along the tracks, never suspecting that their eldest was peddling off the overage at three cents a pound.

  Membership in a neighborhood youth gang dedicated to the five Bs—baseball, boosting (shoplifting), boozing, burglary and brawling—when he was seven soon allowed Tony to display his superiority in boosting and burglary. He was fearless, inventive, insatiable.

  Tony Pino’s first arrest came at the age of eight for stealing a ride on a streetcar. The following year he was apprehended trying to swipe candy from a vendor’s stand, dragged into court on two charges of breaking and entering and larceny, reprimanded by the judge, released and subsequently thrashed by his father, two teachers and one nun.

  The youngster promised his parents he’d go straight, swore the same with his hand on a Bible to the priest, took the first in a long series of legitimate jobs he would hold for the rest of his life, gave his earnings to his parents as he would more or less try to do the rest of his life, helped out his junk-collecting Uncle Joe Pino, thereby learning the skill of furniture rebuilding and refinishing—and went right on stealing. He passed a good portion of his ill-gotten gains on to his parents under the guise of salary bonuses or lottery winnings.

  By the time he was shot in the buttock and thigh atop a fence, while trying to escape a police raid prompted by the theft of some cakes and milk the gang had stolen and were consuming, fifteen-year-old Tony’s record boasted eight arrests, three probations and one seven-month stint in a reformatory for a $20 theft—$20 in cash taken from his junk peddler Uncle Joe’s basement-apartment storeroom.

  When thirty-one-year-old Tony Pino was taken across the Charles River from Boston to Charlestown and incarcerated at Massachusetts State Prison on January 6, 1938, his recorded arrests totaled twenty—another two and one-half years had been spent in a reformatory. And he was by no means a big-time hood. The feds had never heard of him. Until recently not even the news-sharking crime-beat reporters of the Boston dailies were aware of his name.

  Pino’s reputation among the cons who had known him on the outside was diverse. Inmates who had worked with him before, Jimma Faherty, Mike Geagan, Sandy Richardson and Henry Baker, ranked Tony a master safecracker, a top-rate case man and ingenious organizer-operator of well-drilled robbery teams. And Tony, according to his supporters, wasn’t lacking in muscle with politicians and the cops. For God’s sakes, said they, hadn’t Tony been caught dead to rights up in Manchester, New Hampshire? Hadn’t an eyewitness identified him as the guy who walked in with a pistol and stuck up the joint? And hadn’t three local cops—three of the biggest Boston cops including Jim Crowley—all said they saw Pino sitting in a Boston restaurant when the heist was coming off in Manchester? You don’t get Detective Jim Crowley going to bat for you unless you got plenty of muscle, believe you me, fella.

  Tony Pino’s con enemies were numerous, vocal, hardly charitable and usually Irish. They called Tony the Pig, claimed he was the messiest, cheapest son of a bitch that ever lived, a loud-mouth blowhard given to constant exaggeration and flat-out invention instead of concrete criminal achievement. After all, how could a chronic shoplifter like Pino organize and run anything big, of major illicit merit? To begin with, he was Italian and this was Boston—Irish Boston. Times were changing. But not enough for good, solid Irish crooks to let an Italian booster tell them what to do. Consider Tony’s so-called crew. Everyone knew that the Irishmen working with him were falling-down drunks. Nice fellows, but drunks. And there was a Jew on it, too. A nice guy and clever thief, but a Jew. And what had they ever scored that was worth crowing about? Had they ever pulled off a major haul? No. Had they ever risked breaking a federal statute? No. They were small beans—nickel-and-dime operators. And Tony the Pig was a goddamn lousy stoolie, a rat. An informer. A Jim Crowley informer. Jim Crowley owned him and used him and got him off the hook up in New Hampshire so Pino could go right on informing on fellow crooks.

  Most of these assessments were shared by a majority of officers at the Boston Police Department—an almost totally Irish cadre.

  Two allegations which bothered Pino the most were contradictory: that he was a rapist and that the shooting incident which almost took his life when he was fifteen had left him impotent and sterile.

  Once inside Charlestown (Massachusetts State), Pino fashioned a new image. He energetically became a merchant, one of the lowest forms of prisoner species—a con who makes a profit from other cons. Pino sold any bit of prison property he could lay his hands on. To facilitate the pilferage, he remodeled his prison coat and trousers with trick or hidden pockets. A half shoulder of beef could be slipped into the baggy pants and smuggled out of the kitchen freezer. This access to prison foodstuffs eventually resulted in Pino’s opening a private kitchen—right in the foundry where he was assigned. He and fellow prisoners and several screws would stand roasting meat and potatoes over the molten sewer lids.

  The indefatigable merchant-prisoner gave a great deal of time to mixing powders and poultices which he quietly marketed as surefire cures for crab lice, diarrhea, constipation and other institutional maladies. Pino’s alchemy led to a near disaster when one of his concoctions blew up.

  After World War II broke out and American civilians faced shortages of many staples, convict Pino of Charlestown Prison was often blessed with a surplus. Cigarettes and liquor and candy bars were smuggled in with regularity. Screws solved their transportation problems by visiting inmate Pino and receiving either bona fide gasoline ration stamps or the address of two local stations that would fill car tanks on presentation of a written note bearing his signature.

  The secret to this wartime profiteering lay in Pino’s propensity for entering into partnerships. An assistant cook conspired with him to steal rationed beef in bulk from the prison cold-storage locker. Rationed canned goods and sugar by the case were obtained by another partner—a storeroom screw. Yet another business merger was effected with a guard who drove a prison supply truck, who delivered the precious cargo beyond the wall to two more partners—each of whom ran a filling station and paid for the contraband with a combination of cash and items to be smuggled back into Charlestown.

  Not every successful undertaking was profitable. His three guard partners in the rationed food theft ring beat him out of the money, never depositing a cent in his outside account, as per agreement.

  Not every undertaken venture was successful. Tony’s attempts to establish a private laundry inside Charlestown by cutting off buttons and in other ways mutilating inmates’ uniforms that were sent to the regular and free prison laundry ended when a group of indignant cons worked him over in a lavatory late one evening.

  That Pino harbored any regret as he rode
away from Charlestown Prison in the custody of federal marshals the morning of September 12, 1944, was due to oversight and a bit of bad luck. He had never bothered to apply for United States citizenship. A 1942 Board of Immigration Appeals ruling, citing Pino for having twice served prison terms of one year or more in duration, deemed him an “undesirable alien” and ordered his deportation to Italy.

  “I had them citizen’s papers all filled in and ready to mail two or three times and don’t know why I didn’t,” stated Pino. “But let me ask you, if I became undesirable, where did I learn it, huh? I got here when I was eight months old, so you can’t blame Italy for me turning crook. I’m not ashamed of being a crook, because that’s what I could do best. When you’re a little kid, you do what you can do best; then all the other little kids pay attention to you.

  “Now, if you wanna see luck coming up bad, you take them two pinches that sent me to the can [March 29, 1928, to October 29, 1930, at Massachusetts Reformatory for abuse of a female child and January 6, 1938, to September 12, 1944, at Charlestown], them two arrests the immigration people used against me.

  “That abuse thing was worse than a frame. It was stupidity, see what I mean? I’m only twenty at the time and going straight, and there’s nothing more stupid than that. A green punk. I got this honest job bootlegging, making maybe a hundred bucks a night and buying them fancy suits. The shiny kind. It was Prohibition time, and this one night me and another bootlegger let go at one another [with knives]. Slash at one another over who sells them dollar pints on what corner. That’s where the scars come from on my stomach. So the ambulance comes, and they go and patch us up at the hospital and take us to the police station. Well, we ain’t gonna prefer no charges against each other, so they let us go. I start walking out, and some young girl they’re bringing in starts pointing at me and yelling, “He’s one, he’s one. He was there, too. He did it to me, too.”

  “‘Mother of God,’ I thought, ‘what’s she yelling about? What is this thing anyway?’

  “Now, what I find out later is the cops raided a friend of mine’s apartment. The bootlegger I work for. Raided a party at his apartment and find a couple of girls, only one ain’t up to age. She’s escaped from a girls’ reformatory, too. I know who she is but never talked to her. So she says I was at the party raping her along with the others. I can’t go and confess I been in a knife fight or they’ll book me for assault. And I’m too young and dumb to plead guilty and take a lower sentence like they’re offering. I think being innocent is enough. Anyway, she was crazy, and I did thirty months.

  “That’s when I got bitter and started listening—started learning about peeling and other things [during incarceration for abusing a female child]—and that’s when I became a real crook, too. A guy from Illinois—I’ll never forget him—started teaching me about petes [safes]. When I got put, he sent me to old Jake. Old Jake had been the best pete man ever born, and he liked helping out young, promising fellas. Right away, the first night almost, he took me with him on a score. I learned the way you should, by doing. Pretty soon I was teaching him a thing or two—the student teaching the teacher, see what I mean? So maybe if that crazy girl hadn’t fingered me, I’d be an honest man. I don’t think so, but maybe.

  “Now the guy that was really crazy was the Minister. He’s this common house thief who’s running around cleaning out apartments and running straight to the telephone and telling the cops, ‘Hello, this is the Minister speaking to ya, and I just committed another breaking and entering.’ This Minister’s rifling and calling day and night and driving everyone cuckoo. Got everyone peeking under beds and pokin’ up chimneys. Only I don’t know nothing, understand? Never heard of him.

  “Okay, it’s Thanksgiving [1937]. I been doing pretty good taking petes. Got together a lot of reliable fellas, a good crew, and I’d say we was doing two or three pieces of work a week. This was Depression time, so we put in extra effort.

  “So we all eat our own turkey dinners at our own homes and tell our families we’re going out for a walk, and we meet up. We drive to Rhodes Brothers Market on Massachusetts Avenue. It’s bad times, like I said, Depression, and this pete in there must have sixteen-thousand dollars inside her—all them receipts for Thanksgiving food. I looked the place over pretty good, know it inside and out, only someone screws me up. Someone pulled down title outside metal door in back, and that’s the way I was planning to go in. So I tell the fellas to wait a couple minutes and come round to the front door. I pick the lock to the side door so nobody knows it’s been picked and come on through and open the front door—let the fellas in the front way, see what I mean?

  “So what I don’t know is this is the Minister’s favorite neighborhood. And it’s Thanksgiving, too, and a man has just finished eatin’ his turkey and reaches over to the windowsill where he had his pipe. What he seen through the window is my fellas going in the front door of the joint. This man with the pipe thinks he’s seeing a whole platoon of ministers.

  “Okay, I’m inside moving the pete out. I’ve got a man holding the leg ’cause they’re heavy, and I’m moving it out so I can start peeling. I hear a siren, and somebody said, ‘Jesus, you hear a siren?’

  “I said, ‘Don’t pay no attention. That’s probably an ambulance going by.’

  “I take out the tools, and all of a sudden there’s banging on the door, and I let out a holler, ‘Don’t nobody move. Stay below the counter and lie on your bellies.’

  “It works. The cops look in the window and don’t see nothing and start going away. The fella I told to lay near the window to be lookout decides they’re already gone and starts sliding toward us. Only the last cop is just passing the window and sees this fella sliding along like a snake. This cop lets out a holler, ‘Did you see the man in there? He’s in there. He’s in there.’

  “He thinks he’s seen the fucking Minister, and all of Boston comes running. Every cop on the force is trying to bust in. I gotta couple a fellas along who ain’t from Boston, so I tell ’em they better not run or they’ll get killed. Boston cops do lotsa killing when they get excited. So we grab the tools and run to the cellar and hide the tools and then hide ourselves in the candle room where all the chicken eggs are, where they look inside the eggs with a candle to see if the eggs is rotten. We hear the cops break in upstairs and go running and shouting all around and come on downstairs. And don’t do nothing ’cept whisper to one another when they get down to the basement. I know we’re cooked, see, so I don’t wanna take no chances. Get shot unnecessarily. I yell out, ‘Lookit, we have no pistols.’ We’re not armed and ready to give ourselves up.

  “And they said, ‘Come out, come on out.’

  “They bring us upstairs and out into the lot where no one can see, know what I mean? None of the reporters or the couple of dozen innocent people who is watching can see. So now maybe we’re surrounded by maybe a hundred cops, and they’re all panicked and start jostling me.

  “‘Whatcha getting mad about?’ I ask ’em. ‘You grabbed us, ain’t that enough?’

  “‘The nitro,’ they say to me. ‘Whatcha do with the nitro?’

  “They’re scared to death of nitro, and we don’t have none along, but I don’t tell ’em that.

  “‘Stick your nose up my ass and you’ll find it,’ I tell ’em.

  “I guess that’s what caused all the trouble. Maybe I did push one of ’em—gentle like—but first thing you know one of ’em hits me over the head with his rifle. And all the rest of ’em start hitting me with fists for no good reason, can you imagine?”

  For the first time, Tony Pino’s name made the front page of local newspapers. According to the headline account in Boston’s Daily Globe, 1,500 bystanders witnessed the capture by thirty police officers in which the thieves made a “frantic” bid to escape.

  Kicking wildly, swinging with both arms, the live men went down under the rush of policemen after one of the alleged robbers, Anthony Peno, 30, of Kennebec St., Dorchester, tried to snatch the revol
ver of a patrolman, whose arms previously had been jammed in the door.

  The September 12, 1944, trip from Charlestown Prison across the river to Back Bay Boston took approximately fifteen minutes.

  “So the two feds drop me off at Charles Street [Suffolk County Jail],” Pino explains. “I’m sitting in there waiting for Jimmy [Tony’s brother-in-law, Vincent James Costa]. He’s the one who’s supposed to go post the bail. The son of a bitch is two hours late, and some fairy con is trying to get me to take a shower with him, so when he [Costa] gets there, I let him have it.

  “‘Where the goddamn hell you been all this time?’” I tell him.

  “‘I got caught in traffic,’ he tells me.

  “That got me. ‘What the hell traffic can there be in five goddamn blocks? It’s only five goddamn blocks from the bailman to here!’

  “Well, it makes no sense arguing with ignorance. So I walk outta Charles Street. I’m a free man. Mary’s waiting in the car—she’s my fiancée. Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Joe are in the car, too. So is my sister Nancy. Nancy’s married to Jimmy [Costa]. Everybody hugs and kisses me, and we all drive out to my father and mother’s house in Mattapan. My father, me and my brother and some cousins built the house with our very own hands—I think back in 1923 or 1924. We got a helluva buy on the land, too, ’cause it’s right next door to Calvary Cemetery. Look out their back window and there’s the stiffs.

  “Oh, that was some party we had. All the aunts and uncles and cousins. I musta put on twenty pounds eating that delicious food. Some of the older aunts and uncles was at the party they had back in Italy when I was born, and they start talking about the old days—how everybody was scrimping and saving to get over to Boston and went on scrimping and saving when they got here so they could bring the next one over. They were proud of that, and so was I. I always liked hearing about it.