Big Stick-Up at Brink's!

by Behn, Noel;

  The location did offer certain advantages. An ample number of shops were in walking distance. If Tony wanted to entertain a business associate in the immediate neighborhood, there was always the J. A. Club one block down. Right up Columbus Avenue, on the same block as the apartment, stood a late-hour eatery called the Egleston Square Diner—just the type of place where a man whose wife was often away at work at dinnertime or who himself was often up in the wee hours of the morning might stop for a bite or cup of coffee or, if he feared his phone was being tapped, to make a call or two. Pino occasionally liked to take the steam, and around the corner was a steam bath—or, as he called it, a spa. Public transportation was readily available, and should he get a car, he could both park and service it directly across the avenue at a Socony gas station operated by his old friend Tony Gaeta—the same Tony Gaeta many suspected had supplied the gasoline ration stamps which Pino had bartered with inside Charlestown Prison.

  The premises afforded one minor but strategic plus to an indefatigable crook who was used to being surveilled or to beating fast retreats even from his own home. The apartment was on the first floor. The hallway outside led both to a front and back door. Hurrying from the flat and through the rear door and down a short alley, Pino could be on Atherton Street behind the building in less than half a minute.

  No details of the intended living arrangements were revealed at the traditional Sunday afternoon dinner of the Pino clan other than a statement by Tony that he had signed a lease on the Columbus Avenue apartment and Mary would be furnishing it prior to his taking occupancy in a few weeks. That night he drove back to Stop and Shop with his cousin.* He began loading promptly at 7 P.M., and the going was easier. He didn’t manage to stay awake while waiting at South Station, but at least he didn’t miss the 6 A.M. train back to Dorchester. He was up before 2 P.M. on Monday afternoon and out on the boost with Big Steve and Jimmy Costa. The two-hour expedition was disappointing; it netted only four sweaters and two business suits, both of which happened to be Tony’s size. Big Steve suggested they lay off a few days, opined that Pino was too tired to work the boost effectively. Tony flew into a rage and blamed Big Steve’s conservatism for the poor take.

  Late Monday afternoon Costa drove Pino to a foundry. Hot haggling over prices erupted before an order for a three-section wedge, essential to Tony’s type of safe peeling, was placed.

  He finished loading his last Stop and Shop truck about 4 A.M. on Wednesday, hung around joking with warehousemen until checkout time at 5, then walked up D Street, turned left and followed Summer Street on across the bridge to South Station. Pino plunked himself down on a waiting bench and tried to nod off. He wasn’t tired. He went outside into the predawn darkness and meandered farther down Summer Street. A camera store caught his attention. He gazed through the glass, noting both the wide selection of merchandise and the location of the cashier’s office.

  Pino took a different route back to South Station, a route that passed an open Western Union office. His pace slowed as he studied the night clerk standing behind the message counter. The uniformed man was almost as pudgy as Pino, but slightly shorter. A second clerk emerged from the door behind the counter, putting on a company jacket.

  Thursday morning after work Pino reversed his spotting of the previous day. He first walked past the Western Union office. The pudgy clerk was again behind the counter. Tony walked on to the camera store, entered the adjacent alley and checked the rear door. The lock could easily be picked. He returned to Summer Street, thought of going back to South Station to wait for the six o’clock train, checked his wristwatch, found he had a full thirty minutes to kill and decided to forage northward.

  A block farther up he veered right onto Federal Street, a narrow thoroughfare leading into Boston’s canyonesque financial district. All remained dark and motionless until Pino approached the Chamber of Commerce building at 80 Federal. Light shimmered dimly from an alleyway to his right. He turned in. The glare was brightest behind a brick fence near the opposite end, near Congress Street. Pino moved on and peered around the barrier’s corner. An unlit parking lot lay ahead. To the left loomed the rear of the Chamber of Commerce building. Light spilled from a row of glass doors fronting a marble main-floor corridor. To the left of the doors and leaning back against the building wall was a uniformed guard holding a long wide-barreled weapon—possibly a shotgun. Backed up and parked odd-angled to the left of the guard was an armored truck.

  Pino ducked into the shadows on the opposite side of the alley, inching along to achieve a better vantage point.

  Two more uniformed guards pushed a large metal box on wheels out through the glass doors.

  Pino hurried from the alley, and glanced back over his shoulder as he crossed Congress Street. The metal box was being steered toward the shimmeringly outlined truck. He skirted around a block-wide construction site between Congress and Pearl streets. The three uniformed guards were standing and chattering in a dim refraction of lobby light. The metal box rested—unattended—a few feet away.

  Tony sauntered up Pearl Street, keeping his eyes focused across the construction site, Congress Street and the parking lot. The gun-toting guard stepped to the truck and pulled open a door. The other two guards hoisted the metal box and rolled it inside. One of them climbed in after it. The gun toter locked the door, then followed the other guard around the truck’s cab. The doors were unlocked. Both men climbed in.

  The engine kicked over. Headlights burned on. The armored vehicle pulled away from the building, accelerated across the unlit parking lot, slowed, turned right onto Congress Street, gained speed. Not until the truck passed under a streetlight was Pino able to discern that it was painted white. The lettering on the armored vehicle’s side read “Brink’s.”

  Pino kept walking. His gaze shifted from the illuminated marble corridor and rose to the towering façade above. Every window was dark except for a line of three on what he determined to be the fourth floor. A man in shirt sleeves was seen passing behind one.

  A rumble became apparent. Pino glanced up Congress Street to see headlights approaching. Only after they passed under the streetlamp could he see that the vehicle was a second armored truck. It cut sharply, bumped the curb, swerved into the parking lot, stopped about ten yards from the Chamber of Commerce building. A uniformed driver jumped out, locked the cab door and headed for the building. As he did so, a third armored truck roared past without turning in, continued two blocks farther down Congress Street and took a hard right.

  Pino found a pitch-black recessed alcove on Pearl Street to stand in. It offered a head-on view up the marble corridor. At the opposite end was a second row of glass doors that he assumed opened onto Federal Street. Two more armored trucks pulled into the lot.

  Pino stepped from the doorway, tucked his lunch pail tight under his arm, walked up Pearl Street, turned left and followed Milk Street across Congress Street and onto the intersection of Federal Street. One armored truck stood before the Chamber of Commerce building. Another was parking.

  “Mother of God, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing!” Pino asserted. “There was all them money trucks standing there, and once they started loading up, I knew they was mine. I damn near shouted, ‘Hey, you fellas, go easy with that merchandise. It belongs to me.’

  “I don’t know how I ever got home, but I musta been jumping up and down on the train seat all the way. And when I got home, I was all perspired thinking about it. I had maybe four belts of whiskey and a hot bath trying to stop thinking about it, but I was beyond help. I was electrified.

  “Now I was rehabilitated, too, understand? I wasn’t going to steal a cent more than I needed for my deportation and moderate living. But when a man walks right up to you and says, ‘Here, take all my money,’ it would be bad manners to turn your back on him.

  “The terrible thing was I had nobody to tell it to ’cause I didn’t have a phone, and if I did, it wasn’t any good. Here Mr. Brink’s was going to make me a millionaire, and th
e whole goddamn world was fast asleep.”

  *AKA, Big Steve.

  *Pino’s cousin, a truck driver for Stop and Shop, had arranged for Tony’s job.

  Chapter Three

  Sandy

  It was dawn and nineteen degrees above zero. Five-foot seven-and-one-half inches, 145-pound Sandy Richardson tightened the parka hood around his scarf-protected face until only his blue eyes could be seen. He turned into the whiplash wind and, driving the metal hook hard into a huge burlap bale, squatted, tensed, lurched backwards, strained and tugged and gathered momentum, and dragged his 800-pound load across the ice-splattered wood pier and into the Army Terminal warehouse at Castle Island.

  He watched the final sled lowered from the ship’s hold be unloaded, then, with his longshoremen cronies, made straight for Melodie’s Saloon.

  Sandy sat drinking in the saloon until 8 A.M., then, shoulders lowered, pushed through a gathering gale to the large seamen’s hall just within the Army Terminal gates and neighboring the paymaster’s shack. A crap game begun the previous night was noisily under way in one corner; another was starting to form not far off. Neither game was small or restricted to longshoremen. Military personnel and a few well-known Boston area high rollers were already trying their luck. Others were expected as the day progressed.

  The “shoots” could hardly be termed impromptu. Ex-convict Richardson and two partners were founding fathers, as well as proprietors of the enterprise.

  Sandy hadn’t planned on staying long, but the presence of two detectives in the larger game altered his strategy. He removed his parka and galoshes, stripped down to one layer of work clothes, washed his sharp-featured, ruddy-complexioned face in a cold-water sink, Vitalised and combed his sandy hair and took over supervision of the second game. The phone call came soon after.

  “Hi,” he said into the receiver.

  “Oh, God, Sandy, you won’t believe it,” Pino announced breathlessly from the other end of the wire. “There’s never been anything like it in the history of the world, understand? Since Christopher Columbus first came—”

  “Slow down,” Richardson demanded. “Slow down and tell me what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, Sandy, Sandy, I seen something like nobody ever seen before.”

  “I gather that, but what the hell was it?”

  “I seen something delicious, Sandy. Delicious with whip cream! Whip cream like you never thought could be, and it’s all ours. It belongs to us. A fella’s insisting we take it. He’s standing there, holding it out and begging us to come take it off his hands. Chasing us up the street with bags of candy and shouting and pleading for us.”

  “All right, all right, I get the idea,” Richardson interjected. “When do I get a look?”

  “Oh, Sandy, Sandy, it’s a miracle. A goddamn living miracle. You’ll have to pinch yourself twice to remember you’re not dreaming. It’s a sight hike—”

  “When do I look?”

  “Come pick me up after work—and bring a pail, know what I mean?”

  Had it been a year to the day earlier, Thomas Francis Richardson, AKA James Garely, Thomas Kendricks, Patrick T. Nash, Thomas Richards, Sandy Richardson, would have been running a risk driving off at 4 A.M. the next morning. Parole regulations expressly forbade meeting with other known criminals. His parole, however, had ended on September 25, 1943, with a bill of excellent conduct.

  Several local detectives were less optimistic concerning Richardson’s postprison deportment. In their opinion he was a graduate of the old South Boston Gustin Gang and a seasoned gunman. One police sergeant remained convinced that Richardson and Pino had been partners since childhood days in an assortment of skulduggeries that eventually germinated into the safe-cracking and stickup ring operation which ended when Tony was sent to Charlestown Prison. In fact, Richardson didn’t meet Pino until both were in their late teens, even though they were reared only ten city blocks apart and much of their upbringing was similar.

  Thomas Francis Richardson’s maternal and paternal grandparents had fled Ireland during the potato famine and settled in Newfoundland, where his mother and father met, married, then moved on to America and South Boston. Sandy was the young couple’s only child, born on March 22, 1907, in their ground-floor $9-a-month apartment at D and Bolton streets.

  The elder Richardson, like Tony Pino’s father, earned a borderline subsistence living by driving a horse and wagon long hours six days a week. Sandy’s mother worked as a housekeeper when times were good, taking whatever jobs she could find on darker days. Their joint income might have sufficed for a family of three had not Richardson’s father been a drunk. Gin was often purchased before food, and a gin binge almost certainly meant a thrashing for young Sandy. Beatings were hardly an exclusive parental privilege. The nuns and priests at St. Vincent’s Catholic Church were not loath to mete out Old Testament retribution when the obstreperous Tom Richardson acted up at Sunday school or mass. The teachers at Hawes Hall School, where Sandy went through first and third grades, were also fast with ruler raps across the knuckles or backsides. When Richardson matriculated to the Bigelow School, he seemed to calm down, at least in the classroom. Sandy took a shine to studies, particularly English. When he graduated the ninth grade, there was even some talk of going on to high school; the necessity of earning money dashed such illusions.

  Sandy’s first illegal activity, like that of Pino, was stealing coal from railroad yards. By the time he was six Richardson belonged to a local street gang whose activities included baseball, drinking, clubbing rats to death in waterfront pier buildings, fighting, boosting and burglary.

  “The stealing wasn’t as much an amusement as a necessity,” Sandy recalls. “We were all dirt poor, and often the only way we could get something, including the shirt on our back, was to steal it. I’m not excusing the theft as justifiable by any means. Many of the boys who were in as bad a way as our crowd never stole a thing. And most of my gang gave it up sooner or later. But I never saw anything wrong with taking what I needed, even after I was old enough to have jobs. I always had a job (longshoreman), and I always stole. Perhaps my logic was that I had to take full advantage of what few opportunities existed then. You were hungry for anything that would get you out of the rut of the moment. For example, gin was plentiful and cheap. When I was six, you could say I was a hopeless gin drunk. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I won a pistol in a crap game and started sticking people up.”

  Sandy’s first two arrests occurred in 1922, when he was fifteen. Both were for drunkenness. He worked with various partners-for-crime over the next few years, gained the reputation of a petty thief, in general, and small-time holdup artist in particular, became a full-fledged stevedore, purchased a car and began dressing in the sharp suits popular among hoods of the day, as well as frequenting the better-known gangster saloons, restaurants and gambling dens in the Greater Boston Area.

  Richardson first ran across Tony Pino in 1926. Prohibition was in full bloom, and both nineteen-year-olds, each in his own territory, were peddling dollar pints of booze. At the time of these early and generally social encounters, Sandy had been drinking heavily, so heavily that his thievery was adversely affected. Pino couldn’t abide drinking and had more or less abdicated robbery for what he considered to be the legitimate trade of bootlegging. But the chubby little Italian couldn’t stop thinking about crime; what’s more, he couldn’t stop talking about it. The thin, wiry Irishman was a listener. Pino possessed the type of imagination Richardson respected. Sandy had the type of logic and caution Tony sorely needed.

  The two young hoodlums worked a score or so together and found they complemented each other in several more ways. Pino was a natural spotter, a case man; Richardson showed an aptitude for rechecking a potential job, finding weaknesses Tony’s fast eye often missed. Pino was a mass of impatience; Sandy stoically the opposite. Tony was compulsively enthusiastic; Richardson inveterately reserved. Pino was a blazing extrovert, an egocentric who mistook attention for ac
ceptance; Richardson was introverted, preferred avoiding the limelight, was supportive of Tony’s self-professed but untested leadership ability. Pino had the type of large, warm, closely knit family Sandy had always found appealing. They pulled more jobs together—usually small burglaries and stickups. Disagreements arose and were usually settled with ease. There was one minor point at which they were always at odds: Pino fancied himself a master chef; Sandy, on his hungriest days, could not digest one spoonful of Tony’s food.

  On July 3, 1927, Richardson got married. On March 29, 1928, Pino was sent to the Massachusetts Reformatory for abuse of a female child. The Depression struck, Sandy had his first child, employment opportunities for longshoremen all but vanished, and in 1930 Tony, who had learned the rudiments of safecracking behind bars, was paroled.

  The pair of twenty-three-year-olds resumed their illicit partnership, rented an “office” in Dorchester—around the corner from a candy shop owned by Tony’s Aunt Elizabeth—where they stored bootlegged booze, guns, tools and contraband. Richardson brought in a young thief and part-time longshoreman he had met in 1929—Jimma Faherty—and the three began concentrating in the area where Pino was rapidly excelling—safecracking. Before long, additional manpower was required. The takes weren’t all that big, averaging perhaps $2,500 per cracked pete, but when four or five a week, and sometimes two a day, were knocked over, profits mounted. All participants shared equally in the loot. No one, including Richardson and Pino, was exclusively committed to the gang’s activities. Tony established his own outside partnership for boosting and petty burglary. Sandy limited his noncrew arrangements to stickups.