Big Stick-Up at Brink's!

by Behn, Noel;

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Some guy was hanging around Jimmy O’Keefe’s pretending he was you, so I been avoiding him.”

  “Whaddaya mean, pretending he was me?”

  “He told everybody his name was Stretch, but I knew he wasn’t you.”

  There was a short pause on Pino’s end. “I need you tonight.”

  “Saturday?” Maffie asked.

  “That’s tonight, ain’t it?”

  “What time?”

  “Seven.”

  “Oh, well, I can’t do it at seven. What about later?”

  “Whaddaya mean, you can’t do it. This is big business.”

  “I have to take my wife somewhere.”

  “Well, take her and sneak away.”

  “Oh, I can’t sneak away from there. Everybody will notice if I tried to do that.”

  “Where the hell you going, the coronation?”

  “Bowling.”

  “You can’t run a goddamn corporation if people go bowling when you need them the most.”

  “I thought we agreed I’d get a full day’s notice before you needed me.”

  “I’ve been trying to goddamn call you for a full day!”

  “Oh, well I been avoiding this other fella who was pretending he was you.”

  “That was my brother-in-law, and I sent him to get you ’cause I couldn’t get you any other way!”

  “Oh, well, nobody told me who he was.”

  “Okay, okay. We’ll set it up for tomorrow!”

  “Sunday?”

  “Sunday follows Saturday, don’t it?”

  “As far as I know. What time on Sunday?”

  “Seven.”

  “Oh, I can’t do that. I go have dinner with my mother and father every Sunday night. Never count on me for Sunday night.”

  “Next goddamn week then. Monday or Tuesday.”

  “Oh, well, you see, I’m going to New York. I won’t be back for maybe ten days.”

  Costa and Pino opened the bureau in the Savin Hill garage, put the hydraulic jacks into the burglary tool satchel. Tony got into the front seat of a recently stolen station wagon and hoisted the satchel onto his lap. Costa opened the garage doors, came back, drove the wagon out, stopped, went and locked the doors, got back in and headed for Boston. Richardson was picked up at a street corner behind South Station.

  “I think this was the first pete job I went along on,” Costa relates. “One of the first, anyway, and the reason he took me wasn’t because of any promise—there wasn’t” anybody else to take. It was a Saturday night.

  “So I park and we go into this joint out at the end of Massachusetts Avenue not far from Boston University. It’s probably eleven at night, and we go up to the third floor where the safe is. Tony peels the door in nothing flat, and there inside the pete is this metal box. It’s like a safe inside a safe, this metal box. It’s welded in there. So we put the hydraulic jacks inside the door, wedge them between the walls of the safe and rip the box free. The [inside] box is too strong to get open. Tony packs up his tools and runs downstairs. Sandy and me lug the box to the window and throw it. The box smashes on the sidewalk and won’t open again. We put it in the wagon and take it back to Savin Hill. Tony goes to work with the flame. Puts the torch to it. We get it open, and it only has thirteen dollars inside.”

  Tony Pino was fired from Stop and Shop—ostensibly for not reporting beforehand that he was a parolee. During his eight weeks of rehabilitated labor he had earned an average weekly salary of $90—net a total of some $600. During the same period he amassed nearly $6,000 from boosting and safe theft. His largest expense was $5,000 given to a lawyer for deportation matters. His physical assets included a half-remodeled set of burglar’s tools, a partially furnished apartment without a phone at 3 Fuller Street in Dorchester, a stolen panel truck, an unoccupied, unfurnished, partially painted apartment at Egleston Square, ninety-nine business cards without any address or telephone number, and a 1938 Chevrolet sedan for which he had just paid $325—a bright fire-engine red Chevrolet sedan.

  Chapter Six

  Mike

  Mike Geagan ducked under a beam of filtering light, righted his agile 170 pounds to its full five feet eleven inches, moved cautiously over the creaking floorboards and up to the end of the dark hallway. He surveyed the pair of doors, trying to remember what he had been told, reached up to his blue knit watch cap and retrieved a piece of paper tucked in the fold. A penlight came out of a pocket. He snapped it on, examined the instructions, replaced both paper and light, stepped before the door on the left. A honed edged pick was silently eased under the lock tongue. He slowly twisted the knob and abruptly threw open the door, shouting, “How they hanging, Captain?”

  The seated figure in the unlit room dived to the floor.

  “Hey, is that any kind of welcome for your lieutenant?”

  The sound of crawling was the only response.

  There was no answer.

  “It’s me, Mike.”

  There was no answer.

  “Tony, I’m back on leave.”

  “You goddamn dumb chicken fucking son of a bitch, you wanna go giving people heart attacks,” echoed Pino’s harsh whisper.

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “Under the desk—where any sane person would be in this condition.”

  “Jesus, I didn’t mean to scare you that bad.”

  “I heard you all the way from the street!”

  “Then what’re you doing under the desk?”

  “Looking for something.”

  “Come on up. I brought you a present.”

  Pino crawled from under the desk and stood. “Whatcha brought me?”

  “Irish whiskey,” Geagan held out a bottle.

  “Irish?” Pino took the bottle with his right hand.

  “Jameson’s. Drink this and your troubles will be over!”

  “Okay, I’ll drink yours, and you drink mine.” Pino’s hand came around from behind his back holding a milk bottle.

  “What kind’s that?”

  “One hundred percent American/Italian piss. You snuck in on me while I was taking a pee, you fucking dumb potato eater.”

  Geagan laughed, took the binoculars from the desk, lifted them to his face and trained them out the window. “So that’s the Brink’s outfit, is it?”

  “Who the hell told you about that?” a urinating Pino demanded.

  “Sandy.”

  “Did Mr. Blabbermouth Richardson tell you about your bookie friend?”

  “Jazz? He told me the trouble, okay. I’ll straighten him out. Where’s the pete?” Geagan asked, shifting the binoculars from window to window.

  “Right behind the door behind the big table.”

  “Mary, Mother of Jesus,” Geagan gasped, peering through the glasses.

  Pino shook himself off, zipped his fly and capped the milk bottle. “Whatcha seeing now?”

  “They’re loading a big tin box right onto the back of a truck. We could jerk it from them on roller skates.”

  “Stop looking down there and stop thinking pistols,” Pino barked. “Look upstairs where the pete is. Only that’s not what I wanna know. What I wanna know is, are you back in town to do some honest thievery or are you just gonna sit around getting soused?”

  Geagan lowered the glasses in the darkness. “I’m the lieutenant, ain’t I, Captain?”

  Thirty-year-old Michael Vincent Geagan was born in Boston of Irish immigrant parents; reared under the shadows of the commonwealth’s oldest penal institution, Massachusetts State Prison, in the city’s oldest section, Charlestown; grew up on the streets of a neighborhood which in terms of opportunity and poverty was no better or no worse than Costa’s North End or Richardson and Pino’s Southy.

  At the age of eight he won a school award for exemplary deportment and scholarship and then, as if to neutralize the honors, went on a rampage that included breaking into railway cars to steal coal and potatoes and that ended in his first arrest and con
viction for malicious injury to real property. By the age of nine he was a confirmed drunk. A year later he was brought into court first for auto theft and then for being a stubborn child. His first larceny arrest came when he was fourteen—the theft of two baskets of grapes. Sometime between his fourteenth and fifteenth birthdays a friend gave him a pistol.

  “Having a gun was your strength,” Geagan explains. “People do what you tell them then and don’t get hurt. I never thought of using it. I never did hurt anyone with a gun.”

  At the age of sixteen he was committed to the Shirley School, a reformatory, for armed robbery. More experienced inmates taught him the advantages of shotguns and tommy guns, explained the finer points of jewel theft, hijacking and B&E. On being paroled in June, 1926, eighteen-year-old Mike went to see a guru safecracker known as the Silver Fox or Professor—the same Professor who took Tony Pino under his wing two years later.

  Michael Vincent Geagan’s first love remained the stickup. He partnered with different Southy gunmen. Hard jobs were pulled. He gained the reputation of being a “hard” or “potent” guy. He liked that. He was called a dangerous guy—a moody and unpredictable drunk with a gun. He differed with that. He liked to travel. He combined business with pleasure and perpetrated holdups in Rhode Island and Connecticut and New York. He bought a new Ford every year. He was Irish, and he liked Irish stories and Irish songs and Irish whiskey. He liked reading. He liked being alone. He respected people he considered strong. He respected people he considered intelligent. He respected the institutions of family and church. He lived at home with his parents until he was married at the age of twenty-four. He was picked up by the cops as he drove away from the church with his bride and Jimma Faherty and spent his wedding night in jail with Faherty. Long before that day he was always giving up crime.

  “I wanted security, and there wasn’t security in stealing. Not the way I was doing it,” Geagan explains. “When a chance came along to be a lineman for the telephone company, I took it. It paid less than where I was, driving a truck, but there was a future with the telephone company.”

  One day after work, Mike ran across an old Shirley School alumnus, Jimma Faherty, in a Southy saloon. Jimma liked two- and three-day drunks, liked guns better than Mike did. They rekindled their friendship, got soused together, pulled a few stickups together. A third man was needed for one particular job. Jimma brought in a pal who also had a reputation for booze and pistols—Sandy Richardson.

  On an evening in 1930 Richardson took twenty-two-year-old Mike Geagan to Southy’s Alfred E. Smith Club, better known as the Gun Club, and introduced him to twenty-three-year-old Tony Pino.

  Mike’s respect for Tony’s criminal mentality was immediate. In Geagan, Pino, who fancied himself as a tough guy, instantly found a real live hero. As far as Tony could see, nothing much scared Mike. Each man was partial to flattery. In Tony, Mike saw the possibility of combining theft and financial security. Geagan joined forces with the fledgling Pino/Richardson/Faherty crew but didn’t give up his telephone company job.

  Mike had practical safecracking experience and soon became the number two man on clouts. An organizational ability began to show. Geagan took charge of personnel and left Pino free to concentrate on spotting and casing and planning. The crew’s efficiency—and profits—increased. Tony dubbed Mike his lieutenant. Mike proudly referred to Pino as Chief or Captain.

  A schism developed. Mike and Sandy and Jimmy wanted the crew to take on more stickups and hijackings. Tony was opposed. A compromise was reached. All four men were free to pull whatever outside jobs they liked with whomever they liked as long as it didn’t disrupt the pete clout and burglary schedule dictated by Pino.

  Eight months later Geagan and Richardson were arrested in connection with an October 16, 1934, $12,742 robbery of the Treasury office at the Brockton City Hall. Sandy was cleared for lack of evidence. Mike was found guilty. On February 26, 1935, he returned to his old neighborhood, entering Massachusetts State Prison to serve seven to ten years for assault with intent to murder, plus twenty-eight to thirty years for armed robbery. A year later Richardson and Jimma Faherty joined him—as the result of armed robbery. The entire crew was reunited behind bars when Tony Pino arrived in 1938. All four concurred they wouldn’t be doing time if they had stuck together and listened to Pino. While at Charlestown, they resolved that when they got out—and if they should return to crime—Tony would be boss, even when it came to armed robbery.

  On December 16, 1942, Geagan was transferred from Charlestown to the State Prison Colony at Norfolk, Massachusetts, where the inmate roster read like a Who’s Who of eastern seaboard criminals. His chances for parole prior to 1955 seemed remote. No offers of early release were made to Mike or any other convict volunteering to be a guinea pig for the U.S. government’s experiments with an artificial blood plasma that could be used on the battlefield.

  “The thing could kill me tomorrow if I could do something for my brothers and for someone else’s brother and my country,” Mike states as his motive for submitting to the test.

  The cow blood, as Geagan termed the synthetic, was transfused into some thirty convict-volunteers. The aches were immediate, traveled through the body like a “jolt of electricity,” culminating in a sensation of “blowing up and exploding.” Mike almost dropped on the spot. Others did. Some went temporarily blind. Some were afflicted for life. A twenty-four-year-old convict by the name of St. Germain died; he subsequently had a Liberty ship christened for him.

  The results of the synthetic blood plasma experiments at Norfolk were never made public. The guinea pigs, along with volunteers who hadn’t been injected, were soon released from prison.

  Mike Geagan won his freedom on July 28, 1943, under Chapter 222, a commonwealth statute referred to as the Cleary Act, which had been enacted to aid the defense effort by prematurely releasing convicts for essential military activities. Geagan met the condition by enlisting in the Merchant Marine.

  Many longtime friends question Mike’s claim that the artificial blood transfusion left no debilitating effects.

  “I knew something was wrong right away,” Pino asserted. “A fella don’t sneak up on ya in the dark when you’re peeing like that unless something’s wrong. I’m not saying it was a big change, but I could see it all right. We went over to Bickford’s, and I can see he was acting like he was asleep. Dreamy. I thought he was half drunk, but that wasn’t it. He was dreamy from the cow blood. But it wasn’t bad. It was a little change.

  “So I tell him all about the scores I have ready to go. That woke him up. And when we go out to take them places, he was as good as new. The old Mike. Maybe better than old Mike. Mother of God, the four of us [Pino, Richardson and Geagan on the inside; Costa driving] musta taken ten petes in six days. Three on Sunday. I figure my share comes to ten or fifteen grand alone. And the boost got hot as hell that same week, so there was another five hundred.

  “So when Mike’s gotta pull out and go back on the Coast Guard boat, it don’t make no difference, see what I mean? I’m in business better than ever. I got working capital and can buy all them tools I need. My spirit and my confidence is up. Everywhere I look I find another score. I can smell ’em. I can look through brick walls and find ’em.

  “When I hear Jimma’s [Faherty] getting out of the can, that does it. Now I’m really cooking. I’m getting more done in one day than some people do in a year. I even got the apartment painted. I even got Jazz straightened out. The Chevrolet that crazy woman sold me don’t have a decent set of tires on it, but the rest of the world is wonderful. When things is going your way, you gotta take advantage of ’em. I’m takin’ so much advantage there ain’t time to sleep.”

  Pino’s endless days of boosting and safecracking and spotting and casing and tending to assorted trivia was indicative of future modi operandi. So was something else—for almost three weeks he had forgotten Brink’s. And that affected Jazz Maffie.

  “Sandy Richardson asked me why I was giving
Tony Pino the swerve,” Maffie relates. “I told him the guy was driving me crazy talking about nothing and I didn’t want to work with him. I didn’t need the money, and I didn’t need Tony Pino calling me up all the time. He called me up at Jimmy O’Keefe’s eight times in one day. I told Sandy Richardson if he ever had something himself to call me up.

  “So Sandy Richardson drove me over and showed me all those armored trucks parked in front of Brink’s [Chamber of Commerce building]. He told me never to tell Tony Pino he said so, but he and Tony Pino were going after Brink’s pete. That was interesting—”

  Interesting enough for Maffie to say he would work with Pino and Richardson on the stipulation that Sandy be his sole liaison with the crew and that he have the prior right to reject any proposed score he wanted for whatever the reason.

  Pino and Costa excused themselves from Sunday dinner at Tony’s parents’ home in Mattapan, got in Jimmy’s LaSalle and drove a mile away. They pulled into a garage behind a large house, jacked a Buick up, took off the brand-new rear tires and left the garage with the Buick still on blocks. Ten minutes later they rejoined their relatives at the dining-room table.

  Big Steve boosted the receipt. Costa filled it out. Mary studied it the next day, agreed the sewing machine Tony had purchased had, in fact, been purchased—let it stay in the still-unoccupied apartment at Eglestone Square.

  Sandy managed to get into the subbasement at the Chamber of Commerce building, found no vault belonging to Brink’s or anyone else.

  “Okay, I’m sliding the console out the front door of the shop with my foot, see what I mean?” Pino said. “I’m moving into the new apartment and don’t wanna show up empty-handed. Mary ain’t moving in till the weekend, so I wanna get this new radio console. I’m looking forward to sitting in my new living room and listening to Fibber McGee and his wife, Molly.

  “So I got the console out the shop door with my foot. Jimmy and me pick it up.

  “So we’re on the boost, see. Boosting this console. I get it out the door with my foot, and Jimmy and me pick it up and start running away with it—and that stupid brother-in-law of mine goes and drops it.”