Big Stick-Up at Brink's!

by Behn, Noel;

  Pino dropped Geagan, Richardson and Faherty beyond the Chamber of Commerce building, continued down Congress Street, took a right, then after traveling a short block, pulled another right into and up Federal Street, stopped, backed up into the alleyway, cut the engine, let Gusciora out. Neither Tony nor any other crew member had been in the area since the last Friday in November, but that didn’t strike anyone as unusual. In the past, after final casing, the robbery crew had stayed away from certain targets as long as six weeks before moving in to score.

  Gusciora, window washer’s bucket in hand, moved down the far sidewalk.

  “The timing’s gotta be perfect, see what I mean?” said Pino. “The Kid’s [Gusciora] gotta be on the street when the truck starts down [Federal Street] or else the driver and guard’ll get suspicious. Okay, so the Kid’s moving up the street on the Chamber of Commerce side, and way up past Brink’s [Chamber of Commerce building] I see a fella pass under a streetlight and hope to God it’s Jazz.

  “Like I told ya, it’s dark out, but from the slow goddamn way he’s moving I convince myself it can’t be anyone but Jazz. Now I got two of ’em moving slow. And only one of ’em’s supposed to be on the street. Jazz don’t make his move till after the truck gets parked. He comes out after the driver goes in. So he ain’t supposed to be where he is, and Gus’s getting down too close. He’s only supposed to walk so far and wait in a goddamn doorway. And then Gus stops altogether. He’s standing on the goddamn street too close, and he’s stopped. Then it hits me. The truck ain’t arriving like it should. The goddamn truck’s late. Oh, Jesus.

  “I tell myself maybe they changed the schedule some, see? We ain’t been around this joint for a month. But that shouldn’t make no difference. I been watching this goddamn truck three years, and it splits the second right in half. It ain’t never not been on time.

  “So now I’m counting seconds by the beat in my throat ’cause that’s where my heart jumped up to—my throat. It’s stuck up there choking me. I’m trying to wave at Gus to keep going because that’s what he’s supposed to do if things get screwed up. He’s supposed to keep going. Not a goddamn thing’s right, including Jazz—he’s still out there, and the goddamn guy is standing still, too.

  “Now I’m waving at both of them to get outta there. I damn near honk the horn. Now I see Jazz start walking down the street, and I almost faint. If the fellas out back [Richardson, Geagan and Faherty] see him pass the door, they might start moving in. They can see right through to Federal from Congress. If the truck shows up now, they’re going to get us all out of position. The driver’s gonna see people all the hell over the place who shouldn’t be there, and even if he don’t notice nothing, they’re outta position for what they gotta do.

  “Now I look down there and see the worst: Jazz’s stopped and Gus had started to move. Jazz is just standing a half a block from Brink’s. Now the goddamn Kid does the same thing. He stops a half a block up on the other side. The goddamn truck comes along right now and sees that, and it’s curtains.

  “That does it. I start up the floral truck and head down for Brink’s. I’m praying the truck don’t come by and spot me. They never seen the floral truck around here. But once I pass, Jazz and Gus see me, and they know what it means. They start walking again. Jazz is walking the right way for a change—away from the joint.

  “I pick up all the fellas where I’m supposed to get them if things don’t come off. We’re all in the truck saying to one another what the hell’s happening? What the hell’s gone wrong? Do you think somebody spotted us? Do you think somebody tipped them? Why the hell didn’t the truck show up?”

  The reason was that Brink’s Incorporated had moved—as a matter of fact, had moved on December 8, 1948, the same day Pino and Big Steve were arraigned for the theft of a dozen golf balls.

  BOOK THREE

  THE GOLDEN DUCK

  Chapter Twelve

  North Terminal Garage

  Copps Hill is a place of history. Sloping upward from pier dotted waters to an altitude of fifty to fifty-two feet at old Boston’s northernmost extremity, it commands a fine view of the Charles and Mystic rivers to the north and west. Along the hill’s northern crown is the spot where, in 1630, John Winthrop and his Puritan followers from plague-stricken Charlestown across the river landed their longboats and stepped ashore to begin colonization. Over the same waters traveled by Winthrop, but in an opposite direction and 145 years later, on April 18, 1775, Paul Revere was rowed by two colonists to land and a horse.

  A prerevolutionary burial ground, shaded by venerable elms, where many of America’s first patriots were laid to rest under slate markers, is settled on the crest of Copps Hill. Many of the headstones bear shot marks from British muskets which used them for target practice during the English siege of the city. Beneath the cemetery segments of tunnels that formed the fabled Underground Railroad are believed still to exist.

  Down the southern slope, below the burial ground, Old North Church punctuates the sky, its reconstructed steeple rising like a cautionary finger above an industrial and residential complex. Moving clockwise from Old North, other vestiges of early America are evident among the four- and five-story frame dwellings that line a labyrinth of thin, often abrupt colonial streets. The cloistered community, unwelcoming to outsiders with no business there, is called Little Italy.

  Hull Street descends northwest from the burial ground to the crown, a narrow avenue that retains a semblance of Federal and revolutionary atmosphere in the area to its right, ends at a two-way Commercial Street which runs parallel to the river. Snowhill Street rises from the eastern base of the hill, ascends in a slightly southern direction, passes the burial ground and intersects Hull Street, veers further south in its descent to Little Italy, stops at another narrow prerevolutionary avenue, a bottomland thoroughfare called Prince Street, which lies generally parallel to Hull Street on the east.

  Copps Hill originally may have been fifty-seven to fifty-nine feet high. During the late 1700s the slopes and crest were shaved somewhat to provide earth for the construction of a street around the hill’s eastern and northern crown. In 1806 work began on filling in Mill Pond, which lay to the west of Copps Hill and to the east of Beacon Hill. When the reclamation was completed five years later, Beacon Hill had been lowered by 111 feet. Copps Hill also contributed to the pond fill, went on giving up soil. By 1840 the crest was seven feet lower, but a far greater loss was suffered by one of the sharper faces. Beginning at the promontory intersection of Hull and Snowhill streets, all the rise along the northern side of Snowhill down to Prince Street and all the rise immediately to the west along Hull Street down to Commercial Street had been sliced away, leaving a sheer perpendicular drop of forty to forty-five feet near the summit. What was left on the floor below comprised a long stretch of level ground which formed a rectangle between parallel Hull and Prince Streets and intersecting Commercial Street to the north and ended in a canyonesque triangle as Snowhill Street veered southwesterly between Hull and Prince streets at the opposite end. It was to the rectangular section of the tract, a location not far from where John Winthrop and his colonizers debarked to found the city in 1630, that Tony Pino, in January, 1949, would eventually and circuitously find his way.

  “Now we’re driving away [from 80 Federal Street], not knowing what’s what,” Pino related. “We got our fears aroused. That truck [48 Truck] has been arriving religiously every Friday, and now it don’t. The crew’s saying, ‘You think we got spotted? You think we got tipped? You think they found out and are coming to arrest us?’

  “Now I’m back at the diner, uneasy. I’m making the coffee and figuring if Brink’s smelled us out and missed us at Federal Street, I’m gonna have visitors. But what can they do, see what I mean? They can’t dump you in the can for harboring criminal thoughts. No visitors show up, and I start to concentrate. If they didn’t pick us up in the truck and they didn’t come to arrest us after, then maybe they don’t know nothing about nothing. But wher
e the hell’s the [48] truck?

  “I’m going mentally cuckoo. I’m not interested in nothing only this unsolved mystery, because I wanna know what happened here. This is a fortune gone down the drain—a million and a half bucks going down.

  “I go into town. I got over at eight or nine A.M. The place is swarming. I see armored trucks up and down Federal Street like there always is, but not one of ’em belongs to Brink’s. These are trucks from other companies that haul payrolls.

  “Okay, now I scram outta there. That’s a bad part of the country. Lotsa cops is always around. Lotsa Pinkerton fellas live down there, too. I’m a well-known criminal personality. I can’t afford being seen here.

  “I drive over to Cambridge, to where they got their garages—the joint I went into to make all the keys to their trucks. I take one look, and it hits me. There ain’t a goddamn truck anywhere. The lousy sons of bitches snuck off in the night and didn’t leave no forwarding address.

  “So I know we’re in the clear, see? People don’t pack and move away because a bunch of thieves is after them. They move to better themselves, and that’s got me concerned. Wherever they’ve gone can be a tougher joint to crack. That truck [48] can get itself loaded up in a goddamn castle behind a ditch instead of out in front like on Federal Street. For all you know, they may even start switching the loads around. Instead of putting on forty-eight packages, maybe they’ll put on two. I got a million and a half bucks involved with this company. I can’t afford no changes.

  “So I gotta find out where they snuck off to. I gotta find out fast before the fellas get fed up and kiss it off, but that don’t mean I can pick up the phone and call Mr. Brink’s up and say, ‘Hey, this is Ireland and you won the sweepstakes. Where the hell you expect me to send the money?’ You don’t do things like that because what if they got one of them new kind of electric phone gadgets that can check your voice?”

  Pino’s best recollection is of spending the weekend simultaneously cooking at the diner, worrying about the strategy to counteract his golf ball conviction and devising a plan of action for locating the missing Brink’s Incorporated. On Monday, January 9, he was able to hire, a full-time chef. Tuesday saw his lawyer appeal, for the second time, the judgment for conviction of the theft.

  Either Wednesday or Thursday afternoon, January 11 or 12, Tony drove to a small manufacturing plant not far from Mattapan. In days gone by he had seen a Brink’s truck drop off a package here, and he knew that this was the last delivery of the day. Tony’s professed strategy depended on the armored car company’s not having changed any of its procedures. If the plant near Mattapan was still the last location on the delivery route, Pino need only tail the departing truck, which he hoped would lead him to Brink’s new garage. Once the garage had been found, he need only return there early in the morning and follow any truck. Any truck would be going to pick up a payload at the new offices.

  “So I’m out near Mattapan, and you show up right on schedule like you always do,” Pino related. “Now I’m on your tail. I tail you back to Boston. I stay maybe fifty or sixty feet behind, and you’re heading toward North End. I ain’t never seen you come this way before. Okay, we’re on North Washington. Shadow’s coming around a corner. I slow and look out my window. I see another truck [Brink’s] sitting there in a gas station. I’m turning onto Commercial Street, and I see another truck pulling out. I know I gotcha. I know the garage’s gotta be right around here somewhere.

  “Okay, you’re up ahead, and you slow it down. I slow it down. You’re right in front of this big garage on Commercial. I think that’s where you’re going, only I get tricked. You go to the end of the garage and pull a right. I’m back about thirty feet, so I speed it up and take a right, too. You vanished. The road [Hull Street] goes right up the hill, and there’s nothing on it. I keep going up. I’m on the side of that building, see? That garage building [whose doors he had just passed on Commercial Street]. And the building’s built right into the hill [Hull Street side]. I see a big garage door on the second floor and another up on the top [third and last level]. I look in ’em both and can’t see much, but I figure you are in one or the other.

  “I pull right past the building and slow down near the cemetery [Copps Hill burying ground at the intersection of Hull and Snowhill streets]. I can see down the hill from there. I’m looking in my mirror and see another truck [Brink’s] coming up. It turns in the first door. Now I know you’re on the second floor. I get outta there and go home.”

  North Terminal Garage was the registered name for the three-story, 54-foot-high, concrete structure occupying the northeast end of the excavation below Copps Hill. The front of the building in which Pino now believed Brink’s housed its armored trucks was generally considered to be on Commercial Street—a two-lane avenue running in a northwesterly direction at this point. The northeastern wall of North Terminal Garage was, as Tony noted, erected flush against the old hill slice and ascending Hull Street. The lower garage door on Hull definitely led into the second floor of North Terminal; the second door, nearer the hill-crest, offered egress to the third and top floor. The opposite side of the building stood on level bottom ground, rose up parallel to narrow Prince Street. Both Prince and Hull were one-way thoroughfares going in the same direction—from northeast to southwest away from Commercial Street. The rear of the square concrete building faced onto an asphalt-covered, acute-angled, triangular playground. The longest side of the tract was walled by the sheer Copps Hill cut which apexed at the Hull/Snowhill streets intersection, then descended along Snowhill to the Prince Street intersection. The Prince Street side of the playground was several feet below sidewalk level and protected with a metal chain-link fence. A cluster of small tenement buildings stood in the Snowhill/Prince Street corner of the triangular and paved expanses.

  In a fashion, North Terminal Garage was an interloper in a predominantly residential sector of North End. Not that other businesses weren’t nearby. Going left on Commercial Street from the front of the garage, the trucks took only two short blocks to be at the merging intersection of busy Washington Street, as well as beneath the overpass for the Charlestown Bridge. On the other side of Washington, Commercial became Causeway Street, and a causeway bearing Route 1 ran overhead. On ground level, two blocks west of Washington Street and between rows of steel support girders, was the common entrance to both North Station and the Boston Garden. Across overpass-covered Causeway Street from the indoor sports arena/railway terminal was an almost uninterrupted line of shops and restaurants.

  Leaving North Terminal Garage and following Commercial Street to the right, around the seaward northern base of Copps Hill and on to where the thoroughfare became Atlantic Avenue, one would encounter first a police station, then a mounting number of piers, waterfront warehouses, industrial buildings and dockside restaurants.

  The panorama directly beyond the Commercial Street doors of the garage building was more picturesque and remote. A wide expanse of well-tended grassland lay between the thoroughfare and shoreline fronting the Charles River. Rising up to the left was the Charlestown Bridge. In easy viewing distance across the river was Charlestown.

  To the rear of the triangular playground behind North Terminal, via either Hull Street up over the crest of Copps Hill or Prince Street around the southwestern crown, lay a maze of narrow prerevolutionary avenues—some short, some twisting, some intersecting others at odd angles. Compressed tightly together along every sidewalk of every street on these inland slopes and aprons were four- and five- and six-story apartment houses, many dating back to revolutionary days, many poor or adequate or excellent facsimiles of the Federal style, almost all bearing the scars of rigorous wear.

  At the lower end of Prince Street, approximately four short blocks south of the playground side of North Terminal Garage and along the building-jammed eastern crown of the hill, ran the Broadway of Little Italy: Hanover Street.

  It was just off Hanover, probably near the corner of Tileston Street that Pino par
ked his car when he returned that night to North End.

  “Okay, I get out and start walking,” Pino related. “It’s about seven fifteen at night, and all the families is eating their spaghetti dinner. Even if they ain’t, it don’t matter. I’m dressed like a truck driver, and I know this neighborhood good. This is where my brother-in-law [Costa] comes from. Lots of other friends come from here, too. Italian friends. It’s all Italian around here. I’m dressed like an Italian truck driver, so what the hell.

  “I go up on the hill [Copps Hill], see? You can walk from one end of that hill to the other in four minutes, so it isn’t much of a climb. It’s dark as hell all over. All these streets is narrow as hell because Paul Revere built ’em. He forgot about the lights. That’s why they’re the best crooking streets in the world.

  “Let me tell you about them streets and this neighborhood. Remember that Frenchman fella, Pepper k’Moka? Well, you go see that movie of his [i.e., Pepe Le Moko in Algiers]. You take all the white houses in that town of his [Algiers] and paint ’em green or yellow or red, and that’s what you got right here. A stranger ain’t got a chance around here, and neighbors ain’t gonna help you much. A thief could hide in here five years and never get pinched. A lot have. The cops’uv been looking for the bookie joint back of Prince for ten years and never found it. The biggest bookie joint in the state.

  “Okay, we’re up the top of the hill. Hull and Snowhill. And there’s buildings all around, but it’s dark as hell. It’s darker where I am ’cause the cemetery’s right behind me. People got lights on in their apartments, but that don’t ruin nothing. The streets stay like they should—dark.

  “Now I cross Snowhill and get over on Hull. On the right side of Hull, only we should be on the left side ’cause that’s where the garage is. I go over to the left side. Get on the sidewalk there. Before you get to the garage, there’s this gate, brick gate—over on the left, too. I go to the gate and give her a burn. I see these steps, and then I see a terrace and more steps and another terrace. Whatcha got here is a big staircase with three terraces going down to the park [playground to the rear of garage building between the base of the hill cut and Prince Street]. They go way the hell down because it’s a helluva drop. You fall off here, and it’s fifty feet before you hit bottom.