Big Stick-Up at Brink's!

by Behn, Noel;

  The whereabouts of most every known and suspected crook in Boston on the night of the robbery was checked, and nothing was developed. The whereabouts of every notorious criminal in the country on that night was checked, and nothing was developed. Deals in exchange for information were offered to convicts serving time and criminals about to be convicted and big-time racketeers who needed favors, and nothing was developed. The routine Boston underworld informers were paid or coddled or coerced, and many names were repeated over and over again, including McGinnis and Pino and Geagan and Richardson and O’Keefe and Gusciora and Baker. Ben Tilly was mentioned most of all, and from what the FBI knew and had observed they deducted that Tilly possessed the capacity for planning and perpetrating the crime. Tilly became the prime Boston area suspect. The Sturtevant robbery was mentioned often as being a prototype of Brink’s, and the bureau which had looked into but not investigated that 1947 holdup, believed Sam Granito was the boss of the operation, didn’t feel Tony Pino possessed the capacity to run Sturtevant, let alone Brink’s—and never would. Even so, ten of the actual robbers, including Tony, were placed under day and night surveillance, along with Tilly and about twenty other Boston criminals.

  It was eventually stated that $2,775,395.12, of which $1,218,211.29 was currency, had been stolen from the vault room. Of the currency, serial numbers were known for 24,050 individual bills totaling $98,900. The public circulation of these serial numbers created a gigantic treasure hunt across the United States—and brought not one result. The day and night “hot surveillance” placed on prime Boston suspects saw not a single marked bill being passed; nothing else indicating any had participated in the robbery was noted.

  In truth, neither the bureau nor Brink’s ever knew exactly how much was taken from the vault room. Among the missing loot were “sealed packages”—sums of money which had not yet been counted by the owner, such as the telephone company’s monthly service receipts from customers. The crooks themselves never knew how much they had stolen. The heat was so intense the day after the robbery, the day of the scheduled “long count,” that they rushed their tally and came up with $98,000 in bad or “new bills,” and $1,100,000 in good or usable bills. In addition to this and because of the heat, they had allowed Joe McGinnis to do something they had always feared: take away two and a half sisal sacks full of uncounted packages. Joe also took $98,000 in bad bills and $800,000 in good or usable money and was later given the $380,000 “good” money Baker had protected on January 17. Before leaving the count, Maffie, Gusciora and O’Keefe each took $100,000. Maffie later discovered his $100,000 was only $81,000. All crew members expected the two and a half uncounted bags to yield no less than another half million in good money. Some expected it to be far more. Whatever, each crook expected his share of loot to be at least $140,000. The crew’s misgivings of McGinnis proved true. Joe proceeded to rob his fellow robbers, claiming that the good money he took away from the count only came to $400,000—even though the others had counted it at $800,000. He also claimed that the two and a half untabulated sacks had yielded not one cent in good or usable money, and that Baker returned only $100,000. He not only said this, but demanded money back from Maffie. He couldn’t demand it back from O’Keefe and Gusciora because the two had left town. McGinnis might well have been abetted in this theft among thieves by Pino. Joe McGinnis did strip down the getaway truck per instruction, but he didn’t ditch it on a street corner as he was supposed to. This would always confuse the FBI, as well as many gang members. Joe kept the truck and tried to sell it back to Tony Pino. Pino never dared tell other crewmen of this additional double cross. He was afraid they were already planning to kill McGinnis. If the heat hadn’t been so intense, if most of the robbers weren’t under twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance or being spot-checked when they least expected, if perpetrating a homicide would not have pointed a finger at them, they might well have done damage to Joe.

  When the FBI, acting on a tip, moved in on a garage where the truck was stashed, McGinnis and Banfield cut the vehicle apart with blowtorches, stuffed the smaller parts into the sisal bags Joe had tried to sell Tony, piled everything onto a truck, avoided what they thought were pursuing bureau cars and in the dead of night tossed the lot—large disassembled sections and filled sacks—into a Stoughton, Massachusetts, commercial dump which was not far from both the Gusciora family farm and the home of O’Keefe’s estranged wife and adopted son. Specs and Gus were outraged and rightly so. The bureau began looking harder in their direction. The bureau began tracing the sisal bags as far as South America, with no results. The bureau’s Washington lab was unable to find any relevant fingerprints or marks on the disassembled truck sections or the bags.

  It was the local police and Boston police who found the truck parts in the dump. FBI special agents came right in under the nose of Jim Crowley, loaded every last scrap and bag onto a rented truck, outraced and lost tailing reporters. The trucknappers could not use their primary hiding place to stash the parts because it was already occupied; other agents had stolen Ben Tilly’s car for a few hours and were, without court sanction, installing an electronic listening device.

  Ben Tilly was still local bureau men’s first choice as the possible mastermind and organizer of Brink’s. Next came Joe McGinnis. J. Edgar Hoover favored Willy Sutton, who had escaped from prison and was at large.

  Six months after the robbery the Boston agents, through what at best was coercion and at worst blackmail, turned a well-connected area man into what they considered their first truly reliable informant. He named nine of the actual robbers—everyone but Maffie and Faherty. According to the source, McGinnis was the brains and boss and Tony Pino the second-in-command. It was a ranking the bureau would never dispel. Ben Tilly was also believed to have some high-level involvement. Emphasis shifted to the McGinnis-Pino crowd, but about twenty Boston crooks were still afforded “hot” surveillance.

  Informant information had also indicated O’Keefe and Gusciora were to embark on an auto trip into the Midwest. The FBI’s cross-country stakeout lost Gus and Specs as the pair left Chicago, heading back east. Alerts to notify the bureau and not interfere with the two suspects’ journey if their car was spotted backfired when the sheriff of the county jail at Towanda, Pennsylvania apprehended them. Gus and O’Keefe had robbed two stores during their Pennsylvania trek. Stolen guns and clothing were found in their automobile. Gusciora pleaded guilty to a robbery charge and was sent to Pennsylvania Western State Penitentiary near Pittsburgh, where he would remain for the better part of five and a half years. O’Keefe pleaded not guilty on June 12, 1950, and was sentenced to ninety days in the Bradford County Jail at Towanda for loitering with known criminals—to wit, Gus. After that time had been served, he received another three years at Bradford for violation of the Uniform Firearms Act. Following that, he would have to stand trial in McKean County, Pennsylvania, on the same offense for which Gusciora received a five- to twenty-year sentence at Western State. Despite all this, O’Keefe was on parole for several Massachusetts convictions.

  Whether the FBI was involved in these harsh sentences remains moot. But new types of heat were being exerted on O’Keefe. He had a reputation for not doing time well. His legal fees for fighting the convictions would be costly.

  The FBI would later avow that sheer deduction had put them on the trail of the actual crooks, that each suspect interviewed had a tendency voluntarily to repeat, without being asked specifically, the time “seven o’clock” and state exactly where he was and what he was doing at that specific hour on the night of January 17, 1950. If not 7 P.M. exactly, certainly 7:10 P.M. was a stumbling block for bureau investigators. It had become the official time the robbers were believed to have entered Brink’s. Indications are, the thieves were leaving the premises or en route home by 7:00. The majority of alibis given by the gang were corroborated by people who honestly remembered seeing them at places other than Brink’s at the alleged time of perpetration. Nowhere were alibis more authoritativel
y verified than with McGinnis and Pino. When special agents interviewed James V. Crowley on August 24, 1950, the BPD lieutenant confirmed having been with Tony and Joe at the time they claimed—around 7:10 P.M. In subsequent interviews he would stretch the period between 7 and 7:25 P.M.

  Delving into the robbers’ actual financial history garnered little for the bureau. Everyone seemed to live on exactly what he earned at a legitimate job or quasi-legitimate job and, in some instances, observably stole. Pino was seen boosting a five-cent plastic cup from a dime store. Nothing he purchased in a year couldn’t have been had on his declared income of between $4,000 and $5,000. Special agents were aware of Joe McGinnis’ running an illicit whiskey still somewhere in New England, but he more than got by on what his package liquor store alone netted him. The FBI wasn’t above trying to apply economic heat by interfering with livelihoods, even illicit livelihoods in hopes of, among other things, forcing one of the suspects to crack or go to stolen Brink’s money—marked money. Nothing of consequence resulted from pressure placed on the union-controlled docks where Richardson and Geagan worked, but special agents were adept at having tête-à-têtes with Pino and Costa’s lottery salesmen and scared most of them off. Boston bureau men made no bones about whom they suspected. Many a special agent told Tony and Costa and Baker and Geagan they knew they were in on Brink’s. Overt or “open” surveillance, letting the crooks know they were being watched, was a bureau policy. Bumper-to-bumper automobile surveillance often became a game, particularly between FBI man Ed McNamara and Pino. When a suspect was paying for something in a store, it was not uncommon for a bureau agent to walk up, pluck the bill from the crook and either check its serial numbers then and there or replace it with currency of his own.

  Congenial relationships developed among certain of the pursuers and pursued. One Thanksgiving Costa’s wife brought out dinner to a pair of special agents sitting in a car surveilling her house. The agents eventually parked around the corner and out of sight of neighbors so as not to embarrass Costa’s children. But the overt surveillance was embarrassing, a stigma for the suspects’ families. This was also a part of bureau strategy. Still, not one marked dollar was retrieved from the crooks. Nothing else was found that implicated them. No amount of heat indicated anyone was ready to confess. No one, however, was putting all the eggs in one basket. Twenty Boston area crooks continued receiving the hot surveillance treatment.

  Special agents’ confidence that they were on the right track was buttressed when intercepted messages O’Keefe was smuggling out of Bradford County Jail to Pino and McGinnis left no doubt that Specs was dunning them for money, was threatening them. Specs’s legal expenses had bankrupted him and were draining his sister, brother-in-law and brother. Henry Baker and a McGinnis cohort by the name of John “Fats” Buccelli were observed visiting O’Keefe in jail. More threatening notes were sent by O’Keefe. Special agents went to interview Specky, got nowhere. According to Geagan and Richardson, the crew had raised a fund of $50,000 and sent it along to Specs’s contact.

  Willy Sutton was captured and said he had nothing to do with Brink’s. Nevertheless, J. Edgar Hoover wasn’t convinced his Boston field office was on the right track. Eighteen months after the robbery the FBI had major investigations in progress on 5,000 criminals throughout the United States, was able, under the guise of Robink 91-5535, to establish nationwide files in a category its specialization of the past had ignored—general crime.

  With the three-year federal statute of limitations running out and no break in sight, the bureau, determined to keep the case under its jurisdiction, decided to go along with the Irish Gang, played a desperate gambit that it hoped might induce the actual robbers to “find their tongues”: They instituted a federal grand jury hearing in the United States District Court of Massachusetts. O’Keefe and Gusciora were brought back from Pennsylvania imprisonment for the United States v. John Doe, otherwise known as the Brink’s robbery. During the twenty-five secret sessions, sixty-five witnesses, including every one of the actual crooks, except Faherty, were called before the panel. Many witnesses refused to say anything and were charged and convicted of contempt, including Jazz Maffie, who received a one-year jail sentence. Relatives of O’Keefe suffered the same treatment. James V. Crowley swore that he had seen Pino and McGinnis in front of the liquor store at 7:10 P.M.* the night of the crime. The jurors refused to pass down indictments “mainly due to three conditions”: (1) the participants in the crime were effectively disguised; (2) the lack of eye-witnesses to the crime itself; (3) the refusal of certain witnesses to give testimony and the inability of the grand jury to compel them to do so. Regardless of the guarantee of secrecy, a bureau request for court permission to conduct wiretaps on two relatives of Specs found its way to the press. O’Keefe and Gusciora were named in headlines as Brink’s robbers.

  Despite the federal statute of limitations’ having run out, the FBI continued its investigation. It was now in a footrace with two other organizations to whom jurisdiction had legally passed—the office of the Massachusetts state’s attorney and the Boston Police Department. The commonwealth’s statute of limitations on armed robbery ran for six years, which meant there were thirty-six months remaining in which to crack the case or see the perpetrators freed of prosecution for all time. And no one wanted to crack it more than Lieutenant James V. Crowley, who visited O’Keefe at the Bradford County Jail and applied increasing pressure on McGinnis and Pino. The number of Boston bureau agents exclusively assigned to Robink 91-5535 diminished dramatically; by the end of 1954 it would be down to four full-time investigators, the year after that, two.

  Another strategy for keeping the heat on suspects in hopes of garnering a confession evolved among local, state and federal authorities. It was the first exclusively legalistic method to date, and in many instances the FBI’s massive Robink file provided the data for action. Jazz Maffie, who had successfully beaten the contempt conviction for his refusal to answer federal grand jury questions regarding Brink’s, spent nine months in federal prison on an income tax filing violation. Mike Geagan served two months in the house of correction for leaving the scene of an auto accident. Sandy Richardson, who had not been arrested in seven years, and then only for drunkenness, was arrested three times in seven months—for drunkenness. Jimmy Costa, who only once in his entire life was pinched for speeding, was pinched twice in eight months for speeding. Jimma Faherty, the off-again, on-again, off-again suspect, had his parole revoked owing to “Unsatisfactory Conduct, Drunkenness, Refusal to Seek Employment and Association with Known Criminals” and was sent back to state prison for seven months. Barney Banfield could have been arrested a dozen times for drunkenness, but he was being afforded immunity by federal agents hoping that he and Joe McGinnis would lead them to the illicit distillery McGinnis was running in New Hampshire—and eventually Barney did. Tony Pino’s golf ball theft in 1948 was cited as a felony, used by the U.S. Immigrations to reinstitute deportation proceedings under a new statute which made two-felony arrests the criterion for such action.

  Tony was placed in detention as Specs O’Keefe, out on bail, returned to Boston after having served nearly three years and eight months at the Bradford County Jail on offenses which, under ordinary circumstances, would have required no more than eighteen months of incarceration.

  O’Keefe’s legal prospects were bleaker than ever. He faced probation defaults at Boston’s Central Court dating back to several 1945 convictions and was due to return to Smithport, Pennsylvania, and answer to the burglary offense which had sent Gusciora to Western State Penitentiary. He was desperate for funds with which to fight those actions. He also hadn’t learned that Joe McGinnis had clipped the gang on their robbery shares. He visited Maffie and demanded some $80,000 in Brink’s loot he claimed he left with Jazz. Maffie said it had never been $80,000, only about $30,000 and that, per Specky’s own instruction, he had given every cent of it to O’Keefe’s brother and sister.

  The day Universal Pictures s
et up its cameras in front of Old North Church and began filming Six Bridges to Cross, based on Boston Globe reporter Joe Dineen’s fictitious account of the Brink’s robbery, fifteen blocks away O’Keefe and an ex-con pal, John Carlson, kidnapped Jimmy Costa off a street corner. The next day Tony Pino was released from federal detention, pending a U.S. Supreme Court decision on his deportation action, and met with O’Keefe. Tony secured Costa’s release with half of the $7,500 demanded as ransom. As FBI agents followed up on the rumored kidnapping and went to interview Costa and Carlson, Okeefe was almost killed in a hail of bullets from the machine gun of fugitive assassin Elmer “Trigger” Burke. O’Keefe, unaware of his assailant’s identity, went to Pino’s house, accused Tony of the assault and failed in his attempt to get the final $3,500 in ransom he felt was owed him. With Carlson, O’Keefe marched into the family-owned vending machine offices of Henry Baker and at gunpoint ordered Henry’s brother to write him out a $3,500 check. He was told there was no money in the bank to cover such a withdrawal. O’Keefe said he’d be back the next morning to collect cash, was good to his word and had an inept shoot-out with Henry Baker on the sidewalk. Trigger Burke tried a second time, machine-gunned at O’Keefe in a parking lot late at night, nicked Specky in the wrist. O’Keefe went into hiding. Word spread in the underworld of the assassination attempt, of the possibility Specs was dead, of who had shot him. The BPD, via New York detectives, learned the identity of the gunman. Burke was apprehended on a Boston sidewalk. His room was searched, and a machine gun found. Possession of such a weapon was a mandatory life sentence in Massachusetts. During questioning Burke spoke in the third person, refused to answer who had hired him, and made no bones about coming to Boston to do “some rubbing out” of the O’Keefe creep. Boston evening and morning papers of June 18 and 19, 1954, blazed with news of Trigger’s arrest and an admission of having wounded O’Keefe. Once more, Specs’s name made headlines.