Final Confession

by Brian P. Wallace

  Cresta Sr. was mechanically inclined, and he loved his tools a good deal more than he loved his kids. One day Phil, who was thirteen years old, returned home from school to find his father in a rage because one of his prized tools was missing. After beating Phil, his father handed him a shovel and said, “Dig.” Phil was accustomed to the beatings, but this was new. He looked at his father and said, “What?” “You heard me,” his father screamed, “I want you to dig your own grave. And when you’re finished I’m going to kill you.” Ruth, hearing this, ran upstairs and sent one of her daughters to her brother-in-law’s house, a block away.

  Mike Cresta, who moved in and out of the family’s house at will, rushed over and confronted his brother as the boy continued digging. Mike was usually no savior, but he sometimes had more sense of decency than his brother. When Phil Sr. finally relented, he said to his son, “If there’s ever another tool missing from this house, nobody will be able to save you from this grave.”

  On other occasions—and they were numerous—Cresta Sr. would take a child upstairs to one of the bedrooms. Once there, he would take the youngster’s hands and place them in two holes precut in an interior wall. When the hands were through the opening, he would go into the adjoining room and place handcuffs on them, then laugh like hell at the child’s predicament. Once the child was shackled, he would return downstairs or go out for hours at a time, leaving the child handcuffed. This was his idea of entertainment. No one else had keys to unlock the handcuffs or the courage to face Phil Sr.’s wrath.

  Although Ruth Cresta tried her best, she was no match for her sadistic husband. The Cresta children loved their mother and cried in unison on those many occasions when their father would beat her senseless or fling her down the stairs.

  Everyone around Phil Jr. knew how much he hated authority. That trait stayed with him until the day he died. It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out that his hatred of authority stemmed from how his father treated him and his family. Young Phil Cresta also had no love for athletics, or for school. He went only because the law stipulated that he must, and he planned to drop out as soon as the law allowed.

  The constant beatings by his father toughened him far beyond his age. He never looked for a fight, but he never backed down from one either. He was, according to those who grew up with him, quiet and almost shy. His younger sister, Rose, recalled, “I never heard Phil say a bad word about anybody. My father beat him more than any of us; maybe that’s why he became so daring.”

  As the Cresta kids grew older, their father became more sadistic, with the help of his brother Mike. With an electric cord, the Cresta brothers would take turns whipping the kids. Phil’s older sister, Mari, remembered one occasion: “Once, for some reason, Uncle Mike reached into his back pocket and pulled out a long knife. He grabbed Phil from behind and placed the blade of the knife on his neck, screaming that he was going to kill him. But my mother grabbed Phil from Mike’s grasp and disaster was averted.” She went on. “We were all scared to death of my father and my uncle. My mother did not want Uncle Mike living with us, but my father insisted. It was a terrible time.”

  One of Phil’s younger brothers, Bobby, noted, “We were constantly being beaten, Phil more than anyone, and with the beatings came the rantings and the ravings and the screaming that were almost as bad as the physical abuse. I don’t think I ever saw my father happy. He was always pissed off, always ready to strike one of us. I didn’t think things could get any worse, but then, whenever Uncle Mike came to live with us, they did. My father never gave us any credit for anything or showed us any encouragement. He always tried to tear us down, both physically and mentally.”

  After the United States entered World War II Phil Cresta Jr. volunteered for the army, even though he was much too young. He was rejected but encouraged to join a Civil Defense unit. His assignment was to go around the North End neighborhood to make certain that everyone’s lights were out after curfew. Phil liked the job and the sense of doing something worthwhile, but it was hard for him to spend hours patrolling the city to make sure everyone maintained blackout instructions, and then come home to see what his father was doing. Phil Sr., never one to abide by anybody else’s rules, had devised special black curtains and window shades that gave the appearance from the outside that all the lights were shut off, which they weren’t. He taunted his son for his role in the Civil Defense.

  As Phil began to become independent, he showed a bent for acquisitiveness not unlike his father’s. One day while on his Civil Defense rounds, Phil saw a couple of ration booklets and stole them. He was caught, but because this was Phil’s first offense, he was placed on probation.

  A few months later he was arrested again, this time for stealing tires with some of his friends. One of those arrested with Phil was the son of a Medford police sergeant. The Medford cop offered each set of parents to “make this thing go away.” The parents of the other boys were grateful for the offer, but Phil Cresta Sr. insisted on teaching his second son a lesson. It was one lesson that Phil never forgot—or forgave. At sixteen years of age Phil Cresta Jr. was taken out of one prison—his home—and placed in another, where he would spend the next two years. This new home was the Massachusetts Reformatory at Concord. The other boys went free.

  One month after Phil was released from Concord, he was convicted of assault and battery. No longer a juvenile, he was sentenced to two more years, this time at Norfolk Prison.

  Six months into that sentence, Phil’s family received a letter stating that their son had been drafted into the army, but once the army heard where Phil was living at the time, he was categorized as undesirable. It’s hard not to wonder what Phil’s future might have been if he had been drafted six months earlier or had the chance to enter the army with the clean slate the policeman had suggested.

  On September 5, 1947, while at Norfolk, Phil received word that his father, while driving his beloved specialized car, had died from a massive heart attack. Phil felt no sadness at his father’s death, only resentment toward the man he blamed for putting him in Concord.

  Ruth, everyone was sure, would now be much happier. Her tormentor was gone. But shortly after burying her husband, she suffered a nervous breakdown from which she never fully recovered. She and the younger children moved to Medford, where she was tended by her teenage daughter, Rose, who also finished raising the younger boys. Mari had left home some time before, and was not coming back. She teamed up with Orson Bean for a while, then went out on her own as a dancer.

  When Phil came out of Norfolk at twenty years of age, he had no parents to speak of. Within a few months, on July 4, 1948, he married a woman who in this book will be called Dorothy. The couple rented an apartment at 20 Headland Way in Medford, near where Phil’s mother was living with his sister Rose. Phil and Dorothy began to raise a family. Ostensibly now a car salesman, Phil put his heart into his real line of work, which had been learned, at government expense, from older crooks. He may never have been much of a student in school, but his Norfolk friends had noticed how quick a study he was, especially with picking locks. Phil’s proficiency in this “elective subject” at Norfolk had brought him such admiration that he finally realized he was good at something other than taking a beating. Now free and with a family to provide for, Phil decided to put his new skill to use.

  BOSTON’S CRIMINAL ELEMENT has always been considered a poor stepsister to the more organized and deadly crime syndicates in Chicago and New York, but it was no less deadly. Al Capone, Frank Nitti, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Dutch Schultz, Mad Dog Coll, and Frank Costello were famous Mafia figures who led dangerous and glamorous lives elsewhere. Movies and newspapers could not get enough of the cigar-chewing, police-baiting gangsters who flaunted their wealth and seemed invincible.

  While everyone in Boston knew the name Capone, only a handful of people, mostly in South Boston, knew of Frankie Wallace. On December 2, 1931, Wallace, leader of the Gustin Gang of South Boston, had been invited to a meeting in t
he office of Joseph Lombardo, in the Testa Building in the North End. Wallace was accompanied by his top two lieutenants, Barney Walsh and Tim Coffey. The South Boston gangsters walked up the three flights of stairs to Lombardo’s importing company and knocked on the door. Within seconds Wallace and Walsh were dead at the hands of seven or eight of Lombardo’s men. Coffey hid in a broom closet until the cops arrived, but he refused to testify against Lombardo, whose gangland stock had risen after the daring daylight massacre that eliminated his only rivals. At the time of the Testa Building massacre Joe Lombardo was thirty-six years old.

  For the next twenty-four years he and a fight promoter named Phil Buccola (also known as Filippo Bruccola) ran the loosely organized crime syndicate in Boston. Buccola was of the old school and often gave second and third chances to those who went against him. His successors, Patriarca and Angiulo, who began to take over in the 1950s, were less forgiving.

  In the early 1950s Phil Cresta, then in his mid-twenties, was busy breaking and entering, laundering money, and working at other small-time endeavors to pay the bills his growing family incurred. He wanted, however, to do a lot more than just pay his bills. He wanted respect and wealth, and he was convinced that neither would be attained by carrying a lunch pail. He began to associate with Jerry Angiulo.

  Jerry—nine years older than Phil, whom Phil knew from his early days in the North End—had been just twelve years old when the bullet-ridden bodies of Frankie Wallace and Barney Walsh were carried down the stairs of the Testa Building on Hanover Street. It was a lesson that young Angiulo never forgot. As the long careers of Joe Lombardo and Phil Buccola were coming to an end, a newer, tougher, more educated breed of criminal was rising to power. Angiulo—one of this breed—knew that Cresta had guts, and that he was hungry to get ahead. This would make him a perfect soldier for Angiulo’s burgeoning crime empire, which he ran out of Boston’s North End.

  Working for Angiulo was Cresta’s night job, you could say. During the day, Phil played a respectable, law-abiding citizen in various ways. For example, he ran a small West End diner called Lucy’s Snack Bar. Owning a diner can be profitable, depending on how it’s run and how many customers walk through the door. There was no restaurant in Boston, however, making as much money as Lucy’s Snack Bar.

  Most businesses, when they open, figure what their overhead will be—things such as rent, equipment, furniture, and electricity. Then they figure what they’ll need to take in, to turn a profit. Most businesses. Phil Cresta and his partner, a low-level Angiulo operator named Bones, ran things differently. They had no overhead. Everything in the restaurant came from one of Phil’s five-finger discounts, that is, everything was stolen. Even the rent was free; the storefront was owned by Bones’s brother.

  Each morning Phil and Bones would get up at sunrise and steal whatever they needed for the restaurant that day. Whatever meat or fish they stole at Faneuil Hall Marketplace or Boston’s docks became the special of the day. The meat and fish taken care of, they would proceed to five-finger discounts on bread, soft drinks, milk, coffee, sugar, and whatever else the restaurant required. Their prices, as you may have guessed, were the best in Boston.

  Angiulo got his cut, and everybody was happy. At Lucy’s Snack Bar, a person could buy more than a meal. There were bargains on suits, sneakers, blouses, cashmere jackets—whatever the local wise guys had hijacked the night before. It was one-stop shopping at Lucy’s. Phil continued running the diner until 1955.

  Under Lombardo and Buccola, Angiulo had been a low-level numbers runner. With his outstanding organizational skills, though, he soon took over bookmaking in Boston. In the late 1950s, booking was profitable but still fragmented. Bookies didn’t share their winnings. That changed as Angiulo gained power.

  According to Phil Cresta, during the time Angiulo was consolidating bookmaking, Phil and three or four of his buddies, all of whom were on Angiulo’s payroll, were given a list of local bookies to hit. They’d go into the bars or clubs where an intimidated bookie worked and take his betting slips. The very next day, after the Suffolk Downs pari-mutuel number had been published in the newspaper, the same four or five guys would return and tell the bookie they’d hit that pari-mutuel with him. They would then produce one of the bookie’s own slips, from those taken the day before, as proof. Many of the bookies at first refused to pay, but they soon changed their minds.

  “Me or one of my buddies would stick a gun down the bookie’s throat and tell him he either paid up or he died,” Cresta stated. Once a bookie was brought into line, he was told that one of Angiulo’s men would be in once a week to see that things “like this” didn’t happen again. It wasn’t long before it was accepted that if a guy wanted to book in Boston he had to give a cut to Jerry Angiulo, whose lack of patience was becoming famous. Many of those who refused didn’t last longer than their second chance.

  Phil’s early efforts at lock picking were not completely successful. In 1957 Phil was seen picking a lock to a house. The witness called police, who charged Cresta with breaking and entering, possession of a firearm, and assault with intent to kill. (They claimed he tried to shoot them; Phil said that never happened.) Before his case went to trial, the high-priced lawyers working for Angiulo had the charges reduced to entering a home by means of subterfuge. Phil was sentenced to serve two and a half years in the old Charlestown state prison, but later was transferred to the newer state prison at Walpole. It was at Walpole that Phil found a way to acquire the wealth he sought.

  Phil hated prison, but he learned a lot there. He made friends with Joe “The Animal” Barboza, Vinny “The Butcher” Flemmi, and John Robichaud, all of whom would later become famous for their viciousness. Phil also got to know the guys who’d pulled off the daring Brink’s robbery in 1950 that became the subject of several books, television shows, and movies. He listened to the stories of the bank jobs and the murders that The Animal had been involved with. Phil decided that their style was not for him. Their fame, and where it got them, gave Phil warning: a guy in his kind of work was better off staying in the shadows. So he decided to get better at being unobtrusive.

  By the time Cresta returned to Boston’s streets in 1959, there weren’t many locks he couldn’t pick or alarms he couldn’t disable successfully. Phil had also become adept at making perfect molds of keys, a talent that had many uses. He began working his new skills.

  At some point around this time he also made an enemy who vowed to bring him down, a sergeant in the police department of Arlington, a bedroom community about six miles outside Boston. Nobody knows, or at least nobody is saying, why Sergeant Jim Doherty hated Phil Cresta so much.

  Doherty did his utmost to make Phil’s life miserable and, to a degree, he succeeded. It became routine for Doherty to drive into Boston, pick Phil up, not charge him with any crime, beat him up, and leave him bloodied. Miranda, of course, had not yet come to court. The only Miranda Doherty knew of was Carmen Miranda, the woman who danced with bananas on her head. Doherty knew he had no police authority in Boston, but he harassed Cresta there anyway.

  Phil retaliated with psychological warfare. Every time a severe rain- or snowstorm hit the Boston area, Cresta would drive to Arlington, pick the lock of Doherty’s car, roll down all the windows, and then return to Boston. After Sergeant Doherty’s shift was finished, he’d find his car’s interior completely drenched. He must have felt as if a permanent rain cloud were following him. For, despite his efforts to hide his car, Phil always managed to find it and go through his ritual.

  Sergeant Doherty wasn’t the only cop who knew that Phil Cresta was more than a car salesman, but few were able to discover exactly what he did for his “real” job, now that the diner was long closed. Phil received some unwanted publicity when on November 12, 1959, a worker in the Everett dump found the body of Joseph “Angie” DeMarco. A well-known North End criminal, DeMarco was found lying faceup, with six bullets in his head. His body was covered with wooden crates and rubble. “He definitely wasn’t k
illed in Everett,” Lieutenant Henry Fitzgerald of the Everett Police Department told the Boston Herald. “His body was dumped here by his attackers.” DeMarco had last been seen at an after-hours joint in Boston called the Coliseum, which was owned by the Mafia. The last person he was seen talking to was Phil Cresta.

  Middlesex District Attorney John Droney was aware of the public’s fascination with the Mafia and did not let go of the story until he’d milked it dry. He called the DeMarco slaying a gangland execution, and assured reporters that he was not going to stand by and watch Middlesex County become a dumping ground for “racketeers, dope peddlers, loan sharks, and other hoodlums.” DeMarco’s background was publicized: he had spent the better part of his forty-two years in prison. In 1943 he had been sentenced to fifteen to twenty years for manslaughter; he was released in 1955. Three years later he was arrested and sent away briefly for carrying a concealed weapon. He was released in November 1958, but was back in jail in March 1959, this time after a wild auto chase. The grand jury proceedings on the DeMarco killing became more of a media show than an inquiry.

  When the grand jury convened in Middlesex County Superior Court in Cambridge, they called six witnesses: Jerry Angiulo; Larry Baione, who would later become an underboss in the Angiulo syndicate; Phil Waggenheim, who was a notorious contract killer; Henry Noyes, a well-known Mafia member; Peter Jordan, the former mayor of Revere; and a young upstart named Phil Cresta Jr. It was pretty heady company for the former North End kid.

  Years later Cresta would say callously, “Angie DeMarco was a piece of shit, a low-life scumbag who couldn’t be trusted. He’d started robbing Angiulo’s ‘protected’ bookies after leaving jail in 1959. It made us look bad—and that made him dead. DeMarco was also a fool. He knew he was playing with fire and he got burned.”

  It is not clear from Cresta’s tales who actually shot DeMarco, though Cresta certainly wouldn’t have had any problem putting bullets into DeMarco’s brain if he’d been given the contract. Cresta had no pity for the district attorney’s office, either, who never got their indictment for DeMarco’s murder. “They knew they’d never solve that DeMarco hit. The number of people who wanted to see DeMarco dead could fill Boston Garden.”