Though Droney’s public indignation did not bring about an indictment, Phil Cresta did get in trouble because of the investigation. He had to show up at the courthouse daily, as did the other gangsters who had been subpoenaed with him. One day as he waited in the corridor Phil met one of his old friends from his younger days at the Concord reformatory, who was now a felon. The two went across the street to a deli and talked about their days at Concord and life since. Little did Phil know that his old nemesis, Sergeant Doherty, was sitting in a back booth.
After Phil and his buddy left, Doherty went straight to Phil’s parole officer, turned him in for associating with a felon, and insisted on punishment. So, though Phil had recently been seen on television every night in the company of the known felons subpoenaed by Droney, Cresta was returned to prison for violation of parole. He did not stay there long.
By this time, Phil had a small army on his payroll: informants, hoods, elected and appointed officials. To him, crime was a game, and whoever had enough money, connections, or influence usually won. One of Phil’s payees worked in Governor Foster Furcolo’s office, and he gave Phil a get-out-of-jail-free card after he’d served only three weeks.
It just so happened that the day Phil left jail, it was raining. Hard. Phil decided to pay a debt. Instead of going to his favorite bar, he headed for Arlington. The next morning, after a night of steady rain, Sergeant Doherty discovered his car windows wide open and about a foot of rainwater on the car floor. He complained bitterly about Cresta’s release to a guy in the governor’s office. The man listened to Doherty’s claims that Phil Cresta was responsible for everything except the bombing of Pearl Harbor, thanked Doherty for all the information, then called Phil to tell him what the sergeant had just said about him.
3
Massachusetts Tightens Its Pockets
PHIL DIDN’T LIKE ANGIULO. In Phil’s words, “Jerry Angiulo was a greedy bastard who liked to have his ass kissed.” By the time January 1961 rolled around, Phil figured he’d made enough money for Angiulo and it was time to make some for himself. He was still doing some muscle work for Angiulo, but being a strong arm was never his forte. Phil had been working on an idea for quite some time. All he needed was the right day to set his plan in motion.
“When I woke up on the morning of Kennedy’s inauguration, I knew that was the day. The weather had to be some kind of omen. Not only was there a couple of feet of snow on the ground, but this was the one day when everyone, at least everyone in Boston, would be home watching Kennedy. It was perfect.”
Phil left the house wearing a large trench coat and a mask, which could be pulled down over his face to ward off both the weather and nosy witnesses. He also carried a large black suitcase. Inside was a hacksaw. Phil was the only person on downtown Boston’s Washington Street that day, which gave him an eerie feeling. “I knew there wouldn’t be a lot of people on the street, but it was like I was in the Twilight Zone or something. There was nobody around, nobody. All the time I’m walking down Washington Street, I can hear radios broadcasting Kennedy’s being sworn in, and his inauguration speech.”
If someone had been watching the area that day, that person would have seen a trench-coated man stop at a parking meter, open his suitcase, and take out a hacksaw. He then very quickly sawed through the pole, just below the meter, as he kept an eye out for possible witnesses, snowplows, or police vehicles. There were none. Once the top of the parking meter was free, the man placed it in his suitcase and continued his stroll through downtown Boston.
After he had cut the heads off three parking meters, Phil headed back to the warmth of his favorite North End social club on Hanover Street. “I was frozen by the time I got to the North End, but I knew I had what I’d come for, which made the trip a little easier,” Phil said. “As I walked into the club, there were about fifteen wise guys hanging in front of the TV, watching the Kennedy stuff. They looked at me like I was crazy to be out in that kind of weather, and when I opened the suitcase, they really thought I was crazy.” Phil laughed.
The puzzled onlookers watched in amazement as Cresta brazenly dropped the three parking meter heads on a card table. The puzzlement quickly turned to scorn. “Hey, big fucking score, Cresta, you gutta have at least a double sawbuck in there,” one guy yelled out as everyone laughed with the speaker. “Hey, Phil, ya get caught with that and you do life with no ticket,” a well-known mob figure screamed. “No ticket, ya get it?” In the parlance of Walpole State Prison, where most of the guys in that room had spent some time, a ticket was more formally known as parole.
“I stayed in that zoo just long enough to get warm and then I loaded the three meters back into the suitcase and screwed,” Phil said. “Where ya going, Cresta, on ya honeymoon?” “What ya gut, a new sex toy?” some of the goons called out as Phil closed the door behind him. They may have all thought that Phil had lost his marbles, but the laughter soon turned to jealousy when Phil Cresta became Boston’s most wanted scofflaw.
The day after John Fitzgerald Kennedy was sworn in as President of the United States, Phil Cresta took a cab from his home in Lynn, where he was living at that time with his wife Dorothy and his four children, to Logan International Airport in East Boston. He had in his possession one black suitcase. With his newspaper, suitcase, and boarding pass for a flight to Chicago, he looked like any normal passenger. But while other passengers’ suitcases contained clothes and personal items, Phil Cresta’s contained items that belonged to the City of Boston. By this time, though his sister had not yet married Augie Circella, Phil had some very good friends in Chicago’s syndicate, a hugely profitable corporation grown out of the efforts of people like Al Capone, Frank Nitti, and Tony Accardo. Nobody in Boston’s mob could hold a candle to Chicago, and nobody could “smoke” (duplicate) keys like the Chicago guys.
While serving time, Phil had become captivated with cons who were called “picks” by the other cons. Picks weren’t the biggest or the toughest prisoners; in fact, they looked like accountants or businessmen. But they impressed Phil with their expertise and with the fact that they didn’t tend to get rubbed out like the mob’s heavies did. Cresta was close to six feet tall and his weight, though it fluctuated, averaged about 190 pounds. He was as tough as any con in prison, but though he didn’t graduate from high school, he was intelligent enough to see that learning to pick locks was a win-win situation. He decided in prison to become the best pickman in Boston.
As Phil later said, “I could’ve been muscle for anybody in the United States, but those guys, like Barboza and DeMarco, always wind up with a bullet behind their ear, and that wasn’t going to happen to me.”
When he had left prison in 1959, Phil used his prison friends to get the necessary introductions to their pick counterparts in Chicago. It was a match made in heaven, and this trip in 1961 would not be the last time Phil traveled from Boston to Chicago.
When Phil got off the plane in the Windy City, he headed for the Chicago locksmith who would help to make him a rich man. He asked the locksmith to make three keys, one to fit each type of meter he’d brought with him. The next day Phil was back in Boston with his new keys.
Within a week he was clearing $250 per day. And he did not get caught. Phil Cresta had done his homework.
Conveniently enough, Phil had made friends with a woman who worked as secretary to Bill Doyle, Boston’s assistant parking commissioner. Phil knew that, sooner or later, he’d need an “ear” to the man who’d lead the investigation when someone discovered how massive the amounts of money were that Phil planned to siphon from meters.
Phil started out with the Beacon Hill area of Boston, which surrounds the State House. “I was a little too cautious at first. I thought everyone was looking at me every time I opened up a meter, but in reality I was invisible. Nobody gave a second glance to a guy dressed as a parking attendant unloading change from the meters. After the first week, it got too easy; there was no challenge, but the money was damn good,” Phil said. The city’s tr
affic department had no idea what was happening, and the wise-guy population was no longer laughing at Phil Cresta.
“Angiulo and his soldiers wanted a piece of my action, but I just smiled and kept making easy money. Anything that was easy was attractive to Angiulo. He wanted a piece of everything, but I wasn’t some frightened little bookie and he knew it. If they wanted my keys they were going to have to take them from my dead body—and they didn’t have the balls to deal with that.” So for the next seventeen months, Phil Cresta was a one-man crime wave, stealing over a hundred thousand dollars from the City of Boston.
Finally, in May of 1962, the Boston traffic commissioner, Tom Carty, after looking at revenue shortfalls, called for an in-house investigation. “They thought it was an inside job, so it took them another two months to determine that someone was clipping them from outside the department,” Phil commented. He found out from his lady friend in the commissioner’s office that the investigation had come up empty and that the commissioner had decided to change all the parking meters to an Ace lock system, which was said to be theftproof. “She told me it would take three months after the bids were sent out before there’d be any changes in the existing meters. That was all I had to hear,” Phil said, chuckling. The next day, it seemed, Phil Cresta had a change of heart.
“I went down to the North End club and began to meet secretly with some of the wise guys who were always after me for a key. Separately, I told each man that I’d give him his own key for fifteen hundred dollars. But part of the deal was they couldn’t tell anyone else, or I’d have to sell them a key, too. I sold twelve keys for fifteen hundred each, and all twelve of them thought I was the greatest guy in the world to give them a piece of my score. A couple of months later, the keys were as useless as tits on a bull. I walked out of that score with over a hundred grand and twelve new friends—no, make that eleven new friends and one archenemy.”
The archenemy’s name was Ben Tilley.
In Phil’s opinion, Tilley was a small-time hood who liked to hang around big-time gangsters. His claim to fame was that he had been an early suspect in the famous Brink’s robbery of 1950. (The feds dropped him from their list of suspects, then found the crooks who’d really pulled the job.) “Tilley had about as much to do with that Brink’s job as my mother did. Pulling that score took balls, and Tilley was short two of those. That little fuck went around telling anyone who’d listen that he was the one who got away,” Phil said. “Nobody got away.”
The one thing Tilley did have was a string of good informants who led him to some pretty good scores, although he never actually did the jobs. Tilley would case them and then hire some muscle to actually pull them off. “Tilley was a little pervert who got his jollies by watching. I never liked Tilley,” Phil said, “and one of the happiest days of my life was when I sold him that bogus key for fifteen hundred dollars.”
About a week after Phil sold Tilley the key, Tilley got arrested on Beacon Street by two Boston cops. “The asshole was hitting parking meters in a three-piece suit!” Phil said derisively. “He deserved to get busted.” Tilley was arraigned for possession of burglarious tools and for petty larceny. He pleaded not guilty in Boston Municipal Court and was released on his own recognizance. A couple of months later he was found guilty on all counts.
Tilley was furious, but instead of taking the pinch and paying the fine, he appealed it on the grounds that a key, in and of itself, was not a burglarious tool. Tilley lost round after round until finally his case was heard by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The justices ruled that a key does not in and of itself constitute a burglarious tool. They also ruled, however, that if that same key was used in the performance of a crime, then it was, in fact, a burglarious tool. And Tilley had, in fact, used it for larceny.
The case cost Tilley six figures. He turned his hatred on Phil Cresta and told a number of wise guys that Cresta had set him up. Though nothing came of their enmity at the time, both would suffer for it in years to come.
4
The Team Forms
AFTER THE PARKING METER SCAM and a few other jobs that he pulled off solo, Phil achieved newfound respect in the ranks of the Boston underworld. He was well liked and well connected, but he was still no fan of Jerry Angiulo. Though a number of people talked incessantly to Phil about “being made” (initiated into Angiulo’s branch of La Cosa Nostra), Phil wasn’t sure he wanted to go that route. He listened, though.
“I never closed one door before another one opened,” Phil noted years later. “At that time nobody was beating down my door with work, so I went along with the made-guy routine for a while. I was between a rock and a hard place. I knew that if I went with Angiulo and became a made man, I’d have the benefit of their protection and muscle, which was considerable. But I would also have to give them a piece of everything I stole, and I didn’t like giving Angiulo anything.
“If I went out on my own, I knew I’d have to keep one eye on the law and the other on Angiulo’s stooges, who didn’t take too kindly to independents working their area. I knew Angiulo was pissed at me for the parking meter thing. He told a few people close to me that I should’ve given him more respect. What he meant was I should’ve given him a cut.
“Make no mistake about it, everything has to do with money. Money is respect. If you brought in a lot of money, you gained a lot of respect. If you didn’t, you were at the bottom of the totem pole. We used to say, ‘If you earn money, you’re funny; if you’re broke, you’re a joke.’ ”
A FEW MONTHS after Ben Tilley got pinched with the parking meter key, Phil was standing at the bar in McGrail’s, where lawyers, cops, Red Sox players, visiting-team baseball players, judges, newspapermen, crooks, and blue-collar workers all gathered to have a few beers and share stories. It was summer 1962. Someone mentioned Tilley’s name and a big guy at the end of the bar jerked his head around and looked up. He was obviously listening in on the conversation and trying to be discreet about it. His interest caught Phil’s attention. “A lot of guys in this business have big mouths and they usually bring themselves down by opening them at the wrong time,” Phil commented. “This guy caught no one’s attention but mine, and that got me interested in him.”
Phil waited until most of the others had left and then introduced himself. “I know who you are,” the big guy said to Phil. Phil bought him a drink and they talked. His name will be given here only as Angelo. He had grown up in Medford and he stood over six feet three inches, weighing in at about 240 pounds. He told Phil that he’d been doing some work for Tilley and was always interested in what was being said about his boss. Then Angelo said he’d never been arrested.
“He was kind of ashamed to tell me,” Phil remembered, “but I told him it was good he had no record. If the cops don’t know ya, then they can’t suspect ya.” This made Angelo feel better about his virgin status. According to Phil, he was strictly small-time, but had a great deal of potential. “I liked him right from the get-go,” Phil said.
“Whadda ya hear on Tilley?” Phil asked Angelo cautiously.
“I hear he’s blaming you for his pinch,” Angelo said, looking Phil straight in the eyes.
“Are you?”
“Hey, I owe Tilley shit. He’s a big boy; if he don’t know how to steal, then he shouldn’t be in the business.”
“I really liked this kid,” Phil recounted. “There was no bullshit about him. If you asked him a question, you got an answer—no song and dance—and I liked that.” Still, Phil checked him out. Angelo’s reputation turned out to be solid. As Phil put it, “The word on the street was that Angelo was somebody you didn’t mess with.”
A few days later Angelo was back in McGrail’s. Phil Cresta went there too—mostly just to listen, but that night he did some more talking.
Angelo had heard that Cresta was an independent who worked alone, so couldn’t believe his luck when Phil asked if he’d be interested in working together. Angelo later stated, “I could tell he was a straight-up guy—
just the opposite of Tilley—and I really liked that. I couldn’t believe all the shit Tilley was pulling. His arrest was strictly nickel-and-dime, and he made a federal case out of it, almost literally. When Phil asked me if I’d be interested in doing some work with him, I almost shit. I said yes before he had a chance to change his mind.” Angelo then suggested including his best friend, who also did some work for Tilley.
“I really didn’t want to meet anyone’s friend, but I liked this Angelo kid, so I took a chance,” Phil said. “I was sitting in McGrail’s and the Sox were playing a doubleheader. The place was packed. I had my back to the wall, which was something I did whenever I was in public. I never let anyone get behind me, anywhere, anytime. I’d seen too many guys get hit from behind. It wasn’t going to happen to me,” Phil explained. “I was talking to a few Boston dicks when I spotted Angelo coming in. It looked like he was alone, so I motioned him over with a jerk of my head. He froze. Then he turned around and walked out. I had no idea what was going on. All I could think of, as I followed him out, was how ghost-white his face had turned.”
Phil pushed through the Sox fans and made his way out to the street. “What’s the matter?” he asked Angelo, who was apparently alone.
Angelo blurted, “Phil, those two guys you were talking to are cops!”
“I know,” Phil said.
“One of those motherfuckers busted a friend of mine three years ago.”
“Well, I can guarantee they won’t bust you.” Phil smiled.
“How the fuck can you do that, Phil? They’re cops, for crissake.”
Final Confession Page 4