“Yeah, and they’ll fuck both of us pretty good if they do find out.”
“I’m not saying anything, Phil, and I know you’re not either. So how is anyone gonna find out?”
“I don’t like to push my luck, that’s all. I’m surprised we’ve kept it a secret this long,” Phil said.
But the Bain thing was tempting. Louie was estimating the take to be in the area of half a mil. As he left the diamond broker’s office, Phil told Louie, “I don’t know, let me think about it.”
Phil pitched the idea to Angelo and Tony that night at McGrail’s. They were both skeptical. “What if Louie’s just setting us up?” Tony asked Phil. “For who?” Phil replied. “Could be Angiulo. Could be Gambino. Who knows?” Tony said. “He knows he’s a dead man if he sets us up,” Phil argued emphatically. He pointed out that Louie was far too smart for that. “We made the guy some decent money. How much does he want this time?” Angelo wondered aloud. “More. It’s always more, no matter how much he’s made,” Phil responded. “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Tony said.
Since they weren’t getting any closer to a decision, Phil suggested they check this guy Bain out, then talk again. They agreed.
Walter Bain was a forty-two-year-old diamond broker from Dedham, Massachusetts. He was a big-time broker who worked exclusively for Baumgold, Incorporated, of New York. After clocking Bain for a couple of weeks, the team decided to take him down. There were a few things that would differentiate this highwaymen robbery from the others. First, Bain traveled only in daylight. This was going to make the Bain theft a lot more difficult than the others. And Bain was shrewd. They’d clocked him on six different occasions and he never took the same route out of Boston twice. He would leave his house around nine-thirty in the morning and go to Dedham Police headquarters, where he’d have left his uncut diamonds for safekeeping the night before. He not only kept his car in his locked garage, he had a lock on his gas tank. He was a very thorough person. He was also a careful driver: he never went over the speed limit and he never changed lanes. Once he got on the Massachusetts Turnpike, he moved to the center lane and stayed there. He was doing all the right things to protect himself.
“Bain was good,” Phil said, “but we were better.”
They set the date to hit Bain: May 2, 1966. But before that day came, Louie Diamonds dangled another temptation in front of Phil Cresta’s face.
BESIDES KNOWING when diamond merchants were in town and where they were staying, Louie Diamonds often knew where they would store their merchandise for safekeeping while in town. In those days some of the top-of-the-line jewelry salesmen, when visiting Boston, would temporarily store their merchandise in a local police station. What better place, right?
Wrong!
A famous diamond merchant came from New York to Boston for a show at Hynes Convention Center in late April 1966. Louie Diamonds told Phil that the salesmen was staying at the Parker House, a piece of news that brought a smile to Phil’s face. Louie also told Phil that the New Yorker always kept his diamonds and other jewels somewhere in Station 1 on North Street, four blocks from the Parker House. The news, to Phil, was like one of those challenges from his days on the streets of the North End. He could almost hear the words behind Louie’s information: “I dare you!”
Phil found out when the merchant was arriving, and Tony and Angelo, a picture of the salesman in hand, waited at the airport, in East Boston, for him. Phil was standing at the corner of North Street, downtown.
At the airport, the salesman hailed a taxi and went directly to the North Street police station. Tony and Angelo followed at a safe distance, through the tunnel that connects East Boston to downtown, and onto North Street. Tony spotted Phil standing on the corner and, as agreed, hit the horn three times.
As soon as he heard the three beeps, Phil turned and started toward the police station. By the time the jewelry salesman and the taxi driver began unloading three big cases and carrying them into the station, Phil was already inside, looking at some pictures of wanted men taped to the wall, some of whom he knew. To the average observer, Phil, dressed in chinos and a blue-and-gold windbreaker with an insignia on it, looked like an off-duty detective. There were three civilians filing complaints in the lobby, and a dozen or so officers coming and going. Nobody even looked in Phil’s direction.
The salesman came to the desk and asked for the captain, who came out and greeted him like an old friend. The captain called a couple of young cops, who carried the three cases down a flight of stairs, followed by the captain, the jewelry salesman—and Phil Cresta.
The captain pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket and told the cops to put the cases down and go back upstairs. They passed Phil on their way up, and disappeared. The door the captain opened, about twenty feet to the left of the bottom step, had no lettering on it. Phil watched as the captain and the jewelry salesman carried the three cases into the room, then he exited the station before the men began their trek up the stairs.
Having seen all he needed, Phil walked over to the European Restaurant, where he found Tony stuffing his mouth with a huge sausage sandwich. Tony tried to ask Phil a question, but the words were inaudible. Angelo, sipping on a bottle of Schlitz, inquired, “How’d it go, Officer?” Phil looked down at his Boston Police Emerald Society windbreaker and laughed. “You’d better take that jacket off before Angiulo’s guys whack you,” Angelo said, laughing. “Not only am I a cop, but an Irish one to boot,” Phil said, smiling. “Yeah, you’re about as Irish as Capone,” Tony exclaimed. Phil stripped off his Emerald Society jacket and got down to business.
The diamond show was not scheduled to open until the next afternoon. Phil and Angelo drove to Sears and purchased a new suitcase, then back to the Fenway Motor Inn, where Phil showered and put on the same clothes that he’d worn that afternoon in the police station. This was a two-man job, and Phil decided to use Angelo only.
At 9:00 P.M. he and Angelo left the motor inn and headed downtown. In the trunk of the car lay the new piece of luggage and inside it were three red bricks. Phil and Angelo sat outside the police station for an hour, watching and waiting. It was a Friday night, which generally meant a lot of police action in downtown Boston. By 10:00 o’clock many people were plastered and just looking for trouble, which they usually found. By 10:30 that night, the North Street police station was humming, as squad cars and wagons brought in their human cargo to be processed and booked. It was mass confusion, as drunken students intermingled with pickpockets and shoplifters.
Phil liked what he saw, but still he waited. At 10:45 six young women walked into the station, apparently to report a crime. Phil knew instinctively that the time was ripe. He grabbed the suitcase with the bricks inside and headed into the station. He heard the women reporting that their car had been stolen. Nobody paid any attention to him as he headed down the stairs, took a left, and stopped in front of the unmarked door. It took Phil less than ten seconds to pick the lock. Once inside, he hit the light switch and headed for the three locked jewelry cases in the far corner of the tiny room. He picked their locks in a matter of seconds. He then took the bricks out of his suitcase and placed the contents of the three cases into it. Once all the jewelry was safely stashed, he placed a red brick in each of the jewelry cases, relocked each case, and left the room.
He quickly climbed the stairs. The women were still crying to the desk sergeant about their lost car. He walked out the door, crossed North Street, placed the suitcase in the backseat, and got into the front seat of a car that Angelo and Tony had stolen that afternoon from Logan Airport.
The next morning Phil anxiously looked in both Boston newspapers to see if there was any mention of the jewel robbery. There was none, nor would there ever be. It was too embarrassing for the Boston Police to admit that someone walked into one of their stations and carried out $750,000 worth of precious stones. The jeweler, Phil later learned, picked up his three cases the next morning and went to Hynes Convention Center, where the jewelry sho
w was being held. He opened the first case and almost had a heart attack.
Phil was on a plane to Chicago by then. He visited his two elderly jeweler friends, who were pleased to see him and even more delighted to see the jewels. While he was there, waiting for the jewels to be fenced, Angelo and Tony were in Boston, continuing to clock Bain. Since there had been no publicity on the police station heist, they felt safe to keep the schedule they’d set up to hit Bain.
Phil stayed in Chicago with Mari for three days. On the third day he got a call from one of the jewelry merchants he’d visited when he arrived in town, who asked him to stop by their store. Phil accepted the invitation as well as the $450,000 in cash that he was handed. He flew back to Boston, where he split it with Tony and Angelo. “We split everything three ways. That was the one rule we lived by,” Phil said. Tony always laughed about the police station robbery in which he didn’t really play a major role. He told Angelo that Phil paid him $150,000 for eating a sausage sangwich.
“The best part about that job,” Phil said, “was that we didn’t have to cut in that sleaze Louie Diamonds. He had heard the rumors like everyone else, but he could never put us together with the robbery.”
The salesman recouped his losses from his insurance company. Although there were rumors in some circles about the theft, nobody publicized it. The story took on legendary status and no one knew for sure how the $750,000 worth of jewels had disappeared from so “safe” a place. While many people, especially those in the jewelry business, have talked about the robbery, nobody knew how it was done or by whom—until now, that is.
13
The Highwaymen, One Last Time
ON MAY 2, 1966, summerlike weather came to the Boston area. Three men emerged from a room at the Fenway Motor Inn at two A.M. They were dressed in black. Half an hour later a maroon sedan registered to someone other than its driver moved along Highland Terrace in Dedham. The sedan stopped briefly at the corner of Highland Terrace and one of the men got out. Then the car turned around and parked down the street, heading in the opposite direction. A few seconds later, the man who had alighted from the sedan walked into the driveway of 42 Highland Terrace.
The street was quiet. The man walked around the garage twice, then bent down and opened the garage door with an object he pulled from his pants pocket. Inside, he clicked on a small flashlight, barely illuminating the car in the garage. Less than thirty seconds after the flashlight went on, it went off. The man quietly closed and locked the garage door and walked back to the nearby waiting car. The scene was now set.
At approximately nine-thirty that same morning, the man who had opened the garage door some seven hours earlier still sat in the front seat of the same maroon sedan. He watched as Walter Bain kissed his wife at their front door and entered his garage from outside. The three men sitting in the parked car waited anxiously to see if the diamond broker noticed anything out of the ordinary. Their answer came a minute later. Bain drove out of his garage as usual, and headed in the direction of police headquarters.
Tony waited until Bain turned off Highland Terrace before he headed in the opposite direction. He arrived at headquarters a couple of minutes before Bain, thanks to a series of shortcuts he’d mapped out while clocking this job.
The Cresta team watched as Bain entered empty-handed and returned ten minutes later carrying what they estimated to be about $250,000 in uncut diamonds. Bain looked around cautiously, unlocked his car door, and placed the diamonds in the backseat.
“That was the key for me,” Phil said. “If he’d placed the diamonds in his trunk that day, we might have just gone to breakfast.” From observing the man over the previous two weeks, Phil knew Bain sometimes put his diamonds in the trunk, other times in the backseat. On that Monday, Bain put his diamonds in the backseat. That decision would cost him dearly.
Bain drove to the Charles River and onto the VFW Parkway. Not long after entering the parkway, Bain later told MDC police, his car’s engine suddenly seemed to skip. He thought little of it until the skipping grew worse. When he stopped at the edge of the parkway, Bain saw a maroon sedan pull up in front of him. Two men got out and approached his car, while a third stayed behind the wheel of the sedan. The two men tried unsuccessfully to open Bain’s car doors. Then the one at the driver’s door pulled a gun from his pocket and aimed it at Bain’s face. Bain opened the door. The gunman pushed him across the front seat. When Bain unlocked the back door the other gunman grabbed his briefcase with the diamonds. They then forced Bain’s hands over his head and handcuffed him, ran back to their sedan, and headed toward Boston.
Bain jumped from his car and tried to flag down a passing motorist. But nobody would stop for a man who was handcuffed and waving like a maniac. After ten futile minutes, Bain dashed across the VFW Parkway and into West Roxbury’s Veterans Hospital. There, hospital workers listened to his story and called the police. Both MDC and Boston police responded. Neither the Boston nor the MDC officers could open the unique handcuffs that bound Bain. He was taken to a Boston locksmith who, after several failed attempts, was finally able to free him. Meanwhile, Boston police found the maroon sedan believed to have been used in the robbery. It had been abandoned on the grounds of the Blue Hills Country Club in Canton.
In the Boston Globe’s evening edition of May 2, MDC police reported that, as in the previous highwaymen robberies, they suspected a foreign substance had been put into the gas tank to make the car stall on the parkway. As in all the other highwaymen robberies, there were no clues or witnesses, even though hundreds of cars had driven past Bain’s stalled car and the maroon sedan at the time of the robbery.
The next day, however, a front-page story in the Globe told a different story. MDC Lieutenant Neil Cadigan told reporters that an electronic device was found on the engine of Walter Bain’s car. It probably had been used to disable it. The secret was finally out, although it didn’t make Walter Bain or the Baumgold company any happier. Baumgold had been hit three times by the highwaymen. Their losses far exceeded half a million dollars.
The three highwaymen were out of business after the Walter Bain robbery. “I let them have the staller,” Phil explained, “because I knew it was our last highwaymen robbery. I also knew how dangerous it was to be out on the VFW Parkway during rush hour traffic with guns drawn and masks on. I told Angelo before the job that it would be in and out—no worrying about the staller, no dillydallying. When we found the door of Bain’s car locked, I was afraid Bain was going to play the hero and maybe get shot. I was glad he opened the door when he saw Angelo’s gun in his face. Once the door was open, I knew we’d get the loot, but in the back of my mind I was thinking about the MDC and Boston cops who are always patrolling the parkway. I kept looking for a cop car, but we were lucky. I’ve always have said, ‘Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.’”
The ex-highwaymen drove directly to New Hampshire. The next day Phil, with his loaded briefcase, headed for a plane to Chicago. When he got to Logan, he saw a huge headline in the Record American that read, $150,000 HUB JEWEL HOLDUP. Louie Diamonds had assured Phil that Bain would be hauling more like half a mil. For a while Phil wondered if they’d taken too great a risk for so small a haul. But then he reminded himself of past reports he’d read—how the marks and their companies used one figure for the paper, another for the insurance companies, and then they had the real figure, which wasn’t even close to the other two. It was all a game, and usually it was the insurance companies who were the big losers.
But not this time. Bain had been telling the truth. Chicago verified that he’d had only about $150,000 worth of diamonds. Louie Diamonds had given Phil an inflated estimate. Phil never dealt with him again.
Phil said, “It was kind of weird to be waiting for a plane and listening to everyone talk about the ‘big robbery.’ They all had their own opinions on this and that, and I found it very amusing to listen to the different scenarios. One guy, who couldn’t stop talking about the highwaymen robbers, asked
me and a few others where we thought the jewels and the highwaymen were right then. The guy didn’t know it, but the jewels were about five feet away from him, tucked into a false bottom of my suitcase, and he was talking to one of the highwaymen. It was like that time in Southie at the Transit Cafe when all the wise guys were trying to figure out who the highwaymen were and we were sitting right in front of them.”
14
Machine Guns at the VA
DESPITE CRESTA’S EFFORTS to keep violence to a minimum during his crimes, violence erupted on a sizzling hot Tuesday, July 26, 1966. The temperature was approaching 90 humid degrees as the staff of the VA Hospital in Jamaica Plain was going to lunch. It was exactly 12:22 P.M. when Bernard Fisher and Donald Bettano, of Armored Banking Services of Lynn, pulled their truck into a small alcove near the main lobby of the hospital. As usual on a Tuesday, the guards were bringing $68,000 cash so that the hospital could cash its employees’ paychecks the next day.
Fisher, the first guard, walked toward the front entrance of the hospital as his partner, Bettano, moved toward the back door of the truck to lock it. Each had three bags of money in his hands. The men would normally go into the hospital together, drop off the six bags of cash, return to the truck, unlock the back door, and bring in more bags of cash. But this day was different.
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